11.3.2015 The End of Music History http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2013/09/theendofmusichistory.html 1/18 PostClassic Kyle Gann on music after the fact The End of Music History September 8, 2013 by Kyle Gann Why are good teachers strange, uncool, offbeat? Because really good teaching is not about seeing the world the way that everyone else does. Teaching is about being what people are now prone to call counterintuitive, but to the teacher simply means being honest. – Mark Edmundson, Why Teach?: In Defense of a Real Education, p. 181 At the request of my department chair – and he so rarely asks me for anything, I could hardly have turned him down – I am teaching a 20th-century music history survey course, or rather, music since 1910. I’ve been dreading it, and my fears are so far confirmed. First of all, I have long been convinced that you can’t do the entire 20th century in a survey course. To me, third-semester music history should be 1900-1960, and the fourth semester should take over after that. Not only is there way too much material, there’s no unifying idea to the first and second halves of the century. The year 1976 seems to remain a popular stopping point for many professors and textbooks, and I wonder if anyone (besides me) has ever taught a 20th-century class in which the last three decades got as much attention as the first three. Secondly, while it’s always easy to know where to start, and has always been tricky knowing where to end, these days ending is impossible. Forty years ago, when I took this course at Oberlin, you could begin with Stravinsky and Schoenberg and work your way up, decade by decade, through the various “
The End of Music HistorySeptember 8, 2013 by Kyle Gann
Why are good teachers strange, uncool, offbeat?
Because really good teaching is not about seeing the world the way that everyone else does.Teaching is about being what people are now prone to call counterintuitive, but to the teachersimply means being honest.
– Mark Edmundson, Why Teach?: In Defense of a Real Education, p. 181
At the request of my department chair – and he so rarely asks me for anything, I could hardly haveturned him down – I am teaching a 20th-century music history survey course, or rather, music since1910. I’ve been dreading it, and my fears are so far confirmed. First of all, I have long been convincedthat you can’t do the entire 20th century in a survey course. To me, third-semester music history shouldbe 1900-1960, and the fourth semester should take over after that. Not only is there way too muchmaterial, there’s no unifying idea to the first and second halves of the century. The year 1976 seems toremain a popular stopping point for many professors and textbooks, and I wonder if anyone (besidesme) has ever taught a 20th-century class in which the last three decades got as much attention as thefirst three.
Secondly, while it’s always easy to know where to start, and has always been tricky knowing where toend, these days ending is impossible. Forty years ago, when I took this course at Oberlin, you could beginwith Stravinsky and Schoenberg and work your way up, decade by decade, through the various
movements and major figures. It was assumed that the language of music was evolving, and that thatevolution could be traced, with a few detours and parallel streams. But of course, now we know whathappens: past 1970 the idea of a mainstream evaporates, and – as musicologist Leonard Meyer soshrewdly predicted – we entered a kind of stasis in which many, many styles compete and continue.Everything is permissible; a million things have been done, anything we can imagine will be doneeventually, and many things that had been done get done all over again. I suppose if you’re a hard-coretraditionalist it’s easier to draw your boundaries, but the Downtown music I like to focus on blends intojazz and pop around the edges. I have to argue with students for the right to teach Laurie Anderson,Pamela Z, and Mikel Rouse as postclassical music. Just deciding what music to include within thedefinitions of the course requires a whole separate section on the philosophy of music.
And I am finding that the philosophical difficulties extend into the past retroactively. I know perfectly wellwhat I’m supposed to teach, and in fact, I am quite lucky in my mandated choice of textbook: the newTaruskin/Gibbs Oxford History of Western Music. The book itself has revisionist leanings and casts itsown sly suspicions on orthodox pedagogy, and so is more in sync with me than any other textbook Icould use. The best thing I can say about it is that its pronouncements never make me wince, which Iconsider high praise in this context. We use it for the entire music history sequence because its quality isso high; the fact that Professor Gibbs is on our faculty is, of course, entirely coincidental (as is the factthat I am heavily quoted in the final chapter).
