The End of the Mannerist Century

by William Bolcom

In March of 1996 the composer Donald Martino came under attack from the mucicologist-critic Richard Taruskin, who in a New York Times article on twelve-tone composition excoriated Martino as one of its more perniciously academic practitioners. (1) All this only occasioned by the reissue, mind you, of a Nonesuch record of around twenty years before; it's as if someone, now, decided to ambush a prizefighter walking by for winning a controversial match in 1965. the attack seemed certainly out of proportion for the occasion, and I rose to Martino's defence in print.(2) This eventually brought about a reaquaintance between Martino and me; I'd known him in seminar in Tanglewood in 1966, and we'd seen each other at odd times, but this public crisis occasioned a pleseant correspondence between us. Don very kindly sent some of his own music, and listening to it confirmed what I had remembered-that here is not only one of the most tonal of "atonalist" but also a composer extremely musical and natural of uttterance. The intellectual rigor involved with serial technique never exposes itself for its own sake in his work. But it is always there.
To summerize Taruskin's argument would take up more space than this essay can spare, but one can note his two main (though unrelated) point: that 1) Mondernism's stranglehold on music has lessened, as it has in the visual arts and good riddance too; and 2) there is a lack of connection between Martino's super-controlled language and what Taruskin calls its "primitive and simplistic" expressive gestures. (One could easily attack especially the late Schoenberg for the same thing; Boulez's early-1950s essay "Schoenberg est mort" jumps on him for using Viennese periodicity and gestures-the very things that make a good performance of his music coherent if recognized and nonsense if ignored.(3)

Taruskin's screed against what is now anything but a current musical style-so many years after it hedgemony-must come from a long-pent-up anger at what was, in its time, an almost facistic doctrine of historical inevitability adopted by some serialists. One would think that a composer like me, a Stanford graduate student in the early 1960s who quickly became interested in ragtime, popular music, and simple tonal gestures, would also rejoice at the death of the dodecaphonic witch. It is worderg\ul now not to have to worry about two hundred composers looking over your shoulder disapprovingly if you dare to write a triad. (I remember dinner in 1965 in West Berlin with Louis Andreissen at the apartment of Luciano Berio, who was directing Boulez's Domaine Musical that summer-I was one of the groups's pianists. Afterward, Luciano summoned up the courage-with a quite a bit of shared cognac-to sit down and play what would later become Wasserklavier, a rather sweet piano piece clearly in F minor. No wonder we needed so much cognac in that musical climate! This was heresy.)

We are now distant from those times, however, and the issues are too complex and far-reaching to imagine that we can simply reject twelve-tone, or any type of musical rigor. Whatever Donald Martino has had as a composer to interact woth a disipline-whatever disipline-is essentally the same as any one of us needs in some form. Forty years ago the serialists held the greatest intimidating force in the small world of modern composition; then there was a terrific rebellion against many of its assumptions-I was certinly part of that rebellion-and now it is OK to attack all serialists, indeed all the new music of the period roughly between 1950 and 1975. And it is true that much ugly music of that time, written with the help of complex pseudo-mathmatical processes, really doesn't need rehearing. Why is then Martino, for an example, worth seperating from the crowd of so much shrill musical logical positivism? Because it sound good, and not necessarily because of the tonal implications, but because there is a truly sensative ear at work here, strongly imprinted with Renaissance chordal spacing and conterpoint and married to a Classical proportional sense; there is an epic power in some of his music, Paradiso for example, thatd raws me immediately to the world of my most beloved Italian so-called primitive painters. (The art-history "primitive" classification has always puzzled me. particulary when one remembers that painters under its rubric like Castagno and Della Francesca were facinated with newly explored science in their art, something one easily forgets while reeling openmouthed from the emotional power if, say, Piero's Arezzo frescoes.) What made Bach's fugues "truely poetic creations" to Schumann was only incidentally their intellectual brillance; yet the structure of fugue cannot be discounted in the whole impact of the piece, and this is also true in the very best serial music of our time.

The twentieth century has been obsessed with language-the invention, the destruction, the arbitrary building, of language-and this may be the easiest way to grasp whatever modernism means. We have become enormously dependant on the word, the explicated concept, the published manifesto. For example, it took Frank Stella years of writing a large amount if obfuscatory prose to herald his stylistic change from minimalism to an exuberant maximalist style; I love the result as musch as I did his earlier art, and i regret that he needed to confuse Artforum so totally in order to avoid being hooted downf or his new work, but that's the world of today.

