On Complexity

On Complexity
Author(s): Richard Toop

Source: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Winter, 1993), pp. 42-57
Published by: Perspectives of New Music
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ON COMPLEXITY1
RICHARD TOOP
for Suzanne Davies
A NIETZSCHE ONCE WROTE, "to define a thing is to begin to lie about

t." It is not my intention to lie to you this evening, nor even to swamp
you in half-truths. But I have a difficult subject to deal with, and as I start I
have only one word to hang it on: "complexity." It's a word which, where
music is concerned, has great scope for being misunderstood, and even
more for being waved around as a polemical weapon, without any desire to
grasp what it might mean. Goethe's Mephistopheles seems to me to formu-
late perfectly the dangers not just of the next forty-five minutes, but of the
next three days when, dressed up as Faust, he says:
Denn eben wo Begriffe fehlen,

Da stellt ein Wort zur rechten Zeit sich ein.2
On Complexity 43
May I quote this diabolical authority on deception and self-deception a

little further?:
Mit Worten lasst sich trefflich streiten,

Mit Worten ein System bereiten.3
Maybe I shall have some "fighting words," but not, I promise you, a
system. Let me quickly outline what I have in mind: some prefatory
comments, then three main areas of inquiry:
* first, the notion of complexity itself, and its relationship to other words
such as "complication" and "difficulty";
* second, in rather summary fashion, the ancestry of "complexity" within

Western art music;
* third, the evolution of the "complexity" debate in the post-war period,

and its current situation.
People sometimes ask, ingenuously or otherwise, "Why do composers

today want to write complex music?" Looking at the broad history of
Western music I would be tempted to reply, equally simplistically yet not
inappropriately, "When have the talented ones ever wanted to do anything
else?" Perhaps the most striking single aspect of Western music, in contrast
to that of other cultures with sophisticated musical traditions, is that the
moment composers find out how to do something, they want to do
something else. The axiom underlying Western art music seems to be
"Given X, assume the possibility of X+ 1" or even, more drastically, "Given
X, consider what not-X might have to offer." At a trivial level, this accounts
for the ephemera of musical fashion; at a deeper one, it is a token of the
continual pursuit of transcendence. The latter leads almost inevitably to
what one might loosely term a greater richness of discourse; this, in turn,
implies, in one form or another, complexity.
Yet curiously, though "complexity" in one form or another is something
we constantly seek in a work of art (whether from the standpoint of
composer, performer or listener), when we find it-when it moves or
astounds us-we tend to find other words for it. Having heard a piece, we
don't say, "Heavens, that was complex!" unless we were frankly puzzled by
it. We are more likely to say "that was beautiful," or "that was impressive,"
or "astonishing," and so forth. In other words, the sensation of successfully
deployed complexity is aesthetically "transferred" to some other mode of
description.
It is mainly this transference, I think, that gives "complexity" its artistic
prestige. Taken by itself, it might not suggest much more than Karl Kraus's
sardonic comment on the "new music" of his day: that it was like a young
44 Perspectives of New Music
woman who compensates her lack of natural attractions with a perfect

