The curmudgeon is back, and the readership is pins-on-needles in eager anticipation of what I shall attack next.



Welllll...I do not care to be the author who is expected to go around slamming everything and everybody that I read, though I must admit that the wind sculpture constituting so much musicological prose merits criticism on stylistic grounds. I, for one, continue to not subscribe to the "why use one word when five will do" thesis of scholarly prose, and my unwillingness to scour the thesaurus for the most obscure Latinate derivations applicable will not serve me in good stead as I attempt to communicate to my fellow musicologists. I just know that my next submission to JAMS will be rejected due to the absence of sentences that cannot be understood without multiple readings.



And so how can I account for Kyle Gann? His writing is direct and comprehensible. He makes a statement and then his very next sentence contains new information, as opposed to writing sentence after sentence saying the same thing in increasingly confusing Latinate. Can a musicological author be both appealing to fellow scholars and the larger, general readership. Decades writing for the Village Voice have taught him how to communicate to the rest of us, but how does he rank in the eyes of his colleagues? After all, to them, being read by hundreds of thousands of interested readers cannot possibly compare to being read by a couple dozen of his musicological colleagues, who will all read with the assumption that they already know far more about the topic than Gann does.



So allow me a moment to praise Kyle Gann for his useful and interesting essay "Subversive Prophet" in the Henry Cowell symposium. Since he gives us such a clear and helpful view of Cowell's theories and practices, I shall only quibble with Cowell, based upon the presumption that Gann has reported Cowell with accuracy. Happily, Gann gives a healthy portion of quotes from his New Musical Resources, and armed with these, one can discern a good deal of Cowell's theses.



So what's my beef? Well, in the first quote, Cowell, according to Gann, implies that use of a technique does not justify it. To which I would respond, "Well, what else would justify a technique other than its usage?" Gann includes the quote "...that a certain chord is built up in fourths is not a sufficient explanation. A reason for the suitability of fourths as building-material must be shown..." Henry Cowell, meet Paul Hindemith. Since the ancients recognized the fourth as one of the most stable, consonant intervals, triads being a latter-day innovation, chords in fourths sound to modern ears as perfectly acceptable. McCoy Tyner named one of his early albums Reaching Fourth just to pun upon his preferred chord structures.

Gann does wonder about Cowell's attempts to discuss overtones, essentially doing so in order to absolve his tone clusters, while failing to break out of the trap of equal-temperament. Given Cowell's far more innovative theories concerning rhythm, one might forgive him his relative simplicity concerning intonation. Cowell reached for the overtones in order to justify, as mentioned, the clusters. It seems interesting that Cowell again worries about justifications for any harmonic innovation, be it clusters or chords in fourths. Had he never heard of Tinctoris, who, in the fifteenth century, declared the third to be an estimable interval to base music upon, not out of any theory of that theorist's devising, but for the simple reason that he felt they sounded good.

One might be amused to read Cowell complaining about the tyranny of note values being halved or doubled, without a notational aid any better than writing a "3" beneath a triplet, by stating that "Were the use of such notes of rare occurrence, this method might be justifiable". Musical notation history is that of advances being made upon recognition of a need for that advance. Once Cowell comes along and wants to write disparate odd meters against each other, we may need to sophisticate our rhythmic notation, but until he did, little "3"s did the trick. Anything more elaborate was not done.

In a way, Cowell sounds not a little unlike Milton Babbitt, the latter understanding that he writes for a listenership of the distant future who nay be able to comprehend his music by ear alone. Cowell insists that, with adequate practice, his polyrhythms can be mastered by the performer. This only leaves the question of whether the listener has a prayer of comprehension upon exposure. And also the question of whether it is any more important for the listener to spot the six-against-nine rhythm than it is for him to be able to puzzle out a serialist's tone row.