Notes

Postmodernism:

I will embrace a "positive" postmodernism that is not merely a childish, baby boomer reaction against the agenda of their parent's generation.

David Claman's sextet for the Cygnus Ensemble, Gone For Foreign, demonstrated to me, clearly for the first time, a positive postmodernism:

"Let's agree that we are totally alien (and inscrutable) to each other because we want to breathe the air of some inscrutable other ethos."

This form of postmodernism that I deduced from the music is exoticism with an agenda, but a positive one. I make no claims that the composer had any intention of provoking such a deduction.

Terry Eagleton, in The Illusions of Postmodernism, deconstructs this perspective suggesting that the postmodernist's seeking a generic otherness can be a selfish puruit to a degree that is pathological. (Both Claman's Gone For Foreiegn and Mackey's work, Indiginous Instruments evoke a generic exoticism. They do not practice or seek to practice "authentic" indiginous musical traditions.)

Eagleton:

"One could imagine, then, such a subject dreaming of dismantling these inconveniently autonomous others, even if the price of that vicotry would be the simultaneous dissolution of the self which confronts them. Or, to put it another way, everyone has now been converted into consumers, mere empty receptacles of desire. In place of those old autonomous others, who were all too stubbornly specific, there now emerges a portentously generalized Otherness, the particular bearers of which can become indifferently interchangeable: women, Jews, prisoners, gays, aboriginal peoples. Such abstracting is hardly in the spirit of postmodern particularism; nor is it all that complimentary to inform these 'others' that they are just some generalized signifier of Otherness, for which purpose any bunch of them would presumabley do just as well as any other. Otherness in this sense is by no means the oposite of exchange-value. What homogenizes these avatars of Otherness is just the fact that none of them is me, or us, which implies quite as self-centered a perspective as the most discreditable 'humanist' subject. If the 'other' is reduced to whatever dirupts my identity, is this a humbly decentring move, or a self-regarding one? And if the world is hollowed out along with me, as a fractured subject confronts a fictional reality, is that subject really as humble as it seems if it has made sure that there is no longer any obdurate reality ou there to resist it?"

I agree with his critique, but it does not have to go so far as to take the wind out of the sails of strong, positive postmodernism. To his credit, Eagleton says a few paragraphs later:

"There is indeed, then, a genuine as well as a bogus form of otherness, and postmodern thought at its most creative has been able to tap something of its elusive power. If we are really able to divest ourselves of the centred ego, rather than merely enjoy the act of theorizing about it, then there is surely no doubt that a great power for political good would be unleashed..." (He goes on to say that socialism strikes the right balance between the more positve aims of postmodernism and the more positve aims of liberal humanism.)

....[ongoing]

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Eine Gezupfteweltanshauung

This is a work for mandolin and electronic plucked sounds.

The four meanings implied by the title are all relevant to the piece:

--the worldview of a plucked fowl awaiting slaughter

--a plucked flower and it's implication-->

--the worldview of one whose virginity is lost

--the worldview of one devoted to the world of plucked strings,
and the way (The Way) plucked notes relate to one another--the Tao of Pluck.

The work is an attempt at hochgezupftekunst, dedicated to my friend, the brain-scientist Eckehardt Trenkner.

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The Job of Journeywork

Modern, Postmodern, or Decadent?

This piece is for uillean pipes (an Irish version of the bagpipes), fl, ob, vln, vc, and two banjos. It is a treatment of a traditional uillean pipe tune, The Job of Journeywork. Because the tune is diatonic, and the piece employs nothing but the tune throughout, in the normal Hanslickian fashion, it is part of the general retreat from atonality. Yet this piece shifts between pan-diatonic counterpoint to "maximal" counterpoint in 12-tone aggregates. Nothing new in that, but the strength of this piece hinges on the success of the cute transitions from one mode to the other.

What happens to diatonic tunes when they are in this "maximal" context of 12-tone aggregates? Diatonic tunes in 12-tone aggregates have a maximum of enharmonic relationships. Does this not merely reinforce their diatonicism? Enharmonic relationships are an artifact of the diatonic order. They go away when the chromatic scale is renamed 0-11. Does the presence of the diatonic tune in a 12-tone context subvert the 12-tone context, or does the context subvert the diatonicism of the tune? Which is more maximal, the 12-tone context, or that context in dynamic tension with the diatonic context?

Depending on how one answers these questions, this piece is modern (progressive), postmodern, or decadent.

Is there expressive tension in a work that exhibits all of the above in a kind of Derridaian decenteredness?

