Minority pursuits

Minority pursuits

I.M. Milton Babbitt, 1916-2011

The world has been making do without Milton Babbitt since 29 January this year. I came to Babbitt far too late: his music first caught my attention little more than a year ago, which illustrates how careless and unsystematic my listening has been. To some extent I can plead a natural progression of interests: five or six years ago I realised that I had the material capacity to explore and develop my longstanding fascination with electronic and electroacoustic music; since then I’ve been attempting to train myself in just about every aspect of music-making, and the study of serial composition techniques came up along the way. From Reginald Smith Brindle’s 1966 text Serial Composition I eventually ended up at Milton Babbitt’s critical writing and started to explore his musical language. I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover how engaging, lively, and profoundly satisfying Babbitt’s music is, but I was, because I had allowed myself to cultivate a relatively narrow field of musical interests. I grew up listening to radio programmes hosted by people who had been (as I can see in retrospect) profoundly influenced by the neoclassical and nationalist strains of twentieth century music: who had ‘been through the Boulangerie’, as Babbitt once put it. The notion that one could describe serialism with words like ‘engaging’ and ‘lively’ never crossed my mind until I began my own study of the stuff. This, too, ought not to be surprising: most music tends to sound better once you become aware of what it’s doing, either by long exposure, your own musical practice, or a certain amount of specialised study.

Those familiar with Babbitt’s career – and specifically with the aspect of it that was most visible to the general public – will recall that he got into trouble over the notion of specialisation. Any time someone offers a summing-up of his ideas about music, there’s always a mention of the article he wrote under the title ‘The Composer as Specialist’ but that High Fidelity magazine published (in 1958) as ‘Who Cares if You Listen?’ – a tag-line that followed him around for the rest of his life. The point behind Babbitt’s preferred title was simple enough: why not look on advanced musical composition as a specialised activity like advanced physics or engineering – something that naturally requires a certain amount of familiarity with the field on the part of a potential audience? His ultimate goal in the essay was to argue for an ‘academic’ music based in the university system, analogous to pure research in the physical sciences: something of little obvious practical utility, which most people will find obscure and irrelevant to their lives, but which contributes to the sum of knowledge in the field, and without which no real innovation or development is possible. Babbitt’s 1958-vintage faith in the university system is probably no longer tenable (not least because the university system as it was in 1958 no longer exists), but the basic conception of specialised activity as being something one must prepare both to perform and to receive is well worth remembering. It also happens to be one possible way to conceive of taste and sensibility, neither of which comes into being without effort.

In his 1958 essay, Babbitt wrote about withdrawing from the arena of public performance: about pursuing the music itself without being concerned about ‘the public and social aspects of musical composition’. That said, he did not go so far as to suggest that advanced music need not be performed at all: he simply located the ideal venue of performance in a semi-private, cloistered space. Babbitt was forever being accused of being an elitist, but to say he was by virtue of the nature of his work a member of a more or less involuntary and beleaguered elite would be closer to the truth. By writing deliberate, serious, and thoroughly composed music, he naturally fell to the side of what a mass audience probably wants – or rather, what the people who curate the idea of a mass audience chose to conceive as being the wants of this audience: an audience in no small measure invented by the said curators as the object of their own professional and commercial interests. The experience of hearing Babbitt’s music is much like that of hearing Babbitt himself conduct a conversation: not in terms of what he said, but in the structure of his speech. He spoke in long, flowing sentences, branching and diverging, taking up minor points and running them to ground before re-establishing what he originally had to say. Babbitt sentences were, as he spoke them, intricate structures that seemed to spread out beyond what one breath could contain, but which ultimately demonstrated cohesion and direction. The past tense is a concession to the tragedy that there will be no new Babbitt sentences, just as there will be no new Babbitt compositions, to read or hear; but what he left behind will remain a powerful evocation of the composer’s unique sensibility and taste.

