We Are All Illegal Aliens Now: Ageism in Calls-for-Scores and Competitions as Quasi-Immigration Policy?

P  eople are not equal, partly for the reason that they cannot all be born at the same time.”
  —  Walter Miles, Handbook of Social Psychology, 1935, p. 596.

I  n my first career in I.T./computers, I earned my degrees in Math and then M.S. and part Ph.D. in computer science. So when I decided back in the summer of 2003 to pursue a composing career, I decided to start totally from scratch. … I was almost 52 years old at that time.”
  —  Joel Irwin, post on SCIMEMBERS listserve, 01-MAY-2008.

W hat is it about people over 35 (or 15, 25, or 90 for that matter) that should prevent them from competing with their artistic efforts? Is it that they have ‘had their chance’ and now need to get out of the way? For me, that argument does not hold water. With the ‘baby-boomer’ generation, we will see more and more people who are over 40 and at the beginning of their creative careers after having worked in other professions for years, often not by choice. These folks need a chance to show what they can contribute just as much as the person who is also starting out but under a certain age. Why should the older beginner be excluded from participating in publicly held competitions?”
  —  Robert Raines, post on SCIMEMBERS listserve, 30-APR-2008.

I  founded Juventas with two other young composers who felt there was a flaw in the ‘system’. Instead of ‘whining’ … we decided to take initiative and form an ensemble that focuses on giving amazing performances of music by primarily young, living composers, and to perform this music as repertoire—meaning more than once. Since that time, we have worked diligently to form a community of supporters for our mission. Juventas, as it stands, is the result. I encourage you all to do the same. If you see a problem with the way ensembles, calls-for-scores, competitions, etc., are run … then create something that supports your ideas.”
  —  Erin Huelskamp, Executive & Artistic Director, Juventas New Music Ensemble (Boston), post on SCIMEMBERS listserve, 01-MAR-2008.

Within the last several days there has been a vigorous dialogue about the topic of ‘ageism’ on the Society of Composers listserve, triggered by a new call-for-scores posted by Juventas New Music Ensemble. Ageism has to do with prejudice and injustice based on age. It appears in all sorts of situations and affects people of all ages. The thread on the Society of Composer’s listserve this week concerns the frequent stipulation of rather low upper age limits for composer competitions.

Of course, energy and dynamism and value are not the exclusive monopoly of youth, anymore than they are exclusive attributes of the citizens of a country. It’s not a very profound insight but it is one that has caused a prolific reaction—so much so as to cause some of the SCI listserve members to complain. The reaction has not been about Juventas (whose charter and founding principles are specifically focused on youthful composers). Instead, the reaction has to do with the pervasiveness of the age restrictions on many, many competitions.

In a way, each age bracket is like a different ‘country’. We leave one country and enter another. There is even the expression ‘over the hill’, which is where we go in middle or later life. Those of us who are ‘refugees’ from over the hill leave behind a place that is familiar but problematic, and we progressively acquaint ourselves with a new place. We hope that our reception by the locals will be supportive and friendly, but there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. We hope that we will rapidly become connected, able to navigate efficiently in the new landscape and form relationships that will nourish us and that we, in turn, can nourish. Composing as a second career (or as an avocation) is like this.

Kyle Gann’s post a couple of years ago on his ArtsJournal blog suggests that the restriction of entries for many competitions to composers under 30 or other youthful limits is not so much a manifestation of the aim to provide aid to needy young people as it is an embodiment of a ‘cult of prodigy’—as if truly stellar composing is, like ballet or theoretical mathematics, somehow only possible when one is very young, as if the ability or potential to do truly new and spectacular things is lost as one enters middle age, or as if discovering and supporting young Mozarts is a goal that trumps all others.

This is more about power—who is able to grant or withhold privileges, and which stakeholders in the status quo stand to benefit from that power—than anything else. It is about civic stratification and welfare policies in the social/political microcosm of music. It is about who is “in” and who is “out”.

Twenty years ago Gary Freeman wrote a famous paper that argued that the welfare state is necessarily ‘bounded’—that national welfare states cannot co-exist with the free, uncontrolled movement of labor. In establishing a principle of distributive justice dependent on membership of a limited community (for example, of people under a certain age) the ‘welfare state’ [the constellation of commissioning and competitions that exist for new composers right now] inherently and unavoidably departs from free-market capitalism.

