![]() ![]() I have far less in common with people twenty years younger than I am. Like my parents and grandparents, I grew up reading print newspapers and magazines, writing longhand or on a typewriter, listening to records, mailing letters, driving with maps. I was a college student in 1989, and the world of that year now seems ancient. The rapid spread of globalization, the triumph of unregulated free-market economics, the invasive power of the Internet, and the decline of liberal democracy have eroded institutions that defined cultural activity throughout the twentieth century. The “fall” in the title points most obviously to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, but it has wider resonances. Just as the cultural twentieth century began late, with the modernist convulsions of 1907-13 (Picasso, Matisse, Stein, Pound, Schoenberg, Stravinsky), so it ended early, its verities collapsing under the pressure of political and economic tumult. Rutherford-Johnson, who is forty-one, is wise to commence his account in 1989, rather than in 2000. He has the faculty of “omniaudience”: he seems to have heard and comprehended everything. “Music After the Fall,” like the blog, addresses a vast range of music, from the gnarliest experimentalism to the mellowest minimalism, and Rutherford-Johnson applies a critical intelligence that is at once rigorous and generous. I became a devoted reader after he compared the work of Harrison Birtwistle to “granite in November rain”-a fine phrase for that rugged, monumental music. I first encountered Rutherford-Johnson as the author of a new-music blog called the Rambler, which he started in 2003, when starting a blog was still a novel thing to do. “Music After the Fall” is the best extant map of our sonic shadowlands, and it has changed how I listen. Rutherford-Johnson makes us think about other borders: between genres, between ideologies, between art and the world. What, then, isn’t composition? Conversations around the term often focus on either erasing or redrawing the boundary between the classical and the popular. By the end of the book, definitions seem more elusive than ever: to compose is to work with sound, or with silence, in a premeditated way, or not. In fewer than three hundred pages of cogent prose, Rutherford-Johnson catalogues the bewildering diversity of twenty-first-century composed music, and, more important, makes interpretative sense of a corpus that ranges from symphonies and string quartets to improvisations on smashed-up pianos found in the Australian outback (Ross Bolleter’s “ Secret Sandhills”). Writing overnight history is a perilous task, but the British critic Tim Rutherford-Johnson manages the feat in “ Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989” (University of California). Such artists may lack the popular currency of Lamar, but they are not cloistered souls. Du Yun, Kate Soper, and Ashley Fure, the Pulitzer finalists in 2017-I served on the jury-make use, variously, of punk-rock vocals, instrumentally embroidered philosophical lectures, and architectural soundscapes. By century’s end, a composer could be a performance artist, a sound artist, a laptop conceptualist, or an avant-garde d.j. ![]() By the early fifties, Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry were creating collages that incorporated recordings of train engines and other urban sounds Karlheinz Stockhausen was assisting in the invention of synthesized sound John Cage was convening ensembles of radios. ![]() ![]() Within classical composition, meanwhile, activity on the outer edges had further blurred the job description. In 1965, a jury tried to give a Pulitzer to Duke Ellington, but the board refused. But that definition was always suspect: it excluded jazz composers, whose tradition combines notation and improvisation. Circa 1950, this was understood to mean writing a score for others to perform, whether in the guise of the dissonant hymns of Charles Ives or the spacious Americana of Aaron Copland. Lamar’s win made me think about the changing nature of “distinguished musical composition,” to use the Pulitzer’s crusty term. The thirty-one-year-old composer Michael Gilbertson, who was a finalist this year, told Slate, “I never thought my string quartet and an album by Kendrick Lamar would be in the same category. Lamar’s victory, for his moodily propulsive album “ damn.,” elicited some reactionary fuming-one irate commenter said that his tracks were “ neurologically divergent from music”-as well as enthusiastic assent from younger generations. Not until 1997 did a nominal outsider-the jazz trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis-receive a nod. Composers in the classical tradition have effectively monopolized the prize since its inception, in 1943. When the hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Music, in April, reactions in the classical-music world ranged from panic to glee. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |