This Life of Sounds - Renee Levine Packer

I'm very excited about this book, for personal reasons as well as the importance of the material it covers.  It just happened to fall on my desk a few months ago as a new book to be cataloged and added to the University of Louisville's collection and of course I checked it out right away.

The book gives a first had account of the history of the Creative Associates in Buffalo, NY at the University of Buffalo.  This history intertwines with the creation of the June in Buffalo Festival, thanks to Morton Feldman,  as well as with the lives of many famous performers and composers, including John Cage, George Crumb, Terry Riley, Cornelius Cardew, Maryanne Amacher, Frederic Rzewski, David Tudor, Julius Eastman, Charles Mingus, David Del Tredici, Aaron Copland, and many more including Jan Williams who generously donated his personal collection of photographs which I cataloged and are now available online as a digital collection.  The Creative Associates was a group of performers with a yearly changing lineup created by Lukas Foss, paid on grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, brought to the University at Buffalo.  They had no teaching responsibilities, but were soley responsible for performing contemporary music at the Evenings for New Music Concerts at the Albright Knox Art Gallery.

Renee Levine Packer worked directly with Lukas Foss and the subsequent directors of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts and therefore is an invaluable resource in the recording of this section of contemporary music's and Buffalo history.  As she points out, one of the most important aspects of the Creative Associates performances was the ability to work with the living composers on their music.  She provides a similar service as a primary resources for the history of this music.  This book is essential for those interested in new music, as Buffalo played a critical role in the dissemination of this music, provided a forum for composers to hear their music performed, and cultivated new generations of musicians to learn music from this repertoire.  While this group was dissolved in 1980, the annual June in Buffalo Festival continues this tradition in Buffalo, now under the direction of composer David Felder.

The University at Buffalo Music Library assisted Renee Levine Packer in her research and provided many of the pictures found in the book.  Here is the Archive for the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts which includes a catalog and recordings of the Creative Associate Recitals and Evenings for New Music.

Who Cares If You Listen - Milton Babbitt

Last week my brother came home to work on an assignment for his general music class.  He and his friend had to give a report on Milton Babbitt's "Who Cares If You Listen?" and Christopher Palestrant's reply.  I thought this would be a good chance to revisit this article and consider how a current composer might view this seminal article.  Both the original and the response are found at the following website: http://www.palestrant.com/babbitt.html

Babbitt intended the article to be titled, "The Composer as Specialist," but it was published under its better known and more reactionary title.  I believe Babbitt's title better illustrates his point.  Palestrant's article irritates me from the outset and he has clearly missed the point entirely.  He begins by criticizing Babbitt's choice of a title, accusing him of negligence for his art and work.  I find it hard to believe he would begin an argument without even a minute of research, which is about how long it to me to find out that Babbitt had different ideas about his publication than did his editors.  From the first sentence of Palestrant's article, I have already chosen sides.  I have little patience for an unfounded rant and incredible respect for Babbitt, a better established composer, and apparently with a better ability to write and craft a thoughtful essay.

Babbitt begins by illuminating the state of new music during his time, which echoes the state of our own new music.  Except for those of equal compositional endeavors, the music remains largely unheard and unplayed.  Now I regress already, coming from a school like UB where new music is a common occurrence.  Perhaps it is more common these days, but still resigned to a small academic community.  Babbitt refers to this as isolation, although it may not seem so isolated to those of us immersed in it everyday, intent on earning a degree and then remaining in an academic setting for the rest of our professional lives.

There is no doubt a giant rift between this "serious" music and popular music.  Amateur musicians used to play the latest compositions by composers around the home, but today amateur musicians are far less common, playing the music of composers from centuries ago, or simple guitar tabs from the internet.  I am drawn to Babbitt's comparison of his music to the studies of science, mathematics, philosophy, etc.  There are theories, problems, and ideas in each of these academic fields which we learn through high school, but the majority lies beyond the grasp of anyone without an advanced degree in this field.  This seems like a valid argument.  It is only because a great deal of music lies in the popular realm that the general public, or perhaps even composers like Palestrant, cannot accept that some music may be about concepts beyond 4 minutes of dancing or commiseration on the radio.  This music finds a refuge and a means of existence in universities, much like what Babbitt is calling its comparative programs of study, for specialists.  It is here that the composer can explore new modes of communication, description, and exploration without concern for public opinion influencing the path music will take.  While new music may begin largely unheard and unappreciated it has the possibility to influence and even leak into the popular music realm, for example, consider how different popular music was one hundred, two hundred and even three hundred years ago.  Who knows what we will be listening to in the years to come.

