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chiming of glockenspiels. In the final section, all come together in a blazing
chorus, although the ending is admirably curt.
In his next piece, Music for 18 Musicians, Reich added strings, winds, and
pianos to create a fine-tuned minimalist orchestra. The premiere took place at
New York’s Town Hall on April 24, 1976. Here the fascination of rhythm is
joined to a comparably sophisticated drama of harmony: at the core of the piece
is a cycle of eleven chords, each of which underpins a section from two to
seven minutes in length. Early on, bass instruments touch repeatedly on a low
D, giving the feeling that this is the work’s fundamental level. But in Section V,
the midpoint of the structure, the bass clarinets and cello lower the floor from D
to C-sharp—a crucial alteration in the physical space of the music. The
harmony sinks toward F-sharp or C-sharp minor, and rugged six-note figures
burrow in. A similar change in the weather darkens Section IX, which is almost
expressionistic in its stabbing intensity. Only at the very end do bright D-and A-
major-ish chords clear the air. As in Feldman’s Rothko Chapel, the seeming
stasis of the sound encourages the listener to zero in on seemingly
inconsequential details, so that the smallest changes have the force of seismic
shocks and something as simple as a bass line going down a half step sends
chills up the spine.
In the seventies the downtown Manhattan scene reached an apex of cool.
Composers from around the country converged on the city to take part in it. Loft
apartments were cheap, alternative performance spaces imposed no creative
restrictions, audiences sat through the most far-out occurrences with an attitude
of jaded calm. Phill Niblock worked with enormously amplified, slowly
glissandoing electronic tones, which resonated with the surrounding acoustics
to create soundscapes of mind-bending force. The singer-composer-dancer
Meredith Monk manipulated the extremes of her voice to produce the illusion of
an Ur–folk music, a ritual language of sensual chants. Frederic Rzewski wrote
The People United Will Never Be Defeated!—a massive, hour-long sequence of
variations on a Chilean revolutionary song, in heaven-storming, semi-Romantic,
virtuoso style.
John Rockwell remembers a magic night when Glass and his ensemble played
in Donald Judd’s SoHo studio:
The music danced and pulsed with a special life, its motoric rhythms,
burbling, highly amplified figurations and mournful sustained notes
booming out through the huge black windows and filling up the bleak
industrial neighborhood. It was so loud that the dancers Douglas Dunn
and Sara Rudner, who were strolling down Wooster Street, sat on a
stoop and enjoyed the concert together from afar. A pack of teenagers
kept up an ecstatic dance of their own. And across the street, silhouetted
high up in a window, a lone saxophone player improvised in silent
accompaniment like some faded postcard of fifties Greenwich Village
Bohemia. It was a good night to be in New York City.
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Minimalism is the story not so much of a single sound as of a chain of
connections. Schoenberg invented the twelve-tone row; Webern found a secret
stillness in its patterns; Cage and Feldman abandoned the row and accentuated
the stillness; Young slowed down the row and rendered it hypnotic; Riley pulled
the long tones toward tonality; Reich systematized the process and gave it
depth of field; Glass gave it motorized momentum. The chain didn’t stop there.
Starting in the late sixties, a small legion of popular artists, headed by the Velvet
Underground, carried the minimalist idea toward the mainstream. As Reich later
said, there was “poetic justice” in this flipping of roles: just as he had once been
transfixed by Miles Davis and Kenny Clarke, pop personalities in New York and
London gawked at him in turn.
Rock ‘n’ Roll Minimalism
On the eve of his gradual revolution, Reich had a lot of pop ringing in his ears.
He listened not only to modern jazz but to rock and R &B. In an interview he
singled out two sixties songs that make the minimalist gesture of locking on one
chord: Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and Junior Walker’s
“Shotgun.” It’s Gonna Rain has something in common with Dylan’s “A Hard
Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” which combines biblical prophecy and atomic-age anxiety
into an anthem of imminent doom: “And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, and it’s a
hard, and it’s a hard, and it’s a hard rain’s
The Velvet Underground essentially took the form of a musical conversation
between Lou Reed, a poet turned songwriter with an achingly decadent voice,
and John Cale, the droning violist of La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal
Music. Cale’s early career gives a comprehensive tour of the late-twentieth-
century musical horizon: he studied at Goldsmiths College in London with
Humphrey Searle, a pupil of Webern’s; moved on to conceptual composition in
the vein of Cage, Fluxus, and La Monte Young; arrived in America by way of a
scholarship to Tanglewood; reduced Mme. Koussevitzky to tears by performing
a work that required the smashing of a table with an ax; rode to New York with
Xenakis; made his debut by playing in John Cage’s marathon performance of
Satie’s
a-gonna fall.”
