ESTHESIC BECOMING AND ACTUALIZED WORK: An Artist’s Statement [2015] — I. Practice as Related to New Music and Classical Music

This post is part of a series which will make up the dissertation I wrote alongside a portfolio to complete my PhD in 2015. It is exactly that: an attempt at an account of where I was two years ago, and many things have changed. Still, it might be useful in understanding how and why I write music.

Read the Preface here.
Read Chapter 2 here.
Read Chapter 3 here.
Read Chapter 4 here.

See the bibliography here.

Find my work here, here, and here.

This music is written to be listened to with attention — even if attention to oneself — in a quiet, welcoming space that does not create a great physical separation between performer and audience.

I distill my artistic practice into the above. Thisis the result of examining what it is in my artistic practice that appears to be unchanging, essential, and affirmative. I employ specific musical materials and forms in service to this, if only barely so. While composing the music that makes up this portfolio, new materials and forms arose each time my practice was nudged by a greater awareness of how I relate to the New Music world, the classical music world, the art world, and the world. A top-down examination of my work must begin with a description of what artistic space I am carving out in each of these worlds, followed by with what sounds I then permeate that space.

The “Common Practice Period” of Western classical music is over.1 This term describes Western art music’s period of nearly exclusive use of progressive tonal harmony, and of form contingent thereupon — a period generally conceived as beginning in the Baroque and diffusing via Wagner and Debussy. Its demise is the epicenter of a splintering in the contemporary consciousness of the classical music community, especially in conservatories: the argument over whether what it brought about was the end of classical music, or (more crassly) the end of composers’ sense of responsibility to the aesthetic thrusts that make classical music valuable. Although many practices common to classical music have continued through the turn of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, obvious changes have obscured the relationship between a person who might call herself a composer in 2015, and one who might have done so in 1850. The advent of popular media, the invention of the electronic musical instrument, and the postmodern commingling of styles have all changed the practices enough that it would be difficult to claim that any modern composer has the same relationship to an art music tradition that Brahms did. And yet conservatory educations, orchestral commissions, and the soldering to European tradition clearly indicate a membership in the Romantic tradition to those inside the scene as much as those outside. Contemporary composers find themselves too distant from Common Practice to be fully a part of classical music, and too stylistically diffuse to consider themselves part of a new, distinct common practice.

Martin Iddon has convincingly argued that what might be called New Music (or be otherwise stylistically associated with the word ‘Darmstadt’) far more resembles a subculture, “distinct both from the tradition of ‘art’ music which many still regard as its heritage and from other mainstreams.”23 Moreover, Iddon argues, New Music’s shift to subcultural status is incongruous with its residual funding models, those of the state, universities, and generous patrons and arts organizations — an incongruity which presages an inevitable shift in how the scene is supported and maintained. Iddon opines that “perhaps a move to the margins will enable new music to find a new social function, critically engaging with other musics, other art forms, other cultures and subcultures.”4 The implication is partially that New Music’s current model has prevented it from reckoning any of these with itself properly.

No matter what the future holds for this way of sustaining music, either stylistically or economically, New Music as it is can no longer claim the (already deposed) throne of classical music, nor can it subsist as it is without it. New Music certainly, in most respects, exists in opposition to the mainstream, but if anti-hegemony is something that New Music practitioners — as contemporary artists — value, the definition of New Music’s location in relation to major hegemonies is necessary. Iddon describes a “move to the margins”; accepting this, New Music practitioners must construct a raison d’être that would make this move as productive as possible.

In theorizing a counter-hegemonic feminist theory, bell hooks locates the margin as a “space of radical openness. . . a profound edge.”5 According to hooks,

marginality [is] much more than a site of deprivation; in fact I was saying just the opposite, that it is also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance. It was this marginality that I was naming as a central location for the production of a counter-hegemonic discourse that is not just found in words but in habits of being and the way one lives. As such, I was not speaking of marginality one wishes to lose — to give up or surrender as part of moving into the center — but rather of a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist. It offers to one the possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine new alternatives, new worlds.6

This is certainly not to say that New Music, with all its baggage, could slide into this position. hooks’ “radical openness” can only come about via a thorough reckoning of our place in relation to capitalistic cultural hegemony. Without the umbrella of classical music’s cultural or intellectual authority, practitioners must work out whether New Music stands tall among genres as truly “experimental,” “new,” or “innovative” on its own. Other fruitful, albeit controversial, sites to locate a common practice may be whether new musicians are brought together primarily by class or access education, and whether that bringing together is hegemonic and must be usurped. In any of these cases it is a composer’s responsibility, if this particular New Music is to continue and be believed in, to think about a raison d’être that can bridge roots in classical music, the level of stylistic diversity apparent in all those who might consider themselves in this broad tradition, and a potential move (even further) toward the margins, not as relegation, but as a new space in which to build a practice from positive traits.

