Kenneth Woods- a view from the podium

I’m a bit concerned that this sudden outpouring of advice is making me look even more like a pompous gasbag than I do simply by virtue of being a conductor (and worse yet, a conductor who writes), but then there was this…. 

 In the comments on More Tips for Soloists, composer Rob Deemer asks-

Nice posts, Ken - I would be curious to have you take your comments about concerti commissions one step further to give us your thoughts on working with composers in general, both in terms of writing non-concerti orchestral works and “tips” on how to work with a conductor & orchestra during a rehearsal for a premiere. Many of your comments in your previous post in regards to etiquette sounded quite close to my own thoughts on composers in rehearsals. I’ve given my own composition students plenty of advice, but it’s always helpful to hear it from another conductor directly.

The piece below started life as a post on Orchestralist in response to one composer’s plea for help in getting their music programmed. It generated lots of comment at the time, including….

Dear Ken -

I am only now catching up with old orchestralist digests. I just wanted to drop you a line and thank you for your thoughtful and true posting concerning composers and conductors. Much of this I have been preaching for years and years, and I am glad to see a conductor saying it as well. And I found your descriptions of the opposition and preconceptions you encountered before the composer was even know to the board to be especially poignant. The same has happened to me on too many occasions, and I’ve actually had board members later come up to me and say, “hey I’m sorry that I didn’t want to give you a chance now that I hear your music. You’re stuff is nice!” Sigh.
    
But I especially found your comments on deportment and rehearsal protocols to be right on target. I’ve seen too many composers shoot themselves and everyone else in the foot with their own bad or unprofessional behavior in response to someone else’s bad or unprofessional behavior. I have found that it’s always best to make the best of things! Honey goes solo much further than vinegar!
       
Thanks again for your support of music of living composers, and again for your posting.

            All my best to you and yours -

                Linda                Linda Robbins Coleman

And this

Ken,

Spectacular posting on Olist!  Thank you for hitting the target so accurately.

Warm regards,

Jennifer Higdon  

Well intentioned advice from a conductor to (young) composers-

Helpful hints for getting your music played by an orchestra and surviving, even enjoying, the experience:                                                                                              

First, please remember that there is probably no initiative a conductor can take, except for firing a player, that will almost always generate more complaint and resistance than to program a brand new piece of music. Last year (2003), my orchestra (the Oregon East Symphony) had our first ever composer-in-residence (Emily Doolittle), and a year long focus on music by living women composers. Some members of our board literally tried everything they could think of to block this project. They even passed a resolution saying that our management was too busy to pursue funding, that the board was too busy to pursue funding, and that the orchestra, although comfortably in the black and ahead of our projections for grant income, was too poor to fund it ourselves. They also held up approval of the residency concept for so long that we were unable to apply for many of the normal grants for commissions. They literally forced me to go looking for funding myself and to prove that I wasn’t making the office staff help me. Imagine the reaction of the leader of that faction when we pulled it off and found a donor who would make the project happen!Some players are also notoriously skeptical about new works- they often start making judgments about the piece right away, when they may be playing it so terribly that there is very little of the composer’s vision on display.

Composers, rightly, ask a lot of conductors. We are your advocates, and we have to overcome the skepticism or outright hostility of players, funders and audience members. Any time we program new music, we know there will be complaints, extra work for us, extra expense for the orchestra and probably some lost revenue thanks to those members of the public who would rather sit at home sulking than listen to something they don’t already know.

In the end, the residency was very successful. We gave three premieres, one US, two world, of pieces by Emily, one per concert. Each was better received and played than the one before. We also featured her final piece, “green/blue,” which we commissioned, on our educational concerts as well as the subscription program. Emily made school visits, and spoke to the kids about the piece at the concert. We have a great visual art center and community here, and we tried to connect Emily to that network. The visual art world has a completely different attitude than the music world about new material- it is the heart of what they do and makes up the bulk of what they present. We found that there were board members at the art center who had given many thousands of their own dollars to support living artists who had never even thought of going to a new music ensemble concert or supporting a new composition. As some of their leaders watched the residency unfold, heard this composer’s breadth of style over several concerts, and got to know Emily they began to get very excited about watching a new piece of music come to life. They recognized the same thrill of discovery they knew from their work with painters and sculptors- an attitude our own board could have learned a great deal from.

