Coherence in New Music: Experience, Aesthetics, Analysis

Mark Hutchinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367229405
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317164647
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

What does it mean to talk about musical coherence at the end of a century characterised by fragmentation and discontinuity? How can the diverse influences which stand behind the works of many late twentieth-century composers be reconciled with the singular immediacy of the experiences that they can create? How might an awareness of the distinctive ways in which these experiences are generated and controlled affect the way we listen to, reflect upon and write about this music? Mark Hutchinson outlines a novel concept of coherence within Western art music from the 1980s to the turn of the millennium as a means of understanding the work of a number of contemporary composers, including Thomas Adès, Kaija Saariaho, T?ru Takemitsu and György Kurtág, whose music cannot be fitted easily into a particular compositional school or analytical framework. Coherence is understood as a multi-layered phenomenon experienced, above all, in the act of listening, but reliant upon a variety of other aspects of musical experience, including compositional statements, analysis, and connections of aesthetic, as well as listeners' own, imaginative conceptualisations. Accordingly, the approach taken here is similarly multi-faceted: close analytical readings of a number of specific works are combined with insights drawn from philosophy and aesthetics, music perception, and critical theory, with a particular openness to novel metaphorical presentations of basic musical ideas about form, language and time.

1 Introduction

Beyond the delta?

‘[Tim Page:] Well, John, this is a question that I’m going to be asking all the composers in this series. Where do you see music going? Do you see it continuing to spatter out in many directions?

[John Cage:] I wouldn’t say spatter out, I would say delta. Instead of being a mainstream, it’s like a river that is divided into many streams. It’s not even three; it’s countless possibilities. And those countless possibilities are going to ocean …’

(Page and Cage, 1985)

John Cage’s evocative image of a musical delta at the end of the twentieth century neatly encapsulates a tension at the heart of much writing on this period. On the one hand, it suggests a directed process of increasing multiplicity and fragmentation, a splintering of a musical mainstream into ‘countless possibilities’ (as Cage put it) whose variety and individualism renders them mutually incomprehensible. This is something noted by many general accounts: Ivan Hewett (2003: 105), for example, writes of the suspicion that ‘what we’re dealing with in each case is not a reinvented realm of music, but a private language’, whilst Alex Ross (2009: 561), drawing on Cage’s analogy, suggests that the best account one can hope to offer of music at the end of the millennium is ‘an aerial tour of an ever-changing landscape’. Robert P. Morgan (1991: 489), writing soon after Cage’s own predictions, sees ‘the openness and eclecticism of current musical life’ as coming ‘at the expense of a system of shared beliefs and values and a community of artistic concerns’, but argues nonetheless that ‘it faithfully reflects the fragmentary character of the larger world in which it exists’ – an argument which harks back to Leonard B. Meyer’s ([1967] 1994: 98) prediction that we were approaching a period characterised by ‘the coexistence of a multiplicity of quite different styles in a fluctuating and dynamic steady-state’. Writers on this music, then, are expected to serve as cartographers and tour guides, tracing the varied routes which composers might take in the exposition of their own independent languages, and expecting little in the way of shared features to be found in the process – either between different contemporary ‘substreams’, or between these streams and the broader, slower river of the past.

On the other hand, the image of a looming ocean in Cage’s account also suggests that this process of stylistic multiplication is not endless. Just as the many streams of a delta begin to meet and merge as they approach the ocean, so (Cage suggests) the distinctions between different musics become more and more superficial as the multiplication of personal styles reaches a saturation point; we begin to notice unexpected parallels between styles, borrowings or quotations in unexpected places, and eventually it becomes impossible to make fruitful distinctions at all. This is an active and self-reinforcing process, not merely a passive dissolution into empty uniformity; as the boundaries between different styles and compositional strategies begin to blur, so musicians are liberated to enrich their own personal languages with an ever more diverse range of influences – a situation which is often seen as emblematic of a postmodern environment, at least as that term is frequently understood within popular culture. Each iteration of this process erodes the banks between these personal sub-streams still further, until they flow together and merge – not at a single historical ‘zero point’, but gradually and actively, stream by stream, in a manner which can only be recognised in retrospect.