Vexations;
Reed entered the picture in 1964. At the time he was writing kitsch songs for a
company called Pickwick Records. For reasons that remain obscure, Pickwick
hired three Eternal Music performers—Cale, Tony Conrad, and the drummer-
sculptor Walter De Maria—to assist Reed in performing a would-be novelty hit
called “The Ostrich.” It went nowhere, but the Eternal musicians got along with
Reed, who was independently experimenting with novel tunings and modes.
The first Reed-Cale band was called the Primitives. A little later, with Sterling
Morrison on guitar and the Eternal Music percussionist Angus MacLise on
drums, they became the Velvet Underground.
and, finally, joined Young’s ensemble. In his autobiography
Cale states that one of his duties was to obtain drugs for Eternal Music
performances. Transactions were allegedly conducted in musical code: “six
bars of the sonata for oboe” meant “six ounces of opium.”
At first the Velvets specialized in art happenings and undergroundfilm
screenings. Then they began putting on conventional rock shows. MacLise quit,
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objecting to any format that would force him to start and stop at a specific time.
Maureen Tucker, a drummer with a hard minimal touch, replaced him. A 1965
New Year’s Eve show caught the ear of Andy Warhol, who plugged the band
into a multimedia event called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. An album finally
emerged in 1967, with some of the songs sung by the doomy-voiced German
model Nico. The Velvet Underground & Nico
La Monte’s everlasting fifth (“To be held for a long time”) is all over
sold poorly at first but is now
recognized as one of the most beautifully daring rock records ever made.
The Velvet
Underground & Nico.
In the seven-minute onslaught of “Heroin,” at the end of side A of the LP, a held
note sets a deceptively calming tone. Maureen Tucker lays down a purring
pattern of tom-tom and bass-drum beats. Cale’s viola kicks in with an open fifth.
Reed’s lyrics evoke the eerie peacefulness of a junkie absorbed in the task of
sending himself into oblivion. Later, the drone splinters apart into a storm of
microtonal, electric-Xenakis noise, as Reed looks around with contemptuous
sorrow at a world of “politicians making crazy sounds” and “dead bodies piled
up in mounds.” Three months before the release of
It hums in back of “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” stamps
beneath the bluesy “I’m Waiting for the Man,” flickers in the stream of
consciousness of “The Black Angel’s Death Song.” Other songs gravitate to
blues, rock ‘n’ roll, and Tin Pan Alley forms, but with a flat, unsentimental affect.
Free dissonance periodically saturates the field, leaving the listener with the
uneasy feeling that these often wistful songs survive at the whim of a cruel
authority.
Sgt. Pepper’s,
After the Velvets came Brian Eno, an art-school experimentalist who
metamorphosed into one of the unlikeliest pop stars of the modern era. Eno’s
early musical loves were John Cage and La Monte Young; he liked to unnerve
audiences by smashing out the endless repeated chords of Young’s
the Velvet
Underground had closed the gap between rock and the avant-garde.
X for Henry
Flynt, which was also part of Cale’s repertory. When the Philip Glass Ensemble
played Music with Changing Parts
Eno acquired pop celebrity circa 1971, when he played keyboards and
designed sound effects for the art-rock band Roxy Music, which shot to stardom
on the strength of the song “Virginia Plain.” Reichian phasing effects appear on
the second Roxy Music album,
in London in 1971, Eno was in the crowd,
enthralled. He also attended a Steve Reich and Musicians concert in 1974.
Reich remembers a trendy-looking Englishman with long hair and lipstick
greeting him after the show, although at that time he had no idea who Eno was.
