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Dig the New Breed, Part 3
 Arvo Part The result was 12-tone or Serial music, in which each tone of the chromatic scale is given equal weight. Since no one tone is more important than any other, Amis says, "you have no reference whatsoever." In the last decade or so, composers have begun to return to the use of a pitch reference because audiences were rejecting the "theoretical" and generally dispassionate approach of Serial music. "It doesn't even have to be pitch," Amis says. "It could be rhythm." Minimalist music, which was largely pioneered and popularized by composers outside the academic loop, notably Steve Reich and Philip Glass, used recurring rhythmic patterns as the reference point. The problem with Minimalist music, according to Amis, "is that the reference goes on constantly for maybe ten minutes, so you never get away from it. That's where you lose the listener's interest. But nowadays, composers are making that reference more apparent. Even if they do wild and crazy things for the rest of the bar or the rest of the phrase, they're always drawing people back to that reference, so that the listener can follow them or at least know where they are when they get to that place. And that's reassuring for the listener." The danger in eliminating the pitch reference -- or some other compelling reference point, which Amis calls "home base" -- is that when music is based not on an audible foundation but merely on a theoretical one, "listeners who don't know the theory aren't going to hear it." That's where specialized skills -- academic training -- become a virtual necessity, requiring more of a commitment than most listeners are willing to make. Minimalism was one response, perhaps the earliest, to the dreary randomness of much academic Serial music, descended from what is known as the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. The relative simplicity of Minimalist structure and content, its rhythmic insistence, and its occasional ability to induce trancelike states in listeners helped to make the music of Glass and Reich much more appealing, and more commercially successful, than its predecessors. Influenced by various forms of world music, including Indian ragas and African drumming, the early Minimalists created a form of music that was light on content but that found a way to draw in the listener where Serialism was failing. The influence of world musics came both directly and through their use in the music of the luminary jazz composer and saxophonist John Coltrane. According to jazz commentator Eric Nisenson's book Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest, "Coltrane's static harmonies (really modes), his use of the rhythmically repetitious vamps, his snaky lyricism are all reflected in Glass's work." Jazz had previously influenced Debussy, Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, and others, but not, apparently, the Serialists. For Randall Fleischer, Minimalist music is "a groove. It's a different kind of ideology. It's not the dramatic structure of a Brahms symphony." George Clinton draws a parallel between Minimalism and the "world sound" -- ethnic music that also consists of repeated figures or drone sounds, such as Armenian duduk, Indonesian gamelan, Australian didgeridoo (an instrument which some claim is 60,000 years old), and certain other idioms not usually associated with either world music or Minimalism. "If you listen to medieval dance music, bluegrass fiddle tunes, or Irish folk tunes, especially the fiddle tunes," Clinton says, "they are all parallel in some way. The rhythm is definite, the tonality is usually very simple, and it's the activity of the melody over the tonality that gives you the feeling of the music. "Our lives are metered by the tick of the clock and other sounds that we hear on a daily basis that remind us of time passing. We're always being reminded of the finite and so, sometimes when things are as free-flowing as, say, Gregorian chant or the duduk music of Djivan Gasparyan, it allows us to consider the infinite or at least to be free of the pulse of time. During the Middle Ages, when the loudest sound in town was the blacksmith's shop, it must have been stunning to go into a church and hear a full choir reverberating or, later, a huge pipe organ." Rolf Smedvig, the classical trumpeter and founder of the Empire Brass Quintet, puts it another way. "Sometimes I feel like listening to Minimalist music when I'm a nervous wreck and I'm getting up at 5:30 in the morning and I've got to go to another continent." He finds the music energizing just as others find it relaxing or trance-inducing.  Alvin Singelton Alvin Singleton points out that Glass and Reich came from outside academia and were considered anathema by those composers. Nonetheless, Minimalism soon entered the academic world. But by then, other alternatives were already afoot. A whole generation of composers born in the late '50s and early '60s grew up looking for alternatives to Serialism and Minimalism, just as they grew up steeped in the rhythms and attitudes of rock and roll, R&B, and soul music. The music they have created is in most cases more complex and demanding than what you're likely to hear on most pop or classical radio stations these days, but at least it is directed at an audience other than their own colleagues. The downtown ethos of Bang On a Can -- the festival that has come to embody a kind of movement -- goes even further. At its