Again, this trope recurs in contemporary writing. Elsewhere Ross (2011: 18–19) extols the virtues of an eclectic, ‘iPod Shuffle’ approach to listening tastes as a way to free music from ‘all fatuous self-definitions and delusions of significance’, allowing listeners to appreciate that ‘music is music’, no more and no less. For Meyer ([1967] 1994: 344–5), on the other hand, this trend is more troubling; once music is no longer held together by ‘extended syntactic processes’ and instead consists primarily of a ‘foreground play of pleasant patterning, piquant sonorities, and intriguing textures’,¹ stylistic diversity turns into a kind of lowest-common-denominator egalitarianism – musical differences being reduced to superficial decoration in order that all music might appeal to ‘an enormous and culturally heterogeneous audience’. Paul Griffiths’s (2010: 410–11) account of the period neatly encapsulates both sides of Cage’s viewpoint: he argues that ‘no Ariadne’s thread of common practice is to be found’ in ‘the labyrinth of contemporary music … the abundance of avenues is at once overwhelming and unsettling’; yet equally, this multiplicity is to some degree ‘illusory, for each of today’s many musical languages implies all the others and is implied in them’.

Both sides of this metaphor connect clearly, albeit subtly, with a specific view of the history of music. It is notable that Cage deliberately chooses ‘delta’ in preference to the interviewer’s non-directed term ‘spatter’; the current situation is depicted clearly as the culmination of a century-long process of musical fragmentation, with the amorphous ‘ocean’ as its climax and goal. In a sense, then, Cage’s metaphor appears little more than another restatement of the classic modernist narrative of musical development, whereby composers progress inexorably from tonality towards atonality, through a process of increasing technical complexity which is seen as driven by historical necessity – a phenomenon which Adorno called ‘the irresistibility of the modern’ ([1970] 1997: 20). The ‘ocean’ in this viewpoint marks the telos, the final goal, of this narrative; further paradigm shifts beyond this point appear impossible (unless we were somehow, eventually, to arrive at another musical shore altogether). Whether we see this dissolution of stylistic distinctions as something positive, as Cage and Ross clearly do, or as something more ambivalent, as Griffiths and Meyer seem to, it nonetheless seems to mark a sea change (as it were) for the way we think and write about music.

‘Post’-boxes and cartographies: Against reductionism

Although it is highly evocative and rings true for many aspects of the contemporary musical situation, this delta metaphor – like all overarching metaphors by which we understand history – has a disturbing ability to smooth over the roughness of reality. It is all too easy, guided by such an appealing model of multiplication, to classify the developments of late-twentieth-century art music under a variety of branching and increasingly uncertain categories. Abundant in the discussion of this repertoire are taxonomies of terms such as ‘post-tonal’, ‘neo-Romantic’, ‘post-serial’, ‘post-minimalist’, ‘post-Darmstadt’ and even (Ligeti’s personal favourite) ‘non-atonal’,² each of which conveys in its title its own lack of clarity. Assigning categories in this way produces the happy illusion of pseudo-cartographic comprehension: by labelling the sub-streams, we think we are mapping the terrain.³ But in reality, all we are doing is defining movements in terms of their absences; to say a piece of music is ‘post-serial’ tells us a certain amount about what it is not (it is not straightforwardly serial), but very little about what it actually is. Easiest of all is to renounce attempts at making connections altogether, either presenting all post-1980s music as utterly individual, or else placing it all under the neat heading of ‘pluralism’. This plays nicely into the ‘rhetoric of autonomy’ which Charles Wilson depicts in the writings of contemporary composers – placing emphasis on the uniqueness of their own compositional language in order to differentiate themselves in an increasingly crowded marketplace (Wilson, 2004: 7–9) – but, again, it carries the unmistakable taint of oversimplification. Indeed, as Charles A. Williams notes, the de-individualisation of particular composers, in the service of unifying historical narratives, is just as clear a feature of modernist musical writing (Williams, 1993: 37–44).

