Modern classical music is bedevilled by what might be called the Kandinsky Problem. Modernist painters, writers, and filmmakers had a far easier time finding a wide audience than composers did. Kandinsky creates mob scenes in museums; the mere appearance of Schoenberg’s name on a concert program can depress attendance. Although composers do not deserve blame for this state of affairs—conservative institutions are fundamentally at fault, having created a hostile atmosphere for new music as far back as the mid-nineteenth century—inscrutable program notes and imperious attitudes did not ease the standoff between artist and audience. Millennial modernists tend to take a different tack. Trevor Bača, one of Czernowin’s American students, says of his grittily evocative scores, “I write because I feel an emotional compulsion to write—to give form to fantastic or impossible colors and shapes as sound and as pleasure—and, yet, when I write, I am intensely aware of the fact that I am setting up and taking apart a code. . . . I reject any dichotomy that pits the analytic against the emotional.”
Rutherford-Johnson has no interest in constructing a new canon of Great Men, or of Great Women, who are carrying on the saga of heroic musical innovation. (The suffocating maleness of music history is at an end, even if the news has yet to reach most big-league orchestras and opera houses.) Instead, he presents a decentered, democratized scene, in which famous names collide with figures who may be obscure even to plugged-in fanatics. Reading his book took me months, as I stopped to search out Internet evidence of the likes of Cynthia Zaven’s “Untuned Piano Concerto with Delhi Traffic Orchestra” (2006), in which the composer improvised raucously on the back of a truck being driven around New Delhi.
In Rutherford-Johnson’s telling, composers are not sequestered monks but attuned social beings who react to cultural pressures. The book is organized around an array of such forces: late-capitalist economics, the breakdown of genres, sexual liberation, globalization, the Internet, environmentalism, the traumas of war and terror. Moving from nation to nation and continent to continent—the book includes not only British, American, French, and German composers but also Lebanese, Filipino, and Asian-Australian ones—Rutherford-Johnson hosts a musical version of the Venice Biennale. For a theoretical frame, he adopts the curator and critic Nicolas Bourriaud’s notion of “radicant” aesthetics—radicant being the botanical term for organisms with no single root, like ivy.
Attracted to conceptual extremes, Rutherford-Johnson devotes many pages to works that extend the radical experiments of John Cage. A lot of the pieces he describes consist mainly of verbal instructions, and verge on being exercises in meditation. Peter Ablinger has written an assortment of compositions that involve photographs hanging on a gallery wall or chairs arranged in various locations, such as a parking lot or a beach. The music becomes, as in Cage’s “4’33”,” whatever one happens to hear in the space. The score for Jennifer Walshe’s “THIS IS WHY PEOPLE O.D. ON PILLS / AND JUMP FROM THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE” begins with the instruction “Learn to skateboard, however primitively.” Performers are asked to acquire the rudiments of the sport and then to re-create the experience while playing whatever instrument comes to hand.
What does any of this have to do with distinguished musical composition? With that inevitable question, the Kandinsky Problem resurfaces. In the art world, instinctive antagonism to the new, the weird, and the absurd is less common. People think nothing of queueing for hours in order to sit in a chair opposite Marina Abramović or to grope their way through a foggy tunnel designed by Olafur Eliasson. Indeed, composers can often find a more appreciative audience if they reclassify their music as an installation or as performance art. Walshe is a fascinating in-between case: her catalogue includes a delightfully bewildering group of manifestos, scores, art works, and recordings that purport to document an Irish Dadaist collective called GRÚPAT. The collective is entirely Walshe’s invention. grúpatworks have been presented mainly at museums and galleries.
Outré tinkering can yield new kinds of beauty. Such is the story of the international composing collective known as Wandelweiser, many of whose creations are so austere that they try the patience of even hardcore vanguardists. Manfred Werder’s “2003 (1)” asks a trio of performers to make only two sounds during a performance of indeterminate length; the one extant recording lasts seventy minutes. As Rutherford-Johnson has written on his blog, such a score is a “utopian extravagance,” but it clears a space for a piece like Jürg Frey’s Third String Quartet, a whispery procession of frail, gorgeous chords. The music of Wandelweiser seems to embody a philosophy of passive resistance. In an information-overload culture, the most revolutionary act might be to say as little as possible, as quietly as possible, as slowly as possible. (John Cage’s “As Slow As Possible” is currently receiving a performance at a church in Germany; it began in 2001 and is scheduled to end in 2640.)