For my money, here are some basic things to keep in mind, if you really want your music to be played and understood. This advice is not artistic in nature, only practical. I really believe that you, the composer, hold your own professional destiny in your hands to a much greater extent than you know, although it may feel that you have more power to damage your situation than to help it sometimes. These suggestions are not presented to be condescending, but just as food for thought from a friend. They are offered with love and the deepest admiration for what you do, knowing full well that for many readers, I’m stating the obvious.

(more…)

12 Tone music is dead.

Yeah, right….

Given the fact that the stats, email and the comment page tell me that my rather arcane post on tonality from Saturday is one of the most read and discussed posts I’ve ever done here, I would say that this music still has almost unlimited power to inflame, incite and challenge the imagination…

I’ve been finding myself gradually creeping intuitively towards a new path that I find helpful in better understanding serial music, which is that I want to be more honest and thorough in understanding what it isn’t and what this language doesn’t do, and in doing so, perhaps I, as a performer can better understand what it is and how it works.

The very fact that nothing in music gets people so fired up as serialism is still, for me, one of the most important arguments for its relevance. That power of fascination is at the heart of so much art since 1900.

Anyway…. I just wanted to come back to tonality a bit more. Everyone who has seen it remembers the original Star Trek episode with the parallel universe, where Kirk finds himself in the cosmos with the ruthless Spock and the barbaric Federation, right??? The idea is simple- placed in another universe, the same things (Kirk, Spock), exhibit a nature contradictory to their behaviour on a familiar one.

This is the essential attraction of tonality, of keys, of tonal centers. A key is a universe- move the same note or the same interval to another key, and the same material has a different meaning. A leap from g to c in C major means something quite different than in E minor. What about the same two notes in E-flat major? Same pitch set, same interval, same interval vector, but place it in a different universe, and it means something different, which means our expectation of what might follow it will be completely different. Whether the composer chooses to fulfil our defy our expectation, the ability to create expectation, and quite sophisticated expectation at that, is about as powerful a compositional tool as one could ever have, and I’m not sure that serial music, whether that of Schoenberg or Boulez or Dallapiccola or Webern really has kept that tool in the tool box.

Remember, one of the early ideas in serial music was that to liberate music from the restraints of tonality, one should generally avoid intervals associated with tonal arrival and expectation- avoid thirds and sixths in favour of seconds and sevents. Tritones are good, but they can never resolve inward to thirds! It’s been called the liberation of dissonance, but it could also be called the elimination of expectation.

I  tried to talk on Saturday about the how the elimination of tonality makes it hard to organize forms on a large scale. The obvious example is progressive tonality as found in Mahler- one could not begin to construct a form on the scale of the Second Symphony without keys. The keys are the form in that piece, and how amazing that in a symphony in C minor, he’s able to wait an hour and ten minutes before giving us our first cadence in the relative major of E-flat!

The example I gave above shows the problem of creating phrases and rhetoric on a much smaller scale. Haydn and Wagner might be the greatest masters of playing with expectation in tonal music. I’ve written here many times about the fallacy of Haydn as the ultimate arbiter of normality- again and again we here people say, “normally, in, say, a Haydn symphony, the music would do this,” but Haydn almost never does what one expects. He is simply without peer in creating expectation then suspending it. Both Haydn and Wagner play with my example above in remarkably similar ways. Play the two notes- G and C, then make the audience wait, perhaps interject a commentary in another voice. Their expectation may be that this strong rising fourth surely implies C major, and that therefore, we are establishing a tonic, but any number of things are possible. Perhaps Haydn repeats those two notes again. Perhaps the audience assumes this is a way of reiterating the strength of that implied tonic? Then, after a third repetition, we might finally get a chord, but not C major, try B7! The C over the B7 creates a wonderful, very dark b9 chord, and then you can just walk down by step from the C back to the G and resolve the B7 to E minor. Wagner would do the exact same thing but resolve the 7th chord deceptively….

Now, just think about how that harmonization would shape the audience’s expectation of what they will hear next anytime they hear a fourth in that piece! The composer may NEVER AGAIN harmonize that interval in the same way, but once heard like this, all future expectations in the music have to be changed!

In the 20th C. it became fashionable to refer to common practice music as music in which certain rules limit the composer- Chord A or Interval X “have” to resolve to Chord B or Interval Y. The Liberation of Dissonance, Debussy, the musical history of the entire 20th C all mean that Chord A can now go anywhere, that Interval X can go anywhere. The problem is that, within stylistic boundaries, that’s always been true. Chord A was always free to go just about anywhere, but that first, generally speaking, it created an EXPECTATION in you, the listener, that it would go to Chord B.

