Must we fight this war again? Obviously so, then let at least a few people
declare for peace before the shooting has overwhelmed all else.

In the late 1930's and through the 1940's there was a consensus among
many people, some of them well placed in both public and private arts
institutions, that a new clear and accessible style of music needed to
be the focus of modern American composition.  The foremost spokesman of
this movement was Copland, though over the period of its ascendancy such
luminaries as Nadia Boulanger, Leonard Bernstien and Virgil Thomson could
be counted among its adherents.  This school, a branch of neo-classicism,
took as its basic principle that art had to be accessible in order to reach
people, and that the purpose of art was to elevate people above the misery
of economic depression, the horror of war, and the homegenised ugliness of
industrialism and its products.  It was part of a broader movement which
can be thought of as Post-Romanticism - conscious attempts to bring the
essential surface and desire for a publically stated unified aesthetic of
beauty into the 20th century.  It can be thought to be part of the same
impulse that produced art deco, the craftsman movement, and photo-realistic
painting.

In its period of acsendancy, it took Schoenberg as its bete-noire, and
searched for anti-Schoenbergs.  Searched for reasons why "the new music"
was not music at all.

You cannot step in the same river once, and the genunine interest that
12 tone music aroused - even among composers who were taken as part of
20th century tonality such as Britten and Schostakovich - created a
gradually growing group of people who could not accept the tonalist
hard line.  After the second world war, serialism erupted as the most
avant-garde of avant-garde music.  Backed by ideology supplied by Adorno
and Dalhaus - and by a ferverant, almost messianeic belief that serialism
stood for all that was right - composers such as Boulez and Stockhausen,
Babbit - became the foremost proponents of the parameterisation of music as
being the pinnacle of art.  Art, so the belief went, opposed mass banality
which created fascism, art was difficult and advanced, and therefore the
more complex the technique in music, the more advanced it was.  It was the
last gasp of progressivism in the arts, the highest peak of the idea of the
avant-garde in modernism that one must remake oneself in the image of the
modern world.

And paradoxically, the dawn of post-modernism.

The avant-garde took the academic high ground.  And as they had been
attacked when out of power, they turned and attacked.  Copland, who had
been among the most ferverant of anti-complexity composers began, in turn,
to feel the pressure of being out of date.  But the new avant-gardists had
a different world view.  They dismissed neo-classicism as conservative, it
is true, but the real enemy was any perceived hold over fro the 19th
century past.

Defections accelerated - Eliot Carter, always in sympathy with the American
iconoclast Ives, Stravinsky - god father of neoclassicism - Lutoslawski,
Ligeti, and much later Lukas Foss - all contributed to the impression
that a tide was rushing in, and everybody who was anybody had gone over.
Bernstiens upset at his close friend Foss' change of heart on the matter
is an example of the kind of emotional investment that individuals made
in "their" side of the style wars.

What is interesting is current supporters of both sided fail to acknowledge
the political sins of their artistic forebearers.  Bring out documentary
evidence of the kind of social censorship that was practiced, first by
the neo-classicists, and then by the avant-gardists - and there will be
instantaneous cries of denial.  But, sadly, the charges have merit all
of the way around.

- - -

But what should be underlined is that even this is beginning to recede into
history.  Neo-classicism peak was from 1940 through 1955, avant-gardism
had its day until the middle of the 1970's.  Each fell from grace to be
replaced by the next movement.  And, in the end, only the artifacts and
ideas remain behind.  The gruseom process of winnowing and re-evaluating
continues onward.  While lives, careers and years may hve been wasted, this
is the price of the playing the game of art.  One must not only make art,
but make a case for that art which will rally others to it - if one desires
success in the present.

Regular readers will know that I explain serialism as being part of a
larger technophile movement of its time.  It was an era where symbolic
science seemed the most important of disciplines.  It had won the second
world war, it seemed the only means to win the cold war.  It was at its
peak in social prestige and in necessity.  It was also part of a reaction,
especially in Europe, against the enforced artistic policies of the
third riech, and any association with accessible art as a tool of social
engineering.  To make art that was inaccessible was in line with both of
these forces.  And with a third force - fine art was only just begining to
come to terms with the reality of reproduction - reproduction which did for
popular and iconographic thinking what the printing press had done for
symbolic thinking - it allowed mass dissemination.

This change - breaking 300 years of dominance of symbolic thought over
iconography - had sent ripples through art.  At first the belief was that
the popular was not art at all, and indeed any popular medium could not be
art.  Jazz first and foremost was accused of this.  Anti- popularism was,
again, as much a virtue for the aspiring serious artist as being thought
of as being advanced.  The avant-garde offered the mos suiccint and clear
answer to reaching these goals, and consequently could ennunciate most
clearly in short declarative sentences why its followers should be sure
they were on the right path.