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Notes on Cygnus Concerts:

April 30 at Sarah Lawrence College
May 7 at Elebash Hall, CUNY Graduate Center


Berceuse Elegiac

In this program, as in Babar, or Bambi, the story only begins after the mother is killed-off. Busoni composed Berceuse Elegiac upon the death of his mother in 1909. We put it forward here as a prescient moment in a gradual transition from Romanticism to Modernism, a transition that involved an overcoming of the many excesses of the Victorian era. The lost generation would characterize this as an overcoming of the excessively feminine aspects of the Victorian era--the most annoying qualities of Queen Victoria, Mary Baker Eddy and the women of the temperance movement all rolled into one. Hemingway deals with this issue very directly inThe Short Happy Life of Curtiss MacComber.

Frank Brickle: “Busoni’s Berceuse is very much in the mode of the Decadents, who explored the stylization and aesthetic value of death. The first of Schoenberg’s Hanging Gardens songs is another good example.”

In Berceuse the chromaticism is luscious, the piece is full of “bracketed semitones”--the trichord beloved of Webern, and everywhere in the background of Babbitt’s music; but Brickle notes that the underlying harmonic progressions of the Berceuse are very simple post-Wagnerian moves. It is a transitional work--mother is gone, but tonality, not yet.

Berceuse Elegiac was first a piano solo. Busoni later made an orchestral version. Schoenberg made an arrangement of the work for nine instruments in 1920. Frank Brickle’s new version uses guitar and mandolin as the textural glue that the harmonium served in the Schoenberg version, and the string section is halved, suiting the intimate Cygnus formation. Frank Brickle: “The idea was to transform the piece into a pencil drawing with light aquatint.”

Touching on Babbitt’s Philomel

Many of us had our first exposure to Babbitt through a violent primal scene, Babbitt’s setting of Hollander’s “Philomel”. For better or worse, Philomel suggests mis-taking Babbitt in the way many of us have mis-taken Beethoven--with an over-emphasis on violence. In musicological circles there has been some discussion of music as a remnant of ritual sacrifice. The discussion verges on being absurd, but there are some grounds for the general argument.

The cathartic events that we require to make us feel we’ve lived and crossed-through into something new and fresh--such events sometimes require a degree of violence. The likes of bread and circuses, media circuses surrounding major weather events and world events. The rap stars depend on violence--the killing and the outrageous language. Orpheus was devoured by maenads, and the mystique surrounding Astor Piazzola had more than a little to do with his claims that he received death threats as a consequence of his internationalization of Tango.

Music as a way of living intensely and fully can involve a degree of violence, wielded through supremely masterful voice leading events, which is what happens in the music of composers like Beethoven and Babbitt. These are two composers who dare to offer music that is not always pretty.

Yet the violent jolt (the sfortzando in Beethoven, the stark ff, surrounded by p’s and pp’s in Babbitt’s music) is only one of many ways that the two composers spin the musical progress. If anything, Philomel is the work that puts violence in its place and overcomes it. One is tempted to make a connection between Philomel’s transformation (after her rape she is transformed into a nightingale) to the transformation that took place in Babbitt’s music-- Babbitt gradually became a composer of music for live acoustic instruments, exclusively. Yet something remains of his extensive work in electronic music-- his treatment of dynamics and his use of time-points. These techniques seem to have come naturally out of cutting and splicing magnetic tape in measured proportions in block dynamics that can be nested anywhere within the simpler divisions of the bar. That these “mechanical” techniques were gradually adapted to music for flesh and blood players is a very funny development, especially when taken in connection with the violent primal scene in Philomel. I am struggling to describe here, some very fascinating and funny kind of poetic crossing.

By speculating on the possibility that certain of Babbitt’s compositional techniques came naturally out of working in electronic music, I do not want to feed into the myth that Babbitt’s compositional techniques are unmusical, “academic” or “cerebral”. For electronic media or live players, Babbitt’s approach to dynamics and his use of time-points is thoroughly rooted in musical tradition, despite their being revolutionary. The use of time points is one of the latest developments in a long, gradual evolution from geometrical proportions to proportions more commonly found in nature. Babbitt’s proportions are not based on fractals or the Fibonacci series, but these are two examples of non-geometrical proportions that are similar to Babbitt’s proportions. Babbitt’s dynamic schemes are a bit cubist in flavor, but the cubists were still very concerned with depth. and, as composer Robert Martin points out, on each side of a cube in a cubist painting there is subtle shading, and so in Babbitt’s music the players have all kinds of freedom to shape within each dynamic level. Here the players can out-do the magnetic tape, or they can imitate the angularity of the tape, which sometimes works best. Also, in defense of a cubist approach to music, 12-tone equal temperament is naturally a cubist medium. One would need the entire frequency spectrum to get the kind of chiaroscuro that we see in say, Titian.