I believe Palestrant has missed the basic essence of Babbitt's article. He argues, as I understand it, that music should reflect the human perspective and transcend analysis; music is objectified in its performance and therefore cannot be alienated from an audience and performers.  He is calling for composers to cater to the preferences of these two groups so that music may continue to exist.  Palestrant seems unwilling to stretch the boundaries of music.  He is limiting it to a static existence, and it is in fact this, and not alienation which will kill it.  While audience and performers as a whole will prefer more established works, there are always those which will push for new music, a new means of expression, one current and reflective of the world in which we live.  The human experience is ever-evolving and and such composers, performers, and audiences should not complacently deny this fact and live in the past.  These works they rehash are no doubt great works of art, as evidenced by their longevity, but they at one time were viewed as unpleasant and their authors had to fight for their existence.  That's my thought on the matter anyway.

Speaking of new music and popular music and the boundaries between them, Northwestern University is holding their Music Marathon April 30th - May 1st (http://www.musicmarathonconcert.org/).

Performance an as Extreme Occasion - Edward W. Said

Edward Said, best known to me as author of Orientalism, a staple of any class touching on the subject of the "other" or related issues (ie. class, gender, race), always surprises me with his thoughts thoughts and writings on music.  This is a book of three chapters, each a lecture delivered at the University of California as a part of the Wellek Library Lectures in 1989.  Although I believe a good portion of the text is over my head at a first cursory read, I can still appreciate his mastery of the topic and insight.  The first chapter, "Performance as an Extreme Occassion," focused on Adorno's points from various publications and Toscanini and Gould as examples of modern performance.

Adorno's points, as Said understands them, are as follows:

1. The death of Beethoven ushered in an era marked by the complete separation of music from the social and plunged it completely into the aesthetic.  Adorno believe that Schoenberg fully grasped this new direction of music and embodied it in his compostion.  Thus music became a "pure" form of cultural expression which reflected the isolation and alienation of composers from their listeners and the world.

 2. Music has relevant to other cultural studies and modern thinkers were able to link these various disciplines with music and society itself.  However, now these disciplines are no longer integrated and even disciplines within music are split (into theory, history, ethnomusicology, composition, performnace) reflecting the current fragmentation of music (into the public and the private, between composer and performer).

3. As an autonomous, "mysterious" art form, fully privatized with Schoenberg's composition (as begun during early romanticism, the gap between the public and private in music is bridged through today's performance practices.

I enjoy Said's dramatization of the performance.  He discusses everything that comprises the performance, but which occurs beforehand such as the practicing involved, ticket sales to a willing audience, time, and money all to create a single event, unrepeatable, temporal, and unable to be revisited.  This extremism of the performance is exemplified in Toscanini and Gould.   My knowledge of Toscanini was previously, and embarrassingly limited.  I knew of his connections to the NBC Symphony Orchestra and the location of his annotated scores in the basement of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library Central Branch and that I fully appreciate his recordings of the Beethoven Symphonies, but that's it.  Said applauds his memory, command of the orchestra instruments, and mastery of the score.  There is the problem of his domination over the music, and how he manages to strip it of individuality, that of the composer or performer.  Gould is another noteworthy example, especially in the case of the disappearing composer as master performer of his own work.  This is where I wanted to attempt to tie this reading into my recent Frank Sinatra exploration, but I'm necessarily sure it applies completely.  However, Sinatra like Gould, makes his performance almost a new composition through the interpretation.  Modern performances have the ability to concurrently redefine performance practice and compositions of the past.