A Challenge to the Challenging, or: Just enough thinking for me to confirm what I already think

I’ll begin today with the ending.

Life's too short.

Ah, yes. Gather ye rosebuds, carpe diem, just do it. Or, for our purposes, don’t waste your fucking time on modernism!

"You have turned your back on common men, on their elementary needs and their restricted time and intelligence," H.G. Wells complained to Joyce after reading "Finnegans Wake." That didn't faze him. "The demand that I make of my reader," Joyce said, "is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works." To which the obvious retort is: Life's too short.

Besides the distinct possibility that Joyce was yanking Wells’ chain—Joyce’s quote was actually taken from an interview with Max Eastman in Harper’s Magazine by Richard Ellmann (1959), Wells’ (d.1946) from a personal letter to Joyce—besides that, there’s several interesting points of note, before we get going.

The first is the contrasting points of view, illustrating continuing dichotomies between high and low art, commercial and non-commercial, accessible and inaccessible, etc., etc. (Surely, this is simplified, but something I think the author of today’s article intends)

The second is our author’s obvious retort. He questions the worth of investing time in a complicated aesthetic (to be contrasted with complex, below).

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Okay. Now, let’s poop on modernism from the beginning.

Too Complicated for Words: Are our brains big enough to untangle modern art?
Terry Teachout
Wall Street Journal

Literary types recently celebrated Bloomsday, a "holiday" not generally recognized by those who haven't read James Joyce's "Ulysses," a novel whose principal character is named Leopold Bloom and that takes place in Dublin on June 16, 1904.

How could I have forgotten, dear Detritusites?

Happy Bloomsday!

As always, the celebrations included a marathon bash at New York's Symphony Space during which excerpts from "Ulysses" were read. One participant was Stephen Colbert, who admitted to a reporter: "Performing 'Ulysses' on Bloomsday at Symphony Space is the only way I'll ever finish the damn book."

Very funny—but also very much to the point.

Is the point that one TV pundit-parodist can’t finish reading Joyce? That’s not a very good point.

The novels of Joyce and Gertrude Stein, the poetry of Ezra Pound and John Ashbery, the music of Pierre Boulez and Elliott Carter, the paintings of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock: All have at one time or another been dismissed as complicated to the point of unintelligibility.

Uh oh. Now no one can figure out when to be happy or sad.

Modern art comes in many varieties, and countless works once thought to be unintelligible now strike most of us as clear.

Excellent point. End of article, right? I mean, time put it into perspective and, lo, it made sense. Enough said. Happens all the time.

End of article. Right?

I wish it were so.

But I have yet to notice a collective change of heart when it comes to such exercises in hermetic modernism as Joyce's "Finnegans Wake," which contains thousands of sentences like this: "It is the circumconversioning of antelithual paganelles by a huggerknut cramwell energuman, or the caecodedition of an absquelitteris puttagonnianne to the herreraism of a cabotinesque exploser?"

I have to be honest, Microsoft Word didn’t like that sentence very much, either. So what’s the deal?

Are certain kinds of modern art too complex for anybody to understand?

Ah!

Ah.

Oh.

Uh…

But wait…

The authors of the Wikipedia article, faulty though they may be, seem to understand Finnegans Wake pretty well. They even seem to embrace Joyce’s difficulties.

Fred Lerdahl [This year’s Pulitzer runner-up] thinks so, at least as far as his chosen art form is concerned.

Hmm. I like music.

Let’s give it a go. What does Fred say?

In 1988…

Twenty-two years ago. Or the difference in age between Gustav Mahler and Igor Stravinsky. Or the difference in age between me and someone born in 2000.

In 1988 Mr. Lerdahl, who teaches musical composition at Columbia University…

Ivy League? I thought we were going to be arguing against having to think too hard. Was I wrong?

