TN#: 498761 Brian Moseley Faculty/Staff [email protected] Music 8646166899 brianmos Comments: Notes: No Matching Bib/No ISBN, ISSN, or OCLCNo in request. Need by: 12/20/2017 Journal Article Shipping Option: Odyssey Journal Title: The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays Volume: Issue: Month/Year: 2009 Pages: 144-52 Article Author: Taruskin, Richard Article Title: A Surrealist Composer Comes to the Rescue of Modernism Imprint: Item #: Call #: ML3785 .T36 2009 Location: Music Library | General Collection Date Received: 9/21/2017 10:00:46 AM Status: Notice: This material may be Date Cancelled: protected by copyright law (Title Reason Cancelled: 17 US. Code) Date Sent Number of Pages: Buffalo Libraries, Document Delivery Services BUF NYUSBU 716-645-2812 [email protected] BUF - Document Delivery23 A Surrealist Composer Comes to the Rescue of Modernism “Nowadays you're eclectic or you're nothing,” a graduate student at Prince- ton University said recently when I inquired about the reigning philosophy of composition at that old bastion of utopian purity. Talk about signs of the times! By that new-Princetonian token, Thomras Ades, the English compos- ing phenom (still under thirty) is really something, and the records keep coming. The fourth and latest Adés disc from EMI Classies brings Ayla, the ‘wenty-three-minute symphony-in-all-but-name that has just won its young. composer Louisville University’s Grawemeyer Award, the biggest plum the classical-music world now offers. Is all the shouting merited? Yes indeed. If the attention being paid the ‘wenty-cightyear-old Mr. Ad@s is another sign of the times in classical music, there is reason, at this time of millennial stocktaking and auguries of doom, for renewed hope. Mr. Ades has in effect extended to a satislying end-of century culmination the far side or other face of serious modern music, the alternative current that has always shadowed the severely abstract variety of ‘modernism that hogged the headlines until it ran out of gas, The ttle of the prize-winning piece, the plural of asylum, plays poctical (and yes, alittle pedamtically) on the word's ambiguity. Refuge? Madhou litle of both? It’sa gentle tease and, like the music, sportively provocative Te may well have had its origins in “a beautiful statement about music,” as the musicologist Joseph Kerman rightly calls it, from Emerson's Journals. (Mr. Kerman quotes it at the end of Concerto Conversations, a graceful set ofr minations just published by Harvard University Press.) °So is music an a lum,” Emerson wrote. “It takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim Firstpublshed inthe Nao Yk Tines, 5 December 1g, Copyright® 2008 The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission mTASURREALISY COMPOSER 145 secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for wh; whereto.” Wonder too much about such things and you might well end up in the madhouse (or ata rave), Mr. Adés seems to hint in his antic third movement. For the most part, though, Asylais appropriately consoling and uncomm heartfelt in a time of compulsive flimflam and simulacra. Tt had a big and sgushy press on its premiere, last year, by Sir Simon Rattle and the City of Bi mingham Symphony Orchestra, and the present recording (EMI Classics 56818 2; CD, with other Ades works conducted by the composer) is a com= posite of their live performances. They do it con amore, as one rarely hears contemporary orchestral music done. That sense of love and trust is what makes the recorded performance of Agylaseem a major event, not just a wu derkind’s breakthrough into compositional adulthood. Indeed, from the beginning and, according to some reports, right down, to his gloomy recent "Message for the Millennium” at the New York Phil- h , Mr. Adés’s work has been unusual in its air of sincerity. For all ts precocious technical sophistication and its omnivorous range of reference— fifteenth-century England to seventeenti-century France (o contemporary Hungary; gamelans and ouds; Billie Holiday, Astor Piazzolla, the Chemical Brothers—it does not put everything “in quotes.” It has urgency and fervor, and communicates directly. What has put Powder Her Face, Mr. Adés's first opera (also on EMD), in such demand worldwide as to be newsworthy, it seems to me, is nor just the notorious fellatio aria. Its rather that having set up its main character, an aging nymphomaniac duchess, asa figure of cruel and predictable fun, it turns around and honors her, and the audience as well, with unsentimental and affecting sympathy at the lonely end. So for all his spectacular eclecticism, con't call Mr. Ades a postmodernist _justyet. For one thing, his spoiled ich commented on in the press, shows that he is still playing the part our culture has written for a modernist artist. But more positively, as long as there are strong controlling hands like his at the stylistic mixing board, there will be enough life left in modernism, taking that word now to mean the late-romantie projection of a strong creative personality, to last well into the coming century. Also symp