Category: Articles

Photo by Roberto Doati

Well, I am an American, I am a composer, and I am living in Italy, but I am not sure whether I would want to re-arrange those characteristics into a single phrase. Living abroad changes perspectives on a lot of things, of course, but I never was comfortable with the idea of “American music” as opposed to…what?—”European music” or “Asian music”… maybe “non American music”… or “un-American music”? Globalization and cross-fertilization has been going on for centuries, the difference is that now they happen almost instantaneously and quite thoroughly. Composers born in Europe are exposed to all the trends in the U.S., just as composers born in the U.S. are aware of what European composers are doing; but what if those Europeans already have some Americanisms (whatever those are), and the Americans already have some Europeanisms (whatever they are)? We really don’t have anything specifically American or specifically European to point at. We do have creative people with distinct and complex personalities making their (often unique) music within what I might hazard to call the Western tradition; and we do have characteristic institutions that tend to support certain kinds of music (and that might determine if you get hired, get a performance, or win a commission), but I fail to hear the music itself as being nationalistic or regionalistic.

Oh, of course Neapolitan songs come from one place only as does the blues and certain kinds of drinking songs. But when composers get to work on serious artistic effort (most of us know what “serious” means even if we’re not supposed to use that word—to be clear, Il Barbiere, Cosi’ Fan Tutte, and Falstaff are serious artistic efforts, too) that involves discovering or molding or transforming musical materials into something unique that is more than another version (no matter how well done) of something that’s been around for awhile, then what matters is the composer’s constantly growing sensibilities, tastes, craftsmanship, ideals, and musical values. Those aren’t national characteristics, they are (highly personal) musical characteristics. The only country composers are citizens of is called Music.

From over here, the whole business of trying to compose “American” music (and to define it in terms of being “not European”) looks rather pathetic. But there are some equally pathetic organizations over here that promote “Italian”. I think a noteworthy difference is that the promotion here is for Italian composers, not for Italian music; it’s just a matter of trying to get Italian composers performed, and the nationalistic business is what the politicians need to justify sending those organizations a few euros now and then. When colleagues here talk about “American music” they generally mean the commercial pop slop that has invaded the planet and is now the standard entertainment and background for everything from elevators to pasta sauce advertising. Otherwise they will talk about specific composers, who happen to be from New York or San Francisco or wherever.

Some composers have one kind of aesthetic; some have another. And to my mind the best thing that can happen is that each composer discovers what expresses himself best, and then becomes as accomplished as possible in that “what”. Getting better and better at ones art inevitably brings out the uniqueness of the individual, which may be strong and influential on others, or may be subtle and delicate, to be appreciated but not necessarily followed or imitated. Music is a big country; it has room for all these folks.

When I hear American composers complaining about European this and that…hey, wait a minute, you sound just like my Italian colleagues complaining about not getting any performances in New York or London or Paris. It really hasn’t anything to do with the music being of one nationality or another, it does have a lot to do with those old tiresome problems of promotion, politics and luck. And regrettably it does have quite a bit to do also with the journalistic image of contemporary music which composers everywhere should know better than to believe. Journalists are adept at repeating banal slogans and reviving 100 year old issues, because they are fundamentally lazy, incompetent, and ignorant. And that too is a universal phenomenon. We got ’em over here, too.

Living in Italy has certainly opened my eyes to the provincialism of U.S. attitudes toward a lot of things, especially political, but cultural as well. But all countries have that kind of provincialism at the “official” level (the promotion, the Hurray For Us type of thing). Individual composers shouldn’t. There’s already enough of that provincialism in other aspects of any country’s culture and especially in its politics that can turn deadly. I think composers, musicians of all kinds, can make a real contribution to the emerging global dimension of civilization by simply ignoring the old slogans, the old nationalistic distinctions, and maybe coming up with some new one-liners for the ignorant journalists.