Haydn makes you think that what goes up must come down, but then shows you that what goes up may turn left.

In its obsession with avoiding the cliché, in avoiding the predictable, serial music risks losing the possibility of the unpredictable. If you cannot generate expectation, you cannot unleash surprise.

Boulez, who as a performer has become just an ardent a champion of Mahler and Bruckner as he has been of Nono and Stockhausen, once said “Classical tonal thought is based on a world defined by gravitation and attraction, serial thought on a world which is perpetually expanding.” I would respectfully say that he has slightly missed the mark in his description of tonality. It might be more accurate to say that classical tonal thought expresses the relationships of different tonal worlds (as opposed to a single world), of nearby planets and distant galaxies and the ways in which their movements and behaviors are dictated by gravitation and attraction- the gravitational pull between D and A major are very different from that between D and Bb Major. But then, I come back to the idea of parallel universes, because if keys were merely worlds, then the laws of physics in each one would remain the same- in every world, what goes up comes down, but in tonal music the expectation, the very laws of musical physics, change depending on what key you are in. The what goes up must come down in C major, perhaps, but in A flat, what goes up may well keep going up or turn right or boil or solidify….

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods 

PS- Equal temperament sucks!

We had a good weekend with the preparatory orchestra at Wallowa Lake. It is an even younger group this year than last, but also our strongest overall so far (this is our fourth year).

Our main project this month is preparing Mendelssohn 5 for a joint performance by the youth orchestra and the OES. After two long days working very, very hard on this piece, I just wanted to use this space to let fly with one of my long held frustrations.

Almost all composers tend to get misrepresented by history. Of course, the great modern example is the “debate” about Shostakovich, in which many American academics continue to promote a portrait of the man at odds with descriptions of him by all his children and colleagues. Of course, there was more to Mozart than the cartoon-ish figure in Amadeus, and if Mahler was really as neurotic and emotionally unstable as he’s often portrayed, he could never have run the two biggest opera companies in the world.

However, I think Mendelssohn has gotten about the worst treatment in the press of any major core-repertoire composer. Why is it that he is still treated as the composer of cutesy-wootsey, nicey-nicey music? Why do writers so often call his music “brilliant” as if that were an insult? How often does a commentator really come to grips with the true spiritual depth of his music?

Let’s set the record straight. Let’s make this perfectly clear:

Mendelssohn’s reputation has been shortchanged for over 150 years because of repeated, clearly anti-Semitic attacks by commentators in the 19^th Century, who created a false portrait of a composer of surface brilliance whose music somehow lacked the profound spiritual content of his non-Jewish contemporaries and successors. It was with the worst of intentions that those who wrote history described his music as  “sweet and tinkling without depth” (Wagner’s words).

History has taught us to look for deep meanings in every note by Beethoven. Wagner, who repeatedly denounced Mendelssohn in his less-savory writings, told us himself that we were to look for symbolism, context and meaning in every bar of his music. With Brahms it is assumed that we will always treat his every thought with reverence and deep contemplation.  In fact, we may have shortchanged of these composer’s capacity for humor and good cheer by insisting on treating their ever thought as deeply personal, and powerfully felt.

On the other hand, as often as we hear Mendelssohn’s “hits,” we rarely get any discussion of what this music means, only how popular it is and how easy it was for him to write. We treat the Violin Concerto as harmless, remembering only the sunny and virtuosic finale and forgetting the tragic and stormy first movement. We think of the Italian Symphony as a virtuoso showpiece for the orchestra, but isn’t there something quite ferocious and wild about the tarantella? Both piano trios are in minor keys and are just as stormy and scarey as anything by Dvorak or Brahms.

No one in his generation understood Beethoven better, or was more successful in responding to Beethoven’s ideas about form and meaning. Mendelssohn’s early A minor String Quartet is a beautiful and very thoughtful answer to Beethoven’s own A minor Quartet op 132. Mendelssohn’s Fifth Symphony traces a truly Beethovenian path from tragedy to celebration, and yet commentators have scarcely noticed the tremendous pathos of the slow movement, or the high tragedy of the first.

Of course Mendelssohn himself expressed some reservations about the Fifth, but these seem to have been the result of his eventual realization that the anti-Semitic voices in the press were never going to accept him on his merits. I can’t help but feel he lost the stomach for this work which so eloquently celebrated the legacy of the Reformation. Quite a tragic turn for a man who had been baptized and raised in the Lutheran church.

