Chapter 36: “Many Streams”: Millenium’s End

I. Competing Visions
A. “Uptown composers” refers to those who follow in the footsteps of European composers.
1. The name is “uptown” because Columbia University is in uptown Manhattan.
2. This music has been described as “PhD music.”
3. These composers are historicist in orientation.
a. History, research, and innovation are more important than listeners,
communication, and society.
4. Uptown music began to fade in the 1980s.
B. “Midtown” composers are associated with the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and the
groups who perform there.
1. These composers matured during the time of Stravinsky’s neoclassical music and
Copland’s Americanist works.
2. Many were performers themselves (unlike uptown composers).
3. Bernstein’s West Side Story is one example of a work by a midtown composer.
4. This group saw education as an important endeavor and worked to promote music to
young audiences.
5. These composers essentially competed with the “museum repertory” of the Three B’s
in that they used the same language and form, only updated vocabulary.
C. “Downtown” composers are geographically located in the Greenwich Village area and include
the minimalists.
1. They were seen as mavericks.
2. Cage was a part of this scene.

II. The Cold War Ends

A. With the fall of communism in 1989, the debates over “progressive or conservative” fell
away.
1. One question resulting from this was whether or not the audience was worth more than
historical progress.
B. Younger musicians tended to accept a broad swath of different musical styles.
C. America became a place of innovation and leadership in music.

III. The Postmodern Condition

A. The last third of the twentieth century has come to be seen as “postmodern.”
1. Aesthetically, postmodern signals a change in sensibility—exactly what is debatable.
B. We have become “multicultural” as a result of many battles fought in the 1960s and ’70s.
C. The idea of progress was questioned by some, linked to a “master narrative” that assumes
cultural progress (like that of the New German School).
1. New ways of thinking about everything mark a significant break with Romanticism
and Modernism.
2. In France this led to “post-structuralism,” associated with the revisionists Foucault,
Bathes, Lacan, and Derrida.

IV. Collage and Pastiche

A. Postmodern architecture blends styles from different periods together. The musical equivalent
was the collage (cutting and pasting) and pastiche (imitation in the style of the past).
1. These procedures were neither new nor unique to Postmodernism.
a. Berio’s Sinfonia (1968) is an example of collage.
2. It was commissioned by Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, with vocal parts
composed for the Swingle Singers (eight amplified voices).
3. The texts used vary widely: some are vocables.
4. The first movement has readings from Lévi-Strauss, a French anthropologist who
influenced post-structuralists.
5. The title of the work suggests a link with the past. The work also has connections with
Mahler (whose music was in vogue at the time, thanks to Bernstein).
a. Mahler’s Second Symphony, third movement forms the background structure
for the third movement of Sinfonia.
b. Aural “graffiti,” drawn from a variety of sources, project above it.
6. The second movement is concerned with political events, including the assassination of
Martin Luther King, Jr.
a. The overlapping ostinatos represent America’s slow pace toward racial justice.
B. As he grew older, Berio turned to using music of the past more frequently.
1. He orchestrated early Mahler songs, finished Puccini’s Turandot with some creative
insertions of music from other styles, etc.
C. George Rochberg is another example of a composer who worked with collage.
1. His Music for the Magic Theater (1965) mixes Mozart, Mahler, Beethoven, Webern,
Stockhausen, Varèse, “Stella by Starlight,” and his own pieces.
2. Rochberg’s Third Quartet went further.
a. The first two movements are decidedly Modernist.
b. The third movement is in a fully functional A major, in the style of late
Beethoven. It is a pastiche. Rochberg seemed to be channeling Beethoven.
c. This piece broke all the rules. There was no distance between the past and
present.

V. Aesthetics of Pastiche
A. Rochberg’s Third Quartet asks the question, Why didn’t he simply devise his own “tonal”
idiom instead of copying Beethoven’s?
1. Rochberg explained that personal emotions are never simply that but are part of
something that connects people.
a. His ideas are similar to those in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.
b. Such innocence is not associated with serious composers of the 1970s who
seemed to have been faced with the choice of renouncing expression or borrowing a voice.
c. Using functional tonality innocently was Rochberg’s choice.
B. Rochberg was already famous as a Modernist, so this turn to pastiche drew particular
attention.
C. How to deal with the dominant museum culture was a looming question for twentieth-century
composers.
1. One could not reject older music styles if they were still being performed continually.

