A few days ago on his excellent blog, Lane Harder brought up the interesting habit of contemporary composers listing the technical devices used in composition as a means of “introducing” their works to audiences. You can read the post here. Lane rightly criticizes this habit, and I suggested in my comment on his post that this tendency is a means of justifying something that is often sonically uninteresting. As I further reflect on this practice (and I’ve been guilty of it at times), it seems that there are several other issues at work.
1. A retrogression to a pre-Romantic aesthetic that would suggest that music needs to justify itself by resorting to another discipline (often mathematics but sometimes literature) to make a claim for legitimacy.
2. The practice of equating complexity with beauty. Very specifically here, the issue is not whether a work is complex in and of itself, but the idea that the composer needs to let the audience know just how clever he/she is. (Imagine Bach including a note in his church bulletin that says, “Be sure to catch the bit where I invert the fugue subject in the third movement of the cantata this morning.”)
3. The post-structuralist tendency to analyze the unique gestalt of an art object by giving an autopsy to its component parts and then adding them up to re-establish the whole. This gets into complicated epistemological questions, and I’m working on a forthcoming paper to untie the Gordian knot. For now, let’s just say that I think this approach provides us with a series of reductionistic images that can never reach the sum of the original object.
4. A profound lack of a sense of humor which almost all the great composers of the past maintained – even the petulant ones like Richard Wagner.
5. A lack of honesty and courage to simply write something because it’s what you have to write. Sometimes that’s a complex thing and sometimes it’s a simple thing.
I once had a friend that got some sort of mathematical sequence from a lab for the AIDS virus. He created a tone row from the sequence and wrote a piece based it. He got a Fulbright. I tried to hear it at a concert once, but I honestly fell sound asleep when he started playing and never heard the thing. The music was uninteresting, but it received national attention because of the non-musical aspects. All of which is to say, if Uncle Milton really didn’t care if we listened or not, why did he bother to write the article?
Some thoughts:
1. Why is the invocation of a pre-Romantic aesthetic "retrogressive?" One could just as easily say that Romanticism was an aberration in the evolution of Western art aesthetics… or that there's no such thing as a "progression" of aesthetics.
2. Investigating and describing the complexity of a beautiful art object is not the same as equating complexity with beauty. As you say yourself, sometimes the artist "has to create" a work of art that happens to be complex. (Perhaps I have a different take on this, but in my mind, when a composer provides his own program notes, I presume he's telling me what he _intended_ to do. That may or may not have anything to do with my perceptual experience of the piece… but as Ives said, "What has sound got to do with music?… What it sounds like may not be what it is.")
3. OF COURSE the "reductionist" approach you describe (#3) doesn't reach the sum total of the original object. That's the very definition of reduction! Be careful not to fault the duck for quacking.
4. I'm not sure what you're targeting with this criticism (about a lack of humor). Uncle Milton certainly had a great, impish sense of humor–one that is sometimes revealed only in the kind of reductive analysis you criticize, but does that mean it's not present? (I think of the "Easter eggs" that programmers sometimes slip into commercial applications.)
5. I'm not sure what "compositional" honesty is, but to suggest that Babbitt (or Schoenberg, or Cage, or your favorite avant-gardist) wasn't composing with courage seems an odd claim to make.
As for Uncle Milton's motivation for "The Composer as Specialist": is it so hard to imagine a motivation for Uncle Milton to pen this besides teasing us into listening to Philomel?
I agree that not all analysis (or program notes) informs listening. If you're suggesting that analysis has a moral obligation to do so, however, I'd have to politely disagree. (In any event–and perhaps most important to this conversation–no analysis can possibly be complete. Berio wrote that the best analysis of a musical composition is another musical composition.)
Really interesting post!
Stan,thanks for the clarifying and insightful questions. I need to get some of these issues resolved before I start revising this paper. Here are some thoughts.
