Atonal post-tonal nontonal protonal bicostal polymodal polyrhythmic
pentametric multioctave pitch set everbody get sick It's time to do
the Vroon Swoon

new sounds old clowns Uptown downtown von Karajan is not a noun It's time
to do the Vroon Swoon

hip hop trip hop dodecaphonic student slop common practice clip clop it
doesn't matter what they say It's time to do the Vroon Swoon.

- - -

If there is any single point which is consistenly misunderstood and
misrepresented in the discussion which buzzes around classical music it
is the simplest and most important fact about that discussion:  that there
is an argument over new and old music.  In fact, there is not an argument,
because, underneath the different tastes and postures, there has rarely
been such broad agreement about the salient realities of classical music.

Almost everyone who writes regularly about classical music in a popular
mode - as opposed to a technical mode - agrees that there is a pervasive
disconnection between the general public, those who administer the
establishement, and the artists themselves.  While people make much of
the stylistic differences, their own personal tastes and ideas - when the
structure, as opposed to the decoration, of what is written is consistently
predicated on the belief of this disconnection.

To take two signature examples:  one would be hard pressed to find a
more reactionary inkwell than the nutgalls and vineagar that Donald Vroon,
editor of ARG - a publication which has entirely too few 'R' s in its
acronym - dips his pen into.  On the other hand, one would be hard pressed
to find a more consistently agressive advocate of experimental music than
Kyle Gann, author of a widely perscribed, if not widely read, guide to 20th
century classical music.  Vroon is well known for his explosive attacks on
atonality, and the idea of the need for new music in general.  Using terms
of opprobrium once reserved for jazz by adherents of European classicism,
he regularly compares "the new music" to the most juvenile of popular
expression.  Gann, on the other hand, has made a career of complaing
how the musical establishment does not recognise the "genuine" American
classical tradition based on the experimentalism exemplified by the music
Cowell and Ives.  However, both are fundementally joined in the thrust of
their argument - based on a vision of an establishment which refuses to
recognise axiomatic human needs for spiritual expression in music.

Gann writes of the defenders of "Uptown" music:

(The complete article is at
http://www.home.earthlink.net/~kgann/downtown.html)

   The premise of Downtown music is one that the other arts - painting,
   literature, poetry, dance - have had no trouble accepting.  It is
   that music, like all other art, is a symbolic language of personal
   expression that each individual artist brings up from his or her
   soul.  If the artist reaches deeply enough, and disciplines him- or
   herself honestly enough, the extreme particularity of his or her
   expression will achieve a kind of universality with which "audience
   members" spectators, listeners, will be able to sympathize.

Vroon opines:

   The beginning of music's decline came with atonal and 12-tone music,
   almost a century ago.  Serial and non-tonal music has a very limited
   emotional range.  It cannot express joy or gratitude, love or awe.
   In fact, it is only good for the darker emotions (as Bruno Walter
   once put it).  The people who responded well to it were people with
   a history of depression or reason to be depressed (the horrors of
   the two wars, for example).  I can understand that depression and
   bitterness find something in such music.  But I have never been
   depressed; I have a cheerful heart.  That means either I'm rather
   limited in my emotional range (but why should I want to experience
   depression?) or the music really serves only a negative function
   (certainly it can't lift you out of depression?).  Even Wozzeck sounds
   like nothing but anger and bitterness to me.  I never feel that way,
   and I don't care to listen to music that indulges defeatist and
   destructive emotions-just as I don't care to listen to rock, which
   seems to encourage lust and rebellion with every beat-or rap, which
   feeds anger and hatred.

Leave aside for a moment that both writers have a distressing ability to
ignore any facts which get in the way of a good polemic - and that the
musical systems they are supporting are worlds apart.  After all, to Gann,
Vroon is merely a conservative Uptowner, and to Vroon, Gann is merely
another jeujune immature individual who feels the need to scribble on
the Mona Lisa.  Instead focus on the assumption that each individual has
accepted as axiomatic:  of the distant and soulless nature of the
establishment which they feel holds power in music.