In 1988 Mr. Lerdahl, who teaches musical composition at Columbia University, published a paper called "Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems," in which he argued that the hypercomplex music of atonal composers like Messrs. Boulez and Carter betrays "a huge gap between compositional system and cognized result."

A very good argument, too—one worth thinking hard about!

And Mr. Teachout is also kind enough to give us a link to the online article. I recommend it; it’s a good read.

"Much contemporary music," [Lerdahl] says, "pursues complicatedness as compensation for a lack of complexity."

Okay. Let’s take a step back and clarify what Mr. Lerdahl meant, because cherry-picking quotes that fit your thesis is usually considered a bad practice.

Throughout the cited article, Lerdahl builds upon his 1983 book, A generative theory of tonal music, co-authored with R. Jackendoff, in which they outline, à la Chomsky, a grammar of listening, which is broken down into rules, preferences, and constraints that must be present for musical structures to be intelligible (cognizable). Complexity and complicatedness are, thus, semantically differentiated for reasons we will see below.

An important thing to note is that, “[Lerdahl is] not interested in passing judgement on the composers and compositions that are mentioned, particularly not on the remarkable work by Boulez that [he uses] as a representative example. The thrust of [his] argument is psychological rather than aesthetic.”

So, to get back to Mr. Teachout’s point: there is no guarantee that a compositional system will be intelligible. Fair enough.

What else?

Mr. Lerdahl's paper isn't widely known outside the field of music theory.

You don’t say.

But it stirred up a huge stink when it was published, and it continues to make certain of his colleagues understandably angry. For if he's right, then a fair amount of classical music written in the past century is too complicated for ordinary listeners to grasp—meaning…

Ordinary listeners can't grasp the notion of a sound cloud?

…meaning it is never going to find an audience.

Yikes. "Never" is a little harsh, don't you think? Didn't you just say:

Modern art comes in many varieties, and countless works once thought to be unintelligible now strike most of us as clear.

You did just say that. What gives?

Can there be any doubt that "Finnegans Wake" is "complicated" in precisely the same way that Mr. Lerdahl has in mind when he says that a piece of hypercomplex music like Mr. Boulez's "Le marteau sans maître" suffers from a "lack of redundancy" that "overwhelms the listener's processing capacities"?

"Precisely"? Uh, highly doubtful. I mean, can’t you reread a sentence?

The word "time" is central to Mr. Lerdahl's argument…

Right! You can’t just ask the orchestra to replay that complicated bit of Atmospheres before moving on; but you can reread a sentence whenever you wish.

…for it explains why an equally complicated painting like Pollock's "Autumn Rhythm" appeals to viewers who find the music of Mr. Boulez or the prose of Joyce hopelessly offputting.

No. You’re doing it wrong.

While a book may be laid out linearly, you can reread it at will—it’s not time dependent. With Pollack, or painting in general, you are afforded the luxury of focusing your attention on whatever you wish, at any time, whether one strain of dripped paint or the total cacophony. But Boulez? Not so much.

If time is the question, then the pairing of Pollack and Joyce has more in common than Boulez and Joyce.

Unlike "Finnegans Wake," which consists of 628 closely packed pages that take weeks to read, the splattery tangles and swirls of "Autumn Rhythm" […] can be experienced in a single glance.

You’re still doing it wrong.

Is that enough time to see everything Pollock put into "Autumn Rhythm"? No, but it's long enough for the painting to make a strong and meaningful impression on the viewer.

Wait. How is that analogous to a piece of music? It isn’t.

Does our author wish it to be analogous? Is this the call to arms for an aesthetic reappraisal?

Should all music strive to be a sound bite, ready for mass consumption? Is this a Wall Street Journal thing? Should I blame capitalism?

That is why hypercomplex modern visual art is accessible in a way that hypercomplex literature and music are not.

See, you’re still doing it wrong.

You can't get through a complicated novel faster by turning the pages more quickly.

You’re. Still. Doing. It. Wrong.