For Your Pleasure,
The chain of influences continued. Standing next to Eno at Glass’s 1971
performance in London was the rising rock star David Bowie. On his mid-
seventies albums
marking another slippage of
minimalism into pop. Eno broke away to become a solo artist, superstar record
producer, record-label entrepreneur, sound theorist, and freelance composer.
Under the influence of the minimalists, he propagated the genre of “ambient”
music—music that floats at the edge of the listener’s consciousness, weightless
and pristine.
Station to Station, Low, and Heroes, Bowie abandoned A-B-A
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pop-song structure in favor of semi-minimalist forms characterized by dry
attacks and rapid pulses.(Glass returned Bowie’s homage by writing a Low
Symphony.)
Even hip-hop, the dominant end-of-century pop form, isn’t immune to the
minimalist virus. Lacking instruments of their own, rappers from America’s
ruined inner cities built up tracks by playing fragments on turntables, placing
themselves in a circuitous line of descent that goes back, by way of Cage’s
Terry Riley got a nod from the Who, who learned tricks from his
solo electronic improvisations and worked his name into the title of their
teenage-wasteland anthem “Baba O’Riley.” Swirling patterns out of Reich and
Glass showed up in upbeat disco hits of the late seventies, then spread to the
darker, druggier environs of techno, house, and rave music. The great New
York post-punk band Sonic Youth has a distinguished minimalist ancestry; its
two lead guitarists, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, first met while playing in
an electric-guitar orchestra organized by the downtown composer Glenn
Branca, a committed Reich and Glass fan.
Imaginary Landscape No. 1, to Wolpe and Hindemith’s phonograph concerts in
pre-Nazi Berlin. As technology grew more sophisticated, tracks became
monstrously dense: Public Enemy’s “Welcome to the Terrordome” is the Rite of
Spring of black America. Hip-hop relies on the speaking voice, but, as Janáček,
Partch, and Reich demonstrated at different times, the speaking voice has
music in it. On Missy Elliott and Timbaland’s anti-materialist anthem “Wake Up,”
a preacher or politician is heard angrily shouting, “Wake up! Wake up!” Then an
ultraminimal three-note melody is extracted from the pitch content of the voice.
This is much like Reich’s Different Trains.
“Repetition is a form of change,” Brian Eno once said, summing up the
minimalist ethos. Repetition is inherent in the science of sound: tones move
through space in periodic waves. It is also inherent in the way the mind
processes the outside world. So, in a sense, minimalism is a return to nature. At
the same time, repetition underpins all technological existence. Robert Fink, in a
cultural study of the movement, acknowledges that minimalism often mimics the
sped-up, numbed-out repetitions of consumer culture, the incessant iteration of
commercial jingles on TV. But he argues that the minimalists deliver a kind of
silent critique of the world as it is. They locate depths in surfaces, slowness in
rapid motion. Borrowing a neologism from the musicologist Christopher Small,
Fink writes: “Repetitive musicking rarely expresses a longing for authentic
relationships that don’t exist, and in this way has at least the virtue of honesty
that more traditionally avant-garde musicking often lacks. More often repetitive
music provides an acknowledgment, a warning, a defense—or even just an
aesthetic thrill—in the face of the myriad repetitive relationships that, in late-
capitalist consumer society, we all must face over and over (and over and over
…). We repeated ourselves into this culture. We might be able to repeat
ourselves out.”
Not since Wagner has a classical
composer put so much of the outer world under his spell, whether or not the
outer world knows it.
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SUNKEN CATHEDRALS
As Highway 1, the California coastal highway, goes north of San Francisco, it
holds the eyes like a work of art. The landscape might have been devised by a
trickster creator who delights in grand gestures and abrupt transitions. Rolling
meadows end in cliffs; redwood trees rise above slender patches of beach.
Towers of rock rest on the surface of the ocean like the ghosts of clipper ships.
A lost cow sits on the shoulder, looking out to sea. Side roads head up the
inland hills at odd angles, tempting the aimless driver to follow them to the end.
One especially beguiling detour, the Meyers Grade Road, departs from
Highway 1 shortly after the town of Jenner. The grade is 18 percent, and the
steepness of the ascent causes dizzying distortions of perspective. The Pacific
Ocean rises in the rearview mirror like a blue hill across a hidden valley.
