When the hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Music, in April, reactions in the classical-music world ranged from panic to glee. Composers in the classical tradition have effectively monopolized the prize since its inception, in 1943. Not until 1997 did a nominal outsider—the jazz trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis—receive a nod. Lamar’s victory, for his moodily propulsive album “damn.,” elicited some reactionary fuming—one irate commenter said that his tracks were “neurologically divergent from music”—as well as enthusiastic assent from younger generations. The thirty-one-year-old composer Michael Gilbertson, who was a finalist this year, told Slate, “I never thought my string quartet and an album by Kendrick Lamar would be in the same category. This is no longer a narrow honor.”
Lamar’s win made me think about the changing nature of “distinguished musical composition,” to use the Pulitzer’s crusty term. Circa 1950, this was understood to mean writing a score for others to perform, whether in the guise of the dissonant hymns of Charles Ives or the spacious Americana of Aaron Copland. But that definition was always suspect: it excluded jazz composers, whose tradition combines notation and improvisation. In 1965, a jury tried to give a Pulitzer to Duke Ellington, but the board refused. Within classical composition, meanwhile, activity on the outer edges had further blurred the job description. By the early fifties, Pierre Schaefer and Pierre Henry were creating collages that incorporated recordings of train engines and other urban sounds; Karlheinz Stockhausen was assisting in the invention of synthesized sound; John Cage was convening ensembles of radios. By century’s end, a composer could be a performance artist, a sound artist, a laptop conceptualist, or an avant-garde d.j. Du Yun, Kate Soper, and Ashley Fure, the Pulitzer finalists in 2017—I served on the jury—make use, variously, of punk-rock vocals, instrumentally embroidered philosophical lectures, and architectural soundscapes. Such artists may lack the popular currency of Lamar, but they are not cloistered souls.
Writing overnight history is a perilous task, but the British critic Tim Rutherford-Johnson manages the feat in “Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989” (University of California). In fewer than three hundred pages of cogent prose, Rutherford-Johnson catalogues the bewildering diversity of twenty-first-century composed music, and, more important, makes interpretative sense of a corpus that ranges from symphonies and string quartets to improvisations on smashed-up pianos found in the Australian outback (Ross Bolleter’s “Secret Sandhills”). By the end of the book, definitions seem more elusive than ever: to compose is to work with sound, or with silence, in a premeditated way, or not. What, then, isn’t composition? Conversations around the term often focus on either erasing or redrawing the boundary between the classical and the popular. Rutherford-Johnson makes us think about other borders: between genres, between ideologies, between art and the world. “Music After the Fall” is the best extant map of our sonic shadowlands, and it has changed how I listen.
I first encountered Rutherford-Johnson as the author of a new-music blog called the Rambler, which he started in 2003, when starting a blog was still a novel thing to do. I became a devoted reader after he compared the work of Harrison Birtwistle to “granite in November rain”—a fine phrase for that rugged, monumental music. “Music After the Fall,” like the blog, addresses a vast range of music, from the gnarliest experimentalism to the mellowest minimalism, and Rutherford-Johnson applies a critical intelligence that is at once rigorous and generous. He has the faculty of “omniaudience”: he seems to have heard and comprehended everything.
Rutherford-Johnson, who is forty-one, is wise to commence his account in 1989, rather than in 2000. Just as the cultural twentieth century began late, with the modernist convulsions of 1907-13 (Picasso, Matisse, Stein, Pound, Schoenberg, Stravinsky), so it ended early, its verities collapsing under the pressure of political and economic tumult. The “fall” in the title points most obviously to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, but it has wider resonances. The rapid spread of globalization, the triumph of unregulated free-market economics, the invasive power of the Internet, and the decline of liberal democracy have eroded institutions that defined cultural activity throughout the twentieth century. I was a college student in 1989, and the world of that year now seems ancient. Like my parents and grandparents, I grew up reading print newspapers and magazines, writing longhand or on a typewriter, listening to records, mailing letters, driving with maps. I have far less in common with people twenty years younger than I am. Virginia Woolf’s famous birth date for modernity—“On or about December 1910 human character changed”—probably has a latter-day counterpart, sometime in the nineties.
In composed music, the big news was the retreat, and possible demise, of modernism. After the Second World War, prodigiously complex systems of organizing music spread to all corners of the globe: twelve-tone composition, its serialist variants, chance operations, and so on. The archetypal modern piece was knotty and abstract, with angular gestures and abrupt transitions. Traditional musical forms fell from fashion, and direct emotional expression was considered vulgar. The high priest of the epoch was the late Pierre Boulez, who declared that any composer who had not absorbed Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method was “useless.”
One of the sharpest critiques of the modernist ethos came from the musicologist Susan McClary, who, in a 1988 paper, “Terminal Prestige,”dissected the “mystique of difficulty,” seeing modernism as a “reductio ad absurdum of the nineteenth-century notion that music ought to be an autonomous activity, insulated from the contamination of the outside social world.” Behind the defiant modernist façade she detected a macho pose, an aversion to “soft, sentimental, ‘feminine’ qualities.” The modernist disdain for popularity and commercial values masked an alternative marketplace in which élite artists competed for grants and professorships. All this could be seen as an offshoot of a Cold War mentality in which abstruse pursuits were propped up with scientific-sounding language.
