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Music After The Fall
Modern Composition and Culture since 1989
By Tim Rutherford-Johnson UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2017 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95904-0
CHAPTER 1
1989 AND AFTER
BEGINNINGS
It begins with a string quartet: two violins, a viola, and a cello pumping notes up and down like pistons. An image of the American machine age, hallucinated through the sound of the European Enlightenment. The image is strengthened as a voice — mature, female, American — intones an itinerary: "From Chicago ... to New York." The sound is prerecorded, digitally sampled and amplified through speakers beside the ensemble. More samples are added: more voices; the whistles and bells of trains; one, two, three, or even more string quartets. Rapidly the musical space far exceeds what we see on stage. This is a string quartet for the media age, as much recordings and amplification as it is the four musicians in front of us. Yet everything extends from it and back into it, whether the quartet of quartets, which mirror and echo each other; the voices, which seem to blend seamlessly with the instrumental rhythms and melodies; or the whistles, which mesh so clearly with the harmonic changes that it seems certain they come from an unseen wind instrument and not a concrete recording.
* * *
It begins with thumping and hammering, small clusters struck on the piano keyboard with the side of the palm or with three fingers pressed together, jabbing like a beak. The sound recalls a malevolent dinosaur or perhaps a furious child, but it isn't random; a melody of sorts, or an identifiable series of pitches at least, hangs over the tumult. After twenty seconds or so the thunder halts abruptly for a two-note rising motif played by the right hand, which is then imitated (slightly altered) by the left. It is a simple gesture, refusing, with that delicate variation on the repeat, to do as expected, and expressed with the utmost clarity and efficiency. We have jumped from breezeblocks to water, but the expressive force remains. At every turn the music — on paper just a short sonata for piano — seems about to burst its own edges. Distortion is applied in every dimension, from the blurring of the melodic line with those cluster chords, to the extremities of force and volume required from instrument and performer (for the majority of the piece, every note is marked to be played very loud, except those marked even louder), to the extremes of range, from the very highest to the very lowest notes of the piano that stretch any sense of sonic unity or middle ground to its limit. Even at just seven minutes long, it is a shattering experience for both performer and listener, only heightened by the few moments of quiet contemplation that occur toward the end of the piece.
* * *
It begins with water, gently lapping, close miked. In the distance, the hum of a city. The occasional calls of a gull suggest we are on the coast. A woman's voice enters, softly describing the location and where she is standing, where we are listening: "It's a calm morning. I'm on Kits Beach in Vancouver. It's slightly overcast — and very mild for January." She is very close, almost inside our ears, but the place she describes and what we can hear is far away. An aircraft passes overhead. A car sounds its horn in the distance, and it echoes against buildings and around the bay. This is Kitsilano Beach, on the south shore of Vancouver's English Bay, a popular spot in summer for sunbathing and beach sports. The narration is straightforward at first, but it soon moves from describing the sounds to reflecting on their acoustic properties: "The tiny clicking sounds that you hear are the meeting of the water and the barnacles. It trickles and clicks and sucks and ... The city is roaring around these tiny sounds. But it's not masking them." Just as we start to internalize those sounds, hearing them in the same abstract headspace as the narrator's voice, the recording levels are suddenly turned up: "I could shock you or fool you by saying that the soundscape is this loud." And then: "The view is beautiful — in fact it is spectacular. So the sound level seems more like this." The levels drop again, now quieter than they were before, and our perceptions of what is real and what is artificial, out in the world and inside the recording, are completely subverted. "It doesn't seem that loud."
* * *
It is loud, and it begins instantly. We hear what is probably feedback, controlled in some way to create different pitches. Blank, artificial, but somehow also animal (fleshy at least) — overdriven and very distorted. After a few seconds it is intercut with something like the sound of tape spooling backward — high-pitched, an almost glistening sound. Then sudden, violent splices of what sound like fragments of orchestral music. Again, lots of distortion, electric screams. Sounds continue to snap in and out of the frame. Passing connections can be made as some noises return, but really the only constant is change. There is something concrete, something like material underneath it all, but it is crushed by layer upon layer of distortion, warping, splicing, and reconstitution. It's not that this isn't music, it's that it seems opposed to form itself, as anything resembling the sort of patterning and resemblance that creates meaning is smashed into oblivion.
