October 3, 2007 By Kyle Gann
AMSTERDAM
- The painter Philip Guston was Morton Feldman's best friend. In 1970,
Guston abandoned the abstract expressionist style he had been closely
associated with, and began painting cartoonish figures that often
included shoes, disembodied eyeballs, and hooded figures. To say Feldman
was shocked would be an understatement. As someone recently told me the
story (heard from someone else who was there), Feldman came to the
initial exhibition and Guston came up to ask him what he thought. For
several minutes, Feldman simply couldn't speak, and Guston slowly and
sadly got the point. Finally Feldman just turned away and left, and the
two parted ways for years. And Feldman wasn't the only one. "It was as
though I had left the church," Guston later recalled; "I was
excommunicated for awhile." The dependably venomous Hilton Kramer titled
his review of the show, "A Mandarin Pretending to be a Stumblebum."
I have a couple of upcoming performances in Amsterdam, and I got here
early to see John Luther Adams and to hear his beautiful sound
installations Vespers and Veils. John and I have fantastic
conversations. Something about the interaction of his profundity and
vagueness and my superficiality and sharpness gives off sparks that seem
to intermittently illuminate all of existence. Perhaps the most
mind-blowing musical conversation I've had in my life was one John and I
had about a year and a half ago, walking through the snow and cold
outside Fairbanks. I keep meaning to blog about it someday, but I'm
still trying to process it. I'll tell you about it when I can do it
justice.
John, as everyone knows, is a composer whose paradigm is nature.
Vespers and Veils, based on prime-numbered harmonics of the overtone
series, are softly roaring continua. All of John's works, by his own
frequent admission, have to do with the incredible Alaskan landscape he
lives within. His pieces are walls of sound: not impenetrable, but
gorgeous, relentless, ebbing and flowing, swelling and dispersing,
piling up in waves that stretch beyond one's concert-hall attention
span. Veils engulfs you and makes you just want to sit down and be
quiet. His orchestra piece For Lou Harrison, just released this month on
New World, is a series of avalanches, each one quite like the last but
different in detail, before whose massive beauty one can only submit.
His music is big, beyond human in its scope, and as impersonal as it is
translucent.
Back in the '80s, I tried to be the kind of composer John is. It was
in the air. Cage had unleashed the force of nature into music, and
everyone was obsessed with sonority and process, trying to get their own
personality out of the music and let nature speak for itself. The
objectivity of 12-tone music had given way to a perhaps even greater
objectivity of process-oriented logic. But over years of
experimentation, I found that nature didn't speak through me. The
natural processes I came up with were more tedious than compelling. I
loved Cage's music, and La Monte Young's, and Steve Reich's, and John's,
but it was not mine to write. Whatever joy I took in composing had to do
with the personal and subjective: the quirky melodic decoration, the
unexpected key change, the rhythmic figure that seems bizarre at first,
but finally becomes familiar through repetition. I greatly admired the
composers of nature, and wrote about them enthusiastically, but I was
not one of them. My muse led in a different direction.
I'd been thinking about this difference between me and John lately,
and in discussing it, we wandered into Feldman and Guston. Both of us
largely base our music in a Feldmanesque paradigm, an ongoing continuum
of only subtle dynamic change. For me, Feldman was not a composer of
nature, though he is ambiguous in this respect, and the question is one
about which reasonable people could disagree. "Those 88 notes are my
Walden," he said, referring to the piano keyboard, and I interpret that
to mean he saw himself not as a channel for nature, but as the
Thoreau-like individual reacting to nature. I hear the anxious melodic
figures in Rothko Chapel as psychological, not natural, conscious of
their alienation and attempting to find release or resolution or
integration. Take the incredible passage near the end of Feldman's For
Philip Guston where the music strips down to just four chromatic pitches
for a full 25 minutes, and then suddenly opens up into a pure C-major
scale across the entire piano: that's no natural process, the result of
no inevitable logic, but an incredible psychic release after almost
unendurable repression. Of course, I'm cherry-picking my examples to
make the point.
What was revealing was the differing reactions John and I had to
Guston's heretical pictorial style. When he first encountered it years
ago, John, he said, had the same reaction as Feldman: he couldn't
believe that a great abstract expressionist had turned away from the
wonders of pure color and shape to paint naive-looking figures with
strangely personal, idiosyncratic associations. It took him awhile to
decide that Guston's late works were no less masterful than the early
ones. I first knew Guston from his earlier work as well, but the shoes
and giant eyeballs and hooded figures flooded me with an instantaneous
sense of relief. It was liberating. I had been a Jackson Pollock
fanatic, or thought I was, but Guston made me realize that I was hungry
for art to reintegrate the human element, the personal element, the
whimsical and idiosyncratic. Nature is a paradigm that an artist can
hardly help worshipping, but ultimately I felt that we also need an art
that is about being human, with all the attendant neuroses,
embarrassments, longings, and humor. I love(d) abstract expressionism,
but I wanted to know how, once we had made our way through it, we were
going to come back to dealing with the uncomfortableness and absurdity
of human consciousness.
