Chapter 36: “Many Streams”: Millenium’s End

I. Competing Visions A. “Uptown composers” refers to those who follow in the footsteps of European composers. 1. The name is “uptown” because Columbia University is in uptown Manhattan. 2. This music has been described as “PhD music.” 3. Uptown music began to fade in the 1980s. B. “Midtown” composers are associated with the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and the groups who perform there. 1. These composers matured during the time of Stravinsky’s neoclassical music and Copland’s Americanist works. 2. Bernstein’s West Side Story is one example of a work by a midtown composer. 3. These composers essentially competed with the “museum repertory” of the Three B’s in that they used the same language and form, only updated vocabulary. C. “Downtown” composers are geographically located in the Greenwich Village area and include the minimalists. 1. They were seen as mavericks. 2. Cage was a part of this scene.

II. The Cold War Ends A. With the fall of communism in 1989, the debates over “progressive or conservative” fell away. B. Younger musicians tended to accept a broad swath of different musical styles. C. America became a place of innovation and leadership in music.

III. The Postmodern Condition A. The last third of the twentieth century has come to be seen as “Postmodern.” 1. Aesthetically, Postmodern signals a change in sensibility. B. We have become “multicultural” as a result of many battles fought in the 1960s and ’70s. C. The idea of progress was questioned by some, linked to a “master narrative” that assumes cultural progress.

IV. Collage and Pastiche A. Postmodern architecture blends styles from different periods together. The musical equivalent was the collage (cutting and pasting) and pastiche (imitation in the style of the past). 1. These procedures were neither new nor unique to postmodernism. a. Berio’s Sinfonia (1968) is an example of collage. 2. The title of the work suggests a link with the past. The work also has connections with Mahler (whose music was in vogue at the time, thanks to Bernstein). 3.. The second movement is concerned with political events, including the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. B. As he grew older, Berio turned to using music of the past more frequently. C. George Rochberg is another example of a composer who worked with collage. 1. His Music for the Magic Theater (1965) mixes Mozart, Mahler, Beethoven, Webern, Stockhausen, Varèse, “Stella by Starlight,” and his own pieces. 2. Rochberg’s Third Quartet went further.

a. The first two movements are decidedly Modernist, but the third movement is in a fully functional A major, in the style of late Beethoven. It is a pastiche. b. This piece broke all the rules. There was no distance between the past and present.

V. Aesthetics of Pastiche A. Rochberg’s Third Quartet asks the question, Why didn’t he simply devise his own “tonal” idiom instead of copying Beethoven’s? 1. Rochberg explained that personal emotions are never simply that but are part of something that connects people. B. Rochberg was already famous as a Modernist, so this turn to pastiche drew particular attention. C. How to deal with the dominant museum culture was a looming question for twentieth-century composers.

VI. Across Time and Space: George Crumb A. In the 1970s Crumb was one of the most frequently performed of living American composers (excepting the minimalists). B. Several of his compositions are set to texts by Federico Garcia Lorca. C. Crumb achieved “transhistorical reach” through the quotation of existing music, including Bach, Mahler, and Schubert. D. He mixed timbres that would not usually be heard together or playing instruments in unique ways. E. Crumb used political themes, particularly in Black Angels for electrified string quartet. F. Frederic Rzewski also made political statements in The People United Will Never Be Defeated (1975).

VII. Conversions in Reverse A. Uptown composers moved downtown as they moved away from Modernism. B. One notable example is David Del Tredici. His Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (written over a period extending from 1968 to 1996) leave the frantic dissonance of Modernism for “voluptuous sonority and honeyed harmony.” C. A number of American neo-tonalists (or neo-Romantics) followed suit: from John Adams to Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. D. Some proponents of neotonality went out of their way to explain why it was okay— sometimes going way back in music history to confirm diatonic pitches. 1. In the 1980s, for listeners to be able to understand music became an important point for many young composers.

VIII. The End of Soviet Music A. Ligeti and Penderecki also moved to a neo-Romantic style in the 1970s. B. Glenn Gould toured the Soviet Union in 1957 playing music by subversives such as Berg, Webern, and Krenek. C. Stravinsky visited the Soviet Union in 1962 for his eightieth birthday, when he was acknowledged as a “Russian classic.”