mastery of Sanskrit.4 And to tell the truth, a certain self-deceptive narcis-
sism can all too easily reside within the notion of "complexity." But that's its
vice, not its virtue-and I doubt whether there is any significant aesthetic
category that does not have scope for both.
Before leaving the area of undefined generalities, let's briefly consider the
obvious "alternative" to complexity. A former Australian colleague of mine,
and admirer of Aaron Copland (but also, to be fair, of some acoustically
more intransigent phenomena), never tired of citing the "Shaker Song":
"Tis the gift to be simple, tis the gift to be free." This struck me, and still
does, as naive. Even if one sets aside the comprehensive physical and
metaphysical prohibitionism that underlies this phrase-though why
should one set it aside?-one would be left with a flat contradiction
between the notions of simplicity and freedom. The song does not say "It's
O.K. to be simple"; like the current New Simplicists, it says "Be simple, or
be damned"-which in both theological and, where applicable, human(ist)
terms is to be taken rather literally. Simplicity as ideology is, it seems to me,
the apogee of enforced unfreedom. As Heinz-Klaus Metzger put it, long
ago, the alternative to complexity is not simplicity, but brutal simplifica-
tion. In art, perhaps it always was.
Is there not, then, a third way, a "via media," an Aristotelian mean?
Frankly, I think not. Schonberg once wrote that the middle path is the only
one that does not lead to Rome. Personally, it's not only the middle path
that I would discard, but the hypothetical "lower" one too (in my terms, a
simplicist path). It is possible that radical simplicity, to the extent that it is
potentially free from compromise, the perpetual whorehouse of the "via
media," might also lead to some kind of urbs aeterna (given the theological
preoccupations of a Part, a Tavener, or a Gorecki, where else would it
lead?). But for the most part, it's a dull, dumb path, and I doubt whether its
Rome is worth reaching. Yet at the same time, one must recognise that the
"upper path" is by no means an exclusive transit lane for the so-called "New
Complexists."
Enough of generalities; or rather, let's address some rather more specific
generalities. Since I am inevitably dealing with musical conceptions in
terms of words, let's look more closely at some of the words which tend to
figure in the debate about musical "complexity."
Firstly, let me look at the relationship between "complex" and "compli-
cated," as it might apply to music. Although "complicated" may have
certain pejorative or at least critical connotations, it also has a considerable
objective, material-based content. If I say a work is complicated, I don't
really say anything about whether I like the work, about how it "feels,"
about whether or not I admire its content, or sympathise with its aesthetic
aims. I do imply something about how the work seems to be made, or how
On Complexity 45
it looks on paper; perhaps that it seems very full of detail (again, this
doesn't involve assessment of the effect or legitimacy of the detail), or that it
might be hard to play or conduct.
With the notion of "complexity," however, real disagreements, real
incompatibilities of judgements can arise. I might say that I find a work by
Composer X complex (though that too does not necessarily involve a
judgement about worth), and you may very possibly disagree completely.
You may say, "No, it's not complex at all; it's just complicated." This
disagreement, I think, would really be one about personal perception, not
material substance. Accordingly, it is unlikely in the short term that we
could do more than agree to differ.
On the other hand, if I say that another work, by Composer T, is
complicated, it is unlikely that you would disagree quite so flatly. For
example, it is very unlikely (though not inconceivable) that you would reply
"No, it's not complicated at all; it's just complex." It is far more likely, if we
disagree, that you would say "Well, no, I don't think it's really that compli-
cated." This doesn't mean that we have radically opposed perceptions;
probably, it means that we basically agree on the "material substance" (if I
may strip that term of its weightier philosophical connotations), but that
you do think I am inclined to exaggerate its problematic physical aspects.
And these aspects may well have less to do with "good" and "bad" than
with elements of the idea of "difficulty."
So let us now turn to some of the meanings of "difficulty" in relation to
music, and their relationship to "complexity." They are not quite the same
as in literature or painting, though of course there are overlaps. One can
reasonably distinguish three main areas: difficulty in performance, in com-
position, and in listening. Once again, I shan't attempt to outline a
"theory"-just a general physiognomy.
Difficulty in performance is both physiological and intellectual. If, as a
pianist, I look at a score-it might be Bach, or Godowsky, or
Ferneyhough-and before I've even played a note I say "God, that looks
difficult!," this could mean several different things. It might mean that the
score calls for a level of technical competence that I don't have (or that I'm
not sure I have); this has nothing to do with substance or complexity as
such, only with my shortcomings.
Or it might be that the work looks conceptually difficult. This is where
the intellectual element enters, but there may still be a physical one too.
Suppose that I have seven notes to play in the left hand, against five in the
right: is that mainly a physical problem, or a mental one? Some paradoxes
arise here. For example, it may be more physically demanding if there are no
gaps in the groups of sevens or fives, but it is conceptually/intellectually
easier. In fact, nothing terrifies us more than discontinuity: the horror of
waiting, the panic of the pause (whether micro- or macro- ). This rather
suggests that by global standards, Western musicians have a wretched sense

