The orchestral piece that ended the Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood last summer was loud, abrasive, urban, raucous. Written by a 55-year-old Dutch composer, Louis Andriessen, Snelheid ("Velocity") divides an orchestra into two antiphonal ensembles that violently catapult accelerating angular rhythms back and forth, depicting the sensation of momentum. Though a highly disciplined score, it gets some of its pulsating rhythmic energy and some of its blasting sound from popular music; at least it seems, unlike most symphonic music, to share the same planet with pop.

The performance received a wildly enthusiastic response from a mostly young audience, as well as from an orchestra of young players, but not from the festival's boss. Leon Fleisher, the administrator of the Tanglewood Music Center, sat in a front side box in the new Seiji Ozawa Hall during most of the performance with a pained expression on his face. His famous fingers--he was one of the most important American pianists until a neurological ailment curled the fingers of his right hand some three decades ago--were lodged securely in his ears.

Whether Fleisher just didn't like the volume of sound (it isn't really any louder than The Rite of Spring but it is a lot more relentless) or the music, or both, hardly matters. A new element has entered into concert music and there is no muffling it. That element is represented by a group of young American composers, many of whom happen to take encouragement from Andriessen. Theirs is a music that enthusiastic young audiences understand and that more and more conventional classical music audiences actually find, sometimes to their surprise, invigorating. It is also a music that, within the last year or two, has begun invading Tanglewood, Lincoln Center, symphony orchestras everywhere, and the major record labels.

This is the music of a new generation of composers who were born around the beginning of the 1960s and who grew up in a musical world unlike anything previous generations had known. By the time they came on the scene, the big battles of 20th-century music had already been fought. Academic Serialism had run its course. The experimental movement was fondly remembered history. Minimalism was nearly as old as they were. Neo-romanticism was having an all-too-apt resurgence during the Reagan years. Music from all eras and all cultures had become handily available on recording. But pop, as every kid growing up in America well knew, was the world's real and inescapable music; the backbeat, the universal language of the global village.

One kid, a brilliant piano student in Milwaukee who got his early musical training from nuns, didn't know any of that, however. Michael Torke has said that, although exposed to popular music, he was the rare teenager who exhibited no interest it, nor did he gravitate to modern classical music. But when the pop music bug bit him, which it did when he entered the Eastman School of Music, he became a fanatic. He liked it so much that he had to include it in the music he was writing; in the process, Torke reversed what had long been the common practice with American academic composers, who very often grew up in the thrall of pop music but felt they had to excise it from serious compostions.

Torke, instead, felt compelled to integrate pop into rigorous composition and a few years later in 1985, while a graduate student of composition at the Yale School of Music, announced to the world what appeared to be a new style with The Yellow Pages. A kinetic seven-minute chamber piece for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, The Yellow Pages is built over a cleverly disguised syncopated bassline derived from a Chaka Khan song. Classically made, the score nonetheless oozes rock rhythms, placing the accents off the beat in a way that any American teenager can instinctively feel but that typically baffles the conservatory trained, whose reflexes are conditioned to land firmly on the beat.

Although The Yellow Pages sounded utterly fresh and was followed by lively orchestral scores, most notably Ecstatic Orange, that were unlike any other concert music then being composed, Torke had not really invented anything new. Popular and folk musics had been finding their way into the classical literature since the Renaissance. The early mass might, for instance, be based on the cantus firmus of a popular song, or chanson, with the composers following procedures not radically unlike Torke's. Many profound Baroque and Classical-period forms derived from dance music. Mahler regularly returned to folk song in his most soul-searching symphonies. Stravinsky relied heavily on the musical traditions of Russian peasants when he broke musical ground in The Rite of Spring. Even in the 12-tone works of Schoenberg and his disciples early in the century, shreds of dance forms, if barely recognizable, remained.

But high modernism in music, and especially the ultra-complex brand of it that flourished in the '50s, in its attempts to create a whole new advanced style of composition rejected outright any popular elements in music. The highly influential German futurist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, for instance, has often claimed that his memory of march music from his forced participation in the Hitler Youth Corps had produced a permanent distaste for all repeated rhythms. For other composers, the allure of science and a faith in progress, with its promise of new worlds to explore, was more than enough to rule out accessibility.

