Identity and Diversity in New Music

The New Complexities

Marilyn Nonken

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367727710
• eBook ISBN: 9780429758225
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Identity and Diversity in New Music: The New Complexities aims to enrich the discussion of how musicians and educators can best engage with audiences, by addressing issues of diversity and identity that have played a vital role in the reception of new music, but have been little-considered to date.

Marilyn Nonken offers an innovative theoretical approach that considers how the environments surrounding new music performances influence listeners' experiences, drawing on work in ecological psychology. Using four case studies of influential new music ensembles from across the twentieth century, she considers how diversity arises in the musical environment, its impact on artists and creativity, and the events and engagement it makes possible. Ultimately, she connects theory to practice with suggestions for how musicians and educators can make innovative music environments inclusive.

1 Old Complexities

Four pioneering, historically important contemporary music ensembles—the Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen (Society for Private Musical Performance), the Group for Contemporary Music, Ensemble L’Itinéraire, and Bang on a Can—set the precedent for countless other performing and presenting organizations, many in existence today. Examining this select sample of ensemble-presenters allows us to consider their contrasting missions and methods, curatorial strategies, constituencies, and sources of support. It also allows us to consider, from an ecological perspective, how they influenced and were influenced by the environments from which they emerged. Vienna in the years following World War I offered a different sociological, economic, and cultural environment than post-1968 Paris, just as New York’s Uptown scene of the early 1960s differed vastly from the same city’s Downtown a decade later. In these diverse environments, some thrived, and others perished. This leads us to consider both the factors that made some of these groups so robust and those that rendered others unable to adapt.

Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen

By the advent of World War I, Arnold Schönberg had already written many of the works for which he is most renowned today: Verklärte Nacht (1908), Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten (1909), Erwartung (1909), and Pierrot Lunaire (1912). These compositions broke free from tonality in an expressionistic, dramatically radical style. Audiences greeted them with a mixed reception. Some listeners were confused by the unusual content and forms of Schönberg’s compositions and struggled to grasp his embrace of uncertainty, irrationality, emotionality, and moral ambiguity. Proponents of modernism enthusiastically endorsed the complexities of his music, while conservatives dismissed it with malevolence. He was portrayed in the press as both “a remarkable Viennese genius” (Maurice Rosenfeld, Musical America) and “the representative of German musical frightfulness” (Henry T. Finck, The Nation), simultaneously messiah and Satan (Feisst 2011, 31). With awkward ties to academia, Schönberg taught privately and struggled financially. When called for military service at the age of forty-two, his private teaching came to an end, and his creative development halted.

Discharged from the military in 1916, Schönberg returned to Vienna. He found it difficult to work amid the shortages of food and fuel, money, and housing. At this low point in his life (he only achieved financial and professional stability in 1925, when he succeeded Ferruccio Busoni at the Preußische Akademie der Künste in Berlin), he developed the idea of the Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen. The Verein’s mission was articulated in a prospectus, presumed to be written by Schönberg’s student Alban Berg (1885–1935): “to give artists and friends of art a real and precise knowledge of modern music.” The Society gave its first concert in 1918. In the next three years, its players presented over 350 performances of more than 150 works, in 117 concerts.

From the beginning, the goal of the Verein was the education of its members. Schönberg conceived of it as an extension of his teaching: as an instrument of education and not propaganda. Its goals were to prepare works thoroughly and to perform them with clarity, insight, and refinement, without emphasizing any particular style or aesthetic. Inspired by his mentor, the conductor and composer Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), Schönberg sought to infuse the work of the Verein with his principles, methods, and cosmopolitan attitudes (Meibach 1984, 7). This meant rehearsing above and beyond the standards of the day. A single concert might be preceded by eight rehearsals, two of them offered during the standard Viennese concert hour (7:30pm). Schönberg devoted himself wholeheartedly to the Verein, to the extent that he composed no significant musical works during the years he devoted to the project.