Reading demands a greater investment of time than looking at a complicated painting…

You just said it’s not! Remember?!

Is that enough time to see everything Pollock put into "Autumn Rhythm"? No [..].

Remember that? I did.

So, are you insinuating that maybe we don’t (shouldn’t?) want (need?) to see everything that Pollack put into it?

…and the average reader is not prepared to invest that much time in a book, no matter what critics say about it.

…because critics often have it dead wrong.

I feel the same way.

Good.

Oh. You didn’t mean what I meant. Sorry.

I suppose I could get to the bottom of "Finnegans Wake" if I worked at it—but would it be worth the trouble?

The scholars [sic] of the Wikipedia entry think it's totally worth the troub…

Wait a goddamned minute! You haven’t read Finnegans Wake but are perfectly happy to criticize it?!

Or would I be better served by spending the same amount of time rereading the seven volumes of Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past," a modern masterpiece that is not gratuitiously complicated but rewardingly complex?

First, is more better? I mean, I could read the entire Twilight Saga in the same amount of time it takes to read the first volume of Proust. And I hate vampires.

Second, my argument, by contrast, is this: that the complicatedness of artworks serves other exigencies, not just unintelligibility. Or, put another way, intelligibility is another criteria with which a composer may play.

And it’s here, too, where I somewhat disagree with Lerdahl. At the end of his article, he contemplates aesthetic value. He first claims that, “The best music utilizes the full potential of our cognitive resources,” which he is careful to qualify. It leads him to make the distinction between “complexity” and “complicatedness” we saw above.

Complexity refers not to musical surfaces but to the richness of the structures inferred from surfaces and to the richness of their (unconscious) derivation by the listener.

And…

A musical surface is complicated if it has numerous non-redundant events per unit time.

However, as I proposed above, I think that complicatedness can be just as valuable to an aesthetic position as intelligibility. In this sense, the artist may choose to play with or against intelligibility as a means of expression, rather than following a cognitively-prescribed formula. If we obey the later, we cease to seek anything beyond our baser intuitions. That is, if what is desirable is immediacy, then thinking becomes unnecessary, superfluous, and merely an afterthought.

And, because this is coming from the Wall Street Journal, I have to think: if music is indeed a commodity, then you don't want the consumer to think too hard about it--just get 'em to pay the entry fee and move 'em along. That is not a reason for aesthetic realignment.

Anyway, Lerdahl goes on to make his second aesthetic claim:

The best music arises from an alliance of a compositional grammar with the listening grammar.

Again, quite elegant. And given his definition of “complex,” this makes a lot of sense—it strikes an efficient balance between compositional grammar and listening grammar.

Still, is he asserting that he knows what the “best music” looks like? That would be arrogant, for sure.

Instead, what if what he meant by “best” is as I suggested above, efficient, then to whom is it efficient and complicatedness not worth the time? As we’ve seen earlier, Mr. Teachout doesn’t have the time; he finds immediacy valuable.

More importantly, if “efficient” is indeed what Lerdahl intends, he’s still fastidiously avoiding polemics, which is commendable. (Though I have my doubts to whether or not this is the case.) However, this is not Mr. Teachout's goal. He's not exploring cognitive and aesthetic issues; he's using a cherry-picked article to justify the disparaging of complicatedness simply because it’s difficult and time consuming. It's just another attack on thinking, which attempts to value art on its cognitive (market?) efficiency—a lazy reason to like what one already likes, and an excuse to be intellectually insufficient.

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Mr. Teachout’s aesthetic prescription is then fervently echoed by a commenter who, to my delight, recalled some of his previous thoughts on the matter.

I can't quite work up sufficient enthusiasm (or courage) to read in full or closely the hugely detailed and technical 25-page PDF file of Fred Lerdahl's treatise cited and linked by Mr. Teachout…

Awesome.