My attempt to find my raison d’être both individually and as a member of a tradition came from watching the sheen of classical music’s “authority” melt away from what I was doing, and what I wanted to be doing. In a seminar when we were both graduate students at UC San Diego, composer Benjamin Hackbarth lamented that contemporary musicians in our realm have no common practice. Even as a newcomer it struck me that there must be something other than a general lack of acceptance of classical music that had us all so consistently interacting with each other. Quickly scanning for something that we all seemed to share, I thought of our concerts. Almost all concerts of New Music involve some variations on the clear separation of performer and audience, audience seated in rows or semi-circles, bowing and applause before and after pieces, and the attempted suppression of non-musical noise and movement. It seemed to me that these objectified priorities not only bound new musicians together, but may have been some of the last things wholly binding New Music to classical music.

John Chernoff’s African Rhythm, African Sensibility further solidified this for me. I read it as an introduction to ethnomusicology, and came across his instructive, if somewhat dated, way of distinguishing African from Western musical practices. For Chernoff, Western art music

reflects the social and psychological realities of its context, restating them and representing them through the artistic medium which transforms or, some would say, distorts them. . . what we generally consider most wonderful about art is its enduring ability to affect us, to withstand the test of time, as the saying goes, and to transcend the limitations of its particular historical and cultural location.7

He opposes this to “African” music, which, via a greater integration into daily life and integration of the various art forms,

articulate[s] and objectif[ies] their philosophical and moral systems, systems which they do not abstract but which they build into the music-making situation itself. . .8

While it is helpful to see these two modes of thought laid out next to each other, I would argue that New Music and classical musicians absolutely “articulate and objectify their philosophical and moral systems” with their practice, and that the extent to which they do not see themselves as doing so might actually mirror the extent to which the Ghanian musicians Chernoff interviewed would not state the goals of their music in these terms.9

The question for an artist is: “What philosophical and moral systems do I want to objectify?” It should not be difficult for any artist to conceive of her work in these terms, but engaging with them directly could take what is a common humanistic practice, and map different answers productively onto common artistic practices. Wishing to negate, as much as possible, much of the elitism, imperialism, and hegemony of Western classical music thinking and funding, I nevertheless accepted my role as part of its history and sought traits shared by the inherited practice and my desired one.

Explicit political messages or ideas in art are not my goal. However, following hooks, I hope that the music I write can, in a world of so many intersecting hegemonies, carve out a space in which some of those hegemonies are fleetingly rendered powerless. With this in mind, I looked at the bare bones of what I share with classical and/or academic music to locate my desired concert practice: music written to be listened to with attention — even if attention to oneself — in a quiet, welcoming space that does not create a great physical separation between performer and audience. It was in this artistic physical space that I thought I could work regardless of funding model, regardless of my genre’s status as cultural or subcultural, and regardless of any external attempts to impose an undesirable political agenda. They are traits that I value myself, and that I feel comfortable defending as potentially valuable for most. I hope that this space articulates and objectifies my philosophical or moral systems, and I hope to make music that both necessitates and deepens them. I describe the ways I think about sonically filling this space in the following chapters.

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1 The term “Common Practice Period,” as discussed in Rehding 2015, was probably coined by Walter Piston in the introduction to the first edition of Harmony in 1941, in which he states “the period in which this common practice may be detected includes roughly the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” (Piston, p. 2) Rehding comments that this term “is a Saussurian masterpiece, oscillating as it does between a historical period and an abstract set of rules. ‘Common practice’ is, on the one hand, broadly coterminous with the repertoire of the tonal period between ca. 1650 and 1900, and on the other, with the rules that make up functional tonality. Both sides seem to come together in a perfect circle.” (Rehding, p. 2).

2 Iddon, p. 68.

3 “New Music” in English usage comes from what in Germany would be called Neue Musik, and stands for a slightly more European-influenced version of what Americans might call “contemporary [classical] music,” or “experimental music” (the latter term divorced from its association with John Cage and the New York School). It might also be associated, more specifically, with specific American graduate music departments such as: Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, SUNY Buffalo, and Northwestern.

4 Iddon, p. 68.

5 hooks, p. 149.

6 Ibid., pp. 149–150.

7 Chernoff, p. 32.

8 Ibid., p. 37.

9 Chernoff, far from ascribing his definition of African music to the words of any African person, recounts that when asked what their music was, “Most looked at me as if I had said something funny or strange, and a few simply laughed and said, “Don’t you know?” (Chernoff, p. 35)