of both temps espace and temps duree, on both the large and the small scale
(their redeeming feature is, presumably, their synthetic capacity).
In passing, I can't help recalling a conversation about twenty years ago
with the Italian composer Paolo Castaldi (in retrospect, a patriarch of
postmodernism). Like many composers in the sixties, he had a bit of a
Stockhausen neurosis ("Did Stockhausen say anything about me?" etc.).
And since Mikrophonie I was still very much "in the air," perhaps it is not so
surprising that Castaldi, as he told me, was planning a piece for two tam-
tams. As I remember, one of the players would have a relatively simple part:
constant tempo, basic meters, and fairly straightforward rhythms. The
other player would have had the complete post-Gruppen kit: logarithmic
tempi, constantly changing complex meters, and all kinds of irrational
rhythms. So one can imagine that one player would proceed quite placidly,
while the other was in a constant state of panic. The result of the two parts,
if correctly executed, was to be exactly the same. Yet also, evidently, not the
same: although the second tamtam in this parable of a piece (it doesn't
really matter whether or not it was ever actually composed) is at one level
gratuitously sadistic, there can be no doubt that its (attempted) perform-
ance would elicit a sense of tension and struggle (also a potential aesthetic
category) unattainable by other means.
Clearly, difficulty of execution can be an inbuilt aesthetic component,
most evidently in nineteenth-century music. But once again, though it may
be one (drastic) means of projecting and enhancing the innate complexity
of a work (as in Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata and Grosse Fuge) it does
not of itself endow a work with "complexity." A good performance of
Liszt's Mazeppa Etude may astonish through its virtuosity, and remind you
at every moment of the hair-raising difficulties that are being successfully
overcome. But it will never, I believe, convince you that the work is
"complex": it's just damned hard to play. On the other hand, it seems to me
that a good performance of Feux fllets (an infinitely more subtle piece of
music which is also infernally hard to play) would be one which doesn't
necessarily seek to conceal technical difficulty, but wilfully plays with the
idea of difficulty as a conjurer might, concealing or revealing at will: this in
itself would be a step towards "complex" substance.
A third kind of difficulty in performance involves that kind of difficulty
more directly. I look at a score-perhaps a Bach fugue-and I see that
although my fingers are not going to be unduly taxed, there are many
diverse elements in the piece, sometimes simultaneously, that I need to
absorb, and which I am going to have to project in a lucid manner (and
moreover, in a situation where I have to decide for myself just what
constitutes "lucidity"). But this is no longer just performer-specific; it
already begins to overlap with composition and listening.
On Complexity 47
The socially determined difficulties of composing new music, and of

grasping it as a listener, were dealt with a quarter of a century ago by
Adorno, and in such an authoritative manner that it would be naive of me
to imagine that I have anything fundamental to add (in recent years, it
seems to me, Adorno's critiques have suddenly become more relevant,
rather than less-the underlying programme of postmodernism is not so
far removed from that of thirties and forties totalitarianism). The recent
socio-political climate does, however, offer some new exemplars. The thou-
sands of people who went to Stockhausen concerts in the late sixties and
seventies don't go any more. This is not, I believe, because of the question-
able stylistic changes in Stockhausen's music, but because for them what
was once vastly exciting now seems just "difficult": involuntarily, they have
"unlearned" the codes which made that music meaningful to them. This
has little or nothing to do with individuals growing old: it has to do,
though, with the post-war society growing old. As Metzger writes, it is not
"new music" but the audience that has become incomprehensible.
In more general terms, and leaving aside those difficulties that arise from
ignorance or incompetence, difficulty in composing normally arises out of
the struggle to come to grips with unfamiliar material. This is the difficulty
of almost any kind of exploratory artistic intent: not a material difficulty in
"doing it," so much as the difficulty in "making it work," and even in
deciding what "making it work" means. Moreover (reverting to comments
made earlier) one should not underestimate the degree to which composers
(and especially those we think of as "great composers") have also sought to
make their own (compositional) lives difficult. This is not always a matter
of transcendental aspirations; it may just be a flexing of artisanal muscle.
Yet even here, it is always hard to determine at what point the slightly
masochistic joys of compositional problem-setting and problem-solving
mutate into something more elevated.
Whatever the composer's intent in such cases, the outcome is likely to be
an increase in the intricacy of the musical fabric: more subtle working of
individual lines, or a richer set of relationships between different lines. This
does not, of itself, amount to "complexity," but it does set up circumstances
in which "complexity" may plausibly be expected to occur.
This, of course, places potential strains on the listener, and there are in
fact few eras in Western music in which there was not some kind of
reception-based debate about "complexity," over and above the debates and
limitations arising from state ideologies. In the preface to his last collection
of Psalms Songes and Sonnets (1611), William Byrd writes:
a song that is well and artificially made cannot be well perceived nor
understood at the first hearing, but the oftener you shall hear it, the
better cause of liking you will discover ...
In effect, this is the standard composers' plea in favor of complexity: it

insists on the right of, even the need for the composer to "over-compose"-
to create something that resists immediate decoding, while seeking to offer
some kind of incremental revelation through repeated listening.
So what, then, is this thing "complexity"? As you may have gathered
from previous remarks, it is, in my view, essentially a subjective, perceptual
phenomenon-not an objective, material-based one. For me, the word
"complexity" evokes a situation in which there are not necessarily "many
things" (there could be many, but there might be only a few), yet in which I
sense many levels of relationships between the few or many things. What-
ever the definable cause of these relationships (organic, mechanistic, or
even fortuitous), their outcome is something I unreflectingly sense (I can
reflect microseconds later . . ) as "richness."
This richness is by no means the same thing as systematic consistency.
On the contrary, I would think of G6del's theorem, and particularly of
Hans Magnus Enzensberger's gloss on it:
?In jedem geniigend reichhaltigen System

lassen sich Satze formulieren,
die innerhalb des Systems
weder beweis- noch widerlegbar sind,
es sei denn das System
ware selber inkonsistent.<
And also this:
Um sich zu rechtfertigen
muss jedes denkbare System
sich transzendieren,
d.h. zerstoren.
?Genugend reichhaltig<< oder nicht:

