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Wednesday, 23 July 2008
It's a strange issue that makes bedfellows of Terry Teachout and myself
on the one side, and A.C. Douglas and David Byrne on the other. That unpleasant
word-picture out of the way, this issue was also a central concern of
Kyle Gann's PostClassic blog on Monday.
Nothing here really changes anything I said in my
own original post on the matter earlier this week. There seems to be
general agreement that Byrne's argument was poorly considered in his
choice of Die Soldaten as the specific target of his dismay, but
one or two things in Kyle's comments section should be addressed. Kyle
mentions there that "[My agreement with Byrne] hinges on one assertion
that I hope to god we can all agree with: Not every composer who writes
thorny, complex, difficult-to-understand music is a genius." Sure; so long
as we can also say that not every composer who writes accessible and
easy-to-understand music is a genius either, in which case I'm
not sure I get the point. Composers write what they feel they have to
write, for the most part, conditioned by many things, but I don't think
that their self-assessment as geniuses (or such an assessment by
their critics or audiences) is necessarily one of them. Both the aesthete
and the populist possess their own forms of smugness. In any case, I don't
find in Byrne's original post where he makes that assertion.
Byrne does, however, question the motives of composers of this thorny,
complex, etc. music:
There are lots of books exploring what the fuck happened with 20th
century classical music, when many composers willfully sought to alienate
the general public and create purposefully difficult, inaccessible music.
Why would they do anything that perverse? Why would they not only make
music that was hard to listen to, but also demand, as in the case of
Zimmermann, that the piece be performed on twelve separate stages
simultaneously, with the addition of giant projection screens and other
multimedia aspects? Were these composers competing to see whose works
could be heard and performed the least? Why would anyone do that?
The only response to that is that composers (or playwrights or painters
for that matter) wouldn't do any of those things. This is an oddly
anti-modernist prejudice from this successful prog-rocker
celebrity, whose current project at the Battery Maritime Building
itself plays with some of the very dimensions of music – timbre,
color, duration – that also formed the basis of some of the most
profoundly experimental (and, needless to add, controversial and
marginalised) work of the 20th century. His primary target, that old
bugaboo atonality, is only the beginning of 20th-century musical
innovation (and it began with Wagner and Debussy, not Schoenberg and the
Viennese School) – Playing the Building builds on experiments
in resonance, timbre and color made by some of the very composers he
condemns. (And I'm not sure that the "total theatre" use of the Park
Avenue Armory is much different than Byrne's co-opting another huge
public space like the Battery Maritime Building.) The question can be
turned right around: Why would Byrne do what he does? Along with the
composers he castigates, he seeks to introduce new elements into our aural
imagination and consciousness of the world.
However valid Byrne's and Gann's charges of self-marginalisation
might be (and frankly I don't think that they are), certainly the rhetoric
and vitriol that have traditionally been directed at some of this new
music under discussion haven't contributed to its wider acceptance either,
and if the former isn't good for the state of music as an art form in the
21st century, I don't see how the latter is – especially from an
artist like Byrne, who considers himself an innovator and should at the
very least avoid vitriolic condemnation of other innovators.
All that said, in Queenan's and Byrne's original writings, something
still irked me. Where had I heard this condemnation of artist, critic and
audience before? Where in the recent past had I heard much of this same
rhetoric? And then it struck me. The recent Bill Henson controversy also gave rise to much of the
same kind of hostile vocabulary, political and cultural recidivism, and
puritanical rhetoric; so much for the assumed cultural and inclusive
progressivism of the Western left. Henson's motives in creating his work
were questioned; artists themselves, as an elitist cabal, were charged
with a deliberate attack on the nation's morals in defending Henson's work
(as if two or more artists could be gathered as a collective to do
anything in which they all agreed; the music and theatre
blogospheres are evidence enough against that); the audiences for this
work were characterised as potential paedophiles themselves. The
situations are of course not at all identical, but there's some
similarity; Australia's children needed to be defended from the
depredations of photographers like Henson, and David Byrne's and Joe
Queenan's ears (as well as the ears of others) needed to be defended from
the subversive, "ugly" sounds that contemporary composers produce.
The Australian Prime Minister's office is a different, more chilling
bully pulpit than the pages of the Guardian or the entries on a
popular art-rocker's blog, and nobody, least of all me, is suggesting
that Byrne and Queenan want to toss Zimmermann et al. in jail for
their offenses against the tender ear. But the determination of what
should be accepted as art and what should not is still an issue here.
Queenan says, "I consider myself to be the kind of listener contemporary
composers would need to reach if they had any hope of achieving a
breakthrough," implying that Queenan and his peers could ultimately
determine which work was truly music and which wasn't, as Kevin Rudd could
determine what art was acceptable to the citizens of Australia and what
art was not. And many of the tactics against artists, their art, and their
audiences are the same: vilification, insult, condemnation.
On Monday, David Ian Rabey added to the comments section of my
original post a carefully-worded excerpt from Howard Barker's poem
Don't Exaggerate (all poems, I would hope, are
carefully-worded):
The final solution to the problem of art
Art is a problem, after all
Is to call it incomprehensible
To burn it only lends it grace
I agree with Kyle again when he writes, "There are no easy lines to
draw here, which I think is part of the value of art, that it plunges us
into ambiguity; but there are some important principles, which perhaps it
will take another blog entry to puzzle out." So let's not draw easy lines,
and I hate to say this, but I think it might take more than one more blog
entry to puzzle out. The question is far more important than that.
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