Yet the basis of this oversimplification can be found even within the metaphor itself. The image of delta formation as a directed, finite process is attractive and fits nicely into modernist conceptions of musical history, but it does not fit reality nearly so well. In fact, the formation of a delta is an extended process which begins at the mouth of the river, where sediment from further upstream is deposited and forces a branching in the flow; this effect then multiplies gradually, over extended periods, until a recognisable delta shape forms. The sub-streams can never be decisively mapped; the constant arrival of new sediment means that the configuration of the network is continually shifting, streams branching and merging as old waterways become blocked and new ones open up. If the process can be seen as directed at all, it runs in the opposite direction from that implied by Cage: we start at the ocean and work towards the source. Moreover, the sediment of past ideas and traditions, far from standing in the way of progress (as an Adornian view of ‘historical sedimentation’ might suggest),⁴ instead provides the material for contemporary developments and the necessary ‘grit’ for stylistic variety.

If the current musical landscape is to be understood as a delta, then, the inevitability of arriving at a pluralist ‘ocean’ is very questionable, reliant on a historical perspective that the metaphor itself does not support. More likely is an endless reconfiguration of different sub-streams, with no mapping ever remaining stable for long enough to be worthwhile. But perhaps the delta is most eloquent when read (contrary to Cage’s own usage) as a metaphor for our own tendency to shape our view of musical history around our view of the present state of music: the ‘sediment’ that we perceive in current compositional approaches, composers’ statements about their working process, and the contemporary reception of older music generates a particular understanding of the preceding course of musical development – whether we then view it as a single river, a branching of many streams, or a free play of disconnected ideas. Cage’s use (or abuse) of the delta metaphor surely exemplifies this tendency to read history backwards, to interpret it according to our present concerns and extrapolate into the future accordingly.

What is lost in this kind of historical reductionism is the brute particularity of the experiences provided by specific musical works. Listening to a particularly effective and affecting composition, it is as impossible to hear it as simply an exemplar of a specific historical category as it is to consider our hearing of it in total isolation, unaffected by other pieces we have heard which remind us of it, or of other concepts (musical or not) which it brings to mind. To experience a particular work – and to attempt to reflect some of that experience through writing – is to eschew the position of a cartographer or navigator and instead to become an inhabitant: drinking the water of the delta, fishing in its streams, and learning the shape of a particular locality at a particular time through contingent, personal engagement, rather than detached contemplation.⁵

Repertoire and terms

It is this approach I explore in this book. I present here a series of analytical studies of works by a number of the most prominent composers active in the last decade of the twentieth century: John Adams, Thomas Adès, Henri Dutilleux, György Kurtág, György Ligeti, Kaija Saariaho and To-ru Takemitsu. The works studied were all written between 1985 and 1995; I am not attempting a historical survey here, but rather a snapshot of a particular moment in time, with more ambitious, delta-like interpretations of the shape of musical history deliberately avoided.⁶ An outline of some core features may help to give a clearer picture of this historical moment. Pluralism is certainly in evidence; these composers come from a variety of countries and represent a diverse range of stylistic and aesthetic backgrounds, from the charged, expressionist brevity of Kurtág – with its roots in Webern and Hungarian literature – to the expansive and unabashedly triadic Debussyesque sonorities of late Takemitsu. Their development and associations cover a broad timescale: György Ligeti (1923–2006), György Kurtág (b. 1926) and To-ru Takemitsu (1930–1996) were closely connected in earlier periods of their output with the post-war avant-garde, whilst John Adams (b. 1947), Thomas Adès (b. 1971) and Kaija Saariaho (b. 1952) stand several decades removed from its particular struggles, and the music of Henri Dutilleux (1916–2013) represents an earlier, pre-war generation. Nonetheless, there are important shared concerns connecting these pieces which go beyond immediate considerations of style, and which render historical discussions of tradition and innovation particularly ambiguous. At the most basic level, of course, all these compositions fall broadly within the Western concert tradition; they are written predominantly for relatively conventional instrumental forces, to be performed as wholes in traditional concert situations, with very little sign even of the questioning of these conventions found within the post-war avant-garde. Several of the pieces even fall into established generic categories: Adès’s Arcadiana (1994) is a string quartet (and can also be seen obliquely as a cycle of variations), Takemitsu’s How Slow the Wind (1991) is an orchestral tone poem in the manner of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, and Kurtág’s ΣΤΗΛΗ (1994) draws heavily upon the large-scale symphonic tradition of late Romanticism.

