One of the lazier bromides from right/traditionalist/conservative pundits about atonality in music is to insist that ever since Adorno cultural Marxism has insisted upon atonality over against tonality. This is so stupid a claim that you'd think the mere mention of the name Eisler would be enough to shut all that down, or you could mention Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger but I suppose folk/popular musicians never count. In any case, it's not that hard to reference how frequently atonality could be condemned as formalism in the USSR, but this isn't the entire picture. One of the things that's interesting about Taruskin's sprawling Oxford History of Western Music is that he mentions there were a handful of atonal composers that were Nazi-approved because ... well ... do you really need to guess that hard as to why? There were also composers who assimilated elements of dodecaphonic music within the Soviet Union. So the idea that atonality represented a cry of freedom against fascism or totalitarianism in the arts is a dubious claim at best, but its' a claim that got made from time to time.
Thing is, there are those who have attempted to argue that atonality and total serialism were not the dominant expected academic paradigm in the United States. The claim to this effect is that a bunch of tonal music sold like hotcakes. Duh. John Halle wrote a rebuttal to someone's claim to this effect being a reason that serialism and atonality were not, in fact, having soemthing of a stranglehold within higher education in music programs and higher ed level textbooks about 20th century music.
John Halle makes a mid-length form argument to the effect that saying that atonality didn't dominate the accepted canon of American art music might be comparable to pretending that Gary Groth of Comics Journal fame loves manga because Fantagraphics started reissuing Peanuts in chronological order. Or, if that level of dehydrated sarcasm doesn't come across, I can just quote Halle's own writing. :)
Which is to say that I'm kind of surprised mention of something like this polemic from a self-identified Green with left sympathies in politics in the United States couldn't have gotten a name-drop by Borstlap for the second edition of The Classical Revolution. I don't really consider myself particularly left or Marxist but I regard it as wildly intellectually dishonest to collapse any and all musical idioms I can't quite get into as the result of some kind of "cultural Marxism". I don't deal with New Left writers, to the extent that I can identify them, as being of the same nature or kind as Frankfurt school authors or people who are willing to straight up say they're Marxists. A good chunk of what traditionalists and conservatives have disliked in what they regard as "cultural Marxism" may not really have much to do with Marxism so much as the New Left, and even a Marxist like Adorno had doubts about them, just like Adorno registered a complaint against total serialism that Leonard B. Meyer quoted in Music, the Arts and Ideas. So when I read authors over at the Future Symphony Institute saying Adorno messed up things for the European symphonic tradition I hope they have some awareness that in a good swath of the liberal/left Adorno is regarded as an elitist racist condescending asshole. :) I mean, I've lived in Seattle for decades and I can't think of more than ... actually I've never once met an artist in the Puget Sound area who has either admitted to even reading Adorno, let alone admitting to liking anything he wrote! So ... with that aside out of the way ... let's get to Halle's comments about the stranglehold total serialism and atonality have had in a few higher ed. music programs.
http://stage-left.johnhalle.
Thing is, there are those who have attempted to argue that atonality and total serialism were not the dominant expected academic paradigm in the United States. The claim to this effect is that a bunch of tonal music sold like hotcakes. Duh. John Halle wrote a rebuttal to someone's claim to this effect being a reason that serialism and atonality were not, in fact, having soemthing of a stranglehold within higher education in music programs and higher ed level textbooks about 20th century music.
John Halle makes a mid-length form argument to the effect that saying that atonality didn't dominate the accepted canon of American art music might be comparable to pretending that Gary Groth of Comics Journal fame loves manga because Fantagraphics started reissuing Peanuts in chronological order. Or, if that level of dehydrated sarcasm doesn't come across, I can just quote Halle's own writing. :)
Which is to say that I'm kind of surprised mention of something like this polemic from a self-identified Green with left sympathies in politics in the United States couldn't have gotten a name-drop by Borstlap for the second edition of The Classical Revolution. I don't really consider myself particularly left or Marxist but I regard it as wildly intellectually dishonest to collapse any and all musical idioms I can't quite get into as the result of some kind of "cultural Marxism". I don't deal with New Left writers, to the extent that I can identify them, as being of the same nature or kind as Frankfurt school authors or people who are willing to straight up say they're Marxists. A good chunk of what traditionalists and conservatives have disliked in what they regard as "cultural Marxism" may not really have much to do with Marxism so much as the New Left, and even a Marxist like Adorno had doubts about them, just like Adorno registered a complaint against total serialism that Leonard B. Meyer quoted in Music, the Arts and Ideas. So when I read authors over at the Future Symphony Institute saying Adorno messed up things for the European symphonic tradition I hope they have some awareness that in a good swath of the liberal/left Adorno is regarded as an elitist racist condescending asshole. :) I mean, I've lived in Seattle for decades and I can't think of more than ... actually I've never once met an artist in the Puget Sound area who has either admitted to even reading Adorno, let alone admitting to liking anything he wrote! So ... with that aside out of the way ... let's get to Halle's comments about the stranglehold total serialism and atonality have had in a few higher ed. music programs.
http://stage-left.johnhalle.