* * *
It begins with a percussive crash. For an instant it is unnamable, then a brief flurry of woodwind and a dissonant string chord set us firmly in the sound of the twentieth-century orchestra. The winds cut short, accelerating slashes over the strings, before xylophone and double basses strike a menacing three-note motif. The strings shiver in response. As fragments from the rest of the orchestra coalesce into larger and larger stabs, the strings swell dissonantly and cinematically. Decades of Hollywood film scores have imbued the language of midcentury modernism with unmistakable meaning, and now that is being projected back into the concert hall with clear and forceful intent.
DIVERSITY
These five pieces are Different Trains, by Steve Reich (b. 1936); Piano Sonata No. 6, by Galina Ustvolskaya (1919–2006); Kits Beach Soundwalk, by Hildegard Westerkamp (b. 1946); "Brain Forest — For Acoustic Metal Concrete" from the album Cloud Cock OO Grand, by Merzbow (Masami Akita, b. 1956); and H'un (Lacerations), by Bright Sheng (b. 1955). With the possible exception of "Brain Forest," they were all created within what we might (for now) call the contemporary Western art music tradition. That is, they are all pieces that were composed or preplanned reflectively, fixed in some sort of notation for a performer or creator to interpret or execute, and intended to be listened to by an attentive, informed, and critical audience. We might add that it is a style of music that traces its primary lineage back to the courts and churches of pre-Renaissance Europe, and although those courts and churches are today mostly long defunct or culturally marginal, contemporary art music maintains an important relationship with their modern-day descendants and the structures of production and listening that they represent.
Yet even this definition, as broad as it is, barely captures the range of artistic production in these five examples. We might intuitively group most or all of these pieces according to some set of "contemporary art music" family resemblances, but each represents a distinct set of challenges to that model. In many important respects — style, technique, materials, media, and even audience — they are utterly remote from one another. Different Trains, for example, may on the surface be a conventionally "classical" work, yet its reception history depends far more on late twentieth-century models of patronage such as the entrepreneurial ensemble and the recording company than it does on the old institutions of church and court. The piece was commissioned by the Kronos Quartet (formed in 1973), one of the world's leading contemporary music groups, and is exemplary of a form of entrepreneurial new music practice that relies on the creation, identification, and fostering of market niches, as well as a media-conscious reinvention of the image and of the function of the string quartet itself.
Ustvolskaya's sonata looks and feels quite like conventional classical music. It even aligns itself with that tradition in its choice of title. Yet in codifying or enacting pain as a compositional parameter — the very real physical pain of the pianist, who is required to contort his or her hands awkwardly and strike the keyboard with punishing, repetitive force — Ustvolskaya disturbs the conventional image of the performer as a more or less impassive transmitter of the composer's vision, instead having him or her dramatize the work in an act of physical theater that is as close to the performance art of Antonin Artaud or Marina Abramovic as it is to a classical piano sonata.
As works of electroacoustic music, both Westerkamp's Kits Beach Soundwalk and Merzbow's "Brain Forest" fundamentally challenge the score-based requirement of my outline definition of contemporary Western art music. The Reich and Ustvolskaya pieces may be said to exist as much in their scores as in their recordings (although Reich's use of tape stretches this definition), but no scores for the Westerkamp or Merzbow works exist, except perhaps as private studio notes by their creators. Yet this does not make the two pieces alike in how they were created. Kits Beach Soundwalk was produced in the studio over a period of time through a painstaking and reflexive period of composition, with Westerkamp selecting, manipulating, and organizing materials with extraordinary skill and technical finesse in much the same way as one would go about creating a conventionally notated piece of music. (Note the way in which features such as bird calls or swishes of water always counterpoint or fall between spaces in the narration rather than masking each other.) "Brain Forest," however, while executed with no less skill in terms of the selection, arrangement, and manipulation of materials, was created primarily in a live, semi-improvised setting and subjected to further postproduction manipulation during mastering.
