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by
Alex Ross
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October 30, 2020 - May 25, 2021
“Everything had to be stylized and made abstract: music regarded as a glass-bead-game, a fossil of life.
In the exotic instrumentation there are hints of Balinese, African, and Japanese music, but nothing so vulgar as a melody or a steady beat. This is ultramodern Orientalism that exploits world music at the highest remove and with the utmost refinement.
In November 1945 politics published a defiant little poem by Babbitt that sounded like a rallying cry for the propaganda war: A lie for a lie, Untruth for untruth: this can be read in the book of the dead; make it your maxim and load it with lead.
“The more vicious the society, the more vicious the individual.”
Cowell enrolled at the University of California in 1914 and studied with Seeger for two crucial years. He also joined a mildly cultish Pismo Beach community called Temple of the People, led by the Theosophist poet John Varian, who proclaimed, “There is a new race birthing here in the West. We are the germic embryonic seed of future majesties of growth.” From Varian and other local visionaries Cowell inherited the idea that California would be the eastern frontier of a great Pacific Rim culture, an ecstatic commingling of far-flung peoples. His vision of a Pacific Rim utopia grew to embrace the
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Feldman once delivered a merciless sketch of the prospects of the American composer. He starts out as a romantic, Feldman said, a budding genius overflowing with original ideas, or at least with ideas about originality. Then he goes off to university and discovers that romanticism is defunct. He studies for six years at Princeton or Yale, learning about twelve-tone writing, total serialism, indeterminacy, and the rest. He goes to Darmstadt and samples the latest wares of the European avant-garde. “He writes a piece occasionally,” Feldman wrote. “It is played occasionally. There is always the
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Kyle Gann in some trenchant commentaries on late-twentieth-century music. Gann lumps both “modernists” and “New Romantics” together in the “uptown” category, named for the Upper West Side of New York City, home of Lincoln Center, the Juilliard School, Carnegie Hall, Columbia University, and other richly endowed institutions. Downtown composers are those who, in Harry Partch’s words, look for “a way outside”—anti-European, anti-symphonic, anti-operatic. They descend from the free spirits who had long gone their own way on the West Coast. In New York such composers have tended to congregate in
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Schoenberg invented the twelve-tone row; Webern found a secret stillness in its patterns; Cage and Feldman abandoned the row and accentuated the stillness; Young slowed down the row and rendered it hypnotic; Riley pulled the long tones toward tonality; Reich systematized the process and gave it depth of field; Glass gave it motorized momentum. The chain didn’t stop there. Starting in the late sixties, a small legion of popular artists, headed by the Velvet Underground, carried the minimalist idea toward the mainstream.
Now classical music is the world; it has ceased to be a European art.
Sheila Melvin and Jindong Cai’s absorbing history, Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music Became Chinese,
An astonishing incident took place on Chinese television. He Luting, who had drawn fire from a proletarian-minded critic for defending the music of Debussy, was subjected to a physically abusive interrogation but refused to apologize. “Your accusations are false!” he shouted. “Shame on you for lying!” No composer ever made a braver stand against totalitarianism. He Luting lived to the age of ninety-six.
Schnittke told a friend: “I set down a beautiful chord on paper—and suddenly it rusts.”
