As footnote to my post The Perennial Fiction of Nature, a friend points me to an apropos quotation that everyone quotes from the spectralist composer Gerard Grisey. I tried to find the original context on the internet, but the quotation is ubiquitously trotted out by itself, as some sort of self-evident motto for spectralism:

"We are musicians and our model is sound not literature, sound not mathematics, sound not theatre, visual arts, quantum physics, geology, astrology or acupuncture."

Of course, we're musicians and so shouldn't burden our feeble imaginations with anything but music's physical characteristics! I didn't get the memo, and so I've written music about astrology and am currently writing a vocal piece inspired by literature. I like the snark implied by the inclusion of acupuncture, as though to base music on either literature or acupuncture is equally ludicrous. [Interestingly, David First has been making music to listen to during acupuncture.] The curious thing is, Hanslick and Wagner had this same argument over a century ago; it ended in a draw, pretty much, and with Hanslick looking pretty silly. Monsieur Grisey was French, and I'm sure he felt very apologetic about Debussy's La Mer and Berlioz's "Witches' Sabbath."

And before you condemn me to perdition for being anti-European, I will say, and have said, exactly the same kind of thing about John Cage: because Cage visited an anechoic chamber in Boston, now we all have to write music that can't be ruined by babies crying in the audience. Right. These statements about why music has to be made a certain way (from now on) are invariably a power grab, an attempt to manufacture political support beyond what can be achieved by the attractiveness of the music itself. They often work, because younger composers admire their chutzpah and don't think through the ramifications of their specious logic. There's nothing wrong with taking such a principle as a personal inspiration or guideline, but when it starts to be wielded as a weapon for valorizing this music and dismissing that, it is simply careerist aggression.

This is why, politically speaking more than musically, I am a minimalist: because no minimalist ever invented a rationale for why non-minimalist music was invalid. Because the underlying impulse of minimalism was not, "We must do this!," but - "Hey, this is cool!"

Copyright 2016 by Kyle Gann

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