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Some people need
to grow in soil that is carefully guarded and protected by a
personal sense of turf, Emily Dickinson’s way I call it.
There is certainly a heroic kind of nobility in that. I prefer
a more reckless way. The risk is greater, and I often lose my
balance in the torrent of influences I juggle ... but the payoff
is sweeter because the end product, when I succeed, is so densely
packed with “converging patterns of significance,”
as Northrop Frye would say.
It is 1945. I am
three years old. I am seated on my father’s lap at the
piano. His big hand holds my little hand tightly moving it one
note to another while he accompanies me with his left hand.
Three times the width of my finger, these white keys! 1957.
It is a warm afternoon in Montclair, New Jersey. I am lying
in our hammock reading a biography of Liszt, and looking above
me into the flickering light of the warm summer sun between
the leaves of the tree, “What a grand thing to give one’s
life to Music to struggle bravely to join the ranks of the Immortals!!”
The profound impact
of the music of Sergei Rachmaninov, and the critical perspective
I acquired from Jacques Barzun’s Berlioz and his
Century, gave boundary, scope, and sometimes conflict
to my own artistic vision. Ives, Varese, Webern, Carter, Stockhausen,
Stravinsky, and Boulez influenced the music I wrote at the Manhattan
School of Music. I was captive to the emotional depth and power
of this so-called cerebral music. Stockhausen’s Momente
and Boulez’ Marteau sans Maitre were obvious
continuations and expansions of the same highly-charged properties
of expression found, say, in Schoenberg’s Ewartung,
Debussy’s piano works, and many works of Scriabin, Mahler,
even Hindemith. I was aware that certain post-WW2 European composers
were introducing new things. I embraced these developments enthusiastically.
The connections and the similarities between Stockhausen’s
Momente, Wagner’s Tristan and
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, were very obvious.
My interest in music led to an equally lively interest in history
and the other art forms (particularly painting and literature).
I wanted to know what the artists said about themselves, their
art, and their times. I believe that what we in the West have
called “masterworks” are works that combine a kind
of datelessness (the “immortal classic”) with an intensely
personal, cultural, historically fixed identity. It is difficult
to make such works. This is why, I am sure, there are so few
of them.
My music is fashioned
from the ‘whole space’ of modern musical history ...
imagining all the music I know, I leave out everything I don’t
like. (Debussy) Or, as Flaubert and Joyce understood it, Everywhere
present, yet nowhere visible ... like Michaelangelo and his
marble block from the pits of Carerra, smashing through all
that holds in bondage the image trapped in the stone ...What
is this new music of mine about? Yes, ‘Program music’
but ‘the program’ is “All the music of modern
history” ... how it behaves, and what it says and does
to those whose spirits are aroused by it.
I hold a mirror up to music itself (this idea is rooted in Cézanne)
showing it through the sensibility of a thoroughly disciplined
free and fearless craft. I have Rauschenberg’s curiosity.
What work is coming to life here? (I ask myself in my studio).
I myself work from behind the mirror I raise to music ... selecting
who-knows-how from the vast palette ... multiplicity, variety,
inclusiveness ... but it is not personal, I am aiming to portray
“music” not “me” ... set, as it were, as
a picture sits in the “frame” of all the music which
is left out. I am afraid of nothing ... “not even the beautiful”
as Rauschenberg has said. And so everything is, then, really
possible ... and following Chopin’s advice I help myself
abundantly to the laws of freedom.
A Little Manifesto
Feeling as he did about systems and pedantry and knowing history,
Berlioz naturally refused to limit the scope of either music
or modern music.
“As for my
own confession of faith, is it not in my works? In what I
have done and what I have not done? What music is today, you
know as well as I do; what it will be, neither you nor I can
tell.......Music is....like the antique Andromeda, divinely
naked and beautiful, whose burning glances break into many
colored rays by shining through her tears. Chained to a rock
on the edge of a boundless sea, she awaits the conquering
Perseus who will break her chains and destroy the Chimera
named Routine.....I believe that by now the monster is getting
old: his motions are not so energetic as of yore, his heavy
paws slip on the edge of Andromeda’s Rock. And when the
devoted lover of the sublime captive has restored her to Greece,
at the risk of seeing his passion repaid with cold indifference,
it will be vain for neighboring satyrs to laugh at his ardor
and cry: ‘Leave her in chains! How do you know that once
freed she will be yours? In bondage she is easier to possess....’
The loving lover wants not to wrest but to receive. He will
save Andromeda chastely, and would even give her wings to
augment her liberty.”
Berlioz declined
to bind himself by a program and assume the role of leader of
a school. His faith was clear from his deeds and parables and
strong without the buttressing of a cosmic philosophy. Berlioz’
decision to stand on his accomplishments rather than on a platform
appears as sound judgment now that the theorizing of the Wagnerian
Futurists appears in all its inconsistencies.....How could he,
arguing for freedom, be a party to boxing up his art within
a creed?
I believe with Berlioz that it is a composer’s business
“to write true and beautiful music, music remarkable by
its expression, by its melody, by its harmony, by its rhythm,
and by its instrumentation ... BUT if you try to establish a
doctrine of absolute beauty. I give up....”
Music: Transfixing, elaborating, giving enduring form and self-renewing
vigor to ... movements of the human spirit.
The “Music
of the Future” cult set Wagner atop a pyramid of musical
dinosaurs that it declared extinct. Among them ... Gluck, Mozart,
Beethoven, Weber and ... Berlioz! To Princess Carolyne (Liszt’s
companion, and no friend to Wagner!) Berlioz replies,
“You propound
in regard to music a paradoxical theory of ‘ancestors’
and ‘descendants’ which, if you will allow me to
say so, is at once palpably absurd and a libel against me.
It is as if you accused me with philosophical calm of being
a liar and a thief. This made me indignant. I admire with
passion many works by the descendants and I heartily detest
many illustrious ancestors given over to what is false and
ugly.... Times, periods, and nationalities are all one to
me, and nothing would be easier for me than to prove it ...
let us drop these arbitrary systems designed to forward a
special cause.”
You see, Berlioz
was free. And as Barzun tells us, we may be sure that Berlioz
grasped the relation between his thirty years of singlehanded
innovation to this ‘recent burst’ of so-called “futurists.”
Music is a free
art: Its beauty depends upon no system or methodology apart
from laws intrinsic to itself.
--Ron
Thomas
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