The same commercial media that give us easy opportunities to write and publish blogs also make it very easy to write our own music, and realise performances of it in electronic form, and people are taking up writing and composing in droves. At the same time, neither writing nor composing is as easy as it seems; and as the managers of our new media delight in serving the markets they create, how-to publications and do-it-yourself kits abound. In terms of music, much of this advice involves the latest versions of common practice tonality; as well it might, because tonality is everywhere around us, in popular music, in the music that serves as a soundtrack or background to everyday life, and even in the chirruping of telephones and other electronic gadgets. It’s always faster to plug into something ready-made than it is to develop a language from scratch, and it sounds nice, too. In this respect, tonality is like the super-glue that comes with a plastic model kit: given the right bits and pieces, if you get the chord progressions right, you’re writing music. The forms of electronic music that currently enjoy mass appeal can be built up at home from an ever-expanding supply of made-to-order sounds meant to ease the kit-building process: synthesisers and sample-based instruments pre-programmed with timbres, rhythms, and fragments of melodies ready for use in producing one’s own version of the most popular styles and genres. Here we should recall that the early appeal of electronic music was not in the novelty and timbral richness of the sounds it could produce, and certainly not in the medium’s ease of use, but in the degree of control the technology allowed the composer to have over the finished work. Such control was particularly important in Babbitt’s approach to serial techniques, where every aspect of a composition could be approached via a set of organizing principles that had been devised uniquely and exclusively for that piece of music. The great achievement of this form of serialism is the understanding that each work can be made utterly unique, referring to nothing outside itself: that each musical composition involves the creation of a new world. As distinct from music that relies on traditional practice to support itself, his is a music that relies on its own structure, its own underlying principles, to develop: music that is as much itself as it can possibly be, and that contains as much of itself as it can. This kind of music demands exhaustive work put in by the composer, so as to determine what a specific piece can be. What are the possibilities inherent in a particular combination of intervallic relationships? The composer’s role is to discover as much of this potential as can be found, and to give the music as much development as possible. Ultimately, the virtues of such music grow from the force of personality that went into making it: the composer’s sensibility has been brought to bear on every aspect of every sound. Babbitt’s sentences are difficult to understand if one only half listens to them, and his music is difficult to understand in much the same way. This is music that should be experienced in toto: to allow its systems of internal relationships to unfold and draw us in; and to listen for what the music has to say about itself. Each piece is an essay in being, expressing its own intrinsic shape, which is itself a reflection of the mind that created it: a very pure form of minority pursuit, in that the composition pursues the mind of the composer, as the composer pursues the composition; and the listener’s own experience as the composition unfolds becomes the best possible guide to interpreting the music. As we listen, as we read, as with all experience, only a constant process of refining our own taste and sensibility can help us to bring a sense of order to what we perceive, as each of us become minorities of one.

I wager that it’s fairly rare for people to actively seek out the minority position: most of us end up stumbling into it, and being by degrees surprised and dismayed by what we find here. Interviews with Milton Babbitt conducted in the past ten or twenty years present us with a man who always worked passionately for what he understood to be the things most worthy of commanding his interest and attention – and he was passionately interested in a very wide range of things indeed, including beer and baseball, popular songs of the 1920s, and the combinatorial potential of tone rows. He was a thoroughly grown-up intellectual, who had the misfortune to grow older in the context of a culture that had come to value youthful instincts more highly than mature refinement. But that, of course, is just what happens to people – not to all people, and perhaps not even to most people, but to the fascinating and endlessly stimulating minority that until 29 January of this year included Milton Babbitt as a living eminence. He seemed to accept the minority position more or less gracefully, while being a clear-eyed and properly strict critic of the sillier things the majority gets up to. All in all, his was a condition to admire and to aspire to.

That which we love, and to which we cannot return

That which we love, and to which we cannot return

I.M. Aldo Clementi, 25 May 1925 to 3 March 2011

Aldo Clementi passed away on 3 March; over the past week or so I’ve been listening to the recordings of his music that I’ve been able to accumulate, arranged in chronological order, except for a few cases of duplication, where I repeat a piece or two a bit out of sequence. There have been few notices of his death in the English-language press, which seems rather odd. Together with his near-contemporaries Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono, and Luciano Berio, Clementi was one of the giants of post-war Italian music. In photographs I’ve seen, Maderna usually has an air of Boulezian confidence about him, Nono inevitably looks like he’s angry about something, and Berio seems genial and about to lend someone a hand. Clementi often presented a dour face to the camera, although his expressions seemed to become more impish as he got older. Among that group of four, Maderna and Nono were Venetians, Berio was born in Liguria, and Clementi in Catania, Sicily. Being a provincial myself, I tend to see a non-metropolitan unsettledness in Clementi’s development, in his progress through the usual mid-twentieth century upbringing from Webern to Darmstadt, and then to his own unique style, which leaned heavily on influences from the visual and plastic arts (Pollock’s paintings; Calder’s mobiles). In the latter influence he is somewhat like Morton Feldman, but where Feldman’s music sets up expansive textures like a Rothko painting, Clementi’s burrows into dense networks of interlocking lines. Both composers appear to struggle against the monumental uncertainty of music-making: the unsettled ground occupied by the avant-garde in the aftermath of both common practice tonality and serialism. The generation born in the early to middle 1920s was largely responsible for reinventing the European avant-garde after the war; perhaps because of their radical experience with destruction, both physical and moral, they had a tendency to be even more emphatic about sweeping away the old than had been the post-WWI generation of Modernists. And of course this led into a dark, uncomfortable corner: the death of artistic expression itself, or at least of any kind of honest belief in the inherited systems which had provided an expressive mechanism for artistic ideas. This impasse led Boulez into elaborate clockwork castles, and sent Stockhausen right off the earth; Clementi found a language that could balance his love for what had been lost against the necessary understanding that there is no right of return to the pre-modern certainties. Even as it documents the last days of European music, Clementi’s work holds up a brave commitment to continue, somehow, to exist. And of course Aldo Clementi was a radical: a member of the avant-garde; although in his case it would be more satisfying to identify him as an avant-garde of one, singly pursuing a conviction well in advance of the rest of us, a figure making poignant gestures alone on the edge of an abyss we will all approach sooner or later.

