“You get 150 people at new music concerts,” said my sage piano teacher Nathan Schwartz. “Unfortunately,” he added, “it’s always the same 150 people.”
He didn’t tell me — but I soon discovered — that one of those people would be wearing a bumblebee cap with long slinky-style antennae and bright yellow tips, and that he would always sit in the front row, where his antennae would bink-bonk disturbingly in the periphery of my vision.
We would rehearse and rehearse and rehearse, mostly trying to figure out rhythms so confoundingly complex that only with the advent of MIDI sequencers could they be deciphered successfully. All that irritating and enervating drill vanquished any possibility of bringing any understanding to the music — if, indeed, there was anything much there to understand. It was all count, count, count. Our goal was simple and direct: we rehearsed in order to stave off disaster.
The taste of the Kool Aid yet lingered when I was in my early twenties; I still believed, in part, all the sweeping statements made by music history professors and all the sales pitches from the purveyors of new music. Behind all those ferociously complex surfaces, within all that cerebralism, underneath all that seemingly random crash, clink, and clatter, there just had to be something I could come to appreciate and understand, if only I Iistened hard enough, long enough, and well enough.
But it just wouldn’t clear up. I found no nugget of musical nourishment tucked within the styrofoam enclosures. Soon I came to suspect that the Emperor was indeed as stark naked as my elders considered him to be. During one particularly galling rehearsal for a rigidly senseless two-piano piece, I had the temerity to ask the composer if he would play through a particular passage for me so I could get an idea of what he had in mind. “Oh, I can’t play it,” he replied airly. Could you at least clap the rhythm for me because I can’t figure it out, I asked. “Oh, I don’t know how that rhythm is supposed to go,” he chirped. Do you mind if I play this passage at 82.6 beats per minute instead of the 82.3 beats you have specified, I asked. “Oh, that’s just the result of the metric modulation,” he explained, “don’t pay any attention to it.”
It dawned on me that his last statement was, in fact, the very guidance I had been seeking. Don’t pay any attention to it. So I paid no attention to it. I played more or less whatever fell under my fingers, more or less in the specified keyboard range, more or less in the specified meter, with more or less the notated rhythms. So did my fellow pianist.
And nobody was any the wiser, including the composer.
That depressing state of affairs was the norm for new-music performances when I was just starting out in this profession, especially when working with East Coast types who rarely strayed from their campuses and for whom the minimalist movement hadn’t happened. Despite the winds of change sweeping music in the 1970s, the hardcore atonal serialists remained in charge and their dicta ruled academic and conservatory music-making. Signing on to a new music concert meant thrashing your way through nearly impenetrable thickets of notes, steeling your ear to unremitting dissonance, and suffering through three-Excedrin-headache rehearsals. For all that, your audience of 150-plus-bumblebee listened politely and offered a few wan patters of applause at the end. No artistic reward, no glow of happy music making. Just bother, aggravation, headaches from all the dissonance, and toothaches from incessantly gritted teeth.
It couldn’t last; people will put up with only so much pointless abuse before they rise in revolt. Happily for me, the revolution was well under way when I entered college so my sojourn in Serialist Purgatory was mercifully short. When I began working with John Adams and the San Francisco Conservatory’s New Music Ensemble, like as not we performed some newly-minted minimalist piece that required concentration but was otherwise unthreatening. Such pieces were fun to play and often a lot of fun to hear. They were too long, but that meant we didn’t have to rehearse a bunch of other stuff as well.
The bumblebee guy was replaced by fragrant stoners, definitely a step in the right direction. They tended to applaud long and lustily, sometimes while we were still playing, but that was OK. They were having a good time. How much of that good time was coming from us up there on the stage, and how much had been inhaled immediately before the concert and/or at the intermission, remained a point of debate. No matter: we had happy people in the concert hall for a new music concert, instead of grimly determined folk straining every nerve to understand music that was, at its core, cerebral gibberish.
And those blippity-bloop composers? What happened to them? Damned if I know. They didn’t win the judgment-of-posterity sweepstakes. Instead, they dropped into the vat of anonymity, that cavernous container for folks who gamble on artistic fads and lose. Because when all is said and done, that’s all atonal serialism ever was — a fad. It was a fad clothed in tweed jackets with leather patches, a fad tucked cozily into seminar rooms and college recital halls, a fad obfuscated by yards of jawbreaking Latinate academic prose. But it was just a fad, a passing fancy, a schtick dreamed up by mediocrities as a fig leaf to mask their creative shortcomings. While they pontificated, postured, and manifestoed, the real composers were doing their thing, sometimes scorned by the intelligentsia but carrying on valiantly nonetheless: Benjamin Britten, Dmitri Shostakovich, Serge Prokofiev, Samuel Barber, Malcolm Arnold, Henri Dutilleux, Heitor Villa-Lobos. The ones we still play. Shostakovich’s posthumous star is showing signs of going supernova. But Stravinsky drank the serialist Kool-Aid in his last decade and produced a series of bleak things that have dropped into the black hole that also encloses the impenetrable blips of Martino, Stockhausen, Babbitt, and their tenure-track brethren.
Today’s conservatory students just don’t know how good they’ve got it. Nor do I think there would be any value in obliging any of them to schlep through the preparation and performance of a Babbitt chamber piece. The stuff just isn’t worth it, and the time and energy can be put to far better use, such as playing Beethoven and Schubert and Brahms, such as growing and stretching our hearts and souls.
Thinking is all well and good. But in the last analysis, it’s a musician’s heart that matters. But atonal serialism had no heart, just a gaping hole filled with punched paper tape, transistors, and row-manipulation charts. It’s gone and may it never return. Perhaps we should mutter requiescat in pace over its rotting corpse, but personally I don’t care whether it rests in peace or eternal agony.
I suggest a simpler, earthier epitaph: Hasta la vista, baby.