best, the results of Bang On a Can's experimentation can seem fresh and serendipitous, as in Phil Kline's piece Bachman's Warbler, created with harmonica and 12 boomboxes playing tape loops. Are such pieces merely ingenious, or do they repay repeated listenings? Some recordings that helped shape the evolution of modern music remain valuable even if they are difficult to listen to and are not often heard. I think of Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz or some of the late Coltrane albums like Meditations and Om. How much of Bang On a Can will be deemed essential a decade or two from now remains to be seen, but its willingness to try just about anything to catch listeners off guard and maybe pull them in is a welcome tonic to three decades of academic hauteur. Not that such extreme approaches are the only ones that will work in building an audience for the best new music. Increasing numbers of young listeners are being drawn back to this area of music as rock and pop and much of jazz seem to have run into a series of blind alleys. Sales of new music CDs are up and, in some areas, symphony orchestras are successfully introducing new works to their constituencies. A path somewhere between Randall Fleischer's cautious mixture of new works and old warhorses and Bang On a Can's experimentation is being blazed by Esa-Pekka Salonen, the 36-year-old Finnish conductor. In his third season as music director and conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Salonen has been winning over concert-goers with a largely 20th-century repertory; the average age of the orchestra's audience has been going down even as subscriptions have risen. (The young British phee-nom Simon Rattle has had a similar success with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.) By surrounding challenging modern works by the likes of Gyorgy Ligeti, Luciano Berio, Witold Lutoslawski, and Olivier Messiaen with their early-20th-century forebears Debussy, Bartok, and Stravinsky, Salonen has been able to create a context that makes the newer works sound less foreign. "If you want to reach a young person who has not learned classical music at home or in the schools," he recently told the Times, "the best repertory is 20th-century repertory rather than Mozart or Haydn or Beethoven. Just because of the familiarity of the sound world, something like Le Sacre gives you a sense of recognition, even if your only point of reference is rock music. It doesn't belong to the establishment." Salonen is careful to distinguish among several strains of postwar composition, criticizing much of Serial music for its rather arrogant assumption that it could create an entire new musical language (which he compares to the idealistic, perfectly conceived, but rarely spoken language of Esperanto), detached from traditional reference points. But, he maintains, even before Minimalism and the newer, pop-influenced composers came along, Serial music was only part of the story. "There was still a lot of good music composed in that era," Salonen said. "I think we might be coming to the point where it's possible to compose again. You don't have to be neo-something, neo-Romantic or whatever; you can just write music. People from very different angles are heading toward something that could be a mainstream musical language." How mainstream? One group of composers in particular appears to be gaining favor with a wide audience these days, possibly as a reaction to both the dispassion of the Serialists and the numbing speed and informational overkill of modern life. Sometimes lumped together as Eastern Europeans with a mystical bent, these composers -- whose only real links are those of geography and religious faith (specifically Christian) -- create music that is richly colored and complexly textured but that tends to move slowly and deliberately, allowing listeners to savor it. And who wouldn't want to savor music of such passionate feeling? The emotion is generally restrained but when it bursts forth, it does so with bracing explosiveness. The best known is doubtless Henryk Gorecki (pronounced "go-RET-ski"), the Polish composer whose 54-minute Symphony No. 3 (or "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs"), composed in 1976, has been smartly promoted by Nonesuch into a classical best-seller. This is richly sonorous and meditative music without the rhythmic monotony and pallid harmony of George Winston and other so-called New Age stars. Only slightly less well known is the Estonian composer of largely sacred music, Arvo Part, whose series of recordings for ECM is already popular with dancers and some rock musicians. If Michael Torke and Aaron Jay Kernis have been influenced by rock and pop, Part may be the only modern composer who can boast endorsements by Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and Brad Roberts of Crash Test Dummies. Eschewing mere neo-Romantic nostalgia, Part has gone back to traditional folk music and religious chant of the 11th and 12th centuries. On recordings such as Miserere, Passio, and his latest, Te Deum, he exhibits a compression of musical energy, giving an impression of great depth and seriousness but sounding rather simplified and tranquil at the surface. "The complex and multi-faceted only confuses me, and I must search for unity," Part has said in what might be echoed by any of his fellow Eastern European composers. "I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played." That sounds awfully simplistic, yet the music almost overwhelms the listener with its density; it's simple the way a Barnett Newman painting is simple. "Arvo Part is minimal, not Minimalist," says Alvin Singleton. "He gets a lot out of a little material."  