At the opera I am transported to a place and time where there is no disorder. There is disorder on stage, and it is called melodrama. We don't believe it. This is important: that we don't believe it. We do believe... what happens in the movies.... Therefore, opera can have no plot. It is foolish to argue that opera - any opera - can have a plot; that is, that the "characters" and their apparent "actions" and the apparent "consequences" are related in any way. Opera can be story-telling only. That the story-telling happens on stage and that musicians are making music in the pit (to reinforce the story told) is entirely coincidental. The story might as well be told at the kitchen table with a crazy aunt and uncle as the soprano and tenor.

1. Homo agens: man acting, or in conflict (Allegro)
2. Homo sapiens: man thinking (Adagio)
3. Homo ludens: man playing (Scherzo), and 
4. Homo communis: man in the community (Allegro)

Homo agens: Improvement: Don Leaves Linda - Linda in conflict and acting to ensure her own safety

Homo sapiens: eL/Aficionado, the Agent looking back and trying to reconcile his experiences

Homo ludens: Foreign Experiences, Don Jr. having wild rides with an Indian guide in his imagination

Homo communis: Now Eleanor's Idea, Now Eleanor finding her destiny within the Lowrider community

It's kind of an amazing five-and-a-half-hour operatic symphony. (I also have to wonder why I spend so much time on really, really long pieces, when I don't write very long pieces myself.)

A dutiful part of my research on Ashley has involved listening to music by his composition teachers, Ross Lee Finney, Leslie Bassett, and Wallingford Riegger. For the most part, it is well-crafted, relentlessly earnest, dour, unpersonable music, much of it for string quartet or quintet. I was glad to get that part over with. And then I run into Ashley's own characterization, in an unpublished but wonderful lecture he gave at UCSD in 2000:

...I  like dance music. I like America. I like our innocent people. I am one of them. But I have come to like, as well, another kind of music, which is in conflict, I discover, with the idea of music as something to dance to. I have come to like a new kind of "devotional" music, which has moved out of the churches into some unlocated, secular place. I say "devotional," because I don't know a better word, but it is music to be listened to, not danced to. In the listening it takes you to some place you have never been. It is mental. It doesn't require head-nodding. You just sit there and it flows through you and changes you.

I have brought up this point of the difference between dance music (music to be danced to) and "devotional" music (for want of a better word), because Americans keep trying to arrive at some sort of "compromise." Check out the term, "accessible." It almost invariably means the music has a "beat." I don't think there is any reason music has to have a beat, unless you are going to dance to it. That is a pleasant aspect of some music. I do it myself. But unfamiliar music that doesn't have a beat is being discriminated against. The composer knows this. And so the composer is always trying to compromise....

There was a brief few decades, early in the century, when the better-off went to Europe (Germany, in particular) to catch up with non-dance music. Charles Ives didn't go. But everybody else went. They brought back imitation German music. It was good in Germany, but here it was imitation. Then, in this "serious" music there was a brief flirtation with jazz, which mostly came to nothing, because the black people were better at jazz. And black people could not make "serious" music, because they were oppressed. Then (this is a chronology) there came American-Serious-Music. It was taught in the conservatories. Every music school had a Resident String Quartet (the cheapest form of ensemble), a Graduate Student String Quartet, and numberless Undergraduate String Quartets. They played American-Serious-Music. The string quartet was the university computer-music-studio of the 1940s and 1950s... It is a characteristic of the string quartet to emphasize moving the bow back and forth. The more the better.

Insert: Mr. Arditti, of string quartet fame, complained to Alvin Lucier, in the presence of a large number of people, that he didn't like to play Alvin's String Quartet, because there was very little bow movement, which lack of bow movement made his arm tired. To which Alvin replied, "Why don't you play it with the other arm?"

American-Serious-Music became a matter of moving the bow back and forth as much as possible, with accents here and there. You might call it sawing. One of its foremost practitioners called the style, "motor-rhythmic." It is characterized by a continuous sawing of sixteenth-notes or eighth-notes (depending on the time signature and the tempo). Up-bow, down-bow, up-bow, down-bow, endlessly. You know what i mean. This is where I came in. I went to music school. I hated "motor rhythms." Gradually I came to hate string quartets, when they got into that sawing, because that relentless sawing was simply a senseless update of the circle-dances that those innocent people had brought with them to America.... Everything about "motor rhythms" was just another version of the polka, the hora, and whatever else the dances were called wherever they came from. A circle of mostly poor people holding hands and jumping up and down. A long way from Morton Feldman. And I didn't even know Morton Feldman existed.