Like most composers, I have my way of hearing and doing musical things that reflects a lot of listening and practical performing experiences; my hearing and doing will inevitably reflect everything else I do too, including reading and seeing paintings and sculpture and dance and enjoying fine cooking and so on. I’ve engaged in these activities not only on two different continents, but with the whole world for source material (well, as long as I can find it in translation, or the art show comes to a local museum, or the performing group is invited to a Festival nearby or has made a CD which I can find on the Web). I think there is such a thing as an American politics, or rather an American kind of democracy or an American kind of capitalism; and there is certainly an American (public) attitude toward art; I wouldn’t mind if American institutions, both public and private, were a little more European (ma non troppo!). But if there is going to be an American music, it will have to evolve spontaneously, not by forcing it and certainly not by arbitrarily deciding what is “European” in order to ignore anything composed over here. But will it really make any difference, this emergence of an “American” music? Isn’t that pretty much a matter of superficial journalistic categories? Doesn’t what really count is the making of challenging, well-crafted and expressive musical experiences, no matter where they come from? And some people will like it, and a lot of others won’t, on both continents, or rather, on all of them.

So finally, what I think, feel and believe I am is a composer of Western music; but there doesn’t seem to be a Western Music Center anywhere. Maybe we can just drop the old distinctions, already obsolete, or better, just plain irrelevant, and re-name all the national Music Centers so that they become Western Music Center, New York Branch, or Rome Branch or Madrid Branch.

And I like to think I am writing this note to the Music Center located in America, not the Center of American Music. Nowadays it’s only a question of where you put the adjectives.

As of summer 2002, I have spent nearly 20 of my 49 years abroad, or, to put it another way, two-thirds of my professional life. While Europe has probably offered me creative opportunities that I might not have found in the States, I continue to see my work as American in style and in form, and European critics have generally agreed.

I have often found it surprising that those Europeans starting out from a similar standpoint as my own, that is, having an eclectic non-conservatory background, would most often find the doors closed to “New Music” in Europe and would end up in somewhere in “free jazz“, pop or most recently, in the electronic club scene. Furthermore, many doors were open to me as an American composer from New York, which would have been closed to a European of similar background, partly out of a keen interest in the New York musical scene from which I came in the seventies.

Even after such a long period based mostly in Berlin, there are very few composers of my generation in Europe who have influence me in my work. I find myself, even after so many years abroad, still with my ears tuned to developments in New Music in the States, with the exception of some recent activities in the European electronic scene (which however sits outside the common definitions of contemporary composition). I have not found this to be the case in the visual arts, an area which I have been intensively involved as a parallel activity to my work in music.

On the other hand, I have been strongly influenced in other ways by this long intensive exposure to European culture, and by the experience of living outside my own. It is probably ironic, that at this point in time I’m more well-known as a composer in the States, while in Europe I am more well-known as a visual and performance artist.

Your question about whether I still consider myself an American composer made me shake my head and clear my throat… I suggest you look at a map. The country I live in is still America, and may be (these days) more authentically “American” than the one you live in.

I don’t view “America” in any kind of nationalist terms. Rather, America is a plurality: of many peoples, cultures, histories. Since the U.S. as a nation-state has more often than not been pretty evil (never more so than today!), perhaps the most “American” thing to do is: resist. That is a tradition I can identify with….

Reading this month’s issue, I wonder how many of you, like me, find resonance with elements of the expatriate sensibility, all the while making your home in the United States. Even as resident citizens, I wonder how many of you feel like exiles to dominant cultural currents, to leading lines of political discourse, or to aesthetic trends in music which get the most favor. Perhaps it is possible to feel like an expatriate in one’s own homeland, and it may be that this is an extension of our discussion of outsiders in our NewMusicBox issue of April 2002. This is not necessarily a question of patriotism or identity with homeland—what interests me is to what extent people see parallels between living abroad and feeling elsewhere even when “at home.”

Maybe I’m confusing the issue of personal core values with the realities of choosing to live in a foreign culture, but I tend to think that for most of us, home is a deep choice that is defined by more than a street address. Certainly, artists in all times and places have had to carve out a relationship with the culture and nation-state around them, especially those who have lacked political freedom. And in the expansive meaning of the word expatriate, there are countless examples of artists who have lived “abroad” from their cultural mainstream. Further, as Peter Garland notes elsewhere in this issue, the notion of “American” is something to consider with awareness and sensitivity; it is something we at the AMC have to be mindful of every day.