D. Edison Denisov, a student of Shostakovich, promoted advanced Western techniques and shared the music of Darmstadters. 1. He was one of the “Big Troika” of nonconformist Soviet composers, along with Alfred Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina.

IX. Senior Statesmen A. Modernists continued to compose in that style through the end of the twentieth century. B. Two English composers (Brian Ferneyhough and Michael Finnissy) represent the younger generation’s use of Modernism in a style called the “new complexity.” C. Boulez has led younger French composers in a research institute (IRCAM) where they have the opportunity to work with the very latest technology. 1. Their studies resulted in a new approach to form through computer analysis. 2. His influence has not been sustained, even though he created the institute in which younger French (and other) composers work.

X. The Digital Revolution A. The possibilities opened up by the personal computer probably best represent Postmodernism. B. MIDI technology, samplers, and sequencers all contributed to new ideas about composition. C. The digital revolution liberated music composition from the literate tradition. 1. Samples do not use notation. Technology makes it possible to deal with smaller and smaller elements of sound. D. Reich used traditional notation and pre-recorded sounds in Different Trains (1988), a piece commissioned by the Kronos Quartet.

XI. Performance Art A. The 1970s and ’80s saw a revival of oral practices associated with folklore, known as performance art. B. These performances are usually multimedia. C. Yoko Ono is one such artist; another is Meredith Monk. 1. Monk developed a personal style of vocal delivery. She dispensed with words and used her voice as an instrument. 2. The structures she used recall textures and structures found in Medieval music. D. Laurie Anderson is another performance artist. 1. In contrast to Monk’s small-scaled events, Anderson aimed at multimedia shows that toured around the world. 2. Self-parody is another aspect of her performances, which aligns perfectly with Postmodernism. 3. In 1981, her O Superman (based on an aria from a Massanet opera) launched her internationally, with sales reaching over one million dollars. E. Musicologist Susan McClary notes that women have always been performance artists because it is a traditional role for them to be the objects of masculine gaze. F. Among the other composers mentioned, John Zorn has been named “an archetypal example of the composer in the media age.”

XII. The Alleged Death of Classical Music A. At the end of the twentieth century, uptown and downtown music met at midtown.

B. At the same time, however, interest in Western classical music picked up in Asian and South American countries. C. Opera companies began producing new works, including John Adams’s Doctor Atomic. D. New interest in classical music for orchestras surged, too. 1. John Corigliano’s First Symphony (1990) was widely performed. 2. Others, such as Joan Tower and Tan Dun, tapped into new areas of music interest (feminism, American pride, Chinese instruments) with a view that classical music could have topical relevance.

XIII. John Adams and Nixon in China A. Adams began his career as a minimalist but soon moved to other styles. B. His On the Transmigration of Souls commemorated the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and won the Pulitzer Prize in music in 2002. C. His first opera, Nixon in China (1987), was commissioned by four different houses, spread across the United States and into Europe. 1. It is “postminimalist” in style, having many of the traditional means of minimalism but in a more conventional harmonic idiom. D. By the late 1990s Adams’s music was the most performed of any American classical composer.

XIV. A New Spirituality A. Peter Sellars, who worked with Adams on his last two operas, noted that classical music had to offer something other media did not and suggested specifically that it was spiritual content. B. Around the millennium, several composers wrote new works aimed at such a purpose. Multiculturalism was a factor in many of them. 1. Adams contributed an oratorio, El Niño, as did Glass with his Fifth Symphony. Glass’s composition included texts from world “wisdom” traditions. 2. Conductor Helmut Rilling commissioned a cycle of four Passions based on the Gospels. C. Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, who had studied at the IRACM in Paris and was identified to a degree with the Parisian spectralist composers, premiered her opera L’Amour de loin in 2000. D. Others in this chapter explored spiritual themes (Pärt and Gorecki). The popular appeal of spirituality is interesting, and what it means is worth investigating.