Giya Kancheli Just on the fringes of public awareness are two other Eastern Europeans. One is the Georgian Giya Kancheli, whose viola concerto, Mourned by the Wind, with its slow pace and spiritual leanings, is suffused with an unmistakable melancholy that may account for a large measure of its appeal. The other, Sofia Gubaidulina, is a Tartar who has not been widely recorded here. Born within a few years of each other, Gorecki (1933), Part (1935), Kancheli (1935), and Gubaidulina (1931) are older than the current crop of pop-influenced Americans, but they offer one ringing answer to the question, Has all the beautiful music already been written? Their work isn't uniformly successful and the almost unrelieved lento-largo can become positively soporific after a while, but by and large it is a timeless-sounding music of simple loveliness, neither contrived nor condescending. Nonetheless, the first twitchings of critical backlash can already be felt. A snooty piece in the New Yorker a year ago whined about the four Eastern Europeans being "very much in vogue (Henryk Gorecki, Arvo Part), a little bit in vogue (Sofia Gubaidulina), or moving strongly vogueward (Giya Kancheli)." As if Tina Brown's New Yorker has somehow staunchly resisted the centrifugal whoosh of voguewardness itself. The writer, Paul Griffiths, was less upset that their music is gaining a following than that it is being referred to as "mystical" because of its spareness and relative simplicity, complaining that any talk of mystical moderns has to include the far more complex work of Stockhausen and Messiaen. He wondered why "the new illuminati" can't write fast music, as Messiaen did. Yet nobody seems to be grousing about Nicholas Maw, the English-born composer who now lives in the United States and teaches at Bard College. He is a direct contemporary of the Eastern Europeans and, in their spirit, has written at least one supremely long, sometimes quite slow composition, the 96-minute Odyssey; it is an often gorgeous piece of music. Slow, fast, simple, complex--the notion that opposing but complementary poles can exist in current music is hardly cause for alarm. At one point in my discussion with George Clinton, we drifted off into a fantasy about creating a service he wanted to call The Critical Ear and that would provide prerecorded soundtracks for daily life. This might range from a little light gamelan music to get going in the morning, to Broadway show tunes of the 1930s orchestrated by Johnny Green for midday, followed by modern compositions of the Andriessen-Kernis-Torke variety. In the afternoon, Baroque concerti; around dinnertime, a Romantic string quartet or maybe some Gershwin played by Oscar Levant. Later at night, of course, jazz would be fun, or perhaps Gilbert and Sullivan. Then African drums, Ligeti, Part, plainchant. Music doesn't have to be thrilling all the time any more than it has to be all contemplative. Thank heavens there seems to be plenty of both to go around. The rage of opposites continues apace as younger composers have been testing the liturgical waters of late. Jan Garbarek, once a facile jazz reedman, and Gavin Bryars, an English Minimalist who records for Philip Glass's Point Music, have recently released liturgically inflected albums. It's only a matter of time before the backlash against neo-Medievalism sets in, I suppose -- perhaps with some justification this time, as these composers sometimes seem to be going through the motions without any profound connection to their religious format. Not coincidentally, the rise of the Eastern Europeans has been accompanied by the current rage for Gregorian chant -- another simple, soulful music -- that has included a record of plainchant set to a disco beat. Well, if Ethel Merman could go disco, why not the monks? As a final irony, the success of the Eastern Europeans, the renewed popularity of Gregorian chant, and the increasingly wide appeal of "world music" may represent a swing back to the estimable tradition once known as tafelmusik, or "table music" -- the baroque equivalent of today's ambient music. As music critic Alex Ross has pointed out, this tradition was revived in the early 20th century by Erik Satie's notion of musique d'ameublement, or furniture music, meant less to be heard than to be absorbed by osmosis, and was continued in the late '70s by Brian Eno's ambient music-- music as sound environment. As rich as the music of Part and Gorecki can be, it is once again music that does not always have to be listened to with full attention to absorb or be affected by its power. (But when you do listen closely to one of these apparently simple pieces, like Part's five-minute Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, on his Tabula Rasa disc, new layers of sound seem to reveal themselves with each hearing.) You'd never guess that any of this music is in danger of unseating the standard repertory by listening to the radio, however. I listen to several local public radio stations every day, but in the months I've been working on this piece, I've heard virtually none of the people whose work I've been examining, including the supposedly trendy Eastern Europeans. "Classical" stations do play lots of 20th century music, but most of it tends to be indifferent and unchallenging. Of