tomatic is the way Andrew Porter, a selfdescribed “hoary critic” who has ‘made ita mission to search out and destroy postmodernism wherever it shows its face, has cast himself as Mr. Adés’s happy hyper, in informative if some- what frantic program notes for all the composer's CDs so far, He has good reason. In Mr, Adés late modernism has a winner at last, respectably hardcore talent 10 whom audiences, trusting their noses, have responded with enthusiasm, as (despite Mr. Porter's decades of devoted min: istration) they have not responded to Sir Harrison Birtwistle or Brian Fer- neyhough, and never will, Mr. Adés can be promoted without recourse to the imperial haberdasher’s manual. J; whence and at behavior, son146 A SURREALIST COMPOSER For the origins of Mr Adés'seclecticism, and a validation of his modernist, credentials, consider a passage from a new biography of Richard Strauss by Bryan Gilliam, the leading American authority on the composer, published by Cambridge University Press. “Taking a step well beyond the old-fashioned, decadent, fin-de-siéele Salome,” Mr. Gilliam writes, "Strauss realized that the musical language for the new century should be one that intentionally lacks stylistic uniformity, a language that reflects a modernist preoccupation with the dilemma of history, one that arguably foreshadows the dissolution of the ideology of style in the late 2oth century.” The immediate result was Der Rosenkavalier, an opera from which, as it happens, Mr. Adés quotes delectably in Prader Her Face Mr. Gilliam’s sentence isa beautifully calculated slap in the face of con- ventional historiography, which has always regarded Salome (together with its immediate successor, Elkira) as Sirauss’s modernist peak, and therefore his high-water mark asa creative figure, and Der Rosenkavalieras the beginning of the stylistic backslide that eventually condemned Strauss to historical ir- relevance. Mr. Giliam’s proposed revision would locate the origins of an au- thentic modernism in the very eclecticism that is now billed, and sometimes ‘written off, as postmodern. Me: Gilliam’s “dilemma of history” might more pointedly be called the problem of an accumulated repertory: a past that has remained an eternally present and intimidating challenge to its successors. One solution—Straus's, as Mr Gilliam describes twas o accept tat eternally present pastas mine, Another, Schoenberg's, was t try atall costs to outdistance itwith labored novation. That quixotic effort demanded the sacrifice of any hope of robust communication with @ nonprofessional public. The short-range compens- tion was the tiresome bromide that cast public rejection as.a badge of honor. The long-range consequences were drastic: “the futile chase,” as the New Yorkercritic Alex Ross puts it, “after progressively more arcane and irrelevant imusies ‘ofthe furure.”” ‘That is the sad side of the story, the one the textbooks have been telling. Its lingering exponents are history’ castaways, ungracefully aging and re- sentful. The other, happier side of the story has achieved its frst fullscale telling in Untwisting the Serpent, a book by Daniel Albright, a professor of com- parative literature, published by the University of Chicago Press. This mar velous study, the first survey ofthe arts to regard the twentieth century as a completed whole, proposes a more radically revised canon. It finds authen- tic modernism not in utopian purification rituals but in polymorphously per- verse joinings and copulations Among its teasures is the first adequate account of musical ‘The cast of main characters, ranged against the traditional modes Handful (the Vienna Trinity and its graying latter-day saints), includes often marginalized figuresas Weill, Britten, Satie and Les Six, Ravel, Martin,A SURREALIST COMPOSER 147 Virgit Thomson, George Antheil, even the Sunday composer Ezra Pound, The hero of the tale, the explicitly designated antiSchoenberg, is Francis Poulenc, whom Mr. Albright’s narrative will greatly (and, I hope, perma- nently) magnify. “Poulenc was original,” writes Mr. Albright, “not in the way that his music sounds but in the way that his music means.” Rather than Schoenberg's vaunted harmonic dissonance, Poulenc offered "semantic dissonance.” Mr. Ades is lucky enough to be original both in the way that his music sounds and in the way that it means, and he works hard at his individuality (another rea- son not to call hima postmodernist). But that he is a committed and already ‘masterly musical surrealist is evident within minutes, no matter which piece of his you choose to listen to. His polymorphous perversity is only the beginning. More telling by far is the way he contrives his musie so that it seems, contradicting what is thought to be the essential nature of the medium, to inhabit not time but space. Its, “painterly” rather than “narrative” music. It achieves its special atmosphere, ‘and projects its special meanings, through improbable sonic collages and mobiles: outlandish juxtapositions of evocative sounc-objects that hover, shimmering, or dreaimily revolve, in a seemingly motionless