Serialism and Revisionism:
A Response to Straus
Joseph Straus's discussion1 of the much alleged tyranny of serialist practice is a valuable contribution to a reconstruction of the history of recent art music, not least because it reveals a disturbing, if
unsurprising, level of ignorance of the practice of recent American composers among opinion makers in both the journalistic and academic sectors of the classical music establishment. A common
fundamental misconception has to do with an unthinking conflation of a compositional method, serialism, and a perceptual attribute of pieces, namely, atonality. Confusion on this score has led to the mistaken impression that an overwhelming proportion of the music of the last half century has been serial. The fact, well known to anyone with a minimal familiarity with the literature of this period, is that comparatively few composers wrote serial music, at least with a degree of strictness that renders the technique analytically apparent. Straus's statistical analyses of the music of 468
composers from this period therefore tell most of us what we already know. These analyses are meant to go further, however. They indicate, according to Straus, that the bulk of the music composed, performed and studied in this period continued to be not only non-serial but tonal, and that this generalization cuts across all sectors of what he calls "the musical marketplace."2
If Straus is willing to recognize this point, however, a question intrudes with respect to his own previous work, specifically with the marketing and use of his text An Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory. This is a book which the preface suggests is designed to serve, and frequently does serve, as a primary text for a "course in twentieth century techniques and analysis."3 what is significant is the absence of a qualifier: Straus is not suggesting that the book serve for the segment of the class concerned with atonal music, perhaps augmenting other texts dealing with tonal, or quasi-tonal, 20th century techniques. Techniques for atonal and serial analysis are proposed as the exclusive means for coming to terms with the music of this century. If he continues to stand by this orientation, Straus cannot have it both ways: he cannot now claim that serialism is a relatively marginal technique and continue to have it a major focus of a primary text for 20th-century techniques and analysis. Nor can he claim that tonality (or quasi-tonality) in the 20th-century has not been a marginalized topic in the academy while being responsible for a work on 20th-century techniques which fails to mention a single work by Ravel, Sibelius, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Ives, Debussy 4 or Strauss.
While in no way reflecting the actual practice of composers, Straus's text does reflect the priorities of the field of music theory for the past quarter century in viewing the core of the canon of 20th
century works as derived from the Second Viennese School.5 Works from Second Viennese School comprise nearly half of all of the music discussed in An Introduction of Post-Tonal Theory. The
choice is significant not just in relation to the question of the inordinate attention given to atonality, which Straus now claims is only one of "a healthy diversity of approaches." It also reflects on
the more narrow question of the alleged "myth" of serial dominance in the academy which Straus is now attempting to debunk. All of the Second Viennese School composers would, after all, eventually
adopt serialist practice regarding it as a necessary rationalization and codification of what had been previously a purely intuitively guided atonal practice. Reflecting the view of serialism gradually
triumphant throughout the century, the final third of Straus's text is devoted entirely to serial practice and the analysis of serial works.6 That free atonality should be seen as a way station on the road to a serial future is the clear subtext of the progression of Straus's text, an impression confirmed by those works composed after 1950 cited by Straus. These are, with the only partial exception of Stravinsky's Agon, exclusively serial. Rather than a recent musical past in which "serialism was more than one possibility among many"7 the picture which Straus's own text presents of the 50s is one in which serialism has virtually no competition.
...
The way I see it, we could obliterate all of the atonal stuff from music programs and replace it with jazz and folk music education. It's not even that I don't like the Schoenberg violin concerto or the Berg violin concerto. If I were going to be enticed to hit the opera again it would be for a staging of Wozzeck! I like the string quartets of Xenakis. But if you were to ask me (not that you did) what I think should be a focus in music programs I would say to drop Carter and Babbitt and composers like that and replace them with the jazz pantheon and with folk and popular idioms. Maybe keep the atonal scene as a subsidiary scene in music education slightly below that level of prestige that the classical guitar has. I've already written at length here at this blog about the connections I see between the thematic properties of early 19th century guitar sonatas and early 20th century ragtime. I've also written at moderate length about the possibilities for syntactic correspondence between ragtime and sonata forms. I've also tried to read broadly enough across the arts spectrum to have an appreciation that despite the bromide of "cultural Marxism" a decent chunk of anti-capitalist musicians in the United States have found it pretty easy to just say that atonality and total serialism are marginal at best presences in the 21st century musical world we live in. They may have access to more grant and foundation money, and Taruskin has made some mention of Benjamin Britten's comment about a lot of the atonalists being "foundation music" that was more for the funding board's benefit than for a paying audience. Britten's bona fides as a queer communist conscientious objector hardly need to be rehearsed. And yet ... something tells me the go to put down for atonality is going to keep being something like "cultural Marxism" because for a certain type of would-be or actually aristocratic European art snob that's the brand that sticks.
Not that these kinds of guys don't exist in the United States ... maybe somewhere in the general zone of Moscow.
The way I see it, we could obliterate all of the atonal stuff from music programs and replace it with jazz and folk music education. It's not even that I don't like the Schoenberg violin concerto or the Berg violin concerto. If I were going to be enticed to hit the opera again it would be for a staging of Wozzeck! I like the string quartets of Xenakis. But if you were to ask me (not that you did) what I think should be a focus in music programs I would say to drop Carter and Babbitt and composers like that and replace them with the jazz pantheon and with folk and popular idioms. Maybe keep the atonal scene as a subsidiary scene in music education slightly below that level of prestige that the classical guitar has. I've already written at length here at this blog about the connections I see between the thematic properties of early 19th century guitar sonatas and early 20th century ragtime. I've also written at moderate length about the possibilities for syntactic correspondence between ragtime and sonata forms. I've also tried to read broadly enough across the arts spectrum to have an appreciation that despite the bromide of "cultural Marxism" a decent chunk of anti-capitalist musicians in the United States have found it pretty easy to just say that atonality and total serialism are marginal at best presences in the 21st century musical world we live in. They may have access to more grant and foundation money, and Taruskin has made some mention of Benjamin Britten's comment about a lot of the atonalists being "foundation music" that was more for the funding board's benefit than for a paying audience. Britten's bona fides as a queer communist conscientious objector hardly need to be rehearsed. And yet ... something tells me the go to put down for atonality is going to keep being something like "cultural Marxism" because for a certain type of would-be or actually aristocratic European art snob that's the brand that sticks.
Not that these kinds of guys don't exist in the United States ... maybe somewhere in the general zone of Moscow.
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