Music at Century’s End
Not far from here is Brushy Ridge, the forest home of the composer John
Adams. One way to describe his work is to say that it sounds like Highway 1. It
is a cut-up paradise, a stream of familiar sounds arranged in unfamiliar ways. A
glitzy Hollywood fanfare gives way to a trancelike sequence of shifting beats;
billowing clouds of Wagnerian harmony are dispersed by a quartet of
saxophones. It is present-tense American romanticism, honoring the ghosts of
Mahler and Sibelius, plugging into minimalist processes, swiping sounds from
jazz and rock, browsing the files of postwar innovation. Sundry sounds are
broken down and filtered through an instantly recognizable personal voice,
sometimes exuberant and sometimes melancholy, sometimes hip and
sometimes noble, winding its way through a fragmentary culture.
Brushy Ridge is at the far end of the Meyers Grade Road, and the last part of
the drive is a matter of guesswork. The Adams house, at the top of a rocky hill,
is a comfortable, earthy, rural-hippie kind of place; not too long ago, it served as
the headquarters for a pot farm. Walking in, you might find the composer asleep
on the couch with the collected poems of Allen Ginsberg lying open in front of
him. He has a youthful face, framed by a neat, silvery beard. His eyes are
sometimes bright with curiosity, sometimes clouded with a slight sadness.
There is an appealing innocence about him, but it is an innocence sharpened by
confidence. He speaks in mild, unhurried tones, halting to look for the right
words. On occasion, he breaks into an unexpectedly aggressive cackle,
underscoring it with a clap of his hands and a merry roll of his eyes.
Adams makes his way across a ravine to a modern warehouse. “My composing
shed,” he calls it. There is a tradition of composers working in the woods;
Sibelius’s Ainola is surrounded by a stand of forest, and Mahler wrote most of
his symphonies in rustic one-room studios constructed to his specifications.
Adams can claim the largest composing hut in history. He raises the overhead
door and walks through the space, part of which is rented out to a woodcutter
neighbor. There is a sharp smell of freshly cut redwood. He goes into a smaller
room, where sheets of music paper are scattered around an electronic
keyboard and a computer terminal.
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It is the year 2000, and Adams is writing an oratorio called El Niño
—a latter-
day, Spanish-inflected retelling of the Christmas story. He fiddles with the
keyboard, commanding the computer to play an aria for mezzo-soprano and
orchestra titled “Pues mi Dios ha nacido a penar,” or “Because My Lord Was
Born to Suffer.” In meekly peeping tones, the computer sings a sinuous, long-
breathed melody,twisting and turning over lullaby chords. After about fifty bars
the music trails off into a single line. The composer stares at the floor, cupping
his chin in his hand. Then he goes back to work, chipping away at the silence of
everything that remains to be composed.
This has been a book about the fate of composition in the twentieth century.
The temptation is strong to see the overall trajectory as one of steep decline.
From 1900 to 2000, the art experienced what can only be described as a fall
from a great height. At the beginning of the century, composers were cynosures
on the world stage, their premieres mobbed by curiosity seekers, their
transatlantic progress chronicled by telegraphic bulletins, their deathbed scenes
described in exquisite detail. On Mahler’s last day on earth, the Viennese press
reported that his body temperature was wavering between 37.2 and 38 degrees
Celsius. A hundred years on, contemporary classical composers have largely
vanished from the radar screen of mainstream culture. No one whispers
After the End
“Der
Adams!” as the composer of El Niño
From a distance, it might appear that classical music itself is veering toward
oblivion. The situation looks especially bleak in America, where scenes from
prior decades—Strauss conducting for thousands in Wanamaker’s department
store, Toscanini playing to millions on NBC radio, the Kennedys hosting
Stravinsky at the White House—seem mythically distant. To the cynical
onlooker, orchestras and opera houses are stuck in a museum culture, playing
to a dwindling cohort of aging subscribers and would-be elitists who take
satisfaction from technically expert if soulless renditions of Hitler’s favorite
works. Magazines that once put Bernstein and Britten on their covers now have
time only for Bono and Beyoncé. Classical music is widely mocked as a stuck-
up, sissified, intrinsically un-American pursuit. The most conspicuous music
lover in modern Hollywood film is the fey serial killer Hannibal Lecter, moving
his bloody fingers in time to the
walks the streets of Berkeley.