But given the sequence of the textbook, I have to start out with Schoenberg, and for me, to start withSchoenberg already puts everything on the wrong track. (If this offends you, read further at your own risk,because it’s only downhill from here.) The assumption of Schoenberg’s importance, given the continuingunpopularity of his music, is founded on the further assumption that what we’re teaching is the evolutionof the musical language. In fact, the very title of our music history sequence, The Literature andLanguage of Music (“lit’n’lang” in departmental parlance, reminding me of “live ‘n’ learn”) presupposesthat there is a language of music evolving through its canonical examples. If you want to trace a certainabsolutist attitude toward atonality, and the development of the 12-tone row as a technical device,Schoenberg is of course essential to the sequence of events. But does his music, therefore, deservepride of place in the literature?
I consider it the most important thing I can teach my students, assuming I ever succeed in getting itacross, that a lot of music that seems nonsensical or off-putting at first is well worth putting the effortinto assimilating. Nothing irks me more than the reflexive resistance they put up against music theydon’t “like” on first listening. When I was their age, any piece I didn’t understand represented a challenge,a gauntlet thrown down to my musical intelligence. There was not going to be any piece I couldn’tfathom. (Many fine “conservative” pieces I could superficially comprehend, I now realize I dismissedrather too easily.) And yet, there is now tons and tons of difficult, complicated, obscure music, and after45 years of deciphering it I am aware that not all of it eventually repays the effort. I was determined tomaster the intricacies of the Concord Sonata, Le Sacre du Printemps, Pli selon pli, Turangalila, Mantra,Philomel, and I love them all, I’m devoted to them, thrilled to introduce students to them. Other worksthat I committed many, many listening and analytical hours to – almost all of Schoenberg, everything by
Berg except Wozzeck, all but a few pieces of Elliott Carter – simply bore me today. I know that Op. 31Orchestra Variations and that damn “Es ist genug” violin concerto inside and out, but they strike me asawkward and pedantic. I listen to them with acute understanding of how they’re made, but neveradmiringly. A lot of that music I feel I was brainwashed into taking very seriously, and the effects of myyouthful brainwashing are largely worn off.
So, of the music I cannot honestly advocate to students on account of what I perceive as its inherentvirtues, by what criterion do I urge it on them? If historical importance is the guideline, then one needs toclimb the ladder of influences, but it turns out that that ladder frays into a maze at the top. And actually,looking back from 1970, any sense of a mainstream had pretty much died as soon as neoclassicismwas pitted against dodecaphony. The moment Scriabin, Ives, Stravinsky, Varése all separately agreed touse sonorities never heard in music before, everything really became permissible instantly – it just took afew generations to realize the implications. People today still write neoclassic music, still write 12-tonemusic. Partch leaped into just intonation only 15 years after The Rite of Spring, seven years after the first12-tone row, and that’s the course I’m still on. 4’33” is closer in time to Pierrot Lunaire than it is to thepresent. If we’ve had a hundred years of multi-subcultural stasis, how much does it really matter who didsomething first? My students get a much bigger kick out of Gruppen and Sinfonia than they do fromWebern, and since I agree with them, why not simply detail the pedigree of the 12-tone idea as part of adiscussion of serialism? Why play the first 12-tone music instead of the most rewarding?
In fact, to present 12-tone music as a major movement at all, I have to attempt to explain why certaincomposers considered it so crucial to have some universal new system to replace tonality. And the truthis, I don’t understand why they felt that way. I’m so much more in sympathy with what Ives wrote: “Whytonality as such should be thrown out for good, I can’t see. Why it should always be present, I can’t see.”Tonality is so widely evident in much well-regarded music of recent decades that my students and Ishare the same incomprehension on this point. It sounds like an episode that belongs in the bookExtraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Some people in my position would make acountercharge about minimalism, but they would have to contend with the Steve Reich and Arvo Pärtfans among my students; and minimalism never tried to corner the market. (I’m also teaching myminimalism seminar this semester, and the students in there are passionate about the subject, so well-informed that they’ve brought up more obscure pieces than I had planned to address.)
