FROM DISASTER, NEW BEAUTY A Reaction to Henry Pleasants' The Agony of Modern Music

For those who think that some of what has passed for "western art music" over the last century has been oversold, one won't go wrong searching for and then reading Henry Pleasants' concise polemic, The Agony of Modern Music. After an unforgettable beginning that rightly critiques the near-irrelevance Western art music almost created for itself, it lost steam after the first half of the book. The fizzle happened because he leaves the over-arching themes and focuses on particular issues, important to a relative few—'crises' in melody, rhythm, and opera. This closer scrutiny fogs the strength of his overall argument, which is not about particulars in music, but its general contours in the West in the 20th century. Of course the book was published in 1955, so he does not have the benefit of the distance we have today as we look back upon the merits and demerits of 20th century composers' output. He also doesn't have the benefit of knowing that the action in tonality moved not only to jazz, but to film music, a point often overlooked when dire conclusions of "the end of ...." inevitably appear in serious music.

Pleasants' main conclusion is that jazz became our modern art music. Jazz is our 'serious music', in the sense that Mozart, Beethoven, et al, through Schumann and even Bartok, were serious composers who were nonetheless loved by the public at large in their day. And because jazz (at least through the 50s) was hooked into popular taste, and relied upon the supply and demand of this taste, Pleasants feels that jazz best exemplifies a music that hasn't lost its vital social component. Jazz is music in the hands of practicing musicians (not disembodied mathematicians). The music has an audience (especially when 'jazz' meant big band swing and dance bands). And on this point, I agree entirely with Pleasants. American composers ignore the features of jazz at their own peril. Furthermore, if composers ignore the needs of the normal listener's ear, they risk simply never being listened to, no small risk, indeed. Music is never to be dissociated from communal, social appreciation.

I quibble with Pleasants mostly in his conclusions about early- to mid-20th century serious music (atonal, serial, and what is called 20th century "classical music", an unfortunate term). Pleasants thinks the era is not much more than trash, with a public indifferent to its music both in record sales and concert attendance. I tend to not listen to Schoenberg, Webern, Cage, and other composers of what I call "difficult music", with major exceptions of Bartok, Ives, and Stravinsky. But I still think one can find merits in what they strove for in their music. Here I am to briefly assess the merits, limited though each may be.

My sense is that it was simply a matter of intellect being given too much emphasis in the composing strategy. Music composition became something guided by concept—in its creation as well as its appreciation. It became a puzzle or game, rather than a source for beautiful sonority and musical story-telling or narrative. We ought recall that the piano, with its equal temperament tuning, was only accepted fully in the beginning of the 20th century. The implication of this is fundamental, but easy to miss: with the frequencies of the notes equally spaced (as is the case with the piano), by its nature music became more subject to math-influenced approaches to composition, such as that of Schoenberg. "Serialism" was simply the result of taking Bach's insights to their logical, tragic, unmusical conclusions—melodic sense destroyed in favor of strict formulaic pattern, machine-like.

Far more can be said on this matter (and Pleasants contributes much in this regard). My point is that some good came of this, as well. Consider it a kind of palette-cleanser, as one would have at a multiple-course meal. Our taste is wider, more open-minded, because difficult music tends to "clear the ears". That in doing so they tended to dismiss the tonal tradition of the West is quixotic. Escape of tonality and its concerns is impossible, because humans by nature simply hear music as a tonal narrative, even if within that narrative are discordant clashes that attempt to subvert conventional narrative expectations. For to not have a musical narrative sense is your narrative. We hear tones unfold in time; inevitably a journey occurs in each and every piece of music. Always, everytime, there is a beginning, middle, climax, then end.

"Formulaic chromaticism", for all its amelodicism, has led to one thing: more autonomy for contemporary composers. More raw materials is always a good thing. I assert that it helped to prime our ears for absorption of other cultures' music, which was difficult under strict 18th century rubrics. Our options for music are more flexible now, more bendy, more able to handle exotic modes, complex rhythms, and prolonged ambiguity and climax resolution. While early 20th century musical products can often be dismissed as unlistenable, they cleared the table for new and better aural meals. They prepped us for a planet-centrism, with new conventions, new definitions, new obligations and responsibilities as a composer. With our bag of tricks deeper and wider than it was 100 years ago (thanks to the theortical efforts exemplified by Schoenberg, the philosophic efforts of Cage, and the compositional efforts exemplified by Ellington, Williams, and Gershwin), we have the ability for an even more resonant simplicity informed by ambiguity, but also transcendent of its intellectual tethers. As W.A. Mathieu wrote, the composers and their intellectual, deconstructive experiments retooled and remodeled, rather than razed or bulldozed.

Music in digestible form is what most humans best relate with and love, and there is not one thing wrong with that reality. Composers of today, if they want an audience for their music, have to in my estimation go through the fire of ambiguous harmony, melody, and rhythm. We have to cut our teeth on pluralism, and deeply listen to music from all of the world's major cultures and traditions. We have to make sense of this repetoire, find new additions to the canon, and deeply listen to it over many years. If we do this successfully and authentically, then our music reflects that sense-making. And in our own small way as artists, we can offer the world little wave pictures in sound, that metaphor a way to deal with the big wide world. All of this can be only semi-conscious, but it will happen if we are engaged in the world's music, in all cultures, premodern, modern, and contemporary, as a new subject.

The open secret is that music that sounds simple is rarely simple to construct. Authentic simplicity is the result of a yeoman's amount of bodily, intellectual, and spiritual work. To compose a story that listeners relate with requires all of our being, activated. So my advice - absorb as much of the world's juices as possible. Really get out there, live, love, fail, and rejuvenate. Improvise a ton with your favorite instrument, till the midnight becomes dawn. Sing constantly. Compose much, then revise. I really can't recommend enough W.A. Mathieu's monumental book Harmonic Experience, as a fantastic study for composers at any stage of career.

At least in my experience, music pops in an almost shockingly simple way, the real music of your soul sorta seeps into your compositions - organically, and as it should when the time is right for harvest, yet people hear it all "in a flash". We can't let our intellectual ideas get in the way of creative music. We can't have the 'idea' be the central focus of our music. Music is its own beast, and its authentic variety laughs at composers who wants their ideas to territorialize its sonic terrain. Music only partly hits our intellectuality. Mostly it hits our spirit through our meat and bones. And when you are in an improvisation, and your meat and bones get jazzed, then and only then have you taken the first steps towards real composition - the kind that other people want and need to care about.

MD
Chicago, Illinois
November 2005 (rev. May 2006)

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