VI. Across Time and Space: George Crumb

A. In the 1970s Crumb was one of the most frequently performed of living American composers
(excepting the minimalists).
B. Several of his compositions are set to texts by Federico Garcia Lorca.
C. Crumb achieved “transhistorical reach” through the quotation of existing music, including
Bach, Mahler, and Schubert.
D. He mixed timbres that would not usually be heard together or playing instruments in unique
ways.
E. He also drew the notation of his works in ways that reinforced the idea of collage.
F. Crumb used political themes, particularly in Black Angels for electrified string quartet.
1. The rituals enacted therein portray a surrealistic funeral to protest the killing in
Vietnam.
G. Frederic Rzewski also made political statements in The People United Will Never Be
Defeated (1975).

VII. Conversions in Reverse

A. Uptown composers moved downtown as they moved away from Modernism.
B. One notable example is David Del Tredici.
1. His Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (written over a period extending from 1968 to
1996) leave the frantic dissonance of Modernism for “voluptuous sonority and honeyed
harmony.”
2. He once remarked that it was enlightening to learn that it was ok for an audience to
like a piece on first hearing.
C. A number of American neo-tonalists (or neo-Romantics) followed suit: from John Adams to
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.
1. Among these, baby boomers had less problem embracing tonality than did earlier
Modernists, and those born in the 1960s tended to be the most tonal of all.
D. Some proponents of neotonality went out of their way to explain why it was okay—
sometimes going way back in music history to confirm diatonic pitches.
1. Musicians and linguists sought answers in linguistics, noting the transformation
processes outlined by Noam Chomsky.
2. Composer Fred Lehrdal argues that music without pitch or metrical hierarchy made
structural listening impossible.
a. Whether or not that is the right question to ask (the importance being
“understanding”) is not clear.
b. In the 1980s, for listeners to be able to understand music became an important
point for many young composers.

VIII. The End of Soviet Music

A. Ligeti and Penderecki also moved to a neo-Romantic style in the 1970s.
1. Ligeti acknowledged that the avant-garde movement was over in 1982.
2. Penderecki’s change in direction may have been spurred on by the Solidarity
movement in Poland that led to the fall of communism there.
B. Glenn Gould toured the Soviet Union in 1957 playing music by subversives such as Berg,
Webern, and Krenek.
C. Stravinsky visited the Soviet Union in 1962 for his eightieth birthday, when he was
acknowledged as a “Russian classic.”
D. Edison Denisov, a student of Shostakovich, promoted advanced Western techniques and
shared the music of Darmstadters.
1. He wrote in twelve-tone technique.
2. He was one of the “Big Troika” of nonconformist Soviet composers, along with Alfred
Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina.
a. Schnittke’s First Symphony (1972) is a collage of collages, bringing in his own
music, that of Beethoven, Handel, Haydn, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Johann Strauss II, ragtime, and
rock.
b. His Concerto Grosso No. 1 (1977) was the first work of his to gain a big
reputation in the West.
1) It reflects his “polystylism” in a simplified (as compared to the First
Symphony) manner.

IX. Senior Statesmen

A. Modernists continued to compose in that style through the end of the twentieth century.
1. Even though Modern, their styles were no longer new.
2. Their junior composers regarded them as outmoded.
B. Two English composers (Brian Ferneyhough and Michael Finnissy) represent the younger
generation’s use of Modernism in a style called the “new complexity.”
1. Their highly detailed scores reflect the composer’s attempt at timbral diversity.
2. More recent English composers have maintained the intellectually challenging style of
these two, but in more audience-friendly guises.
C. Boulez has led younger French composers in a research institute (IRCAM) where they have
the opportunity to work with the very latest technology.
1. Their studies resulted in a new approach to form through computer analysis.
2. Boulez has continued to compose.
3. His influence has not been sustained, even though he created the institute in which
younger French (and other) composers work.

X. The Digital Revolution

A. The possibilities opened up by the personal computer probably best represent Postmodernism.
B. MIDI technology, samplers, and sequencers all contributed to new ideas about composition.
C. The digital revolution liberated music composition from the literate tradition.
1. Samples do not use notation. Technology makes it possible to deal with smaller and
smaller elements of sound.
D. Reich used traditional notation and pre-recorded sounds in Different Trains (1988), a piece
commissioned by the Kronos Quartet.
1. That ensemble distanced itself from traditional string quartets in physical appearance
and repertory.
2. They consciously aligned themselves with the Postmodernists.
3. Reich’s work is a reflection of his own experience riding trains between Los Angeles
and New York City, and the experiences of Jewish children being transported by trains to
Auschwitz.