The twenty-first-century aesthetic of quietude often overlaps with site-specific and installation-like works, which escape the concert hall and merge with the environment. Rutherford-Johnson explores the genre of the “soundwalk,” in which a composer curates a journey through a particular soundscape. Field recordings are a popular way to evoke places, especially those endangered by environmental change. Annea Lockwood has produced “sound maps” of the Hudson, Danube, and Housatonic rivers; Francisco López’s “La Selva” is a transfixing seventy-minute fabric of sounds from the Costa Rican rain forest. A related genre is what Rutherford-Johnson calls the “journey form.” In 2016, the percussionist Payton MacDonaldperformed thirty works while taking a twenty-five-hundred-mile bike trip from Mexico to Canada, along the Continental Divide. Such projects often have a political undertow. When we stop using music as a noise-cancelling shield—when we listen sensitively to the natural world—we register how much damage we are doing.
“Music After the Fall” would be a dull book if it satisfied everyone, and not all of it persuaded me. Rutherford-Johnson is inconsistent in how he handles composers who have reverted to some form of tonality. Some, such as John Adams, are depicted as market-oriented artists peddling nostalgic neo-Romanticism. Others are praised for undertaking “personal explorations of the expressive and formal limits of musical materials.” It’s not clear how one can decide from a distance what inner urges motivate any given composer. Nor is it necessarily the case that pure or impure motives lead to better or worse music. And Adams hardly fits the profile of a pandering nostalgist; otherwise, he would not have written “The Death of Klinghoffer,” the most politically divisive opera of recent decades. Rutherford-Johnson is on firmer ground when he observes that few artists fall into the binary positions of “resisting or embracing the market.” On either side of the enduring tonal-atonal divide, most composers are, at best, eking out a living.
Rutherford-Johnson is correct in asserting that market forces have led to an upsurge of euphonious, audience-friendly scores. Still, there should be a space for principled populism—works that enter the arenas of opera, symphonic music, film scores, and musical theatre not to appease but to provoke. An avant-garde piece that addresses misogyny and rape culture is unlikely to cause much dissent in an audience of metropolitan connoisseurs. But when Missy Mazzoli’s 2016 opera, “Breaking the Waves,” a brutally expressive adaptation of the Lars von Trier film, places such issues in front of a broader crowd, the tension is palpable. The atmosphere becomes all the more charged when Mazzoli uses gestures out of Puccini, Janáček, and Britten, in which women have limited agency or hardly exist.
Another blurry area of Rutherford-Johnson’s map—one that might require another book—is the terrain where experimental composers cross paths with the less popular denizens of popular music. In his opening discussion of 1989-era figures, one stands apart: Masami Akita, who records under the name Merzbow. Unlike the others, Akita never received formal classical training, and his enormous output takes the form not of scores but of studio and live recordings. Still, the decision to include him makes intuitive sense. What Akita shares with the notational composers who dominate “Music After the Fall” is his distance from the center: noise music is, by its nature, an underground culture. To many ears, Merzbow and Chaya Czernowin may sound much the same, despite the obvious differences in the composers’ backgrounds and methods. They are Other Music—to borrow the name of the beloved, now departed East Village store that stocked the kinds of releases you couldn’t find at Tower Records.
But, if noise musicians belong in Rutherford-Johnson’s narrative, so do countless other contrary-minded artists. The lineage of free jazz and “great black music” that descends from Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Anthony Braxton should have a prominent place. The composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey, a deserving recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship last year, shows the vitality of that strand in the younger generation. He writes in the interstices of classical and jazz; his music is both composed and improvised. Such artists also refuse to play the problematic role that white America tends to assign black musicians: that of the redemptive mass entertainer. The composer-scholar George E. Lewis has noted that the idea of a black avant-garde—or, for that matter, of a black classical composer—is often considered a contradiction in terms. The awarding of the Pulitzer to Lamar was widely hailed, but the choice of the avant-garde-leaning Henry Threadgill, two years earlier, was largely ignored.
The veneration of the musical canon leads all too easily to a kind of highbrow theme park that trades on nostalgia for a half-mythical past. Yet tradition can also foster a revolt against a quasi-totalitarian popular culture that subjects everyone to the same bundle of products. Rutherford-Johnson mentions “something indefinable” in the Western classical tradition that attracts creative musicians from across the globe, even if they end up rebelling against that tradition. The more they reject the past, the more they pay tribute to it. This September, the New York Philharmonic will give the première of Ashley Fure’s “Filament,” for orchestra, instrumental soloists, and singers. Some members of the gala audience may squirm at Fure’s fiercely bright chords and distorted, staticky instrumental textures. When, at the end of the program, they rise to cheer “The Rite of Spring,” they should remember that they are applauding yesterday’s unlistenable noise.
Originally posted on THENEWYORKER.COM
