ftp.xmission.com/2014.06.ftp.xmission.com.tar/ftp.xmission.com/pub/lists/zorn-list/archive/v02.n356

Internet Message Format | 1998-05-05 | 21KB

From: [e-mail] (Zorn List Digest)
To: [e-mail]
Subject: Zorn List Digest V2 #356
Reply-To: zorn-list
Sender: [e-mail]
Errors-To: [e-mail]
Precedence: bulk


Zorn List Digest         Tuesday, May 5 1998         Volume 02 : Number 356



In this issue:
-
       Re: Boulez
       Re: Music & Jargon
       Avant magazine
       Re: James Bond
       Marc Edwards and E#
       Re: Music & Jargon

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Tue, 05 May 1998 09:38:10 -0800
From: George Grella <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Boulez

Patrice L. Roussel writes:


> And I guess seeing him as you see him is OK, right?
>
> I would like to know where you ended up getting such rosy picture of him? What
> magazines, books should I read to realize how fooled I was? Don't hesitate to
> enlight me.
>
> You seem to refuse the main point in my argument: Boulez was not just an
> artist making music or a conductor interpreting his/other's music (like Cage,
> Stockhausen, Xenakis, etc). He was in power, meaning controlling where the
> money goes and who should be played. His fascination for power has been the
> subject of puzzlement among his piers. I am really surprised that you never
> heard of it.
>
> Did I say that Boulez stopped composing in the '60s? No, I said worse than
> that: nothing really major after the '50s. Check around, you will only see
> polite comments (best case) on what he did after the '50s. For someone who
> was unanimously considered as the incarnation of the future of music in the
> '50s, I find that a little bit strange. You don't. That's fine.
>
> Financing art in France? Or you are naive, or you just refuse any negative
> comment on your man (and everybody will notice that my mail was not about
> Wynton Marsalis on r.m.b. :-). IRCAM ended up to gobble most of the credits
> allocated to research in music (like the Opera does with budget for classical
> music). Boulez' strong acceptance among the people in charge of financing the
> arts was instrumental in favoring some forms of contemporary music, and not
> others. I remember reading about Xenakis' bitterness at not being able to get
> any serious financement for his studio (when IRCAM was running full swing in
> creating the music of the future :-). I have not checked Georgie Born's book
> on IRCAM. I will.
>
> You don't seem to know anything about the intellectual atmosphere in France
> when Boulez was the darling of the French establishment. It is easy to dismiss
> all that as jealousy of "inferior" composers, or "gossipers" like me, and I am
> sure that in many cases this is true. You might blame the politicians who are
> looking for the "providential man" on whom they can download all their
> responsabilities. Boulez was such a man for music. When he was in control,
> there was not any room left for anybody else.
>
> I never doubted about the brightness of Boulez. As far as talent is concerned
> I have no doubt that LE MARTEAU SANS MAITRE will keep shining as one of
> The masterpieces of the post-WWII music. But that's all. Yes, I think he is
> a great conductor, but by saying that I just repeat what many people said
> (although I think his version of LES NOCES is boring -- but JEUX is superb).
>
> Anyway, I am happy to know that French culture still exports well.
>

Patrice, my point is that I regard Boulez, critically, as a musician.  I
don't know the man personally, I can't pass judgement on his aesthetic
and bureaucratic politics, nor do I care to.  It doesn't matter to me,
because that kind of thing quickly becomes a contest over who belongs to
the better/cooler/more moral side of the equation, as seems to be
happening.

Remember, this all started for me when you criticized Boulez for doing
something you supported, recording Zappa, but criticizing him because
you didn't like his reasons, or what you assumed his reasons to be!  I
found that totally unfair, on both counts.  Unless you know the man,
regard him as a musician.  You are criticizing him as you see him as a
public figure, which is subjective and emotional, all arguing by
assertion; not just what Boulez did, but how you feel about it as an
aggrieved party.  There's parties who are NOT aggrieved by Boulez's
actions.