sonic emulsion. T know of no other music quite like it in these defining respects, but many paintings, by Dali, de Chirico, Magritte. Mr. Adés himself seems to “see” his music rather than hear it: he describes the wispy final movement of his early ‘Chamber Symphony as “a serene overview of the preceding music, asiffrom great height.” Indeed, great heights—and depths—of pitch are among the elements Mr. Adés musters to produce his uncanny effects of “spatial form,” to cite the term coined by the literary critic Joseph Frank more than half a century ago. The top notes of the piano and the bottom notes of the tuba or contrabassoon, rarities in anybody else's music, are among Mr. Ades's most characteristic sonorities, and he often deploys them in tandem. The coun- terpoint of extreme registers immediately (and literally) arrests the ear with the impression of a vast expanse within which musical events taking place in more normal registers—often very ordinary events, like common chords or particles of diatonic melody—seem objects bizarrely suspended and, in con- sequence, made newly strange. The orchestration, full of pointillistic per cussion and cunning resonance devices, adds a shiny edge or murky penum- bra to the sound, transforming timbres and locating them in sonic space with. often amazing precision, Perhaps even more striking is the quality of Mr. Adés’s rhythm, At the tural extremes one is likely to hear the kind of stretched-out tones that have ong conjured up infinite expanse in picturesque orchestral music. But the music is not deprived of impulse and beat, Fast ostinatos, often of a tricky, ear- beguiling complexity, coexist at varying speeds in contrasting colors and reg- isters, evoking not linear distance but gyres and vortexes: sound in motion but148 SURREALIST ComPOstR not going anywhere, Most telling of all is the technique—reminiscent of me- dieval “mensuration canons” and in all likelihood learned by Mr. Adés in music history class, God bless him—of putting slow melodies in counter points that move at different speeds and with beats of differing length. When such linesare contrived so that their beats coincide neither with the bar line nor with each other, the music becomes effectively meterless, sometimes for ong stretches. The unfolding counterpoint is regulated by the conductor's signals, but the signals have no correlate in actual sound, There is movement aplenty but no momentum, So if Poulene was the anti-Schoenberg, then Mr. Adi But of course itis only the Beethoven of the dynamic 1 ‘most influential of the Beethovens—that Mr, Ades is “ag: Beethoven string quartetsand piano sonatas, Mr. Adés’s music opens up a mag- jeal domain for the ear’s mind to explore at what seemsits Ieisure. “An image, Ezra Pound wrote in a passage memorably glossed by Joseph Frank, “is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” Pound meant “as fin an instant,” of course, since he was writing about poetry, temporal rt like music. Mr. Adés’s music, like that of the contemplative, even quiescent late Beethoven, is full of transporting Pounclian “images.” Let the rapt second movement of syla exemplify itall. The main tune is along descent by alternating close and wide intervals, first played by the bass oboe, ‘Iphone, an inst monster scores by Strauss or Delius. Itis a typically recondite Ades color: Maestro Rattle has told an interviewer that the slow music in Asyla reminds him of Parsifal; the heckelphone tune reminds me of the oboe d’amore and ‘oboe da caecia partsin Bach’s cantatas 1s. In either case, the music recalled is transfigured by the rare timbre into a mythical beast; and, imi: wd accompanying lines floating and overlapping in registers C0 superlow, it seems to beget a whole surrealist bestiary The sweltering, droopy descent thus initiated is accompanied by a har- monic mudslide in which an upright piano uined a qnarter-tone flat smoothens the perpetual lowering of the pitch with queayy notes “in the cracks.” Iswear that this study in bottomless sinking and lassituele hae already reminded me of Dali's Persistence of Memory (yes, the wilting watches and rec~ ognizable if unidentifiable carcass) before I put two and two together and verified the agreeable surmise chat the composer's mother was in fact Dawn Ades, the author of important books on Dali, Duchamp, and the dada and surrealist movernents, What to make of this all-too-suggestive family connection is anybody's guess, But it does invite one to imagine that growing up surrounded by the captivating ifacademically disreputable imagery of dream realism during ab- stract expressionism’s waning days might have given a gifted young composer the confidence to resist what was still a powerful and entirely comparable isthe anti-Beethoven, ddle period—the nst.” Like the late r hee sment that otherwise turns up only rarely, inASURKEALIST CososER 149 conformist pressure during his tutelary years, Mr. Adés was thus able to buck sterile utopia while avoiding the opposing pitfall of ironic pastiche, What raises his music so far above today’s average is his phenomenal success