Of course, for 19^th century listeners it was easy to equate profundity with pomposity, and there is not a pompous or self indulgent note in all of Mendelssohn’s music.

Mendelssohn’s music is %100 fat-free.

It is pure fire, pure direction.

At its best it is devastatingly tragic without a hint of sentimentality or self-indulgence.

It is a challenge to find any resource on Mendelssohn that avoids these pernicious stereotypes that have haunted him since his death. If you visit the website that bears his name, you’ll read this.

“Whether he was born with his incredible talent or was the product of an artistically and intellectually-inclined family will remain a mystery, but like all prodigies, Mendelssohn showed signs of true genius from childhood.”

I’m sorry, Mendelssohn clearly was born with incredible talent and was the product of an artistically and intellectually inclinded family. Moreover, he did not “show signs” of genius from childhood, he clearly was a fully accomplished genius as a child. He was not the next great child prodigy after Mozart, he was a greater child prodigy than Mozart. Nothing Mozart wrote before the age of 22 can be compared to the best works of Mendelssohn’s teenage years, such as the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture and the Octet, as well as the early quartets.

He worked himself to death as conductor, giving us back the music of J.S Bach, and wrote possibly the most perfect choral work of the 19^th Century in Elijah, which we continue to offer up for public massacre at the hands of inept church choirs everywhere. Felixmendelssohn.com suggests that he was “a great composer who’s contribution would have been greater, had his life been marred with more hardships,” and yet he died at 38 with the body of an 80-year old. For me there is just as much hardship and pathos in the very-brief third movement of the Fifth Symphony as in all of Tristan. Let’s stop talking about him as a man who somehow wrote facile music that sounds good and recognize him for what he truly was so that we can appreciate him for what he really gave us. It’s not just music that sounds like great music, it is great music, and as performers and listeners we ought to be thinking harder about what this music really says.

By the way, can you think of any composer who wrote more often in minor keys?

UPDATE- A nice response at My Second Act

c.2006 Kenneth Woods

I was content to let the 100th birthday of Shostakovich pass without comment.

Just think, though….

Already, just a few years after his death, we’re beginning to see his body of work recognized as the single most important contribution to Russian culture and cultural history in the 20th Century. The old admonition that “nobody remembers who the Prime Minister of Bavaria was when Beethoven was writing his 9th Symphony” is already beginning to ring true for Shostakovich. After all, who has had a more profound impact on today’s world, Napoleon or Beethoven?

For all his killing, Napoleon never succeeded in redrawing the map of Europe in any lasting way. His importance and his influence have long since faded. 

Likewise, even with the deaths of tens of millions on his hands, Stalin is now no more than an irrelevant and discredited petty dictator. His grand program to remake the world is a forgotten nightmare. 

Murder is a feeble tool, whether for building empires or remaking societies. 

I recently heard the commentator Keith Olberman’s (sorry, once-a-year reference to politics at VFtP) powerful commentary on America’s obscene failure to create a meaningful monument to the dead of September 11, 2001 even five years later.  He’s right, of course, but should we really entrust mere politicians with the memory of the lost?

Do we need our leaders and teachers to tell us when to grieve and how to mourn? Are governments really credible agents of remembrance? 

Shostakovich showed us, and all those that come after us, that we don’t need the might of governments, mountains of money, or even the blessing of our leaders, to bear witness, to speak in memory of the dead and the bereaved, to remember, or even to condemn those who cause suffering and loss. After all, far too often it is our governments and our leaders who are the cause of that suffering and loss. One human being can sit in a room and put notes on paper and begin to heal that which seemed beyond healing.

Sometimes, people can’t wait for memorials to be built.

There is no need to canonize Shostakovich. We don’t need him to be a martyr- a chain-smoking, vodka-swilling, football-loving, depressive, sarcastic, conflict-avoidant musical genius will do fine.

Accept then that this mere man, this imperfect being could show us so great an example.