Whatever the merits of such art, it became a music for a specialist audience. It led to the greatest rift between high art and low art that music had ever known (those who tried to bridge the gap, like Leonard Bernstein, were seen as largely irrelevant at the time), a division that took more than a quarter century to mend fully. But reconciliation occurred either through outright rebellion (the Minimalists rejecting the Serialists), a kind of curiosity seeking (Frank Zappa's love of Var�se because he thought the music so weird; Brian Eno's shopping the Experimentalists and Minimalists for ideas), or cheerful slumming (the avant-gardist Luciano Berio arranging Beatles songs for his wife, new music specialist Cathy Berberian).

What is in fact new about Torke and the other composers of his generation is that acceptance rather than rejection seems elemental to their natures. They have the postmodernist's love for the whole range of musical styles now readily available, and they disdain neither audience nor musical institutions such as the big symphony orchestra. "I want everything to be included in music," Aaron Kernis, a classmate of Torke's at Yale, once wrote, "soaring melody, consonance, tension, dissonance, drive, relaxation, color, strong harmony and form -- and for every possible emotion to be elicited actively by the passionate use of these elements."

Aaron Kernis

While Torke's music is usually motoristic and postminimalist, Kernis's tends to be more contrasted, expressing everything from political rage to rapturous contemplation. He is a poetic imagist and eclectic who has set out to make each piece the ultimate ravishing experience. He has also stuck closer to traditional forms than Torke and his other colleagues, writing multi-movement symphonies, string quartets, concerti, and various kinds of text settings.

But Kernis is no less urban than Torke. He proudly snuck a Jerry Lee Lewis quote as well as some salsa into his 1989 Symphony in Waves, his first symphony. In the New Era Dance, a brash Bernsteinian piece written to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic in 1992, he brought the sound of his neighborhood onto the stage with the Philharmonic. A police siren is part of the percussion section; sampled street sounds, including rap from passing cars, are added to the mix through a MIDI keyboard. And the result sounds something like West Side Story for the very noisy '90s.

Torke and Kernis have their detractors. They are regularly attacked in the less mainstream music criticism of the Village Voice, for instance, as particularly odious examples of composers who have been co-opted by the midtown music establishment. They are equally anathema to the old-school uptown academics. And they are still viewed with suspicion and incomprehension by many traditional performers (the New York Philharmonic players hardly sounded in their element when asked to rap during New Era Dance, and even Tanglewood students who can sightread Elliott Carter struggled nervously through The Yellow Pages last summer). Some of this is standard grousing about success. Torke is so often commissioned by the New York City Ballet these days that he has practically become to Peter Martins what Stravinsky was to Balanchine; Kernis is composer-in-residence of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. Both are extensively recorded on London's Argo label. And both composers have by now created a body of concert music that has proven remarkably resilient, music that embraces both popular and classical traditions in a way that is not trivial and that is proving to have a broad appeal.

Torke and Kernis may have been immediately embraced by the musical establishment (while in his early twenties, Torke became the youngest composer ever signed by the prestigious music publishing firm of Boosey and Hawkes, and Kernis had his first piece played by the New York Philharmonic when he was 23). But it was the annual new music festival in New York City known as Bang on a Can that became this generations's main downtown manifestation. Bang on a Can began in 1987 in a seedy converted church on a dangerous street in the East Village. Its highlight was an all-day, all-night marathon that was little more than a show-and-tell for the musical friends of composers Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe. But there was nothing else like it and over the next couple of years, the marathon became to new music something of what the Whitney Biennial is to art: a place to find out what was happening.

Unusual about this music marathon, however, was that it did not give exclusive billing to the non-institutionalized composers of its founders' generation. Instead, it always made room for a range of musics. In fact, the marathon proved emblematic of exactly what makes this whole new movement thrive: the glad acceptance of differing musics. Pierre Boulez, whose music could be found on the same festival with work by a sound artist using boomboxes, may have been as much the intruder at Bang on a Can as rap is at the Philharmonic, but his work was welcomed nonetheless. However wide Bang on a Can ranged, the atmosphere was informal and the audience never felt very distant from the spirit or tone of popular culture.