Swan-Song No. 1

Babbitt’s endings are also his beginnings, and this makes it difficult to suggest specific landmarks to help one through a first hearing. Yet Swan-Song No.1 does offer moments of poise--the quarter note triplets in measures 21, 27, 61, 64 97,111, 191. The general flow of Swan-Song No. 1 is a thoroughly ambiguous interplay between three different pulses--the quarter note, the dotted eighth-note and the eighth-note pulses. This ever shifting underlying pulse is extraordinarily dynamic and propulsive. The quarter note triplets are fleeting moments of stasis within this very dynamic quarter/dotted-eighth/eighth-note flow. In addition, the quarter-note-triplet moments show very interesting relationships to one another--vertical and horizontal shufflings (and in m. 97, a superimposition) of elements. These same elements are also heard clearly in the faster sections. Major thirds rise to the surface at the onset of the faster music: in ms. 18-20 we hear a 4-0-5 tune in the flute that relates to what we hear in quarter-note triplets in. m. 21 and 27. In ms. 38-40 we hear very clearly an 0-2-6 tune that is later heard, poised, in m. 97 in quarter-note triplets, and verticaly in m. 61.


All of Babbitt’s endings are striking for their sense of inevitability, and yet here is an ending unlike any of Babbitt’s other works. Swan-Song No. 1 ends with sustained soundings of the lush diatonic harmonies that we hear foreshadowed in the quarter-note triplets, Brahmsian in flavor (the major 7th chords). The ending is also unusual for Babbitt’s music in the way the quarter and dotted-quarter pulses achieve a kind of equilibrium. They achieve a more uniformly rolling or flowing continuum, again a bit Brahmsian, as Brahms’ rhythmic ambiguity is all “beneath the skin” in that it is achieved through odd accretions of simple units. In other words, Babbitt achieves here rhythmically a kind of stillness in motion that also mirrors what is happening with the pitches--an odd harmonic stasis in flux.

By offering key material in fast and slow motion, and also by offering a texture that might be called pseudo-heterophony, Babbitt seems to be trying to make it very easy to hear things in this piece. Quasi-heterophony: there seem to be two sets of three-part counterpoint unfolding throughout this piece, and often the two groups point to the same pitches in different registers, focalizing the same background in different registers. It is quite easy to hear what rises to the surface, especially because these focal pitches tend to pop out in different registers in quick succession. This is a radical departure from the unforgiving break-neck speed of some of Babbitt’s earlier pieces. [And yet even as early as his songs for two clarinets and soprano (early 60’s) Babbitt has written works that are slower, and relatively easy to hear.]

At the very end of the work we hear a clarion call (in the flute and oboe), the peal of a bell (guitar and violin pizz.), and a chortle in the ‘cello--a descending two-note figure. These two notes in the ‘cello, Gb and F, are found throughout the work at moments that suggest themselves as very important (particularly because they are presented so plainly in the quarter-note triplets). Gb and F are like characters in this piece. One wonders who they are.

The Zen Approach to Babbitt

I am a musician, an interpreter, not a a musicologist or a theoretician. And I am just a bit of a composer. I want music to speak to me directly. I have explained how Swan-Song No. 1 spoke to me plainly and directly. If anything I said sounded convoluted or obscure it is simply because words will always fail to map music every bit as much as they fail to map any aspect of reality. Nevertheless, to the extent that Babbitt’s music is the focus of intense dialogue about how much the ear and the mind, working together, can assimilate, I offer this testimony:

Babbitt’s musical processes are all about perception and hearing. I insist that Babbitt shares with the minimalists the goal of attaining a transparent unity of process (or structure) and expression. His processes are musical processes. He does not set out to execute processes whose resulting musical surface has no relation to those processes. They are not convoluted, unmusical process in lieu of Cage-like chance procedures!


Listening to Babbitt as if it is chance music--I call this “the zen approach” to listening to Babbitt’s music . It is certainly a perfectly valid way to listen to anything. However, this way of listening gives up on, and sometimes even seems to deny the possibility of, understanding the transparent relationships between process and the resulting musical surface . Listening this way one will hear a great deal (perhaps as much as a pre-verbal child can hear in a conversation--loud, soft, tender, rough), one can enjoy the work immensely, but one will miss important content and metaphor. Having said this, Babbitt’s music is difficult, and even with the best intentions one may lose the thread and start hearing “innocently”. Philomel comes to mind again in that the primal scene is often a jolt into a supervening consciousness, from an innocent to a knowing stance. Throughout his carreer, Babbitt was met by violent negative reactions to his music, much like what Schoenberg experienced. (And see how easy Schoenberg is for us now!). This has to do with a perceived demand on the listener to listen differently. Music, for most, is the last sphere of human activity that may seem pre-semantic. Music that seems to ask us to listen differently is met with a recapitualtion of a Philomel-type primal scene.