The upshot is that I can no longer teach the canon of early/mid-20th-century music, as it was taught tome, in very good faith. The only criterion I could defend, if challenged, is how much fulfillment I still getfrom the music today, with some scholarly lip service granted to what pieces posed an influence on thecomposer’s contemporaries. Certain composers who don’t get much academic attention – Milhaud,Poulenc, Tailleferre, Busoni, Wolpe, Sorabji, James P. Johnson, Vermeulen, Blomdahl, Rochberg – seemto me infinitely more appealing to present than some of the usual suspects. After all, we’ve already gonethrough this revisionist process for 19th-century music: if we hadn’t, we’d still have to be putting Hummeland Spohr on the listening tests. At the other end, I have only the flimsiest of rationales for teaching allthe wonderful array of postclassical music I love while still excluding jazz and pop, the ultimate onebeing my faulty or nonexistent expertise in those latter fields. I resorted to describing the history of my
idiosyncratic career as justification for my particular view of recent history, and while I’m happy forstudent input, I hardly want to surrender my hard-earned historical understanding to the chaos of 22variously-informed student perspectives.
So it’s a mess, and an enforced experiment with few visible guideposts. I’m afraid I know the lasthundred years of music so well that I no longer know what the history of it is.
Virginia Anderson saysSeptember 9, 2013 at 3:25 am
Weird having Music since 1910. Ah, well. I’ve taught courses called ‘Twentieth-Century Topics’,‘Twentieth-Century Problems’ ‘Twentieth-Century Literature’, ‘The Evolution of Music in Europe’,and so on. They’re all pretty much the same, despite the differences in titles — meaning the coursewill mean what you intend it to mean. (Leo Treitler once taught a course called Rhythm andNotation after 1600. When we complained that it was all about rhythm, nothing about notation oranything after the mid-19th century, he said, ‘Well, I was going to call it Rhythm and Blues…’).
Don’t try for a survey course. Instead, give them the best of what you know and think to beimportant in the time they have. Pick out key thoughts and techniques and focus on them in yourlectures and seminars, with a few allusions to other techniques, ideas, pieces. If you haveseminars, give them scores, of course, but also landmark contemporary readings, like bits ofEssays Before a Sonata or Silence, and have them discuss the implications for the music that thewritings present. Lecture topics might include serialism, minimalism, rhythm and meter,experimentalism (early and late), sonic resources, and so on — whatever you think they should goaway with. You can order the students to read the assigned text for context, with theunderstanding that they’ll be responsible for all of it on the test, using the knowledge you’ll givesthem on the principles. Then limit what they can do for essays and ban whatever they think is
easy. Normally this means Britten’s War Requiem and pretty much anything by Debussy or JohnAdams. (For that reason I ban Citizen Kane and Star Wars in film class and Sgt Pepper in popmusic). If you have a midterm test, do something like the Rite of Spring — keeps them from merelyspitting back the copious commentary — or another ultra-famous piece, to give you an idea ofwhat they are doing (the first time I tried this I was shocked to see how many of them could notidentify the Dance of the Adolescents after my very detailed, analytical lecture) and to make themrealise what they need to do to pass. Good luck.
kea saysSeptember 9, 2013 at 6:42 am
an interesting point about schoenberg—his music is, in fact, relatively popular, and has enjoyedcontinued popularity. but we’re not talking about the twelve-tone pieces here, we’re talking abouthis big late-romantic works (verklärte nacht, pelleas, gurre-lieder, etc). (personally i find them to berather dreadful, in common with most of the other austrian & german late-romantics of the fin-de-siècle, mahler and karg-elert and so forth, but that’s neither here nor there.) one would thus betotally justified in talking about schoenberg via the influence his music had on erich wolfgangkorngold, expressionism in film music and so forth, and only mentioning the twelve-tone system inpassing as something he invented “and we’ll hear more about it in lecture five, ‘serialism'” (whereyou’ll play a short audio excerpt of a schoenberg piano piece and then move on to the moreinteresting composers). his atonal stuff was anyway just late-romantic music straitjacketed into atwelve-tone matrix (he himself once harmonised the main melody of the variations for orchestrawith syrupy tonal chords, iirc), which is perhaps why a lot of people don’t warm to it—it’s all“forced”, never directly inspired, just something he felt religiously obliged to write.
