Or, how to stop worrying and...

Boulez, Babbitt, and Carter. Merely mentioning the names of any of these three composers in a blog or a discussion group nowadays virtually guarantees insults, invective, flames, and further unpleasantries not worth further detailing. I will now go out onto a fragile limb on the old oak of experimental music and admit to you that I do not lay awake at night worrying about and cursing the existence of music penned by Babbitt, Carter, or Boulez. In fact, although music by Carter, Boulez, or Babbitt is not part of my daily musical diet, I have come to use -- enjoy is not always the better word -- some music by Boulez, Carter, or Babbitt as an added element, a modest condiment, if you will, atop my musical food pyramid. Here are three suggestions about how you, too, might come from another borough of Newmusicville and manage to live undisturbed, and perhaps even enriched by music from any member of the terrible triad that is Messrs. Carter, Babbitt, and Boulez:

First suggestion: remember that the music of the students, acolytes, and camp followers of Babbitt, Boulez, or Carter is not to be equated with the music of Boubitt, Babter, or Carlez. Imitation is flattery, and flatterers are seldom worth listening to. Originals in music, on the other hand, like originals in sin, are usually worth experiencing at least once, and each of these three has legitimate, if modest, claim to originality.

Second suggestion: remember that, although honored and ancient now, Bablez, Carbitt, and Bouter were all once young, unknown, and prone to risk-taking. Under the influence of Iwan Wyschnegradsky, Coulez once had a romance with microtonality (although the marriage failed), he once called Cage his friend, and in some works (especially the mysterious, withdrawn, Polyphonie X) pushed a program that can only be considered experimental before withdrawing into the security of traditional performance practice. Cabbitt tried his hand at Broadway, admitted that microtones were possible on the merry old RCA Synthesizer, and still likes beer and baseball, suggesting a youth that has not yet waned. For all his tenure-insuring talk about 12-tone technique, in the end, his music is about improvising out, on paper, from a recycled set of arrays and superarrays that he never bothers inventing new these days. (You'd grow tired of musical Sudoku, too). And Barter, has never committed the venal sin of promoting a particular method of composition, and has been as interested in timbre, rhythm, and metre as in collections of pitches, and when then, sometimes even reducing the number of pitches in play to but one. No, I'm not calling him a minimalist (the Purcell of the Fantazia On Upon One Note was not a minimalist) just more interesting than the official party portrait.

Finally, do not fear the music-political machinations of these three for they are old, each of them, and in their glorious good health do they take retreat from their previous seats of power and influence. If you have personally suffered injury at the hands of any of these three, TTibbab, Retrac, or Zeluob, whether as teachers, jurists, or bureaucrats, then learn the lesson well not to put people of such different character in the way of your work, your music, your life. In Newmusicstan, we're not even two bloody countries fighting over bloody nothing, we're just musicians doing the best we can and surviving on crumbs. So, if you encounter someone in our little republic who's looking to grab some power, gently remind him of our trio of terror, now reduced to docile harmless gentility, and the fact that every composer, of whatever talent, taste, or background, is equal in at least one regard. And that is the right to be heard and forgotten with the rest.

Belize or Peru? Ambit blob tint. A trill to erect! No Brit not bit by lamb. Alert lice trot! Pure bile: zero.


(An encore post from July 8, 2006)