soft strings, and not much else …
Thinking about what I’m writing, what I’ve been writing. Concert coming up next weekend with the two parts of MONO which I’ve done so far … the Prelude and Numb, nearly half an hour of music. And then I dive into finishing up the next CD, hopefully done by the middle of May, when I head off to MacDowell for a month.
What I’ve been thinking about is my language. Tonal, rhythmic, melodic, accessible. Recently I’ve heard a number of things which have seemed to me exactly the opposite of what I like, but which have generated great audience enthusiasm. Specifically, in the concert last weekend, my piece was preceded by a work from Matthias Pintscher. Which sounded very derivative of work by Helmut Lachenmann. I heard a full evening of Lachenmann’s music few weeks ago at Miller Theater. It’s all whispering strings, in the range of ppppp to pp, entirely composed of “extended techniques”, scrapings, playing on or near the bridge, all very quiet. Both Lachenmann and Pintscher are clearly skilled composers. But the work strikes me as similar to the big Mark Rothko paintings, with slowly morphing monochromatic canvases. What’s wrong with the Rothko canvases? They’re from the ’50’s, that’s what. Let me explain. It has a lot to do with why I write the way I do.
Mid to late 20th century music and art seemed to be a time to test boundaries. Visual arts needed to explore how you made a language without representation. Composers needed to explore how you could make structure and musical sense out of all the full universe of sounds. This was the ultimate lesson from Cage, and from Stockhausen, and even from Pierre Schaeffer. Good lessons. Both in the visual and musical arts, our minds are more accepting and our ability to form a language draws from a much wider range of choices. But this is a lesson I learned in the 1960s and 1970s, when I was a student. And my reaction to the concert of Lachenmann’s music was that I’d walked into a fossilized version of my 1970s grad school composition seminar. This music sounds very old to me.
So it’s surprising to me to run into young musicians who seem to hear this as something new and exciting. And I’m talking about really wonderful young players whom I’ve worked with and respect. And while I can relate to the “gee whiz” factor of figuring out how to make unusual sounds from your instrument, I find myself unable to find any excitement in music which seems to only focus on the novelty of the sounds. The novelty, for me at least, wears off. Then I want the music to say something to me, to make me feel something, to take me somewhere emotionally and intellectually. Ideally, to take me somewhere I might not otherwise visit. For that, extended techniques, the use of all manner of unusual sounds from acoustic, electronic and environmental sources, are certainly useful tools. It would be foolish to act as though they weren’t available as part of our music. But, at least to me, it’s also very limiting to refuse to include the elements which speak to people in all cultures: melodies, rhythmic patters, pulses, harmonic movement. The things that allow us to remember a piece of music.
An example in my work is my fascination with using electronics to transform acoustic sounds in concert. For me, what makes the noise of the transformation meaningful is the reference to the acoustic sound it comes from. This is just the opposite of the standard dogma of electroacoustic music, formulated by Pierre Schaeffer in the 1950s, which says the sound should be completely divorced from its source. For me, this is just wrong. What is fascinating, and what carries meaning, is hearing how the transformation happens. Because transformations carry stories, and stories carry meaning.
So, the Pinstcher piece I heard last week was a lovely extended moment … but it was a static, quiet, unmoving and very blurred snapshot. Not unattractive, but missing anything which will really make me care about it. And using sounds which seemed very old hat to me, but which the audience seemed to be discovering for the first time. Go figure.
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