New Music, Summer Picaresque

CMT: So I’m glad I’m not the only one who felt that John Toole’s classic, Confederacy of Dunces, is unreadable. A friend loved the book, but the very fact that he loved it annoyed me tremendously. The book is so unmitigatedly self-conscious! How could anyone love that book? It’s reassuring to know that you really really didn’t like it, for the same aesthetic reason that I find the book objectionable!

DSM: I think the same phenomenon happens with some musical compositions. They’re excessively self-aware, almost as though the composer thinks the work has to be weird and depressing to be considered serious ‘new music’.

CMT: But then, even with such music, if you live with the music for awhile, it often grows on you. Give it three or four listens. Give it the benefit of the doubt. The bits that, on first impression, seemed contrived or self-referential turn out not to be so calculating or stiff after all. True, the music may never ascend to become popular or “In”, but at least its merits do come into focus with repeated listenings. The composer’s conceits and methods do, when you reflect on the piece, deliver something honest and valid. You just were unable to appreciate it properly on the first hearing.

DSM: Arvo Pärt’s Für Alina and other of his tintinnabulations and iterative compositions were like that for me. But there’s nothing that intrigues me quite as much in music as a fractured analogy, a piece of music that tries to do something emulating another type of art. It is, of course, best if the construction is sound and the performance is convincing and feels ‘right’. But a big part of the fascination of new music for me is the flat-out novelty of the experience—the novelty of discovering for myself whether I like it or understand it. The novelty, if it’s a premier performance, of encountering terra incognita. There’s none of the ‘baggage’ of received wisdom and critical consensus, regarding what the significance and inner workings of the piece may be. The piece is simply a naked fact, something we absorb and react to—both extemporaneously at the time of the live performance, and afterward, usually after a lot of reflection—as you’re saying. That’s always exciting. Seldom comfortable, but always exciting!

CMT: In music and music theater, society only accepts literary Intellectualism if the music is “In,” highly popular and massively acclaimed by the mainstream media. If it’s valued by the broader community, then intellectualizing it is socially acceptable; if it’s not popularly valued, though, then intellectualizing about it out loud as we’re doing is totally unwelcome. In general, musical intellectualism isn’t valued in the U.S.—and it’s especially discouraged when it comes to new music. I don’t understand why intellectualizing about music is treated this way. Painting, sculpture, dance, other of the Arts are at least cut some ‘slack’ by the media and arbiters of public discourse.

T his is about a vacancy in culture, the absence of younger voices, perhaps the absence of a generation. The few—extremely few—intellectuals under the age of thirty-five, even forty-five, have seldom elicited comment. They are easy to miss, especially because their absence is longstanding. An intellectual generation has not suddenly vanished; it simply never appeared. And it is already too late—the generation is too old—to show up.”
  —  Russell Jacoby, 2000.

DSM: But I don’t think of what we’re discussing as a kind of ‘intellectualizing,’ really. We like to identify some reasons that support our opinions, yes. It wouldn’t be meaningful conversation if you couldn’t explain why you think as you do. But, beyond that, I think we have no prejudices as to what the nature and quality of ‘acceptable’ reasons are or should be—regardless whether it’s new music or otherwise. The whole point is to experience the music, preferably ‘live’, and to (re-)experience and enjoy discovering and refining our experience of the music together through conversations about it. That’s still why we do this, right?

CMT: Yes, of course it is. The dialogue’s the thing! Much in the way that chamber music itself wouldn’t be chamber music were it not for the dialogue among the parts, the various voices. But the summer season is upon us, and summer means that performances of ‘new music’ are harder to find than at other times of the year; our dialogue needs to be more actively cultivated, to keep it going. Summer’s the season for chamber music festivals, so there’re a lot of events to attend. But many of the festivals confine their programming to the classical canon. The Ottawa Chamber Music Festival, however, includes new music. The Banff Festival has its Canadian Commission Round, with a new quartet by Kelly-Marie Murphy that each competing ensemble will perform. And the Kuhmo Festival in Finland has considerable new music in its line-up.

