|
HomePage |
|
|
|
|
The following paper was presented to the Music and Theater Arts Visiting Committee on October 29, 2002. Recordings of musical excerpts were played then; those excerpts can be reproduced here by selecting the hyperlink. The presentation was preceded by a recital of my compositions Sonata for Viola and Piano, performed by Professor Marcus Thompson (viola) and Judith Gordon (piano), and Doubles, performed by Senior Lecturer David Deveau (piano).
Why should anyone compose music? Why devote a lifetime of learning and endure any amount of hardship in order to acquire and practice that skill? Surely there are more useful pursuits, more practical vocations?
Composers feel an urgent necessity to make music in their bones. When they try to express it in words however, they feel the way children do when they try to jump outside their own shadows. It feels like you should be able to do it, you almost did it!, but of course you never succeed. Why not?
I would like to try to address these questions tonight with reference to some of my own pieces that you have just heard.
Some years ago I took a sabbatical leave and returned to live temporarily in the part of England where I had grown up. Little of the topography and culture of Norfolk and Suffolk has changed in the intervening years – I left for America when I was about the age that my students are today – and, moreover, I was returning with children of my own. I used to drop them off at their schools in the morning, schools that are like the schools I went to, not like their American schools, and then go for a run on the beach. I had returned to my childhood home, living near to family, experiencing sensations that I had almost forgotten. My feeling of elation was profound. One morning I came home from one of those runs, sat at the piano and played an impromptu figure that matched the exuberant mood that I was in. That figure subsequently became the opening of my Viola Sonata.
I had a hunch that this figure was one that I would want to use, so I wrote it down. How do composers know which of their ideas is a "keeper" and which are the many more that can be thrown away? I can only speak for myself, of course, but the answer is in part that the "keepers" often include a promising germinal structure of some kind. In this case I heard at least two possibilities: One was a hidden triadic reference (D major) that is clarified at the cadence of the ensuing phrase.
The second thing these notes implied for me was a set of intervallic possibilities that could be spun out in interesting ways. The dissonant linear and chordal materials of the middle section of this movement are systematically derived from the opening chords.
However, the structural possibilities that I chose to develop were only part of the story. Equally important were what the music expressed for me. I described it before as an exuberant gesture that corresponded to my frame of mind when I wrote it. It is thus what linguists might call a 'phatic' gesture. Jakobson drew attention to this term in his important discussion of language functions; in a general, dictionary sense it means "employing or involving speech for the purpose of revealing or sharing feelings or establishing an atmosphere of sociability rather than for communicating ideas." [Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary Unabridged] Obviously this is a very useful concept for anyone interested in thinking about the expressive aspects of music, because so much music is phatic in this sense.
Must the conscious emotional state of the composer precede the musical gesture for it to have phatic meaning? Absolutely not. The equation that the Romantics proposed between the subjective state of the composer and of his or her music fueled many vital musical innovations and explorations in the nineteenth century, but it bedeviled subsequent discourse about musical emotion. Take, for example, the individual movements of my piano piece Doubles. Many of these are meant to be specific in terms of their affective connotations. However, in most instances they were composed before I named them, and in naming them I simply attended to the emotional associations that they evoked in me. (A comparable, though grander, case, and an extraordinary one because of Liszt's leadership in the development of program music, is the symphonic poem Les Préludes. Liszt is now known to have provided the program for that piece, a poem by Lamartine that is printed with the published score, some considerable time after the music was completed.) In the movement from Doubles entitled Inward, the broad unfolding cantabile melody, the gradual descent of the accompanying ostinato across the span of the movement, the choice of the simultaneous keys and modes (e-flat and g minor), and the slow tempo combine to suggest a state of introspective melancholy that led to its name. As far as I recall, however, I felt tolerably cheerful when I wrote the music. Of course, any Freudian will tell you that a composer's emotional relationship to his or her music is considerably more complex than what he or she consciously feels. Perhaps unconsciously I felt guilty about being cheerful and compensated by writing a miserable piece. The important point is that the Romantic equation between a composer's feelings and the expressive character of music is at worst wrong, at best an oversimplification.
Now that I have said something about what I do and how I feel I can approach the question that I began with: Why compose music? Clearly, there is much more to composing than the invention of coherent musical designs, no matter how ingenious they are or satisfying to make. What engages composers is a sense of purpose and meaning that transcends those of everyday reality, and that meaning and purpose has something to do with the feeling that is invested in music by composers, performers, and listeners alike.
Adding listeners to this group runs the risk of leading us down another potential cul de sac. There is a fairly widespread belief that the emotional character of a musical work arouses a corresponding emotional response in the listener. This belief derives partly from the Baroque period, when music theorists, many of them composers, developed the idea in what came to be known as the "Doctrine of the Affections." Like the Romantic idea, this doctrine was important historically. However, it, too, is a gross oversimplification.
In reality, the expressive world of a piece of music normally sets up the corresponding mood in the listener, if at all, in only the most general way. A tranquil piece will establish a general mood of tranquility, a furiously fast and loud piece creates a general atmosphere of heightened arousal, and so forth. At these extremes there undoubtedly are physiological consequences too, such as a mild suppression or quickening of pulse. (The philosopher Peter Kivy has elaborated upon these affective aspects of music very helpfully in his book The Chorded Shell.) However, there is nothing in the range of such general moods to suggest the specificity and limitless variety of the musical works themselves.
