Yet again, I responded to a question posed in an online forum, and stuck the response here. The original question posed was from someone who had just attended a concert featuring Boulez, Messiaen and Lutosławski, and found that he couldn't talk to his friends about it.
My experience with Difficult Century XX Music began when I was about 15 or so (fyi - that’s almost three decades back) when I suddenly found myself laboring under the likely misimpression that it was the “coolest” possible thing to seek out the most challenging music I could find and see if I was up to it or whether I could stretch my ears around it over time. All I remember having to begin with, really, was a 1979 Frank Zappa interview in which he referenced Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Webern, Varese and Conlon Nancarrow. Not bad to be going on with, though. Years later, the intellectual-exercise-for-its-own-sake aspect has faded, to be supplanted by a notion of “beauty” something like the very unsentimental way art critic Dave Hickey has used the term: as a challenge to other agendas. Good music is good music, and it usually sounds good, too, no matter how challenging it is. To that end, what I’m enjoying about Century XXI is how the XX musics have already begun to differentiate themselves. I suspect it won’t be long before having Boulez, Messiaen and Lutosławski on the same program will engender cognitive dissonance. They don’t strike me as being all that similar, now. As a listener, I find Boulez’s doctrinaire serialism an awful lot like taking a beating to join the Crips, and frankly I don’t doubt that was how Boulez intended much of his music to function. I appreciate his “Pli Selon Pli” plenty when I listen hard, but only then and no more than that. On the other hand, I find much of Messiaen’s music to be beautiful without qualification. “Quartet for the End of Time” is like Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue for me – obvious in its appeal only because its means and its rigor give its unequivocal pleasures a special gravity. I’m also very fond of “From the Canyon to the Stars” and “Vingt Regards.” It’s like harder wood giving a hotter flame, when you get it going. It can also make all the earlier "classical” music that we think we understand sound even better, because what it cost its creators is made more apparent by our understanding of what it costs our contemporaries.
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3 comments:
I happened to be listening to Messiaen's Meditations Sur Le Mystere do La Sainte Trinite on the subway this morning and reading your post I'm reminded of how enjoyable it was to hear his collage of old and new musical styles in one piece. As in much of his work he swings from birdsong passages to joyous plainchant to meditative drone to loud dissonant chords of terror, all moods of spiritual fervor. Since that fervor is his main mission he's happy to use 800 year old music like plainchant to represent a feeling because it will do the job better than anything he could come up with. Serialism as written by the strictest practitioners is driven to make something thoroughly new and unheard, excluding anything familiar, which makes their inclusion on the same program so jarring.
Well you're over my head, but it was fun to read -- a Crips beating -- ha! I made some mind expanding forays in college, musical of course, picked up Stockhausen's Mikrofonie I from the Bainbridge library in the Bronx. I didn't get very far. I get Erik's point about serialism in the strictest sense, but with some of that stuff I have the same problem that I do with some contemporary visual art. It is made for a very small audience. Art for artists. Chalk one up for academia, but what about the rest of us? That said, I'm going to check out Messiaen.
Mikrofonie I & II are a trip, man. The almighty tam-tam.
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