The Rhetoric of Blippity-Bloop

When Shostakovich visited America and Europe as part of a Soviet delegation in 1959, he was repeatedly asked about his opinion of the then-accepted modernist avant-garde of atonal academic serialism. Here is one such response, given to a Polish journalist at the Warsaw Autumn Festival:

I am firmly convinced that in music, as in every other human endeavor, it is always necessary to seek new paths. But it seems to me that those who see these new paths in dodecaphony are seriously deluding themselves. The narrow dogmatism of this artificially invented system rigidly fetters the creative imagination of composers and deprives them of individuality…Dodecaphony not only has no future, it doesn’t even have a present. It is just a "fad" that is already passing.

…[I am] very much worried that certain Polish composers, particularly the younger ones, cling to the ‘revelation’ of dodecaphony, seeing in it the musical art of the future. I should sincerely like to warn them away from this infatuation and advise them to dedicate themselves attentively and feeling to the national tradition of Polish music…the Western avant-garde music played at the Warsaw Festival is contrary to human nature and to the lofty human art of music.

 
Although Shostakovich’s resolutely aversive stance towards dodecaphony was interpreted at the time as evidence of Soviet music’s almost complete withdrawal from the mainstream of Western musical development, in hindsight his remarks sound less as regurgitated official doctrine and more as the authentic voice of a perceptive musician who could tell a hawk from a handsaw. Certainly posterity has given Shostakovich the last laugh, as his posthumous reputation has grown steadily to his current status among the giants of the 20th century, while atonal academic serialism seems downright quaint, a bizarre artistic cul-de-sac that did nothing, produced nothing, and was ultimately worth nothing.

I find it intriguing that another composer considered reactionary in his day, Benjamin Britten, has also seen a considerable uptick in his posthumous reputation. Given the revitalizing force of tonal music today, and the wholesale retreat from academic serialism on the part of today’s younger composers, Shostakovich’s dismissal of dodecaphony as a ‘fad’ comes across as downright prescient. Oh, he may have been toeing the official Party line, but it’s clear enough to me that in this instance he was more than willing to do so. Not too many years after Shostakovich’s statements were published, critics began coming out of the closet—at first only the most securely-positioned ones who could risk the inevitable backlash, then just about everybody—admitting that serialist music had remained stubbornly incomprehensible to them, no matter how much of it they heard and how hard they tried to break through. Commentators worldwide admitted that they had the same reservations voiced earlier by Shostakovich, and by the time Dmitry Dmitriyevich had passed on in 1975, the tide had turned. The Emperor was indeed stark naked.

The situation reminds me a bit of a certain elderly academic serialist who visited my conservatory for a series of concerts. During a public question-and-answer session, one person asked him the $64,000 question: despite his long career and high level of regard amongst academics, he had yet to find an audience in the broader public; what lay behind that? His answer: the public needs to be "educated" to understand his music, and then they’ll show up.

At which point I almost leapt out of my seat but somehow I stayed put and kept my mouth shut. It wasn’t easy. My rebuttal would have been: I am a highly educated musician. I chair the theory program in a major conservatory. I’ve had abundant exposure to new music of all kinds, including performing swathes of it with a series of ensembles, as well as even programming it on my own recitals from time to time. I’m far more educated in contemporary music than any average symphony audience member, and I most definitely qualify as an exceptionally discerning listener. But *I* don’t understand your music. It makes no sense to me whatsoever. I played one of your compositions and I had to learn it by rote, as though memorizing a speech phonetically in a language I don’t know, just a series of technical gestures on the piano and random sounds. If I can’t make sense of your music, what chance does the general concert-going public have?

That’s the sort of thing that commentators couldn’t say in public forums back in the 1950s and early 1960s, before the dam burst and flushed away the accumulated effluvia of denial and dishonesty. But what in heaven’s name took so long? How was it that so much blippity-bloop got written—and now clutters university library shelves as it molders away to pulp, unseen, unheard, and unlamented—and how did people put up with the comedic travesty of audiences applauding politely for music that bored them silly, confused them no end, and barely seemed like music at all.

It occurs to me that serialism lasted precisely as long as the Cold War remained in full force. Once the Cold War generation (its opinions formed in the crucible of the Second World War) gave way to the Baby Boomers who began acquiring intellectual and economic power in the late 1960s, serialism was toast. Serialism had been a bargaining chip between Russia and the West: if your government was a sweet dear darling auntie just like ours, you get to write all the blippity-bloop you want and nobody in Washington will breathe a word of protest. On the other hand, if your government is a snarling ravenous repressive beast like yours, they won’t let you write blippity-bloop, and isn’t that a crying shame?

From the other side of the aisle, the issue would be put this way: if your culture values its past and your composers wish to communicate with other human beings in a mutually-understood language, then you should not be writing blippity-bloop, nor will our government support you if you do. On the other hand, if your culture is hell-bent on following every passing fad and your artists really don’t care whether anybody groks them or not, then go ahead and write blippity-bloop; we’ll just see how things look fifty years from now.

I can well imagine the consternation of those Western journalists in the face of calmly confident Soviet statements about atonal serialism being inhumane doo-doo. We mustn’t forget that as of the late 1950s the Soviet Union was trouncing the United States in the race to the moon, it had armies and military power on par with the West, and it had just recently flexed its enormous power by flattening a Hungarian revolt. Both American and European journalists were scared to death of the Soviet Union. Communism was a dreadfully dirty word, spoken in the same hushed tones as someone might whisper atheism at a Baptist conference. So with Soviet military power at least on par with ours, and their aerospace technology miles ahead of us, Western critics had to point to something that they could identify as indubitably superior, something that Americans and Europeans could have freely while their Soviet counterparts could not. It was one thing to point out that your average Muscovite tasted chicken at best a few times a month, or that such basic amenities as an automobile were out of reach for just about everybody in the Soviet Union save party functionaries. All true enough, but your average cerebral type is unlikely to drum up much dudgeon about poultry or Fords.

Intellectual freedom: now there was the card to play. To be a Western academic back then must have been dreadfully schizophrenic; universities were hotbeds of Marxism, after all, but at the same time everybody knew that in the largest Marxist country on earth, intelligentsia weren’t free to state their opinions, however irresponsible, naïve, and divorced from reality those might have been. Our intelligentsia were free to pursue their interests—however impenetrably weird they were. We got to read Doctor Zhivago, and our composers were welcome to bore audiences silly with dodecaphonic blippity-bloop. Definitely a talking point to press, while Sputnik soared overhead and our puny little Redstone rockets blew up on the launch pad, and a brand-new Marxist country had just popped into existence a few miles off the Florida coast.

Well, Doctor Zhivago turned out to make a lovely, if rather dull, movie and nobody much bothers any more with dodecaphonic blippity-bloop. The United States won the space race—a victory on par with winning the Saturday bingo game at St. Veronica’s—and Cuba remains Marxist. Neither the Soviet Union nor the United States exist any more, at least not in any form that would have been recognizable to a citizen of either nation in 1960. The Cold War took serialism with it to the grave, and good riddance to both.

A perceptive friend of mine once pointed out that whenever religion and the State mix, religion invariably loses. I think we can say the same of music—although the losses may not be as straightforward and clear-cut as one might imagine. Academic serialism’s only real value was as a bullet point in the rhetoric of the Cold War, but unfortunately we are paying a high price to this very day, in alienated audiences and a lingering suspicion that still warps the relationship of composers to their societies.

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