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The psychoacoustic evidence for two classes of listeners can inspire either dread or delight. A composer might view these two diatometriclaly opposed classes of listener as an opportunity, or a problem.
There are two ways you can take these findings: for instance, you might (in a moment of spectacularly bad judgment) try to use 'em as ammunition for this or that particular tuning agenda. This is the way the polemicists have misused and abused psychoacoustics findings for the last 60 years--grab any paper you can, and then twist it to fit your particular musical agenda. This or that paper "proves" that John Cage's coin-flipping, or Pierre Boulez's unlistenable theory ueber alles, or Milton Babbit's double-entry bookkeeping misconstrued as composition, are THE final stage of mankind's musical evolution. Wellllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll, if we've learned ANYTHING by reading the past 60 years of music history, we've learned that there *isn't* any final stage of musical evolution. There is no "ultimate style." There is no "Single correct way to compose." After a while, you realize that the fashion industry is a lot more honest about this than the avant- garde music literary-industrial complex. Yves St. Laurent doesn't pretend that miniskirts or maxi skirts are "the final stage of human fashion." It's just another fad. One year you wear cellophone, the next year you wear a dead flounder. It's all just a craze, like hula hoops, or pet rocks, or 3-D movies.
Composers of the 90s have moved beyond this nonsense. To their great credit, the younger generation of composers--the Michael Gordons and the Alison Camerons and the Julia Wolfes and the David Langs--are most strongly influenced by two geniuses who weren't on the charts AT ALL in the 50s/60s/70s. If you listen to any new music twday by a composer under about age 45, you're not going to hear a lot of Cage-type stunts and scams. No more burning pianos, no more flipping coins. What you'll hear is a lot of spiky complex rhythms and non-twelvular pitch inflexions. The rhythmic complexity of today's younger composers comes from Conlon Nancarrow-- a composer who wasn't even mentioned in the hot new music journals until about the mid-80s-- and the microtonal part of today's younger composers comes overwhelmingly from Harry Partch--a composer who was systematically "given the back of the hand treatment by the musical establishment," as Joel Mandelbaum put it. Significantly, the pundits and doyens of new music in the 1950 and 1960s and 1970s got it completely WRONG. They muffed it. They blew it. They missed it by a mile. In my library is a book called "The Composers of Tomorrow's Music." It was written in 1971 by a supposed "expert," one of the doyens and cogniscenti of new music in the 50s-60s-70s. This book is fascinating, because not a single one of the people supposedly destined to compose "tomorrow's music" have actually wound up as influential composers today.
Conlon Nancarrow is not even mentioned in this book. Harry Partch gets a tiny footnote as a peripheral figure with "no followers, even today." (You can tell how long ago 1971 really was when you read this book!)
And who are the Big Boys destined to create "tomorrow's music"?
Pierre Boulez--today, a nonentity. Arnold Schoenberg--another vanished icon. Anton Webern--respected, but with no contemporary followers under the age 45. Milton Babbitt-- a musical accountant completely lacking even the slightest scintilla of compositional talent.
John Cage, of whom no more need be said.
Or heard.
Rounding out the list are the usual suspects:
Charles Ives (obviously a fine composer), Edgard Varese (another safe bet) and Iannis Xenakis (another fine composer & an obvious choice--but curiously no mention of Gyorgi Ligeti or Krysztof Penderecki, who produced very similar music at almost exactly the same time).
As mentioned, Conlon Nancarrow is completely ignored--his name cannot even be found in the index of this book.
So let's see...
We've got a bunch of "experts" who told us what tomorrow's music was going to sound like. And they were completely, utterly, 100% wrong. We had a bunch of "experts" writing polemics all through the 50s, 60s, 70s. People who flailed and yammered and screeched that any composer who doesn't write serial music is useless--and any composer who doesn't compose chance music is useless--and any composer who doesn't use live electronics is useless-- any composer who doesn't stage musical "happenings" is useless--and any composer who doesn't compose algorithmic music is useless-- in short, any composer who doesn't [fill in the blank] isn't a REAL composer and can't be taken seriously.
Meanwhile, "tomorrow's music" has taken a 180-degree turn precisely away from the direction these folks told us it would take. So how can we take people like Boulez and Fonville and Roger Reynolds and Tod Machover and Ben Boretz and James Boros seriously?
In the 50s they told us serialism was the end-all and be-all of new music...in the 60s they told us analog electronics and graphic scores were the end-all and be-all of new music...in the 70s they told us improvisation and digital electronics was the end-all and be-all of new music--in the 80s they told us that algorithmic composition and real-time DSP was the end-all and be-all of new music... Now these same bozos are telling us what's important for new music in the 90s.
Gimme a goddamn break.
At this point, why should we pay attention?
Why should we even listen?
Why should we do anything but laugh?
What's particularly galling to me is that this kind of crap is STILL going on. Allen Strange, one of the few academics who DOES know better, is setting up World Wide Web Pages on "American Icons"--exactly what an "icon" is....well, that's hard to say. If we go by the usual standard, it means Big Bucks. Lotsa tails-'n-tux performances at Lincoln Center. Big commissions. Hard cash. The clanging of cash registers, the popping of champagne corks, the rumble of Rolls Royce engines.
(America, after all, worships only one thing: hard cash and lots of it. Anyone without Big Bucks in America is no one very much.)
Well, by this standard the composers who qualify as "American Icons" are obviously: Madonna, Michael Jackson, U2, and Niggas With An Attitude.