Can we not do better in our own times? 

c. 2006 Kenneth Woods 
 

Last August, Suzanne and I spent our holiday time traipsing around Normandy and Brittany. One afternoon, we found ourselves in a beautiful and unspoiled little medieval town in western Brittany looking rather aimlessly about. Having quickly found the market and the castle as well as a few other obvious “sights,” we were on the verge of running out of stuff to do. As we sought a bit of shade on a narrow little side-street, we passed a rather dilapidated old house with a hand made sign outside that said “Gallerie.” Having nothing else to do, and seeking further relief from the August heat, we stepped in. Although all décor had been removed, the space was still very much a house. Walls remained where they had been, and there were still plumbing fixtures on the walls of some rooms. The entrance of the building was all peeling paint and cracked plaster, but as we followed the signs upstairs, there were signs of recent painting (all white, of course) and wonderfully bare, old floor boards. 

As it happened, there were two exhibits on, both of photography. The first was by a Russian artist I had never heard of. Within moments, though, I knew we’d stumbled onto something very special, and then, less than a minute after I entered I saw two photographs in quick succession that both gave me the exquisite, heart-in-throat feeling of experiencing art that is raw, alive, terrifying, essential- that feeling of seeing an image in the world that has been buried, unseen, in your own subconscious for all your life. The first was this one-  

The artist was Alexey Titarenko- you can stop laughing now, those of you who know way more about photography than I do. We spent the next couple of hours very quietly looking. Looking and somehow changing as we absorbed these images of life, death, despair, menace and mystery. I was so moved and impressed that I did something I never do at museums and galleries, possibly because I feared I’d never see his stuff again. I bought the book! We kept it safe in a corner of our little car so it wouldn’t get smashed by camping equipment until we got back to Cardiff. Even then, it was a few weeks before I finally took the shrink wrap off and read the book. I was a bit nervous that the photographs couldn’t possibly be equal to that first experience where it seemed like my heart was both racing and stopping. Fortunately, they are images that endure and haunt, and I’ve enjoyed the book immensely. Imagine then, when I discovered that music was a huge influence on Titarenko’s work. According to the book, his picture “The Black and White of Saint Petersburg” was inspired by the Brahms Violin concerto, and that, for him each musical piece, and its conveyance of the state of mind of the composer, affects how he sees a city or a landscape. In particular, one composer seems to have had a huge influence on Titarenkos approach and that is Dmitri Shostakovich.  In particular, the Second Cello Concerto has “provided the underlying rhythm for the photographer’s inspiration.” In the artists words “I was so hooked on this concerto, that I could listen to it all day, every day. During my walks around the city, I realized that St. Petersburg offered endless living illustrations of this music. The monotonous opening cello melody was one of despair, but also of expectation. The concerto was instrumental in realizing certain images.” Fascinating. To me, this is the greatest cello concerto. For all the glories of the Dvorak and the poignancy of the Schumann, even for Shostakovich’s own, brilliant, First Concerto, to me, this work is the most essential work written for cello and orchestra, because, at least to me, its message is so important. It is music that is the conscience of a destroyed culture, and a very precious reminder of the frailty of humanity. It’s personal and universal messages are perfectly embodied in the juxtaposition of solo cello and orchestra. Few other works, maybe the Beethoven Violin Concerto, Berg Violin Concerto and the greatest Mozart Piano Concerti find this balance so perfectly.  In any case, to what extent could my powerful reaction to Titarenko’s images be due to the fact that we shared this common love of one piece of music? How does music change us, imprint its layers of meaning on us? Perhaps I was carrying these images in my subconscious, not from birth, but from Shostakovich, or perhaps all three of us, and all of you, have always carried them inside us, but that only the true artist could bring them out into the world were we could all look or listen and say, “yes, I know this.”   

More on Alexey Titarenko, including an interview in mp3 format.

 c. 2006 Kenneth Woods

Very briefly….

My favourite moment in the second movement of  Beethoven 3 is bars 157-159 (just after letter E), when we hear a very soft, very high a-flat in the first violins, followed by a very loud, very low a-flat in the celli and basses, then a very loud a-flat major chord with all the strings and the horns. I have my own, very personal, poetic idea of what this moment might express dramatically, but I thought it would be good to see if I could understand why Beethoven used those notes to create that moment. Certainly it is the most dramatic moment (of many very dramatic moments) in the movement, so why a-flat? Maybe the answer is in more questions…
 Question: What is the first note with an expressive marking on it in the movement?

Answer: A-flat (First violins, bar 6, sf)
 Question: If the E-flat major theme at letter A is the first sign of any hope or respite, what note takes us back to c minor?