XI. Performance Art

A. The 1970s and ’80s saw a revival of oral practices associated with folklore, known as
performance art.
B. These performances are usually multimedia.
C. Yoko Ono is one such artist; another is Meredith Monk.
1. Monk developed a personal style of vocal delivery. She dispensed with words and used
her voice as an instrument.
2. The structures she used recall textures and structures found in Medieval music.
a. Dolmen Music (1978) has a conclusion that sounds something like the parallel
organum discussed in Chapter 1.
b. Monk sees the similarities with ninth-century music as a break from the linear
view of historical progress dominated by male writers.
D. Laurie Anderson is another performance artist.
1. In contrast to Monk’s small-scaled events, Anderson aimed at multimedia shows that
toured around the world.
2. There are several layers of digitalization in her shows, which often last four to five
hours.
3. Self-parody is another aspect of her performances, which aligns perfectly with
Postmodernism.
4. In 1981, her O Superman (based on an aria from a Massenet opera) launched her
internationally, with sales reaching over one million dollars.
E. Musicologist Susan McClary notes that women have always been performance artists because
it is a traditional role for them to be the objects of masculine gaze.
1. With the performance artists we have studied, a major distinction arises in that these
women write their own material.
F. Among the other composers mentioned, John Zorn has been named “an archetypal example of
the composer in the media age.”
1. His Spillane (1986) is a collage that moves somewhere between composition and
improvisation, live and digital sounds.
2. His music is noted for quick style changes and a huge range of borrowings from
Josquin to TV jingles to ragas.
3. His music emerged at about the time MTV was born and Michael Jackson’s Thriller
debuted. The video for the song Thriller contains many aspects of the performance art described
earlier.

XII. The Alleged Death of Classical Music

A. At the end of the twentieth century, uptown and downtown music met at midtown.
1. This is in spite of the prediction that classical music was dead.
2. Yes, media coverage had diminished, the audience was aging, record sales had
declined, classical radio stations had declined, and publishers were less interested in new
composers.
B. At the same time, however, interest in Western classical music picked up in Asian and South
American countries.
C. Opera companies began producing new works, including John Adams’s Doctor Atomic.
D. New interest in classical music for orchestras surged, too.
1. John Corigliano’s First Symphony (1990) was widely performed.
 a. A memorial to victims of AIDS, each movement is dedicated to a specific
person.
2. Others, such as Joan Tower and Tan Dun, tapped into new areas of music interest
(feminism, American pride, Chinese instruments) with a view that classical music could have
topical relevance.

XIII. John Adams and Nixon in China

A. Adams began his career as a minimalist but soon moved to other styles.
B. His On the Transmigration of Souls commemorated the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and won the
Pulitzer Prize in music in 2002.
C. His first opera, Nixon in China (1987), was commissioned by four different houses, spread
across the United States and into Europe.
1. It is “postminimalist” in style, having many of the traditional means of minimalism but
in a more conventional harmonic idiom.
2. Hardly realistic in its portrayal of the main characters, the work was criticized for
presenting a false face, or mythological one.
3. The value of Nixon in China lies in its capacity to create spiritual archetypes, not its
reporting of the story.
D. By the late 1990s Adams’s music was the most performed of any American classical
composer.
1. Some of his popular works include Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986, instrumental),
and the operas The Death of Klinghoffer (1991) and Doctor Atomic (2005).

XIV. A New Spirituality

A. Peter Sellars, who worked with Adams on his last two operas, noted that classical music had
to offer something other media did not and suggested specifically that it was spiritual content.
B. Around the millennium, several composers wrote new works aimed at such a purpose.
Multiculturalism was a factor in many of them.
1. Adams contributed an oratorio, El Niño, as did Glass with his Fifth Symphony. Glass’s
composition included texts from world “wisdom” traditions.
2. Conductor Helmut Rilling commissioned a cycle of four Passions based on the
Gospels.
C. Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, who had studied at the IRACM in Paris and was identified
to a degree with the Parisian spectralist composers, premiered her opera L’Amour de loin in
2000.
1. She also worked with Sellars on this production.
2. It is based on the story of a twelfth-century troubadour, Jaufré Rudel.
3. The theme (and title) of “Love from Afar” occurs in both the immediate sense (the
lovers are separated but maintain their love) and spiritual (the surviving party, Clémence, enters
a convent and expresses love for God and/or Jaufré).
4. Set in the Middle Ages, the story covers two distinct areas, West and East (afar). The
composer is able to show how two different cultures influence one another, and does so by
moving freely in and out of Medieval, Modernist, and Postmodernist styles.
D. Others in this chapter explored spiritual themes (Pärt and Gorecki). The popular appeal of
spirituality is interesting, and what it means is worth investigating.