Every piece of music in performance evokes an atmosphere. Emotion is a more or less prominent part of that atmosphere, depending on the piece. The atmosphere of a piece arouses and focuses our interest. What we attend to, however, is detail: Instruments, harmonies, rhythms, melodies, motives, text (if there is one), and the innumerable variety of relations that these establish with one another as the music unfolds. Some of these relationships correspond to the "structural possibilities" that I mentioned before, and a great many of those are susceptible to cool, objective analysis. Many such relations, however, are not. Those intricate relations unfold, develop and close in patterns of motion that embody a vital aspect of human life. We certainly do not know enough about how, or why, this is so; only that it is so. We know in part because the experience of music is frequently accompanied by feeling far deeper and more important than the affect of the piece. We do not normally try to describe that feeling, and when we do we reach for words that philosophers find to be notoriously problematic: beautiful, transcendent, sublime, etc.
The irreducible essence of the experience of music is a wordless illumination of our humanity. This is what I believe draws composers irresistibly to their work. The poet Stephen Spender has written of the "high vocation" of poets in ways that apply, with suitable adjustment, to composers. Poets, Spender writes, are "ambitious to be accepted for what they ultimately are as revealed by their inmost experiences, their finest perceptions, their deepest feelings, their uttermost sense of truth, in their poetry. They cannot cheat about these things, because the quality of their own being is revealed not in the noble sentiments which their poetry expresses, but in sensibility, control of language, rhythm and music . . . . The poet's faith is therefore, firstly, a mystique of vocation, secondly, a faith in his own truth, combined with his own devotion to a task. . . . At the same time this faith is coupled with a deep humility because one knows that, ultimately, judgment does not rest with oneself. All one can do is to achieve nakedness, to be what one is with all one's faculties and perceptions, strengthened by all the skill that one can acquire, and then to stand before the judgment of time." [Spender, Stephen, The Making of a Poem, London, Hamish Hamilton Ltd. (1955), pp. 59-60 (my emphasis).]
Thus the arts illuminate our humanity in ways that cannot be duplicated by other fields. It is for this reason that a curriculum of higher learning that aims to educate the complete human being cries out for the arts to be included.
Two years ago, as part of its fiftieth anniversary celebrations, the School of Humanities and Social Sciences was renamed the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. This change symbolized retroactively a change in our academic community of immense significance, comparable to the development of the humanities at MIT after the war. In 1949, 10 years before C.P. Snow's seminal Rede Lecture at Cambridge University entitled "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," the Report of the Committee on Educational Survey at MIT, the famous Lewis Report, argued for the importance of humanities in a science and technology based curriculum. The report argued then in terms that resonate no less forcefully today, overshadowed as we are by the immanent catastrophe of war and other human disasters, for the need to cultivate within our students appreciation of value, humanity, and ambiguity through a full-blown humanities and social science curriculum equal in stature to science and engineering. This led to the establishment of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences and the development of its distinguished faculty. As early as 1963, Snow singled out MIT (along with a handful of other American institutions) as an exceptional educational environment because it had already begun to bridge "the two cultures."
The arts represent a third way, of importance equal to science and engineering and the humanities. Through their rigor and discipline the arts reveal for us an essential dimension of what it is to be human that is quite different from those dimensions revealed by the rigors and discipline of science and the humanities. Once again, MIT can rightfully claim a position of leadership for having developed further bridges to this 'third culture,' which is inhabited at MIT by practicing artists, not subsumed under the umbrella of the humanities, drawn to technology only to the extent that their personal vision leads them. Relations among the three cultures here can be unpredictable, generally cordial, sometimes less so. What counts, though, are the bridges, especially the bridges that are built in the minds of the students whom we all teach.
Finally, let me return to composition and say that I have no agenda, not for myself, certainly not for other composers. Our musical culture is one of extreme diversity, and the musical communities that composers declare allegiance to (explicitly or implicitly) are similarly multifarious. Some concert music composers adapt their musical language with reference to the global community of world music, others to jazz or popular music, others to the traditional enclaves of western concert music down to the narrowest community of like-minded professional musicians. Others drift freely among several of these possibilities, combining them differently at different times. The strength of the current situation is its freedom of individual choice.
In the poems of Carmen Bernos de Gasztold called Prayers from the Ark, she imagines petitions to God addressed by the myriad animals, insects, fishes, and birds on Noah's Ark, along with one harassed plea by Noah himself. The effect of the poems, of which there are many more than I chose for my piece, is cumulative. They capture the ways in which yearnings for transcendence are modulated by the particular circumstances and personalities of individuals, their special gifts, their individual limitations. The wind quintet struck me as the ideal vehicle for setting these poems for the very same reason that composers of chamber music often find the wind quintet intractable: the distinctiveness of the individual instruments, their sharp differences of timber, attack, and character, their unevenness across their individual ranges, their resistance to blending. I chose to set Bernos de Gasztold's poems because they symbolize for me the infinite diversity of the human struggle for transcendence. But they serve just as well to illustrate the infinite diversity among contemporary composers, who in the end, each and every one of them, must look to their own hearts. I stand with the Little Pig, who says: "Yes, I grunt. Grunt, and snuffle. I grunt because I grunt and I snuffle because I cannot do anything else."
|
HomePage |
|
|
|
|