Art Music and Popular Music

Recently, in writing of Leonard Bernstein, I mentioned Bernstein as a composer who bridged an admittedly arbitrary (but sociologically real) divide between “high art” music and “popular” music.

Bernstein was not the first or only composer to do this. On further reflection I realized that there at least three types of ways in which different composers have bridged or blended the “high” and the “popular.”

One important side issue is that there are at least two different ways of conceptualizing the popular, the popular in the sense of folk culture and music or in the sense of modern “pop culture” or “mass culture.” While this can be an important distinction, as I said, here it is a side issue. Whether thinking about folk or pop music, these musics can be incorporated or combined with art music in a number of ways.

First, some composers have drawn on popular music as source material for the production of art music. In some cases, this takes the relatively straightforward form of simply arranging or orchestrating folk or pop songs, such as with Berio’s “Folk Songs” or the arrangements and orchestrations of Duke Ellington songs by Luther Henderson, as performed by Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra on the album Classic Ellington. In other cases, the melodic and other content of folk or pop material might be thoroughly varied and transformed to produce art music with less clear (though not to say unclear) connection to the popular source material, e.g. some of Bartok’s use of Hungarian folk music, or the use of folk melodies in Dvorak’s Symphony #9 “From the New World.” Of course, the use of one sort of music as source material for another sort of music is a two-way street. Think of Malcolm McLaren’s “Madame Butterfly,” Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven,” or David Shire’s “Night on Disco Mountain” (the latter two from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack).

Second, some composers have also drawn on popular music as source material but in ways that present popular music in recognizable form but in collage with other material. Charles Ives was an early master of such music. For example, in “Central Park in the Dark,” written as a sort of musical evocation of a place, recognizable bits of popular tunes occasionally enter and fade upon the theme of the piece, just as one might catch momentary passages of music coming from neighboring saloons while on a stroll through the park in the early 20th century. (There’s one musical moment in particular where, through the indelible influences of other elements of pop culture, the recognizable strain of an early 20th century pop tune inevitably evokes for me the thought of the singing frog from the old, but later, Warner Brothers cartoons, “Hello, my baby, hello, my darling, hello, my ragtime gal…”) Some of contemporary composer Osvaldo Golijov’s music works in a similar vein, e.g. the use of Latin American folk music in his “St. Mark Passion.”

Third, some composers draw on popular and art music traditions (rather than particular pieces as source material) simultaneously to produce music that is ambiguously new popular music and new art music. This is where much of Bernstein’s work fits, most famously West Side Story (though I tend to think of his Mass in the prior category). Another example would be Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. (Today, though still popular in the sense that large numbers of people still enjoy them, the genres of Broadway-style showtunes and jazz are no longer typically thought of as “pop music,” and they tend to always occupy an ambiguous position between art and popular music. What Bernstein and Gershwin succeeded in doing that was a bit different was creating new music that was simultaneously taken seriously [even if not by everyone] as opera and/or art music and as popular music, as opposed to participating in a genre that today resides fuzzily between popular and art music.)

Leonard Bernstein and Meaning in Music

Leonard Bernstein has several pop culture faces. To some, including myself, who grew up in the 1980s, he was first off a name shouted out in an R.E.M. song, perhaps followed by the question, “Who the hell is Leonard Bernstein?” (I wonder how much of my liking of Bernstein’s music might be attributable to positive associations with the R.E.M. song.) To some (not mutually exclusive with the first group), he was an important mid-20th century American composer who bridged a gap between popular music and entertainment and the Western “high” art music tradition. To some, he was one of the greatest and/or most important conductors of the 20th century. He was also an important mid-century music educator, especially through the public television series of “Young People’s Concerts” he conducted with the New York Philharmonic.

I recently watched one of these “Young People’s Concerts” on DVD that focused on the theme of meaning in music, with Bernstein talking to the children in attendance at Carnegie Hall in between musical examples.

The issue of meaning in music is difficult. Music is capable of meaning – it affects us, which is the result of a semiotic experience, but what is communicated and what the effect of music is is not directly translateable into linguistic meaning. (Food and taste generally, as well as smells, present similar situations. Foods and smells are meaningful not just because of symbolic associations we might have with them, e.g. the Thanksgiving Turkey or the smell of a rose, but also because of the associations with the direct physical experiences of eating or smelling.)

Bernstein’s basic argument is something I agree with – the meaning of music, however hard it may be to define (precisely because it is non-linguistic) is intrinsic to the music and does not derive from anything extrinsic to it, such as a story or title associated with a piece. He argues that while we might associate stories or titles with music, such associations are essentially arbitrary.

He uses the example of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” symphony, specifically the movement titled “By the Brook.” Bernstein agrees that the music is capable of evoking a mental image of a gently babbling brook, but argues that the music could equally evoke “Swaying in a hammock” if differently titled. I agree, even if I find Beethoven’s “Backyard” symphony with its “Swaying in a Hammock” movement amusing but difficult to imagine having been written, but also immediately reacted that the music could not evoke “Riding on a train” or “Falling off a cliff.” Those titles and mental images just wouldn’t fit the music.

He gives another example using the “Great Gate of Kiev” movement of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.” He argues that the “strong chords” of the music fit that image, but could equally fit the flowing of the Mississippi river. In saying so, he’s almost making an argument that there is a necessary iconicity between musical elements and any non-musical elements potentially evoked by the music, but then undermines this by insisting that there’s no real connection between music and image. I agree that the “Great Gate of Kiev” music could evoke the Mississippi River, but I can’t imagine it evoking “By the Brook,” much less something like “Mowing the Lawn.”

The association between music and extra-musical meaning (if any) is arbitrary in the sense that any given piece of music could potentially be associated with a variety of images. “By the Brook” could evoke “Swaying in a hammock.” But association of music and extra-musical meaning is not purely arbitrary – the range of potential associations is defined in part by the range of phenomena that share some iconic relationship with one another, that is that have some clear and systematic relationship of similarity with one another.

Karlheinz Stockhausen, 1928 - 2007

The important German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen has died. Stockhausen, especially with his works of the 1950s through the 1970s, was one of the more influential composers of the past few decades, influencing music across multiple genres, including contemporary classical or art music, jazz, electronic musics and sampling of all sorts, rock and pop.