The Verein was notoriously private, even secretive. Programs were not announced in advance. Publicity of any sort was prohibited. Guests (non-members) were not allowed, and critics were forbidden; those who were allowed to attend the Verein’s activities had to pledge not to publish reports of what they had heard or write or solicit criticisms. At concert events, expressions of approval, displeasure, and gratitude—even applause—were not permitted.

Rules for members consisted of paying dues, endorsing the Verein’s purpose, and not violating its general protocols. All rehearsals were open to the society’s members, who paid on a sliding scale. They were offered half-price scores for purchase and invited to attend rehearsals and lectures by resident composers and musicologists; in this way, they could follow the preparation of the programmed works from their initial readings to final performances and develop an intimate knowledge of each. The members of the society, however, had no say in the programming decisions, which were made by Schönberg and his performance directors Berg and Anton Webern (1883–1945), the pianist Eduard Steuermann (1892–1964), the violinist Rudolf Kolisch (1896–1978), and the musicologists Erwin Stein (1885–1958) and Benno Sachs (1882–1968). This stemmed, in part, from Schönberg’s insistence that critical knowledge separated professional musicians from amateurs.

Schönberg’s mistrust of the layman and the denial of his right to judge stemmed from a deep-seated conviction. He repeatedly expressed such doubts, particularly in reference to the Verein where he insisted that the sole judgment of all artistic matters had to be left to the professionals and not to the members at large … it would not occur to an amateur to hold forth assertive opinions in discussions with professionals in the sciences—with a physician, chemist, or astronomer. Nor could the dilettante argue self-righteously with a lawyer or mathematician. In the arts, however, particularly in music, everyone appeared as a self-appointed expert.

(Meibach 1984, 32)

Schönberg’s attitude toward the listener foreshadowed that of Milton Babbitt (1916–2011), notoriously articulated in his 1958 article “The Composer as Specialist,” commonly referred to as “Who Cares If You Listen?” (Babbitt 2011, 48–54). Schönberg’s goal was not to provide audiences with music that they already knew and liked, but to broaden the range of what was offered in Vienna in terms of the composers, styles, and nationalities represented on the concert stage. His was an attempt to make up for lost time; it was only in 1918 that the government lifted its ban on “enemy composers,” once again allowing the performance of music from the Allied nations of America, England, France, Italy, and Russia. To educate the public in the postwar years meant to acquaint listeners with previously forbidden works, as well as those dismissed by a Viennese musical establishment epitomized by Johann Strauss, the “Waltz King” (notably, four works of Strauss were performed by the Verein and given, as was its standard, twenty-five hours of rehearsal).

The Verein’s opening concert featured the fourth and seventh piano sonatas of Alexander Scriabin (d. 1915), the Prose lyriques of Claude Debussy (d. 1918), and the Symphony No. 7 of Mahler (d. 1911) arranged for two pianos by Alfredo Casella (1883–1947). Later programs featured compositions of Maurice Ravel (1875–1937), Erik Satie (1866–1925), and Paul Dukas (1865–1935); Stravinsky, Busoni, and Reger; and the Austrians Egon Wellesz (1885–1974) and Erich Korngold (1897–1957), who later found Hollywood fame as an Oscar-winning composer of film music. Alongside Schönberg, Webern, and Berg, composers from underrepresented nations included the Czechoslovakian microtonalist Alois Hába (1893–1973) and Joseph Suk (1874–1935), the disciple and son-in-law of Antonin Dvořák; the Hungarians Béla Bartók (1881–1945), Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967) and Kodály’s student Laszlo Lajtha (1892–1963), an ethnomusicologist; the Polish Karol Szymanowski (1882–1937), who had founded the Young Polish Composers’ Publishing Company in 1905; and the Dutch Willem Pijper (1894–1947), whose name is still used to refer to the octatonic scale in the Netherlands. Traditional repertoire, programmed alongside the new music, included song cycles, arrangements of symphonies, and sonatas by Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Strauss, Wolf, Schumann, and Bruckner.

