The cranky curmudgeon is back, this time to enter the ludicrous wiseacring he imposed upon the class last Tuesday in this blog. This way, the indictment can declare concrete offenses and not rely upon unreliable memories of fellow classmates.

First was my oh-so-insightful sudden realization about the apparent fate of Ives' renowned dictum "What has sound got to do with music?" An interesting thesis, one which to any casual listener would seem ridiculous on its face. Nonetheless, it occurs to the C.C. that the ultramodernists of Europe, the integral serialists such as Boulez, and their Stateside compatriots such as Babbitt, had embraced Ives' concept wholeheartedly. A few semesters ago, I studied a work of Boulez in a modern music theory class, and was struck by its mechanistic ethos. Boulez had determined his tone rows, and his dynamics series, and his pre-ordained rhythmic patterns, and had in the end, created a piece that essentially wrote itself, in that once the compositional rules had been laid out, all musical events within became inalterable relations of these assorted rows. The folks at home, given the rows and rules, could map out the piece without Boulez having to bother doing the writing himself. The point is that this work demonstrated a complete indifference to actual sonic result: the work was conceived as a process to be puzzled out, and what was actually presented to the ear was of no concern. In summary, the Boulez work very much answered Ives' question with the unstated reply "Why, nothing, of course."

Now let us turn our attention to the American crazies stationed along US80. My talk on Tuesday was about Harry Partch, who, due to his UI residence during the 1950s in Champagne-Urbana, can be counted among the Midwestern composers. In Partch's music, the sound is everything he is after in his work. His sophisticated intonation theories were developed specifically in order to "better" the harmonic content of what reached the ear. He used no rows of tones, or any other quantifiable musical property, but went right for what sounded right to him. By extension, his music would in turn sound right to the listener, but what is significant is the sound itself. Hence, my thesis is that Partch and his colleagues of those Midwestern colleges staunchly answered the Ives question with a proud "Why, everything, of course."

A cursory review of the fates of the musics, in critical/popular estimation, of the integral serialists versus the crazy US80 composers suggests strongly that the music of the latter has endured rather better, and that, in the end, Ives' question has been settled, not in his favor.

In my discussion of Partch on Tuesday, the class may remember, not without disdain and contrition, of my observation about how Cowell developed tremendous theories developing sophisticated and subtle patterns of rhythmic proportions. Cowell demanded that modern composers break out of the trap of meter, but instead attend to ratios of rhythm. Interestingly, one of the C.C.'s very favorite modern composers, Olivier Messiaen, also determined to escape the trap of meter, but simply by giving notes individual durations, not tied to any meter. Hence, performance of Messiaen requires determining the smallest durational value of the work (eighth note? sixteenth note?), and playing all notes as sums of that smaller value. This breaks out of meter, but goes nowhere near the elaborations that Cowell envisioned. Also. Cowell strove to range through series of tempos, seeming to suggest a row possibility that the integral serialists overlooked, and proposing a compositional approach that Messiaen never thought of trying.

Against that is the music of Partch, which, thanks to the prevalence of tuned percussion in his ensembles, has very clever and at times driving rhythmic patterns in his music. After all, percussion, tuned or otherwise, tend to have very short sound periods per note, and thus is likely to play lots o' notes per metric moment. Hence, all the flashy and riveting percussion licks heard in Partch's music. Nonetheless, Partch apparently did not develop rhythmic theories as he did extensive revision of Western intonation theory. His music is quite striking in its rhythmic qualities, but only in its intonation is there a developed theory of operation. Otherwise, Partch presumably wrote what he thought sounded good, and his preferences drove him to build a cogent and versatile theory governing the axis of frequency, but not one of time. Curiously, Cowell was apparently driven by his investigations to do the reverse, his justifications of tone clusters as containing higher frequency partials striking a more cynical observer, such as the C.C., as little more than an excuse. Of course, back in the 1920s, playing piano with the forearm
would have demanded some justification, and Cowell's reasoning probably was necessary to prevent him from being physically thrown off of the piano stool.