Two John Cage Stories
Even as the 19th century aesthete cherished the divinely inspired genius, and chaired him through the market place, a significant number of 20th century aesthetes might be said to have deplored the whole concept of genius--as well as all the other external trappings of excellence with which we adorn our attitudes. The 19th century needed musical heroes--the 20th century much preferred anti-heroes. The 19th century affirmed something positive and transcendental, but 20th century science turned the artist's face away from the ideal and turned it, with a cynical smirk, toward the ironic.
One of the main ideas, behind both modernist and the post-modernist academic concert music, was that original solutions to musical problems, thus the creation of unique musical identities, was no longer possible using the musical materials handed down to us from our immediate forebears; the implications of this inherited material were laid on too thick for the music to overcome by any other means than rejection. Thus, anything that displayed a self-conscious break with tradition was considered original. Of course vogues and cliques rapidly developed, and thus we got a whole bunch of original music that all sounded the same.
The first Cage story I want to tell takes place at UCLA where Schoenberg was having him realize a figured bass in four parts on the blackboard. Cage wrote his first realization.
Schoenberg said, "Write another."
Cage wrote another realization.
Schoenberg said, "Write another."
Cage wrote another realization.
Schoenberg said, "Write another."
Cage wrote another realization.
Nine times. Finally, Schoenberg said, "Write another."
And Cage said, "There are no more."
And Schoenberg accepted this.
This story is often upheld, to defend the position that all the musical potentials of the style materials of the past are used up, and only a radical departure will yield anything new. This attitude has been a thorn in my side my whole life--so much so that to comment on it even briefly would be to invoke not a blog, but a book from my fevered brain. Let it go with this one disgusted retort:
it may be that, under the confining restrictions of a 4-part exercise, the number of a certain type of mathematical solution may eventually be exhausted, but, you do the math, there are so many other variables in any style period that it would use up many, many lifetimes for them ALL to be used up. The monkey may some day write Hamlet, but who's got the time?
One of the other main ideas, behind both modernist and the post-modernist academic concert music, is that the emphasis of musical expression should be turned away from what is said, placing the main emphasis upon what is NOT said. Anti-Art readily brings forth Anti-Artists.This brings us to our second Cage story. This one takes place during Cage's residency at the University of Illinois in the 60s:
Once upon a time John was having an argument with a musicologist who considered Cage to be an impostor, a charlatan, a non-musician--certainly NOT a genius. The musicologist made a list of all Cage's musical sins, like a priest accusing a prodigal son, and compared him with Beethoven, that paragon of snooty quality. "This, and this, and this, and this, and this is why Beethoven was a great composer and you're not!"
To which Cage replied, "But, you see, Beethoven HAD to be a great composer and I don't." Buddhist non-attachment trumpets to the anti-composer's rescue.
In a way, Cage is pretty much of a punk for passing the buck on to the audience--asking THEM to make up his music for him. And yet . . . there's something magnificent, indeed heroic, nay, SAINTLY in the gesture of giving up control of a created artwork and letting GOD step in! What a selfless act, to create situations in which the personality of the creator is completely canceled out by the technique of the piece! It may not be a stroke of musical genius, but it is certainly a stroke of philosophic genius--and if you accept the mode of transmission of this philosophic truth as SOUND, how is that not music?
Does anybody sound like Cage? Does nobody sound like Cage? What's the difference?
RFT
Glennallen, AK
February 20, 2011
Showing posts with label greek music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label greek music. Show all posts
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Skalkottas
Nicos Skalkottas
Skalkottas, Greek composer, 1904-1949, is one of a legion of "great" composers who was ALMOST never discovered. Indeed, there are so many worthy artists who have never come before the public eye that one must wonder how many WEREN'T EVER discovered. It is common knowledge that the music of no less a composer than Joh. Seb. Bach lay fallow in a corner of a Leipzig library until the St. Mathew Passion was discovered by Mendelssohn in 1829 (54 years after the composer's death). WHAT IF Mendelssohn had not been looking for a piece for his community choir to sing? We know that, of the approximately 350 cantatas written by Bach, slightly more than 200 survive; if you do the math (one cantata=20 minutes (at least)), that's over forty hours of music, from the mind of one of the greatest musician who ever lived, lost. Lost.
Between 1927 and 1930, Nicos Skalkottas was a member of Arnold Schoenberg's Masterclass in Composition at the Academy of Arts in Berlin. Schoenberg, history's foremost musical snob and elitist, included Skalkottas in a short list of individuals he considered to be "a composer." If Schoenberg said you were good, you HAD to be good. So there!
To be so designated by Schoenberg placed him at the zenith of estimable, artistic worthiness; so although one deplores the fact that Nicos was so completely forgotten, it is easy to explain this artistic anonymity when you remember that the composer's prime was right in the middle of World War II. After returning to Greece in 1933, he attempted to mount some performances of his work, but after meeting with hostility and rejection, he simply gave up, and lived out the rest of his life playing back-bench violin in the Athens Opera Orchestra. For years, nobody even knew that he was a composer.
However, when he died, a closet was discovered, in his house, filled to the top with completed scores plus parts, all copied out neatly and professionally, waiting for someone to come along and discover them. Many of these were then lost or destroyed (although, in 1954, some were recovered in the back of a secondhand bookshop), but we still have a fair sampling of his work.