What really seems to be going on here is much more complicated. One can perceive the full depths of a musical texture without understanding how it is achieved. If I do it reguarly with Schoenberg and Babbitt, then anyone can do it. (This has always been a problem too, because why should you trust me?) One can listen to Babbitt effortlessly (passively) the question is how much experience with and exposure to Babbitt’s music is needed to achieve this effortless hearing? Is it really a visceral experience when a great deal of prior exposure is needed? What is the mechanics of this mysterious capitualtion to an unfamiliar music? I only claimed to have experienced the transition. I do not claim to understand how it works. Even easy music takes repeated hearing before we love it viscerally. It would sometimes take me three or four hearings of a Led Zepplin song before it snared me. I have listened to Swan-Song No. 1 from beginning to end about 25 times now, all through a computerized rendering of the score, some days before the first rehearsal. I didn’t get the piece on the first hearing. This sponge-like absorbtion of music languages is similar to children learning language. They do not learn it intellectually, it is something innate. That it is almost a passive process does not mean that one should not study language from the ground up. Likewise, that we can appreciate music passively does not in any way mean that it is pointless to study the musical structure from the ground up, and I insist that this is especially true of the music of Babbitt.

Ultimately, if we decide to allow ourselves to make connections between things in music, there is much more to be gained from music like Babbitt’s.
It is possible to listen to Beethoven in the zen manner, with no appreciation for the relationship between the melodic thirds of the Hammerklavier and the tertiary harmonic relationships that are operating on a slower time-scale (deeper). I find Brahms’ op. 88 an even more touching example of this because the moment where the relationship between the music’s foreground and background come together most poignantly is in the quasi-Baroque passage (with weltschmertz-laden major-seventh chords) at the end of the slow movement, the sketch that Brahms kept in a notebook for years until he came up with op. 88, an Olympian perspective on the sketch. It is very sad to deny oneself the great joy of this moment by insisting on a zen-hearing of Brahms, likewise with Babbitt--if one refuses to listen for connections one misses the chance to find the metaphor (or cosmology) for the work’s structure. For instance: having the same material appear in a dynamic/mercurial/fast-paced/fast-living texture and also poised, as if beyond time--this sounds like a swan song. Making statements like this is interpretive, and if one insists on listening to Babbitt in the same way we listen to free-improv, one misses out on the fun of attempting a strong interpretation of the work.

My observations about Swan-Song No. 1 represent my first impressions regarding how to enter into the world of the piece, and I also mean them as the beginning of a demonstration of the structure’s transparency: the focal pitches appearing in different registers are very clear surface feature that results from the way the materials were designed very early in the work’s composition (deeper in the background). I also feel how these time-scale relationships help propel the piece forward and lead the ear through it. My description merely scratches the surface, and I’ve probably misrepresented many details, yet I have no doubt that with further hearings I will discover more interesting relationships and more clarity about what I’ve already noticed. At the same time I do not need to discover more. I’ve already capitulated to the work’s mode of operation. I am confidend that the surface leads down to other relationships that are significant for their grandeur (immensity of scale). I am happy to be in a sound world that is almost as unfathomable as a landscape (whose charm has much to do with things like not knowing what is beyond the hill, around the corner, etc.). In Babbitt’s music, the relationship between what we hear and the process that created it is absolutely transparent, like minimalist music, yet Babbitt, as a “self-professed maximalist” wants this transparency to be perceptible for an ear and mind working just a bit harder than they are accustomed to working.

Resisting Stillness

Chester Biscardi’s Resisting Stillness is not about death, but to me it does suggests the creative itch as the force that postpones the ultimate slide into oblivion. Biscardi speaks of a “pulling up from silence”. I think of this piece as a musical portrait of this demiurgical force in all its multiple forms--violent & gentle; moving and still. Biscardi has noted that “resisting stillness” could be something that all music has in common, a property of music. This is a stance that suggests every composition as something tantamount to a swan-song.

Another composer, or Biscardi on another day, the Biscardi of his orchestral work, At the Still Point, may adopt an opposing stance. Resisting stillness suggests action as a positive life principle, but there is also the tradition of stillness as a way to stop time and identify with (dwell in) the eternal, returning to the Decants’ (as well as Schelling and Novalis’) adoption of death as a positive aesthetic.

The piece was commissioned by the Cygnus Ensemble and the International Guitar Festival of Morelia (Michoacan, Mexico) for William Anderson and Oren Fader (Anderson/Fader Duo).

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Postmodernism | Eine Gezupfteweltanshauung | The Job of Journeywork | Notes on Cygnus Concerts