David Arditti replies to Bill Pirkle:

>>Is it true to say that all music was avant-garde at one time? Especially
>>major genres.  If so, then why would we even consider rejecting it today.
>>Does is not have a chance of being the classical music of the future?
>
>The thing is, there is avant-garde and avant-garde, and the scale of
>judgement of these things, I mean, how different a piece has to be before
>it is regarded as "cutting-edge", has changed out of all recognition since
>the classical period.
>
>To explain: Up to the 20th century, all respectable art, including music,
>was expected to be pretty much the same as what had been produced before.

This last assertion isn't true, unless you fudge the definition of "pretty
much the same." For example, Mozart and Beethoven knew that Handel's music
differed significantly from their own.  Furthermore, contemporaries knew
that late Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner, and Schumann differed significantly
from Haydn and Mozart.

>The great innovators of music, such as Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, and
>Wagner, pushed the language forward by only very small steps compared to
>their predecessors.  Staying essentially always within the precepts of
>what was considered common-practice harmony and counterpoint, their music
>has much more in common with each other's than the differences of style
>which separate them.

In other words, they were all tonal.  This is like saying that Wagner and
Mendelssohn write the same kind of music, or that Hindemith and Haydn do.
I don't believe it.  The differences in style aren't negligible.

>You only need to look at music criticism of the 19th century to see that
>even very subtle innovation was resisted to an astonishing extent:  you
>get critics savaging composers for some tiny technical "breach" that the
>the critic has got a bee in his bonnet about, such as the writing of
>consecutive sevenths.

And you get the innovation anyway.  Schumann goes on and on about a fairly
non-subtle harmonic change in Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique - the March
to the Scaffold movement - where a non-functional harmonic change occurs at
the distance of a tritone.  In short, Berlioz doesn't even try to relate
the two chords (unlike Mozart's "Dissonant" quartet opening).  Schumann
appreciates the implication.  Of course, there are all sorts of critics,
very few of them having any influence on the development of current styles.

>This all changed during the course of the 20th century.  Attitudes went to
>the opposite extreme.  It became very difficult for composers, like other
>artists, to be avant-garde enough to satisfy many opinion-formers.  Often
>it seemed that everyone had to produce something unrecognizably different
>from what anyone had written before, to the extent that, between about 1970
>and 1990, it seemed that you couldn't be respected as a composer if you
>didn't invent your own notation which no-one else understood, and had to
>be explained in long prefaces to scores.

An exaggeration for the sake of rhetorical pungency? There were all
sorts of "respectable" composers who didn't do that sort of thing at all:
Sessions, Carter, Ligeti, for example.  There were also fairly conservative
composers, like Britten, who did invent their own notational signs.
"Opinion-formers" misleads because it implies a monolithic stance.  Culture
is rarely that homogeneous.  Also, you probably have your dates wrong.  I'd
say somewhere around 1960 through the Seventies.

>This atmosphere, carrying with it the implication of continual erasure
>of the traditions of the past, and preventing the accumulation of bodies
>of music in new, but self-consistent languages or styles, against which
>new pieces can be judges as good or bad examples, it seems to me is not a
>condition conducive to the production of great art.  In art, like society,
>I hold that gradual, evolutionary change, rather than revolutionary, is the
>most constructive.  It is also that which has the most chance of bringing
>public opinion with it.  So we need to get back to a more balanced attitude
>with respect to the virtue of innovation as opposed to developing and
>working within well-understood traditions.

It seems to me that at any given period, regardless of the attitudes
toward traditions of art, at least 90% of everything is crap.  I'm all for
encouraging anything that helps artists to create, since writing music, at
any rate, is hard enough without someone telling you you're doing it wrong,
and in the end creation counts for more than talk about it.  I'd rather
have the Mozart Symphony No.  39 than every study that's ever been written
about it.  I'd also rather have artists excited about what they're doing
than timid about whether they fit into a tradition (although many
avant-garde composers have worried about precisely that).  I, for one, was
very happy about the amount of activity during that 20-year period, even
though I disliked much of what was produced.  There was great variety -
from Barber, Britten, and Hovhaness to Reich, Stockhausen and beyond - and
great excitement.  I miss that sense of new possibilities now, although I
don't miss the rabid, mindless partisanship.

>Looking at musical history, it seems to me, far from the oft-repeated
>dictum that "great music is always innovative", a case can easily be
>made that some of the very greatest music was produced by somewhat
>backward-looking composers, of which the two who stand out most, I
>suppose, are J. S. Bach and Johannes Brahms.

According to Vaughan Williams, some great composers are behind the times,
others are ahead of them.  We can argue over which ones.  Schoenberg, for
example, wrote an essay entitled "Brahms the Progressive." Behind or ahead,
however, doesn't make the music better or worse.

Steve Schwartz