Greetings from the Olympic City

I must confess to have stayed out of the argument here due partly to a
lack of familiarity with Ustvolskaya's music (but mostly to a lack of time).
I have sadly heard OF her without having had the chance to hear her.  I
understand she was much admired by Shostakovich - a composer much harassed
by the Soviet authorities for not writing 'happier' music.  Readers will
know that I am very sympathetic to the whole 'atonal'/pantonal/dodecaphonic
movement in music, so it is time I spoke out.

Dave Lampson wrote:

>I need art that is striving to reach beyond the mundane, to elevate the
>human condition.

I can think of few works pantonal or otherwise, whose darkness and
anguish surpass that of the opening movement of the Beethoven 9th.
Beethoven himself reportedly described it as an expression of the 'tragedy
of existence'.  Yet in expressing it in the way he did he does 'reach
beyond the mundane', he does 'elevate the human condition'.  So too does
Shakespeare and Goethe in their tragedies.  Interestingly it was precisely
this failure to accept the dark, the anguish and the tragic as an essential
part of art that once led to the rejection of the unrelentingly tragic, and
for the sake of 'poetic justice' a happy endings were once substituted in
Shakespeare's great tragedies.

Most telling yet perhaps is the example of the music of J.S. Bach, so full
as it is of its black pearls, its inegalites, and an unrelentingly austere
anguished darkness, whose assaultive dissonance on the contemporary ear we
really only begin to appreciate when we listens to contemporaries such as
Telemann and Rameau.  It is not surprising that these sweeter voices were
much preferred to Bach's, just as today most people prefer a Lloyd-Webber
to an Ustvolskaya.

Indeed the whole aesthetic discussion we are having in this post might be
further rephrased into the age old question, which has haunted us since the
time of Aristotle, of how it is possible for the tragic to be beautiful.
Whether we are dealing with Bach's St Mathew Passion, Wagner's Tristan,
Berg's Wozzeck, Webern's 6 Pieces Opus 6, Shostakovich or Ustvolskaya's
symphonies, I think it matters little.

Robert Peter's wrote:

>So this is what I look for in music (and all arts), Dave:  truth.  It is
>more important for me than beauty.

In many a way I couldn't agree more, except that I do not completely agree
with the classical thesis-antithesis relation between Beauty and Truth.  I
find 'beauty' without truth to be disgusting.  'Truth' without beauty is a
condition of the 'mundane' everyday, but is too facile to be conferred the
status of a final Truth.  The tragic is the synthesis of Beauty and Truth,
as of ugliness and the beautiful.  Beauty and truth, beauty and ugliness
unite in the essence of the tragic

On the other hand Dennis Fodor writes:

>For some reason that I cannot fathom but accept intestinally, the atonal
>or serial stuff simply sounds awkwardly contrived.  It does not sound
>natural.

This emphasis on the 'natural' sounds like the old assaults of Rousseau
(polemicist par excellence on behalf of 'naturalness') et al against
Rameau, whose music was considered horribly dissonant and 'unnatural'.
Much music of the 1700's was more dissonant than that of previous time and
for many this was grossly unacceptable and 'unnatural'.  Copernicus had
once said much the same about Monterverdi.  When we today scream murder
that a composer such as Stockhausen or Ustvolskaya writes in an allegedly
'unnatural' style, generally this means that the listener is unaccustomed
to the dissonant musical 'language'.  It really means not 'this is bad
music' but rather 'I do not understand'.  It would be considered bizzare
that someone who does not speak German should find Goethe 'unnatural'
because they could not understand the words - yet this sort of thinking is
rampant in musical circles.  The important point is that once 'fluent' in
the dodecaphonic medium it sounds no more deliberate than the diatonic
medium.

Ultimately trying to convince an audience which finds someone such as
Schoenberg 'too modern and unnatural' (never mind that he died almost 50
years ago in a past millenium!) that Ustvolskaya works are worth listening
too is really asking for trouble.  I almost wish that Achim had not written
anything on the subject now.  People are still not ready for her.  We have
come too early.  Yet when I listen to a work like Penderewski's Threnody,
after this all the more conservative work he subsequently wrote seems too
easy.  One feels betrayed in listening to his symphonies.  This has nothing
to do with preferring 'putrefaction' to 'beauty'.  It has more to do with
preferrring something visionary, intense, and revelatory to mere prettiness
and an opiate to the dullness of existence.  But I shall imagine all this
pleading will fall on deaf ears.

Dave Lampson wrote:

>>I would like to suggest, so, that the human search for Art is not
>> to elevate human condition, but to skip from it and all it's flatness.
>
>Elevate.  Transcend.  Skip away.  I think we may be saying
>nearly the same thing but in different words.

It was Nietzsche who set the tone for the 20th century in his attack
on metaphysics as an escapism from the 'mundane'.  Mundane here means
'worldly.  Metaphysics prefers the OTHER-worldly to this world.  Yet 20th
century art does contain a trend towards the unveiling of the worldly as
not merely 'mundane', but as a revelation in its own right.  Nietzsche
insisted there was to be no more escapism into metaphysical clouds of
narcotising incense.  There was to be no more damning of the worldly as
corrupt and mundane.  'Love the earth' was Zarathustra's teaching.  Of
course to reduce 20th century musical aesthetics to a contest between the
metaphysicists and anti-metaphysicists too is all too simplistic, but
nonetheless, this escapism from mundane everydayness into clouds of
sweetness seems all to much of a return to an old fashioned aesthetic, as
remote to us as the ideals of poetic justice which dictated that happy
endings be substituted to Shakespeare's tragedies.

I will be looking forward to hearing some Ustvolskaya.  I anticipate that
I too will have some difficulty appreciating her, but unlike the overly
sensitive dear souls on this list who faint at the hint of any dissonance,
I will be relishing the prospect of repeated careful listening until her
musical vision becomes clear to me.  I can imagine liking her more than I
do Sophia Gubaidulina, whose music, deeply influenced as it is by the likes
of Nono and Stockhausen, I still find simply too saccharine!  She is like
an atonal Lloyd-Webber.

Satoshi Akima
Sydney, Australia
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