As its extensive rehearsal schedule suggests, the Verein upheld an extraordinary commitment to excellence in performance. Its performers were hand-picked advocates for the contemporary repertoire, “primarily of the kind that have placed themselves at the disposal of the Society—out of interest to the cause.” Virtuosity for its own sake was not tolerated, and musicians who may have seen their involvement in the Society as a networking opportunity (“for whom the performed work is not the primary purpose”) were excluded (Meibach 1984, 49). The player’s role was to provide a highly specialized but limited service and a performance that would not overshadow the composition.

The center of interest was to be the music itself, and the performer was relegated firmly to second place. The music was to be protected from the ruinously bad performances that difficult contemporary music generally received because of the organization of concert life, centered upon the standard repertory. Above all, the music was to be withdrawn both from the dictates of fashion, which inflated and deflated reputations arbitrarily, and from the pressures of commercialism.

(Rosen 1975, 65)

The Verein offered a supportive environment intended to foster a sympathetic reception for the composer. Through the Herculean efforts of Schönberg and his colleagues, the Verein met its artistic goals and adhered to its rigid protocols. “In this Verein,” wrote David Josef Bach, chief of the Art Department of the City of Vienna, “artistic achievements were accomplished which cannot be compared with anything similar in Vienna or anywhere else in the world” (Meibach 1984, 240). Even so, the Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen failed after three short years. This was largely due to the inescapable pressures of a wildly spiraling Austrian inflation, which made it impossible to pay for performers and venues. No doubt, the Verein suffered from its self-imposed restrictions on promotion and publicity, severe rules, and shunning of the press. It also withered in the absence of any municipal support. The city government, committed to a socialist orientation, privileged the diffusion of more accessible musical works, increasingly emphasizing the importance of art forms and styles considered readily comprehensible for Vienna’s large working class.

Despite the Verein’s spectacular flame-out, it inspired many of the contemporary music groups founded in the next several decades. Some of its extraordinary performers emigrated to America before World War II, where they would perform and teach for many decades. These included Steuermann, who taught at the Juilliard School and mentored pianists including Alfred Brendel (b. 1931), Russell Sherman (b. 1930), Jerome Lowenthal (b. 1932), and Kolisch, who taught at the New School, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the New England Conservatory (Steuermann and Kolisch were crucial figures during the early years of the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik at Darmstadt, which remains one of the most prestigious festivals for new music). Another remarkable performer was the pianist Rudolf Serkin (1803–1991), founder of the Marlboro Music Festival (1951), who would teach for more than three decades at the Curtis Institute. Progeny of the Verein were critical to the rise of contemporary music institutions that emerged in the following decades, including the International Composers’ Guild (1921), the Prague Society for Private Musical Performances (1922), the International Society for Contemporary Music (1922), the Donaueschingen Festival (1922), the League of Composers-New York (1923), Henry Cowell’s New Music Society (1925), the Pan-American Association of Composers (1928), the Copland-Sessions Concerts (1928), Marlboro Music Festival (1951), and the Domaine Musicale (1954). Thus, the attitudes of Schönberg’s society became influential internationally, on stages big and small, and its biases propagated by generations of performers.

Were these attitudes elitist? The answer can only be an unequivocal “yes.” To those sympathetic to Schönberg, he stands as a defiant figure representative of all composers held powerless in the face of financial crises, insurmountable inequities of class and education, and virulent strains of nationalism and populism. For such a composer to create this Verein, under those circumstances, was a deeply committed act requiring unique sacrifices. Yet Schönberg’s was an elitist vision of a jewel box experience available to a select few: the musical equivalent of haute couture or omakase, with an extraordinary value like that of a rare hot-house flower. Schönberg felt no connection to the broader public, and he made no secret of his views, as articulated five years after the Verein folded.

I have surely said it often enough already: I do not believe that the artist creates for others. If others want to establish a relationship between themselves and the artwork, that is their concern, and the artist cannot be expected to deny this to them. Although he should! … Art for the people: one can also see it in this. Art is from the outset naturally not for the people.