Widerspruchsfreiheit
ist eine Mangelerscheinung
oder ein Widerspruch.5
Perhaps it inevitably involves some element of what Brian Ferneyhough

(affirmatively) describes as "too-muchness." But that "too-muchness" can
only begin to fascinate via an immediately eloquent surface, and the per-
sonal surmise that the residue too can be summoned to (metaphorical)
"speech." What all this has to do with what the composer has done
objectively at the compositional level can be investigated later, if one so
desires. But in general the investigation does not "explain" the subjective
response: it just enriches the labyrinth.
On Complexity 49
Complexity, such as it is, is not just work-specific. It can also be histor-

ical, intertextual, and much else besides. In looking back at work from the
past, we may try as hard as we like to put ourselves in the shoes of its
original creators and performers, and we can arrive at all kinds of perform-
ance reformulations and conceptual modifications, which are often highly
useful and instructive: on many occasions, they allow us to see and hear
works in a quite unsuspected perspective. But in the end, we still have only
our own late-twentieth-century minds with which to ponder the results.
Yet even these are not consistent features. His textures can be dense, as in
some of the Marian motets, but they can also be transparent, as in the
Requiem and (if it is well performed) the Missa Prolationem. The melodic
substance of his music ranges from the totally unified three-part canonic
writing of Prenez sur moi to the virtually athematic writing of Intemerata
Dei mater. On occasions, like Bach, he takes pleasure in setting himself
some thorny technical problems-but these also tend to be the pieces
whose acoustic surface aims at an illusion of transparency. I should like to
quote here (entirely out of context) some words by Louis Andriessen: "It
sometimes sounds simple, but it is complex. Sometimes it sounds very
complex, but in reality it is very clear. This is what I would call a 'dialectical'
approach to composing, and in the long term it is the best attitude to
creating something that could be understood as beautiful."6 As it happens,
these words were written about the young English composer Steve Mart-
land, but they also describe perfectly much of Ockeghem's work-which
simply shows that one didn't have to wait for Hegel or Marx in order to be
a dialectical composer. However, they don't describe the whole of
Ockeghem-the good, certainly, but perhaps not the best. "Best," of
course, is a largely subjective judgement, but I think I would be only one of
many to regard Intemerata Dei mater as one of Ockeghem's masterpieces. It
is one of those pieces that "has everything," and yet on the face of it, it
seems utterly irrational; it just shouldn't work. It is undoubtedly compli-
cated, yet also vastly complex. Its perversely low range, the lack of any
obvious thematic relationships, the huge spans without clear cadences, the
arbitrary "intertextual" references to two other Ockeghem masses: it's all
too ambitious, too risky-it seems to be wilfully going in search of disaster.
Need I add then, that as well as being, perhaps, the "Steve Martland" of his
day, Ockeghem was also, at times, its "Brian Ferneyhough."
Turning now to European New Music, the current debate about
complexity-that is, not just about whether complexity is "good" or "bad,"
but also about what is or is not complex-dates back to the early years of
postwar serialism. Various factors contributed to this. Firstly, there was a
certain naive pride on the part of the composer in making the composi-
tional process itself more visible, for public and professional admiration.
The results often suggested a rather simplistic view of progress (which was
true, I think), as well as an acceptance of positivist rather than metaphysical

values (which wasn't true at all). Secondly, the separate handling of param-
eters led to drastically increased performances difficulties, both concep-
tually and in terms of physical coordination. Given the controversy about
the aesthetic results, questions about ends justifying means inevitably
arose. Thirdly, the attempt at a stylistic tabula rasa, coupled with the
determination of the performers to (re)impose old notions of order even
where they were not intended, led to all kinds of perceptual difficulties and
contradictions.
Perhaps the key phenomenon of early postwar serialism was
aperiodicity-not just in relation to rhythm, but to all parameters. That
was one aspect of its taboo system. As Henri Pousseur wrote in the early
sixties:
For some time, serial music has been regarded as radically asymmetri-
cal, as entirely nonperiodic. That's how its audience feels it to be, and
that's how it is conceived by its authors, who do everything in their
power to obtain a maximum of irregularity.7
Thematic and motivic composition, still fundamental in Webern's late

