More about New Music

Are the dictates of modernism beyond repudiation, or is there room to launch an assault on the vaunted ivory towers of 20th century abstraction?

I love reading the posts concerning new music around the internet. The little bit of time that I have to keep track of "what's new" has brought me to a recent conclusion:

Musicians, especially composers, generally don't have a clue as to why they do what they do, nor do they have a clear idea of what music is.

Blame it on a shallow society. Blame it on a lack of (very necessary!) education in aesthetics. Blame it on a century of indeterminate creativity. Blame it on whatever you will, though the problem remains.

Some posit that music means nothing, without even scratching the nature of what we "mean" by "meaning." Some posters pitch the "art for art's sake" (whatever THAT means,) or the "I do it because I like it" modes of thought. (Both arguments are juvenile at best.) Others repeatedly try to justify music as a purely secular art, devoid of the necessity of any meaning or even coherent structure. I will humbly submit that such attitudes are what have alienated new music from performers and audiences.

I'll take the Beethoven-esque "artist hero" over the 20th century "invincible intellectual" composer any day of the week. Say what negative things you will about the Romantic Era's concept of the artist, but people as a whole actually liked it.

I'm not advocating that we throw out modernism as a whole. Far from it. The efforts of 20th century artists have greatly widened and matured our creative vocabulary. I only ask, for example, whether a poet who only writes with vowels would ever be taken seriously. (I know that somewhere out there, a vowel-poet must exist without a small but loyal following. I will question the sanity of such a following.)

In one of the more interesting (and rarely useful) posts on newmusicbox.org, a composer brought up a wonderful story about Moses and Schoenberg. Upon going back to the site to quote him and give credit, I discovered that the quote was gone. How sad.

Anyhow, Schoenberg said that a composer is like Moses going up to the mountain to talk to God. Upon his return, the prophet does not divulge the entirety of his divine communication, rather only giving the people what they can handle at the time. (Or, one could say, a little more than they can handle, to provide a challenge.)

In the case of Schoenberg, of course, we might be referring to another case of the Satanic verses...

Love him or hate him, I prefer Maslanka's take on music, which he divulged to us during rehearsals for the premiere of his 5th Symphony:

"Music is something from somewhere else, something that is constantly trying to batter its ways into three dimensional space. It comes, it is uttered, and it is never heard in the same way again."

Well, at least it gave ME goosebumps.

A century of agnostic politics has only given us a massive body-count. A century of agnostic art has only given us a lack of bodies to count. Is it perhaps possible to accept the grammatical expansion provided by modernism, while rejecting -- for the good of us all -- the philosophy of abstractness and relativism that comes with it?