Seen from a more sympathetic angle, the picture is quite different.Classical
music is reaching far larger audiences than it has at any time in history. Tens of
millions show up from night to night in opera houses, concert halls, and festival
grounds. Huge new audiences have materialized in East Asia and South
America. While the repertory is preternaturally resistant to change, it is being
permeated by twentieth-century music. Stravinsky’s
Goldberg Variations.
Rite, Bartók’s Concerto for
Orchestra, and Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony are beloved orchestral
showpieces; works of Strauss, Janáček, and Britten have joined Mozart and
Verdi in the opera repertory. Young audiences crowd into small halls to hear
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Elliott Carter’s string quartets or Xenakis’s stochastic constructions. Living
composers such as Adams, Glass, Reich, and Arvo Pärt have acquired a
semblance of a mass following. And a few far-sighted orchestras have put
modern repertory front and center: in 2003, the Los Angeles Philharmonic,
under the visionary direction of Esa-Pekka Salonen, inaugurated Walt Disney
Concert Hall with a program that included Ligeti’s Lux aeterna, Ives’s The
Unanswered Question, and, naturally, the Rite.
There is little hope of giving a tidy account of composition in the second fin de
siècle. Styles of every description—minimalism, post-minimalism, electronic
music, laptop music, Internet music, New Complexity, Spectralism, doomy
collages and mystical meditations from Eastern Europe and Russia,
appropriations of rock, pop, and hip-hop, new experiments in folkloristic music
in Latin America, the Far East, Africa, and the Middle East—jostle against one
another, none achieving supremacy. Some have tried to call the era
postmodern, but “modernism” is already so equivocal a term that to affix a
“post” pushes it over the edge into meaninglessness. In retrospect, modernism,
in the sense of a unified vanguard, never existed. The twentieth century was
always a time of “many streams,” a “delta,” in the wise words of John Cage.
What follows is an aerial tour of an ever-changing landscape.
As the behemoth of mass
culture breaks up into a melee of subcultures and niche markets, as the Internet
weakens the media’s stranglehold on cultural distribution, there is reason to
think that classical music, and with it new music, can find fresh audiences in far-
flung places.
Composing remains, as Thomas Mann’s Devil says, “desperately difficult.”
Although vast quantities of music are being written down day by day—national
websites display lists of 450 composers in Australia, 650 composers in Canada,
several thousand in the Nordic countries—few of them have found an audience
outside a relatively limited clique of new-music fanciers. Some specialize in
“music for use,” writing for church choirs or collegiate wind bands or the
soundtracks of video games. The majority make a living by teaching
composition, and their students usually become teachers themselves. They
may sometimes ask, with the title character of Hans Pfitzner’s Palestrina,
Perhaps Ligeti was right; perhaps classical composition is being sustained past
its date of expiration by the stubborn determination of those who perform it,
those who support it, and, above all, those who write it. More likely, though, a
thousand-year-old tradition won’t expire with the flipping of a calendar or the
aging of a baby-boom cohort. Confusion is often a prelude to consolidation; we
may even be on the verge of a new golden age. For now, the art is like the
“sunken cathedral” that Debussy depicts in his Preludes for Piano—a city that
chants beneath the waves.
“What
is it for?” They have read in books that their forebears humbled kings, electrified
crowds, forged nations. Sooner or later they realize that modern popular culture
has no place for a composer hero. The most celebrated composers are
sometimes the unhappiest; György Ligeti, in his last years, was reportedly
haunted by the feeling that he would be forgotten after his death, that he had
outlived the age in which music mattered.
