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Rumpus Book ClubSWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #20: Who’s Afraid of Serious Music?
Once, many years ago, I was at an artist’s colony in New Hampshire, The MacDowell Colony. I could never spend much time at MacDowell without suffering with paralyzing loneliness, and this visit was no exception. In fact, I could rarely stay at MacDowell without entertaining the thought that in the event of my death it would be three days before anyone found my partially decomposed corpse. This did not keep me from writing well at The MacDowell Colony, but it was work that came to light in a costly way. My mental health was at stake. This, it seems to me, is often the case at artist’s colonies. There are often people around you making significant work, but at some cost. Some of these people can be notably eccentric, or, in some cases, extremely troubled. But they are nonetheless inspired. During the stay in question I was in my early thirties, and in those days I was more impressionable. I was vulnerable, and I was porous. I was often shy and somewhat afraid to talk to the other colonists. So: I was at dinner at MacDowell, and this guy walked in and sat at my table, and proceeded to make conversation in a way that was as markedly awkward as anything I have ever heard. Worse than me. (And that’s saying something.) This guy made ill at ease seem like life of the party. He was miserable, but, I thought, he was trying really hard. For example, at one point he said to the assembled table (there were five or six of us there), “I have heard the sound of one hand clapping!” And then he attempted to flap his hand in some kind of floppy double-jointed way that did, in fact, approximate the sound of one hand clapping. This was not a thread in the conversation. This was conversational mayhem. I called my girlfriend that evening (still paralyzed by loneliness), and said, You won’t believe this guy who was at dinner tonight! He turned out to be a composer, of course. Because the crazy ones are often the composers.
I avoided the one-hand-clapping guy after that, at MacDowell, and I don’t think I was in residence much longer anyhow. Couple years later, I was at another artist’s colony, Yaddo, and it was a rather impressive crew at Yaddo–it included the filmmaker Tamara Jenkins, and the composer Ingram Marshall, and many others. It was the summer! Yaddo was like a Shakespeare comedy! And then one particular day I was waiting for dinner, and who should walk in but the one hand clapping guy! Oh fuck, I told my girlfriend, he’s back!
Who would have thought that in fact he was a really reasonable and funny guy and I had totally misjudged him? Who would have thought that he was actually an extremely gifted composer? Who would have thought he would become one of my very favorite contemporary composers and close friend? Who would have thought that in this mix of paralyzing loneliness and obsessive work I was able, at best, to get the whole thing exactly wrong? Who would have thought, in those days, that I didn’t know everything I thought I knew? And that in this moment I was actually about to start learning something–about serious music.
Click sheet music to view larger images.
It’s hard to say exactly how it happened, that the one-hand-clapping guy became a close friend, but I suppose it had a lot to do with Tamara Jenkins, because she likes just about everybody, and is not shy. Anyway, Tamara became friends with this guy, this David Rakowski, who inclines toward the nickname Uncle Davy and who seems to encourage his composition students to call him that, and she sort of brought him near to the rest of the assembled where he became, in a way, the life of the party. I learned, soon enough, that David Rakowski can stand on a chair and sing the entirety of Jesus Christ Superstar, and is not above demonstrating that he really knows all of it, that he can play Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield at four times the original tempo, and that he has a voluminous knowledge of funk, and, especially, of everything produced by the band known as Tower of Power. Moreover, his first instrument was the trombone, and so he comes by a love of good writing for horns naturally. And it gets even better. Davey likes to have dance parties, and to stay up late dancing, and he buries references to James Brown in his works, and he played “Smoke On the Water” in his high school band, and has been known to slip that into his compositions too.
Once I heard him mumble the sentence: “Harps, they’re either going up or going down.”