I confess, the only composition with which I am familiar is the Contrabass Concerto. It made a deep impression on me when I first heard it. The piece is filled with the same concentration of ideas that characterizes the terse epigrams of Schoenberg's star pupil Anton Webern, and yet, in Skalkottas, there is also an expansiveness and humor (dig that string bass tango!), not to mention the tonal freedom, that characterizes Schoenberg's other great student, Alban Berg. You may even be so bold as to suggest that Skalkottas was the PERFECT Schoenberg student, the student who found a balance between two dangerous extremes implied in the 12-tone system.
As I sit here trying to think of how to explain what I mean by "dangerous extremes" I flash on the word "snooty." The Schoenberg Masterclass was filled with "snooty" characters. They bought into Beethoven's egocentric vision of the artist as the voice of God. a prophet, a saint who always looked down on the huddled masses with massive condescension. There is none of that in Skalkottas (I don't think there is in Schoenberg either, by the way)--it is full throated song, innocent and aware of its progenitors only peripherally, as it loses itself in enjoying itself.
It is impossible to give here a complete discussion of Herbert Brun's Statement vs. Argument aesthetic principle, but, to summarize:
1. a piece of music that is made completely of itself, original, anomalous, is called a "statement," and
2. a piece that relies on or makes reference to other pre-existing material (like Nixon jokes), must necessarily take on that material as psychological baggage, and therefore makes an "argument." (Perhaps a better word is "paradox?")
Brun always preferred the "statement," and I always tended toward an open-hearted acceptance of the "argument." In any case, Skalkottas certainly fills in the crack in that area; his music is bursting with personality and humanity that renders the underlying technique invisible and insignificant. A perspective that would have served well both snooty britches Webern and Berg. Skalkottas makes a positive statement about human life without fear of bringing in cultural/archetypal artifacts laden with progeny, unafraid to mix the human with the ideal. In other words, he writes like me.
RFT
Glennallen, AK
January 25, 2011
Skalkottas, Greek composer, 1904-1949, is one of a legion of "great" composers who was ALMOST never discovered. Indeed, there are so many worthy artists who have never come before the public eye that one must wonder how many WEREN'T EVER discovered. It is common knowledge that the music of no less a composer than Joh. Seb. Bach lay fallow in a corner of a Leipzig library until the St. Mathew Passion was discovered by Mendelssohn in 1829 (54 years after the composer's death). WHAT IF Mendelssohn had not been looking for a piece for his community choir to sing? We know that, of the approximately 350 cantatas written by Bach, slightly more than 200 survive; if you do the math (one cantata=20 minutes (at least)), that's over forty hours of music, from the mind of one of the greatest musician who ever lived, lost. Lost.
Between 1927 and 1930, Nicos Skalkottas was a member of Arnold Schoenberg's Masterclass in Composition at the Academy of Arts in Berlin. Schoenberg, history's foremost musical snob and elitist, included Skalkottas in a short list of individuals he considered to be "a composer." If Schoenberg said you were good, you HAD to be good. So there!
To be so designated by Schoenberg placed him at the zenith of estimable, artistic worthiness; so although one deplores the fact that Nicos was so completely forgotten, it is easy to explain this artistic anonymity when you remember that the composer's prime was right in the middle of World War II. After returning to Greece in 1933, he attempted to mount some performances of his work, but after meeting with hostility and rejection, he simply gave up, and lived out the rest of his life playing back-bench violin in the Athens Opera Orchestra. For years, nobody even knew that he was a composer.
However, when he died, a closet was discovered, in his house, filled to the top with completed scores plus parts, all copied out neatly and professionally, waiting for someone to come along and discover them. Many of these were then lost or destroyed (although, in 1954, some were recovered in the back of a secondhand bookshop), but we still have a fair sampling of his work.
I confess, the only composition with which I am familiar is the Contrabass Concerto. It made a deep impression on me when I first heard it. The piece is filled with the same concentration of ideas that characterizes the terse epigrams of Schoenberg's star pupil Anton Webern, and yet, in Skalkottas, there is also an expansiveness and humor (dig that string bass tango!), not to mention the tonal freedom, that characterizes Schoenberg's other great student, Alban Berg. You may even be so bold as to suggest that Skalkottas was the PERFECT Schoenberg student, the student who found a balance between two dangerous extremes implied in the 12-tone system.
As I sit here trying to think of how to explain what I mean by "dangerous extremes" I flash on the word "snooty." The Schoenberg Masterclass was filled with "snooty" characters. They bought into Beethoven's egocentric vision of the artist as the voice of God. a prophet, a saint who always looked down on the huddled masses with massive condescension. There is none of that in Skalkottas (I don't think there is in Schoenberg either, by the way)--it is full throated song, innocent and aware of its progenitors only peripherally, as it loses itself in enjoying itself.
It is impossible to give here a complete discussion of Herbert Brun's Statement vs. Argument aesthetic principle, but, to summarize:
1. a piece of music that is made completely of itself, original, anomalous, is called a "statement," and
2. a piece that relies on or makes reference to other pre-existing material (like Nixon jokes), must necessarily take on that material as psychological baggage, and therefore makes an "argument." (Perhaps a better word is "paradox?")
Brun always preferred the "statement," and I always tended toward an open-hearted acceptance of the "argument." In any case, Skalkottas certainly fills in the crack in that area; his music is bursting with personality and humanity that renders the underlying technique invisible and insignificant. A perspective that would have served well both snooty britches Webern and Berg. Skalkottas makes a positive statement about human life without fear of bringing in cultural/archetypal artifacts laden with progeny, unafraid to mix the human with the ideal. In other words, he writes like me.
RFT
Glennallen, AK
January 25, 2011
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