However, something leads to doubt that Allen Strange is setting up WWW pages on the compositional strategies employed by Niggas With An Attitude... So this leaves me guessing as the exact intent of a set of WWW pages called "American Icons" of new music.
Well, let's see--perhaps Allen Strange means to indicate a group of composers who never made Big Bucks or hit the big time at Lincoln Center, but who *should have.*
Aha!
Now a light begins to dawn...
Allen Strange is setting up a series of Web Pages which are intended presumably to bring to a wider audience the undeservedly neglected music of some of the very finest avant garde composers since 1950.
Hm.
But wait a minute--
There's a web page on James Tenney...who cannot be in any way described as one of the very finest garde composers since 1950. In fact, Tenney is a major theorist but remarkably minor composer who's produced virtually nothing worth listening to twice. On the contrary: Tenney's composition "For Ann: Rising" enjoys the singular distinction of being the only piece of music ever written which makes a telephone dial tone sound interesting by comparison.
Next to get a shot of publicity via Strange's WWW page is John Cage.
In the book "The Perception of Music," Robert Frances speaks of "Legge (1984), who described 2 cases of composers stricken with general paralysis, indicated that while th pateints continued composing, they were incapable of evaluating their own production or maintaining unity in them; they left their productions in the same incoherent state in which they had sprung forth. Dupre and Nathan (1911) cite in tihs regard the cases of 2 general paralytics, phasics with serious intellectual deficit."
So when an ordinary composer suffers a stroke and becomes unable to produce coherent music, this is a condition to be pitied and characterized as "serious intellectual deficit." Ah, but when John Cage leaves his coin-flipping compositions "in the same incoherent state in which they had sprung forth," well, now, for this sublime feat Cage receives adulation, praise, medals and world fame as a Great Composer.
O what sublime mastery!
O what genius!
O what insight!
O what a load of horse manure.
C'mon, Allen, let's GET REAL. Let's set up some WWW pages of composers who actually had some TALENT and who WEREN'T world famous--but who SHOULD have been.
Stop with the bozos and the yo-yos already.
C'mon, Allen--where's the World Wide Weg page on Alois Haba?
Where's the World Wide Web page on Ivan Vyshnegradsky?
Where's the World Wide Web page on Julian Carrillo?
Where's the World Wide Web page on Johnny Reinhard?
Where is the World Wide Web page on Ivor Darreg?
Where is the World Wide Web page on David Rosenboom?
Where is the World Wide Web page on Susan Rawcliff?
Where is the World Wide Web page on Barbara Benary?
Yes, the music changes, but the b.s. goes on and on and on...
Even after hearing 50 years of gibberish from the yo-yos who gave us a musical chairs game of fads and wacky finger-up-the-ass-new-music-theories-of-the-month nonsense, we're STILL getting an earful about how much BETTER the new music situation is nowadays than it was in the 1950s. "Oh," whines WIlliam Bolcom, "it was so AWFUL back then--everyone had to compose in the EXACT SAME Internationl Style. Everyone produced the same-old same-old post-Webern serialist schlock. But now it's so much better for new composers, thank heavens."
Bullshit.
Just listen to the IRCAM series of CDs. It's the same-old same-old. The same International Style, just spiffed up a bit. Yes, you still have to adhere to a stereotyped International Style to get a preformance or get your CD distributed by IRCAM or the CDCM or CRI or Wergo Computer Music series. Today's International Style requires that all new composers must [1] stay rigorously away from a regular beat [2] use dense non-tonal orchestration-- no electric piano solos allowed! [3] rigidly avoid borrowing from other musical cultures--thus Barbara Benary must be summarily fired from her professorship in 1980 and condemned to wander the wilderness becuase she dared to compose and perform in a tradition outside the Western symphony/chamber post-Webern modernist cliches.
So the net result is that you hear the same kind of music played the same way, time after time after time. Jon Appleton hilariously satirized the "typical IRCAM computer piece" in 1989 in an Eletronic Musician editorial called "The Defects of Electronic Music." Every new IRCAM piece begins with a high pure tone which then descends into a series of reverberated dense dissonant chords, and so on. It's a cliche. It's like a hoochie-cootchie dance from the 1920s, so styilzed and stereotyped you can hardly hear the music behind the formalisms. Every IRCAM/CRI/WERGO modern symphonic/ chamber piece must start with irregular and complex rhythms which strictly avoid a tonal center-- the notes build to a climax, which then immediately sounds a solo note, then a very loud dissonant cluster, then a soft dissonant cluster, and now repeat ad infinitum. The stereotypical "new music" composition is now so cliched and pathetically predictable that I'm thinking of sitting down & writing a computer program to spit out these compositions via MIDI. Listen to early Stockhausen and then listen to today's IRCAM symphony-and-computer comopsitions and you'll hear that the style is EXACTLY the same. Chromatic pitches, irregular rhythms, solo note, loud dissonant cluster, soft dissonant cluster, repeat ad nauseum. It just goes on and on and on.
Meanwhile, truly original microtonal music is being composed right and left, and studiously IGNORED by the musical "cognitive elite."
Amazing.
Just amazing.
Like planaria, they never learn.
Sooner or later someone is going to have to point out that COMPOSERS WHO ARE STILL ALIVE are doing DRASTICALLY MICROTONAL AND HUGELY INTERESTING MUSIC. How about some WWW pages for THESE people, folks? How about a WWW Mandelbaum page, or a Darreg page, or a Benary page?
C'mon, folks.
How about it?
--mclaren
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