I have been listening to my Aldo Clementi, and wondering what I might say about him, about the struggle with what can and cannot be said when the language itself is fatally compromised. Which then throws up the question: is it really necessary to approach aesthetic ideas in such apocalyptic terms? Perhaps it is in my case, because I am serious about being a Modernist, with the big ‘M’, and it is impossible to get away from the fact that my chosen movement has lost momentum, that we have become locked in a particular kind of self-made ice. But why would I want to ally myself with a movement that has already produced its own successor movements, when even these post-movements have started to fade from the scene? There is no way out of Modernism: it is not over yet, and will not be over until the circumstances that led to Modernism themselves disappear. And what are these circumstances? The experience of alienation in the world-culture of electricity? A sense of loving that to which we cannot return? It involves a permanent crisis in aesthetic being: the old ways of doing things are no longer viable, and this turns out to be a rolling decay, always rolling forward, always rendering the recently-viable old, and frozen. This is the state of being ‘modern’, this rolling-forward of decay, with the ground beneath us changing constantly. A form that promises order can never be trusted, because it must be built on either an illusion or a falsehood. Sometimes both of these are useful, and necessary; but an avant-garde Modernist has no choice but to insist on illuminating our illusions and falsehoods, even while being aware that this goal itself is quixotic, and itself untrustworthy.

The essay that accompanied a 1982 recording of Clementi’s 1980 vocal-dramatic work Es described a battle then raging between ‘younger composers… convinced that in some cases, the renewal [of music] is already taking place,’ and ‘others… convinced that the glaciation of the musical planet is already inevitable.’ I have always felt myself trapped between these two positions: between the sensation that everything is always renewing itself, and the conclusion that everything is always ending. It reminds me of the popular science books I used to read out in the country, in the summer of my childhood, the most memorable passage having been my discovery of the entropy principle. The word itself fascinated me, and I’d inscribe it in notebooks as one might doodle pictures of guitars or girls in pigtails. This, and the line from Keats, half in love with easeful death, which has as its corollary being half in mortal terror. The pain of not-being always coupled to faith in the world’s power for self-renewal: a faith in something awesome and profoundly non-human, and thus a very cold faith. Art can only offer us a palliative, which will inevitably be illusory, against the vast terror of being; the act of making art inevitably involves us in form and structure, which creates a false promise of permanence and stability. One must be honest about art’s potential, yet if honesty compels silence, what does it imply for everyone who attempts art without being silent? Is any act of artistic creation necessarily a dishonesty? And yet dishonesty is not an absolute, a pole away from what we should desire: honesty, of one variety, involves being clear about which contradictions we choose to call into service at any given time. Why are we not silent? Because we cannot remain silent. It unhinges us, it goes against our nature: humanity is social, and we cannot help seeking after connections with other people. Thus we constantly attempt to communicate, and the richest form of communication (other than love) is art: art will emerge, even if it emerges as a long-extended assertion of its own exhaustion in the face of the world in which we find ourselves.

Which leads me to a rhetorical question: why did Aldo Clementi continue to write music? We can ask a similar question about Feldman and music, and about Beckett and literature, and about anyone who harbours the classical doubts of post-war Modernism, myself included. The resulting art will be restless, often full of self-doubt, but at the same time it will possess the paradoxical self-confidence of a lament, a cry of pain. It will be, like Aldo Clementi’s work, a vertigo of shimmering elements, struggling to express what may no longer be expressible, offering an honest look at its own decay. As Clementi said of his own music, it will be an art that accepts ‘the humble task of describing its own End’.