The following is from the New York Times:

“In “Song of the Youths” (1956), he used a multichannel montage of electronic sound with a recorded singing voice to create an image of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego staying alive in Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. In “Groups” (1957), he divided an orchestra into three ensembles that often played in different tempos and called to one another. (My inserted note: As with any creative and original person, the sorts of things Stockhausen did were not completely without precedent. Much of what he did is anticipated, albeit with a decidedly different flavor by the earlier 20th century American composer Charles Ives, e.g. the use of musical montage, or the division of orchestra into different ensembles playing at different tempos but relating to one another in his “Universe Symphony.”)
Such works answered the need felt in postwar Europe for reconstruction and logic, the logic to forestall any recurrence of war and genocide. They made Mr. Stockhausen a beacon to younger composers. Along with a few other musicians of his generation, notably Pierre Boulez and Luigi Nono, he had an enormous influence. Though performances of his works were never plentiful, his music was promoted by radio stations in Germany and abroad as well as by the record company Deutsche Grammophon, and he gave lectures all over the world.
By the 1960s his influence had reached rock musicians, and he was an international subject of acclaim and denigration.”

The following excerpts are from Bloomberg.com:

“Paul McCartney and John Lennon of the Beatles were Stockhausen fans, and the group honored the composer by using his image on the cover of its 1967 album, "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.'' The single "Strawberry Fields Forever'' showed Stockhausen's influence.
He inspired some of the music by Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, Miles Davis and Brian Eno. His groundbreaking electronic beats found echoes in long compositions by Can, Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream in the 1970s. Of classical composers, Igor Stravinsky was an admirer, though not an uncritical one. Stockhausen's music was compared to Arnold Schoenberg and Oliver Messiaen before him. He went on with Pierre Boulez to offer a vision of the future.
Stockhausen was seen by some as the greatest German composer since Wagner. To others, his music was empty and devoid of merit. Conductor Thomas Beecham was asked, ``Have you heard any Stockhausen,'' and said, ``No, but I believe I have trodden in some.''

“His breakthrough came in 1956, with the release of ``Gesang der Junglinge'' (Song of the Youths), which combined electronic sounds with the human voice, the Guardian newspaper said.
In 1960, he released "Kontakte'' (Contacts), one of the first compositions to mix live instrumentation with prerecorded material.”


For more on Stockhausen, see “Composer Karlheinz Stockhausen is Dead” from Yahoo News, “Karlheinz Stockhausen, Composer, Dies at 79” from the New York Times, and “Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pivotal German Composer, Dies at Age 79” From Bloomberg.com. I recently wrote of Stockhausen, albeit briefly, in my post, “Mythic Music: Stockhausen, Davis and Macero, Dub, Hip Hop, and Lévi-Strauss.”

Comments on Ben Ratliff’s Coltrane

I’ve been reading and enjoying the recent book by Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. I’m currently about halfway through it and have already found a number of interesting points and had several interesting conversations with my partner, Reginald Shepherd, prompted by quotations from the book or points made by Ratliff.

I was both amused and “thought-provoked” (we often speak of something provoking thought without really have a conventional passive form construction to accompany it – and it was this that I experienced – whereas when we speak of being provoked by something, the implication is generally that it is irritation, and not thought, that has been so provoked) by the following passages from Ratliff’s book describing John Coltrane’s earliest recording session, an amateur session from 1946 while he was in the navy in Hawaii, with Coltrane alongside a few members of a navy band, the Melody Masters, almost ten years before Coltrane rose to any kind of serious prominence (or promise) in jazz circles. Ratliff writes:

“One tune from that amateur session was Tadd Dameron’s ‘Hot House,’ a song that later became known as one of the great compositions of early bebop. ‘Hot House’ is a 32-bar song that first borrows from the chord changes of the standard ‘What Is This Thing Called Love?’ before cleverly altering them. And the seamen try an effortful replication of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker’s version of the tune, cut a year earlier – except that the navy trumpeter doesn’t solo, as Gillespie did.
“Instead, Coltrane does. In fact, Coltrane, on alto saxophone, takes the only solo – a hideous, squeaking, lurching thing. But perhaps it didn’t matter to the thoroughly preprofessional Melody Masters, because Coltrane had met Bird.
“Some jazz musicians are off and running at nineteen – Charlie Christian, Johnny Griffin, Art Pepper, Clifford Brown, Sarah Vaughn. John Coltrane was not.”

Ratliff is not out here to denigrate Coltrane. On the contrary, Ratliff clearly (and correctly) sees Coltrane as a seminal figure in jazz and music history who was a sort of genius. (One of the things I like and respect about this book is that it’s neither got an ax to grind against Coltrane or any of his contemporaries – it’s not the sort of work that sees Coltrane’s entire oeuvre as one big hideous, squeaking, lurching thing [see “Vitriol and Jazz”], not is it hagiography – he’s critical and doesn’t count every note to have exited Coltrane’s horn equally golden.)

What Ratliff does here instead is clarify what sort of artistic development Coltrane underwent. Far from being a prodigy who burst onto the scene, Coltrane practiced prodigiously and gradually and organically over a long period. Importantly, this continual development of his talent, skill, and expression never stopped until his death, and as Ratliff argues, the development in Coltrane’s music from 1957 until his early death in 1967 is unparalleled by any completely analogous set of developments over a similar period in the creative expression of any other jazz musician. (Frankly, I draw a blank when trying to come up with any artist in any genre with a ten year period quite like Coltrane in 1957-1967.)

What Ratliff’s discussion prompted me to think about is the nature of talent, genius, and creative expression. In contrasting Coltrane’s gradual and organic development over long stretches of time with the sort of musician who is “off and running at nineteen,” Ratliff delineates two creative types (two types of geniuses in the case of those whose talent is great) with regard to the process of acquiring or having talent, those like Clifford Brown whose talent bloomed quite early, and those, like Coltrane, who only very slowly matured and emerged as a talent of great note. (Brown and Coltrane are clearly extreme cases here, with most creative talents falling somewhere on a continuum in between. I also don’t intend at all to imply that Brown’s genius sprung from nothing, as it clearly came from a lot of hard work on his part, but there’s also plenty of evidence to indicate Coltrane practiced about as hard as it would be possible to practice for a very long period before his promise began to emerge.)

Something I was prompted to think about by Ratliff’s discussion, but which is not the thrust of his arguments is that there are different sorts of talent (and genius) in terms of one’s approach to creative expression. There are also talents for different sorts of things (e.g. musical talent, talent for visual art, talent for thinking mathematically or verbally, etc.), but what I have in mind here are approaches to creative expression and ways of acquiring talent for expression that cut across the particular fields of creative expression, though I’ll use jazz examples to illustrate.

Two sorts of talent, two approaches to creative expression (without making any claim that these are by any means the only two sorts) correspond at least roughly to Lévi-Strauss’ distinction between bricoleur and engineer, between “mythic” and “scientific” thinking. (See also “Mythic Music.”)