But if an award winning and widely cited author, and the publisher and
cheif critic of one of the most influential publications of music reviews
are not members of the establishment - exactly who is? One might argue that
administrators, music directors, and professors of composition are - but
one finds the exact same complaints from the pens of supporters of the
National Endowment for the Arts, from prominently placed arts
administrators in Berlin, from harrased concert hall administrators.

While the particular music, or agenda, that is supported differs - the
common fact reported by all is the sense of being imposed upon, being
suppressed.  It is not the particular works which are in question - but the
means and objective of the conversation itself which is the heart of the
problem.  It is not atonal or tonal music which is spiritually deficient,
is the idea and symbology which has become wrapped around the enterprise
which is classical music.  Classical music has become like the castle which
houses the sleeping beauty - within slumbers another, more poetic age,
guarded by a terrible dragon, and a forest of thorns.

- - -

And is is the reawakening of that age which should be the priority of every
individual who has any love for classical music.  Not in the reactionary
and limited sense of returning to some previous stylism - but returning to
the position that classical music once had as higher order discourse cast
in musical form.  Such a world of classical music is not without a price,
and it is the price that has turned more than a few away from pursuing the
princess.

That cost is paid in installments - the first comes as the realisation
that the surface of music does not contain the substance of its meaning.
One does not know that a composer is a kindred spirit by his relationship
to the tonic triad - any more than one is likely to have the same political
alignment as someone who happens to have the same native language.  This
realisation is, perhaps, the most disruptive and painful to make.  It
removes the easy linearity of identification, One can no longer
instantaneously trust the opening bars of music to tell whether one is
with or against the composer and his meaning.

But it is a price which must be paid - for the same reason that we are
appalled by "racial profiling" by police officers.

The distrust of the surface that is presented is, in fact, at the heart
of an ideology which disrupted, and was intended to disrupt, the easy
certainties of immament rationality.  An ideology which declared that it
was the inner workings of an individual or work of art which established
their true nature, and that these inner workings were often invisible to
the naked eye, only to be revealed by intuition, experience and reflection
arising from altered states of consciousness - dreams, visions, fantasies
- for some even drugs and alcohol.  The first true believers declared that
the idea that one could ascertain the truth from the surface was to open
oneself to fraud and deception.

The ideology's name is Romanticism.

It is Romanticism, in its original sense, which is the essential guide to
the relationship of the individual to works and ideas.  This is because
Romanticism arose out of the very practical observation that any program,
however seemingly rationally conceived, was ineffective if people could not
live with it.  It did not matter if ratinal laws were passed, if they could
not be made workable.

Romanticism then, is the method of searching for the way of being in ideas.

- - -

The second installment counteracts the first.  After all, unbridled
intuitionalism leads to prejudice and emmotionalism.  It leads to the
irrational rejection of the unfamiliar or stylistically unsuited.  It is
the paradox of Romanticism that it began as a means to combat judging
truths by surfaces, and ended up supporting exactly this behavior.  Anyone
who has read any modern criticism at all will recall examples of 19th
century critics imaginine whole biographies of a composer from the sound
of the music.

The second installment then is the acceptance of the primacy of rationalism
in the testing of our assertions and beliefs.  Simply because a belief is
widely held, does not mean that it is correct, or essential.  Essentialism,
the progressive enlargement from irrefutable observation, as opposed to
ardently espoused assertion - is the only true basis of Englightened
Rationality.  Anyone may postulate - demand - some principle, and then
elaborate upon it.  It is only when those postulates are subject to an acid
test, which even the postulator will abide by, that there is rationality,
as opposed to rationalisation.

Rationality then, is the method by which individuals shock themselves
from their own deeply held prejudices and false beliefs.