DSM: And the Aspen Festival as well. The Ying Quartet will perform Tan Dun’s Eight Colors for String Quartet, Zhou Long’s Song of the Ch’in, and Chen Yi’s Shuo in Aspen on July 28. Emerson String Quartet performed Charles Ives’ String Quartet No. 2 and Kaija Saariaho’s Terra Memoria there last Saturday. The Ottawa Festival has some Saariaho and other new works (Roddy Elias, Evan Ware, Victor Herbiet, Christian Elliot, Kevork Andonian, Evelyn Stroobach, and Jan Järvlepp – Aug 01) in their events this year.

CMT: Tanglewood has their new-music segment, too, from July 29 to August 3. Zwilich’s String Quartet No. 2; Eckhardt’s New work; Sollberger’s Advancing Moment; Harbison’s Abu Ghraib for Cello; Corigliano’s Troubadours – Variations for guitar and chamber orchestra; and Alvin Curran and others with Musica Electronica Viva on August 3.

DSM: I’m not sure I can be enthused to hear something entitled ‘Abu Ghraib for Cello’. That suggests to me something about as self-conscious as your John Toole book, Confederacy of Dunces. But Alvin Curran’s work, including his collection of solo piano pieces called Inner Cities, will be performed in Italy at the Santarcangelo International Festival of the Arts. That is both topical and honest and elegant. Daan Vandewalle will perform Curran’s Inner Cities No.13 on July 12 and 13. And Pierre-Yves Macé’s musique concrète piece, Passagenwerk, will be performed there on July 6.

CMT: How about MicroFest? MicroFest this summer has a program of Harry Partch’s music, performed on original Partch instruments, at California Plaza in L.A. If you like microtonality, this event is not to be missed.

DSM: You know, not all of Boulez’s music is ‘new’ in terms of its compositional techniques, neither is Terry Riley’s, nor Elliot Carter’s, say. And aleatoric music, “music of chance”, may transform the composer/performer relationship—but that isn’t inherently ‘new’ either, even though the improvisational aspect of it may be ‘new-as-of-this-minute’. Microtonal compositions likewise are not inherently ‘new’, even though microtonality may be far from conventional.

CMT: Okay! Eclectic and unconventional as our “newish” tastes may be, we’re not alone! So what new music do you want to go and hear? What rolicking musical adventures do you crave? When and where?

I n contemporary popular parlance, the attribution ‘picaresque’ refers to any rolicking adventure that delivers the travels and travails of a central character as he or she careens along the narrative way. ... To contend that a new ‘American picaresque’ has emerged ... is not only to call for an eclectic yet responsible use of the designation ‘picaresque’ but to propose an extended continuity in formal literary terms with other [narrative and dialogical] configurations that had their quite distinctive origins in other lands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. ... The picaresque [genre] [ —like new music— ] changes masks, shifts, dodges, proves resilient, survives … [despite the apparent lack of visible means of support!]”
  —  Rowland Sherrill, Road-Book America, 2005.

• Tanglewood Festival website
  
• Aspen Music Festival and School website
  
• Kuhmon Kamarimusiikki
  
• Ottawa International Chamber Music Festival website
  
• Banff International String Quartet Competition website
  
• MicroFest2007 website
  
• Santarcangelo International Festival of the Arts website
  
• Fletcher A. Built To Last: Ensuring That New Works Enter the Repertory. NewMusicBox, 11-APR-2007.
  
• Habermas J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. MIT, 1991.
  
• Hofstadter R. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Knopf, 1969.
  
• Jacoby R. The Last Intellectuals. Basic, 2000.
  
• NetNewMusic
  
• Sequenza21
  
• Warner M. Publics and Counterpublics. Zone, 2005.
  
• Wikipedia 21st Century composers page
  
• Douglas Self's Acoustic Locators website

Gendered Musical Practices, Feminine Styles

CMT: My young niece has recently decided to begin studying trumpet. I told her about how exotic and novel this choice is, and gave her copies of the recent CDs of Amanda Pepping and Alison Balsom to give her a sense for what’s possible—how mastery of that instrument can be cool for a girl.

DSM: Coincidentally, I was recently reading a medical journal article about cerebrovascular events in musicians, such as cerebral embolism due to a patent foramen ovale and spinal epidural hematoma during trumpet playing. Do you imagine that the phenomenally high intrathoracic and subsequent intrapharyngeal pressure associated with brass playing contributes to why there are so few women brass players in orchestras and other classical music groups?