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“The symphony must be like the world,” Mahler said to Sibelius in 1907. “It must
be all-embracing.” Now classical music
After Europe
is the world; it has ceased to be a
European art. You can use new works to draw a map of the globe—from the
orchestral pieces of the Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe, which draw on
the sounds and rhythms of the Australian outback, to R. Murray Schafer’s
radical music-theater cycle Patria,
In one of the primal scenes of modern music, Debussy fell in love with
Javanese and Vietnamese ensembles at the Paris Universal Exposition of
1889. Appropriately, the first internationally renowned composer to emerge from
Asia—Tōru Takemitsu—found his voice by listening to French music. Toward
the end of the Second World War, soldiers and civilians on the Japanese home
front constructed networks of underground bases, in anticipation of an invasion
that never came. Takemitsu was stationed in one of these dugout fortresses in
1944, all of fourteen years old. Although no music aside from patriotic songs
was permitted at the base, one day a kind-hearted officer ushered the child-
soldiers into a back room and played them some records, using a windup
phonograph with a bamboo needle. One disk had Lucienne Boyer singing
“Parlez-moi d’amour.” Takemitsu listened, he later said, in a state of “enormous
shock.” After so much sunless, soulless labor, that winsome chanson opened a
world of possibility in his mind. Ever after, he honored the moment as the birth
of his musical consciousness.
which can only be performed in the forests
and lakes of the Canadian north. A comprehensive list of significant voices in
contemporary music would include Franghiz Ali-Zadeh of Azerbaijan, Chen Yi of
China, Unsuk Chin of South Korea, Sofia Gubaidulina of Russia, Kaija Saariaho
of Finland, and Pauline Oliveros of the United States. Composition has also
ceased to be predominantly male; the preceding six composers are all women.
Largely self-taught, Takemitsu first studied Debussy and Messiaen, then moved
on to Boulez and Cage. He refined his technique not only in concert works but
in scores for various masterpieces of postwar Japanese cinema, including Akira
Kurosawa’s Dodes’ka-den and Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes.
Chinese music has been operating at a high level of sophistication for several
thousand years. The bianzhong bells of Marquis Yi, which rested undisturbed in
a tomb for twenty-four hundred years before being uncovered in 1978, are
meticulously tuned in twelve-note octaves, close to the modern Western
In
the former he seduced the ears with popular airs, in the latter he raised
goosebumps with Xenakis-like string glissandos and electronic noise. Like
Messiaen, Takemitsu felt no need to choose between the sweet and the harsh.
In the sixties, inspired partly by his film work, he added Japanese instruments
such as shakuhachi flute and biwa lute to his Western-based ensembles. By the
time of his early death, in 1996, Takemitsu had forged a late style that was
precise in design, rich in timbre, tonal on the surface, mysterious at the core. He
compared his music to a “picture scroll unrolled.”
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chromatic scale. Nonetheless, in the early decades of the twentieth century,
Chinese composers defected from native traditions toward the West. They
initially emulated Russian composers, and, a little later, Debussy, whose
pentatonic harmony sounded as familiar to the Chinese as it did to Takemitsu in
Japan. Sheila Melvin and Jindong Cai’s absorbing history, Rhapsody in Red:
How Western Classical Music Became Chinese,
When Mao Zedong and the Communists took power in 1949, composers found
themselves in a recognizable predicament. Like Hitler and Stalin, Mao fancied
himself a patron of the arts, and he meddled incessantly in the cultural sphere,
zigzagging between liberalization and repression. In the “Let a hundred flowers
bloom” period of the late fifties, Western-style orchestras, opera houses, and
conservatories multiplied, and composers such as He Luting tentatively tried out
early twentieth-century styles. Then, in late 1965, Jiang Qing, Mao’s fourth wife,
incited the anti-Western crusade of the Cultural Revolution, and a wave of terror
engulfed every sector of society. Jiang Qing had strong ideas about music,
although they added up to no coherent system. As
offers a telling anecdote about
the conversation between East and West. Some years ago, an American visitor
to China commented that one composer’s music sounded like Debussy’s. The
composer answered in irritation, “No, this piece doesn’t resemble Debussy! Not
at all! Debussy resembles me! Debussy resembles China!”
Rhapsody in Red recounts,
she expressed at various times a dislike of the sound of the trombone, a
preference for Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony over the unscientifically “fateful”
Fifth, and an admiration for Aaron Copland’s film score The Red Pony.
An astonishing incident took place on Chinese television. He Luting, who had
drawn fire from a proletarian-minded critic for defending the music of Debussy,
was subjected to a physically abusive interrogation but refused to apologize.
“Your accusations are false!” he shouted. “Shame on you for lying!” No
composer ever made a braver stand against totalitarianism. He Luting lived to
the age of ninety-six.
