American Modernism

Ugh, American Modernism. I'm in a pretty cynical, dismissive mood for this one, not just because I'm a composer and composers like to be hypercritical of music they don't like, but also because I'm experiencing a pretty huge crisis of my own artistic endeavors. Composition has been an increasingly frustrating and unrewarding struggle, and I'm seriously questioning whether I should be doing this shit anymore.

So here it goes.

I've given Elliott Carter's music a try. I really have. In my undergrad years I remember several times that I checked out the scores of all of his string quartets from the library and listened to each one multiple times, hoping to gain some real insight and find a lasting pleasure besides just marveling at some of the incredibly complex rhythms and virtuosic string lines. At this point, I do appreciate the First Quartet and understand its importance to music history; it was Carter's first big experiment in metric modulation (after his cello sonata), it contains sections that give the impression of simultaneous but unrelated events, and the language is fresh but loosely grounded in a sense of logic.

Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn and Gershwin all died before they were 40.
But this guy just kept on living...

But the rest of the quartets escape me. Their most unique elements are impossible to perceive without a score in hand or with a live ensemble in front of you. I know that Quartet No. 2 has each musician simultaneously playing different material, conveying very different moods, for the entirely of the piece. It's a fascinating idea, but the results are surprisingly unsatisfying. For the twenty-minute duration of this piece, there is not one consistent motif or rhythmic idea to latch onto. The relentless unpredictability of the music becomes, ironically, predictable. One only perceives slight textural changes, and the most palatable parts are the slow sections, where Carter's harmonies are presented in slow motion and can be processed by a human brain.

The Boosey and Hawkes complete edition of Elliott Carter quartets has an introductory essay by the first violinist of the Juilliard Quartet, where he talks about the process of rehearsing and playing these pieces. He claims that they provided him and his fellow musicians with some of the most thrilling performance experiences of their lives. I can imagine the adrenaline rush of responding to other players with laser-beam precision to nail all the polyrhythmic textures, and being as intimate with the music as possible. But do music critics or the general public say that being at an Elliott Carter concert was one of the most exciting or impactful events of their lives? Do people converse about these string quartets and say "Oh, I love that one passage that goes like this...."? Absolutely not. So this music seems to be for everyone except the audience. Elliott Carter enjoyed writing it, I suppose, though this music must have been exhausting to live with and to edit, and the musicians can enjoy the pride of mastering some of the most complicated music ever written. But this whole stream of music travels further and further into complete irrelevance, away from the heartbeat of humanity.

Roger Sessions leaves me similarly ambivalent, but his Third Piano Sonata is easier for me to grab onto than the Carter quartets. This piece has an attractive first movement that strikes a nice balance between Impressionism and blues. The textures are definitely pianistic, and he throws in some chunky Ivesian chords. His Third Symphony has the advantage of orchestral colors and some discernable motifs, so it's easier to follow through the long haul. Still not very fun though.

Milton Babbitt's essay "Who Cares If You Listen?" makes me really freaking angry. In summary, he states that because of the trend in contemporary music toward heady academism, it should be relegated to the world of academia and created only for people who will fully understand it. What irks me so much about his conclusion is that he seems so self-satisfied, so assured in the security of his musical movement, not wondering if maybe it is just a brief phase. He forgets that at one time music was actually created to stir the heart, not just the mind.

I read Claudio Spies' essay on the appreciation of Schoenberg's music, but I have nothing to say about it. I just can't care about it right now.

Hopefully my next post will be less informed by personal concerns and the turbulence of my mood swings. Tonight I'm signing off with a clip from The Lawrence Welk Show, which is the complete opposite of American Modernism in both its functionally tonal music and its portrayal of a naive innocence that never really existed anywhere, but which I long for sometimes when life becomes too much to handle.