1. When I say that the pre-Romantic aesthetic is retrogressive, I'm not speaking about any specific technical apparatus. In that sense, I'm not sure there is progression. I'm really talking about some of my fundamental beliefs about the spiritual development of world history (and specifically some of the writings of Berdyaev). So, I'm really trying to puzzle out some of the problematic areas of composers who find value in reducing their own agency. Norman Brown always used to tease Cage about this. Cage liked to set up chance operations within a very specific context, and Brown would argue that if Cage really believed every thing that he said, that Cage wouldn't have a need to write at all.
2. I think that investigating the complexity of a thing is of special interest to composers and theorists. I think what Lane and I have a problem with is the practice of suggesting that describing a piece of music by talking about a specific technical apparatus does not speak to the aesthetic value of a piece. I think he rightly points out that this is a common practice and that one school of composers has shifted to this understanding. My question is, "In what sense does understanding the technical features give us more access to the music than the 19th century descriptions that suggest that the piece is about the emotions the composer had when he was suffering from tuberculosis with water dripping on his head."
3. Here again, my chief concern surrounds questions of epistemology. I'm wondering how knowing that Gesualdo killed his wife gives me any insight into the music even though I've never killed my wife. Conductors do this all the time. They say, of course this spiritual had secret messages for the slaves (which is a controversial topic anyway), and that helps us to "know" it. This is hard to talk about. My paper is on Martin Buber, and I'll be sure to send you a copy. For now, I'll just suggest that the act of knowing a particular art object does NOT exclude describing particular parts, but that understanding the particulars is not the same thing as an I-Thou relationship with the art object.
4. I don't know what "Easter Eggs" are. I do see a tendency for many composers today to be serious and profound all the time. Dalhaus points out that this is a misunderstanding of the Beethoven myth and that a large portion of Beethoven's output was light music. I see this tendency toward being tragically profound to be somewhat inhuman, and so I associate with the tendency to equate avoiding personal agency in the composition process. That might not be fair.
5. Compositional honesty is something that's hard to pin down, and I never try to do it with people that are dead. However, I can see dishonesty in myself and sometimes in students if I know them well enough. It happens when you don't make the choices that you know you should make and make an easier choice instead. So, for example, if after spending so many hours on your creation, you realize a technical flaw that would require dismantling the entire structure to fix. Instead, you patch it up with duct tape and hope no one will notice the flaw. Also, it happens with the tremendous market pressure to produce sequels to successful works instead of exploring new territory.
I actually like Philomel. It's my favorite Babbitt piece. Berio's suggestion is very similar to Buber's solution. I have another paper that I won't revise that tracks the specific language of Sessions' musical essays to existential religious thinkers like Kierkegaard and Buber. It wouldn't surprise me if Berio came under that same sway.
I'm not sure I have very much to add here, except to say that "Easter Eggs" is a video game reference. Sometimes if you choose one path or open a certain door you'll find a cameo from another game or related storyline. It's cute and has nothing to do with the main game, but gamers love stumbling upon them, and many will look specifically for them.
Similarly, if you are listening to a piece of music, you may hear a quote from another piece. That might be humor, and it might be something else…I think it depends entirely on the piece and the composer and doesn't really make the case one way or another for a sense of humor (or lack thereof) on the composer's part. An audience member might perk up during the quote and think, "Hey, that sounds like Fuer Elise!" but what, exactly, does that have to do with the original ideas vs. execution discussion?
Thanks for commenting, Supermaren! It's especially cool that you are super and not just a regular maren. I think that the point I was making was that most of the great composers have humorous and lighter compositions. Just off the top of my head, I'm thinking of things like Bach's Coffee Cantata, Mozart's "Lick my ass" canon, Beethoven's imitation of a bad field band in the 6th symphony, Brahms' Academic Festival Overture, etc. It may be my ignorance, but I don't know anything funny in the music of Boulez and Stockhausen. That's not to say that I don't like some of their music. It's just that I find the need to constantly be profound and "deep" to be sectioning off a particular part of your humanness to which you decide against giving musical expression. It is in these humorous pieces that we see the contrast of the idea v. execution most clearly. Mozart's canon is wonderful, but if the brief description of it were a technical outline of the musical content, it would be missing the gestalt of the whole. I'm not opposed to describing specific features, I'm opposed to describing parts as if it is the whole or even the main substance.