It seems, however, that schools of painters, composers, or writers in the more distant past were much more defined by geography than by precept. The landlocked J.S. Bach's excursions into Frencha and Italian style, seen from the perspective of a pig-knuckle-eating Leipziger, can be understood as his-perhaps slighlty desperate-attempts to break out of locale. And although many twentieth century schools have defined themsleves nationally (Jeune France of the thirties, De Stijl in current Dutch music), one senses an effort of will as each movement lables itself in the pursuit of a discrete identity, which reinforces their spiritual oppositeness to Bach's attempt at internationalism.

What we have called modernism in this century has usually been an art divorced from locale-although we recognize differnet aspects of mondernism as being rooted in particular cities and countries-and whatever can be called prre modernism had hit several crests and valleys throughout these hundred years. Periods after our major wars ofren have been the times when artists wanted to start over from scratch. Perhaps the major reason for Arnold Schoenberg's relative silience between Pierrot lunaire and the dodecaphonic works of the twenties was the First World War, and the twelve-tones system, like the post-Webren efflorescence of imposed musical procedure after the Second, may have been a source of needed comfort after those ordeals. (Bach's fascination with order has been thaought to stem from the Pietistic hunger for control after the horrors of the Thirty Years' War, even though that had been a considerable time before-changes were slower in that era, one supposes.)

I think the major difference in art movements today from those of the past is in our overwhelming need to publicize; it is ever so much greater because there are so many artists, schools, factions around us now that it is impossible to keep track, and whoever shouts the loudest is the only heard-until someone else shouts even louder. This has escalated our need for polemic, for self-advertisement, for marketing, to unprecidented levels, and our own horn-tooting ablitites grow every day as Web pages sprout all over cyberspace. The danger in sprouting rhetoric about art is that one day one might come to belive one's own words, and that is the beginning of the end of that artist's vitality. Any artist has a modus operandi. We understand our own way of working well enough to be able to continue, but we can't understand the whole picture; thus our attempts to explain ourselves to ourselves and to others are hobbled by our final inability to know what's really going on in us, and tht's probably what saves whatever is valuable in our work from dying out totally.

1. Manner vs. Substance

I am often saying nowadays that ours has been a Mannerist century. Mannerist periods are known and recognized throughout art history more often than in music; they are moments when the how of art overwhelms the what, and they are often rich times, full of promise, new ideas, and invention sometimes seemingly for its own sake. Although the usual notion is that Mannerist periods in art come as transitions between the great stylistic eochs, I don't find that Mannerism in music necessarily coincides with our music-history notion of period. We consider Nenna and Gesualdo Renaissance composers, and Monteverdi an early Baroque one; yet these three and their common or contingent decades share the instability of musical upheaval in certain ways not shared with those preceding or following. (I've always wondered how one can lump Monteverdi and Bach together in the same bin, as music history texts insist.) One could rightly term the turn of the seventeenth century Mannerists (bridging our usual Renaissance and Barouque classifications), one reason being that their music still shares the power to shock-a quality shared with the best Mannerist art (from Piero di Cosimo to Fuseli) and architecture.

What is the distinction between moderism and Mannerism? Modernism is really a subset of Mannerism, involving principally the shredding of past references. but usually we are talking of the renuniciation of terrribly recent references when we look at the great expanse of history. (Remeber that the isims of our time are mostly the children of concepts less than two centuries old.) The Mannerist impulse in archetecture is stronger in Antonio Gaudi than say, Philip Johnson (no matter how many stylistic hats the latter has worn in his long career), partly because their assumptions are differnet, but much more because by the time Johnsom appeared, so much ground had been broken by Gaudi, the Secessionists, and the Bauhaus that the newness of it all had diminished somewhat. What fun it must have been in 1900, for example, to be the first to try out things with film, to know that no one could possibly have done it before! Film today can do anything-the technilogical breakthroughs of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, so stunning a few years ago, elicit yawns today-and this is symptomatic of the end of Mannerist periods.

