Here's an interesting article by the Scottish Catholic composer James Macmillan about the post-1945 High Modernist attempt to extirpate tonality in music and impose a complete break with the past. I think there are certain obvious similarities with the most aggressive post-vatican II liturgical refromer and the sort of landscape for which Macmillan hopes has affinities with what Pope Benedict wishes to do for the liturgy with his reforms.
I think the mindset criticised by Macmillan also has certain affinities to the aggressively secularist interpretations of Irish identity which now prevail within Irish academic studies for instance.
anyway, read and discuss. and anyone who can subscribe t STANPOINT or buy it in the shops should consider it - it always has fascinating material for discussion.
www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/2358/fullEXTRACTS FOLLOW:
Modernity in music is a multi-faceted and complex phenomenon. The much-used "modernism" is also a catch-all definition which leaves questions still hanging in the air. It is, like socialism or spirituality, a word that can easily be hijacked by partisan voices that then claim ownership of it and thereafter imbue it with their own narrow, specific, pointed, sectarian and self-justifying aura. It has to be said that a particular kind of modernism, specific to certain places, times, ideologies and forceful personalities, has been sublimated into a paradigmatic position in our own time.
A European modernism, with its roots in the Second Viennese School and developed by a small group of post-war composers in certain European towns and cities, has been given a special place in official understandings of the development of modern music. A message has gone out that composers, and indeed the musical public, should regard this sanctioned path as, not just the way forward, but the way things are and ought to be. State broadcasters, many sharing the aesthetic and political perspective of the composers themselves and their followers, give the oxygen of life, publicity and dissemination to this view of the musical present and future.
This has been especially the case in Germany and France, which are much more controlled by a centralised and top-down view of what high culture should be....
Boulez's powerful position and influence has determined the nature of the modern music that is programmed and esteemed in Paris in particular and in France generally. I know many composers in France who, because they were not part of the Boulez world vision, were sidelined. I've made a point of finding out who these people are and, to a degree, championing their music, having some of it played here in the UK and finding out what happens when you are cast out from a central orthodoxy. Most interesting are Nicolas Bacri, Thierry Escaich and Guillaume Connesson, who is probably known to Royal Scottish National Orchestra audiences through the championing of its principal conductor, Stéphane Denève. Similar groups of composers and enthusiasts have sprung up, underground-style, in Italy and Germany.
I have observed a very different kind of modern music culture in this country and, in different ways, in other parts of the Anglosphere — the US, Canada and Australia. A plurality of aesthetics and styles is valued in these places. There is no comparable narrowness or megalomania at work. It makes me think that different places experience the challenge of modernity in the arts in different ways. If one looks at the development of modernity in music from the perspective of the US, for example, one sees radically alternative trajectories and a completely different range of personalities at the core of modernism's history — in effect, an entirely other kind of narrative. And who is to say that their narrative is less authentic than the official European one?...
And although the European-rooted, Marxist-tinged orthodoxy has its apologists in the UK too — their agendas working overtime in the prominent reviews they write about modern music — things here are, and have always been, different.
Britain is a prime example of this plurality of aesthetics and style in action. There is no restricting binding ingredient — no false, utopian, extraneous ideology that binds us together in the other way that schools emerged according to a certain political instigation, prompting and inspiration in mainland Europe. This plurality leads to a "promiscuous" disregard for the fundamental precepts of ideological modernism. Some characteristics of the classic avant-garde have been absorbed over the years but many have been easily and lightly discarded.
Why? Could it be, for example, that there is a greater respect for ideology and intellectualism in general on the Continent? Or is it a fetish with ideology, rather than a respect for intellectualism, that holds sway there? There is a great conceit in Europe over their much-trumpeted intellectual culture. But actually it's an intellectual culture that has been hijacked by a now tired and jaded cosmopolitan liberalism which has lost its cutting edge in a new world largely not predicted in the great Marxist, modernist, secular meta-narrative of the last century. We British do tend to be less ideological in our cultural make-up and tend not to fall for the glitz and glamour of revolutionary causes. In many ways, the saving grace of this country's musical modernity is a disregard for rules, and an apathy towards imposed ideological posturing. The fashionable views of the day, in politics and philosophy, have had a limited impact on the way we have shaped our musical culture.
Nevertheless, there is a tendency in British musical criticism to see what happens in Europe as superior to here. And you'll find a lot of disparaging remarks about "British provincialism" running through the comparisons that music critics make between this island, America and the Anglosphere, and the citadels of modernism on the Continent. Our own musical accommodation with modernity, from Vaughan Williams to the present day, is caricatured as reactionary and inferior to what happens in places where a more "revolutionary" rigour has been cultivated. You'll find an unnatural and unfair comparison between — as they would see it — the insularity of the UK and US and the highest heights of professionalism and intellectual endeavour that shape the music of Germany, France and Italy.
So there is a kind of self-loathing, a haughty arrogance in certain aspects of our critical fraternity, which is a problem. It is unrealistic and does not take a broad and objective view of the expanse of recent musical history...