The very personal approaches and perspectives revealed in the Hymn & Fuguing Tune section ring true for me even as one who has always made my permanent home in the United States. I have made two big moves in my life, to places in the U.S. which are so singular that to an outsider they are indeed almost foreign lands, and which demonstrate the danger of stereotyping a place called “America.” After having what seems, by today’s standards, a wonderfully pastoral childhood in Minnesota followed by education in Ohio and Illinois, New York beckoned like a foreign culture. To a midwesterner of my generation, it was indeed “another country” when I moved there in 1984, as exotic and exhilarating as Paris or Rome. As I assimilated the culture of New York and felt the empowerment of gradually becoming a seasoned citizen, at some point it felt like my one and true home. I know this is an experience I share with many others.

After fifteen years, some big life changes, and certain shifts in personal and artistic perspective, it became time to move on. With my family I moved to northern New Mexico, a place of cultural hybrids and profound history, and about as unlike the rest of the U.S. as there is. To be sure, moving to a locale that is quite culturally different from one’s previous experience helps clarify one’s personal sensibilities. Simultaneously it taps into something that is perhaps instinctive in us all—curiosity and a fascination with the “other,” and the resulting joys in connecting on universal levels, feeling at home on planet earth.

Place can mean many things. John Cage said late in his life, “Where I live there are no holidays, weekends, or vacations.” From him, this is not the notion of a workaholic, but rather of an artist who in the spirit of R. Buckminster Fuller, sees the world as mind. Cage was perhaps unparalleled in fashioning his own homeland, and would have undoubtedly had a lot to say to us on this issue of identity and what it means to live “abroad.”

There is a poem by the writer Ntozake Shange, i live in music, that has been made into a beautiful children’s book, one that I read with frequency to my kids. Its introductory lines are perhaps true for all of us, no matter what passports or visas we carry:

i live in music
is this where you live
i live here in music

Photo by United States Federal Government

O.K. True confession time. I was born in Miami, but I’ve spent almost my whole life in New York City and have therefore always thought of myself as a “native” New Yorker. As a newborn in Florida for only a couple of weeks before being whisked away to the North, it was too short a time for me to establish any kind of a Floridian identity. When I spent the better part of two elementary school years there a decade later, I never felt at home and was constantly ostracized by my classmates as “that New York kid.” Which makes me wonder: How long do you need to be in a place in order for that place to mold who you are? And how lasting are the imprints of the places that mold you?

I found it fascinating and somewhat surprising that Belgian-based composer Fred Rzewski still identifies himself as an American even though at this point he has spent more than half of his life in Europe. And I was even more surprised to learn that Rzewski, whom I’ve always perceived of as an avatar of counterculture, claimed that the first and foremost expression of any composer, himself included, is the aspiration of the national culture into which he or she was born.

At the American Music Center, we have historically always taken the broadest possible view of what it means to be an American composer, and have included among our ranks not only composers born and working in the United States, but also composers born abroad who live and create music here as well as composers who were born here who now live elsewhere. So, in the very first year of NewMusicBox, we devoted an entire issue to immigrant composers in America and how their voices have been core to our own national musical identity from the very beginning. But, as we began to explore the reverse phenomenon and examine the trajectories of composers born in the United States who have made their home somewhere else, we find the story is even more complex.

In his HyperHistory of expatriate American composers, Guy Livingston, an American pianist based in Paris, argues that the travel bug has been a defining trait of our composers and has been integral to shaping not only our own culture but also how we perceive our culture in relation to the cultures of the rest of the world.

In our previous issue of NewMusicBox, the point was repeatedly made that immigrant composers working in the United States had somehow “become” American by working here. Such has been the case for generations of composers dating back to Anthony Philip Heinrich in the mid-19th century, composers like Edgard Varèse, Kurt Weill, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky in the middle of the last century, and on to composers ranging from Tania León and Tan Dun these days, all of whom are key threads in the quilt that is American music. But, if that is true, do Americans living and creating abroad take on the national identities of their new homelands? And if they do, how does that account for Rzewski still identifying himself as an American?

That question somehow seems more difficult to answer with any kind of glib generalization. This ambivalence to divided cultural identity is reflected in the experiences of Charlemagne Palestine, Arnold Dreyblatt, Nancy Van de Vate, James Dashow, and Peter Garland, all of whom live abroad, as well as Steve Lacy and John McGuire, who lived abroad for many years but recently returned home to America.

Since “being an American” is not about ethnic origins but is rather about concepts—democracy, enterprise, manifest destiny—it is perhaps easier to “become” an American than it is to “become” French or to “become” Cambodian. Whereas other lands have always been about assimilation, the United States, despite the constant urges from commercial culture surrounding us and tempting us to conform, has established its identity as the result of its heterogeny.