The work of Miles Davis and Coltrane can illustrate.

Davis worked largely through assemblage. Over the course of his career as band leader, the nature of the music put out by his band continually changed, often heading in unexpected directions. (While probably no one could have predicted late Coltrane music like that found on albums such as Interstellar Space or Live in Japan from 1957’s Blue Train, from album to album, period to period, there was near continuous development in a direction unpredictable from the start but nonetheless in a direction. Davis’ music sometimes moved in startling directions after band changes; something like Bitches Brew was probably not just unpredictable from ten years earlier, but from just a couple years earlier in Davis’ career.) This is related to the way in which Davis often related to his bands over the years, choosing musicians who were on the cusp of new developments who might take the music in new directions and allowing them remarkable free reign, often offering his musicians little guidance. This is not to suggest Davis had no vision for his work, but that the vision consisted of assembling pieces that could create unpredictable results. As I discussed in the “Mythic Music” post, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, he took this creation through assemblage a step further (in the studio that is, not live where this would have been impossible), having the band create recordings of material that was used solely as raw material for he and producer Teo Macero to assemble a musical bricolage from.

Coltrane was much more concerned with musical theory and implementing music that expressed his concerns with harmony, rhythm, etc. (not that Davis was unaware of theory, but Coltrane was especially concerned with this as a component of expression). This is also not to suggest that Coltrane’s music was some sort of pure expression of some abstract idea either, nor that the music came solely from him. Far from it. Like Davis, or any artist, Coltrane drew ideas from all around himself, but much more so than someone like Davis, whose expression was working in a different sort of way, he tended to thoroughly assimilate all those influences, incorporate it thoroughly into a distinct “Coltrane sound.”

Ratliff writes (p. 119):

“… one of the most useful and overriding ways to comprehend the arc of Coltrane’s work, one that contains significance for jazz now, is to notice how much he could use of what was going on around him in music. He was hawklike toward arrivals to his world, immediately curious about how they could serve his own ends, and how he could serve theirs. Every time a jazz musician drifted into New York and began impressing people, every time he encountered a musician with a particular technique, system, or theory, every time a new kind of foreign music was being listened to by others in the scene, Coltrane wanted to know about it; he absorbed the foreign bodies, and tried to find a place for them in his own music. He learned as much as he could of the life around him and behind him, and retained only what best suited him, such that you usually couldn’t tell what he had been drinking up.”

Coltrane’s approach seems a bit like Star Trek’s Borg, assimilating all, gleaning what is unique and useful, but remaining fundamentally the Borg – except that in Coltrane’s case, that’s a good thing.

Mythic Music: Stockhausen, Davis and Macero, Dub, Hip Hop, and Lévi-Strauss

It’s not particularly news to say that much contemporary music, popular or otherwise, is constructed through assemblage, put together from pre-existing pieces in what Lévi-Strauss called bricolage (and which he associated especially with mythic rather than scientific thinking) – creating something new out of assorted odds and ends of things already there. This is especially clear with hip hop and its heavy use of sampling previously existing music and sounds, though the use of sampling and re-mixing is not confined to that genre.

To say this is to neither praise nor criticize – it is simply to make a comment on a key quality of much if not most contemporary music. Such musical bricolage can be highly creative (to pick just one example I’m fond of, System of a Down frontman Serj Tankian’s “Bird of Paradise (Gone)” from Bird Up – the Charlie Parker Remix Project uses Parker’s “Bird of Paradise” and other musical odds and ends as source material for something that’s really less a remix than a truly new piece of music), tedious (with many hip hop and pop songs, the most interesting thing is trying to remember which previous bland pop song it is that’s being so obviously sampled), and/or an attempt by record labels to cash in on back catalogue material with remix projects (the Bird Up album I mention above is overall pretty good – but it’s also a crass attempt by Savoy Jazz to make more money from a catalogue that’s been marketed many times over).

Musical bricolage didn’t start with hip hop. One of the key antecedents of remixing and sampling in hip hop is Dub, which in the 1970s essentially involved reformulating the elements, i.e. early remixing, of reggae songs.

One of the earliest instances of music produced through bricolage in a popular genre was the work of Miles Davis and producer Teo Macero on albums like Bitches Brew and A Tribute to Jack Johnson. What they did on these albums in the late 1960s and very early 1970s was, of course, not completely unprecedented. Structurally, what they did was anticipated by the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen – an influence Davis explicitly acknowledged at the time.

What made their work at the time quite different from most everything else done in jazz up until that point was the way in which the final songs appearing on the albums were constructed from multiple takes of different tracks recorded in the studio (as opposed to the standard jazz practice of releasing whole takes, even if multiple takes of a song were recorded, with the best take being the one released).

Even before this, there had been much use of overdubbing in the production of pop and rock recording. Also, in classical music there had been instances of taped material being incorporated alongside conventional instruments in the performance of a musical work. What Stockhausen and Davis and Macero were doing was structurally a bit different.

Conventional overdubbing allows for a finished recording to be constructed from elements recorded in separate instances. However, this isn’t bricolage. The piece of music is pre-planned, a structure is designed and then carried out – i.e. this is an instance of “engineering” (to invoke Lévi-Strauss’ contrast between the engineer/scientific thought and the bricoleur/mythic thought). Overdubbing simply allows a designed structure to be implemented by breaking a task down into constituent parts (a classic “scientific” maneuver) before putting each in its proper place. Earlier classical pieces that incorporated taped material tended to be of the same sort of “engineered” music.

What was different with Davis recordings beginning in the late 1960s was that the tracks that were recorded were not constituent parts of a designed piece. Instead they were freely improvised works in their own right that were recorded with the sole intent of serving as raw material (something that has by no means kept Columbia records from cashing in on all these recordings by releasing them recently in a series of massive box sets – and frankly, much of the material is well worth listening to in its own right, even if it was never intended for release as is), as previously existing odds and ends out of which finished songs were constructed out of bits and pieces from here and there in a true process of bricolage. (If one wanted to qualify, this could be called engineered bricolage, insofar as the oddments for assembly were themselves intentionally designed to serve as such, unlike the found odds and ends of dub producers or more recent remixers.)

There are numerous partial examples of musical bricolage from earlier periods. That’s essentially what musical quotation is, but such wholesale bricolage, where entire works are constructed of previously existing material is fairly new in the history of Western music.