that would be an interesting way to design a 20th century music course actually—lecture oneschoenberg, puccini, rachmaninoff and korngold—lecture two film music and the persistence ofcommon-practice tonality throughout the 20th century—lecture three start moving on to the“canonical” stuff. probably superior to the 20th century music course at my university anyway(where the lecturer spent the first 3/4 of the course outlining various trends up until 1945, thendeclared that everything that had happened after 1945 was just repeats of stuff that hadhappened before, except for minimalism which was of course cynical commercialism with noredeeming value. with the last lecture being devoted to what *he* thought was the future, which ithink was “musical scholarship” or something—reconstructing lost works or inventing ones thathad never existed, e.g. beethoven’s eleventh, mozart’s forty-second—i’ve honestly blocked most ofthat course from my memory)
Thanks for this, Kyle. It gives me a lot to think about.
Jeff Harrington saysSeptember 9, 2013 at 7:43 am
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Beautiful!! The future re-writes the past until the past becomes more interesting…
Russ Gershon saysSeptember 9, 2013 at 2:05 pm
Fascinating. Thanks.
Tawnie O saysSeptember 9, 2013 at 7:50 pm
I envy your students! Even if it is a mess, as you say, your course still sounds like a glorious one tome.
Will Ruth Crawford make it into your course? I rather like teaching her music next to the earlyatonal works of the 2nd Viennese School.
KG replies: Yes, that’s exactly where I put her. In fact, I’m trying to change my approach toCrawford. I’ve always taught her early Two Movements for Small Orchestra because I like theScriabin-y side of her early music, but it’s not a terribly mature piece, and I’m switching to theString Quartet. Hope I learn to like it as well.
Ah, that’s fantastic! You know, it may not be the best piece for your course, but I’m verypartial to the first Diaphonic Suite (for oboe); it’s short and not too difficult for students towrap their minds around, but I think it’s very elegantly structured.
Ian Stewart saysSeptember 10, 2013 at 4:58 am
A really perceptive post which has helped me identify my own views.
Maybe that Schoenberg invented/evolved the twelve tone system could be considered in thesame way as whoever invented the Alberti Bass. I doubt anyone would say they were as good acomposer as Beethoven who used it extensively.
Mark Anthony Turnage said in a recent interview that students are not interested in exploring thegreat post war composers in the way he was. However I believe each generation of composershas to find its own route through the eons of music written. Recently I have heard two works byyoung composers, one influenced by a Sonny Rollins track (although it was not jazz) and one byThe Unanswered Question. When I was a student, the major European composers seemedobsessed with proving their links with the European tradition, and some condemned outright anymusic that did not use total serialist techniques. Now things have changed, younger composersseem to take what they are interested in an ignore the rest. I am sure they will explore thesecomposers sometime in their careers but not necessarily at the beginning.
Howard Whitaker saysSeptember 11, 2013 at 11:35 am
Thanks. One of the rewards of longevity is the observation of evolving perspectives. A couple ofthoughts:
I’ve often wondered how things might have been different if somebody like, say, Milhaud hadinvented serialism, rather than the rather gloomy Schoenberg.
Seeing a recent (sizzling!) performance of Pierrot Lunaire by Eighth Blackbird (with lighting,memorized music, movement around the stage, compelling virtuosity, etc.) reminded me onceagain of the significance of performers in this whole process.
KG replies: Good point. If they want to, performers can make almost anything sound great.
Arthur saysSeptember 12, 2013 at 1:59 am
It seems to me that the entire project of attending to or teaching some kind of “History” of music,art, literature is reductive and false if the approach has to do with sorting out some kind of linearityof influence or lists of major minor figures or periodization or selective assessment of style or,worst of all, the ‘greatest hits’ of the past or recent present. It simplifies the very idea of music/art,creativity and and the complexity of the lives of artists, culture and historical forces. It privilegescritical history over exploration of work by artists. I would also argue that the notion ofanthologizing “works” also sets up a hierarchical system that winds up commodifying artwork, notto mention such exclusionary practices as separating women, minorities, popular foams ‘artists’and the economic/industrial forces that ARE inseparable from the arts and art making.