Answer: A-flat (in the first violins in the third bar of letter A)
Questions: After the great, fortissimo climax of the Maggiore section, what note takes us back to c minor?
 Answer: A-flat (bar 102. Note that bar 101 could still be in major, the down beat is a c major chord- I think many performances lose that sense that it isn’t until the next bar that we know where we’re going).
 Question: What harmony signals our entrance into the coda
 

Answer: A Flat Major (letter H)
 

Question: What is the highest note in the last phrase of the movement?
 

Answer: A flat (first violins bar 242)
 

Now that is cool.

So, what does A-flat mean to Beethoven in this movement?

The last day of this year’s workshop.
On paper, it looks like the most laid-back schedule of the week- we start a little later, have only one teaching session and the concert. It wasn’t unreasonable of me to think that this would be the one day I could get a few things done….
Of course, that is forgetting all the private consultation time, answering last minute questions on breaks, and dealing with performance logistic issues all day. Now 2:02 AM, post-workshop, and the day has come and gone like a hurricane. Hardly a second’s rest.
Last things first- the concert. Frankly, I’m somewhat ambivalent about the concert. We included it in the curriculum in year one because we were keenly aware that we needed to make the workshop sufficiently attractive to enough applicants that it would be a viable project. There are any number of conductors who will come to a workshop just for the chance to get some video footage of themselves. They may not be approaching the workshop with the most positive attitude, but at least they help make possible the infrastructure that allows those who are truly coming to learn the chance to do so.
Two years in, and I’m sure I have yet to see a single student who’s come for any reason but to learn. I don’t know if doing a concert helps recruit students (we know it was not a prime factor for last year’s students),  but it does add an aspect of culmination to the weekend, in ways both good and bad. A long evening of difficult music that hasn’t been rehearsed being directed by student conductors who haven’t actually conducted the entire piece before may sound like a recipe for disaster.
In fact, we did have the odd disaster, and, fair enough, that might have been predictable. Concerts should be rehearsed. Music is important, and we ought to always allow for the pieces we love to be heard in a sympathetic environment. Nevertheless, the concert gives each conductor a chance to test themselves in the music we’ve worked on, and it adds a level of gravitas to the project. Even with a tiny audience, it’s a different kind of pressure.
Fortunately, I think there were more than enough fantastic moments to justify the risks and wrecks. More on those later. Now, at 2:30 AM, having said goodbye to students, orchestra musicians and colleagues, I’m callin’ it a day. We’ve survived two years, and, though I’m kind of heartbroken to be done for this summer, it feels like the RCICW has turned the corner that will let it really endure.
KW

Note-
This is the first of a projected two part series on modernism in music. Today’s piece is essentially about the argument against modernism, the next one is the argument for modernism.
Stay tuned! KW

Recently, the British composer Harrison Birtwistle made the news when he stood to collect the classical prize at the Novello Awards (Story).I have to say, I read the article cheering for the great man, especially when he said- “I’ve never heard so many clichés in a single day.And why is all your music so effing loud?” I have to say I think it’s long past time that proper MUSICIANS, classical or not, stop playing nice with celebrity wigglers (read “pop stars”) just because they make their living lip-synching their way through digitally manufactured non-music. No one would have argued more strongly than I that genuine musical geniuses like Jimi Hendrix or Queen deserved to be taken seriously by classical musicians and critics, but those days are gone. We live in the era of corporate plasto-music, music that has never been played on instruments or sung by people. It’s music driven by focus groups and manufactured on computers using extracts stolen from the work of previous generations through sampling and vocal performances that are either entirely spoken, or which are tuned and edited note-by-note in the editing suite. We’ve traded “rock musicians” and “singers” for “pop stars,” a form of life whose very title has no link to music, performing, communication, creativity or talent.So, well done, Harrison!Nevertheless, as the day went along, I found myself coming back to the word “cliché.” Maybe, on some level, I found myself thinking about how we’re doing in the classical word at avoiding the cliché.