Welfare provisions serve at least two purposes: (1) to provide for ‘needy’ segments of the population and (2) to indirectly influence or control the dynamics of the labor market. In other words, the setting of assistance benefits and criteria indirectly affect the wages and number of commissions. None of the dialogue on the SCI listserve has suggested that purpose (2) is in-play with the current powers-that-be for supporting new composers, which is why I raise it in this CMT post. In fact, purpose (2) is very often discussed in social economics journals and other scholarly writing that is far afield from the sphere with which musicians and arts administrators/policy-makers are conversant. There, it is not a ‘hypothetical’; welfare provisions to indirectly control a market are an acknowledged reality.

Which is funny. Compared to other “isms” associated with stereotyping or prejudice against a group of people, ageism is unusual. Unlike racism and sexism and homophobia, ageism represents a prejudice against a group that all members of the “in” group will inevitably join if they live long enough. Exclusionary, indirect policy decisions where the ones who make them are never themselves in the “out” group are somehow predictable, understandable; by contrast, exclusionary indirect policies that are against the interest of those who establish or support those policies are paradoxical—perhaps denoting denial, self-deception, or lack of forethought.

In any case, the [eventual] movement of labor across age threshholds exposes the tensions between ‘closed’ welfare states and ‘open’ economies, just as movement of labor across national boundaries expose the same tensions. Such movement reveals that, ultimately, national welfare states are incompatible with the free movement of labor. An effective, just welfare state is supposed to balance the distributive principles of justice and mutual aid against the distributive principle of the marketplace. The welfare state is an imperfect but important (and maybe inadvertent) consequence of capitalism. Foreign workers (in this case, older ‘emerging’ composers) show the extent to which the distributive principle of mutual aid is politically viable and sustainable only so long as it is restricted to members and excludes outsiders. Given the deficiencies of the current ‘system’ and the current plight of the NEA, we needn’t discuss the political viability and sustainability of a just and effective welfare-statist policy supporting categories other than the young. There is no policy and little justice, which is the point of many commenters on the SCI listserve. And, given the NEA’s and other organizations’ tiny budgets to commission new works or fund competitions, one might reasonably assert that, in the U.S., there is no ‘state’ [for composition, as an element of the arts], and there is no ‘territory’.

In modern society, we have borders that are ‘constitutive’ for and only for the political system. Geographical extension (in German, the term for it is ‘Staatsgebiet’) has become a prerequisite to modern statehood. States without territories can hardly be proper states; they couldn’t make collectively binding decisions or exert real power; they couldn’t ‘govern’.

But other organizations in society with different purposes are not at all dependent on ‘fixed bodies’, or so you might think. Business enterprises, for example, are not only multi-national but are also these days substantially ‘virtual’, conducted in the “electronic ether”, from anywhere. But the ‘lightness’ of virtualizable endeavors like composing is, however, constrained by composers’ dependence on functioning arts organizations to commission and perform the works, and this in turn depends on the existence of stable and just ‘states’. Deflecting the responsibility away from the ‘state’ (including not-for-profit NGOs) and fobbing the entirety of it off on the immigrant-aspirant, to raise themselves up by their own bootstraps or find a wealthy private patron for support is contrary to the notion of music and the arts as a public good. The issue is about what constitutes a just and virtuous state.

The political science/public policy and political sociology literature on this topic relatively small. A conventional approach was adopted by Gary Freeman who argued that welfare states are inevitably exclusive, and aim indirectly to protect the privileged citizens more than they aim to provide aid to the needy. Migration and the ‘welfare state’ are separately two very controversial areas: unsurprisingly, their nexus attracts polemics of all camps, with relatively little serious analysis.

Assumptions commonly used in published studies of migration-welfare linkages include:

• that welfare states and immigration policies are independent variables;
  
• that different welfare states have similar modus operandi;
  
• that immigrants are an homogenous group; and
  
• that the raison d’être of welfare states is socio-economic redistribution.

In other words, most of the existing theoretical welfare social policy literature is grounded on false premises.

Recently, research has also been conducted in Sweden and Denmark and Germany and elsewhere within the E.U.

	Reason for Older Composer Immigration
Genre	Family	Labor Import	Refugee
	Reunification	Guest Worker
String Quartets	××	×××	×
Piano Trios	×	×	××
String Sextets	×	××	×
Piano Quintets	×	×	××
Brass Quintets	-	××	×
Cello Sonatas	××	××	×
Fugues, Gigues and Sarabandes	×	×	×
Recorder Sextets	××	×	×
Intermezzi	×	××	×
Festen und Gedenksprüchen	-	×	×××
Accordion Duos	×	×××	×××
Tragic Overtures	-	×	×
Electro-Acoustic	-	×	×
Choral Ensembles	××	××	×
Songs without Words	×	×	×

Brücker et al. (2001) note a clear pattern of strong residual effects is in countries with generous welfare systems, which they suggest indicates a “welfare magnet” attraction for migrants and “reverse discrimination” against the locals. (Hypothetically possible in music, I suppose, but I doubt that the youf composer prodigies’ chances are in serious jeopardy from ‘emerging oldster re-treads’, so strongly stacked is the deck today against late-bloomers.)

