Stop and prepare : Cage

[Quijote]

Well I don't particularly care for the fundamentalist label either with its religious and fanatical overtones being applied simply to a dislike of a particular 'musical' genre. How then would you define the vast majority of people who dislike most classical music? What about someone who loves Beethoven but can't stand Bach? Or someone who doesn't like pop or Jazz? Is someone who likes the Beatles but hates Punk a heretic, or an extremist? It is a nonsense to use such language in this context. I have been civil and have not resorted to personal abuse but you heap all sorts of labels on anyone for daring to criticise the avant garde from conservative reactionary, demagogue, to your latest 'Taliban' remarks - yours is the true fundamentalist and patronising position as you seem to think that anyone who doesn't share your tastes is lacking in education. I personally regard myself as having a pretty broad spectrum in musical taste from Perotin to Britten and I know what I like without having to read why I should like it.

I am slightly taken aback at the tone, here. If I applied the "fundamentalist" label to you it is primarily a reaction to your blanket dismissal (and denigration) of a musical genre that you refuse to give the time of day to. Clearly no amount of my cajoling you will change that. I also reject the accusation that I have resorted to personal insult. I do believe that you sometimes resort to demagogy (see my ‘paraphrase’ of one of your postings above), though this should not be taken as insulting, simply the ‘cut and thrust’ of a continuing debate. The original ‘Taliban’ term was unnecessary and I have retracted that, and as a gentleman scholar you will be indulgent of my error. People who embrace Beethoven/ pop/The Beatles but “can’t stand” Bach/Jazz/Punk (to employ your binaries) still would say they are all “music”, so I cannot fairly say their position is “extreme”. But you cannot bring yourself to say the same of electro-acoustic music (and I insist on the term). I think it very healthy to offer informed criticism of the avant garde and I have never suggested that anyone is uneducated for doing so. Where do you get that notion? As to my tastes : oh, from Pérotin to today, I should say. I have to say that your last point made me smile in recollection of a similar comment (very probably apocryphal) : “I don’t know much about (modern?) art, but I know what I like.”

I have a few recommendations for further reading about these and related topics that may well help further our debate (a Philip-Peter “duo” for the moment, though with embellishments from my insane-elder-brother-in-the-attic PDG and that scoundrel Michael). Should I make them?

[Quijote]

My wife (well, not really - my 'significant other' rather) has persuaded me to cede a point. In light of the present political climate I have been ordered to substitute the word 'doctrinaire' for 'fundamentalist'.

And she refuses to take any more food upstairs to the attic for PDG. She says I can do it myself in future. Yes, M'am.

[Peter]

I am slightly taken aback at the tone, here. If I applied the "fundamentalist" label to you it is primarily a reaction to your blanket dismissal (and denigration) of a musical genre that you refuse to give the time of day to. Clearly no amount of my cajoling you will change that. I also reject the accusation that I have resorted to personal insult. I do believe that you sometimes resort to demagogy (see my ‘paraphrase’ of one of your postings above), though this should not be taken as insulting, simply the ‘cut and thrust’ of a continuing debate. The original ‘Taliban’ term was unnecessary and I have retracted that, and as a gentleman scholar you will be indulgent of my error. People who embrace Beethoven/ pop/The Beatles but “can’t stand” Bach/Jazz/Punk (to employ your binaries) still would say they are all “music”, so I cannot fairly say their position is “extreme”. But you cannot bring yourself to say the same of electro-acoustic music (and I insist on the term). I think it very healthy to offer informed criticism of the avant garde and I have never suggested that anyone is uneducated for doing so. Where do you get that notion? As to my tastes : oh, from Pérotin to today, I should say. I have to say that your last point made me smile in recollection of a similar comment (very probably apocryphal) : “I don’t know much about (modern?) art, but I know what I like.”

I have a few recommendations for further reading about these and related topics that may well help further our debate (a Philip-Peter “duo” for the moment, though with embellishments from my insane-elder-brother-in-the-attic PDG and that scoundrel Michael). Should I make them?

There is little point in my continuing - I made my position quite clear at the start and it's clear we will have to agree to differ on this issue. If others wish to contribute to the debate they are perfectly free to, but I haven't noticed much interest so far.

[Quijote]

There is little point in my continuing - I made my position quite clear at the start and it's clear we will have to agree to differ on this issue. If others wish to contribute to the debate they are perfectly free to, but I haven't noticed much interest so far.

There is much point in continuing, even given the little interest from other members. Perhaps they can speak for themselves, without your prompting. Though I notice nobody has rushed in to validate your viewpoints.