I print this here because I think it's wonderful reading, wonderfully put, and an insightful reading of the times. This is not to say I would have said everything he says the way he says it - I have my own thoughts about what "accessibility" means - but, as usual, I can't argue with him. He's a brilliant writer, which has not yet been acknowledged much - so brilliant that even his prose is nearly impossible to paraphrase, so that I end up quoting larger chunks than I'd like to get away with. American-Serious-Music: I know the genre well, and it's a good term for it. We still have a lot of it around.

I keep running into evidence that musicians have never heard of Ashley. (For instance, last night Bill Duckworth told me his interview with Ashley got axed from his Talking Music book because the editor had never heard of him.) This flummoxes me. Ashley has been at the center of my musical focus since I was in high school in the early '70s. When we brought him to New Music America in 1982, he was our number-two celebrity, after only John Cage - and much of his best music hadn't even been written yet. In those days I didn't have a musician friend who wasn't into him. I would have easily said he was as famous as Stockhausen. I can only gather that Stockhausen continues to get taught in music departments, and Ashley doesn't - partly because his insights, such as those above, don't sit well in those music departments. My book will make the strongest attack on that problem that I'm capable of. I am finding that to really get into some of Ashley's works I have to go through the text pretty thoroughly - especially true of Foreign Experiences and Now Eleanor's Idea. It's a lot less work than reading analyses of Gruppen and Le Marteau, and repays the effort.

In my recent post How to Care How It Was Made, I did not at all mean to invoke, as a couple of commenters suggest I did, the old canard about serial music and chance music being indistinguishable. Boulez, in his letters to Cage, absolutely rejected chance as a legitimate musical technique. I find it odd that, having said so so stridently, he was at that very time using pitch techniques that were theoretically just as groundless and arbitrary. This does not mean that I think Le Marteau sounds like chance music, nor that it sounds like Cage. The wonderful thing about Cage works like, say, Music of Changes and Four for string quartet is that they do sound something like imagined nature, with so much unpredictable variety in every parameter (nothing is excluded, even triads can appear fortuitously). Le Marteau's rhythms and timbres and textures sound completely busy and purposeful - it's the pitch language that seems literally meaningless, and I am hardly alone in this opinion. In this respect, one could argue that what Boulez said about Schoenberg in his article "Schoenberg est Mort" of the previous year is equally true of Boulez in Le Marteau: that there's a conceptual mismatch between his rhythmic profile and his pitch profile. (It strikes me that Boulez never made that mistake again.)

[UPDATE: Carson Cooman points out that when I interviewed Boulez and mentioned Nancarrow, he said that Nancarrow's rhythm was extremely sophisticated, but that "the pitch language doesn't follow." Sounds like a theme.]

A fellow graduate student of mine at Northwestern did her master's thesis or doctoral dissertation on precisely the supposed aural equivalence of serialism and chance music. In the course of it, she performed a demonstration in which she played ten musical examples, half of serialism and half of chance music (Cage and Xenakis, I think, exemplifying the chance half), and challenged us, her fellow grad students, to guess which were which. Had we gotten half of them wrong, that would have confirmed her thesis. I not only got nine of the ten examples right, I identified the composers correctly. (The remaining example was a poor recording.) Serialism and chance music are abstractions that are not independent of the composers in whose styles they are embodied. To pretend that one could compare generic serialism, per se, with generic chance music, per se, is to blunder into a syllogism. To defend the point, one would have to be able to compare a chance piece by Boulez or Babbitt with a serialist piece by Cage, which is, of course, impossible. Not only do Cage and Xenakis sound (even in excerpts of a few measures at a time) different from Boulez and Babbitt, Cage doesn't sound like Xenakis, and Boulez doesn't sound like Babbitt. For all its continuing popularity as a historical concept, the supposed perceptual equivalence of serialism and chance music had a grain of truth to it, but one, I thought, that was infertile, and from which nothing important ever grew.

I mentioned that I find myself working Sudoku puzzles lately. My other spare-time hobby, relentless nerd that I am, is analyzing the 12-tone pieces I'm using for my 12-tone analysis class in the fall. The two activities - tone-row searching and Sudoku - are kind of alarmingly similar, so much so that I can forget at times which I'm doing. (Is that "aggregate" filled up yet? Am I looking for 12 of something, or 9 of something?) I do like understanding things, though, so that I get a real childlike kick out of teasing out the structure of a piece I've been listening to for decades. In other words it's more like summer fun for me than it would be, I imagine, for most people.