at ing the line—the finest line there is—beeween the arcane and he banal. The music never loses touch with its base in the common listening experience of real audiences, so that itis genuinely evocative. At the same time itis quirkily inventive and constantly surprising in the small: enough so to confound short range predictions and elude obviousness of reference even when models (often Stravinsky) are nameable, And that makes it genuinely novel. Better yet, the music makes more than a vivid first impression, Subtly fash- ioned and highly detailed, it haunts the memory and invites rehearings that often yield new and intriguing finds, like the recurrence of the main theme from the first movement of Asyla, inverted, in the last. This sort of thing, too, isan experience one often has with surrealist paintings. As youngsters we all, loved to revisit Techelitchew’s Hide and Sorkat the Museum of Modern Art be- fore the dour utopians consigned it to the basement, Mr. Adés has kept cchild’s capacity for serious fun. His music does what José Ortega y Gasset thought all modern art should do, “instill youthfulness into an ancient world.” With conventional modernism gone geriatric, a thing of nostalgic or downright acrimonious eightieth and ninetieth birthdays, Mr. Ad@s’s youth: fulness (not just his youth) is balm. Even rarer, and best of all, he never—well, hardly ever—overloads. His music is not simple, but its complexity is rich and “earned.” The ear (all right, my ear), so often fatigued and insulted in the music of recent decades by senseless selFindulgent complication, accepts and explores Mr. Adés’s intricacies with joy. They recall the wonderful opening of “The Bulgarian Poctess,” one of John Updike’s Bech stories. “Your poems. Are they difficult Bech asks, patronizing. “They are difficult—to write,” the poetess replies, confounding him, ‘On the eve of the millennium, I'l drink to tha health to you, Mr. A. seale of values. Here's a POSTSCRIPT, 2008 The response to this piece was an especially crisp illustration of the old rule: those who like itwrite to you, those who hate itwrite to the Times. Had lovely personal communications from musicians admire, most gratifyingly from John Carewe, the great conducting teacher. The Times mailbox filled up with spite and vituperation from disgruntled lobbyists, It was a funny assortment. From Jay Hoffman, who identified himself as ‘president of a communications firm specializing in music promotions,” came a complaint that in praising Adés I neglected “such exciting young Americans as Michael Daugherty, Lowell Liebermann, Aaron Jay Kernis and,150. A SURREALIST COMPOSER lest we forget, Europeans ike the a8-yearold German Mathias Pinscher, Norway's Rolf Walin and Fintand’s Magnus Lindberg'—no doubt a Ist of his clients. He also insisted that Adee eclectiiam was ax nothing com- pared with Eliott Carter’ only underscored ny point about the revenge From the composer Matin Brody the Catherine Mls Davis Professor of Muscat Welly College, came plea: “When do we sop squabbling about the winners and Towers of modern music and confront is rly challenging legacy: the tilling, if sometimes bewildering, profusion of approaches ints creation and reception tha it gave wse* This would have come wth better grace from someone who, before the tide tamed, had not been sin ttanngenca campalgner guna hie avery “ome, the mow amusing sponse came from Jon Halle, younger con poser onthe fc of ale Unversity tis genuinely wit. Mr Tarek hewrote, makes note ofthe failure of the high-modernist composers Brian Ferneyhough and Harrison Birtwistle to survive the “tender ministration” of the critical ex tablishment, most notably those of Andrew Porter These are not isolated cases. An important aspect ofthe history of musical modernism is that of the public's stubborn refusal to buy into critical hype for what have been perceived, rightly it now appears as sterile acaclemic exercises. Mr. Taruskin assures us that this time its diferent, evidenthy because itis he who is doing the huffing and pufk ing. Those with longer memories might be somewhat skeptical of Mr. Taruskin’ ‘recibility inthis regard. Have audiences flocked to the music of John Thow, (Olly Wilson or Vagn Holmboe, to mention three recipients of Mr: Taruskin’s law ish praise? Have audiences wised up to the bankruptey of the musie of John Harbison, a composer severely censured by Mr. Taruskin in the past? As an ad- mmirer of Mr. Ades recent work, I hope this young composer will survive the crits ical kisses of death thatare being so passionately bestowed on him by crities with aan egregious history of misleading audiences about contemporary music What Mr. Halle omitted from his tirade was that not only I but also Olly Wilson and the late John Thow had been among his teachers at Berkeley. We had all previously endured tirades aplenty from this most exceptionally angry young man. And thisis where the matter stops being amusing. The de- gree of resentment that persists among academic composers, and that comes rushing forth to meet any and all critical assessments, whether positive (as in ny review of Adés) or negative (as in my review of Martino), is the most dis- heartening evidence of their miseducation and their cultural irrelevan and the frustration that it has bred. A ewer from a Princeton alum provided more sad evidence of mised cation. “Well, O.K.." wrote David Claman, 1,00, find some modernist rhetoric extreme, but that could be said of anyartis tic movement. I try to see music in its historical comtext, even when that musicASURREALISE COMPOSER 152 is bolstered by idealistic aestheties—not exactly a rarity inthe history of music For example, I find the romantic progeam to Berlioa’s Symphonie Fantasique laughable, but not the symphony. [recognize the program as a product ofits time, as something that had meaning for Berlioz and that clearly informed the composition of a great piece of music, I take modernist aesthetics in a similar vein, aware that some wonderful music grew from i He had been trained, in other words, to listen to all music, even the Sym: phonie fantastique, as nothing but notes (and, despite his claim, entirely out of historical context), and that puts him, like so many others, in danger of writing music that consists of nothing but notes—and then complaining when audiences find his offerings unsatisfying. ‘And of course there were the crities who wanted Ad@s to stumble, as they. would anyone who achieved success without their permission. van Hewett of the London Daily Telegraph saved my review for more than four years so that he could summon it up for the peroration ofa remarkably mean spirited assault in the days leading up to the premiere of Adés's second opera, The Tempest, in February 2004. Noting that “every few decades the British musi- cal world discovers a bright new star”—Walton, then Britten, then Knussen, now Adés—Hewett did his best to dampen the light, just, it seemed, for the hell of it, the way all the jowLwaggers went after Britten in the fifties. After paraphrasing my description of Asyla—"a succession of vivid images, wher time appears frozen; in between are uncanny passages where the images melt, and what was tight and focused bends and skitters out into extremes: high piecolos, growling tubas, glistening string harmonics’—he delivers the coup de grace: The American musicologist Richard Taruskin gives a surrealist interpretation to this meling quality, likening it to the famous Dali watch. The comparison \ith Dal is more revealing than Taruskin intended, as ic points to facile clew~ ‘erness and an emotional chilliness that for me can sometimes be the aftertaste of Adés's undeniable brilliance and magic.! Shades of the fifties again! Just what the Darmstadters were saying about Brit- ten, just what the Clement Greenbergs were saying about Dali. Poor Hewett, simply didn’t know how prissy and old-fashioned he was sounding. ‘What a relief it was to turn from all this ranting to a leuer from Annette Shandler Levitt, a professor of literature, who queried the notion of surre- alist music As someone who has taught and written on surrealism for 25 years, Lam not convinced that music, per se, can even be surreal: lacking representational ek cements, musie cannot create the disjunction that isa requisite of surrealism ‘There must first be a realism before there can be a surrealism. Indeed, Taruskin, using language lke “collage” and “juxtaposition,” needs the objec correlatives of visual ar in order to make his argument. And the music of152 A SURREALIST COMPOSER Poulenc and Les Six, which he cites and which functions within surrealism, does so in the service of words and images—as in Apollinaire’s operstheater The Brenstsof Tirsiasanel Cocteau’sballetshcater The Welding on the Eff Toor, ‘These are interesting points, but they proceed from an erroneous premise. It isonly from avery blinkered modernist perspective, the very one that hobbles ‘musicians like Mr: Claman, that music is without “representational elements. Music can imitate nature onomatopoetically, as in Vivaldis Four Seasons, or metaphorically, asin Debussy’s Nugges, Itearries generic associations where would Beethoven's Ninth be without its religious, martial, and pastoral tropes?—and it can also allude to other music. It can not only point outside of itself, as in these examples, but also inward, as when a thematic develop- ‘ment or recapitulation represents the components of a musical form (sshich, can be completed or distorted), or when operatic “reminiscence motives” provide wordless links between dramatic moments. Indeed, the device of *polytonalits,” particularly associated with Poulenc and the other members of Les Six (especially Darius Milhaud), can be viewed as a surrealist technique. realism achieves many of its effects by juxtaposing i yex perience in extraordinary ways. A similar effect is achieved when “ordinary © major and “ordinary” D major are combined into an extraordinary, unheard-of texture. It isa big subject, worthy of a book. I've tried to make a ipter 56 of my Oxford History of Western Music, sms of on NOTE, 1 Ivan Hewett, “He's Brilliant, But Can He Deliver?" Daily Tiigraph, 2 February 2004