John Smyth wrote:

>I see another endless argument over Comtemporary vs.  Everything Else
>coming!

Oh, oh; I certainly hope not!  I certainly agree with Steve Schwartz's
position that everyone ought to be given the freedom to listen to whatever
they like.  It's not "either/or," but "both/and."

Nevertheless, the exclusionary position continues to be put forward,
and not only in these precincts.  No less an eminent figure than Richard
Taruskin, in yesterday's NY Times, held forth on a simultaneous Stravinsky
festival and Ring production in San Francisco, recounting the history of
IS's changing opinions on Wagner (first positive, then decidedly negative,
and then somewhat positive again) and ending with a rather odd coda
in which he seems to take issue with the whole idea of what he calls
"eclecticism of taste--the universal tolerance that finds nothing
incompatible with anything." He connects it with the rejection of
"meta-narratives" by "post-modernism" (as though tolerance of various
tastes in art was unheard of in human history until the pesky
post-modernists invented the idea), and then asks, "Could our failure to
take sides, or even to see that sides might be taken, be masking an apathy
that knoweth not its name?"

I suppose that he may be afraid that if people stop taking sides pro and
con Composer X or Style Y, critics such as he might find themselves out
of work, or at least their expertise might be valued much less.  But I
don't see any likelihood of that; after all, few people get into similar
arguments about restaurants ("Italian food is the only kind worth eating!"
-- "No, Chinese food is!"), but restaurant critics are still in business.
And the fact that you tend to go to one kind of restaurant and I to another
doesn't mean that we are apathetic about eating!

>It has been necessary to move on.  Maybe modern music will slowly lend
>itself to new associations, though as I write this I wonder: If earlier
>music was borne out of the rhythms of body movement and speech patterns
>and inflextion, can Modern music, which eschews everything inherently
>"human," (no scarcasm here), ever be associative? If one wants it to be?

My own theory of music, such as it is, also emphasizes that the sources of
all music (classical, folk, pop, etc.) can be found in what I call "singing
and dancing." Certainly much "contemporary" music seems to have strayed far
from those sources.  But I think that the connection is still there.

The analogy with "abstract" visual art is illuminating to me, at least
(while I admit that I am pretty much an ignoramus about the technicalities
of this branch of art).  For a long time, artists produced fairly
recognizable portraits of people and pictures of landscapes, etc.  At the
same time, these works could be analyzed in terms of geometrical organizing
principles, contrasting and harmonizing colors, technical aspects of paint
brush strokes, and whatever, even though only experts paid conscious
attention to these aspects.  Then, some artists began gradually distorting
and even ignoring the representational aspect of painting and concentrating
on these "abstract" aspects more and more, until one finally comes upon
paintings which consist only of these aspects.  Suddenly, the public finds
that it needs more and more education to make any sense at all of what it
is looking at.

A very similar process has taken place in music, I think, and it has met
with even more violent protest from some parts of the public than abstract
visual art did when it first appeared.  Part of the reason for this may
be that visual art works are experienced in almost the opposite way from
musical ones:  a painting or sculpture is first seen as a whole, after
which one concentrates on details, whereas music must be heard moment by
moment, and the listener must then construct a general idea of the piece
from a memory of the details.  Also, the viewer of a visual work of art
is free to choose in what order to study the details, but the listener to
music feels constrained to take them as they come, in the order that the
composer dictates.  (One interesting trend in contemporary music seems to
be designed to give the listener a break in this respect:  compositions in
which the composer instructs the performers to assemble small pieces in
whatever order they want to for each performance, so that listeners who
are able to hear more than one performance can experience the parts in
different orders.)

As a result, I think we tend to feel the need, in music, for more clues to
help us organize the details into a coherent whole than we do in the visual
arts, and often these clues are just the things that listeners such as Mr.
Smyth feel the lack of in much contemporary music.  But in my experience,
at least, one can make coherent structures out of this kind of music even
without the conventional cues, once one gets the hang of listening to it--a
skill that is admittedly different from the way one listens to earlier
music, just as a Pollack or Rothco painting can't be appreciated the same
way a nineteenth-century one can.

That said, I certainly understand why many people don't care to make
the effort to develop a whole new set of listening skills, if they are
perfectly satisfied with the ones they already have.  But if you do
practice a bit, I think you will find that the new stuff is just as
"human" as the old.  Here, I come back to the question of eclectic taste.
If new forms of art completely replaced and obliterated the old ones, it
would certainly be a shame.  But as it is, we can take our pick among
performances and recordings of everything from plainsong down to the
present, and I don't see, therefore, why all of these styles can't be
regarded as equally valid kinds of music.

Jon Johanning // [log in to unmask]