But all of this, it is important to note, all of this antic and slightly comical (more like very comical) stuff about David Rakowski is not really in evidence in his compositions, which, by his own estimation are somewhat complex, intricate, and challenging for those who are not readily familiar with contemporary “classical” music. (His website puts it this way: “The music is difficult (it’s not just hard, it’s damn hard, or in Maine, wickid had), not tonal in the traditional diatonic sense (‘tonal’ is imprecise, and in many senses, my music is tonal — it has also been called atonal, with more tonal centers than you used to have, sounds like it’s in a minor key, pretty, opaque, accessible and unremarkable) — sort of a supercharged chromatic tonality if you will (my eyes rolled instinctively when I typed that) — and somewhat traditionally structured — and it has lots and lotsa notes. Some people call the music Modernist. Others have called it Romantic, total rockout, borderline Neoclassical, zany, too melodic, not melodic enough, postmodern, eclectic, and highly unified.”) Look, it’s not the time and place to get into a serious discussion about the word “classical” right now, but let’s say in passing, since my wish here is to defend “serious” music from the partial neglect it too often receives among contemporary music lovers, that the word “classical” is incredibly stupid when applied to people who write down music on staves, and who appropriate, in some fashion, the history of European serious music, or who use that as a point of origin for what they compose. Could Rakowski’s music, which owes a lot to Ellington, and a fair amount to Milton Babbitt, let’s say, be described as “classical?” The word just seems really reductive to me. Is it meant to designate a particular instrumentation? Like an orchestra or a chamber ensemble? If so, it’s still a stupid word, “classical,” and has nothing to do with what the music is trying to say. Rakowski, after all, his written pieces for toy piano, frame drum, celeste, and is working these days on a piece that incorporates bass harmonica, and he was just asking me for some advice about where to get a good harmonium. These are not “classical” instruments. So let’s not call Rakowski’s output “classical” music, and, even though I sort of think that “serious” music is too humorless and too uptight to describe what Rakowski does, let’s call him a composer “serious” music for now, so as to distinguish this work from the more vernacular “popular song.”
Read the whole article on one page
February 12th, 2010 at 4:18 pm
Thanks for bringing Rakowski to our attention; I hadn’t heard of him. The piano etudes you can hear on YouTube are amazing!
I’m not a music critic per se, but I disagree with you on your choice of term; personally I find the built-in value judgment of “serious” much more obnoxious than the continuing use of “classical” for music that emerges from that tradition. Given that common usage, which has resisted all attempts at alteration over the past fifty years, I think “contemporary classical” is the best, most neutral term for this genre.
The other thing is: why are you of all people buying into the idea that traditional tonality is “aesthetically indefensible,” whether in the long run or in the short? It only is so if you view tonal complexity as inherently superior to (relative) tonal simplicity. Such complexity might be more intellectually challenging in certain ways, even geeky (and as a music geek, I use that word with its most positive connotations) but it’s hardly the only way to make good music.
Those objections aside, this was a great piece and thanks for the introduction to some wonderful new music!
February 12th, 2010 at 5:43 pm
Rick have you listened to any music coming out of places like Angola, Cabo Verde, Guadeloupe, Martinique and Haiti? I think you might like some of it.
February 13th, 2010 at 3:43 am
Hey, you guys, there’s a horrible typo in the piece! Webern! With an “n,” not “Weber.” Sorry about that! There’s always one.
Marco, I am thoroughly excited by many varieties of “indigenous folk music” (and obviously I’m trying to avoid that term “w—- music”), and so why don’t you tell me who you’re thinking about above.
As for preferring “tonal complexity,” of which I am somewhat accused in Jeremy’s note, I am not sure that I do, and that’s why there’s the graph about music needing to be a field of possibilities. What I don’t prefer is “tonal simplicity” for its own sake. Simplicity can be nice. And complexity can be really really excellent, and resisting it because it’s complex is, for me, like saying you’re not going to read William Gaddis because his books are long. Well, they are, but they are also really great and rewarding. I like BOTH the complex and the simple, but I think, today, that “tonal complexity” deserves more attention than it has gotten in the pop music crowd.
February 13th, 2010 at 8:00 am
Webern=fixed!
February 13th, 2010 at 12:45 pm
I agree with Jeremy that “contemporary classical” (with all its wine-glass and white-carpet connotations) is a preferable term to “serious music” (with its “built-in value judgments” and shadow-browed chill). Rakowski’s music takes it origins seriously, but also delights in the freedom and whimsy of the moment—its contemporary playground. To call it “serious music” is too limiting a moniker and impacts its potential appeal. The same holds for Satie and Ives and Stravinsky and many others (even Mozart). Serious, but with a gleam in the eye. On the other hand, I also consider bands like Joy Division and The Mekons and The Fall and Mogwai and even Pavement to be purveyors of serious music. Same with Coltrane, Miles, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor et al. The word “serious” should neither be pejorative nor sufficient.