In a variety of his works, Lévi-Strauss drew parallels between the structure of myth and music. One parallel is the co-dependence of the synchronic and diachronic in both myth and music. Myth narratives and musical pieces unfold through time, and without this diachronic element, there is no narrative, whether mythic or musical, but all the while, the experience of the unfolding chain of events is filtered through synchronic structure – there is not simply a random unfolding of events, but things happening in relation to what has happened prior and expectations of what will happen now and in the future, without which there is only noise.

At the same time, Lévi-Strauss strongly associated mythic thought with bricolage. Mythic thinking involves understanding the world through taking the already there and reassembling it. (He was also rightly aware that even at our most “scientific,” we never impose structure on the world without constraint or without precedent.) But here (until recently, at least) a full parallel with music breaks down. For several centuries, western music, especially western art music, worked in an engineering mode. For example, think about the sometimes mechanistically imposed structure of canon or sonata form, or later serialism.

In Myth and Meaning, Lévi-Strauss made an interesting conjecture. He noted that western art music rose to prominence at roughly the same time that mythic thinking was more and more giving way to scientific thinking in scholarship and western discourse generally. He conjectured that some of the organization of experience typical of mythic thinking was transposed onto thinking through music with its new prominence.

Regardless of the value of that conjecture (I’m not sure how to go about proving it one way or another), I think it’s important to note that music and myth are structurally similar in some ways (e.g. the organization of the experience of time), but until recently, the quality of bricolage so typical of myth has not been characteristic of music. What’s new about Stockhausen, Davis’ and Macero’s experiments in the late 1960s and 1970s, dub, and hip hop is the creation of music in a fully mythic mode.

Mann and Wagner, Art and Culture

I was intrigued by a recent essay by Wolfgang Schneider on Sign and Sight, “Mann and his Musical Demons.” The following is a quotation from Schneider’s essay:

“Nazism used the dominant Wagnerian culture as a gateway into the educated bourgeois classes. Thomas Mann's major essay "The Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner" was an attempt to offer an alternative to the official Bayreuth version of Wagner – as "patron saint of the what-is-German solipsism." Mann tried to take an artistic, psychological, cosmopolitan view of the composer.
“Words like "dilettantism" were enough to shake up the Wagner establishment. In March 1933, there was a "Protest of the Wagner City Munich" in which Thomas Mann was accused of muddying the reputation of "upright German cultural giants." It was initiated by Bruno Walter's successor Hans Knappertsbuch and was signed – among others – by Hans Pfitzner and Richard Strauss. It was Munich's cultural bourgeois and not the Nazi authorities that drove Thomas Mann out of Germany (and that in the name of Wagner!) The Nazis praise the "folk's will" with sardonic joy. The "national Ex-communication" was a mortifying trauma, the worst that the writer ever experienced from the German public, and, like the story of Bruno Walter, a significant motivation for "Doctor Faustus," the novel on the connection between music and politics.
“Music, more than any other art form, served the cultural image of the Nazis. The Bayreuth Festival was a showcase for the Third Reich. Concerts by Wilhelm Furtwängler reached listeners all over the world. Even Thomas Mann the emigrant clung to his radio although not without qualms: "we shouldn't have listened, shouldn't have loaned our ears to the swindle," he wrote in his journal after a broadcast of "Lohengrin" in 1936. For him, Wilhelm Furtwängler was the most powerful example of an artist who thought he could maintain his culture in a political vacuum. And the embodiment of German musical arrogance, expressed in comments such as "a real symphony" has "never been written by a non-German."”

The addendum I would add is this. While music (Wagner in particular) and culture may be inextricably linked for German culture, at least through the Nazi era, as Mann is essentially arguing, though he seems to want that to not be the case, the same need not be and is not true for others.

For Germans in the 1930s and 1940s, Wagner may well have been inextricably tied to a whole slew of associations now viewed as unpalatable by most (and viewed so by at least some Germans like Mann at the time), but as something with its own objective qualities that can be experienced in any number of sociohistorical contexts (and so independently of any specific context), art is not determined forever by a specific context of its creation (the mid-to-late19th century for Wagner) and/or use (the Nazi use of Wagner).

I’m aware of Wagner’s anti-Semitism, aware of Nazism’s primitivism and use of Wagner, Orff, and other composers’ music to help ground an aural image of German nationality, aware of the potential for the Nibelungen to serve as a cipher for Jews, but my awareness of these things is an awareness of the historical contexts of 19th and early-to-mid 20th century Germany. They’re not part of my experiential repertoire when experiencing the Ring operas, but more something I’m aware of at an historical distance.

For me, or for anyone else without the direct cultural ties of Wagner’s era or the Nazi era, it’s a story about a ring, love, heroes, redemption, and dwarves with a weakness for gold and power. These are things that are not inherently anti-Semitic or inherently fascist. For example, all these things are pretty similarly presented in Tolkien’s Ring series.

It’s one thing to say that Wagner clearly intended the Nibelungen to serve as cipher for Jews (or that the Nazis utilized certain musical works in effective ways to present and ground certain conceptions of the nation). It’s quite another to say that the Nibelungen are clearly a cipher for Jews (or that the music of Wagner, Orff, Strauss, etc., is inevitably tied to fascist conceptions of the nation). I see no reason to allow Wagner (much less the Nazis) to determine the ultimate meaning of the operas just because he wrote them. Once created, a work of art has a concrete existence as independent of its creator as of any other individual. Wagner was a brilliant composer, but otherwise a repulsive individual with repulsive views not worth being taken seriously.

Ironically, to insist too hard on the anti-Semitism of the Ring operas is to unwittingly slip into anti-Semitism in the guise of combating it. It’s worth remembering that the Nibelungen could serve as cipher for Jews in certain cultural and historical contexts, as well as the other unsavory associations with Wagner’s music that held in certain specific contexts. But for any variety of other contexts, the only way it can be clearly the case that the Nibelungen are a stand-in for Jews and that the Ring is anti-Semitic is by assuming that Jews really are driven by lust for gold and power.

Max Roach, 1924 - 2007

It’s a sad fact that those jazz greats from the period of the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s who did not die tragically young for any number of reasons (such as Charlie Parker, Clifford Brown, and John Coltrane each did) are now aging, with most in their 80s. As a result, over the past few years we have seen several legendary figures pass away one by one. Max Roach, one of the greatest drummers of all time, is the latest.