What was once new and frighting is old very suddennly. Having spent so much energy on how we're doing something, we become aware of the fact that what we're doing feels meaningless. This mood is intensified by our recalling the sound of ou own shrill voices hawking our wares, hawking ourselves, trying to be noticed-what was it all for? Why did we have to ally ourselves with Serialism, Minimalism, Neo-this and Neo-that, now that our self-lableing in the pursuit of identity seems so hollow in retrospect? Our disgust with our recent past has led to a wholesale rejection of music of that past. Add to this the sense of glut-book publishers and record companies are finnally cutting down on numbers of releases because there is so much stuff around that consumers are tuning out-and it is no wonder that, with our boredom with what is now shouted as new, we are not necessarily wild either about what was new a few decades ago. We are geting tired of Manner; what we crave is Substance.

Reception & Politics

But Substance needs manner to express itself. We depend in the pathfinders of the past who found disiplines that would become our vocablulary. And this is the whole history of music, from technique to technique, from organum and Ars Antiqua ro the New Complexity. The point is that time and usage have eventually always transformed the found disiplines, by a natural process of wearing away of inessentials and the gradual disappearance of underlying dogmas, into language that we could use something to say something. To throw out what is useful in our century's exploration is to cripple our future. We are not, I expect, going to be as obsessed with process as eastern U.S. and California university composers of forty yeas ago were, and thank God. But what I hope for fervently is that, in future, musicans will absorb a portion of our twentieth-century disiplines in the same way as we study sixteenth-century counterpoint and eighteenth-century harmony today. We do not, for instance, configure isometric harmony from the tenor in the same way Zarlino did, but we use the chord-forms he describes in much the same manner, and we have felt the meaning in sequences of these chords. Is this meaning imposed, evolved, or what? Our musical structure could all have been otherwise-there have been so many historical accidents down the long road to our time-but for some reason we have agreed on musical meanings in our culture to a suprising extent. What is also amazing is that music we have produced-at least that of the past-often carries significance to cultures other than our own, and we are finding that music from elsewhere means something to us in musical language (and muscians from elsewhere) hadn't anticipated.

All this seems to indicate that, having conquered vast new territories in musical language, we must now reconquer them using intuitive means. What this involves is paying attention to how a musical effect affects us as compsosers, and then decideing whether it will become part of our musical vocabulary. this is wildly different from the cult of originality that has been a tenet of much of the twentith-century Mannerism. The best artist has often been percieved as the most separate stylistic from all other, and this notion usually is an indication of our blindess to how much that artist reall did owe to what was around. (The so-named post-Webren era was largely predicated on our misapprehension of Anton Webern; far from being as divorced from history as many postwar conpsosers had wished, his music turns out to be deeply rooted in both late Romanticism and the Renaissance. There is a famous description by pianist Peter Stadlen of hearing Webern play his new Piano Variations for the first time; Webern pedaled through the huge silences and employed wildly romantic rubato throughout, a far cry from the white-coat-and-stethscope Webren performances by Robert Craft we grew up with in the sixties. (4)

In the end we may be alone as artists, but we can't avoid our time. either by eschewing the ephemeral in the interest of eternality or by trying to elevate the ephemeral to something it's not. What we can revel in is the enormous breadth of musical vocabulary open to us, now that we are in touch with so much of the surrounding world. I do feel however that our mistake in how we perceive multiculturalism had been to accept distinctions between styles as they are presented to us, by either the artist or the hype surrounding the art or both. (Distinctions are surely there, however, and not recognnizing or involking them flattens out the rhetoric of any art.) In every one of the musics around us are elements that can find commonality with other musics, and their collision and merging are the stuff of musical meaning, because they expand communicartions (just as Bach's espousal of French and Italian elements reduces his own muscial parochialism). This marriage of musics eventually leads to a broader understanding of ouselves and love of others-I truly believe this- but I also note that enforced juxtapostion of style and elements, in order just to make a big-bang, doesn't seem to have much power any more; a deeper link needs to be found.

There are thoughtful critics who bemoan the recent lack of innovation in music Where are the Stravinskys, the Messiaens, the Xenakises, the Nancarrows? It must be admitted that at the mo moment many younger compsoers are churning out a lot of neo-Romanic treachle, much of which it seems very tired to me, even though it is succeeding a little better with audiences than the stuff from twenty years ago. But there must be a deep emotional reason for such apparent regressiveness, as more and more composers have turned to (past styles in an effort to communicate emotionally and spritually-a pursuit ths is common to John Tavener's embrace of Eastern Orthodox church music and George Rochberg's evocation of Beethovven and Mozart. in my own case as a compsoser, I've explored past styles of American popular music. Why are we doing this? Should be the question, more than Should we fo this or not? It's very easy to take the poistion some critics have, that composers are doing this purely to win audiences insome sort of sellout. The fact is, however, that for many composers today the music we of my generation once felt impelled to write out of peer pressure doesn't mean as much to us now. (Some of us are ashamed of our earlier formalists effusions; now that was academic music, Professor Taruskin, not the juicy sensualism found in Martino.) As far as winning audiences to new music is concerned, I haven't noticed an enormous groundswell of public interets in it now that so-called argument goes, as the painter George Grosz once answered to someone accusing him of it (in his later, lyrical, less angry period, after he had given up images of scarfaced World War I veterns decapitating whores), "I've been trying to sell my soul to the devil for 30 years, and he hasn't even come around to make me a price!"