Yet this apparent cultural conservatism is undercut by the manner in which these traditional elements are handled and the freedom with which they interact with sonorities and techniques that are far less comfortable. To use the terminology employed by Leonard B. Meyer (1989) in his discussion of musical style, elements which would have functioned as ‘rules’ in earlier styles – including the rules of the earlier avant-garde, such as the emancipation of dissonance or the avoidance of periodic rhythm – are reduced to available ‘strategies’ for the composer within a field where there are few or no overriding rules per se. Familiar gestures are placed within larger forms that alter their roles and significance; elements of tonal language and processes of expectation interact freely with a variety of post-tonal structural techniques and with passages where immediate sonority overrides any larger-scale syntactic concerns. The status of the past as ‘a foreign country’ (pace L. P. Hartley) is called into question through the use of quotation, pastiche and allusion, often without any sense of ironic detachment or distancing. Likewise, elements outside the ‘purely musical’ are equally available to these composers; their work draws frequently upon visual, literary and theatrical references as a way of grounding particular expressive or formal characteristics – something evidenced by the abundance of evocative or referential titles. The result is music of rich effect and wide appeal; these composers are all notable for the broad impact their work has had within the musical world, drawing praise from players, critics and listeners alike.⁷

Many of these features present a clear challenge to the progressivist impulse that is essential to modernist viewpoints of history. It might be tempting, then, to invoke at this point perhaps the largest and most influential of the ‘post’-boxes found within contemporary discourse: postmodernism. Yet this term is deliberately avoided throughout, a decision that perhaps needs further explanation. It certainly does not stem from a desire to keep the debate framed in modernist terms. Indeed, many features of the methodology adopted here – the undercutting of rigid binary polarities, the acceptance of analysis as a fundamentally interpretative act, the use of a patchwork of different techniques and metaphors to engage with musical experiences – have much in common with aspects of the broader postmodernist project as it has variously been defined. But as a description of this music, it remains highly problematic. Jean-François Lyotard’s ([1979] 1984) account of the postmodern condition, published in English just as the period covered by this study was about to begin, announced the arrival of the term in mainstream philosophical discourse; yet nearly three decades later there is still no sign of a consensus as to what role it can play in discussions of content and ideology within contemporary music.⁸

This problem is in part unavoidable. Even the use of a catchall term such as ‘postmodernism’ represents a massive act of reification that sits uneasily with the complex socio-historical constellati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of examples
• Preface
• Acknowledgements and permissions
• 1 Introduction: Beyond the delta?
• 2 ‘A here that is gone, or is going’: Adès’s Arcadiana
• 3 Connections 1: Interaction, analysis, energy
• 4 Pulling inwards, pushing onwards: Saariaho’s Solar
• 5 Connections 2: Shape, continuity, development
• 6 Strolling through a formal garden: Takemitsu’s How slow the Wind
• 7 Connections 3: Expression, moment, meaning
• 8 Ruined artefacts: Kurtág’s ΣΤΗΛΗ
• 9 Conclusions: Three statements, three questions
• List of primary sources
• Bibliography
• Index