Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Save Me From "Important"

So rule Brittania, while Britten rules the staves, All the music-loving public are his slaves.

-Michael Flanders & Donald Swann, "Guide to Britten"

If, settling into my seat in the concert hall, I read that a modern musical work is "important", or I just can't understand the language used to describe it, I know that what I am about to experience will not be easy on the senses.

Take twelve-tone music. Please. The first time I was exposed to seriously dissonant "modern" music, I began fantasizing about what must be written between the staves:

"Use fork or ballpoint pen to sound string to achieve proper metallic whining sound"

"drop two hundred marbles into piano body all at once"

"emulate a dozen cats on angel dust suspended on a chalkboard over boiling water"

"smash forearm on two octaves below middle C"

"drag fingernails over keys slowly while humming 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic'"

In fact, composers such as George Crumb and Karlheinz Stockhausen (who was so unfortunately recorded saying September 11 was "the biggest artwork that exists at all in the whole universe") use new and unusual notations to convey the odd tonalities and rhythms they wish to achieve. Stockhausen wrote a "circular" piece, in which the musicians may start and end at any point, and Crumb has scored his work in the shape of a peace sign. I occasionally wonder if such scores might be intended to disturb the inner ear and thus achieve the disturbing sonorities of musicians vomiting into their instruments.

Anthony Tommasini, whose columns I enjoy and read avidly, illustrates the problem in his recent column "12 Tones Yield Any Number of Felicities" in the New York Times. This is a review of a concert called "12-Tone and Beyond" which starts hopefully:

Perhaps the buzz generated by this program and the festival as a whole signals that audiences, led by a new generation of listeners, have turned a corner. The emergence of 12- tone technique was easily the most significant theoretical development of the 20th century.

Tommasini uses the phrase "turned a corner" advisedly, as most classical audiences turn the corner away from the concert hall if they think something from the "Second Viennese School" is on the program. As far as "significant" theoretical developments, the concert-going audience has enough trouble unwrapping a cough drop quickly, let alone plumbing the quantitative depths of 12-tone theory.

The adjectives Tommasini uses tell the whole story:

spiky and fascinating..sassy, meter-fracturing percussion outbursts...agitated, zigzagging solo passages ...the combative instrumental writing, the volleys of nose-thumbing brasses...self-contained chords keep being repeated oddly, irregularly and inexorably.

It doesn't sound like a toe-tapping evening, does it? Spare me your nose-thumbing brasses, your sassy meter-fracturing outbursts yearning to be free. What on earth is a "self-contained" chord?

Artists that create "challenging" art are often lauded as rebels or pioneers. Against whom do they rebel? Tommasini refers to Arnold Schoenberg, the father of 12-tone theory, as having "liberated dissonance". Under what authority was dissonance imprisoned? Conventions aren't such straitjackets. Would it be brave of me to come out on stage and pass gas because convention says I should not? Would I be known as the artist who "liberated" his flatulence? People are averse to dissonance because it jars the nerves, not because it is political dissent.

The confusion of Avant-Garde and political dissent is by no means confined to music. Hegel said that "architecture is frozen music." If so, the architect Peter Eisenmann is an ice-cold member of the Second Viennese School. One house he designed is symmetrical along a diagonal. It has stairs coming off the ceiling going nowhere. He also designed a house that only exists in its designs impressed in relief on thick paper. It may literally be a deconstructionist's Nietzschean fantasy, but it's not a house. Or even a building. In fact, just what it isn't is very much on Eisenmann's mind:

"What can be the model for architecture when the essence of what was effective in the classical model -- the presumed rational value of structures, representations, methodologies of origin and ends and deductive processes -- have been shown to be delusory?"

Thus freed from the confining tradition of architectural function, one can hobnob with Cornel West and debate the value of architects as political oppositionalists. If artists are political oppositionalists, of course, those who prefer not to listen are oppressors, silencing the artists much as we "silenced" Barbara Kingsolver and Susan Sontag by ridiculing their reflexive counter-tribalism. If art is political expression, critics must be our repressive dictators.

We're terribly House and Garden, at number 7b, We live in a most amusing mews, Ever so very contemporary. We're terribly House and Garden, The money that one spends, To make a place that won't disgrace Our House and Garden friends.

We've planned an uninhibited interior decor,
Curtains made of straw,
We've wallpapered the floor.
We're not sure if we like it but at least we can be sure,
There's no place like home sweet home….

….Our boudoir on the open plan has been a huge success,
Though everywhere's so open, there's nowhere safe to dress.
With little screens and bottle lamps and motifs here and there,
Mobiles in the air,
Ivy everywhere,
You mustn't be surprised to meet a cactus on the stair,
But we call it home, sweet home.

We're terribly House and Garden, as we think we've said before,
But though 7b is madly gay,
It wouldn't do for every day,
We actually live in 7a,
In the house next door.

-Flanders & Swann - "Design for Living"

Less overtly political, but equally challenging are artists like Ornette Coleman. Coleman is famous for stretching the boundaries of improvisation. Do listeners put on his CDs for fun? Do they study Coleman's "harmolodics"? I have seen him in concert twice. Interesting? for a while. Some incredible instrumental chops? definitely. Musically enjoyable? not really. And I got the sense 98% of the audience was pretending to enjoy it in that "Emperor's New Clothes" sort of way. Why do we do this? Because we know Coleman is "important"?

Let's face it, most of this stuff is just damn hard to listen to. You might enjoy a concert or two (especially when you get the sense the musicians are having fun even if your not), but do you put it on at home? I doubt it. Some of these pieces create new sensations or simulate a feeling like an impressionist painting. But if there was a piece of music that helped you feel what it was like to be violently schizophrenic, would you listen to it more than once? I accept that it's artistic expression, but it too often fails at being any kind of recreation for the consumer.

For my own money, composers such as Hindemith, Mahler and Stravinsky all used dissonance effectively. Hindemith's "Der Schwanendreher" Viola Concerto is a piece that brings tears to my eyes (especially the second movement). My wife performed it once, but it's not a well-known piece and there are only a few recordings. Hindemith knows how to leave strict tonality then return to it in a soul-satisfying way. His "Mathis Der Maler" symphony is similarly stirring.

I enjoy searching for music that touches me deeply. But I feel profoundly silly pretending to enjoy art simply because it's "important", or because the artist has gone to strange extremes to dress up non-conformity as political dissent, thus rendering it immune to direct criticism.

UPDATE: Reader "Chip" writes:

If contemporary music has done
anything for me, it has been to improve my appreciation of the whole tuning up
experience.

Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at February 21, 2002 10:56 PM | Technorati inbound links"); ?>