CMT: I can’t imagine it. There surely isn’t any relevant physical difference between the genders with regard to brass playing—with the possible exception of tuba and lung capacity. Women are able to generate and sustain pressures in Valsalva maneuvers that are as high as men. There isn’t any gender-based anatomical difference that would differentially affect brass playing compared to other wind instruments. Mouthpiece pressure, tooth displacements, and so on. The intrathoracic pressures in double-reed playing can be higher than those for brass instruments—but there’s no barrier for women oboists and bassoonists and so on. So surely the rarity of women brass players just reflects the impact of entrenched cultural notions about what’s “feminine”—the tide of what’s culturally permissible for womanly playing.

DSM: So this is really about whether or not there’s such a thing as feminine musical style or styles. Stereotypes—like the notion that women’s music production should be fluid, should appear as playful regardless of how much exertion is involved, should be hyperexpressive and emotional and dialogical, should be pliant and enabling of others, should be acrobatic or balletic, should have great dramatic moments, should exude a certain jouissance, should be atmospheric, should refer to life events and relationships, should have wide and demonstrative ties between thematic elements, and should overtly draw attention to and emphasize the differences in the movements of women from those of men. The whole bit.

CMT: Well, yes. And how do these things replicate societal norms for gendered musical practices and experience gendered musical meanings? How do these affect women’s expectations and the specific practices and products of their composing and performing?

DSM: As you know, historically, relatively few women have been composers. Equally few are brass players. Shall we think about these correlations? Musicologists and sociologists have only in the last twenty years or so begun to study the situation, and there’s still a lot of work to be done (see Bowers & Tick, 1986; Citron, 1993; Marshall, 1993; Cook & Tsou, 1994; Halstead, 1997; Green, 1994, 1997).

CMT: Regarding primary music education, the majority of gender-related research has been on instrument choice (Bruce & Kemp, 1993; Green, 1997), with relatively little research so far on gender and music in relation to children’s compositions (Green, 1994, 1997; Charles, 2001). The children in Charles’ research carried on ideological assumptions that’re passed down through history about what girls/women and boys/men ought and ought not to do and what they’re like as musicians. She found that children have gendered expectations in relation to music and have strong ideas about the differences between girls’ and boys’ musical practices, even at an early age. She calls these ‘ideologies of gendered musical practices’. Charles found that in general children acted out gender roles in relation to compositional practices. But the most interesting findings were contradictions between the ways that children talked about things (their discourse) and how they operated in practice—contradictions they didn’t seem to notice themselves. And that is, in itself, a chink in the tyrannical cultural armor.

DSM: The teachers in Charles’ study did display many entrenched, gendered assumptions about boys’ and girls’ musical practices and products. And so there’s a summary in Charles’ paper—about girls’/women’s musical subculture—a concept of ‘female musical subculture’.

CMT: About 10 years ago, Lucy Green also worked out a model of gendered musical meaning and experience. Green argues that we must keep open some level of pure musical meaning that’s free from symbolic content. When heard, it’s affected by the values that exist outside the musical notes themselves. In relation to her model, Green says that ‘musical composition requires knowledge of the technology of voices, instruments or other sound sources, and this knowledge implies masculine delineation of mind which conflicts with patriarchal constructions of femininity’. She describes the concept as ‘twofold’ because it’s not only about the cognitive control over knowledge and technique but also because history—which is itself patriarchal—results in an assumption that the authorship behind a piece of music is male. The delineation of masculinity in the construction of musical meaning is associated with the public sphere—the mind, technology and non-conformity—whereas the delineation of femininity is associated with the private sphere—the body, emotions and conformity. It’s an excellent encapsulation of the preconceptions that girls and women in music face.

DSM: Yes, but boys are just as constrained and inscribed by cultural gender norms. Yes, they appear to have a more positive relationship to technology than did most girls, and this was in Charles’ study reinforced by boys’ choice of abstract compositional titles (‘Loud and Soft’; ‘Heavy and Light’; ‘Wooden and Metal’; and so on; see also Armstrong, 2001). But that also means that boys are culturally enjoined against being free to choose other things—they are not at liberty to choose less technically-bound, abstract, objectified, power-conscious forms. Charles finds that more girls chose compositional titles associated with emotion and nature rather than objectivity (‘Happy and Sad’; ‘Rain and Sunshine’). The findings strongly suggest that girls in their discourse and to some extent in their practice were acting as members of a female musical subculture. No surprise there. Discouraging but not surprising.

