Camps

Update: Edited for (I hope) clarity - thanks Steve!

Jessica Duchen talks about "party lines" in the academic composition scene, and I think she describes a situation to which we can all relate.

So what about those of us who love music from both the "Modernist" camp and the "Postclassical" (to use Kyle Gann's term) camp?  Are we eclectic, non-discerning musicians?  Should I have to give up Bolcom for Birtwistle just to impress my colleagues?  Is my fascination with James Dillon's soundworld infecting my mind with the complexity bug? 

Such divisions have existed in all of the arts for a long, long time.  What's necessary is to have the constitution and the guts to own up to what you like and to not be intimidated by those 'modernists' who are eager to dismiss "Prokofiev's rubbish."  I actually feel sorry for such people, and it's impossible to be intimidated by someone I feel sorry for.  I'm sorry they're unable to respond to the honest, simple beauty of the slow movement from Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto or the raw, bitter power of the first movement of the Sixth Symphony.  I'm sorry they're unable to discern subtle distinguishing differences in musical language that make a composer's work "modern."   Why does there always have to be a canyon between composers' rhetorics? Have people lost the ability to hear the subtle differences that make every piece of music different?  Why does working with "systems" make a piece automatically more "modern"?

The reverse also holds true.  There are those postclassicists who automatically refuse to go to a concert if they see Xenakis or Ferneyhough on the playbill.  I feel sorry for them as well.  I'm sorry that they don't get a rush of visceral excitement when faced with an entirely new and, yes, difficult soundworld.  I'm sorry that they spurn a piece the moment it starts to challenge the traditional concept of "beautiful sound."  I'm sorry that they'll never attend another concert with a work by Aperghis on it or listen to a work with the word "stochastic" in the program notes because of a bad encounter with Metastasis.  Why must all music contain "beautiful" melodies?  Why must the dramatic concern of pieces stick to conflict/resolution?  Why must musical ideas be stated and then developed?  Why must instruments be played the same ol' way they've been played for 200 years?

It's because of this penchant for categorization, labeling and dismissing that environments like the one Jessica describes are all too prevalent in schools of music.  And every camp is guilty. 

I like pieces, not composers.  Counting the composers whose entire bodies of work appeal to me would take less than five fingers.  Likewise, I can't think of any composer generally thought of as historically significant that hasn't produced at least a handful of works I enjoy greatly.  Every day I'm frustrated by people's persistent pigeon-holing of everything in life into these facile binary compartments: rich/poor, black/white, gay/straight, modernist/postclassical, masterpiece/worthless.  It's simply a result of laziness.  What's even worse, though, is the habit of completely ignoring and further marginalizing those cases that don't fit into one of the two categories or the composers whose lives and art share traits from both.

Where do Michael Tippett, Frank Martin and Luigi Dallapiccola fit?  They're all masterful composers and have produced honest music, yet the modernists would say they're conservative and vice versa.  They're all progressive but not aggressively so.  They're all concerned with how their music sounds and how their audiences react.  They all didn't find a need to write long diatribes proclaiming their aesthetic stances.  They just composed, and produced magnificent works of art.  As a result, they're left in this weird repertoire limbo and become even more stuck in a niche than the bona fide modernist and postclassical composers, whose music may or may not be as good but whose obvious membership in one camp or another makes them easier to come to terms with and gives them alliance and support from a preformed group.   

The end result of all this is that it stops people from exploring.  Once allied with the modernist camp, it's easy to feel like a traitor when you go to a concert and your jaw drops and your flesh tingles as the hair from Hilary Hahn's bow starts to fly off in the finale of Barber's Violin Concerto and you leap from your seat after the final, rocketing arpeggio upwards is met at just the right time by the final punctuation from the full orchestra.  Who can you talk to about this experience?  Your modernist friends will scoff.  Your conservative rivals will listen and then tell their fellow camp members about your wavering artistic convictions.  Does there need to be this consternation? 

So you didn't like Tetras.  Yes, maybe Xenakis and his successors aren't for you, but there's nothing at all lost by being familiar with his music (even if it's only to give you more ammunition).  Who knows, you might even find something you like!

Comments

[Walter Ramsey]

Thank you, you say many true things. Indeed, it is subtlty that is lost on many of today's composers, who believe unfortunately that one must revolutionize everything in order to have presence, in other words start always from scratch, continually ignoring the tried and true methods of Past Masters. It is unfortunately this attitude that leads to works being justified by their analytic tendencies alone.
And of course, a composer can write however he will please, and a listener can pick and choose. But we should remember that an atmosphere has been created, a default attitude, that says that to compose in the ways of the great Masters, is at best these days only an exercise, to be completed in the student years and abandoned. In other words although composers are free to write as they please, an agenda exists within the system, to block developments from the great traditions of the past. It is why many composers feel the need constantly to create something new, or to justify the existence of their works with analytic jargon.