[Seriously, dear Detritusites, if you read the article, you would have noticed that the “treatise” is not very detailed nor is it technical. In fact, six of the nine figures are simple flow charts. (And for the record, I love flow charts, because, if done right, they increase intelligibility and dispense with unnecessary complicatedness!)]

Figure 1. A simple flow chart

…but I did skim through enough of it to get the impression that Dr. Lerdahl is saying essentially what I said…

How sure are you about that?

…Dr. Lerdahl is saying essentially what I said in a 2008 post on my blog…

Except he said what you think he said twenty years earlier...or the difference in age between Antonio Salieri and Anton Reicha.

…on my blog, Sounds & Fury…

Mmmm.

…titled, "On Music And Gibberish". Herewith, an excerpt.

I actually remember this one very well. I wanted to comment but couldn’t.

"In the wake of yet another wave of outraged attacks by New Music's defenders, supporters, and champions against The New York Times's [sic] longtime classical music critic, Bernard Holland, one of this crowd's favorite MSM whipping boys, for his latest critique of atonal music, we started to think afresh concerning what it is about much of the atonal music of our experience that we found so, well, unmusical — worse, found to be non-music.

“We” is only one person, in case you were confused; it sounds less authoritarian that way.

That reminds me of…

What was that thing that Obi-Wan said to Anakin?

It's not atonality per se — i.e., the music's lack of a triadic tonal center(s); a 'home base,' so to speak — nor is it the almost unrelenting, unresolved harmonic dissonance that's the hallmark of the atonal.

I’m sure it’ll come to me. You know what he said, right?

It's something much more fundamental: the lack of a perceptible and coherent musical narrative from work's beginning to end, which is to say the lack of the work's saying comprehensibly something beyond and exclusive of commentary on its own processes and methods which are — or ought to have been and be — but mere tools used in its making.

It’s at the tip of my tongue. It was in the third one, toward the end, I think. Uh…

"To put the matter ... bluntly ... a composition absent a perceptible and coherent musical narrative from beginning to end is gibberish and not music."

Oh, right! “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”

Get it?! Because life’s too short for anything but simple, cozy stories.
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Boulez Serves up Imperialism

Came across this little arts brief for an upcoming concert featuring Boulez’s Le Marteau sans Maître.

The highlight is a performance of Pierre Boulez’s Le Marteau sans Maitre [sic]…

See.

But…

The highlight is a performance of Pierre Boulez’s Le Marteau sans Maitre [sic] which encompasses the sound worlds of modern jazz, the Balinese Gamelan, and traditional African and Japanese music.

Okay. Here’s the deal—and I think it’s important, or at least it says a lot about our author's care for attention to detail:

Just for argument’s sake, let’s start from scratch. Let’s assume I have no idea what this piece is about, what it sounds like, whether the composer was still alive or not (or what a composer actually does, for that matter), and that he was also a famous conductor (you know, one of those guys who does an interpretive dance in front of a classical band). Let’s assume I’m a targeted reader.

Now, from the above sentence, I’m thinking to myself, perhaps, this kind of stuff. Not bad. Part Allman Brothers, part Ennappadam Venkatarama Bhagavatar. Suffices to say (etymology link), I’m thinking fusion of some sort or another. Or if I were a tad more classical savvy, maybe I’m thinking this fashion of fusion. Not exactly my bag, but certainly fusiony, to be sure.

My point is that it’s to everyone’s benefit, especially the layperson’s, that the description matches the product. But here’s what this description did:

…because this is the product (Movement IX, Bel édifice et les presentiments).

At this point I'm asking myself, how did this go so wrong, so quickly?

I bet I know; and I bet, deep down, you know, too.

Wiki.

Pedia.

The instrumentation was quite novel for Western music at the time [1955], lacking any kind of bass instrument, and drew some influence from the sound of “non-European” instruments, the Xylorimba recalls the African Balafon, the Vibraphone [the] Balinese Gamelan, and the Guitar the Japanese Koto…

I guess a guitar is like a koto; they both utilize plectrums of one kind or another. (Wiki Disclaimer)

Figure 1. A koto (left) and a guitar (right) Wait! Sorry. Koto right, guitar left. Or…dammit Boulez!