works, were replaced (consciously or not) by statistical composition, which
in turn presupposed (consciously or not) statistical listening. It was left to
Stockhausen to spell this out. In the meantime, along with the cries of
"higher mathematics!," along came the first counter-charge: "Is it complex
at all?" Notable among these (not so much for its content as for the fact that
it appeared in the avant-garde's own house journal, die Reihe), was an article
by the Belgian semiologist Nicholas Ruwet: "Contradictions within the
Serial Language." I quote the first two sentences:
I imagine that every attentive listener must have been struck by a

contradiction inherent in a great deal of post-Webern serial music. In
the composer's plan this music is basically very intricate, but as soon as
it is performed it appears unsubtle.8
I don't want to dwell too much on this article, which is now a historical
artifact. Its basic criticisms, applied to the first three or four years of so-
called integral serialism, have some potential substance. What makes it
totally abortive as an extended critique is its axiomatic assertion that
"Music is a language," as opposed to a system of communication, which as
such naturally offers interestingparallels to language. Let me now, however,
quote Ruwet's third sentence, which he puts in brackets, but which I find
most instructive. It reads:
51
On Complexity
(This of course does not apply to certain works, such as Boulez'

Marteau sans Maitre or Stockhausen's Zeitmasse.)9
Now, why doesn't it apply, and why "of course"? Were the composers just
lucky? Is this a matter of token politeness to one die Reihe's editors, or is it
simply intellectual laziness in the face of inconvenient data? Personally I
think it's laziness, and I'm amazed that back in those days both Ruwet and
Levi-Strauss were allowed to get away with musically illiterate nonsense
apropos serialism. Maybe it just shows how desperate the avant-garde was
to attract the attention of other disciplines; if so, they soon fared rather
better with Umberto Eco.
But before setting Ruwet aside, let's persist for a moment with his
parenthesis. Why did works like LeMarteau sans maitre and Zeitmasze elicit
a level of enthusiasm not granted to Polyphonie X, or Kreuzspiel, or the first
book of Structures? In pursuing this question I think we can establish some
principles, however loose, that still have some relevance to late modernism
in the eighties and maybe-who knows?-in the nineties too.
The first essential factor was to move beyond the kind of "point music"
exemplified by Messiaen's Mode de valeurs, and the pieces mentioned a
moment ago. I don't doubt that these pieces were historically essential, as
instances of writing from Barthes' "degree zero." Their problems lie largely
in the fact that the relationship of the single sound to the whole is too
obscure at one level, that of the instant, and too one-dimensional at
another, that of the overall structure. Moreover, there are no mediating
structural levels, or only of the crassest kind (such as the chords that occur
at the beginning of each new serial strand in the first piece of Structures).
And finally, even in "statistical" terms, the total material is over-exposed
and under-differentiated: there is too much surface information, and too
little perceptible tendency or focus within it. To that extent, though compli-
cated, it does indeed lack richness.
Yet some of these early pieces do have an undeniable presence. Where
does it come from? In part, I think, from extraneous factors. In Messiaen's
Mode de valeurs it comes from the pervasive quasi-thematic use of descend-
ing modal fragments in the upper voices, and in Kreuzspiel from the animal
excitement of the periodic percussion layer, which is undoubtedly closer to
the ethos of Orffs Schulwerk than the composer (an erstwhile Schulmusiker)
intended. In Polyphonie X, to judge by the old Donaueschingen perform-
ance, there is no such extra-schematic frame of reference, and far from
gaining thereby-in terms of "purity," or whatever-the piece fails, by
virtue of its dependence on an insufficiently rich generative basis.
So why harp on these rather dusty exhibits from the Museum of Ancient
Modernism? Because, incredibly, they are still advanced in all seriousness,
in endless popular and academic texts, as representing the "essence of
serialism." The results have been drastic. Since the late fifties and early