I never agree to differ. I accept I have failed to convince you of my position. Let others judge the respective merits of our debate so far. It would though be gratifying to see others take up this thread, even in opposition to my position.

[Quijote]

I find real enjoyment and depth by actually going back in time and the older I get I find myself able to appreciate going back much further than I could as a student. There is a whole world of music before Bach that I have only really touched the surface of and its there that I intend to explore - Perotin being a good place to start, though I'm particularly into Monteverdi's 8th book of madrigals at the moment.

Whilst I await postings on my new "Let's chat" thread (the one where we can "get to know each other"), I would like to take up your Monteverdi/madrigal point.

I have just finished reading Susan McClary, Reading Music : Selected Essays, Ashgate Contemporary Thinkers on Critical Musicology Series, 2007. I think you would be suitably challenged reading Part IV (Early Music), chapter 11 : The Cultural Work of the Madrigal. Whatever your view of McClary in general, she writes well and provocatively. She makes listening (and reading) classical (and later) music a refreshing exercise. As it should be.
Comments?

[PDG]

No not exactly PDG - with Op.95 he sent a note to Sir George Smart saying that it was written for a small circle of connoisseurs and "is never to be performed in public". With Op.130 he did grudgingly accept that a new finale was necessary. With Fidelio and Op.53 I think the reasons are different.

Agreed, but I thought that with Op.95 (the astonishing Serioso Quartet), he wrote to Zmelsky or Zmensky (I can't quite recall...), and he wrote something like: "My dear Z, please keep this quartet to yourself, do not show it to anyone, it is a personal gift..." or something very similar. I can't find the relevant quotes or names (so no change there, then!)...

[Peter]

There is much point in continuing, even given the little interest from other members. Perhaps they can speak for themselves, without your prompting. Though I notice nobody has rushed in to validate your viewpoints.

I never agree to differ. I accept I have failed to convince you of my position. Let others judge the respective merits of our debate so far. It would though be gratifying to see others take up this thread, even in opposition to my position.

You notice that no one has validated my position? You presumably mean that I do not recognise a work such as Emin's unmade bed as art or much electroacoustic avant-garde as 'music'? I suspect that the vast majority of people have the same view as the avant-garde only appeals to a minority within a minority. No doubt you will disagree.

I really don't see how you intend to prove my positon 'wrong' as it comes down to acceptance of definitions, personal interpretation and likes, no matter how cleverly you think you can explain it intellectually. However I do accept that some people (yourself included) are able to get much from this stuff and therefore in that sense I am convinced of your position - your problem is that you will not allow an alternative position and resort to all sorts of hysterical name calling such as philistine, doctrinaire, Daily Mail reader etc !!!

[Peter]

Agreed, but I thought that with Op.95 (the astonishing Serioso Quartet), he wrote to Zmelsky or Zmensky (I can't quite recall...), and he wrote something like: "My dear Z, please keep this quartet to yourself, do not show it to anyone, it is a personal gift..." or something very similar. I can't find the relevant quotes or names (so no change there, then!)...

Yes I think he did write that to Zmeskall, but also the letter to Smart. The point is that this work was not written with the public in mind and from that perspective it has to be a rarity amongst Beethoven works.

[Quijote]

You notice that no one has validated my position? You presumably mean that I do not recognise a work such as Emin's unmade bed as art or much electroacoustic avant-garde as 'music'? I suspect that the vast majority of people have the same view as the avant-garde only appeals to a minority within a minority. No doubt you will disagree.

A lot of people view Emin's bed as art (of sorts). You (and many others, too) don't. This is not my problem, nor my loss. I note with some satisfaction that you have progressed from a blanket dismissal of all electroacoustic as music qua music, to a more circumspect "much electroacoustic [...]." This is heartening.

I really don't see how you intend to prove my positon 'wrong' as it comes down to acceptance of definitions, personal interpretation and likes, no matter how cleverly you think you can explain it intellectually. However I do accept that some people (yourself included) are able to get much from this stuff and therefore in that sense I am convinced of your position - your problem is that you will not allow an alternative position and resort to all sorts of hysterical name calling such as philistine, doctrinaire, Daily Mail reader etc !!!

You are free to enjoy your personal interpretations and likes, and I have never said otherwise. Where you are misguided is in labelling electroacoustic music as not worthy of the epithet. You have labelled it acoustic science, but have not answered my Pythagoras retort. I wonder who is really the hysterical one, here?

[Quijote]

What do you find "difficult", or "unappealing" about electroacoustic music? Indeed, why do you have a problem calling it "music" tout court?

[Preston]

I will tell you what I find unlikeable about most electronic music. It does not sound natural, very synthetic actually. I know that there is some electronic music that does sound somewhat natural, though.