It is the European perspective that prefers to see tonality, for example, as to be rejected simply because it is something of the past. That seems an extreme and unrealistic view. It was understandable in a way, in that traditional musical values, like all traditional values, were rejected by the new philosophical, political and cultural elites in Europe after the Second World War. There was a feeling, in Eurocentric terms at least, that "the old culture" had come to an end, that European bourgeois culture had failed. The Christian cement to the Continent's culture had come undone, and therefore it was a perfectly respectable position for young artists to begin with a blank slate — a virgin field, if you like. No rules, no connection, no taint of the past. One sees that in politics and in philosophy, of course, but in music as well, with a deliberate
attempt to expunge any taint of tradition whether it was German symphonism or anything worryingly hierarchical or patriarchal from European history. There were concerted attempts to begin again, with apparently entirely new sounds and concepts. It was exciting in a way, but had worrying unseen implications.
Just as in the visual arts world, where many forms of traditional learning were scrapped and forgotten out of a sort of self-disgust, music entered its own iconoclastic phase. But the difference between music and some of the other arts is that music needs craftsmanship; it can't exist without it. So the craftsman in the composer — whether Boulez, Stockhausen or Berio — eventually took over. And that craftsman — the artisan as much as the artist — prevailed in the end. It is the craftsmanship and technical vision of the principal players in European modernism that prevailed for future consideration.
Much of the debate in modern music concerns "language". If one embraces tonality, it's seen as a backward-looking gesture by some. Even someone regarded here as streetwise and cutting-edge, such as Mark-Anthony Turnage, will be regarded in certain European spheres as a reactionary composer because of his interaction with popular culture, through jazz especially. (That smacks too much of Americana, and it is de rigueur to flaunt an anti-Americanism in Europe.) But there is also a modality and pastoralism in his work that one can also detect in British music over the last century or so, and that is what the European modernist mind despises, possibly because it is seen as nationalistic, provincial and backward-looking, with an ideal based in nostalgia. Even the music of Harrison Birtwistle is regarded as "English pastoralist" in novelty-obsessed modernist Europe. He and a number of other British composers, including myself, used to be published by Universal Edition of Vienna, which has been closely associated with the growth of modernism from Webern to Boulez. They neglected their London division so much that any performances of their British names on mainland Europe that did actually take place were secured by their London representative, the legendary Bill Colleran. They didn't care about their British operation and eventually scuppered it, forcing a number of us to seek a new home at Boosey and Hawkes. We were all apparently far too beguiled by nostalgia, which, if you know Birtwistle's music, will make the mind boggle, although he has acknowledged a deep subliminal debt to Vaughan Williams.
But nostalgia is first on a list of crimes deemed out of bounds for German composers, for example, since the war, because the word "Nazi" can be used to batter anyone who departs from the script, the implications of which are left-wing and radically anti-traditional. I remember attending the famous Darmstadt Summer Festival of New Music in 1980, when any work with a major chord was jeered. There was a concerted attempt under way to undermine Wolfgang Rihm, then regarded as the main young German "reactionary" composer by the ascendant revolutionaries of the time. I have been intrigued and delighted to notice that since then he and other "conservative" German and Austrian composers, such as Detlev Glanert and H. K. Gruber, have risen to the fore and gained international respect, while the Marxist snipers have faded into oblivion, as far as the wider musical consciousness is concerned.
And then there's the question of religion, which has become such a defining battleground in many areas of culture and public life. The liberal elites who control the commanding heights of culture and criticism have an instinctive anxiety about religion. They thought it should have died out by now. But they have been mugged by history, as that hasn't happened and it's unlikely to. This is yet another example of how the once powerfully cocksure analysis of the '68ers has been proved wrong. This is another reason why the prophets of Marxist-inspired modernism are in retreat right across the board. They are perplexed at how the world has gone. Their view has not prevailed, even in modern music. Everything, including our understanding of recent history, is up for grabs. As far as the classic modernist is concerned, we live in a period of chaos. They have lost the argument. The case for modernism has been undermined by the flow and permanence of tradition, and many other things that they didn't see either as important or effective in the making of the modern world.
In the period after the war, what the new Young Turks sought out for themselves was a laboratory culture for music. Because everything was up for grabs and everything traditional — music and culture — was tainted and, in their view, finished, they had to go into a "laboratory" to make something new. They valued the resulting obscurantism, because if something was obscure it wasn't connecting with those traditional and outmoded understandings of culture that, they would say, the bourgeoisie held dear.