Unfortunately, whoever pilfered the Wiki entry and, subsequently, wrote the little concert blurb must not have finished reading the entire sentence.

…though “neither the style nor the actual use of these instruments has any connection with these different musical civilizations” (“Speaking, Playing, Singing” (1963) in Boulez 1986, 341).

What’s that you say? A quote from Boulez, himself! Cited, even! (At least an attempt at a citation. To be sure, I double-checked its veracity.)

Now, exactly where "modern jazz" came from is still a mystery.

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Why?

Last week, Steve Smith of the NY Times wrote a nice article about a Boston new music ensemble called Xanthos. It’s called:

Modernism, Rapid-Fire or Dreamy

But don’t go and read it yet. Hold on a sec.

…Xanthos Ensemble of Boston, which came to Roulette in SoHo on Saturday night with a program featuring works by three uncompromising modernists: Pierre Boulez, Mario Davidovsky and Charles Wuorinen. And in the hands of musicians so copiously skilled and confident, this undeniably challenging music had genuine appeal.

Yes! Challenging, appealing music! Hooray!

That Mr. Boulez is modern music’s foremost voluptuary is no secret. Much of his ensemble music seems as much descended from the gauzy Impressionism of Debussy and the instrumental brilliance of Ravel as from any modernist vein. “Dérive I,” a brief work scored for the now-standard “Pierrot”-plus configuration — flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion — was a brief, intoxicating cloud of trills and flutters.

I’m not entirely sure what “modern music’s foremost volupturary” means (and my Google search for that phrase returned zero results), so I’m not sure that it’s no secret. The sentiment, though, is welcome, and tracing Boulez to Debussy is something all-too-infrequently done.

I also like the image of a “brief, intoxicating cloud”. Sounds like we’re smokin’!

Equally mysterious if less outright sensual was Mr. Davidovsky’s “Flashbacks,” in which sharp eruptions and skittering figures repeatedly rupture a placid rumination. The percussion part makes daunting demands of its player with its rapid-fire alternations of timbre and technique. George Nickson handled the role with ease and flair.

I am a sucker for alliteration.

Most appealing of all was Mr. Wuorinen’s “New York Notes,” in which six players mix and match in a cheerfully choreographed bustle. The opening movement is filled with jazzy rhythms and snatches of nostalgic melody. A throaty cello monologue in the second movement is followed by a passage in which flute and violin curl seductively around a lonely clarinet. In the final movement, a wild barrage of impressions, you can’t help but be swept away by Mr. Wuorinen’s giddy thrill in writing for virtuoso players.

Wuorinen: serialist holdout. You know, for those people who claim that “nobody writes 12-tone music” at all ever anymore, and why would they, blah blah blah.

Among four newer pieces, only Derek Charke’s “What Do the Birds Think?” could be said to extend the modernist tradition. The work’s animated outer movements call for a catalog of unorthodox expressive techniques. In between, an onstage trio (alto flute with muted violin and cello) is juxtaposed with an offstage duo (bass clarinet and percussion). While physical separation was impossible here, the layered sounds still proved fascinating.

Sounds great! What else?

In Daniel Knaggs's "Three Nature Songs," a premiere, the soprano Jennifer Ashe sang sweet, airy melodies accompanied by instrumental impressions of chirping birds and croaking frogs. "Aria IV," bu Pozzi Escot, had Ms. Ashe ritualistically intoning vowels over a droning flute and tinkle of finger cymbals. Donald Hagar's playful "I Am Not a Clock" alternated between bustling, mechanical rhythms and slow, dreamy interludes.

Actually, Escot’s piece sounds like it “extend[s] the modernist tradition”, too. But, whatever.