Have a look at some of the links below, to see whether you agree that current practices and policies restricting calls-for-scores to composers under a certain age are not discriminatory against ‘emerging’ older composer refugees, in a way that resembles ill-conceived welfare statist policies with regard to political immigrants/refugees. I’m not wingeing, just suggesting that things are currently unjust and might be improved. I don’t disagree with Erin Huelskamp’s statement (blockquote above), but I do think we have every reason to be disappointed with the state of affairs in this country—disappointed with the situation that makes Erin’s statement the only realistic response these days. The solution to every injustice in the U.S. seems still to be privatization: find yourself a wealthy donor to fill the gap; start something yourself to address the need or right the wrong that has been caused by inadequate or unjust infrastructure and public policy. It’s a sorry situation, and no way to live or govern.

• Society of Composers Inc (SCI)
  
• Juventas New Music Ensemble
  
• National Endowment for the Arts
  
• National Institute on Aging
  
• American Geriatrics Society
  
• Gerontological Society of America
  
• OECD page on International Migration
  
• OECD page on Social and Welfare Issues
  
• Bommes M, Geddes A, eds. Immigration and Welfare: Challenging the Borders of the Welfare State. Routledge, 2001.
  
• Branine M, Glover I, eds. Ageism in Work and Environment. Ashgate, 2002.
  
• Brücker H, Epstein G, McCormick B, Saint-Paul G, Venturini A, Zimmerman K. Managing migration in the European welfare state. Proc Immigration Policy and the Welfare State, Trieste, 23-JUN-2001,
  
• Freeman G. Modes of immigration politics in liberal democratic states. Int Migration Rev 1995; 29:881-902.
  
• Freeman G. Migration and the political economy of teh welfare state. Ann Amer Acad Pol Social Sci 1986; 485:51-63.
  
• Morris L. Rights Sociological Perspectives. Routledge, 2006.
  
• Morris L. Managing Migration: Civic Stratification and Migrants Rights. Routledge, 2002.
  
• Nelson T, ed. Ageism: Stereotyping and Prejudice against Older Persons. MIT, 2002.
  
• Palmore E. Ageism: Negative and Positive. 2e. Springer, 1999.
  
• Papademetriou D, Hamilton K. Converging Paths to Restriction: French, Italian and British Responses to Immigration, Washington DC: Carnegie Foundation for International Peace, 1996.
  
• Sciortino G. Toward a political sociology of entry policies. J Ethnic and Migration Studies 2000; 26: 213-28.
  
• Soysal Y. Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. Univ Chicago, 1995.

Was Dallapiccola’s Piano Microtonal or Just-Tuned?

W  hy are D-sharp, F-sharp, and G-sharp so horrible?”
  —  Anonymous.

M  any recent composers have come to feel that the compromise of Equal Temperament was a mistake. They feel that the musical logic of moving from any key to any other key became a priority at the expense of music’s sonic sensuousness. Equal temperament chords do have a kind of active ‘buzz’ to them—a level of harmonic excitement and intensity. Equal Temperament could be described as the musical equivalent to eating a lot of red meat and watching violent action films. By contrast, Just intonation intervals are much calmer, more passive. You literally have to slow down to listen to them.”
  —  Kyle Gann.

After my recent CMT blog post on Dallapiccola’s ‘Quaderno di Annalibera’ I have continued to explore these pieces, especially ‘Simbolo’. The dissonances in them are peculiar, unsettling. And the consonances in them are also peculiar—unsettling in their ‘tentativeness’, a quality that’s hard to put your finger on.

I revisited the late David Lewin’s excellent analysis of Quaderno, in hopes of finding a persuasive explanation of these pieces’ effects on me. But, rather than feeling convinced or reassured, I instead began to feel that Lewin’s erudite analysis may manifest certain ‘assumptions’ that were not acknowledged, namely, the assumption that Dallapiccola’s piano was tuned in the standard, modern way—with Equal Temperament (ET). Lewin’s analysis presumes that the piano was equal-tempered. It’s a natural assumption to make, but is it necessarily true? After all, Quaderno was composed during a period that was for Dallapiccola full of intensive exploring and discovery.

How would the tensions and dramatic consonances and dissonances in Quaderno work if the instrument had been tuned in Just Intonation (JI), I wondered? To find out, I downloaded a script to my MIDI keyboard / synthesizer, to change it to JI tuning.