(Auner 2012, 86)

We can compare the hermetic activities of the Verein to the rise, during the same period, of socially pragmatic Gebrauchsmusik: the “useful music” associated with Paul Hindemith (1895–1963), Kurt Weill (1900–1950), and Ernst Krenek (1900–1991). The goals and motivations of composers like Schönberg and Hindemith could not have been more different. The Verein’s programs were curated for a small and select, or self-selecting, audience. Gebrauchsmusik was designed to be appreciated by amateurs, to sing and play for their own pleasure in their own homes. In his biography of Schönberg, Charles Rosen equates the behavior of both elitists and populists with a surrender to the growing commercialism and commodification of music. Proponents of Gebrauchsmusik buckled to the pressures of the marketplace by pandering to the broader public, seeking a broadly accessible common denominator. In a diametrically opposed fashion, members of the Verein fled the pressures of the marketplace by withdrawing from the public entirely and relying on virtuoso performers. In hindsight, neither the strategies of the Verein nor those associated with Gebrauchsmusik effectively countered or combated music’s commercialism and commodification. The whorishness of Gebrauchsmusik and the chastity of the Verein were similarly ineffective solutions of desperation.

Rosen suggests that Schönberg, compared with Hindemith, took the more honorable course despite the fact that it led directly to the scrap heap of history. “Schönberg’s Society was a solution of despair, but it was (and is) necessary to maintain the ideal that music is performed because musicians wish to write and play it …” he wrote. “In any case, the uneasy relation of composer and public today cannot be solved by composers, who must live with it as best they can: it is the creation of forces far too large for musicians to do anything about” (Rosen 1975, 69). Although this is an incredibly defeatist view, Rosen’s words carried and continue to carry a great deal of weight, particularly in the classical music community, coming from not only a performer of note but also the author of highly regarded works such as The Classical Style (1971) and The Romantic Generation (1995). Due in part to Rosen’s ringing endorsement, this tragic view of the contemporary composer remains current. In the popular press, the Schönbergian epitaph is not uncommon. “Herein lies the misery of the modernist composer” wrote Michael Church of The Independent, prefacing his 2003 review of Hewett’s Healing The Rift, “obliged to teach the audience a new language, but inevitably doomed to fail.”

In Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, written at about the same time as Rosen’s biography, Cornelius Cardew (1936–1981), the experimental composer and co-founder of the Scratch Orchestra (founded 1969), articulated a contrasting viewpoint. Cardew spoke forcefully toward the necessity of change in music, with an attitude toward changing society itself. “At that moment when we genuinely confront the ‘necessity for change’ in society,” he stated, “a process of change begins in us, we begin to grow and develop.”

We begin to participate in changing society and our consciousness grows alongside this. So, in terms of the individual human being just as in terms of society at large, the basis of change is internal. Outwardly, he tries to create the favourable conditions for this change to go forward. The revolutionary does not do this by retiring to a cave for cultivation of his immortal soul but by ploughing into the struggle against the old and the obsolete, against the decadent and the degenerate, against the human agents of oppression and exploitation (also in the field of culture and art), knowing that practical activity in this struggle provides the best possible external conditions favouring the development not only of his own personal consciousness, but also the consciousness of the vast masses of people who are materially and culturally oppressed under the present social system. In the struggle against the old and decrepit the new is born.

(Cardew 1974, 68)

A century after the founding of Schönberg’s society, issues of populism and elitism in music have become familiar complexities. In the brief flowering of the Verein, we can suggest that cognitive diversity was highly valued. Indeed, the Verein’s remarkable accomplishments could be attributed directly to the extraordinary individual capabilities of its personnel. Yet bringing their gifts, or contributions, to a more diverse audience was never an institutional goal. It was not even entertained as a legitimate possibility. There was never an institutional commitment to bring the cultural experience to broader audiences, only a dedic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Series Editor’s Introduction
• Introduction
• 1 Old Complexities
• 2 New Complexities
• 3 Toward an Ecology of New Music
• 4 Keeping It Real
• Afterword: On Precarity and Sanctuary
• Appendix
• Index