When it comes to the arts, we want our students to be literate and knowledgeable, but, exactly,about what? All of music history? A bunch of great works? Theory or aesthetics? If they are goingto be artists, shouldn’t the goal be to provide a sense of how creativity and music is bound asmuch to personal psychological choices as to time, place, history, gender, beliefs, even politics?Schoenberg’s music and writing and painting and opera is Vienna then Europe through two worldwars and, later, sunny America. It is Jewish and it is mysticism. The incidental work illuminatesthe major pieces and the arc of his life.
How about if consider an approach that teaches artists’ lives and the corpus of work they produceas the object of study? I actually teach a course called “The Critical Artist” in which students choseone artist to study for the entire semester. They are instructed to find out everything, read, listen,immerse themselves. When at the end, everyone presents their research, the question of themeaning of an artist’s work as a whole and their life and relationship to culture supersedesranking of works.
I advocate this also because it is also training in how to think about and live with the arts andartists of your own time. After all, we rarely experience the work of living artists purely on the basis
of merely hearing there work…Certainly not in the age of the Internet.
mclaren saysSeptember 14, 2013 at 8:10 pm
Batten down the hatches, Kyle. Strap on your kevlar vest and make sure the ceramic ballisticimpact plate is firmly inserted in the front pocket.
You have stepped outside the groupthink and the consequences will prove severe.
As for using the Taruskin text, the solution seems simple. Just skip over the Viennese Kook andhis unindicted co-conspirators, strip out the “Explain nothing” chapter about the Geriatic Kook, andfill the space with significant 20th century composers like Ralph Vaughn Williams, whom Taruskininexplicably never even mentions. (Since Vaughn Williams remains the tributary from which allsubsequent 20th century neoclassicism flows, this omissions remains as perverse as it is bizarre.)The detonation of the historical narrative of a 20th century mainstream post-1976 due to thebrisance of audible reality also runs backward into the past. The detcord full of guerillascholarship in the eighties that blew up the post-1976 mainstream also blew apart the pre-1976historical narrative along with its carefully confected fairytale of alleged musical “evolution” from1900 through the 1950s.
You only get a “mainstream” with so-called ‘evolution’ from 1900-1960 if you drop most of thebest composers and the most compelling musical trends into an Orwellian memory hole. Low-grade propagandists like Paul Griffiths tried that particular game of three-card monte, but it failedpermanently by around 1980 because the cards they shuffled around just weren’t big enough tocover up all the excellent 20th century composers they tried to marginalize.
Here are 3 alternative musical-historical narratives from 1900-1976:
[1] Start with the intonarumori guys like Russolo and the 1928 Bell Labs voder and theThereminvox to show the radical developments in timbre around the start of the 20th century.Russolo’s graphic score to Risveglio di una Citta also shows the sharp break in graphical scoreswith the musical past.
Use Charles Ives’ Calcium Light (1915) to show the re-emergence of rhythmic complexity from thedark ages of the classical era. Crucial highlights? Charles Seeger’s 1929 Tradition and Experimentin (the New) Music, Henry Cowell’s New Musical Resources (1930), with musical examplesCowell’s 1915 Quartet Romantic 1917 Quartet Euphometric and Johanna Beyer’s 1933 PercussionSuite.
Stravinsky’s 1913 Rite of Spring proves useful in bridging the two realms — new timbres +polyrhythms. Haul in Amadeo Roldan’s Ritmicas (1930) for percussion along with Edgard Varese’sHyperprism (1930), along with Johanna Beyer’s Music of the Spheres (1938) and OlivierMessaien’s Oraison (1937) and Cowell’s Concerto for Rhythmicon and Orchestra (1935) to give ataste of the explosion of new timbres, and of the polyrhythms unheard since Ars Subtilis in the late14th century. Anyone who fails to hear a direct line connecting Beyer’s Music of the Spheres in1938 with Russolo’s Risveglia di una Citta in 1913, or Cowell’s The Tides of Manauanaun (1912)with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913) needs to see an audiologist.