The result was fascinating. The effective tonal dissonance is markedly different when Simbolo is played in JI tension structure instead of ET. In fact, Dallapiccola’s choice of register for the several lines or voices seems especially congenial in JI. The consonances in JI generally fall in Dallapiccola’s relatively long passages and very often dwell on long, now only mildly dissonant stases. In ET, the consonances are transient, and the stases are pretty strongly dissonant. ‘Violent’, to use Gann’s phrase. In my opinion, the contemplative quality of Dallapiccola’s Quadernos di Annalibera is far better in Just Intonation than in Equal Temperament. The JI has a primitive, crunchy-but-laconic, ‘communitarian’ feel. By contrast, the spectra and timbre of the ET—for the intervals in Simbolo, say—are, to my ear, too urgent.

In ET, it’s hard to keep Simbolo from sounding hurried, judgmental, aspiring, and self-referential. In JI, however, Simbolo exhorts the listener (and the pianist) to a zen-like composure, a stop-and-smell-the-roses alertness, a non-judgmental satisfaction with what one has. The former matches what we know of Dallapiccola’s politics; the latter matches what a father (Luigi) might reasonably express to his young daughter (Annalibera).

Modern composers using Just Temperament include Carola Anderson, Bill Alves, David Canright, Jon Catler, John Chalmers, David Doty, Tom Doughterty, Dean Drummond, Dudley Duncan, Adriaan Fokker, Glenn Frantz, Kyle Gann, Denny Genovese, Philip Glass, Eivind Groven, Lou Harrison and Michael Harrison, Norman Henry, Ralph Hill, Jim Horton, Ben Johnston, Joan LaBarbara, Anne LeBaron, Janis Mattox, David Mitros, Norbert Oldani, Harry Partch, P.Q. Phan, Larry Polansky, James Pugiliese, Robert Rich, Eric Ridgway, Terry Riley, Gino Robair, Daniel Schmidt, Carter Scholz, Bill Sethares, Jules Siegel, James Tenney, Toby Twining, Erling Wold, and La Monte Young.

But, so far as I can tell, there’s no documentation that Luigi Dallapiccola used JI when composing Quaderno. Nonetheless, the emotionally coherent effect that JI imparts to these pieces makes the JI conjecture at least plausible.

We have no way of knowing in mm. 2-3 whether the G-flat—A-flat—D is an order-segment of an emerging tone-row. We don’t know in ET, and we don’t know in JI. So we don’t hear the trichord { G-flat, A-flat, D } in mm. 2-3 as yet bound to an intervallic ‘context’ when we hear { G, D-flat, F } in m. 4. We are only ‘situated’ in-context later on. And yet… and yet in JI the ‘context’ looms in a more immediate, more rapidly apprehended, more hospitable and inviting way.

The sense of tension in this music is, I suggest, fundamentally linked to the temperament (and its timbre and spectrum, to use Sethares’s language) in which the music is played. The JI tuning is far less tense overall. Most of the tritones in Simbolo are less disturbing in JI than they are in ET. Often these JI tritones are more consonant than the thirds and the sixths—because of the particular positions of the intervals [see spreadsheet, below] used in Simbolo. (But, conversely, in JI some of the Major sixths are off by a whopping 32 cents. Even some of the Perfect fifths are as much as 24 cents out of tune.)

In other words, JI neutralizes some of the tensions that were present when the pieces that comprise Quaderno are performed in ET and simultaneously gives wolfish dissonances in intervals that would otherwise be warm and consonant. Rather than feeling disoriented, we are oriented in new and dramatically different ways. It is as though I am hearing Simbolo for the first time—and maybe understanding it for the first time? Did David Lewin ever think about this?


Lewin once wrote that the marking ‘oscuro’ in m. 33 is a hint that ‘something large’ should happen in mm. 34-36: a tone-row might appear; a new configuration may appear, or a new variation; or the piece may just end (which it does, soon afterward). Lewin maintained that the enigmatic effect of the writing here is not just due to a ‘stimmung’ but rather is due to an ‘incompleteness’—a withdrawing or withholding of the hoped-for tone-row.

Instead, I now think it plausible that Simbolo may have been intended to be played on a JI-tuned piano. Why? In part, I think this because then nothing ‘large’ is expected and frustrated in mm. 34-36; nothing so red-meatlike happens earlier in the piece as occurs in ET. Some of the gestural ‘questions’ and ‘problems’ that Lewin worries about are, in JI, not so puzzling or enigmatic. Instead, in JI we get the calm equanimity that Kyle Gann alludes to. It is a seductive conceit. It may be right or it may be wrong. But based on these little MIDI keyboard experiments it is now intriguing enough to make me want to look for evidence, talk to Annalibera.