I can pick out so many musicians, once you obviously seem to favor, and
apply your own words to them.  Power hungry?  Fine, I'll accept your
premise.  Then I'll call Cage power hungry, because in those terms
[ideology, performances] he was.  He wanted what he wanted, and didn't
believe aesthetically in other things.  Believe it or not, a ton of
major musicians have that same attitude; they like and they dislike -
Ives, Stockhausen, Mozart.  Power hungry?  Whatever.  It's a meaningless
criticism, it just means that Boulez didn't favor what you favor.
Mahler didn't favor what other people favored either, and in terms of
power he developed his whole career around acquiring it.  He did the
pieces HE wanted at the opera, he promoted the music he believed in,
like Bruckner, and criticized the work of other composers, like
Schoenberg.  That was his job and his artistic choice.  Yeah, it was
tough for his detractors, but since when do we all have to have the same
taste?  To you, it can be called a "fascination with power," to me, it's
a strong willed musician exercising his artistic beliefs.  I would do
the same thing in  his position.  As the producer of a record label,
John Zorn does the EXACT SAME THING.  Power mad, obviously.

Your criticism of Boulez's composing is plainly clouded by your
emotional problems with him as a man.  He has written several major
works since the 1940s-50s, and that's that.  The San Francisco Symphony
has programmed one of his pieces for next fall.  "Notations" circa
1978.  I guess that means they don't know what they're doing, perhaps
you can consult on this for them?  What I find ironic is that you've
spent a lot of energy attacking Boulez for his taste in post-serial
music, implying that his is ideologically narrow-minded while yours is
far more catholic, and yet the example of his work that shines for you
is "Le Marteau."  While that piece is interesting and important for its
technique, as music, a piece that rewards listening, it is far less
successful than other Boulez works, "Pli Selon Pli," for example.  The
only people I see describing it, as you do, as a masterpiece, are serial
and post-serial ideologues to whom the serial technique is everything.
Your admiration for that piece indicates a closer fit between your taste
and Boulez's than you may feel comfortable with.

As for government funding, again, it's a matter of whose ox is gored.
You feel Xankis deserved all those government resources because he's
your man.  Other people had differing opinions.  Too bad for Xenakis,
but he still managed to produce work, didn't he?  This is one of my
ambivalent problems with government funding; everyone feels they deserve
some.  Not true.  There's never enough to go around, and choices have to
be made.  Tell me, did any of it have to do with the French wanting to
spend money on the French, not the Greek?  Percectly valid choice for
them to make, if they wanted to.  Yes, French government money, with or
without Boulez as adjunct, influenced contemporary music.  But Patrice,
plenty of contemporary music got made without that money, and continues
to do so.  I have no taste for the sort of political intrigues that got
Myung-Wun Chung fired, for example, but music still got made; Messiaen,
Dutilleux, Vivier.  Dutilleux would seem to me the kind of musician you
would claim Boulez smothered, but nothing like that happened.

The part of French culture that seems to be exported in this case is the
philosophical bickering.  I couldn't care less about that.  I am
interested in the music.  What you're missing is that Boulez is the
great icon ]love him or hate him] of the high Modernist International
Style, the aim of which was to break down nationalistic qualities in
music, so it's strange that your comments seem so wrapped up in French
navel-gazing.  Boulez is like Elliot Carter or Stockhausen is so many
ways, not just in terms of exemplifying that international style, but in
engendering so much animosity in their own countries through their
personal success.  More power to them, I say.

gg





- -

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 04 May 1998 11:02:46 -0800
From: George Grella <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Music & Jargon

Nathaniel Doward quotes Ben Watson:


>         "The beauty of Zappa's orchestral music is a fresh, unacademic
> weighing of particular sounds: you can hear him think as he balances drum
> rolls and string scratching against the clarinet line....
>         "Zappa is an extremely linear--or real-time--composer.  His
> musical decisions result from the attention of the listening ear.  Whereas
> Darmstadt composers frequently pursue a dialectic of schematic,
> mathematical invention versus playability and audibility, Zappa uses
> scores to direct musicians rather than to figure abstract shapes.  This
> means that he very rarely attains the complex simultaneity that
> characterizes Boulez or early Stockhausen.  In writing for full orchestra,
> without the automatic simultaneity of playing with an improvising band of
> musicians, he does not exploit the specific potential of scores, which is
> to generate separate--but simultaneous--events.  However, what he does
> contribute is a sense of freewheeling absurdity that academic composers
> find impossible to attempt without sounding tiresome. ...
>         "This orchestral music is an essential adjunct to the
> project/object.  Not only does it allow us to hear Zappa's music refracted
> through the traditional vehicle of bourgeois expression, it also
> demonstrates the economic vicissitudes and social contradictions involved
> in the area.  Just as much as the _200 Motels_ court case, Zappa uses the
> opportunity to make all kinds of fissures appear in the for-granted status
> of traditional practices.  But it cannot be said that Zappa has left the
> field of classical composition behind as he has left fusion (or 'abstract
> music using rock sonorities'): a burnt-up field.  If the postmoderns were
> correct, and the high-art avant-garde were utterly moribund, Zappa's work
> would stand out heroically against minimal piety and neo-religious
> obfuscation.  However, new sounds are still being generated with the
> symphony orchestra, as the work of James Dillon demonstrates.  In this
> context, Zappa's orchestral style sounds like an intriguing burlesque in a
> side alley."
>