For pitch explorations, start with Jacques Halevy’s 1943 quartertone opera Promethee Enchaineand move on the “Generation Z” Russian xenharmonic composers of the period 1910-1930,including Leon Theremin, Arseny Avraamov, Leonid Sabaneev, Peter Zimin, Nikolai Bernstein,Pavel Leiberg, Boris Krasin, Emily Rosenov, Mikhail Gnesin, Nikolai Garbuzov’s harmonic seriesharmonium, Sergei Rzevkin’s cathode valve radio-harmonium of the 1920s, and so on. Then dragin Percy Grainger’s Free Music No. 1 and 2, preferably mentioning his Butterfly Piano, his bank ofSolovoxes tuned 1/3 tone apart, his Reed-Box Tone Tool tuned in eighth tones, and his Hills andDales machine built with the help of Australian physicist Brunett Cross. (Nary a mention of any ofthis in Taruskin, by the way. The Ministry of Truth works overtime for 20th century music…)
From these foundations you could zigzag through Bartok and Partch, early Conlon Nancarrow andGyorgi Rimsky-Korsakov’s quartertone electronic instruments of the 1920s, and Ruth CrawfordSeeger’s Piano Study In Mixed Accents (1932) along with her dissonant counterpoint pieces withdepartures for the folk music composers like Ralph Vaughan Williams (never mentioned inTaruskin, but clearly the most important composer of the persion 1910-1945) and Bela Bartok andthe industrial brutalists like Alexandr Moslov’s Zovod – the Iron Foundry (1928) and Prokofiev’sSymphony No. 2 (1924) whose Symphony No. 1 (“Classical”) (1916) neatly encapsulates the twinimpulses twixt modernity and classicism which defined the period 1910-1945. Ralph VaughnWilliams’ Symphony 3 and 9 provide a similar contrast, as do Stravinsky’s Pulcinella or Petroushkaas opposed to Rite of Spring (1913) and Three Pieces for String Quartet (1914), or Bartok’s StringQuartet No. 6 compared with his String Quartet No. 4.
The American and European neoclassical tonal composers all come out of Vaughn Williams, fromDavid Diamond and Howard Hanson to Charles Griffiths’ The Cairn of Ceridwen (a superb piece of1915 American music so fantastically obscure that it does not even appear on the internet, andmy CD of it appears to be a mirage because it’s not listed on amazon.com) to Aaron Copland andAlan Hovhaness and Lou Harrison.
From this point the alternate narrative becomes clear, with the timbral guys diverging into theelectronic tape composers, the French musique concrete cadre, the computer composers, the bigorchestral extended technique guys (early Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis, Krzysztof Penedercki), the Frenchspectralist school, Laurie Spiegel, Tod Dockstader, and so on. The rhythm ninjas like Beyer andNancarrow proliferate into the contemporary neorhythmic (you call ‘em totalist) crowd like Mikel
Rouse and Michael Gordon and Emannuel Ghent and the rest. The xenharmonic crowd divergesinto the current microtonal crew with the usual suspects. The neoclassicists proliferate into thecurrent New Romantic guys like Aaron Jay Kernis and Henk Badings and Joan Tower and AlbertoGinastera and Christopher Rouse on the one hand, the cooler more classical composers likeScriabin and Britten and Colin McPhee (Tabu Tabuhan (1936) and Balinese Ceremonial Music andthe later Henry Cowell, with pieces like Ongaku) which leads to the minimalists andpostminimalists (Reich, Glass, Young, Ellen Fullman, Janice Giteck, John Luther Adams, LouisAndriessen, William Duckworth, Eliane Radigue, et al.) and eclectic world music composers likeDavid Lang and Evan Ziporyn as a third stream.