CMT: So girls reproduced traditional gendered musical practices and carried out ‘expected’ or ‘culturally constructed and sanctioned’ roles connected with the conventional private sphere that is reserved to them. The term ‘subculture’ rather than ‘culture’ is used because women’s experiences have been marginalized by male culture, and this leads to a location where commonalities emerge. Marginalization in turn discourages them, to a greater degree anyhow than boys. The concept of female musical subculture is used to explain women’s musical practice within the context of patriarchy and does not imply anything that is essentially female. It acknowledges the category of ‘woman’ as a social construction (see Nash, 1994) and is about women perpetuating traditional musical practices for social/historical reasons.

DSM: This suggestion of feminine perseverance and conformity bugs me. By ‘being girls’, by describing their music as soft and slow and having a preference for soft and slow music, they are ‘against themselves’—or so Charles interprets it. Thank goodness some music education programs are smashing these barriers.

CMT: In light of Citron’s recent writing, it could be said that the girls experience a sense of Other and ‘an anxiety of authorship’. Their sense of Other is another dimension to the concept of female musical subculture. McClary locates ‘semiotic codes’ in sonata form and argues that music participates ‘actively in the social organization of sexuality’ (1991, p. 9). Similarly, Citron identifies ‘codes of gendered representation’ in sonata form and maintains that the codes ‘tell us a lot about the representation of women and men in society, how ideologies affected how music itself was conceptualized and described, and how music had close ties with ideals and processes in society’ (1993, p. 137).

DSM: So children’s and teachers’ discourse on the musical practices of boys and girls in the primary classroom reflect views about gendered musical behavior that have been socially and historically constructed within the larger society. Microcosmic meaning drawing from macrocosmic meaning concerns larger totalities of history and humanity (where past and present connect) that are unifying patterns of beliefs. In the case of this study, in their discourse children defined their being and consciousness in relation to the social world, to others and to the system of beliefs and values that is already in existence about gender and gender and musical practice. This was then reinforced by teachers’ views about boys’ and girls’ composition.


CMT: Chamber music becomes just one more discursive field within which meanings are produced about social relations . . . the discourses will include and be drawn from those current in broader society.

DSM: Yes. Kids quickly learn the discourse of how to represent gendered musical practice that conforms to adult expectations—and this fits in with the wider social organization of music. But the taboos on gendered musical behavior are not so strong at younger ages. The discourse on musical practice has more power over their thinking than over the nature of the music they produce. Ideology quickly dominates their conscious thinking and affects their interpretation of what’s actually happening in their musical training. Would you contend that the social system of gender relations is both a cause and an effect?

CMT: Although imposed externally by outside social forces, it does arise out of self-imposed boundaries. But I think the evidence indicates that in their musical practice kids don’t consistently reproduce ideologies. Thank goodness! My niece, the iconoclast, and her supportive music teacher and parents. All things are in a continuous process of change and humanity is always, whenever it participates in social relationships, open to continual socialization. It’s only a matter of time, once kids are in secondary school, before the strength of ideology becomes greater and contradictions between musical discourse and practice decrease. Iconoclasm gets more difficult between age 14 and 20, say.

DSM: Another icon/iconoclast to tell your niece about is Ellen Zwilich. Ellen is the recipient of numerous prizes and honors, including the 1983 Pulitzer Prize in Music (the first woman ever to receive this coveted award), the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Chamber Music Prize, the Arturo Toscanini Music Critics Award, the Ernst von Dohnányi Citation, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, 4 Grammy nominations, and, among other distinctions, she’s been elected to the Florida Artists Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1995, she was named to the first Composer’s Chair in the history of Carnegie Hall, and she was designated Musical America’s Composer of the Year for 1999. Her chamber works have been commissioned by the Boston Musica Viva, the Abe Fortas Memorial Fund of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, 92nd Street Y and San Francisco Performances (Piano Trio), Chamber Music Northwest (Clarinet Quintet), the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (Double Quartet), and Carnegie Hall (String Quartet No. 2). Ellen was named to the Carnegie Hall Richard and Barbara Debs Composers’ Chair in 1995, the first such position in the Hall’s history. And, in addition to Alison Balsom and Amanda Pepping, you might hook your niece up with Marie Speziale or Susan Slaughter, another couple of excellent women brass artists.

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