But to be honest, it was more than the bourgeoisie they had to worry about — it was the entire world. Therefore their laboratory experiment, in many ways understandable and exciting in its own right, deliberately avoided those aspects of musical communication that were primal, universal aspects of the human condition. They wanted to build a new culture, Khmer Rouge-like, out of the broken shards. This has been the mistake that modernists and Marxists in music and politics have made ever since. What began life in the post-war years as a deadly serious challenge to tradition and a Duchampian provocation is now enshrined in academia and cultural officialdom, with fences all around. To give an example: I agreed to adjudicate on a composition competition at a New Music festival in Hanover. They were all ready to send me the scores. I discovered that the deal usually was that "esteemed professors", when they were asked on to the panel, would have their music played at the festival. But then it became clear that none of my music was being played. When my representatives asked why, the explanation was, "Our New Music festival does not give a platform to tonal and conservative composers." Then why have you asked me to adjudicate? I pulled out.
The modernist hierarchy is still so powerful in places such as German radio stations and German and French New Music festivals that it acts like a politburo. And like all good politburos in recent times, it sees religion as an enemy to be confronted and defeated. This is why it is often airbrushed from official readings of recent musical history. But there is a huge untold story that is worth pursuing, with religion in the fault lines of this ongoing discussion.
It all comes back to Wagner. Although he was an unconventional religious thinker, his absolute ideal was a search for the sacred. The philosopher Roger Scruton explores this in Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde (OUP, 2004). The impact of this opera, not just on modern music but on other forms of modernity, was huge. In the past 100-150 years, there has been a steady line of major composers who were profoundly religious men or women in different ways. Stravinsky, who was as conservative in his theology as he was revolutionary in the music he made, had a great love of the Catholicism he encountered in the West and of his own Orthodoxy. He wrote masses, he wrote music for liturgy. He was a believer.
Schoenberg, the great modernist icon, reconverted to Judaism from Protestantism in 1933 and religious subjects became increasingly important to him in the last decades of his life. He was obsessed by the philosophical connections between silence and music. This is why John Cage studied with Schoenberg and then pursued his own religious paths through a discovery of the religions of the Far East. The interesting thing about Cage, with his aesthetics of silence, noise and music, was that his most famous or notorious piece, 4'33", which is 4 minutes 33 seconds of silence — a kind of rhetorical gimmick, but a real challenge to the culture in many other ways — was originally entitled Silent Prayer.
So even someone like Cage, in his counter-cultural way, was fundamentally plugged into this constant search for the sacred. And then there was Messiaen, who was famously Catholic. Everything he wrote was shaped by a theology and a personal faith. It is interesting to observe just how uncomfortable many continental commentators are when having to discuss this absolutely core aspect of his work. Many prefer to see it as an eccentric personal foible, almost irrelevant to the music he made. Others, more hostile, accuse him of propaganda, preachiness and anti-Semitism.
And in this country, Benjamin Britten, with his social Anglicanism and troubled spiritual searching, points to a profoundly numinous modernity, a universe away from the cultural denials of Darmstadt and elsewhere. Even with Michael Tippett, who always described himself as an agnostic, one can detect a deep mysticism at the heart of his work. It is fascinating that he chose Saint Augustine as one of his major texts for setting. Again there is another untold story here.
Since the Iron Curtain came down, there's been a whole range of composers whom we've become aware of in the wake of Shostakovich, such as Schnittke and Gubaidulina — profoundly religious composers, embracing Catholicism but also keeping alive an interest in the Eastern Churches, and indeed in Islam as well — Arvo Pärt from Estonia, Georgia's Kanchelli, Gorecki from Poland — it's almost as if there's a constant theme going through the development of modern music, that religion is alive and well, and that the search for the sacred has become part of the mainstream of modernity in music. That is a huge challenge to those people who try to rub it out of history and say that it's not important.
I got a fly-on-the-wall report from an academic board that was planning a book on Music in the Twentieth Century. They were going through a list of headings and volumes — music and nationalism, music and gender of course, music and anti-imperialism, etc. Someone suggested music and religion, and it was completely and immediately rejected — there was nothing to write about! There was no place in the discussion of modern music for religion.
The wider discussion here, though, is more about religion of course, and certainly involves more than a straight comparison between the Anglosphere and "old Europe", as Donald Rumsfeld might have put it. The UK has always been Janus-faced in the way it has been able to absorb ideas and influences from Europe and America. This has given us the power to take what is good and reject what is not from both. However, we do have the facility to do the opposite too. We are in a good position of objectivity and detachment to assess developments and potential in cultural matters.
It is widely felt now that the influence of the international Left is on the wane. The ability of this cultural and political movement to mould society according to its classic principles and shape high culture in its own image is fast dissolving. Therefore, the primacy of high modernism, one of its most precocious children, will inevitably disintegrate in its European citadels just as it has elsewhere. The unbridled, dumbed-down populism of American free-market culture usually fills these vacuums. It is not a pretty sight or a happy outcome. But there are other ways. (I hesitate to use the term Third Way, as the whole point of the British contribution to modern music is the very proliferation of multiple options.)
It has been the case for some time now that British composers have flourished in an open, non-dogmatic environment which is the envy of the new generation of composers in other countries. We have pursued freer routes through the necessary balancing of tradition and modernity