[2] You could instead tell the story of the 20th century from the way technology spurred changesin musical style. Invention of the phonograph, vacuum tube, rhythmic devices like Lev Termin’srhythmicon, the way early recording turntables and later magnetic tape produced musiqueconcrete, the influence of computers on rhythm and timbre, the way player piano mechanisms ledto modern digital sequencers, the liberation of pitch courtesy of first analog and then digitalelectronics, the influence of digital workstations and DAW programs like Pro Tools on thepractices of current composers in constructing “layered” compositions, and so on.
[3] You could adapt Harold Bloom’s literary theory of writers arguing with previous generations togenerate new work (essentially Hegel’s analysis/antithesis/synthesis scheme applied to literature)by applying it to 20th century music. Vaughn Williams comes out of his quarrel with themonumentalist maximalist symphonists like Mahler, Bartok and Stravinsky come out of theirquarrel with the “unity uber alles” Germanomanic symphonists like Reger, Copland and Prokofievcome out of their quarrel with the hyperabstract “art for art’s sake” composers, the electroniccomposers like Ussachevsky & Luening come out of their quarrel with the “music must becorporeal” all-acoustic guys like Partch, the microtonalists come out of their quarrel with the “only12 and always 12″ crowd who fetishized that particular number of pitches, the minimalists cameout of their quarrel with the post-competent (misnamed “post tonal”) crowd, the postminimalistscome out of their quarrels with early highly systematized “pure” minimalism, the eclecticcomposers who mix ‘n match many different styles come out of their quarrels with the way musicgets taught and criticized in contemporary America as a single style for each composers“evolving” (code for “getting more complex”) over time, and so on.
None of these narratives has any recognizable relation with Taruskin’s. Each of these narrativesmentions a lot of composers Taruskin never bothered to discuss. And each of these threenarratives of 20th century offers a perspective on the development and variegation of 20thcentury music at least as valid as Taruskin’s but entirely orthogonal and largely contravariant tothe issues he raises.
After all, just because the department chair assigns a textbook doesn’t mean you have togenuflect to it.
KG replies: Brian, I wish I could take *your* 20th-century course.
David Kulma saysSeptember 15, 2013 at 9:14 am
This is brilliant.
John Kline saysSeptember 17, 2013 at 5:40 pm
A great post as always. I wish there were more like you doing regular posting about music,teaching it in college, thinking about it, etc. Academic and informed – yet accessible and dealingwith real issues
KG replies: Thanks!
Susan Scheid saysSeptember 18, 2013 at 10:48 am
Kyle: I second John Kline. Your voice is so necessary. I hope one day you’ll consider offering acourse like this to a wider audience, though designed as you would like. What you wrote herecame to mind again when I saw the syllabus for an online course in which I have enrolled.Admittedly, the course is a short survey of a very long period, and doesn’t pretend to becomprehensive, but even so, I wonder about the reasoning behind selecting Schoenberg as one ofthe only two 20th C choices. I don’t want to prejudge, and I’ll be interested to hear thepresentations, but I’ll have to confess, it made me wistful for the Gann perspective.
Thanks for this post and the comments it inspires (or provokes). I had a long-winded comment inmind but decided to cut it short. As a teacher of 20th-century music for many years at a smallurban college, the factor that made the biggest difference for my students was having living,breathing composers and performers come to the class. I even had students “mime” such worksas Pierrot Lunaire (excerpts). Whether they could actually sing or play the instrument they weremiming was irrelevant. They did have to practice and study the scores to make the mime asconvincing as possible. (I remember a particularly engaging — and disturbing — mime of “Nacht”.)Anything that brought them into as much direct contact with the music as possible gave them aprofoundly different perspective. I’ll never forget a brilliant pre-performance lecture (and in-and-out-of-phase duet and performance (a real performance of Reich’s Piano Phase) given by twostudents. Although I am no longer teaching, I would love to hear about activities that movedstudents from viewing much of this music as the stuff of some imaginary place that they hadnever been to a place they had been to, if even for a few fleeting minutes.
KYLE GANN
Just as Harry Partch calledhimself a "philosophic musicman seduced into carpentry,"I'm a composer seduced intomusicology... Read More…
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