sixties, there have been any number of composers who in their youth made
or read an analysis of Structures la, tried something similar without really
knowing why, spent a lot of time producing something more or less
worthless (and historically superfluous), and then turned round and
proudly announced they had gone "beyond serialism." A pathetic claim!
They hadn't come anywhere near grasping serialism, even in its kinder-
garten stage. I've met other composers, some of them quite well known,
who have dug into their bottom drawers and shown me vastly complicated
orchestra scores (mercifully unperformed) based on the naivest attempts
imaginable to appropriate the notational surface of Stockhausen's Gruppen.
Most of them subsequently turned to musical graphics-all in all, this was
probably their best option.
Serialism, like any other rich approach to composition, is only marginally
described by the recitation of its surface mechanics. Its essence lies in the
musical, philosophical, and aesthetic ideas and conflicts which it helps to
articulate. Only an idiot, I hope, would imagine that Stockhausen's Gesang
derJiinglinge is "about" the numbers 1 to 7, and Carre about the numbers 1
to 4 (or that Le Marteau sans maitre is about the chord-multiplication
technique). Yet just this kind of stupidity pervades the whole debate about
serialism. If, just for once, one came across a polemic which had clearly
grasped the aesthetic intent of a postkindergarten serial work, had some
notion of the compositional process, and then set out to criticize one, or
both, or the relationship between them, then one could talk about a
legitimate "debate." If those criteria are not met, the result is little more
than nappy-talk.
Above all, one needs to sweep aside the numbers fetish. This fetish
exists, I think, only amongst those aprioi opponents of serialism who tend
to howl "mathematics!" the moment any demonstrably conscious kind of
structuring becomes apparent. Yet Dunstable used numbers, Obrecht used
numbers, and Debussy and Scriabin used numbers. What of it? Even Phil
Glass, God help us, uses numbers, and has them counted out loud to make
sure we have noticed them. Now that is a number fetish! (And personally,
every time I hear those numbers in Einstein on the Beach, I can't help seeing
little dollar signs in front of them.)10
For what it's worth-which may not be much-traditional tonal har-
mony can be taught on a numerical basis, too. Who cares? It is what the
numbers are meant to achieve, and the possible discrepancy between intent
and outcome, that form the real basis for debate. But for that one has to
know a little music, and perhaps (as William Byrd would have agreed)
know it rather well.
Apropos serialism, which has undoubtedly been one means of arriving at
musical complexity, as opposed to complication, and whose failure to do so
On Complexity 53
on a regular basis simply reflects the fate of just about every compositional
technique since duple organum (how many fugues do you really want to
listen to, if they're not by Bach or Beethoven?), please allow me one final,
brief polemic. The old banality about the "totalitarian" character of serial-
ism, ancient or recent, is probably best evaluated by looking at the com-
posers who make such accusations, most of whose works would have been
a great deal more acceptable to Goebbels and Zhdanov than the music they
seek to attack. In fact it seems to me that the main urge underlying the
bland pseudo-democracy of postmodernism is, precisely, the longing for a
new millenarian totalitarianism, in which the works of radical and even
semiradical modernism can once again be proscribed as "decadent art"
(defiitively, this time). For me, it is the music of the born-again modalists
that wears the jackboots.
So now, finally, let us turn to the current notion of "New Complexity." I
shall consider the term itself, the history of the music that gave rise to it,
and perhaps the relationship between the music of Brian Ferneyhough-
who in this context has the same sort of key position that Stockhausen held
in terms of fifties serialism-and the work of some younger composers.
Let's admit that the term "New Complexity" is partly a journalistic
convenience. But it is not necessarily to be despised on that account. In
Aesthetic Theory, Adorno writes:
Even as mere watch-words, "isms" must be defended. Isms testify to