Sheng's H'un is, in many respects, the most conventional of all the works presented, as it was written for a typical orchestra, fully notated, and intended for performance in the live setting of a concert hall. It is a work that audibly traces its lineage back to the European Renaissance, through Bartók, Shostakovich, and the Romantic symphonic tradition. And yet Sheng's biography as a Chinese-American, who studied Western music at the Beijing Conservatory before moving to New York in 1982, renders this analysis problematic: this journey is one marked by patterns of adoption, negotiation, and accommodation within a series of colonial and postcolonial frameworks. Moreover, as I intimated above, geography is not the only mediating factor involved in the creation of Sheng's musical language: the repertory of affect from Hollywood cinema, itself derived from late nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century orchestral music, has also played its part.
These five works were all composed within a year or so of each other, between 1988 and 1990. Capturing and explaining this sort of diversity presents obvious difficulties for the historian. Yet it also presents an opportunity. If we want to be able to discuss recent music history in any sort of collective sense (and let's assume that some of us still find it useful to do so), many of the usual ways of writing such a history fall short. This book hopes, in a small way, to contribute to that historical analysis by reconsidering how we tell the history of late twentieth-century music and by looking ahead to what the twenty-first century holds.
UNITY
Histories of contemporary Western art music usually begin in 1945. Its story has been told enough times, with expeditious changes of emphasis along the way, to be familiar: at the end of the Second World War, Europe, the home of post-Enlightenment Western culture, was devastated and in desperate need of reconstruction. America had finally achieved the financial dominance that had been expected of it since the 1920s, thus initiating its dominance over the second half of the century. The postwar settlements with Soviet Russia had set the stage for the Cold War. New technologies and sciences, many of which had been developed in wartime, such as tape recording and information theory, were finding wide peacetime application, and the postwar industrial boom — as well as the increasing importance of cultural soft power as a weapon in the Cold War — began to fuel a rise in the public's consumption of the arts.
This story helps us understand how and why the musical innovations of the postwar decades, from musique concrète to minimalism, came about. However, by the end of the century this narrative begins to unravel, not least because of the rapidly changing scope of what "art music" could be. These histories struggle to accommodate the diversity of musical activity at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Worse still, they cannot set the music of that period within the same contextual depth as, say, the serial music composed in the early 1950s (a product of wartime technologies, postwar rebuilding efforts, and the desires of a young generation to start again) or the early minimalist music of the mid-1960s (a product of jazz and non-Western influences, counterculture, and influences from the visual arts).
The first contention of this book, then, is that to understand the music of our present day and recent years, we need to reboot that story, to begin from a new date. Many of the precepts on which the post- 1945 narrative is based were no longer applicable by the start of the twenty-first century: Europe had rebuilt itself and emerged as the European Union, becoming one of the world's largest economies; the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union had brought an end to the Cold War; and even the United States' claim to global dominance had begun to be threatened after China's opening to the global trading market at the end of the 1970s, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed, and the global financial crisis of 2008. By the end of the century the social democratic consensus that had steered the West through postwar reconstruction had been replaced by market-led neoliberalism. Finally, the birth of the Internet and World Wide Web in the early 1990s, as well as the widespread popularization of digital technologies, transformed the production and consumption of culture in every sphere.
Admittedly, slicing history up like this is a somewhat arbitrary exercise. Any date, once it has been chosen, starts to look important simply from receiving special attention: enough events happen in any given year to make all years look significant. The wider the international focus, the more arbitrary a choice becomes. Most events have only a local significance; very few are truly global in importance. Even then, how can we claim that they are significant across all spheres of human activity? Nevertheless, lines are still useful, no matter how fuzzy, shallow, and semipermeable. They are useful in a teaching sense, in that they help frame, structure, and limit the period of study. From the point of view of relating history to today, divisions also enable us to present a sense of before and after, and therefore a sense of now, and how it is different from then.
There are several dates where a division could be made. The year 2000 is numerically neat, although relatively undistinguished in terms of global events. The year 2001, particularly after September 11, is a more obvious choice, and it seems likely that historians, in the near future at least, will often date the true beginning of the twenty-first century to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Both dates, however, are too recent to leave room for historical depth or an exploration of patterns of continuity and change. They also arguably leave too much of a gap between the petering out of the post-1945 narrative and the beginning of the narrative that encompasses today.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Music After The Fall by Tim Rutherford-Johnson. Copyright © 2017 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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