Ben Johnston died yesterday. I came to his music only in the last six years, mainly thanks to the writing and blogging of Kyle Gann. I recognize that microtonal composition isn't everyone's liking and I can get why. A lot of it doesn't really "work". I think that Johnston's work does. He was articulate enough a writer that I am not sure I could do much better than quote him. While I've never personally been a Cage fan I have recognized that it's possible for composers I admire to be influenced by composers I dislike intensely. For instance, I actually enjoy music by Hindemith and he was influenced by Wagner (among others) whose music I find a chore. I tend to enjoy Bartok more than I enjoy Lizst ... although I'm trying to give Lizst a chance.
Johnston studied with Cage and Partsch ... but his work is not necessarily out to be iconoclastic in quite the same way as his teachers. Compared to his teachers Johnston might not be considered an "innovator" (although that can be contested), but he did a lot to consolidate new and fertile pathes in the realm of music written using just intonation and microtonal possibilities. I've found myself coming back to Johnston's work, particularly his string quartets, in ways I've never found myself doing for Ferneyhough or Birtwistle, whose works are, eh, whatever, if you like that good for you.
Johnston managed to articulate what seemed to be a core problem in twelve-tone technique, that it was more or less a reaction to conventional 19th century tonal options seeming cliche, yet the Schoenberg legacy meant that in the end all the other non-traditional non-tonal options were "used up" even more quickly than the traditional tonal options had been in the previous centuries. Johnston described Schoenberg's whole methodology as an interesting but ultimately marginal stopgap attempt to address a crisis that, in Johnston's estimation, was more the result of the standardization of tuning systems around a single chromatic scale with twelve tones than it was ever the result of tonality having been "used up". So, here are a few passages from his writings where he explained his take on things.
MAXIMUM CLARITY: AND
OTHER WRITINGS ON MUSIC
Ben Johnston
Edited by Bob Gilmore
Copyright (c) 2006 by
the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
ISBN-13:
978-0-252-03098-7
ISBN-10: 0-252-03098-2
Kindle edition
From “MUSICAL INTELLIGIBILITY:
WHERE ARE WE?” (1963)
Location 2142
We can expect opposing isms for some time. But there is a
common problem, the solution of which could eventually integrate musical styles
on a new basis.
This problem is musical intelligibility. Without alert
reception by ear, music can mean nothing. Attention must be engaged. A failure
on this level is catastrophic but all too common.
Good composition is
good mnemonics. A listener needs to discover order in music. He will even
impose order upon it if his interest is intense enough.
Location 2275
Schoenberg is
especially important because while greatly expanding the sound vocabulary of
music he also tried to provide new means for organizing new complexities. But
in the long run a conception like "atonality" is, like Cage's
"no-continuity," an abandonment of the problem of rendering
complexity intelligible. Serial technique, Schoenberg's solution to the problem
of organization, is applicable even to noises. yet in an important and basic
way serialism is, as I have suggested, a less
sophisticated technique than tonal organization.
It is clearly necessary
to generalize the concept of tonality if it is not to be abandoned altogether.
The solution should have the characteristic of including the traditional tonal
methods within it, as special, limited cases. Serialism does not provide such a
connection between tonal and nontonal sound patterns. It is an elaborate development of
thematicism, not incompatible with tonality but not a fully satisfactory
substitute for it. Tonality is based upon ratio organization, whereas serialism
is based upon ordinal and interval ordering. A ratio scale does not, like an
interval scale, provide equal sizes in all adjacent intervals. Its special
virtue is that it expresses each term as a relation to a single point of
reference. This is precisely what is characteristic of tonality. [emphasis added]
Now this next passage from Johnston might resonate with some points John Borstlap has been making in his writing.
Location 2481
Schoenberg replaced a
tired system with a less subtle but more vigorous one. Alternatively, others tried to replace
tonality with parallel alternative systems such as the Asiatic ones just
mentioned. But when your own tradition outgrows its childhood, it is not a
workable next step to abandon your own line of development for a parallel one.
Nor can you permanently abandon overworked sides of your development to
concentrate on potentially healthier ones.
Unfortunately, in
tacitly accepting s an arbitrary "given" the twelve-tone
equal-tempered scale, Schoenberg committed music to the task of exhausting the
remaining possibilities in a closed pitch system. [emphasis added]
There are people who
cannot stand to be confined in no matter how large an enclosure. They find the
walls and are made miserable by them. They don't care how many bars you put in
the cage--twelve, twenty-four, forty-eight, nineteen, twenty-two, thirty-one,
fifty-three--they will hurt themselves on them. Or break them down.
When you reach a
philosophical impasse you need to get to a more basic idea. You need to raise your assumptions about your
field to a higher level of abstraction. If you do this successfully, what used to be basics will turn out to be
special cases of more general principles.
Einstein's physics does not invalidate Newton's. It simply reveals
Newton's laws to be special cases of more general ones. The discovery of DNA, a substance which
controls the intracellular synthesis of proteins and is thus basic to life
itself, does not knock out all of biochemistry up to that breakthrough, but
rather forces a reevaluation of many of its assumptions.
The implication of this proposal that Johnston worked out in his composing was to retain tonality but drop equal temperament. He also had some comments in the early 1980s which remind me of some comments that were made around the same time by George Rochberg about how much modern music consigned itself to oblivion by using techniques and forms of organization that worked against the cognitive processes involved in memory and listening.
from "BEYOND HARRY PARTH" (1981)
Location 4788
Much so-called new
music does not really deserve the wider audience it complains about being
denied. If the only alternative to this is the endless replay of "the
classics" or an attempt to rewrite them or to quote them or to even
parallel them, we have already abandoned the serious effort to keep concert
music alive.
I would be unhappy to
see this happen. I would like the tradition of Western concert music to
continue to develop among the world's musics in a future in which its dominance
will have ended.
Location 4859
We already face a
situation in this culture where the values of "serious music" are threatened
economically as well as culturally. If we elect to preserve only the museum
aspects of this tradition because of the anachronistic social and economic
organization of the main channels of its dissemination, we will ensure its
atrophy.
In the face of this
prospect, two main problems demand solutions: how can the tradition continue to
grow without losing its public, and how can it become a healthy, fruitful, and
even powerful stimulus to the world's other musics rather than an adulterative
and disintegrative influence? If these problems are not addressed successfully,
the traditions of European concert music will not only wither in this country [the United States] and elsewhere but will be displaced successfully by rival traditions of music
which reject above all its aristocratic anachronisms.
Not that I "have" to but if I "had" to choose between something like the New Complexity and Ben Johnston's approach, I prefer Johnston's. Between Rochberg's criticisms and Johnston's observations of serialism I personally don't see that it's all that useful a form of composition to learn. Now, by contrast, I think there's all sorts of benefits of taking up cyclic form or cumulative form even more so by way of works by Benjamin Britten (Nocturnal!) and Charles Ives ... but I trust I'll get some understanding about that as I'm writing as an American about an American composer.
Anyway ... in memory of Johnston's work, a good deal of which I enjoy, here are some links to some of his works in case you're interested.
String Quartet No. 9
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbOW4TK48Tg
String Quartet No. 10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uZUQqOLyPQ
"Blues" from his suite for microtonal piano
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkaGm8B8CZI
POSTSCRIPT 7-27-2019
It took them until 7-25 but the NYT obit is up
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/arts/music/ben-johnston-dead.html
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