- - -

This dichotomy - of tonality as natural versus avant-gardism as advanced
- is, in its strange way, a rather stable solution set.  It provides two
sets of answers which seem to divide the world between them,and each gains
strength from the existance of the other.  Until the last tonalist is
slashed and has salt poured in his open wounds, until the last 12 tone
piece is left to rot in the stacks of some library - along with 15th
century polyphonic compositions, a study for the curious alone - the two
sides cannot rest.  Demons abound and must be exorcised.

But, for reasons too obvious to mention, my orientation is towards the
future, rather than the past.  While the echoes of previous artistic
conflicts shape a part of my social reality - in as much as old cold
warriors still run festivals, write reviews and decide what is to be
performed and supported - the present is rather much like the state of
music in the wake of the conflict between rising rational classicism and
baroque traditionalism in the 1750's.  An academic style has collapsed in
the public's estimation, various styles proposed to replace it are
simplistic in their approach to the point of being able to offer only
limited means to effect and only isolated ideas of interest, which cannot
be developed without some deep insight into their musical nature.  In that
time it was Haydn and Mozart who combined the rigor of polyphonic voice
leading, which they came by through studying the younger Bach and Padre
Martini - with the flexibility and articulation of the italian homophonic
style, the german sturm and drang movement - and a host of other styles
which grew up in the wake of the collapse of polyphony.  Between 1750 and
1775 however - the future of music was very much open to many possible
futures.  The one that prevailed was not the only road that might have
been.

The future now rests on dealing with the artstic problems of the present,
and these problems are not, particularly, solved by rehashes of the
mid-century style wars.  These wars mean nothing in China, and less than
nothing in many other lands, which none the less are developing a taste for
classical music, and which have a need for high art.  These debates have
little meaning in Europe and America - where sound painting has long since
replaced serialism, and minimalism is at least as important as tonalism.

The present, in otherwords, is not the modern world of the post-cold war,
it's near past, which is to be rebelled against - is this conflict.  There
is yet one more wave of young academy trained artists who will be soaked
in the vernacular of the style wars, and we shall, I feear, be treated to
repeats of the doctrines for some time.  But ask yourself something - as
believers in art, and in original thought as being important - can you live
your artistic life repeating truisms penned in the early years of this
century? Schoenberg laid out his case in 1920, and little has been added
to the avant-garde since in terms of basic rationale.  Tonalism is an
extension of the victorian idea of the naturalness of a particular art
style.  These are doctrines which are older than the vast majority of
people on the planet.  To make new art, we must have new ideas and
standards.  We cannot have new art if what we are listening for is the
next Scheonberg, Rachmnaninoff or Phillip Glass.

- - -

The artistic program which engages me can be described simply:  symbolic
thinking occupies a central place in our society, because that societies
basic infrastructure is controlled through symbolic means - computer
programming, physics - and it is in conflict with iconographic thinking,
which is what is used to control the movements of people - by advertising
and social pressure.  High art then, must give people the tools to rise
above, and avoid being trapped by, the lure of our symbols and the pressure
of our icons.  It must produce artifacts which show people a way of being
where they can maintain both individuality and community in the face of a
massive stream of symbols and icons.

To do this requires a classical music which contains the crucial insights
and ideas of the past century, and puts them forward in terms which can
be felt even if they are not expressly stated.  Which allows people to
identify their ownpersonal narrative within the narrative that the music
presents.

This, in my case, is done by altering the basis by which woks are
structured - from resolution to superposition - and using these technqiues
to produce a sound surface which is able to range freely from the simple
to the complex, and from the consonant to the dissonant.  It is based on
teh belief that performance comes out of the ability to take a pattern
which can be incorporated into the body, into the mind, and provide the
framework for action.  To this end I have studied, and written on, the
basic prodsodic tactics of English poetry, the contrapunctal structure of
tonal music in Beethoven - because such means of producing multiplicity
out of simplicity are the means to an art which, seemlingly forbidding
at first, can be made acheivable.

There is the past, and there is even a point to finally setting that
past in order - with all of its acheivements and errors - sorting through
its welter of works and artifacts to decide which ones to refurbish or
perserve.  But there is also the future.  A future where abilities
incomprehensible to our recent forebearers are now available at the touch
of a button.  A world where the average person will be able to do what
was once the province of large companies, and small groups that which was
the domain of nation states.  Where even the smallest nation can possess
weaponisable mass destruction, where the economy and environement are
inexorably globalised, and the discourse of the world carried on in more
languages than since the end of the 19th century.  We must live in such
a world, and make art to survive - and florish - in it.  It is our
evolutionary heritage to use our aesthetic to make the infinite,
understandable - and to make the understandable, doable.

stirling s newberry
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http://www.mp3.com/ssn