Recently, the British composer Harrison Birtwistle made the news when he stood to collect the classical prize at the Novello Awards ).I have to say, I read the article cheering for the great man, especially when he said- “I’ve never heard so many clichés in a single day.And why is all your music so effing loud?” I have to say I think it’s long past time that proper MUSICIANS, classical or not, stop playing nice with celebrity wigglers (read “pop stars”) just because they make their living lip-synching their way through digitally manufactured non-music. No one would have argued more strongly than I that genuine musical geniuses like Jimi Hendrix or Queen deserved to be taken seriously by classical musicians and critics, but those days are gone. We live in the era of corporate plasto-music, music that has never been played on instruments or sung by people. It’s music driven by focus groups and manufactured on computers using extracts stolen from the work of previous generations through sampling and vocal performances that are either entirely spoken, or which are tuned and edited note-by-note in the editing suite. We’ve traded “rock musicians” and “singers” for “pop stars,” a form of life whose very title has no link to music, performing, communication, creativity or talent.So, well done, Harrison!Nevertheless, as the day went along, I found myself coming back to the word “cliché.” Maybe, on some level, I found myself thinking about how we’re doing in the classical word at avoiding the cliché.Certainly, the only genre more easily identified than the pop song is the high-modernist sound word?  In Britain, some call this music “plinky-plonky,” or “squeeky gate” in the US “bleep-blop.” These terms tell you a great deal about the listening skills of those that use them, but they also might tell us something about the aesthetic sophistication of modernist music.
There are very good reasons why music of the modernist movement is prone to the cliché. The origins of post World War II modernist music of course lie in the New Vienna School of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, and also on the Avante-Garde movements of the 20s and 30s. These movements essentially advocated two aesthetic goals-

• The expansion of theoretical possibilities and aesthetic horizons
• The movement away from the stylistic expectations of previous generations, particularly those of the late-Romantics

When we speak of Schoenberg, we often speak of the “liberation of dissonance.” It should be remembered that dissonance has always been a part of music, no one wrote more dissonant music than Mozart. However, in previous generations, the expectation was that dissonance must resolve. So, in the age of the “liberation of dissonance,” we can now allow dissonance simply to exist, not as a path to resolution, but as a viable aesthetic state of its own.
Schoenberg’s early atonal music is usually described as “freely atonal,” in that he is combing the two qualities outlined above without creating any new technical structure to replace tonal function, which was the reason that in early music dissonance had to resolve.

Eventually, Schoenberg became convinced that, in the absence of the tonal system, a new system for developing musical ideas in time was needed, hence the famous “Method of Composing Using all 12 Tones.”

Schoenberg felt that to avoid the clichés of the previous generations, it was necessary to avoid any hint of tonal function, hence the emphasis on the sequential use of all 12 tones before repetition of a tone. Although sequences (tone rows) can be created which create recognizable tonal sonorities, including all the triads, Schoenberg also felt that it was best to avoid those sonorities as they were the clichés of a previous era. Therefore, in both vertical and horizontal musical organization (that is, harmonic and melodic structure), the music of this revolution from it’s earliest days focused on only a handful of the possible intervals, the tritone, the second and the seventh. Thirds, sixths, fourths, fifths and octaves were to be avoided.

Of his students, Webern was the strictest and most innovative in applying these ideas, and it was in his music that the compelling relationships between this method of composition and mathematics first began to make itself felt. To many, Webern is the true founder of ‘plinky-plonky.” In the next generation, composers of the Darmstadt school took this approach to the next level, integrating the serial approach to all aspects of musical construction. Rhythms, dynamics and articulations were all serialized.

Some contemporary writers have recently called this movement a great historical detour, but I can’t help but see in this approach a tremendously interesting  movement towards creation of art that is profoundly unified and organic. To me, serialism is the perfect approach for the age of DNA- it reflects this understanding of life as a process of replication and evolutionary development.

So, why do people call it “bleep-blop” music?

Let’s go back to the liberation of dissonance. Schoenberg taught us all that a major seventh or a tritone don’t have to resolve anywhere. What then of consonance?  In liberating dissonance, have we imprisoned consonance?

Music of the tonal era is developed largely through creating patterns of tension and release, and those patterns are largely determined by harmony. Tension is created by dissonant sonorities, then released by consonant ones. Composers use dynamics, orchestration, color and texture to reinforce the states of tension or release, but it is harmony that generates the tension and provides the release. These patterns, like fractals, exist at every structural level of the music, from note to note, bar to bar and phrase to phrase, but also in the larger harmonic structure of whole works. The whole idea of sonata form is not that we’re in a key, but that we’re trying to get back to a key- that’s where the tension is. Mahler’s progressive tonality took this even farther- in many of his works the tension of harmonic searching goes through the entire work because it is not until the end of the piece that we understand what key we’re seeking.

If tonal music is organized through tension and release, and tension and release are generated through harmony, then how is modernist music organized?