In the
spirit of proletarian solidarity, “bourgeois” artists were subject to vicious public
humiliation, and some chose suicide as a way out.
At the height of the madness, conservatories were closed and orchestras shut
down. The few composers who continued working were confined to the task of
perfecting Jiang Qing’s “shining-star models” of Communist musical theater—
ballets and operas such as Red Detachment of Women, The Red Lantern, and
Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (a title later ironically appropriated by Brian
Eno). These works were thuggishly simple in design, relying on a kitschy blend
of pentatonic tunes and Tchaikovskyan Romanticism. Yet they hinted at a new
direction for Chinese composition. At the same time that Takemitsu was mixing
strings and taiko drums in the soundtrack for Woman in the Dunes, Wu Zuqiang
and Du Mingxin, the composers of Red Detachment of Women,
Mao died in 1976, and the conservatories reopened in 1978. The first classes in
composition brought forth a remarkable roster of talent: Tan Dun, Chen Yi, Zhou
Long, Bright Sheng, and Guo Wenjing, among others. All were children of the
Cultural Revolution, and their ignorance of tradition turned out to be a sort of
used makeshift
but effective combinations of Western and Chinese timbres.
390
bliss: they could start with a blank slate. Tan spent much of his childhood in a
remote village in Hunan Province, singing folk songs while planting rice in the
fields and playing fiddle in a provincial Peking opera troupe. When, at his
entrance exam at the Central Conservatory in Beijing, he was told to play
something by Mozart, he innocently asked his examiners, “Who’s Mozart?”
In the eighties the Chinese “New Wave” composers caught up fast, treading the
progressive path from Debussy to Boulez to Cage. Yet they did not forget the
rural musical traditions to which they had been exposed while doing compulsory
labor on collective farms. Tan juxtaposed Cagean water and paper noises with
lavish Romantic orchestration and humble folkish melodies that might have
brought a smile to the face of Jiang Qing. The irony is that most of the New
Wave composers ended up in America, practicing cultural interpenetration
within the familiar university setting. Back home, Western music commanded an
enormous audience, but the repertory tended to stop short at Tchaikovsky. If
the Chinese classical business can accommodate new music in the coming
century, the center of gravity may shift permanently eastward.
The term “classical music” changes meaning as it traverses the globe. It now
connotes almost any ancient practice that has persisted into the modern era—
the ritual opera of China, the imperial court music of Japanese gagaku, the radif
All this activity renews the old folkish projects of Bartók, Janáček, the young
Stravinsky, and Falla—the quest for the real, the “dance of the earth.”
Folkishness went out of fashion in the high avant-garde era, its ideal of
communal wholeness compromised by the bloodthirsty nationalism of the world
wars, but by century’s end it had regained its political virtue, counteracting the
homogenizing force of corporate conglomerates.
or “order” of Persian melodies, the great classical traditions of India, and the
polyrhythmic drumming of West African tribes, among a hundred others. Those
who cherish the “classical musics” share a fear that the behemoth of
massmarketed pop will wipe out the wisdom of the centuries. To be “classical,”
in this sense, is to protect tradition from the ravages of passing time, to
perpetuate the musical past. Not surprisingly, coalitions have recently formed
among “classical music” practitioners around the world: the Persian master
Kayhan Kalhor has performed at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival; Yo-Yo
Ma’s Silk Road Project has convened American, European, East Asian, Central
Asian, and Middle Eastern musicians in programs of ear-catching intercultural
design.
In the year 2000, the Argentinean composer Osvaldo Golijov, a descendant of
Russian and Eastern European Jews, unveiled his St. Mark Passion, which
trumpeted from a different station the end of European hegemony over modern
composition. It opens with a barrage of Latin-American sounds: a rustling of
Brazilian shakers and musical bows; spooky accordion moans, representing the
voice of God; the hot tones of a chorus braying in Africanized Spanish over a
soft roar of Afro-Cuban drumming. The listener is thrown into the middle of a
Lenten street festival, one whose celebratory mood is filigreed by tension and
dread. The work falls halfway between ritual and opera, in the manner of
Stravinsky’s Les Noces. There are also mercurial minimalist canons in the