Why am I writing about this? It was a great review. It treated the pieces fairly, and on their own merits. It was well-written with lots of style.

Why?

Because I omitted the beginning of the first paragraph, reproduced below:

The word has been out for decades now: The bug-eyed monster of musical modernism is vanquished. Try telling that to the young, accomplished members of the Xanthos Ensemble…

Why? Why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why?

Why begin a wonderful review of young, scrappy, new music-advocating players playing new music you liked and reviewed well by reiterating old-hack adages about the death of dumb old “bug-eyed monster” modernism?

Why?

Aargh! “Everyone knows modernism sucks/sucked, but here’s my review of some modern music that was actually good!”?

Besides reinforcing damnable and clichéd stereotypes, it undermines the article before it even begins.

Why?

Composer of the Day!

Today’s composer of the day is Morton Feldman.

(1926-1987)

He was thick and wore thick glasses, sometimes covered by greasy, brown hair. He had a thick Brooklyn accent.

His music is sun-dappled. He tried out graph notation, but ended up opting for traditional looking scores. Little known, he also made use of serialist procedures. His music is often confused with minimalism, but it never really repeats. The music is very long and very quiet. John Cage was a good friend. So was Mark Rothko.

Here’s a link to his cool piece, For Stephan Wolpe (you’ll need realPlayer to listen to it; there’s a download link on the page, if you need it). It’s about thirty minutes long, but well worth your time.

Here is an excerpt from an interview with Fred Orton and Gavin Bryars, taken from Morton Feldman Says, edited by Chris Villars, who also runs a website devoted to Morton Feldman stuff.

Fred Orton: You once referred to the ‘terror’ inherent in the teachings of Boulez and Stockhausen.

Morton Feldman: Yes. The terror is that you have to have an idea, while with me my ideas came out of the piece. ‘Idea’ became the new myth for that old word ‘inspiration’. If I was going to wait for an idea to write a piece I’d go out of my mind, I’d commit suicide. But it’s a very important terror that the piece has to be good, that it has to make sense, that it has to go somewhere, it has to exploit the materials, you have to use up its potential, it has to feed on itself, that it has to be something.

In his essay, called The Future of Local Music, Feldman sums up his position on many things.

IX. There is a marvelous story about Duchamp and an art student in San Francisco many years ago. Duchamp goes to this art school and he sees this kind of tough, macho San Francisco painter and Duchamp looks at this picture he doesn’t know. He says to the fellow, “What are you doing?” And the painter says, “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.” Duchamp pats him on the back and says, “Keep up the good work!”

You should listen to his music. Seriously.
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Composer of the Day!

Today’s composer of the day is Olivier Messiaen.

(1908-1992)

Frenchman Olivier Messiaen’s music is difficult to find in America, though it is still performed with relative regularity. His students, however, are well-known and widely respected (Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockcockblochen, Iannis Xenakis).

He had a disease, which, one assumes, helped make his music extremely colorful. He had synaesthesia.

Synaesthesia is classified as a disease in which specific sensory input (e.g. a sound) triggers involuntary responses from another, second, sensory pathway (e.g. vision). In other words, sounds can trigger visual sensations. There are many kinds of synaesthetes, including number-letter » color associations, number » form (object) associations, sound » color, word » taste, and the ever rare sound » taste.

In the case of the sound » color form, specific pitches or harmonies create a sensation of specific colors or patterns of colors.

For a composer like Messiaen, his sound » color form of synaesthesia translated into vibrantly “colorful” music. A devout Catholic organist, he developed his own highly personal symbolic system of composition with color. I forget the exact chord which symbolized the blood of Christ, but I assure you it's a good one.

Check this out. An organ improvisation. This is F-ing cool!

Check this out, too. Some orchestral music that has bird calls.

There's a lot of information about him on the interwebs. He is one of my favorites. You should listen to his music.