The seventies and eighties saw the gradual return of tonally based composition, in the form of minimalism, the New Simplicity, and the New Romanticism. These developments aligned with postmodern trends in other art forms: the return of ornament in architecture, of figuration in painting, of episodic narrative in fiction. The first work that Rutherford-Johnson discusses in his book is Steve Reich’s “Different Trains,” from 1988, which incorporates a live string quartet and a digital soundtrack of speaking voices, prerecorded string tracks, and ambient sounds. Its chugging motion and repetitive gestures present an invitingly smooth surface, even as the recorded material pivots toward stories of the Holocaust. The piece typifies the late-twentieth-century return to fundamentals—what McClary describes as “composing for people.”
Yet Rutherford-Johnson follows his analysis of “Different Trains” with discussions of very different works from the late eighties: Galina Ustvolskaya’s Sixth Piano Sonata, in which the performer bashes out hyper-dissonant cluster chords; Hildegard Westerkamp’s “Kits Beach Soundwalk,” a montage of sounds recorded near Vancouver, Canada; Merzbow’s “Brain Forest—For Acoustic Metal Concrete,” an onslaught of electronic noise; and Bright Sheng’s “H’un,” a brooding orchestral memorial to victims of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The point is clear: Reich’s reaction to modernist complexity is merely one strand of an intricate musical fabric.
Indeed, Rutherford-Johnson takes a cool view of mainstream minimalism, saying that it “speaks of and to America in the 1990s: it is redeemed, technologically ascendant, media friendly, culturally dehierarchized, and postmodernistically optimistic.” Such music appeals to classical and pop-trained listeners in equal measure—a characteristic that gave Reich, Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt, and other minimalist-leaning composers an audience far larger than the industry average. The most unexpected Billboard hit of the early nineties was Nonesuch’s recording of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, a hypnotically doleful immersion in slow-moving tonal harmony, which sold more than a million copies. By the early years of the twenty-first century, pop-inflected post-minimalism was the dominant style among younger Americans. At a certain point, composers like Nico Muhly and Caroline Shaw and indie-pop groups like the National and Arcade Fire often seemed to be speaking the same half-bright, half-bittersweet language.
Tonality had its comeback, to the extent that it ever went away. At the same time, modernism failed to expire, despite the many obituaries that were written for it. McClary acknowledged as much in a 2015 essay, “The Lure of the Sublime,” published in the anthology “Transformations of Musical Modernism” (Cambridge University). In it, she describes the emergence of a “twenty-first-century version of modernism” that adopts a more openly sensuous language. McClary singles out three operas on topics of doomed passion: Salvatore Sciarrino’s “Luci Mie Traditrici” (1998), Kaija Saariaho’s “L’Amour de Loin” (2000), and George Benjamin’s “Written on Skin” (2012). All three works have mesmerized large audiences, even though they avoid obvious tonal reference points. The arrival of Saariaho’s opera at the Met, in 2016, was a particularly bracing sign of modernist longevity. The piece begins with low tendrils of sound, which gather into immense, shuddering dissonances. But the gradualness of the process—the methodical accumulation of shimmering patterns over organ-like bass tones—saturates the ears instead of battering them. The music breathes and moves like a living organism. As McClary suggests, it imparts a human dimension to the modernist sublime.
Other heirs of the modernist legacy have refused to compromise, hunkering down in dissonance and difficulty. In the nineteen-eighties, the British-born, American-based composer Brian Ferneyhough was named the avatar of a New Complexity, and although Ferneyhough never adopted the term himself, it reflects the extreme density of his music—a meticulous chaos of piled-up rhythms, conflicting melodic lines, and disintegrating forms. Rutherford-Johnson captures the effect: “The way Ferneyhough deliberately overpacks his music with information, starting and restarting it every few seconds to create a perceptual overload, thwarts the memory’s ability to create a meaningful structure. . . . Time after time, what we have just heard is pushed into the background by what follows next.” This is a very contemporary experience, matching the from-all-sides tempo of video games and social-media threads. Small wonder that Ferneyhough has been hugely influential among composers who have come of age since 1989.
Much twentieth-century modernist music sounded like—and actually was—the outcome of a preordained process, the working out of a utopian or a mathematical idea. Modernists of today, whether of the sensuous or the spastic type, are less concerned with method: their music tends to have a tactile immediacy. One compelling figure is the Israeli-born composer Chaya Czernowin, who studied with Ferneyhough and has become a formidable teacher herself. Rutherford-Johnson says of her 1999 opera, “Pnima,” that listeners can feel the notes being played “as different forms of abrasion and pressure”: “air pushing against dilating lips, bow hairs sliding against strings, fingertips plucking and sliding.” Although her music is dark and unyielding, and is written in the shadow of trauma—“Pnima” is about younger generations coming to terms with the Holocaust—there is nothing dry or cerebral about it. Czernowin composes the negative beauty of disaster; it is the musical equivalent of Picasso’s “Guernica” or Anselm Kiefer’s “Margarethe.”
Originally posted on THENEWYORKER.COM