Roach is most associated with that period of jazz music history from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s. It’s hard to say this was the golden era of jazz, for there was certainly great, wonderful jazz both before and after, but it was definitely a golden era for the music, a period associated with performers worthy of their legendary status. There were a variety of jazz styles during the period, “bebop,” “cool jazz,” “hard bop,” “free jazz,” etc., but there was a loose unity of style as well (cool and hard bop styles were direct and clear developments from bebop, and even with free jazz, there is continuity both in the senses that most free players were well grounded in bebop related styles and the freeing up of the parameters for individual improvisation begun with bebop was magnified in the free style). I would say that this period was the golden era for the small acoustic jazz combo (as opposed to the earlier dominance of big band swing or later experiments with electric instruments and fusion and even acoustic groups directly or indirectly influenced by those experiments).

Max Roach was an integral part of jazz music and history during that two decade period (I don’t intend to slight anything he did later, but it is the case that he was a driving force in the mainstream of jazz mainly during the two decade period under discussion).

Among the highlights of his career:

In the mid- to late 1940s, as part of the bebop scene he was as responsible as any drummer for introducing complex polyrhythm on top of straightahead 4/4 time, transforming the drumkit from a time keeper into simultaneously a time keeper and a frontline instrument. He was part of many classic bebop recordings alongside other legends like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, including “Disorder at the Border,” “Ko-Ko,” “Anthropology,” “Scrapple from the Apple,” and “Now’s the Time.”

In 1949 and 1950, he was a major part of the creation of the “cool jazz” sound, participating in the Miles Davis nonet recording sessions, first released on 78 rpm records, that were ultimately collected as the famous Birth of the Cool album a few years later.

In 1953, he participated in one of the most famous jazz concert recordings of all time as a member of “The Quintet” in Jazz at Massey Hall, alongside Gillespie on trumpet, Parker on alto sax, Bud Powell on piano, and Charles Mingus on bass. I wouldn’t claim this as one of the most important jazz concerts of all time – this wasn’t one of those moments that changed music, no radically new innovation was introduced, or anything of that sort – instead it’s five established and very accomplished musicians playing some damn fine music.

In the mid-1950s, Roach played in one of the best hard bop combos, Brown and Roach, Inc. The “Brown” was the talented trumpeter Clifford Brown, who died far too young in a car accident in 1956. Given Brown’s untimely death, the group didn’t record much, but what they left behind is well worth a listen, especially the Roach original “Mildama” and their version of the standard “I get a kick out of you.”

In 1962, he participated in a piano trio recording with Duke Ellington and Mingus, producing the Duke Ellington Money Jungle album. (15 tracks were recorded in a single day – I’m continuously amazed when reading jazz album liner notes with how quickly massive numbers of tracks would be recorded by jazz musicians in the 1950s and 1960s. By the way, this album was part of one of the busiest months in the career of Ellington. Within a span of about a month, he recorded this album with Roach and Mingus, and the Duke Ellington meets Coleman Hawkins and Duke Ellington and John Coltrane albums.) Money Jungle could be described as the closest Ellington ever got to free jazz – and on some tracks that’s actually pretty close.

Just a bit earlier, in 1960, Roach had already forayed into free jazz territory with his important album We Insist!: Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite (an album featuring, among others Booker Little, Coleman Hawkins, Olatunji, and Abbey Lincoln). This recording attempted to unify the emphases on freedom in jazz improvisation and in the demands of the civil rights movement.

An obituary of Roach can be accessed here.

Opera in America

I’ve just encountered an engaging article on “America’s Opera Boom” by Jonathan Leaf. For anyone interested in opera or the arts generally, there’s a lot of interesting information in Leaf’s article, and also some encouraging news about opera in America.

Concerning the growth of opera companies and a surprisingly healthy audience size, Leaf writes:

“The U.S. now has 125 professional opera companies, 60 percent of them launched since 1970, according to the trade group OPERA America. The U.S. has more opera companies than Germany and nearly twice as many as Italy. In the most comprehensive recent study, the National Endowment for the Arts found that between 1982 and 2002, total attendance at live opera performances grew 46 percent.
“Annual admissions are now estimated at 20 million, roughly the same attendance as NFL football games (22 million, including playoffs, in 2006–07). In part, this reflects a shift toward seeing opera domestically. “Foreign opera destinations like Salzburg and Glyndebourne are more expensive, and more Americans are staying home—and probably feeling safer for it,” says Richard Gaddes, general director of the Santa Fe Opera in New Mexico.”

Obviously this is not to suggest that opera rivals professional sports in popularity in the U.S., for if you include television viewing, the NFL’s audience dwarfs that of opera, but nonetheless, I was pleasantly surprised to see just how many people do attend live opera. Leaf does point out elsewhere in the article that this doesn’t mean opera makes big money – it doesn’t – but most opera companies in the U.S. are able to find donors (who are mostly passionate about opera) to make ends meet despite relatively meager state support in most U.S. contexts.

In some of the more interesting discussion in the essay, Leaf points out that it’s not just opera in general that’s popular but new opera, and that the cultivation of new opera in America is happening largely outside of New York. Here is Leaf:

“On the morning I meet them, Smith and Johnson are on a high, savoring a recent rave review from the Los Angeles Times for their production of a new opera by Ricky Ian Gordon based on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The Minnesota Opera’s successful introduction of new works is characteristic of a wider pattern. Almost all of the most acclaimed recent operas have been introduced outside New York. John Adams’s Nixon in China was first presented by the Houston Grand Opera, Tobias Picker’s Emmeline by Santa Fe, Kirke Mechem’s Tartuffe by San Francisco. The last, a gorgeous, touching, and amusing opera, has had over 300 productions in six countries since its premiere in 1980.
“Stefania de Kenessey, a highly regarded new composer working on an opera based on Tom Wolfe’s novel about Wall Street, Bonfire of the Vanities—with Wolfe’s enthusiastic encouragement—says that companies outside New York can be easier to work with. “The regional companies usually plan out their schedules three to four years in advance, while the Met plans out about eight years ahead. That means the regionals can be more flexible in picking new works and can more easily spot and take advantage of musical trends.”

From a later portion of the text:

“This trend toward doing new works appears to be broadening. According to Santa Fe’s Gaddes, 'The repertory of opera companies has changed [since] 10 or 15 years ago. It’s become more adventurous and more contemporary.' In many cases, the premieres of new or unfamiliar productions are selling better than the repertory staples like Verdi’s La Traviata. The Minnesota Opera notes that it sold more than 98 percent of the tickets for The Grapes of Wrath, and St. Louis is proud of its sellout of an opera by David Carlson based on Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. This summer’s Santa Fe program includes the American premiere of Chinese contemporary composer Tan Dun’s Tea: Mirror of the Soul, sung in English, and three other new productions.”

