A Salute to Forward Thinking

One drawback of achieving recognition as one of the old masters in your own time is that people often falsely assume that you are fully up-to-date with all the trends and ideas circulating in the contemporary musical scene.  The sad reality, of course, is that even though my mental faculties have not diminished one whit to this point, I am still far from clairvoyant.   A great deal of discourse about aesthetics and theory has moved onto the Internet and out of my easy reach.

For example, not too long ago I asked Ed if he knew how Lejaren Hiller at the University of Illinois was doing; he and I had a bit of a testy relationship back in the late '50s, due to his insistence that his and Isaacsons's String Quartet "Illiac Suite" was the first ever piece of computer-generated music.  My own "Calculations" predated it by twenty years and was in fact written even before the advent of electronic computers themselves -- I wrote out the circuitry needed to compose the piece on paper but had to wait until 1958 before I was able to realize it.

A simplified version of the piece

In spite of that one shortcoming, he was otherwise a fairly talented and forward-thinking composer worthy of some respect.  Thus I was quite disappointed to learn that he passed away sixteen years ago, and that no one had thought it worth mentioning to me.  I wonder who received all of those Christmas cards I'd sent him in the meantime.

The point of this rather long digression is that it led to my discovery of a brilliant document -- a sort of aesthetic manifesto, if you will -- that Ed found on the University of Illinois web-site while he was getting me up to speed on the goings on there [link here - Ed].  The title is Who We Are and Choose to Be and  I would not hesitate to compare it to Boulez's Schoenberg is Dead, or Leibowtiz's Sibelius, le plus mauvais compositeur du monde, or my own John Adams is a Pompous Fool.

The opening sentence is direct and to the point:

The Composition-Theory Division seeks to challenge the status quo, to question the premises on which tradition unthinkingly rests, and to require of ourselves, our colleagues, and our students that alternatives be proposed and considered.

Challenging the status quo is doubtlessly the main goal of any self-respecting composer; nothing is more embarrassing than slaving away at a piece for months on end only to receive a standing ovation at the premiere from the unthinking public.

Every composer's worst nightmare

Who We Are addresses that fact:

Creative work–scholarship, performance, composition–is directed to an audience; but its proper role is to define an audience, not to respond to one. It stands with respect to its audience in the same relation that teaching stands with respect to students: it seeks to make itself unnecessary.

Here, at last, are people who understood the purpose of my universally misunderstood piece Segregations, where I separated the audience by ethnicity!  It wasn't about race at all; it was actually a commentary on the composer's need to define his audience.  I don't remember what the actual music was like, but it likely contributed to that overall purpose.

I also fully support their intention to make creative work unnecessary, but the sad fact is that as long as the general public continues to be as uninformed and ignorant as it is, enlightened individuals such as myself must continue the thankless task of opening their minds to new musical ideas -- by force, if necessary.  That is why I heartily approve of this sentiment:

...this restricts [contemporary art-music's] actual audience to individuals willing and able to make the necessary effort. The result is an elite, but one which is self-defined and which encompasses many individuals who are not part of the traditional, socially and culturally constructed, art-music elite.

The traditional "art-music elite" I think they are referring to here is the traditional, moneyed, (and frankly, mostly Jewish) establishment that promotes art music largely for show, like it's some kind of cultural talisman you can wave around to let people know you are better than them.  But that's not who we ought to have running the show -- we're better than that!  We may need their money, but we don't need their calcified, outdated views or their regressive social mores.  But I think the composition faculty at the University of Illinois say it better:

In the School, in the University, in the wider community, music's future is threatened not by an extremism of speculation but by an extremism of conformity.

The brilliance of their plan is that by all appearances, the University of Illinois seems to be an active part of that traditional elite -- funded by the state and wealthy donors; structured according to a near-medieval system of tenure, research grants, journal publishing that rewards conformity of thought above all else; and so forth -- but it is only by cloaking themselves in these trappings, as it were, that they can hope to infiltrate the System and perhaps destroy it from within.  I can only imagine what brilliant musical compositions have and will emerge from this setting, lighting the academic world on fire with its radical newness.

The Revolution will not be review board-approved

 I also admire how these individuals are able to isolate and describe one of the most pressing issues in modern music:

Composition always entails drawing distinctions, but it does not always invite its audience to draw its own, to enter into the creative act. That invitation is issued most consistently by experimental music, defined as music in which the process of composition is of an interest commensurate with the result. Engagement of an audience with the compositional process demystifies composition, making each audience member a student of compositional thought.

I am proud to say that nearly every piece I have written is just as interesting on paper as it is in actual performance.  In fact, many of my pieces are even more interesting when described than when heard, and it is about time somebody recognized just what a remarkable achievement that is.

Many audience members show up at a concert with the mistaken impression that they are there to hear and possibly enjoy a piece of music.  That, of course, is naive to say the least.  They are really there in order to have their core beliefs about music, society and God systematically called into question and reevaluated. Or, as the wizards of Urbana-Champaign put it:

To the extent that creative work is easily grasped, it is easily disregarded; to the extent that it is unobjectionable, it is ineffectual.

To ensure that music is as objectionable as possible, I cannot overstate the importance of the pre-concert lecture -- because music has the unfortunate quality of being slightly ambiguous, and these difficult questions ought not to be asked very ambiguously.  "Engagement of an audience with the compositional process" often requires one to two hours of spoken word for every thirty minutes of new music.

Copious program notes are often very helpful as well.  I once wrote a forty-five page discourse on the role of chance in my seminal work "Cat o' Nine" and made it explicitly clear in the publicity for the concert that it was to be read in advance.  When most of the audience showed up unprepared, I cancelled.  There really can be no compromise on that matter.

Now there are quite a few more brilliant observations in this document that I could comment upon, but that would leave you no reason to read it yourself.  And you simply must!  I have not had this much hope about the new music coming out of America's universities in a long time.

I should drop Jim Tenney a line and make sure he's read this as well!