Quite a statment, and it actually manages to mean something!  It's
frustrating, because while he actually says something about the music in
the first paragraph, does a good job of conveying how it sounds to him
[Watson], he goes on to nullify any cogent criticism with the type of
red herrings and jargon-filled nonsense that I am so passionately
against.  There's an enormous quality of elitist value judgment here,
which goes beyond liking things as a mark of hipness, but liking them
for the right reasons.  The best way to screw things, and oneself, up
when talking about music is to inject ideology into the mix.

Why the straw-man of Darmstadt?  A lot of composers were there during
it's epoch, and not only did their work differ in personal ideas and
style, but, as with most artist, their work changed throughout their
careers.  This monolith of "Darmstadt" is a myth, as the variety of
contemporary music [or the variety within Stockhausen's ouvre alone]
shows. And why Darmstadt alone, why not set Zappa against other
"movements" like Black Mountain or the west coast?  If Watson wanted to
prove a critical point, he was unfair to only pitch Zappa against such a
narrow definition of his contemporaries.  He also fails to point or
[perhaps he's ignorant of . . .] Zappa's debt to Varese and, before
that, Darmstadt's debt to Varese.  Varese liberated sound from both
tonality and structured atonality, he pushed timbre as it's own
structure, successfully.

Watson also implies that Zappa did things that no other "academic" and
or "bourgeois" composer did, which may be true when you compare him to
Randy Newman or Billy Joel, but not when you put Zappa into the context
of contemporary art music, where the work under dicussion belongs.  Go
back to Varese again, or Stravinsky, and someone please tell me that the
intended humor and absurdity in Stravinsky's music is tiresome.  It's
certainly far more concise than Zappa's, and if brevity is the soul of
wit . . . and Watson should know that every score "directs musicians,"
it's how they play the damn music!

His class-based comments are incoherent.  The symphony orchestra is the
traditional vehicle of expression for symphonic composers, not for an
economic/social class.  I can imagine the number of composers who would
have been amazed had they found themselves classed as bourgeois.  But
Watson can't seem to admit that music was created out of the desires and
ideas of the composers, not out of bourgeois demands.  If that were
true, then all reviews of new works would be good ones.  Economics and
politics are one thing, the economic and political aspects of art are
another, and, fortunately for us listeners, music is another thing
altogether!

The Boulez appendix is interesting, not least because what other
contemporary composer generates any such press coverage?  Not a one.
But Zappa was a rock star making a new foray with these recordings, a
commercial success in a commercial field [of course an artistic one was
well] with a popular audience, not the cult-like public interest in
contemporary music.  There's a disconnect here when musicians that have
been mentioned in this list are successful when they sell 3,000.  If
Zappa regularly had sales like that, no one would know who he was, and
no orchestra would have recorded him.  So I can understand if Boulez
felt a little ambivalent about the project.  Obviously, he had enough
regard for the music to perform it, and perform it well.  He was
probably a little put off by a press that demanded instant response and
reaction from a musician who is used to spending decades with scores,
his ideas changing the whole time.  And I think it would be only human
of him to feel conflicted in some ways about the popular response to
Zappa's orchestral work, when Boulez's record sales in his lifetime
probably don't match even one Mothers of Invention LP.  What I can
imagine hm thinking in his comments [and this is entirely subjective],
is that he wanted to reserve judgement on the scores so he could spend
enough time with them to go as deep as he could into them [what
conductors and composers actually do at home anyway], but his initial
reaction was quite favorable, as shown in his praise of the vitality of
the music, which he obviously found refreshing.  That is no small
comment of praise on anyone's music, be in Zappa or Beethoven.  At the
very least, Boulez regarded the music, not the esoteric, vapid,
nonsensical pseudo-intellectual [de]structural/post[whatever] context.

gg





- -

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 06 May 1998 00:08:15 -0400
From: Lang Thompson <[e-mail]>
Subject: Avant magazine

The new issue of Cadence lists a few issues of a magazine called Avant.  Is
it worth getting and do the cassettes with it have any unreleased music?
- ------------------------------------------------------
Lang Thompson
http://www.tcf.ua.edu/wlt4
New at Funhouse:  Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan obituary.