I'm also honing in on the repertoire for the course. Looking for Schoenberg 12-tone pieces I can stomach, I've come up with the Waltz, Op. 23 No. 5, the first 12-tone piece he published, with a row that never transposes; the Op. 24 Serenade sonnet with the 11-syllable lines that go out of phase with the row; and the magnificent first scene of Moses und Aron. For Webern I am almost criterion-less, because they all make the same point, and I already use my favorites - Opp. 21, 27, and 29 - in other courses. Using the Concerto feels like such a cliché, but I guess my students need to know the clichés. I'm afraid I'm at the point of dropping poor Aaron Copland from the list. Connotations and Inscape are big, unwieldy pieces, and I just don't think they're that good, and I don't want to end up weakly defending them. Copland's imagination seemed constrained by the technique. If I'm going to venture into a large orchestral work (in addition to Sinfonia), I'd much rather use Rochberg's Second Symphony, which is the most exciting, memorable, and followable orchestral 12-tone work by any American I know of - also more to my taste, frankly, than anything the Second Vienna School ever produced. I'm already using Rochberg's Serenata d'Estate, which has been fun to take apart.

I have to do much of this at the beginning of the summer, because I need to order scores for students, and I have to make sure I don't get in over my head. I don't want to omit Boulez, and I'll attempt Le Marteau rather than more attractive examples only because there's a published analysis. Yes, I'm slowly working my way through Lev Koblyakov's oddly titled Pierre Boulez: A World of Harmony, a stunning work of analysis, and an equally stunning piece of dismal writing. If he could have stuck with even one musical passage long enough to show how Boulez derived it from beginning to end, it would be immensely more illuminating, but instead he goes concept by concept and jumps all over the piece with each new concept. He's certainly concise - too much so, in fact - and I admire his achievement, but he could have made his findings infinitely easier to digest.

(Time magazine hasn't yet added it to their online archive, but I clearly remember around 1980 when they ran an article breaking the news that a music-analyst, Koblyakov, had cracked the code to Le marteau. Amazing to think that mainstream media actually cared about such things a mere 30 years ago.)

Nevertheless, I get that Boulez divides up his row into five segments in five possible ways based on a rotating number series:

and so on. I also get that he "multiplies" each of those five segments by all five of them to build up derived unordered pitch sets - the process of "chord multiplication" being to transpose one chord to all the pitches of the other chord and add all the pitches together. And you can see how (if you take the trouble) each gesture is drawn from the pitches of these chord-multiplication products:

I also get how Boulez chose the order of chord multiples by making little diagonal patterns through his chart of available sets. Sounds like fun.

Well, that's great, sir, you're a Lebowski, I'm a Lebowski. What I can't see is why this method of generating pitches has any significant advantage over Cage's chance processes, which Boulez so vehemently rejected. I can't see what they have to do with the ostensive unifying purpose of the 12-tone row, and since Boulez plays around within them as unordered collections, plus has two of them going at any given time in extremely rapid succession (any one collection rarely occupying more than two beats at quarter = 168), I can't see what purpose this incredibly convoluted process serves in the least. Stephen Heinemann in "Pitch-Class Set Multiplication in Theory and Practice" (Music Theory Spectrum Vol. 20, No. 1, Spring 1998) promises to reveal a "process-based listening strategy" for Le Marteau based on all this, but by the time one's waded through all his math, the results aren't much. He shows how in "Domain 5" (one of the five harmonic areas) a certain octatonic partitioning tends to occur, but then writes

the other domains do not parse as easily as Domain 5, and... such an analytical approach is not without its obstacles. The aural "processing" in terms of interval class 3 and octatonic structuring is complicated... by the sheer rapidity of change...

If this is the best assurance we can get from someone who understands Le Marteau well enough to correct Koblyakov's misconceptions about it, I'm ready to give up on anyone ever making detailed aural sense of the piece. As Fred Lerdahl famously wrote (and Taruskin quotes it in his history),

Boulez's Le Marteau sans Maitre (1954) was widely hailed as a masterpiece of post-war serialism. Yet nobody could figure out, much less hear, how the piece was serial. From hints in Boulez (1963), Koblyakov (1977) at last determined that it was indeed serial, though in an idiosyncratic way. In the interim, listeners made what sense they could of the piece in ways unrelated to its construction. Nor has Koblyakov's decipherment subsequently changed how the piece is heard.... The serial organization of Le Marteau would appear, 30 years later, to be irrelevant. The story is, or should be, disturbing. ("Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems," in Generative Processes in Music, Oxford, 1988)

I agree. I'm disturbed by it. And yet...

