I’ve been thinking about music a lot lately. I was curious about what was happening in the world of music right now. I mean, if I lived one hundred years ago, I could have heard the premiere of Ravel’s orchestration Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, a piece of music that I love. Or heard new work by Stravinsky or Shostakovich. Not to mention many great pioneering jazz performances. But what is happening right now? The newest music I have been kind of familiar with is the genre of “minimalism,” a kind of music that is mostly tonal. (Ironically, when I googled tonal music just now, one of the first things that came up was this weird, reactionary article about the need to teach tonal music to our children. As if there were a movement to teach atonal music to kids…) Minimalist composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich are quite old now, as is minimalism-adjacent composer, Arvo Pärt. One composer loosely associated with minimalism, Henryk Górecki, died in 2010. Surely a younger generation or two of composers has come around since then. This post and the next are about my personal exploration of what came next, focusing on Bang on a Can, a festival and performance group specializing in young composers. For the past couple of weeks, I have been listening intently to Bang on a Can recordings and the music of some of their favorite composers (whether performed by Bang on a Can or other performers), and reading Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace by William Robin.
flyer for the first Bang on a Can Festival
To talk about Bang on a Can and its associated composers, a little scene-setting is required. Bang on a Can was founded by three young composers, David Lang, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe. The had their first festival—essentially a marathon of playing in a single 11-hour session, in 1987 at the art gallery Exit Art. By aligning it with an art gallery, they were staking a “downtown” position. “Uptown” and “Downtown” had specific, mutually antagonistic musical meanings in the 60s, 70s and 80s.
Uptown versus downtown refers to competing schools of musical composition. In the 70s and 80s, these two words were used to represent the academic, serial composers (uptown, like in Columbia University) and the funkier, loft-oriented downtown composers (including John Cage and the minimalists). Serialism is an outgrowth of musical experiments in the early part of the 20th century by Arnold Schoenberg. His big idea was to use “tone rows,” melodies that used all 12 notes in the Western scale, as opposed to being in a particular key, which uses a group of 8 notes, some of which will be flats or sharps (except in the key of C, where one uses no flats or sharps). This music was challenging for the average concert-goer to listen to. Schoenberg’s two most important followers were Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Serialism took the idea of the 12 tone system and expanded it to pitches, rhythms, dynamics, timbres and other musical parameters. The result was a kind of music that conquered academe after the second world war. Think of composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Milton Babbit and Charles Wuorinen. It is music that dares you to like it. In fact, Babbit wrote an essay in 1958 that was published in High Fidelity called “Who Cares If You Listen?” Supposedly this title was given to the essay by the editor of High Fidelity, but it expresses the gist of the article.
‘“While the tonal system, in an atrophied or vestigial form, is still used today in popular and commercial music, and even occasionally in the works of backward-looking serious composers, it is no longer employed by serious composers of the mainstream,” Wuorinen wrote in the preface to his book Simple Composition. “It has been replaced or succeeded by the 12 tone system.”’1
It’s useful to think of where we were in 1958. The USA had become the richest, most powerful country in the world. It was awash in dollars. One of the things it decided to do with all those dollars was to provide a college education to returning soldiers. This meant pouring money into higher education. Suddenly you had pretty sophisticated music instruction in even the least important land-grant college. These music departments provided jobs with tenure to the most advanced composers in America. And these composers were writing serial compositions.
Consequently, colleges were very much ivory towers for music that no one wanted to listen to, and an ethos of “fuck the audience”. Being in school utterly shielded them from the ordinary requirements of art—that someone out in the world likes it.
“The history of American graduate studies in composition after the 1962 founding of Princeton’s pioneering PhD has largely been analyzed as a kind of Babbit aftershock, one in which Cold War ideology and patronage constructed a home for mathematical, atonal, and audience-unfriendly music to flourish outside the marketplace.” 2
This was music that almost no one wanted to hear. It could not survive in the marketplace. Survival in the marketplace is one of Robin’s primary themes of Industry. Uptown’s solution was the university. “When first arguing for the creation of a composition PhD at Princeton back in 1960, Milton Babbitt, with his colleagues Edward T. Cone and Arthur Mendel, stated in a memo that ‘It must be realized that university teaching provides the only means whereby the composer can exist within his profession; to deny his right to teach is to deny serious music the right to exist.’”3
“Meanwhile, a little more than a hundred New York blocks south of Colombia University, but sonically worlds away, the downtown musical scene took shape—one whose ethos was shared by composers in San Francisco and Ann Arbor and other freethinking enclaves across the country. Their spiritual godfather was John Cage, who pioneered the techniques of indeterminacy and chance operations in the 1950sto create works that circumscribed the composer’s authorial voice and afforded new freedoms to to performers and listeners. Cage’s permissive creative philosophy helped give shape to the wide-ranging sphere of experimentalism, encompassing everything from the performance-art happenings of Fluxus to the hushed, longform ruminations of Morton Feldman to the electronic tinkerers of the Sonic Arts Union.”4
Downtown included LaMonte Young’s minimalist experiments, in whose loft Steve Reich and Philip Glass hung out. It included sound-scape composers like Pauline Oliveros, whose identity as a woman and a lesbian was integral to her music.
The feel of these two “worlds” was different and there was a lot of mutual hostility. But who cares about the conflicts of a bunch of composers that almost no one ever heard? To paraphrase Sayre’s Law, composers’ disputes are the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.
Bang on a Can were cognizant of this conflict and decided to take a stand against it by inviting both uptown and downtown composers to the festival. They programmed Vision and Prayer by uptown maestro Milton Babbitt to play right before Four Organs by downtown stalwart Steve Reich. Each composer introduced his own work, but neither stayed to listen to the other composer’s work nor did the two even speak to each other at the festival.
This was the beginning of a series of festivals that continues to this day. (They are having one on January 20th, Peoples Commissioning Fund Concert.) In addition to organizing these marathon concerts, they established a seven-piece ensemble, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, to take the show on the road. Below is a video of the All-Stars playing “Believing” by Julia Wolfe.
I invite you to check out their YouTude channel where they have a huge number of videos of their festivals and the Bang on a Can All-Stars.
I want to delve deeper into new music mostly to educate myself about it. I want to look at it from the point of view of festivals (Bang on a Can, obviously, but earlier festivals of avant garde music like The Festival of the Avant Garde, which ran annually from the 60s until 1980; New Music America, a mobile festival that stopped in Houston in 1984; and several others), from the point of view of funding and management. and what the scene for new music is like here in Houston, the petrochemical armpit of America.
In the meantime, listen to some of the composers listed above and to Bang on a Can. Much osd this music can be found for free on YouTube. I would recommend “Anthracite Fields” by Julia Wolfe, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015.
[Please consider supporting my work by becoming a patron, and you can also support my work by patronizing my online store. And one more way to support what I do here is to buy books through my bookstore. ]
p. 5, Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace, William Robin
p. 19, Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace, William Robin
p. 41, Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace, William Robin
p. 6, Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace, William Robin