Or maybe it’s even deeper than that…Maybe, it’s because most composers to some extent are strangers in strange lands, working in isolation, never quite connected to the cultural mainstream. And American composers, whose traditions by and large have been a constant struggle to fight against the traditions of previous generations and to constantly rebuild, often in the face of little to no outside recognition from so-called mainstream “culture,” are even further estranged in the strange land never quite grokking (to continue the Heinlein reference) the mainstream so as not be absorbed by it. Coming from our already disconnected environment into cultures where homogeneity and centuries-old traditions are the rule would seem to make expatriate American composers the most disconnected of all composers.

I think this all raises more questions than answers, which is one thing we always try to do with NewMusicBox. But one thing is certain, I know I’ll be feeling homesick for Manhattan when I visit friends and relatives in Florida for the holidays this year!

Greg Sandow

This past summer, I wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal about dinner music. I’d eaten in a fine country restaurant, where unfortunately there was one annoyance—classical music on the stereo, first some surging 19th-century romantic work, bad for the stomach, and then classical music’s greatest hits, Bolero and the like, bad for the imagination (and distracting precisely because they’re so familiar).

That got me wondering what music might have been better. I restricted myself to classical stuff, not because jazz or world music, or Sade wouldn’t have been fine, but because I know classical music best. I thought the best dinner music would be something that didn’t tug at your attention, but that rewarded you if you happened to listen. I came up with some suggestions—Stravinsky’s Apollo, Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint (the multiple clarinet piece), and Haydn’s Symphony No. 63, “La Roxelane.”

But then, as I wrote, I realized something that should have been obvious—restaurants ought to commission dinner music, asking composers to write something that (in my view, anyway) should sit quietly in the background until you found yourself listening to it. And, come to think of it, would give you something delightful even if you listened for just a few seconds, never forcing you (with any kind of blatant drama) to keep listening, or else feel that you’d missed something crucial.

This should have been obvious to me because I think composers should be asked to write pieces for every occasion where music is played. A while ago I was asked to speak at the annual meeting of the New Jersey Symphony (a very happy orchestra that’s little known in New York, even though it’s recognized throughout the orchestral world as a model of imaginative management, and under its past music director, Zdenek Macal, gave some of the most satisfying concerts I’ve heard in the past few years). Of course there was music, played by members of the orchestra, but I couldn’t help thinking that one of the two pieces played should have been new. If a new bookstore opens, and there’s a party, someone should be asked to write a piece. If a band marches in a civic parade (St. Patrick’s Day, anybody?), someone should fund a new band extravaganza. (Don’t even get me started on the gala performances that open concert and opera seasons.)

Happily, one new music organization did pick up on my restaurant idea, so maybe something will happen. But already I can hear some objections. How can I ask anybody to write music people won’t listen to? Isn’t that an insult to composers? Won’t I encourage trivial music, at the expense of profound musical thought?

I’ve got many answers to that. First, look at the pieces I chose for my own ideal dinner—Bach, Stravinsky, Haydn—and substantial works, at least from the first two; not what I’d call trivial. Any dinner composer who writes anything even a tenth as good as Apollo deserves thanks from all of us. Secondly—and now I’ll extend my defense to the band piece for St. Patrick’s Day, and whatever anybody writes for the bookstore inauguration—not all music needs to be lofty. Anybody who wants to storm the heights of emotion or intellect in every composition is free to ignore my ideas. Though I do think that all grades of music are, in the end, related. Flood our lives with happy pieces for every occasion, get people used to seeing composers and hearing their work, and the market expands for everyone. Even Elliott Carter’s five string quartets will get more attention than they currently do.

But all this is a prelude to another idea. I was talking a while ago with someone in classical radio (I won’t name any names, or say which station was involved; no need to shine lights on someone who’ll do best working in private, without any pressure). This person works for a station that’s more or less typical; it broadcasts unchallenging music. My conversation partner had no thought of changing that, but wondered if, by some alchemy yet to be evolved, the station could sound a little more like the city it’s in.

I said: Commission some composers. Or, maybe, hold a competition. Ask people to write pieces that would fit with no trouble—no raised eyebrows, no shaking of heads, no turning the dial elsewhere, no angry letters to management—into the station’s playlist. And then don’t just play the winner, or, rather, don’t have just one single winner. Play everything you get that would work on the air (subject, I guess, to the laws of reality; the station would probably have to pay to get the works performed, and its bank account most likely isn’t bottomless).