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 - and yet, just as I couldn't decipher Le Marteau on my own without Koblyakov's almost grudging help, neither had I been able to tease any detailed sense out of Stravinsky's Requiem Canticles before Joseph Straus's Stravinsky's Late Music appeared. (Koblyakov proudly asserts that he analyzed Le Marteau without seeing Boulez's sketches, which are apparently lost, but I gather Straus had access to Stravinsky's notes.) In my youth I struggled vainly to relate the luscious quadruple flute chords from the Interlude (so proto-Feldmanesque, although Feldman was already doing similar things) to any kind of pitch order drawn from the first movement:

What a relief it was to learn that the chords are drawn from the first two-note columns in an array of four rows, prime, retrograde, inversion, and retrograde inversion:

And, going on, the two chords in the fifth measure are drawn from columns 3 and 4, respectively. The relationship of this fat A-flat 9 chord, drawn from two notes each from four different row forms, with duplications, to any sense of this work's 12-tone content is just as tenuous as the order of Boulez's chord multiplications. Here and elsewhere, it's almost like Stravinsky wrote out his row forms in some interesting logical order and then just glanced around for groups of pitches he liked that happened to be adjacent on the page. Of course, that gorgeous chord locked in the choice of other chords following it, quasi-randomly determined, with little musical function of their own but to resolve back to the initial one. The approach seems more charmingly intuitive, almost accidental or even opportunistic, than theoretical. I'm reminded of Bill Duckworth's piece from the 1970s Pitch City, in which the players are given a map for improvising their way through a row matrix.

(I was also amused to read in Straus's book about Boulez's and Stravinsky's relationship. Despite the flattering interest Stravinsky showed in the young Boulez, Boulez led a disastrous 1958 performance of Stravinsky's Threni, and frequently made public his contempt for all of Stravinsky's post-1923 music. In 1970 Stravinsky said, "I have not had any contact with M. Boulez myself since, shortly after visiting me in Hollywood three years ago, he talked about my latest compositions... with unforgivable condescension, then went on to play them at a prestigious concert in Edinburgh. This was not the first proof of disingenuousness I had had of that arch-careerist, but it will be the last in which I have any personal connection." (Stravinsky's Late Music, p. 34, n. 66) I'm not sure "arch-careerist" is the precise term for someone who bites the hand that could feed him, but I do feel certain that, even with my stunted sense of political advantage-taking, I would have returned the solicitations of Igor Stravinsky more graciously than that.)

In neither the case of Le Marteau nor Requiem Canticles does the technique seem to have any perceptible relation to the unifying idea of a 12-tone row. In the case of Requiem Canticles, though, it doesn't matter to me, because I've always loved the piece and I always will; it and Threni are among my favorite Stravinsky works, which I guess makes me a pretty rare breed of Stravinsky fan. (Straus goes concept-by-concept too, but with his broad hints I've been able to trace the rows through half of Threni.) I'm curious to find out how Requiem Canticles was composed, but the knowledge won't influence the way I listen to it, and I didn't care what the process "turned out" to be. In Le Marteau's case, however, I have always been baffled by the music, was never able to learn to love it or even like it or remember any of it, and finding out what total disregard for perceptibility it was written with is more likely to reinforce my dismissive attitude toward it than to make me listen more sympathetically. (I'm with this guy.) And yet I do love some of Boulez's later music, particularly Pli selon pli and Rituel.

Going further into all this is bracing me for the big philosophical question I'm expecting from the students this fall: Why use 12-tone method? What was the point? I don't expect to have an answer by then. Already when I mentioned in modernism class that some composers deviate from strict use of the row, they became indignant; if you believe in the theory, they said, you should trust it devoutly, and if not you should abandon it. (Young people can afford to be so pure.) The music itself will have to convince them that it's not so black and white: that the row is sometimes a unifying factor, sometimes a melody, sometimes a note generator, sometimes a pretext, sometimes an ideological weapon, sometimes a bad idea entertained for too long, sometimes even a Rorschach test. But I think I can convince them some beautiful music happened in spite of it, if not always because of it.