Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup crazy_music Cheyne-Stokes gasps from academic composers

From: mclaren
To: Practical microtonality group
Subject: The source of those quotes you've been reading

The source of this particular item can be found at:

http://www-crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/m209/puckette.html

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Stand back: twentieth century art music is falling under its own
weight
Miller Puckette
1. Should we care if they listen?
Milton Babbitt's famous article "Should We Care if They Listen?"
published
in Perspectives of New Music in 19? was reputedly given that title
not by
him but by his sharp-eared editor. The title speaks volumes about how
listeners and composers of "academic music"--that peculiarly American
construct--relate to each other. To ask, "Who cares if you listen,"
is to
open and peer inside the forbidden closet. The skeleton inside has
twelve
ribs. Run a mallet down them to hear the sound of 20th century
academic
music in the USA.
The university is only one possible part of town where we could make
new
music, but for the most part we tend to stay among our own. We have
these
quaint academic meetings that we call recitals. How do they fit in
the whole
music scene? How does playing in and going to recitals help us know
how to
play or listen to the music of our own place and time? And when do we
stop
going to meetings and start living our real lives, start making our
real
music?
Confining our view to the USA for the moment, we appear to live in a
tiny
subculture where composer-professors write music that most of
humanity can
not understand a word of. Putting ourselves in the place of the non-
elect
(or remembering the days when we ourselves were among the non-elect),
we see
a strange sight, that of music which is not written for the way it
will
sound but for the sake of structural goals. I remember a time years
ago when
one hexachord sounded almost indistinguishable from another, and a
Schoenberg piece would have sounded much the same forward as
backward. (I am
not really sure I can tell the difference now; I'm afraid to run the
experiment). Writing music from the point of view of structure, and
then
expecting an audience to train itself to like the way it sounds--puts
the
cart before the horse.
One possible reply is that hearing occurs inside the brain of the
listener,
so there is no such thing as writing music for how it sounds in the
absolute, only how it would sound to an individual. The only thing the
composer can do with integrity is to write for her own ears alone,
and hope
that the work will resonate inside other ears as well. To do
differently
would mean changing oneself into somebody else, which Westerners
consider a
violation of that all-important integrity.
Another answer is to enlarge the scope of discussion to include
Europe. Our
subculture did not spring into existence by itself. The names we
invoke,
Stockhausen, Boulez, Xenakis, and all their predecessors, grew up
thinking
of themselves as continuing the great tradition of European art
music, as do
their disciples in turn. And over there, there is an audience, not
very
large perhaps, but enough to keep the ball in play.
At bottom, though, we write this difficult music because we have no
real
choice. Do we stop making music? Dumb our music down? No, we are
stuck being
who we are. That is perhaps the common situation of all artists:
being stuck
who you are, deriving artistic energy from the ever-changing but
never-to-be-resolved conflicts and making beauty come out of them. The
peculiar thing is that we are trying to do this in a university
setting,
with its emphasis on rationality and explanation and cross-
referencing and
argument-making.
The audience
So we find a central contradiction between what we musicians need our
musical languages to express and what our potential audience can
hear. Our
attempts to deny or ignore the contradiction having failed, we next
search
for ways to resolve it. Perhaps the audience is wrong, and perhaps we
can
either educate it better or treat it better, or perhaps we can
conclude that
we are simply right and they are wrong, that we can merely
repeat, "who
cares if you listen?"
The "better education" idea appeals to us academics, and indeed it is
worth
pursuing. Excellent writers such as Brendel and Griffiths champion
Carter in
much the same language as they discuss Beethoven in the pages of
general
readership periodicals. They argue passionately against the program
directors' natural impulse, when there is no alternative than to
program
"new music," to choose safe, easy-listening, neo-tonal music over
what is
difficult but worthwhile. The fight is uphill, but that does not make
it
less worthy.
Treating the audience better might help too. Sitting in a concert
seat is
not comfortable [1] and much of our potential audience might be
staying home
simply because they do not enjoy concerts very much. Of course you
can not
easily play Beethoven in a club setting, but that need not stop
makers of
new music from considering such an outlet. Just do not write for
unamplified
string quartet.
The final solution of simply telling the audience to go away is
wrongheaded.
Taking the audience away causes the music to shrivel (and in turn,
unenergetic music turns the audience further away.) Academic music in
the
USA is played in front of small audiences, and much the same people
night
after night. This is part of our problem.
The language
It is sometimes useful to think separately about the way music
sounds, and
the way it is constructed. This separation appears to be very real in
twentieth century composed art music. Few composers would pretend
that the
way their music sounds is unimportant, but many seem to feel that
structural
integrity is just as important, perhaps more important. This leads us
to the
old and contentious question, whether and how the structure of a piece
should be perceived by the listener. Although we can not resolve that
issue
here, it does seem that there are ways to perceive structural
integrity that
do not depend on the listener's conscious understanding of
some "system."
With certain exceptions, it does seem that music should not display
all its