My radio friend responded, a bit worried: “But wouldn’t that restrict the composers?” Or, anyway, words to that effect. Wouldn’t composers have to push down their creative urge, writing pieces for easy listening when surely they’d rather write something as searing as Mahler’s Sixth.

The answer, of course, is that anyone who didn’t want to write radio music wouldn’t have to enter the competition. And also that restrictions aren’t necessarily bad. They can even stimulate creativity. The 12-tone canons in the first movement of Webern’s Symphony, Op. 21, are pretty fearsome in their rigor and complexity (not in their sound). But Webern didn’t sacrifice anything by writing them, except maybe some sleep. When Prokofiev decided he’d write the last movement of his Classical Symphony without using any minor chords, that didn’t put him in a straitjacket. It was a challenge; of all the music he might write, use only the kinds where minor chords don’t occur. Or when Tom Johnson wrote
The Four-Note Opera…does anyone remember that? Tom, a certified downtown composer (and chronicler of the downtown scene in The Village Voice, to the delight and edification of many of us who first learned about downtown music from him), wrote a sly tonal opera with just four notes, D, G, A, and E. It was a wild success early in the ‘70s, got into Time magazine; and Tom was still Tom.

A radio composer could see her work the same way. She’d be like Prokofiev: Of all the musical ideas she might have, use only the ones that would work on classical radio. There’s no limit to how cannily the ideas can be fit together. It’s true that you can’t express violent emotion in a piece like this, but if that’s an objection, then we’re forgetting all the great pieces that aren’t violently emotional. You know, like the Brandenburg Concertos or Music for 18 Musicians. We’d also rule out sounds that are in any way extreme, like Glenn Branca symphonies (extremely loud) or anything by Morton Feldman (mostly very soft), but enough already. We’re not saying all music should be like this; only the pieces written for the radio. And anyone who doesn’t like it doesn’t have to participate. The point, if you ask me, is that classical radio isn’t going to go away (or at least we hope it isn’t), so let’s turn it to our purposes.

***

On another note, I’d like to say something in defense of Dead Men Walking, the Jake Heggie opera that my critic colleagues pretty well savaged when City Opera produced it this fall.

It’s not what you’d call a sophisticated piece, though the Terrence McNally libretto bristles with commercial smarts; it’s constructed tightly enough to rival the most successful Hollywood screenplay. The music is somewhat crude and not exactly specific about crucial dramatic points. At the start, when we watch a violent murder, the music howls something translatable, more or less, as “This is horrible!” What, exactly, the horror means is something the music can’t tell us, not then or anywhere in the piece. Compare the violent music in Verdi’s Otello, after Otello degrades Desdemona in their scene in the third act. It’s utterly specific; it wouldn’t fit in any other Verdi opera, or at any other point in this one.

I never felt anything like that anywhere in Dead Men Walking. Even at the opera’s climax of redemption, when Sister Helen tells a desperate killer (on death row, awaiting execution) that God is with them, the music only says: “This is lovely and important.” It doesn’t make us feel the presence of God, or the strength of Sister Helen’s belief, or the peace the idea of God brings to the now-repentant killer. I can’t remotely tell what God means to Heggie; whether, for instance, he believes God really did descend, or simply that Sister Helen’s faith made it seem as if He did. The whole thing comes across, in the opera, simply as a dramatic device, just as McNally’s libretto comes across as an expert contrivance. (Which is not, by the way, to say that Heggie doesn’t have any feelings or ideas. It’s just that they don’t sound in his music.)

But, as Galileo muttered even after he was forced to recant, “Eppur si muove”…”Still the earth moves.” (In the astronomical, not the Hemingway sense.) No matter what fault I find with it, this opera, too, moves—it slams along with real force, and captures the audience, earning strong applause. Compare that to The Great Gatsby, John Harbison’s waste of an evening at the Met, infinitely better written than Dead Man, heavy with sobriety and high aspirations, which unfortunately weigh it down until it can’t move, instead of giving it fuel for a climb to the heights. Judged purely as opera, it’s flattened—whipped, completely eclipsed—by Dead Man Walking, a piece otherwise so inartistic that too many people make the mistake of not taking it seriously.