Looking back at the future

In the twentieth century, one couldn't avoid the notion that things were moving forward, optimistically improving upon all that had gone before, even when going forward meant taking a few cautious steps backward (small is beautiful, food is better when slow, and even music can be renewed). But our present century has begun with a deep pessimism: supplies of vital resources have peaked, technological fixes might not come soon enough, the rational is competing with unthinking fundamentalism, and there is great uncertainty about a world where theocratic and billion-strong nationalist states are emerging as unavoidable forces. How much of the present conservatism in music has been composed over this pessimistic background?

*****
Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn aptly named the Varese-volume of their MusikKonzepte series Varese: A Look Back at the Future. They were spot on; the future in Varese's music has become a nostalgic one, with non-trivial connections to now-tired utopian visions ranging from the futurists to marxists. The most currently pervasive utopian visions -- whether of a new caliphate or a networked pax (corporate) Americana or the China that gets rich before it gets old -- don't seem to be inspiring much in the way of the new in new music. (I can't help but think of the title of that late Nono piece: La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura.)

*****
It's a bit shocking to consider the possibility that some of the "most modern" music ever composed was composed in the 1920s and '30s. The cool serial and indeterminant works of the 1950's, dressed up in a flat international style, are often honest about their mysticism. Certainly so in Messiaen, Goeyvaerts, Stockhausen, but Cage's appeals to Eastern thought, Nono's to Marx, and even Babbitt's positivism each have mystical qualities of their own (isn't there an element of the mystical in the notions of projecting and hearing a set class or an agggregate?). The divisions of those years -- sacred/meditative, social/political, quasi-scientific -- continued to inflect music in the next generations.

*****
Varese's, like the futurists, dipped constantly in the reserves of the romance of modern science and technology. Consider just his titles: Hyperprism, Ionization, Density 21.5. Varese's music combined great gestures stripped of their expressive referents, alongside suggestions of mechanical rhythms, but static and dynamic, and the continuous functions of portamenti, sirens, and the Ondes Martenot. But the futurists, like Varese, were also primitivists. While this is a trope shared with the Stravinsky of Le Sacre or Antheil's Ballet Mechanique or Revueltas' Sensamaya, the balance between these two elements defines almost all of Varese's music. (There is after all, nothing both more primitive and more modern than the rhythms of a machine.) From the Ondes Martenot-accompanied Popul Vuh text in Equatorial to the ethnological recordings interrupting Poeme Electronique, Varese was completely at ease in such juxtapositions. (Xenakis, too, would find a distinct balance between his most calculated or abstract materials and material that connects directly to his own folk music culture).

*****
Varese's personality is the one among major 20th century composers that is most difficult to approach. The music has traces of his fury and his sensitivity; he was as attached to early, particular vocal, music as to the ultra-modern, and his own achievement was one mostly for winds and percussion; the small number of scores and their broken chronology are marks of a complicated psychology. What are we to make of the anti-semitism that turns up in his letters? Connecting to Varese and to his music becomes increasingly difficult, as difficult as it is to connect to the now-aged vision of the future his music everywhere expresses.

(These remarks are due to the chance juxtaposition, on my desk, of a summary of the recent, controversial, speech in Augsburg by the Bishop of Rome, and a copy of the score to Hyperprism).