2. What Will Survive?

Will the future eschew whole sections of the past, in a sort of artistic holocaust? It isn't impossible-who could blame the young for feeling crowded out in our time?-and the impulse to destroy the past is one of the oldest in human society. (To see this, visit the Edfu temple on the Nile and see with what violence someone has brutally hammered out any bas-relief representation of the bird-god Horus.) We've been such packrats in our Mannerist century, with one hand pushing for newness at any cost, and the other hand just as avidly preserving and unearthing our history to be saved for ever and ever that I wouldn't blame some twenty-first-century artistc terroists for setting fire to all those dead rivals to their own hegemony. I would have put the recent 100-best movies list issued by the American Fiilm Institute and Taruskin's violent attacks on Prokofiev and Martino in the same bracket, that of an arrogant, millernaristic need to weed out what is considered extraneous material for our supposed future benefit. Perhaps we can circumvent such arbitrary apocalypses by doing some weeding ourselves as artists. Of course we do this every day: as a composer I use various elements of music around me and ignore others, and even if this selectivity is a purely personal (and, alas, generational) process, it turns out probably to be my principal means of comminicating to others and is perhaps what makes my music mine. But I can't say I hold out for much hope for avoiding something more violent in our future artistic history in a world-wide level, as conglomerate mass-market venues trample out human individuality increasingly each day, state and private support for non-commericial art dries up in country after country, and the artists of all strioes and persuations censor themselves into a univeral grayness.

We forget that the serious music of the recent past, zealous as it often was in declaring the death of tonality, of continutiy, of whatever else it decided was dead, still depended for the most part on traditional instruments, conservatory-trained executants, and the concert hall ethic that is more than any stylistic rebarbativeness, that the Martinos, Wuorinens, Stockhausens, and Boulezs may mean little to succedding generations: all of these composers took for granted some semblance of the traditional performer-listener axis, theri attempts to violate it actually confirming an unconcioius belief in it, so that now-when the whole equation seems to be changing because of electronic advances in world communication-their music may well be swept away with the global electroinic tide. (That goes for my music too, yours, and most music in any time, despite our greater ability to perserve things.)

What will surviuve is what nourishes us emotionally and spiritually, probably to the detriment of what is merely intereseting. What distinguishes Bach fugues from, say, the vast majority of ricercars and canzinas of the previous century is the emotional and spirtitual meaning Bach carries to us through a form clearly derived from, and respectful of, its musical ancestors may regard the workings of his music as secondary to its spiritual impact on us. But Bach didn't; he clearlly lived and needed the disciplines of the past to make his designs that our Mannerist century ha shappened upon will be of use to our own musical future, and this will be only if we find some music in our vast catalogue that we truly love, that we really need in order to go on living. "Art is what is irresistible," the writer William Saroyan once said to me, and I have yet to find a better definition of it. Only time will tell whether we have made irresistible music during our Mannerist century. I think some of it is, of any genrers and provenances, and what we select wil have a commonality and siginification that will be the basis for the music of the world's future.

Notes

1. Richard Taruskin, :How Talented Compsosers Become Useless," New York Times, 10 March 1996, section H, p. 31.

2. Bolcom, Letter to the Editor: "In Defence of Dodecaphonism," New York Times, 7 April 1996, section 2, p.7.

3. Reprinted in translation as "Schoenberg is Dead" in Boulez, Notes of an Apprenticeship, trans. Herbert Weinstock (New York: Knopf, 1968), 268-76.

4. Peter Stadlen, "Serialism Recoinsidered," The Score 22 (February 1958): 12; cited in Hans Moldenhauer, in collaboration with Rosaleen Moldenhauer, Anton von Webern: A Chronicle of His Life and Works (NewYork:Knopf, 1979), 484.