logic, that would lead only to tedium. To sound "right" without
sounding
pedantic depends on the ability to hide structure.
But a composer's choice of musical language must obey a second
constraint as
well, which is that it must empower the composer to write the music
in the
first place. We instill the need for structures to write within early
in a
music student's career. The craft of getting the notes to work out
according
to the rules is taught to young composers in "writing and analysis"
courses
which trace the development of our classical music heritage as if our
music
were a great march forward toward ever higher levels of skill and
complexity. As I have argued elsewhere [2], the process of Western
art music
composition requires a system of complex, interlocking rules. Without
the
rules to push against, there is no way to expend effort; either the
ink will
not flow or else it pours out and covers the page. Put differently,
the
rules are an essential kind of mental chewing gum, without which the
composer can not walk.
Musical movements such as the Spectral school or the New Complexity
fill
this need. Music which is founded on rationalistic grounds can not
achieve
the all-important quality of ineffability until the wheels and cogs
of the
machinery become so complex that they can no longer be fully
comprehended by
the composer. As our technical standards rise ever higher, the music
becomes
ever more complicated. How much longer can this continue?
Hidden Assumptions
Although our music is complex to the point that few people can listen
to it,
we certainly do not offer the world's most complex music, merely the
world's
most unlistenable music. To compare our music to that of north India
by
asking which is the more complex is simply ludicrous. However, ours
somehow
sounds too complex. This may lie more in qualitative aspects of our
music
than quantitative ones; we might have a different kind of complexity
(or
perhaps it's just plain obfuscation) from that of other musics [3].
The
West's skill in classifying, combining, dissecting, structuring, and
constructing has led us to world leadership in manufacturing, medical
procedures, and electronic circuit design; yet our own population
turns to a
music which derives more strongly from the African diaspora than from
our
"own" musical culture.
2. Composition and music scholarship
The composer is the central cult figure in our twentieth century art
music.
This development has been long in coming (composers such as Beethoven
and
Wagner come to mind) but the dominance of the composer has only now
reached
its logical extreme in the U.S. university scene. This dominance both
derives from and contributes to the bookishness of university
composers.
Universities are about bookishness, not music. The token at the end
of the
tunnel, the Ph.D. dissertation, is essentially a book. In general,
artists
are not awarded Ph.D. degrees, although art historians or theorists
are;
their output is not works of art but scholarly prose. Somehow,
though, the
idea became accepted that a large-scale written score, a piece of
Western
art music, could qualify as a dissertation, and that therefore the
correct
university degree to award a composer would be the Doctorate of
Philosophy.
This places certain expectations on music of the university genre. To
start
with, the music must be written down. Many musics are written down
but many
others are not. The former can get you a Ph.D. in itself; whereas to
specialize in the latter you will have to find something to write
down in
the music's place. The need to write about unwritable music is
answered by
the academic field of ethnomusicology.
Second, the book you have to write to gain entry to the university
must have
a linear structure. Music as it is performed has little choice but to
start
at the beginning, proceed to the end, then stop. But there may be
many other
ways of thinking about it, and we may be neglecting nonlinear
approaches to
musical invention because we think of writing music as being like
writing a
book.
Third, scholarly books are rational, measurable, ponderable,
evaluable.
Music may or may not enjoy these qualities. To insist on them, as the
university has taught composers to do, is to choose one music over
perhaps
many others.
Finally, an even more basic assumption is favored by the academic
music
mill, which is that music should live on a two-dimensional grid with
discretized time and pitch for axes [4]. Pitch runs twelve units to
the
octave and time is divided in measures which hold between one and
sixteen
beats, occasionally with a half beat added. On this grid the music is
divided into objects called notes. You can hear all the notes in a
piece of
music and there is never any question whether some sound you are
hearing is
one note or a superposition of many simpler ones. The note is the
indivisible atom of music.
These are the traits of a written language. Our culture, which begins
with
the sentence, "In the beginning was the word," has found a way to
reduce
music to a form of writing. Music might serve to declare something,
or might
ask an answerable question. Music could even present an enigmatic,
meaningless poem. But music always has to speak in some language.
Priests
If composition is a form of writing, the composer is the literate
priest in
a countryside populated by illiterate peasants. The priesthood is
charged
with the vital responsibility of keeping the written culture alive.
Music
scholars are the monks who help by copying and sometimes illuminating
the
precious manuscripts.
In the old days this made sense. If we wish to have a system of music
making
that emphasizes continuity, so that every church across the land can
sing
the same hymns on the same holidays, the written score is the ideal
solution. If our musical culture is carried forth by putting on
concerts
where a dozen or more musicians are expected to play together, the
only
practical solution is the written score. Finally, we turn to written
scores
when the complexity of our music exceeds the capacity of an oral
tradition
to learn it by heart.
But the twin technologies of amplification and recording change
entirely the
economics of music performance. Two or three musicians can make as
much