Philip, I think that it is perhaps your loss that you admire works of art, such as Emin's bed. Not trying to sound derogatory, just thought it might be something to think about.

[Quijote]

I will tell you what I find unlikeable about most electronic music. It does not sound natural, very synthetic actually. I know that there is some electronic music that does sound somewhat natural, though.

Philip, I think that it is perhaps your loss that you admire works of art, such as Emin's bed. Not trying to sound derogatory, just thought it might be something to think about.

Preston, I really don't know what to do with you. Oh well, never mind.

[Peter]

Preston, I really don't know what to do with you. Oh well, never mind.

There you go again with the poor poor simple thing patronising attitude that is oh so typical of those who fawn over the likes of the unmade bed.

[Peter]

What do you find "difficult", or "unappealing" about electroacoustic music? Indeed, why do you have a problem calling it "music" tout court?

Because I find it ugly, boring, contrived, unpleasant to listen to and gain no pleasure from it at all.
One should really ask why you have a problem accepting that many people simply dislike certain forms of 'art' or 'music' - just accept it and enjoy what you do without belittling others who don't.

[Peter]

Here is an excellent article which sums up exactly how I feel about it.

THE HECKLERS ARE RIGHT ABOUT THE MUSICAL AVANT GARDE

By David Hellewell

David Hellewell first made his name internationally as a composer, conductor and performer of avant garde classical music in the 1970s. At the same time he was composing music for classical musicians combining classical, jazz, rock, Latin American, baroque, romantic and popular music. His work has now developed into what he terms


FOR LIFE, LIBERTY AND PROPERTY

The musical avant garde is now some eighty years old, and for the last forty years or so these composers have been well-funded and promoted, excellently performed, extolled, analysed and proselytised by a global avant garde music establishment of a small, but controlling, cadre of elitist mandarins within the arts establishment: the Arts Council, publishers, critics, universities and colleges, education authorities, opera and orchestral managers, and the BBC. Yet this movement has still not produced anything of worth for the public, or for musicians, who avoid it like the plague that it is; and they are right!

Contrary to what their apologists say, there is nothing you need to know in order to understand a piece of music: WYSIWYG; only in this case What You Get Is What You Hear. If a piece sounds like a dissonant cacophony - that's what it is, just as a pile of bricks (even at the Tate) is nothing more than a pile of bricks.

ANTI-PEOPLE MUSIC

But although the avant garde isn't new anymore, it is still as damaging. It gobbles up limited funding and precious performance space, so that `alternative' composers are prevented from competing. It actually professes a total disdain for the public (as Sir Harrison Birtwistle only recently stated on Desert Island Discs); and which are the "masterpieces" produced by a Birtwistle. A recent Times leader (2/4/95) called Birtwistle "the finest modern British composer - some would say of all time" but this not the public's, or the vast majority of musicians', view. If Birtwistle is so brilliant, why are his little clarinet pieces Linoi, for example, not in every clarinetist's repertoire, or the Five Little Pieces for piano by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (a studied composer in the music education curriculum) not on every serious pianist's music stand?

Never before has such `anti-people' music been produced. What has come out of Pierre Boulez' multi-million pound, state-of-the-art electro-acoustic IRCAM in Paris, or from the many other heavily-funded studios in universities around the world? If these were actual real scientific R&D establishments they would have been closed down years ago, as failures.

THE AVANT GUARDE IS A CLOSED SYSTEM

In the seventies, when I was actively involved with the avant garde, as a composer, conductor, performer and promoter, I corresponded with, and subsequently met, Sir Karl Popper, to discuss, even then, my serious criticism of the avant garde's tenets in relation to my, and his own, philosophy. He told me that in 1919/20 he became a member of Schoenberg's circle, and a pupil of Erwin Stein, the result of which was that he left, after three years, a convinced reactionary.

Significantly, an opponent of Popper's, Theodor Adorno, was an advocate of Schoenberg's methods. Popper's "Open Society" is the antithesis of the totalitarian `Closed Society'. The avant garde is such a closed system: state-funded, yet exclusive and elitist. It excludes in its language just about everything that music lovers value. Indeed, it could crudely but accurately be stated, as a working tenet, that a work must, to be `avant garde', be an affront to normal artistic/ audience sensibilities; and especially, that it must not be `popular' or liked by the public! The avant garde equate standing out' with `outstanding'. (They have a great problem with past masterpieces, which are both profound and popular.) Hence, the seeming diversity of styles within the avant garde are merely different facets of the same ideology: what total-seriel Stockhausen and aleatoric Cage (and their mutations that have since been spawned) have in common, is this audience effrontery - a spit in the eye - and the avant garde's colluding critics call this "challenging" or "controversial", terms which were never considered to be aesthetic-judgemental criteria before the twentieth century. We have certainly moved a long way from `Art imitating Life'; it is now `Art intimidating Life'! Today, they can incorporate even popular art forms such as jazz into their idioms, provided that the material is deconstructed and processed (used to be called `composition') so that it deeply offends normal jazz lovers. They can now do this with anything: fox trots, mediaeval motets, the classics, nothing is safe; clever, aren't they?