It helped that Guston's paintings were cartoon-like. I love cartoons
myself, and in the '90s found myself drawn to what I think of as my
cartoon music, the stylized appropriations of musical clichés. I
especially let myself go in my Disklavier pieces: the rhythmically
dislocated ragtime of Texarkana, the deadpan tango rhythm of Tango da
Chiesa. I flatter myself that, like Haydn, Ives, and Satie, I am one of
the rare composers capable of purely musical humor, independent of
extramusical references. My entirely representational Custer and Sitting
Bull, with its trumpet calls, Indian flutes and drums, and "Garry Owen"
quotations, taps into obvious prototypes. There are deliberate
caricatures in my music, skewed pictures and appropriations of familiar
musical phenomena.
I fear that, to the sophisticated new-music fans who've learned to
love the sublime blankness of John's self-evident canvases, those
caricatures must seem like a naive back-pedaling. I often use secondary
dominants, and even in these days of returned diatonic tonality, such
familiar chords are not "signifiers" of originality. Composers (though
never John) sometimes react to my music with the same disappointment
that Feldman showed Guston's late work, denigrating it as merely
pastiche or satire, and I've learned very well how it feels to seem like
a mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum. On the other hand, I think my
music may be more comfortable for fans of 19th-century classical music
than John's, in whose wide canvases they might miss a certain expected
level of surface detail. In 1989 John Rockwell, kinder than Kramer,
called my music "naively pictorial," and it was a phrase from heaven.
I've carried the banner of "naive pictorialism" ever since.
I wrote a piano concerto about hurricane Katrina - only it skips over
the hurricane. The first movement, "Before," is an expression of happy
thoughtlessness; the second movement, "After," is about anger, mourning,
betrayal, recovery, and includes a stylized image of a New Orleans
funeral. If John had written a Katrina piece, it would be about the
hurricane. It would be a hurricane.
The "natural" path was not easy to abandon. "New music," as we called
it back then, was almost definable as music that "let nature take its
course." Back in the day I even gave a New Music America lecture titled
"The De-Spiritualization of Sound," about how new music was now about
sound waves and not personality, but I gave it with an uneasy
conscience. Distinctions like natural versus psychological, literal
versus metaphorical, are not trivial: they are the axes in reference to
which we position ourselves to stake out aesthetic territory and explore
what music means and what it can accomplish, because, thankfully, we'll
never know everything music can achieve. But just as it was
fundamentally stupid to think, as so many did in the '50s, "OK, the age
of tonal music is over, from now on music can only be atonal and anyone
who lapses back into tonality is not with the times," it would be
equally stupid to think that "history now demands" that music now be
always literal in its depiction, or that psychological metaphor must be
abandoned as old-fashioned. George Rochberg was right: the problem with
12-tone music was not what it added to our vocabulary but what it tried
to subtract, that it attempted to outlaw anything associated with the
past. The history of creative music never goes backward, but neither
does it ever decide that one side of a creative duality is now useless,
and only the opposite side can be gainfully explored.
What's most fascinating for me, though, is that, if you made an
aesthetic map of the new-music world, John would be nearly my closest
neighbor. It is immodest of me to link myself with him, I know, because
he is far better known as a composer than I am. But as he and I discuss
it, we both share a backyard boundary with Peter Garland, with Jim Fox
and Mikel Rouse next door, Michael Gordon down the road one way, Larry
Polansky the other way, and like that. You couldn't find two composers
more in the same "camp" than me and John. We have the same influences,
similar histories, the same heros, the same dreams. But our brains are
wired differently, and all those new-music impulses that hit his brain
and turn into vast celebrations of nature hit mine and turn into quirky
celebrations of personality. He once called me a "force of nature," but
that was a generous projection: he's the force of nature, I'm a force of
culture. (Quite parallel, John still models himself after Thoreau, while
I long ago realized I actually prefer Emerson.) It's astonishing how
diametrically opposite people with so much affinity for each other can
be when you look at them close enough.
COMMENTS:
John Shaw says: October 3, 2007 at 8:29 pm - Kyle, what a beautiful
tribute to friendship and a gorgeous exploration of aesthetics. This is
the most inspiring independent clause I've read in ages: "thankfully,
we'll never know everything music can achieve." Thank you.
Wayne Reimer says: October 5, 2007 at 3:41 am - Fascinating
stuff; thank you. I'm torn between thinking it's really worthwhile to be
that self-aware, and thinking it's a real and quite perilous trap to be
that self-aware. I think I may have some bizarre and absurdly naive
concept regarding the possibility of composing without knowing what you
are doing within a larger context, without either thinking about or
being concerned with how one fits in to any frame, historical or other.
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KG replies: Thank you, John (Shaw, that is).
KG replies: Interesting response. I think, though, that if I hadn't
worked at becoming self-aware, I might have spent my life trying to
write music that seemed socially mandated (or "hip" or that "fit into
the larger context") but didn't fit my personality.