- - -

Measured against this twin price, we find that the current realm of
classical music discussion is exactly the reverse.  Romanticism, which in
its ideal sense is the means of finding spiritual oneness with a mileu, is
instead used in its debased form as a means of excusing a limited and
partisan mind set.  Again, I will reiterate that it does not matter under
which banner one marches - feuds require different sides composed of people
who feel that since they are dividied in their tongues, they are dividied
in their hearts as well.  Rationalism, which in its ideal sense is the
search for essential and irrefutable facts, and the overturning of
convictions which are at variance with those facts, is used in its debased
mode as a means of creating a thicket around the ego of the individual's
own prejudices.

The Modern, in its larger sense, is the search for balancing Rationalism's
authority, with Intuition's Autonomy.  Rationalism was, in fact, created,
as a means of restraing abolute authority - whether from Rome or the Crown.
Romanticism was merely the final form of the Humanistic sense which first
stares back at us from the paintings of Botticelli, and is the antidote to
the excesses of rationality unloosed from the complexities of the human
organism.  The Modern run wild is to be a Romantic when one should be a
Rationalist, and a Rationalist when one should be a Romantic.

- - -

What are the observable, irrefutable, testable and rational observations
which we should procede from? What is the undeniable and inescapble
structure which we must incorporate?

And how do we create a method which will allow us to reach expression
of these twin ideas without constant and agonising self-conscious
self-examination?

The irrefutable observation was described above - it is the alieanting
and suffocating nature of the establishment - even to its own members.  If
Vroon and Tommasini, and Gann and Glass and Carter and Babbit and Barenboim
can barely tolerate the establishment as it exists - then how can people
who receive none of the attention, adulation or pay be expected to have any
patience at all for it? How can one expect to inflict upon the potential
music lover exactly the pain which nearly drives even the most devoted
classicist to taking up Chinese Brush calligraphy?

The first step of the program then is to disinfect our writing about
classical music from this miasma.  How often have you read an article on
a composer or musician which spends half of its length with a pro forma
recitation of the artists credentials? If we desire Music to be Present in
people's imaginations and Present in their lives, and Present in society,
then it must be Present in our writing about music.  Who an artist studied
under is irrelevant, where they got their degree, which orchestras they
have played with, which awards they have won do *nothing* to contribute
to the Presence of the Music, and instead bring to the foreground the
very feature of our circumstances which is causing us the most pain.

It is, to use a baseball metaphor, the first rule of holes:  if you find
yourself in a hole, stop digging.

Words such as "important", "acclaimed", "honored" all create the Presence
of the Establishment.  The entire mode of writing adopted by politicians
to make it seem as if a particular individual is a social inevitability
is poison.

If the rational observation is the miasma of the establishment, then the
irrefutable spiritual reality is the search for making classical music a
way of being.  If the first step is the establish the presence of music,
rather than presence the establishment of music - then the second step must
be the Engagement with music as a way of being.  Each word or phrase must
be directed to creating, sustaining and enhancing the presence of the
real object - the music and its relationship to a way of being.  Which is
created by a sense of having msuic as the means by which we connect with
the deep patterns out of which arise our consciousness, emotions and sense
of being in the world.

To take a pair of practical examples.  Vroon writes at great length
attempting to undermine modern music, he attacks is rationality, proclaims
the impossibility of its comprehensibility, and sneers that it is a
juvenile gratuity.  His editorial is rife with exactly the two errors I
have described above - his assertions are testable and incorrect, and he is
devoted, not to the spirituality of the music which moves him, but to the
establishment which terrorises him.  And by doing this, he creates in the
minds of others the very sense of an oppressive establishment which he
loathes.

I have criticised Anthony Tommasini for his writing.  Two days after
publishing a lengthy polemic about the routine nature of the New York
Philharmonic's playing the New York Times published an announcement of an
opera workshop which was presenting excerpts from 14 different new operas.
Not one word was spent describing any of the compositions beyond title,
composer and librettist.  Why didn't Tommasini save the inches he wasted on
castigating another establishment figure for having different musical taste
- and instead singled out a work from among the 14 that he felt deserved
merit or consideration? By writing as he did he deprived 14 composer of new
works a chance to have their ideas presented to a larger audience - instead
Tommasini presented Tommasini and underlined the supremacy of an uncaring
and out of touch establishment that he was in the same breath decrying.