And, while JI may be the best possibility, it is not necessarily the only alternative. For example, I think I will also try the temperament put forward by Giuseppe Zarlino, the Maetre de Chapelle of San Marco in Venice. In 1560 Zarlino proposed inverting the Major and Minor tones of the upper group in Aristoxenus’s classical scale. This gave him these intervals:

C	D	E	F	G	A	B	C
0	204	386	498	702	884	1088	1200	cents

He then reduced every fifth by 2/7ths of a comma to minimize the comma between the rest of the intervals. This was basically a Meantone (MT) temperament. The MT scheme redistributes the intervals such that the principal ones, such as fourths and fifths are uniformly near-perfect in most keys and other intervals are re-tuned so that they still fulfill their traditional intervallic role within the scale. The most common way of doing this involves flatting the first four fifths (C-G, G-D, D-A, and A-E), reducing them enough to give a true third.

This also eliminates the difference between the Major and Minor tones, producing a ‘Mean’ whole tone between the two, hence, the MT name. The major thirds and the minor sixths are then true, but most of the fifths are slightly flat. It enabled safe modulation from key to key but it left problematic intervals like the fifth G#-D# (viz, the Anonymous remark at the top of this post). The interval’s way too sharp, and its inversion (the perfect fourth) is severely flat.

This is known historically as a wolf tone, so called because the effect is like howling of wolves. There are other wolf tones, but this one is the worst. Apart from readability, the wolf tones are one reason why composers historically have tended to avoid using keys with a large number of sharps or flats.

Here is a spreadsheet you can download by clicking on the screenshot. The spreadsheet enables you to see the sensitivity of deviations from ET to scale position, for JI and for a variety of other historical temperaments, including Zarlino.




Interestingly, Mozart avoided C# (D-flat), F# (G-flat), G# (A-flat), and B Major. Correspondingly, he also avoided A# (D-flat) minor, D# (E-flat) minor, F minor, and G# (A-flat) minor, respectively. These keys display prominent wolf tones. Mozart also avoided F# (G-flat) minor and B minor. The latter is odd when you consider that one of his favorite keys was the relative D Major. And if you totalize across the various historical temperaments, both D Major and B minor are about as ‘wolfish’ as the more famously wolfish keys.

Major	Minor
C-sharp (D-flat)	A-sharp (B-flat)
D-sharp (E-flat)	C
F-sharp (G-flat)	D-sharp (E-flat)
G-sharp (A-flat)	F
A-sharp (B-flat)	G
B	G-sharp (A-flat)

Here is a spreadsheet you can download by clicking on the screenshot.




I think I should take an inventory of Dallapiccola’s works, to see what patterns appear and to see whether any of it sheds light on the Quaderno, either corroborating or discorroborating the ideas about JI vs. ET. I’d be very grateful for comments from any of you Dallapiccola scholars out there ...

• JustIntonation.net
  
• Alves B. The JI System of Nicola Vicentino. JIN 1989; 5: 8-13.
  
• Just Intonation (melodic lines) and Pythagorean Temperament (double-stops) thread at ViolinMasterclass.com
  
• Kyle Gann JI webpage
  
• NativeInstruments KONTAKT microtuning script file
  
• Tonalsoft downloads
  
• Barbour J. Bach and the Art of Temperament. Schirmer, 1947.
  
• Barbour J. Tuning and Temperament: A Historical Survey. Dover, 2004.
  
• Forrest J. Tuning and Timbre Java Applet. Univ Wisconsin.
  
• Haluska J. The Mathematical Theory of Tone Systems. CRC, 2003.
  
• Jorgensen O. Tuning. Michigan State Univ, 1991.
  
• Lewin D. Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations. Oxford Univ, 2007.
  
• Lewin D. Musical Form and Transformation. Oxford, 2007. (pp. 1-15 on Dallapiccola's Simbolo)
  
• Neuwirth E. Musical Temperaments. Springer, 2004.
  
• Scholtz K. Algorithms for Mapping Diatonic Keyboard Tunings and Temperaments. MTO 1998; 4(4)
  
• Sethares W. Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale. 2e. Springer, 2004.
  
• Sethares W. Local consonance and the relationship between timbre and scale. JASA 1993; 94:1218-28.
  
• Sethares page at Univ Wisconsin
  
• TonalSoft downloads
  
• Wold E. Luigi Dallapiccola. Erling Wold blog, 04-APR-2008.