Leaf also has an interesting discussion of what makes New York’s Met unique, where this uniqueness is in some ways advantageous, in some ways disadvantageous, to opera in New York:

“The Met deserves its reputation, with the world’s best singers, a superb orchestra, and lavish spectacle. Last year, the Met, under its new general manager, Peter Gelb, inaugurated high-definition video presentations of several of its operas in movie theaters around the U.S., Canada, Japan, and Europe. But in other respects, the Met is ill-suited to assume a tutelary role. Few of today’s top singers first made their names on its stage, and the Met’s immense size works against both dramatic effect and subtle and refined singing.
“The Met is designed to hold an audience of nearly 4,000 in a structure with five ascending tiers and broad rows of seats. By contrast, La Scala in Milan has 2,000 seats; the Vienna State Opera, 1,700; and the State Opera in Berlin, 1,300. These more conventional operatic theaters, which can feel almost like drawing rooms, have an intimacy that the Met cannot come close to matching.
“Into the Met’s vast space, singers must project—without amplification—across a stage extending 80 feet back, 103 feet across, and 110 feet up to the rigging. The result is a preference in New York for singers with gargantuan, if sometimes metallic, voices. Not only can the hall’s scale dwarf the singers and the story, but it can damage young voices.”

Jazz is not America's Classical Music

I’ve encountered many who are champions of jazz who are fond to say that “Jazz is America’s Classical Music.”

The main reason for this is to stake a claim that jazz is just as worthy of aesthetic contemplation and every bit as serious a “high art” as classical music. For much of the twentieth century most saw classical music as clearly “high art” while jazz was just as clearly “low art.” Even today, when jazz is not so regarded (ironically in large part because it’s not popular entertainment music), classical tends to carry more prestige.

Race is involved as well. One major reason why jazz carried lower prestige, at least through the mid-twentieth century, was because of the common perception of jazz as black music (see my earlier post, “Art, Black Art, and Seriousness in Bebop”).

To claim jazz as America’s classical music is to argue that jazz is a distinctly American form of art music (and it is that – or at least was – it’s no longer so specifically American), to place it on the same aesthetic level as European classical music, and to make a case for the centrality of race and black experiences in American art and life in general.

Jazz and classical do have some things in common. They both tend to be associated with high standards of performance to a greater extent than with “popular” genres. Classical is generally regarded as “art music,” as has jazz for at least the past several decades. (All music is art in the sense that it involves the production of an existing object with distinct physical [sound waves] and aesthetic qualities. Jazz and Classical are “art music” in the sense that sociologically they tend to be performed in contexts where their aesthetic qualities are overtly emphasized – though also always in contexts shaped in important ways by political, economic, and other social factors.) Both have a generally recognized canon of composers and performers (something obviously true of some other genres as well).

There is an American Classical Music – And it’s not Jazz

Despite the similarities, there are other clear differences. Both “Classical” and “Jazz” can be difficult to define (and adding to the ambiguity, both terms can be used to refer to either the music of a specific period of time [as in “Baroque,” “Classical,” “Romantic,” etc., and “Jazz,” “Swing,” “Bebop,” etc.] or to broadly defined genres persisting over long stretches of time) – and that’s not my main goal here. Suffice it to say that most have a general sense of what falls into either genre (there are exceptions, e.g. is Terry Riley’s In C classical, jazz, or something else; is Miles Davis’ and Gil Evans’ version of “Concierto de Aranjuez” on the Sketches of Spain album jazz or classical; is Porgy and Bess jazz, classical, opera, or a “musical” – or does it depend on the specific performance?), so I want to focus not so much on providing absolute definition as presenting one or two important distinctions.

Jazz has from its beginnings been a music that emphasizes improvisation. The degree of improvisation varies considerably. In some cases, only a soloist improvises and within highly circumscribed limits, while in others the whole ensemble might simultaneously improvise, but whether in the form of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Sevens or Ornette Coleman’s free jazz, improvisation has been central to the music.

Jazz has been a hybrid genre from the start, drawing on multiple pre-existing musical traditions (something true of any genre really – but jazz’s hybridity is an important part of many people’s conception of the genre). Two of the most important sources for the jazz tradition were ragtime and the blues, with the result being that most jazz shares with ragtime syncopation and a playfulness with rhythm, and often draws on the pentatonic scales of blues.

It would be a mistake to argue that syncopation, much less experimentation with rhythm generally, are not part of classical music. Just think of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, or much of Ravel’s work, or even the much earlier piano works of Chopin, where the left and right hands often have slightly offset rhythms. But syncopation is a much more crucial component of jazz – what makes the music “swing,” and the eight tones of each major and minor key or the twelve tone rows of serial music are quite different from pentatonic blues or jazz. Finally, while improvisation was often emphasized in the Baroque, from the mid-18th century until quite recently, improvisation was essentially absent from classical music.

There is an American classical musical tradition that includes important composers such as Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, John Cage, Philip Glass, Jennifer Higdon and many, many others.

To refer to jazz as “America’s Classical Music” does two unfortunate things. First, it misconstrues the nature of jazz and misrecognizes what’s unique and important about it. Second, it marginalizes America’s tradition of actual classical music.

Jazz Doesn’t Need to Be America’s Classical Music

As I said earlier, to claim jazz as America’s classical music is to argue that jazz is a distinctly American form of art music, to place it on the same aesthetic level as European classical music, and to make a case for the centrality of race and black experiences in American art and life in general.

I endorse each of these basic claims. Jazz is a distinctly American form of art music, though one distinct from classical music. It does have the same aesthetic worth as classical music, without having to be classical music (and thus losing what makes jazz jazz – this is also to say that when it comes to aesthetic appreciation, I see no reason why jazz and classical can’t actually be separate but equal). Given the centrality of black musicians in the history of this distinct art music, jazz does mark the centrality of race and especially of black experiences in American art and life in general.

None of these claims, though, depends on claiming that jazz is classical – if anything, such claims distort and undermine the realities of jazz.

The Experience of Live Music

I’ve written in two previous posts about the experience of music, especially live performance and including how the experience of music or listening compares with other art forms, e.g. the experiences of visual art through looking or of literature through reading (see “Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and the Experience of Art [Musical and Visual]”
and “Reading, Looking, Listening”).

About a week ago I had the pleasure of witnessing a phenomenal performance of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. In light of that experience, I’d like to raise two points for discussion as an addendum to those earlier posts.

Watching Music

Obviously music per se can’t be watched – it’s comprised of sound. But the physical performance of the music by live musicians can be. The theatricality of a rock show is as much about the visual performance of the band, a light show, etc. While not typically involving things like laser light shows, watching the musicians play is an important component of experiencing live jazz or classical music or any other music.