- - -

After eradicating the thicket of thorns, what looms is the terrible dragon
that guards the castle - the blank page.  It is easy to fill a sentence
with a description of the composer's education, or the violintist's
teacher.  It requires no thought at all.  It requires little thought to
talk about biographical detail or quote some puff piece opinion penned by
some intimate of the soloist.

It is this terror, the terror of the empty column inch, the blank page,
the yawning chasm between introduction and conclusion - which holds much
of the scribbling class in thrall.  Chained by the fear of deadline and
emptiness, it is easy to fall back on cliched descriptions of the artist's
relationship to the establishment - which is a matter, not of art, but of
resume.

The second part of any realistic program to change the means of discussion,
is to find expression for the substance of our emotions.  It is, after all,
some abiding and powerful need which drives individuals to fly around the
world in search of Wagner's Ring, or to spend lonely hours editing a score.
It an almost migratory imperative that causes people to reflect on
lietmotifs, or play a chord over and over again to achieve precisely the
right balance of sounds that constitutes "expression".

The road to such expression is the recognition of what is Essential.  For
each individual who is motivated enough to write about classcial music,
there is an emotional need which is the impulse beneath it.  It is my
assertion that the impulse is transpearantly visible beanth their stance.

Let us take Vroon again - his attacks on modern music clearly state what
is, for him, the essential nature of of his relationship with music.  He
seeks comprehensiblity, he seeks maturity, he seeks an intangible sense of
antiquity which is his defense against the ocean of trivia that the modern
world dumps upon us and calls "news", it is the source of his connection
with is own sense of being a rational being.  It is, to him, the well
spring of sincere expression.

Thus every sentence that he wrote as polemic against modern music could be
rewritten, and instead uncovering the confessional object.  If one feels
that some particular aspect of music attacks what is good and noble, then
write a sentence about what is good and noble, and how you have found it in
a particular musical experience.  Write a sentence about your own existance
which shows how the a particular musical experinence or pattern became
Present, and hence caused you to act differently than you otherwise would.

If music is to be a gospel, then one must bear witness to it.

This then is a program:  write as you have before, and then take the review
that has just escaped your word processor, and strip the mask off of each
sentence.  Peal away the grotesquerie of social establishment, and display
what emotional sense was the impulse beneath it.  Any sentence exposed as
an empty phantom with out emotional impulse will then be exorcised, and
sent to the limbo that all empty verbiage goes to sooner or later.  Each
writer must then become his own Minos.

Then look at every weak expression, and show its true form.  How often have
we read a review of a performance where empty adjectives describe the
emotional reaction of the critic - without giving any detail as to what in
the music caused the reaction.  Music must not be a faint shadow behind the
words, but must errupt upwards into them.  To write in any other way is the
equivalent of a syrupy pop anthem which is all facile hook over a cliched
chord progression.

Of course over time, this will become incorporated into writing, and it
will begin to lean on the comfortable formulas which dominate too many
reviews.  But eh first step ist to grasp the tactics of the expression,
and then find larger strategies for its accomplishment.

- - -

This triad - the Presence of the artistic, the primacy of Engagement with
it, and thereby illuminated the Essence of that artistic reality - reverses
the current pattern.  Generally some Essential Nature of Music is posited,
and then the critic argues that only some particular style is the true
embodiment of that Essential nature.  The writer then argues that that
style and only that style should be the dominant Presence of art, and
that the duty of all right thinking people is to Engage the heretics
until victory is achieved.

It is this triad, and in this particular order, which assures that
rationality will be attained, while Intuition served.  This is because the
search for the undeniable Presence is the establishment of Rationality.  By
seeking the essential last, it wards off the temptations to rationalisation
and stylistic or temporal prejudice.

(End of Part I)

Stirling Newberry
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http://www.mp3.com/ssn