Bang on a Can has moved up in the world and so have its three founding composers. The festival has transferred to Lincoln Center as part of the institution's attempts to keep up with the times and to attract for new work some of the fashionable audience that attends the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It has spawned the Bang on a Can All-Stars, an idiosyncratic full-time ensemble (clarinet/sax, cello, bass, electric guitar, and drums) of regular players from the festivals.

Moreover, the founding composers themselves have been busy breaking down barriers. The best known is David Lang for his sassy orchestra pieces, which include Eating Living Monkeys for the Cleveland Orchestra, International Business Machine for the Boston Symphony, and Bonehead for the American Composers' Orchestra. These works never go so far as to evoke the sound or character of pop music, but their sonic and programmatic irreverence is not unhappily received: They make a big, riotous and generally good-natured noise.

Still, despite its success and the profound desperation with which orchestras, record companies, performing institutions, and festivals are clamoring for the new, younger audiences, there is often considerable confusion as to just how to present this kind of new music. A case in point is Todd Levin's Ride the Planet, released as a recording last year on Point Music, the crossover label Philip Glass oversees for the Dutch classical label, Philips. This is arresting music--unlike any other--and a description of it reads like a marketing dream. Written for standard rock instrumentations of electric guitars, keyboards, and vocals, it sounds literally like pop. But it is much more than that. With all the technique of a classically trained composer, Levin, another graduate from Yale and a contemporary of Torke and Kernis, incorporated in this multi-movement work harmonies, rhythms, and counterpoint solidly based on 20th-century techniques that range from Scriabin to Stravinsky to Glass.

Yet Ride the Planet proved a marketing disaster, even with the added attraction of titles and "essay" by text artist Jenny Holzer upping the hipness quotient. Levin's music simply doesn't fit categories. Stores didn't know where to display the recording; radio stations didn't know how to program it; Philips didn't know what the market should be. Now, ironically, Levin has switched to the Mercedes Benz of classical music labels, Deutsche Grammophon. He is convinced that his music should be promoted as a traditional release, believing that a classical audience has a better chance of becoming hip than the pop market does of becoming sophisticated.

He may be right. Or then again, it may not matter. What these new composers seem to suggest more than anything else is that categories are becoming increasingly irrelevant in the Information Age. In this respect, they have been following the example of Louis Andriessen, a scion of Holland's greatest dy-nasty of composers but who nonetheless became radicalized by the political climate of the '60s. A great admirer of Stravinsky and of American jazz, Andriessen adapted the American minimalist style and made it European and political. Realizing that symphony musicians didn't like playing his music, he created an orchestra of jazz-band instrumentation, Orkest de Volharding ("Perseverance"), and wrote rhythmically aggressive music for it, often expounding deep philosophical themes.

Five years ago, he completed De Materie ("Matter"), an opera based on themes from Dutch history that was directed by Robert Wilson. Nonesuch Records has just released a re-cording of one act from Materie that clearly de-monstrates Andriessen's admiration for the rhythms of American pop music, specifically Motown and Chaka Khan. On the same CD is Andriessen's soundtrack from a television work, M is for Man, Music, Mozart, by the obsessive and controversial British film maker Peter Greenaway. This fall, Andriessen's second opera, a collaboration with Greenaway, will be produced by Netherlands Opera. And now Nonesuch has begun promoting Andriessen as actively as it did Henryk Gorecki, the Polish composer whose slow, sad Third Symphony the label turned into an international sensation that managed somehow to gain a large following in both the classical and pop markets.

Of course, neither Andriessen nor any of the younger composers has so far made that kind of impact. None has yet become the next Gorecki or Glass. But as musical institutions lumber into the next century, they are desperate for sources of renewal and have begun to invest heavily in the promise of this generation. Is it any coincidence that Sony Classics decided to drop Leon Fleisher about the same time it signed the Bang on a Can All-Stars?

lingo 4

Books in print by Mark Swed

catalog | new | forthcoming | lingo | sounds | project | contact | order | index | search | exit