New World Music
April 2012
‘America, you have it better’, exclaimed Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1827. While we could be forgiven for being a little more reticent today, there is no doubt that for the last century or more Europe and the Commonwealth has been in the thrall of America – culturally as much as politically.
One of the most potent signs of that dominance has been the rise to world-wide ubiquity of American popular music – first Jazz, then Rock and Roll, and then more recently urban Hip Hop and its variants. Quietly accompanying this rise, however, has been American contemporary classical music and throughout April and May the Melbourne Recital Centre and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra will give Melbourne audiences the chance to experience first-hand something of this music’s extraordinary vibrancy and variety.
Running from April 27 to May 5 the Metropolis New Music Festival (which evolved out of the long-running ‘Metropolis’ series formerly held at the Malthouse Theatre) will feature visits from recent Grammy Award-winning Chicago based chamber music ensemble ‘eighth blackbird’ (whose flautist, Timothy Munro, hails from Brisbane), and renowned composer Steve Reich. Local contributors to the festival include the innovative Syzygy Ensemble, professional vocal group The Consort of Melbourne, and of course the MSO itself.
Our fascination with all things American is in part an echo of nineteenth century European immigrant imaginings of America as a new Eden, a ‘new world’ no less. It was a utopian vision which the apparently hostile Australian interior seemed by comparison to scorn. By the turn of the twentieth century this vision of fertile expanses and vast unclaimed wealth met a new idea of American as the well-spring of world economic and technological development. The emerging great American industrial cities of New York and Chicago came to represent the quintessential modern, if not modernist, experience, and demanded a musical response that was equally radically new. Melbourne-born composer Percy Grainger was not alone in thinking British and European music, by comparison, was ‘hopelessly sunk in conventionality, sham intellectuality and parochialism’. Grainger instead longed for an ‘American (musical) Messiah.’
Ironically, it was a pupil of the archetypal European musical modernist, Arnold Schoenberg, who, more than any other, seemed to meet this desire for a radically new artistic approach to musical composition. Unlike Schoenberg, who continued to believe in the validity of the grand European musical tradition (albeit pushed to the very edge of destruction), John Cage felt no such loyalty. It was Cage who would tune twelve radios to different stations and call the resulting effect a work music; and in 1952 he composed 4’33”, a piece for any instrument or combination of instruments that consisted solely of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of curated silence.
While 4’33” has achieved a degree of notoriety, and with it, some penetration into broader popular cultural consciousness, arguably Cage and his fellow radical iconoclasts were ultimately no more successful than their European colleagues in attracting a broader public to their art. There is, however, a direct chain of influence from John Cage’s ideas to the movement we now know as American musical minimalism. Like Cage, minimalist composers strove to refocus our attention on music sounds as things in themselves; unlike Cage, however, minimalist composers have achieved an extraordinary degree of popular success. Names like Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and John Adams are indeed famous well beyond the classical music scene, and their music can be heard far beyond the confines of the concert hall.
The reasons for the popularity of their music lie in part because it taps into the 1960s Californian zeitgeist and its legacy that sought new, often Eastern-influenced, ways of seeing (and hearing) the world. But minimalist music also provided a renewed platform for the traditional building blocks of Western music like the simple triad, and thus this music was instantly more approachable than the music of the European-based avant-garde. It was only a matter of time before American composers also started to reclaim the traditional techniques of tonal music along with it. These ‘new tonalists’, the classical scene’s ‘new romantics’ perhaps, include phenomenally successful choral composers like Eric Whitacre, Morten Lauridsen, Steven Stucky and Edwin Fissinger. Their music is also featured in this Festival.
The triumph of minimalism brought with it an inevitable reaction, a post-minimalist style that attempted to fuse minimalist processes, modernistic dissonance, a new rhythmic complexity, and the counter-(high)-cultural authenticity of rock into a neo-modernist style, dubbed by its partisans ‘totalism’. Whatever we wish to call it, there is no escaping its extraordinary inventiveness and creative energy, and in the world of classical music, that in itself makes it worthy of our attention. Put together, all this music makes for a terrific excuse for a festival, and the MRC and MSO are to be commended for their bold programming. Melbourne audiences, whatever their professed ‘taste’ in music, classical or popular or not, have a myriad of good reasons to attend.
The Metropolis New Music Festival runs at the Melbourne Recital Centre from April 27 to May 5.
melbournerecital.com.au
mso.com.au