One of the most engaging aspects of watching live music is the way that visual clues can cue you in to subtle aspects of the music otherwise not noticed. In Carmina Burana, in addition to the full orchestra and chorus, there are three vocal soloists: a soprano, tenor, and baritone. The tenor only sings one song (a lament for a cooked swan), and in the case of this song, the singer is accompanied primarily by the viola section. Before seeing the piece live, I had actually not particularly noticed the violas nor the subtle beauty of the music being played in that section of the music. I’m not sure why I had never noticed before – maybe I’ve always just focused in on the tenor’s voice in that song, but it was initially seeing the physical actions of the violists’ bowing (while most of the rest of the orchestra sat still) that made me focus my attention on that component of the music. For me, and I think for most music lovers, this aspect of musical experience is one of the main reasons and joys to experiencing music live.

Hearing Live Music in Relation to Recorded Music

As Claude Lévi-Strauss discussed in the “Overture” section of The Raw and the Cooked (and as I discussed in my essay “Reflections on Meaning and Myth: Claude Lévi-Strauss Revisited,” Anthropos, 2005, V. 100: 221 – 228), music offers an experience that is simultaneously diachronic and synchronic. It unfolds through time (hence the diachronic) – music is largely about our experience of time – but it is simultaneously experienced as if all at once (hence the synchronic) in the sense that what is experienced at any moment is experienced in relation to the memory of what has gone before and the anticipation that sets up about the still unfolding music – with much of the joy of the experience of music coming from the way in which the music meets our expectation or does not and surprises us. It is through this combination of diachronic and synchronic experience that music actively engages the mind.

Over the past century of so, recordings have upped the ante. Before the prevalence of recorded music, the only way to experience music was via live performance. This limited (though it did not eliminate – especially in the case of “folk” genres that would have been more familiar to most people) the ability of people to “know” the piece of music being played before its performance. It’s now possible to enter into a live performance of most music of any genre with a thorough knowledge of what that music usually sounds like.

This has had multiple effects. Many histories of classical music that I have read indicate that one effect of this has been to raise the expectations of audiences and to raise performance standards for musicians and orchestras. When avid (and even not so avid in the case of particularly famous pieces of music) fans enter the performance with a thorough sense of how the music is “supposed to” sound, the bar is raised. In general, this is a good thing, though it might also increase the chances of disappointment from perfectly adequate performances that might simply not reach the highest pinnacles of performance of the last century.

Some worry that the prevalence of recording has homogenized performance. This is to some extent true, e.g. distinct national styles of instrumental or vocal performance are much less in evidence in classical music than was true several decades ago. At the same time, to some extent the presence of so many recordings of repertoire pieces encourages diversity of interpretation. If you’re going to record yet another interpretation of Carmina Burana at this point, you ought to present something new in the piece. An example of this is Simon Rattle’s recent recording of the piece – his pacing to me seems a bit too fast for the work to enjoy listening to too often, but he definitely presents a distinct interpretation the distinctiveness of which would be apparent to most people even casually familiar with the work.

Entering the experience already familiar with multiple recordings of Carmina Burana, I had high standards for the piece (which were abundantly met). Further, though, having the memory of pre-existing experiences with the piece (and with the Atlanta Symphony under Robert Spano and with other performances of other pieces I’ve experienced by this symphony), my experience and pleasure was heightened by the recognition of particular aspects of interpretation that made this particular performance distinct. In this case (as with the performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring I enjoyed earlier this spring), in certain movements the percussion was prominently emphasized. (Both Carmina Burana and The Rite of Spring are highly percussive in places in any interpretation, but this was more prominent than in most.) As a result, I noticed certain percussive elements, e.g. the almost machine-gun-like snare drum in the early moments of the piece, that I’d never particularly noticed before – and that experience now informs each further experience of the piece, whether live or recorded.

Art, Black Art, and Seriousness in Bebop

In my previous post ("Vitriol and Jazz"), I addressed among other things what I see as inaccurate characterizations of bebop and later jazz in Clive James’ recent book Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts.

At the same time, James does have some interesting arguments about the motivations behind the music of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and other bebop musicians during the 1940s.

James rightly points out that these musicians were concerned with producing music that could be taken seriously as art. Also, given the realities of race in America at the time, and given the perception at the time and now of jazz as “black music,” they were also concerned to produce a legitimate black art. James sees all of this as important, good, and laudable.

James deals adeptly with something that requires a certain sensitivity and care. On the one hand, jazz is black music in the sense that historically the vast majority of prominent jazz musicians have been black, and the individuals who most profoundly shaped and transformed the music have been almost exclusively black. My own highly partial (in both senses of the word) list would include Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman. There have been prominent and important white jazzmen (and it has been mostly men’s music) – Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman, Dave Brubeck, and Jaco Pastorius just to get started – but the names on the second list don’t carry quite the same historic weight as those on the first. On the other hand, jazz has no color. After all, it’s comprised of sound. As James points out, Armstrong recognized Beiderbecke not as a good white trumpet player, but simply as a good trumpet player. There’s nothing inherently racial about the music itself – and to go that route leads to a reduction of art to racial essentialism and stereotype.

So, jazz has been simultaneously black music in a sociological or historical sense and without essential or inherent basis in race in an ontological sense. It’s easy to over- or under-emphasize either point.

To get back to an earlier point, James rightly points out that among the concerns of Parker, Gillespie, et al. was to produce music that was art and music that was black art. James is ambivalent about the results. He sees the price of legitimacy as art being a seriousness to the music, with a loss of joy and spontaneity.

I have two reactions to this. The first was a major topic of my previous post. I don’t think this accurately characterizes bebop. While Parker, Gillespie, and others were clearly serious about making music, this doesn’t mean they did so without a sense of humor and that their music is all work and no play. Again, song titles like “Scrapple from the Apple” or “Disorder at the Border” should tip us off, and if that’s not enough, listen to the music. As I’ve written about before (see "Free Jazz and the End of the History of Jazz" and "The End of the History of Music"), one of the qualities of bebop, especially embodied in a soloist the caliber of Parker, is that the individual soloist, by improvising using the notes of the chord changes rather than embellishing and varying a more structured melody, is even more freed in improvisation than in previous forms of jazz – and joy and spontaneity were a big part of this in the hands of Gillespie and Parker.

