A good deal of twentieth-century "music" is experimental sound that has escaped from the laboratory. Some of it is viral, against which there has seemed no hope of cure. Some of it has served the homeopathic purpose of immunizing audiences from further contact with modern music; its doses are given during concerts at which the listener is virtually trapped into taking his bitter medicine between two sweeter, more traditional musical confections. I have been inclined to think of modern music as a form of punishment therapy ever since Charles Ives scolded a listener who was hissing at a modern-music performance: "When you hear music like this, why don't you sit up and take it like a man?" Werner Erhard could not have said it better. However, this has changed.
There has been a revolution in modern American music over the past decade. Like most revolutions it has caused a mess. Composers began writing whatever came into their heads. In the early 1980s, someone at Nonesuch Records had the ironic sense of humor to commission seventeen American composers to write waltzes. Nothing could seem further from the spirit of our age than the waltz, but the resulting Waltz Project provided the opportunity to hear, in miniature, the full wrenching range of modern compositional techniques, from John Cage's nonsensical sounds of subway noises, Milton Babbitt's blurps and blips, and Philip Glass' minimalism, to Lou Harrison's beautifully melodious waltz-lullaby.
In other words, anything was possible. The wild heterogeneity of styles devoted to the same form, may have been dismaying as a reflection of our ruptured culture, but it was also encouraging in its broad freedom of creativity. The clear message from the 1980s is that the stranglehold hegemony of twelve-tone music has been decisively broken and it is once again possible to write not only whatever one may wish, but, most important, what the average classical music listener identifies as music. In short, rhythm and melody are back.
While the chaos of the 1980s sorts itself out, the next decade should see the beginning of the fruition of this revolution, leading American composers and their audiences back into a more traditional relationship in which the one tries to communicate musically with the other. As Theodore Libbey, classical music editor and musician, says: "Fifty years of turn-off music is over."
The resulting confusion of the revolution, and its aural detritus, makes it difficult to discern what the revolution is against and what it is of. Principally, it is against the stultifying uniformity of Schoenbergian dodecaphony, which became the credo of the American musical establishment in the 1950s. Principally, it is for the emancipation of tonality.
In the July and August issues of THE WORLD & I, I tried to make the case that dodecaphony is not the result of musically rethinking things, but is postulated on modern ideology's rejection of nature and its replacement by method - that is, by the primacy of man's will. Like everything else touched by ideology, modern music suffered from what Eric Voegelin calls "a loss of reality." The successive losses have been of melody, harmony, rhythm - of tonality, of any sense of musical motion toward or away from a state of tension or relaxation, or of any motion through a series of conflicts to a resolution.
As Libbey states, "There
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