Kafka, Mann, Faulkner, Cervantes, Beckett, Dickinson, Shakespeare, Sebald et al—serious writing, but with a gleam in the eye.
Again, thanks for bringing Rakowski to our attention. Nancarrow also just came into my view, and I’m enjoying their similarities (and differences).
PS Rick—would you mind elucidating what your “suggestion” was for Rakowski’s “Pedal to the Metal” etude?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXSgNL8okoU&feature=related
February 13th, 2010 at 4:59 pm
Tim, come on, and I say this with all affection: “contemporary classical” doesn’t remind you of “military intelligence” or “semi-boneless ham,” or “the ownership society?” I agree that “serious” is problematic. I also like “new music.” But I have no trouble with “serious” referring to “classical” as well as “popular.” That’s fine. I think the categories don’t withstand scrutiny anyhow. They are just shorthand. “Contemporary classical” just seems so paradoxical, if not oxymoronic, as to be a tough sell for me.
I can’t remember by suggestion for “Pedal to the Metal.” I would have to ask David. I think the prog rock one is called “Prog Springs Eternal,” if I remember correctly. This might just be a piece for pedalling, right? I think there are a couple different etudes for pedals (since there are three petals, after all). Sometimes David says I helped when I did nothing that I know of, at all, which is the kind of reflected glory that one should never repel.
February 13th, 2010 at 11:07 pm
Rick, did you just call me a semi-boneless ham?
You’re right. “Contemporary Classical” is pitiful (better than “serious”—but still insidiously inadequate). Like “Contemporary Renaissance” or “Contemporary Modernism” would be if we thought we could get away with them. This is just English as its sloppiest, like the lack of a second person plural that could have spared us y’all or youens or youse guys. Classical is a (somewhat) distinct period of music, like Baroque or Romantic. How did it come to be the inclusive term?
Does anyone out there in Rumpus land know if this is also a problem in, say, French or German or Italian? I’m too much of a monoglot (and a quick web search proved fruitless just now). If some other language has a term that includes everything from Palestrina to Steve Reich, can we just adopt it, like we did déjà vu and angst and mise-en-scène?
But, come on, Rick (affection intact): “New Music”? If “New Age Music” didn’t already make that ridiculous, the idea that we’d have to keep calling it “new music” even after it had become “old music” certainly does.
Still, I’ll forgive such logical laziness of any writer who could subsequently offer up this resonance: “…the kind of reflected glory that one should never repel.”
February 14th, 2010 at 7:09 am
Angola: Paulo Flores, Carlos Burity, Carlos Lamartine
Guadeloupe: Kassav (the early stuff from the mid-80′s), Henri Debs, Patrick St. Eloi, Tnaya St. Val
Martinique: Malavoi, Kali, Marie-Jose Alie, Michel Godzom, Marce & Tumpak, DeDe St. Prix, Eric Virgal
Haiti: Beethova Obas, Tabou Combo
Compilations: Hurricane Zouk and Zouk Attack
February 14th, 2010 at 4:51 pm
Tim, guilty as charged on “new music.” It’s inadequate.
Will chase down some of this stuff from Marco. I’m excited to do so, in fact.
February 17th, 2010 at 1:19 pm
The bitch is that much this stuff is out of print, but there’s downloads. If you need any help let me know.
February 17th, 2010 at 7:49 pm
This reminds me of the people I’ve misread at first, and how remembering that first impression from the place of friendship is sort of bewildering and vivid at once; anyway it leaves its mark, somehow makes the connection all the more precious and rich as the years go by. Same is true of books and music that took a few tries to love.
February 19th, 2010 at 11:15 am
Baron Karl Maria Friedrich Earnst Weber(n) 1786-1826. How could that have slipped by the “aging hipster” ? Anyway….nice piece on a dork who grows up to be smart AND funny and not only revels in it all but turns it into a career !