noise as an orchestra; and there's little danger of forgetting music
now
that we can routinely press a CD with the night's work. Of course we
would
prefer to be able to have the dozens of musicians, and if we did have
them
we would want to play from a written score, but writing the score out
hardly
causes the musicians to appear, so if you are thinking about a club-
sized
ensemble you might not have a strong reason to prefer to have the
music be
written.
In contrast to priests who are in the employ of their parishes,
composers
are paid by the performers who commission them. A group of sixty
musicians
is in a better position to employ a composer than a trio. The
musicians hire
the composer to instruct them how to behave, in much the same way as
students pay professors to direct them.
Since it's the musicians who are paying, perhaps the composer could
be used
in a fashion that is more relevant to the situation. Although the
commissioning musician asks the composer for a score, it is not the
musician's primary goal that the score be left around after the
performance
as some sort of memento. That, on the other hand, is the composer's
primary
goal; the money helps him keep body and soul together for another few
months, but it is the paper the composer truly cares about. The
musician
views the score as a byproduct that other musicians can later
scavenge, if
they wish, as a cheaper option than to go out and commission some
other
composer's piece.
If we are going to pay them, we can tell composers to do what we
want, and
that can involve writing specific sequences of pitches and times or
not, as
the situation requires. The composer's role in the creation of new
music
could be vastly more variable--and more interesting--than that of a
priest.
Nurturing our composers in the university, as we do in the USA, has
worked
negatively on our music. The harried, flustered composition
professors are
under pressure to keep proving themselves worthy of keeping the
academic
flame, competing with scholars on grounds of rationality, linearity,
and
alphabetizability. This has had an almost irresistibly corrupting
influence
on our music. A hopeful development is the emergence of younger
university
composers who are able to question the structures of the
composer/performer/audience food chain [5]. Since the limitations of
our
musical language seem to derive in part from the university reward
structure, courage will be needed to break free of them. As always,
the
breakthroughs will come only at the cost of having to break rules.
3. Music in the University
Academic publishing, the ritual of getting scores and scholarly
papers into
the journals or published as monographs by the academic presses, is a
classic pyramid scheme. An academic researcher might read 100 papers
for
each paper he writes for publication, but an academic journal cannot
survive
with fewer than a thousand subscriptions.
In preparing our students for an academic career, we are buying them
in to a
parallel pyramid scheme. At UCSD, for example, we have 23 music
faculty (so
we hire one per year on average, say) and in a typical year we
graduate six
or eight new music doctors. Will there be jobs? Only if the university
population expands by a factor of six every generation. This is
linked to
the publishing pyramid scheme. Tenure cases hinge on getting articles
printed in the good journals. If there are not enough people to read
the
journals, who will find it profitable to print them, and if they are
not
printed, how will our tenure track professors get their writings
published?
So from the point of view of dissemination of scores and other
writings, the
university seems unsuitable as a home for music makers. Living in the
university and writing for (and playing to) an audience of out fellow
university lodgers can be seen perhaps as a preparation for something
to
follow, but certainly not as an end. Music -- and writings about
music --
must reach outward.
On the other hand, the university is the best place for musical
exploration
and collaboration. It is also the best monastery we have now for
retreating
from the world of moneymaking to the world of music-making. The last
thing
we should imagine doing upon leaving the university should be to take
up a
teaching post in some other university. The university has a deeply
valuable
thing to offer musicians, which is a chance to think in a serious and
unhurried way about their music. The state of "art music" suggests
that the
time for such thinking is at hand.
In most university programs we work to acquire language. The language
is
always a shared one; chemists talk orbitals, physicists spinors,
linguists
verbs, artists pigments, and philosophers stones. But in music each
composer
speaks her own. Whether or not this plurality of language is a good
thing
for music, the university has been an opposing force, pushing music
toward a
common language which it naturally shrinks from, that of the twelve
tones.
This language may soon be a dead one.
It is tempting to try to cook up a new musical paradigm. Perhaps
there is a
way to construct music which is at once tonal (so that we can hear the
result) but at the same time combinatorially intractable so that the
rationalistic composer can have something to bite down on. Here we
have
argued that perhaps the answer will not be some new compositional
paradigm
ala 12-tone, but rather the question will be mooted by a larger
phenomenon,
which is the shifting role of the composer. From this point of view,
the 12
tone system appears to be a mere aberration brought on by our
insistence on
sticking with the composer/paper/musician model long after it became
unviable.
Notes
1. Thanks to John Mark Harris for this idea.
2. Puckette, M., and Settel, J., 1993. "Nonobvious Roles for
Electronics in
Performance Enhancement," Proceedings, International Computer Music
Conference. San Francisco: Computer Music Association, pp. 134-137.
3. Thanks to Michael Dessen. For related ideas, see Georgina Born,
1995,
Rationalizing Culture, University of California Press.
4. Wishart, T., 1996. On Sonic Art. Harwood Academic Press.
5. This idea arose from conversations with composer Rand Steiger.

Cheyne-Stokes gasps from academic composers

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