Superfluities Redux

by George Hunka
Artistic director, theatre minima

A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater

Wednesday, 23 July 2008

More Defenders

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.

Posted at 5.04 pm in /Music

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