February 19th, 2010 at 11:21 am
oopps…ANTON weber(n)—-Gulp !!!
February 19th, 2010 at 12:41 pm
My 11-month old loves Eric Dolphy’s “Hat and Beard” and my 4-year-old pirouettes to Albert Ayler. I can only imagine the kind of listeners they will be later in life.
I struggled with dissonance and the atonal at first, but as a listener I knew I couldn’t remain stuck in the 19th century. Plus I wanted to hear new sounds. Isn’t that what all of us listeners want?
It’s interesting that you bring up the dread seriousness of the Schoenberg folks. I used to blame it on me being South American, but I could never “feel” their dread seriousness either (except maybe Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso No. 1, although perhaps he doesn’t entirely belong to the dread).
On another note, I am going to hear Luigi Nono’s “La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura” in two weeks!
http://www.sfcmp.org/indexflash.php
February 20th, 2010 at 11:17 am
Cesar, I need to know about some Latin American serious music. Do you suggest the Nono piece you allude to above? Tell me about some stuff you are familiar with from home. I want to hear the new sounds, as you say.
And I agree with your 4 year old about Albert Ayler. It’s so moving. Like deranged hymnody. So far with my soon-to-be-one-year-old daughter we are playing: Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, Les Paul and Mary Ford, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, and Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.
February 21st, 2010 at 12:32 am
Nono’s name kept recurring in my readings, and since I seem to approach new music in a free associative style–Ayler and Sun Ra, incidentally, I pursued after reading your posts. I remember thinking after reading one of them that, given where I stand in the death struggle between the plot people and the everything’s permitted people, and given that we know where this sentence’s going, let me skip my obvious stance and say that I felt, in short, that I was missing out. And I was. Deranged hymnody is so right. And Nono I think I read about in Morton Feldman’s collected lectures/interviews. I haven’t heard anything by him but I am incredibly excited to find out. It does sound exciting, no? “In performance, the violinist moves to music stands positioned throughout the audience – including some dummy stands with fake music, so the audience cannot predict where the violinist will go next. In addition to the solo violin, La lontananza includes eight independent tape parts recorded by violinist Gidon Kremer.”
Unfortunately I cannot contribute much about serious Latin American music at the moment. I grew up in an unmusical house. In a drawer we did have the encyclopedia Salvat’s classical cassette series but no one listened to them. In the living room we had an organ but no one played it. Except maybe my grandfather. A glacial rendition of Brazil comes to mind. I didn’t hear the Symphonic Etudes until I was 23. I do hope to contribute an exciting lead hopefully soon.
March 19th, 2010 at 4:37 pm
Rick, thanks so much for this article. I’ve used Davy’s fonts but never heard his music. I must check him out. My wife works at Brandeis and knows him a little. I’ve sent her a link.
As a musician and someone passionately in love with what i like to call “music no one likes”, i deeply appreciate your description of what seems to me the only requirement for getting a handle on this stuff: curiosity and a certain inclination. I find it a little exasperating when talking to folks at concerts/shows/what-have-you when they say “That was interesting, but i don’t think i understood it.” There isn’t a secret message. What’s needed is just some willingness to come to a sort of familiarity. I think.
BTW, i would have caught the Weber(n) typo, i swear. He’s one of my heroes. I can’t really tell from the piece what your take on the Holy Trinity of 12 Tone Music is besides blaming them for the “dread seriousness” of the 20th century modernists, but i urge you to give Webern a closer listen. Sure, he’s smart, but i love his music for what i hear as achingly sad beauty. And it’s other-worldliness. Just listen to the Symphony, Op. 21, keeping in mind that he was a huge devotee of Mahler.
Anyway, regarding whatcha call this stuff? Music.
Thanks again.
March 19th, 2010 at 4:42 pm
Shit–typo: “it’s [sic] other-worldliness”. Ability to edit one’s post would be great!
April 27th, 2010 at 2:19 pm
Steve, I confess I have grown closer to the “holy trinity” over the years, and find much of it quite lovely, as you say. Although it’s still not where I turn first. I will chase down the Webern piece you suggest, however, because I am always in need of new stuff to listen to. So thanks for the tip!
November 4th, 2010 at 8:53 pm
Webern was a pimp.