Second, while the characterization of the beboppers as concerned to produced art is accurate, it does beg the question why jazz musicians would suddenly be concerned with producing art. The unstated implication is that Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington weren’t trying to make art – they were just making entertaining dance music. Well, they were concerned with making entertaining dance music, but they were also concerned with artistry – and it’s for their superior artistry that they’re important in the history of jazz and art. (Just think how many swing band leaders made entertaining dance music that is barely remembered if at all now.) Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were interested in making art, but they were also interested in making entertaining music (albeit not so much dance music). There are clear and important differences in the music of Armstrong and Ellington and the beboppers, but their motivations as artists and entertainers doesn’t seem so distinct to me.

Which brings us to another point James argues. James sees bebop as the beginning of the erosion of the popularity of jazz – again because they became such serious artists. However, if earlier musicians were also seriously interested in artistry (and I think it’s clear they were), and if the beboppers weren’t actually so stern and serious (and they clearly weren’t), then this starts to seem not so convincing.

I’d say that James is here confusing correlation and causation. The bebop period of the mid-1940s into the 1950s is associated with a period of waning popularity for jazz (even though it remained a fairly popular genre).

Part of the wane in popularity may have stemmed from the new sound and “difficulty” of bebop (I've written before about the topic of "difficulty," though with regard to ethnographic writing. See "Difficulty in Ethnographic Writing." In that post, I was largely drawing upon "Defining Difficulty in Poetry" on "Reginald Shepherd's Blog."). Certainly more difficult music will tend to appeal less broadly. The music of Harry Partch or Karlheinz Stockhausen will probably never have a very large audience. During the 1960s, the more accessible music of Cannonball Adderley had a much larger audience than that of the more difficult Cecil Taylor.

But there are other, more important, causes for the ultimate decline in jazz’s popularity. Swing jazz had been the music of youth throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. By the mid-1940s, swing was identified by youth as the music of the previous generation. It was no longer hip and young and was giving way to newer genres, such as rhythm and blues, and ultimately rock and roll.

The End of the History of Music

In my blog post from yesterday, “Free Jazz and the End of the History of Jazz,” I wrote of free jazz and totally free improvisation as the end of the history of jazz. In speaking of the “end of the history of jazz,” I was drawing on, among other things, the writing of Arthur C. Danto on visual art which presents a Neo-Hegelian view whereby the grand trajectory in art is movement toward a zero degree difference between art world and real world. I argued that in Free Jazz we see the emergence of this zero degree difference between intentionally produced sound and noise.

In the previous post, I was also concerned with jazz as a specific mode or form of music and was also interested (following more the work of another Neo-Hegelian art critic, Clement Greenberg) in the history of the development of an element essential to jazz in particular, free improvisation, the development of which led also to the development of free jazz and Danto’s zero degree difference between art world and real world.

Here, I am interested in placing the history of jazz within the history of Western Art Music generally. Jazz is a particular mode of music with its own unique history, both in a sociocultural and an art historical sense (with the art historical sense the main focus of the previous post). At the same time, jazz exists and has always existed in relation to other forms of music.

Free Jazz in particular was part not just of the historical trajectory of jazz but also simultaneously part of a broad set of developments in western art music from roughly the 1950s through the 1970s which taken together brought about the end of the history of music by reaching zero degree difference between musical sound and random noise, albeit doing so via different routes.

The aleatory music associated with composers such as John Cage came close to this, in much the same way that Marcel Duchamp’s urinal did in visual art – aleatory music could be looked at as “ready made” or “found” aural art. This is taken probably to its extreme form in Cage’s Four Minutes and Thirty-Three Seconds of Silence, where the musician “plays” silence and where ambient sound is the music. Olivier Messiaen’s notations of bird song represent a very different example of found music. Where aleatory music takes noise and presents it as musical sound, Messiaen took patterned sound (i.e. music) produced by non-humans and presented it via human made instruments as human music. In either case, Cage’s and Messiaen’s music stop subtly short of the zero degree difference Danto has in mind; just as with Duchamp’s urinal, there is no or little difference in these cases between already existing phenomena and art objects or phenomena, but only because found phenomena are presented as art. They don’t involve the creation of art as art which is indistinguishable from phenomena existing aside from art.

Where free jazz reached the end of the history of jazz and of western art music via the development of a key element of jazz (free improvisation) to its logical conclusion, certain trends in classical music reached the end of the history of classical music and of western art music at about the same time via the development of a key element of classical music (scripted programming of music, and the gradual elimination of the freedom of the composer with a sort of musical determinism) to its logical conclusion, with this especially associated with total serialist composition and musical experiments of composer such as Karlheinz Stockhausen or Gyorgi Ligeti.

Notation or scripting of music, at least in minimal ways, goes back at least to the Middle Ages in Western art music. We see the beginnings of the restriction of freedom of the composer and a musical determinism at least by the time of J. S. Bach’s work in the early 1700s. The logical end point of this can be seen in the development of Arnold Schoenberg’s early 20th century compositional ideas in total versions of serialism in the 1950s and 1960s, associated with composers such as Pierre Boulez, where a scheme to determine all the elements of musical composition would be set, with the resulting composition being the resulting working out of the scheme. This sometimes resulted in brilliant, unconventional and surprising music, but it also often led to music which was conceptually interesting but indistinguishable to listen to from random noise. While not an example of serialism per se, a similar effect is reached with Ligeti’s musical experiment Poeme Symphonique for 100 Metronomes. As the title implies, the piece consists of 100 programmed metronomes allowed to play simultaneously until all wind down. It’s a conceptually brilliant experiment in extreme polyrhythm (at moments, the rhythms that manifest are fascinating) and in pushing music to its limits, but for most it’s not a piece for repeated listening.

The end of the history of music is reached with the production of musical art which is utterly indistinguishable from random noise. This can be reached through total freedom, as arguably happens on some Albert Ayler recordings, or it can be reached through total determinism, as with Ligeti’s piece for metronomes, but either way the result is the same. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of both Ayler and Ligeti, but some Ayler tracks and some Ligeti compositions are not for most to listen to repeatedly, and in both cases, for me the most appealing works are those which stop just short of total chaos, or which, having already achieved that, simply move on to making good music.)

As I wrote in the previous post, and as Danto has written of visual art, the end of the history of western art music is not a bad thing, nor is it the end of western art music. Instead, it entails a freeing up of composers and musicians from participation in an art historical trajectory. One quite pleasant effect of this is that, although some musical ideologues do still tediously hang around, the dogmatic ideological conflicts that so polarized both “classical” and “jazz” varieties of art music in the 1950s through at least the 1970s seem truly to be falling to the wayside bit by bit.