"Zathras beast of burden to many others.  Is sad
life.  Probably have sad death.  But at least
there is symmetry."  --  Zathras

- -

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 06 May 1998 00:28:04 -0400
From: Lang Thompson <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: James Bond

This is one of those on-going controversies that seems unlikely to be
resolved either way, at least not anytime soon.  It seems worth noting
though that while Barry has claimed he actually wrote it (sworn statement
to Mojo?), he doesn't seem to have made any official attempt to have the
credit changed which tends to indicate that he doesn't think his claim
would stand up.  And I seem to remember stronger evidence in favor of Monty
Norman, such as witnesses or chronology discrepancies, but maybe that's old
age playing tricks on my mind.

LT
- ------------------------------------------------------
Lang Thompson
http://www.tcf.ua.edu/wlt4
New at Funhouse:  Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan obituary.

"Zathras beast of burden to many others.  Is sad
life.  Probably have sad death.  But at least
there is symmetry."  --  Zathras

- -

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 06 May 1998 00:35:41 -0400
From: Steve Smith <[e-mail]>
Subject: Marc Edwards and E#

Tom Pratt wrote:

> Marc Edwards is a drummer, eh??? Sounds like a reincarnation of Percy
> Jones' Scanners with E# and Previte from back in the day. I love hearing
> e# in a rock trio format - I hope they record something!

Marc Edwards is indeed a drummer, but I don't know how forthcoming the rock trio
content might be, unless Marc's got a side I've not heard.  The records from
which I know his playing are Cecil Taylor's "Dark to Themselves" and David S.
Ware's "Flight of i" ......... That, in a sense, makes it all the more
interesting to me, though I agree E# can be mighty compelling in a straight-ish
situation.

Steve Smith
[e-mail]


- -

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 6 May 1998 01:33:18 -0400 (EDT)
From: Christopher Hamilton <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Music & Jargon

I started to write a lengthy, point-by-point criticism of George's
criticisms of the Watson quote, but I decided it would be petty.  Two main
points worth briefly mentioning were: (1) The quote is an excerpt from a
vastly larger work, and shouldn't be taken as a complete critical
discussion of Zappa's work.  (2) The quote compares Zappa negatively to
Darmstadt composers specifically; George's eloquent defense of the breadth
of contemporary European art music is thus misdirected, and in fact serves
to support Watson's final point.  What really set me off was the
following:

On Mon, 4 May 1998, George Grella wrote regarding a lengthy Ben Watson
quote:

> His class-based comments are incoherent.  The symphony orchestra is the
> traditional vehicle of expression for symphonic composers, not for an
> economic/social class.  I can imagine the number of composers who would
> have been amazed had they found themselves classed as bourgeois.  But
> Watson can't seem to admit that music was created out of the desires and
> ideas of the composers, not out of bourgeois demands.

You objected to bringing ideology into discussions of music, but the
romantic individualism you defend in the above is as much
an ideology as Watson's Marxism.  Similarly you seem perfectly happy to
use jargon in your criticisms of Watson, but you nail him for using
different jargon.  It comes off (to me at least) as if you're trying to
smuggle in your own ideology without actually arguing for it.  I doubt
this is your intention, but you might want to be more careful about making
presuppositions of your own when chastising others for theirs.

     (I might add I think ideological lenses can sometimes shed light on
music, so long as one isn't blinded to other perspectives by them.)

Chris Hamilton
Sensitive Former Marxist

P.S. Where might I look in Varese's and Stravinsky's works for absurdity?
I know some work by each, but just the big famous stuff, and I don't hear
it there.




- -

------------------------------

End of Zorn List Digest V2 #356
*******************************


 To unsubscribe from zorn-list-digest, send an email to
       "[e-mail]"
 with
       "unsubscribe zorn-list-digest"
 in the body of the message.

 For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send
 "help" to the same address.  Do not use quotes in your message.

 A non-digest (direct mail) version of this list is also available; to
 subscribe to that instead, replace all instances of "zorn-list-digest"
 in the commands above with "zorn-list".

 Back issues are available for anonymous FTP from ftp.xmission.com, in
 pub/lists/zorn-list/archive.  These are organized by date.

 Problems? Email the list owner at [e-mail]