the universal state of reflection, achieving today what tradition used to
achieve, namely the organization of art into schools of sorts. This
explains why isms have been persecuted by the dichotomous bour-
geois mind which plans, wills and organizes everything except art and
love, the supposed repositories of unconscious, involuntary spon-
taneity.... The taboo on watch-words is reactionary. "
If"isms" can be justified, then surely so can "ities," including "complexity."

That composers themselves are less than enthralled at the prospect of being
incarcerated together in little terminological boxes, is thoroughly under-
standable; I can't imagine that any of the major composers one has in mind
when using the phrase "new complexity" would actually go around proudly
announcing "I'm a New Complexist!" (or anything else of a potentially
reifying character). But I would rather think of such terms not as a box, not
as an aesthetic enclave, but simply as a frame of reference which allows for
any number of diverse and even partly contradictory phenomena: the
Nietzschean idea of the "constellation."
As for this particular formulation-"New Complexity"-the word com-
plexity is one which, as I implied earlier, asks to be taken on trust, as a
matter of conviction rather than theoretical definition. We can agree, I
imagine, that the music of composers such as Brian Ferneyhough or James

Dillon is, in purely material terms, complicated. But for my taste (and not
mine alone!) it is also, when it succeeds, complex (in the sense of "multi-
layered richness" alluded to above).
The adjective "new" appears more questionable, though I have to partici-
pate in a certain collective guilt at having fostered it. For reasons I shall
touch upon shortly, "still complex" might be more appropriate. But who
uses labels like that?: they don't sell well! And that, of course, is the
journalistic, promotional, "instantly controversial/confrontational" aspect.
Even (especially?) in the era of postmodernism, everything still has to be
presented as new.
There is also a reactive - though not necessarily reactionary- component
in this particular label. When the sun rose at the dawn of European musical
postmodernism, in the mid seventies (there had already been isolated
glimmerings in the sixties), it had two long streamers attached. One read
"New Romanticism"; the other, "New Simplicity." I don't propose to
debate the merits of these two tendencies at any length. As far as I am
concerned, "New Romanticism" sought to restore a fictitious archetype of
the "German Soul," while "New Simplicity" was a regression to tribalism.
In other words, transposed back to the not inappropriate referential frame-
work offered by Germany in the 1930s, one was neo-Pfitzner, the other
neo-Orff. Take your choice! Both were, in any case, vehemently opposed to
the traditions of modernism, both Dionysian and Apollonian (just as
Goebbels banned both Stravinsky and Schonberg without bothering to
distinguish between the two).12
Now it has to be said that there has always been a certain martyrological
streak within Dionysian modernism such as Ferneyhough's: you find it
frequently in Schonberg's writings, and more recently in the bewildering
readiness of some of the "new complexity" composers to confess to the
"failure" of this or that part of a work. But there is also a strong streak of
stubborn resistance. The term New Complexity is primarily an open
refutation of New Simplicity, just as another widely used label, "maximal-
ism," is to be understood at least partly as "antiminimalism."
So what, actually, is this phenomenon? Essentially, it's late High Mod-
ernism, and like the more questionable phenomenon of Late Capitalism, it
hasn't lain down and died merely because theoreticians said it had, or that it
ought to. It's a case where, to borrow one of Wolfgang Rihm's titles, what
postmodernism had decreed to be Nature morte turns out to be Still alive. It
is probably one of the few aspects of contemporary art music to remain
faithful to the idea of art as the endless search for the transcendental, and of
music as potential revelation. To that extent it continues "tradition" in the
Germanic sense, not the English one (which is curious, since so many of its
exponents are British!). It is associated above all with the name Brian
On Complexity 55
Ferneyhough, but even within late modernism its origins go back much
further-in particular to those early works of Pierre Boulez dating from
what I would call his "Artaud period," that is, the period immediately
preceding the tabula rasa mechanics of Structures 1 and Polyphonie X.
Those pieces from the late forties, such as Le Visage nuptial, let me
emphasize, were byperexpressive. It is that hyperexpressive tradition that the
young Ferneyhough latched onto in his own early works of the late 1960s,
and it is that tradition for which he has sought to find new perspectives ever
since. Inevitably, that means complexity, in the sense of richness of musical
discourse that I outlined earlier. Ferneyhough's complexity, therefore, is
"new" only to the extent that where it succeeds, it constantly discovers or
discloses new domains of aesthetic experience.
What is more evidently new about the New Complexity is its sudden
flood of new adherents in recent years-without it, this symposium would
scarcely have taken place. But in the process, the image of what I would in
any case prefer to call the "New Transcendentalism" has inevitably become
somewhat blurred. The intricate sculpting of Ferneyhough's serialism has
been dialectically confronted, and partly supplanted, by the al fresco
stochastics of Xenakis. And yet the basic adventure remains the same.
Among other things, Xenakis's music, like Ferneyhough's, has always
tended to confront the performer with enormous technical problems, albeit
of a different kind. Xenakis has a rather neo-Bachian tendency to switch
instruments in and out like organ stops, without worrying too much about
the physical limitations of players or instruments. Ferneyhough writes
much more idiomatically for instruments, yet the sheer gestural disjunction
of his music constantly creates situations which are psychically rather than
physically exhausting. A school of thought which now draws on both these
approaches, always in pursuit of "das Unerh6rte," is almost axiomatically
inclined to take instrumental writing to the verge of impossibility. Just how
"possible" or "impossible" the results are will doubtless be a principal
theme of the coming concerts and forums. Certainly, the path of the "New
Complexists" is fraught with dangers. But in the current, desperately
anaemic situation of art music, it may well be, to paraphrase Holderlin, it is
only where danger lies and is sought out, that there is some hope of
salvation.
NOTES
1. Introductory talk for the "Complexity?" Festival, Rotterdam, 8-10