the composers listed at the beginning of this article, I heard a couple of pieces by the Minimalist John Adams, one by Steve Reich (although they referred to him as Steven Reich), and one piece by Alvin Singleton, entitled Shadows, and that's it. Alvin Singleton isn't a bad starting point for the general listener, incidentally. He's a generation older than Torke, Kernis, or the Bang On a Can group, but his music, which is a far cry from the dry, mathematical approach of many composers his age, can also evoke pop referents. After his orchestral work Again was premiered in Graz, Austria, in 1979, he was approached by a young member of the audience. Referring to the percussion solo in his piece, the kid said, "You stole that from Santana, didn't you?" Singleton was thrilled. "I didn't, of course," he later said, "but I understood that he understood the style. That's why I was particularly moved." Singleton aims to communicate with an audience; growing up black in Brooklyn, his musical models included Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk and he does employ elements of improvisation in his work. But anyone listening for some kind of overt synthesis of jazz and classical idioms will be disappointed. This is largely composed music in a European-American framework, subtly informed by a jazz consciousness; its textures are dense, its rhythmic and dynamic colorations highly sophisticated. But you would be unlikely to mistake it for a work by Charles Mingus or Oliver Nelson. Jazz influences are somewhat more apparent in the latest release from Leroy Jenkins, entitled Themes and Improvisations on the Blues. Jenkins, who made his name as a jazz violinist and composer, represents the interface of composed and improvised music about as well as anyone can. He writes pieces that are either fully notated or largely improvised (with the help of skillful jazz players like Henry Threadgill and Don Byron), but he also sets a score for chamber orchestra against an improvising violin. Two pieces on this disc are scored (at least partially) for string quartet. Listeners who are attuned to modern concert music might have trouble spotting where the notation ends and the improvisation begins, but maybe that's part of the fun. Jenkins has complained about being pigeonholed as a "jazz" artist and this recording shows how useless such categorization can be.  Evan Ziporyn Jeffrey Mumford, a 40-year-old black composer from Washington, D.C., does not appear to use improvisation and yet his work at times has the loose-limbed feel of free jazz blended with some of the coloration of Impressionist music. He has appeared at the Bang On a Can Festival, but his first CD, the focus of blue light, already shows a very distinctive personality. Impressionistic without being vague, emotional but not cloying, it is among the loveliest and most inviting new music I've heard. Evan Ziporyn, a member of the Bang On a Can All-Stars, comes from a mixed jazz and classical background. For openers, he plays the bass clarinet, an instrument that is more closely associated with Eric Dolphy than with any classical composer I can think of, but he also studied music at Eastman, Yale, and U.C. Berkeley and teaches composition at M.I.T. Easy-going and lyrical, the pieces on Ziporyn's Animal Act tend to prove Alvin Singleton's assertion that "the improvised tradition has been a workshop, a lab, for the downtown composers." Meanwhile, Keith Jarrett, who always straddled the imaginary fence separating jazz from the European tradition, has released an album of compositions for violin, viola, piano, and orchestra that is surprisingly moving -- surprising to me, that is, since I never much cared for his piano playing. Jarrett's new works appear to have more of a spiritual connection with the Eastern European composers than with American jazz (although some would probably dismiss them as more neo-Romanticism). Maybe Esa-Pekka Salonen is right; maybe it's all coming together into "just music." Just music that uses improvisation along with strict notation, that combines the world beat with the sacred rhythm, that draws on the past but isn't chained to it -- or to some theoretical need to abandon it ruthlessly. Just music. And yet the question remains: Why do we need new composed music at all? There is so much gorgeous, fascinating, and profound music already in existence -- not only a thousand years of the European tradition but also jazz, show music, sacred music, Brazilian and African and Indian and East Asian music -- that if you listened several hours a day for the rest of your life, you couldn't hear it all. I was pondering that thought one night last November when I went to hear a concert that included a relatively minor Mozart piano concerto (No. 12 in A). The concerto was pleasant but instantly forgettable. It was well played but didn't stay in the mind for one instant after it was over. The program notes explained that, like many composers of American popular music in the first half of the 20th century, Mozart created this work and others to satisfy the public appetite for hausmusik -- pieces that small groups of amateurs could easily learn to play at home. I would have preferred to take my chances with something new and maybe hard to handle. Something passionate to a fault, something too fast or too slow to make everyone happy. Something that you couldn't take in all in one hearing but that you wanted to hear again as soon as it was over. That would be something, all right. |