I would suggest that in serial music “tension and release” are replaced by “intensity and relaxation,” on the micro level, and that harmonic development and planning are replaced by organic development of ideas, or motives, over time at the macro level. Motivic development is not something new- no one gave more thought to the development of musical ideas over time than Beethoven, Brahms or Mahler. Serial music is the logical extension of this approach.

I think one question for future generations of composers and theorists to think about is whether “intensity and relaxation” are an adequate replacement for “tension and release.” Let’s think about the tools a serial composer can use to create intensity or relaxation-

• Changes in dynamic leve 
• Changes in textural density
• Changes in contrapuntal complexity
• Changes in color
• Changes in rhythmic content and tempo

Interestingly enough, these are all tools used in tonal music to highlight tension and release. However, tension and release are created by

• Distance from a harmonic home point or center
• Preponderance of dissonant or consonant intervallic content

With the liberation of dissonance, or, more accurately, the suppression of consonance,  composers have lost those tools, and had to replace them with tools that would previously have been used to reinforce them. Tools of variance that were once of secondary importance are now of primary importance. There is a danger here that something has been lost- certainly being able to juxtapose consonance and dissonance is a very powerful tool, and one that high-modernist music doesn’t allow for.

On the macro level, music in this idiom is built around the organic development of ideas through manipulation of the series. The implications of the core musical ideas are extracted, enlarged, developed and modified overtime. The shape of the piece is in part determined by the implications of its material.

However, again, one can make the case that something is lost. In tonal music there is sense of  fractality present in the ways in which the patterns of  tension and release replicate themselves on the micro and macro levels. In serial music, there seems to be an emphasis on intensity as a constructive tool at the micro level, and on developmental procedure at the macro level. Again, there is a danger that we have given up a powerful tool, the integration of relationships between harmonic stability and instability at all levels on the piece without fully replicating it.

Perhaps this is one reason that composers have found it very difficult to sustain long structures using the modernist aesthetic? Perhaps it is also one reason that the modernist aesthetic is easily parodied? In developing new theoretical constructs, composers have perhaps lost track of others.

Remember the two core goals of the early modernist movement-

• The expansion of theoretical possibilities and aesthetic horizons
• The movement away from the stylistic expectations of previous generations, particularly those of the late-Romantics

Perhaps in trying to achieve the second goal, we’ve actually made it impossible to achieve the first, because no matter how many new possibilities we open up, we can’t replace those we’ve given up.

In fact, this may be one of the core qualities of all 20^th century music. Look at jazz- In the mid century jazz evolved with amazing speed, developing new possibilities harmonically, stylistically, instrumentally and so on. The evolution of improvisation as an art form between 1940 and 1970 is almost too staggering to comprehend!

What has jazz done since then?

In all the rapid development of jazz in the mid-century, certain elements of musical construction lagged behind. First of these is form. While other musics have developed a nearly infinite range of forms, jazz has stayed close to the basic structure of head-improve-head throughout its development. Certainly there are notable exceptions (Miles Davis’ “Nefertiti” comes to mind), but when one considers what happened harmonically in jazz between 1965 and 1995, it is not possible to make the argument that formal construction evolved at anything like a parallel rate. As a result, the evolution of jazz since 1970 has slowed, and we have a stereotype of modern jazz that has become an easily reduced cultural reference point, just like “plinky-plonky.”

Maybe the 21^st century will be the age when composers are able to solve some of these problems. If the question of the 20^th century was how to create music that opened up new possibilities and avoided the clichés of the old world, maybe the question of the 21^st is how to create music that integrates the whole range of musical materials while avoiding not only the clichés of the 19^th century, but also those of the 20^th?

The 20^th century was the age of the genre and of the binary opposition. We assign something a genre, then define it by it’s opposite. Our cultural and political dialogue is dominated by arguments between liberal and reactionary points of view, between right and left, US and Europe, North and South, Western World and Muslim World. In the performing world we have old-school Beethoven (Furtwangler) and new-school Beethoven (Norrington). In composition we have the language of suppressed consonance in music of the 50s-70s (Boulez) or the language of suppressed dissonance in much of the contemporary music of today, especially that of the minimalist school. The question of the 20^th century has always been which school was right- liberal or conservative, dissonant or consonant, lean and mean or big and bold. Perhaps the question of the 21^st century is how to integrate, how to reconcile, how to reinvigorate our divergent approaches, and how to create a more sophisticated approach to our art and our lives.