HECKLERS

It takes courage, and probably a great deal of almost heroic anger, to dare to speak out, as Frederick Stocken and his colleague Keith Burstein have done, against these long-standing iniquities. These two composers will be, indeed already have been, vilified by the powerful avant garde establishment for their temerity. As virtually all serious composers these days are behoven to the musical establishment for their living (not usually as composers, but as teachers), they are thereby effectively stifled from speaking out in public, for fear of losing their jobs and opportunities - but they do vent their anger in private.

That little advert for "Hecklers" placed in the Spectator by Frederick Stocken (and then acted upon!) may well become, through up-front debate (the affair has already generated an enormous amount of media interest - even globally), a symbol, signifying an end to the hegemony of this destructive avant garde, thereby allowing the new more-humanised art to surface, evolve and be created in the future.

WHERE ARE THE MASTERWORKS?

The avant garde has also failed to fulfil the rightful and legitimate expectations of the many first class professional performers who have performed the music. Their outstanding musicianship, nigh-on-perfect performances (of some of the most complex music ever created), and genuine dedication, should have resulted in commensurate rewards and status for their trust. I have been privileged to have worked with some these musicians, who are of absolutely first rank, but who are now, in middle age, still virtually unknown and struggling to make a living. If musicians have mastered a repertoire of the suppose `master works' of the avant garde canon, and received critical acclaim and awards for their performances, they should be able to reap the benefits. This has not happened. If a pianist, for example, presented a concert of these `master works' by Stockhausen, Boulez, Maxwell Davies, Birtwistle et al, would there be an audience, a paying public? No. And yet acknowledged masterpieces are the very bread and butter of concert promoters' and musicians' livelihood, because paying audiences want to hear them - again and again. Young pianists - such as Ian Pace, a vociferous opponent of The Hecklers - should stop to ponder seriously on how will they feel in, say, twenty years time, when the avant garde works they are now enthusiastically proselytising (and justifying by the same sort arguments that were also used twenty years ago) are not new anymore, and still not earning them rewards?

The London Sinfonietta has commissioned and premiered numerous works over the past decades (heavily subsidised, of course), most of which received critical acclaim at their premiere; where are these works now? In the repertoire? We are not talking about poor, under-rehearsed performances (Schoenberg's complaint) in obscure venues, but outstanding performances at auspicious venues with all the sophisticated promotional techniques of the modern PR industry.

PERSONAL PLEASURE

Sir William Glock, father figure and patron (with public funds) of the British avant garde, is also an excellent pianist. What does he play for his own pleasure and in public: Haydn and other classics! Why haven't his friends - Maxwell Davies, Birtwistle or Boulez - written works specially for him for his intimate, personal pleasure? No Goldberg Variations here to ease the troubled mind - this is equivalent to a modern architect living in a Georgian house! Can you imagine Beethoven's patron, the Archduke Rudolph, playing nothing but the `Old Masters' like Handel for his pleasure? Now that patronage is corporate, the sponsors don't have put their own personal funds (and trust, and prestige) where their mouths are. In fact the idea of actually playing avant garde music for pleasure is laughable.

The avant garde movement likes to describe itself as being on a par with Space Exploration ("Boldly going ..."), but all it has actually produced, in some eighty years, is the equivalent, in real compositional terms, of the non-stick frying pan. It has primarily been a technical and ideological movement; but it is arguable that even these (admittedly tremendous) technical developments of advance composition and performance techniques would have been been developed anyway through the burgeoning advances in the `other' modern musical culture: film and popular music. (Commercial studios, computer and recording technology has now outstripped that of the experimental avant garde).


THE DIALECTIC OF NOTES

All in all, the avant garde has been a negative, destructive movement in the twentieth century. When the time-tested basic elements of Western music - the harmonic (vertical) and melodic (horizontal) dialectic of pitched (Pythagorean) notes are jettisoned, you are left only with the expressionism of colour, orchestration, dynamics, instrumentation, etc. which, although ever present, and an integral part of Western music, never has, nor ever can be, a substitute for music's unique language: the `dialectic of notes'.