Three Points of View Author(s): Elie Siegmeister, Alvin Lucier, Mindy Lee Source: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Apr., 1979), pp. 281-295 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/741709 Accessed: 07/05/2009 02:40 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=oup. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Musical Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org Three Points of View I In music - as in everything else - nothing is more permanent than change. Before the twentieth century dramatic changes of style came at hundred-year or still longer intervals; after 1900, however, the pace speeded up to once every twenty or thirty years. Yet despite the constancy of change, theorists, critics, and even composers (who should know better) persist in laying down aesthetic rules and im- peratives, hoping thereby to perpetuate their kind of music into the limitless future. And sometimes it works: the rules regarding paral- lel fifths, the resolution of dissonances, and the answer of a fugue sub- ject in the dominant prevailed for many hundreds of years. Not too long after these rules were overthrown, a new set was foisted on the unsuspecting composer. Tonality, he now learned, was dead, likewise diatonic melody, recurring themes, sonata-allegro and all other traditional forms. "Let's destroy the past!" one pundit proclaimed, and another, "Anyone who has not felt . the neces- sity of the dodecaphonic language is USELESS." In place of the old conservative establishment a new "radical"- that is, acceptably rad- ical - establishment took over to dictate the do's and don't's of music for more than twenty years, leading the writers of reputable text- books on modern music to fill their final chapters with glowing pre- dictions of the postserial, avant-gardist, aleatoric, electronic, com- puterized future. And then the bottom dropped out. Just two or three years ago prestigious critics began to complain that serial music now sounded tired and repetitious. The bloom fell off the avant rose; neo-Dadaism sounded boring rather than shocking; and electronics slipped out of Ivy League professors'hands into those of rock and TV arrangers.Worst of all, certain glamorous leaders of 281 282 The Musical Quarterly the avant-gardist battalions announced dramatically, "Back to ton- ality!" and came up with tuneful, communicable, even Romantic pieces that aroused wide excitement. What's happening? Where is it all going? Let's pause a moment and take a look back a bit. It was in the early thirties that "modern music" burst over Amer- ica. Monteux, Koussevitzky, and Stokowski had brought Stravin- sky's Le sacre du printemps, Prokofiev's They Are Seven, and Berg's Wozzeck to these shores, and a native band of Young Turks - Edgard Varese, Wallingford Riegger, Henry Cowell, Nicolas Slo- nimsky, and the Aaron Copland of the Piano Variations - had in- troduced such daring devices as tone clusters, polychords, quarter tones, polytonality, tone rows, and percussion music. (Charles Ives, of course, had been there before.) Modernism galvanized the young composers, but was royally rejected by major orchestras and the broad musical public, and survived in those tiny concerts attended by 100 - always the same 100 - people. Things might well have continued this way for some time were it not for three major nonmusical events. During the period 1930-45 a series of hammer blows, the Great Depression, Nazism, and World War II, descended on humanity and the artist was not immune. With the shattering crises of the time, composers - who usually live in a world of their own - could not help recognizing the limited impact of their modern experiments on people as a whole and their isolation from the dramatic events happening "out there." Meanwhile, Pi- casso's Guernica, Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus, and Eugene O'Neill's great plays seemed to solve the problem of creating powerful art that reached out to a wide spectrum of humanity. Was there a kind of modern music that might do the same? During the early thirties, this thought began to stir composers throughout the Western world. Within a few years a new direction appeared in music: away from complex experimentation, toward the broad musical audience. In 1933 Prokofiev, setting aside his radical language of Pas d'acier and The Angel of Fire, produced the exqui- site Lieutenant Kije music, and in 1935 his lyrical Second Violin Concerto. The latter year also saw the appearance of George Gersh- win's Porgy and Bess and Dmitri Shostakovitch's populist Fifth Sym- phony. The new movement spread quickly: During the next decade Bela Bart6k, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Benjamin Britten, Three Points of View 283 Alberto Ginastera, Silvestre Revueltas, Aaron Copland, and other composers created a series of clear, communicative, sometimes pow- erful works that led modern music out of its isolation ward and into the mainstream of musical - and human - life. Stravinsky had already contributed the Symphony of Psalms and even Schoenberg turned back to tonality, momentarily at least, in two works, the Suite for Strings and the Theme and Variations for orchestra - both in the key of G major. True to the mercurial nature of twentieth-century art, this exuber- ant, humanist phase did not last very long. With the end of World War II, new disasters soon appeared: the cold war, the threat of nuclear annihilation, McCarthyism, renewed Stalinism, the cult of technology (as distinct from science itself) - all led to the age of alienation, anxiety, dehumanization. A hermetic, superintellectual outlook spread into music, mirroring the computer worship of the period. Theoretical and quasimathematical calculations permeated the dodecaphony, total serialization, and avant-gardism that became the established new styles. Even chance music - ostensibly a release for unconscious impulses - arose out of metaphysical speculation. The outstanding figures of the 1950-75 period - Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, Milton Babbitt, Elliott Car- ter, and John Cage - shared an aversion to traditional form, melody, counterpoint, flowing lines, and straightforward communication. If the new music produced by these men or others under their influence seemed cold, theoretical, and uncommunicative to the sophisticated listeners who by now loved the Bartok quartets, Wozzeck and Ives, so much the worse for them. "Who cares if you listen?" was a com- mon attitude in the leading circles. Whatever the lasting contributions to music of the postserial, avant-gardist period may prove to be (and beyond certain fascinating new colors, textures, and rhythms it is too soon to assess them) one result of its recent hegemony is clear. Of the thousands of works written, scarcely a handful has entered the repertory - in contrast to the dozens of compositions from the preceding period. The char- acter of the pieces has brought modern music back to the isolation ward of the tiny 100-listener concerts, as it did in the 1920s. Having acquired broad foundation and critical support for two decades now, the avant-gardist movement should be able to antici- pate a secure and brilliant future. Yet, strangely enough, it has not 284 The Musical Quarterly worked out that way. Recently, certain of its most prestigious leaders have begun to feel a sense of isolation and to yearn for acceptance by the wide musical public outside the halls of ivy and the tiny con- certs. A number have turned to conducting to find this broader con- nection, among them Boulez, Krzysztof Penderecki, Lukas Foss, and Gunther Schuller. Who are the rebels against the music that was considered the most advanced of all time? Strangely enough, some of its most stal- wart supporters of yesteryear. Penderecki startled the New York critics recently with a right- about-face: his new Violin Concerto written for Isaac Stern. Not only was it flatly tonal but also melodic, thematic, and in sonata- allegro form; it even contained traditional Romantic violinistic flour- ishes. Gyorgy Ligeti's Woodwind Quintet represented an even more dramatic switch, with major triads, imitations, and other traditional - contrapuntal devices all over the place the whole being witty, fresh, and brilliantly scored for the conventional instrumental group- ing. Among the Americans, George Rochberg's return from his twenty- year dedication to serialism resulted in two beautifully crafted if eclectic tonal works: the Third String Quartet and a Violin Concerto also written for Isaac Stern. (Is Stern somehow at the bottom of all this?) Lukas Foss's American Cantata brought this mercurially tal- ented experimenter full circle, or rather full spiral around again to his early The Prairie roots - obviously on a different level.