March 1990. The festival was organized by the Nieuw Ensemble in
conjunction with the Rotterdam City Council. In theory it set out to
document and debate the notion of complexity in relation to many
musical styles and eras; in addition to concerts of renaissance and
contemporary works, there were various lectures and discussion
panels. In the event perhaps disappointingly few of the normally
vociferous Dutch opponents of current versions of "complexity"
showed up, and the level of controversy was modest.
The talk printed here was requested as a personal "position paper"
to open the proceedings. Accordingly, it is polemical, sectarian, and no
doubt somewhat self-indulgent (it was also designed to be spoken, not
read). When Reinhardt Oelschlagel printed a German translation (by
Gisela Gronemeyer) inMusikTexte 35 (July 1990): 6-12, he gave it the
title "Mehr Uberzeugung als Theorie" (More Conviction Than The-
ory), which in fact aptly describes both the paper itself, and my own
view of the "new complexity" movement.
2. "For just when concepts go astray, / A Word leaps in to save the day"
(Faust I). After finishing this paper, I was dismayed to realize that, not
for the first time, many of my quotations and references had already
been used, often decades ago, by Heinz-Klaus Metzger [for example,
the present one is alluded to at the start of "Gescheiterte Begriffe" in
Theorie und Kritik der Musik (1958)]. I would have preferred my
admiration for this writer to have taken a less flagrantly parasitic
form ...
3. "With words one has a warrior's blade, / With words a system can be
made" (ibid.).
4. "Die neue Musik ist ein Frauenzimmer, das seine natiirlichen Mangel
durch eine vollstandige Beherrschung des Sanskrit ausgleicht." Karl
Kraus, Aphorismen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 96.
5. " 'In any sufficiently rich system / axioms can be formulated / which
within the system / can neither be proved or disproved / unless the
system / is itself inconsistent.' / To justify itself / every conceivable
system / must transcend itself / i.e., destroy itself. / "Sufficiently rich"
or not: / freedom from contradiction / is a shortcoming / or else a
contradiction." Hans Magnus Enzensberger: "Hommage a Godel," in
Gedichte 1955-1970 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 168.
6. Liner notes to Factory Facd 266.
On Complexity 57
7. Henri Pousseur, Fragments theoriques I (Brussels: Editions de l'Institut

de Sociologie, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 1970), 241.
8. Die Reihe 6 (Bryn Mawr: Theodore Presser Co., 1964), 65 (English

version).
9. Loc. cit.
10. After this talk had been given, the Canadian composer Rod Sharm
objected with some indignation that at the time of Einstein on the Beac
Glass was an impoverished part-time taxi driver. However, I can't see
any reason to change my impression of the work: to fantasize about l
dolce vita in a state of penury is in no way morally superior to actually
enjoying it.
11. Theodor W. Adorno,Aesthetic Theory (London and Boston: Routledge

and Kegan Paul, 1983), 380.
12. A fact which the latter-day Apollonians are inclined to overlook when
they talk about the "social irrelevance" and/or "elitism" of the new
Dionysians.

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On Complexity - R. Toop

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Author(s): Richard Toop

for Suzanne Davies

A NIETZSCHE ONCE WROTE, "to define a thing is to begin to lie about

Denn eben wo Begriffe fehlen,

May I quote this diabolical authority on deception and self-deception a

Mit Worten lasst sich trefflich streiten,

* second, in rather summary fashion, the ancestry of "complexity" within

* third, the evolution of the "complexity" debate in the post-war period,

People sometimes ask, ingenuously or otherwise, "Why do composers

woman who compensates her lack of natural attractions with a perfect

suggests that by global standards, Western musicians have a wretched sense

The socially determined difficulties of composing new music, and of

In effect, this is the standard composers' plea in favor of complexity: it

?In jedem geniigend reichhaltigen System

And also this:

?Genugend reichhaltig<< oder nicht:

Perhaps it inevitably involves some element of what Brian Ferneyhough

Complexity, such as it is, is not just work-specific. It can also be histor-

true, I think), as well as an acceptance of positivist rather than metaphysical

Thematic and motivic composition, still fundamental in Webern's late

I imagine that every attentive listener must have been struck by a

(This of course does not apply to certain works, such as Boulez'

Even as mere watch-words, "isms" must be defended. Isms testify to

If"isms" can be justified, then surely so can "ities," including "complexity."

imagine, that the music of composers such as Brian Ferneyhough or James

1. Introductory talk for the "Complexity?" Festival, Rotterdam, 8-10

7. Henri Pousseur, Fragments theoriques I (Brussels: Editions de l'Institut

8. Die Reihe 6 (Bryn Mawr: Theodore Presser Co., 1964), 65 (English

11. Theodor W. Adorno,Aesthetic Theory (London and Boston: Routledge

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