THINKING OUTSIDE THE NEW-MUSIC BOX

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We live in an age obsessed with novelty in which merely attaching the word "new" to something is more likely than not to increase its perceived value. We boast about buying a new computer or a new car but are hardly likely to describe the purchase of an equally serviceable old, used, or "pre-owned" model with quite the same enthusiasm.¹ We raze historic buildings and landscapes to make room for new shopping malls, condominiums, and parking lots. We devour the latest tabloid news, leaving the better part of history to languish on dusty library shelves. We readily hire new, younger employees, passing over or displacing older, more mature workers. Indeed, we regard age as a disease that must be masked by a host of new treatments, from Botox injections to phenol peels. Even the loftiest products of human civilization are looked upon as little more than obsolete or irrelevant artifacts if nothing conspicuously new can be extracted from them.

"Make it new," trolled the chorus of modernists (even as they mined history for ideas), and this is the kind of world they have helped to shape—a world, it should be added, in which any artistic reference to the past, if it is not overtly oppugnant, must at the very least be oblique or obscure. Thus spoke composer Pierre Boulez: "It is not enough to deface the Mona Lisa because that does not kill the Mona Lisa. All the art of the past must be destroyed."²

It is ironic, then, that such strident iconoclasm, rather than gratifying society's insatiable desire for novelty, has resulted in the production of a huge repertory of "new music" that has almost always met with public indifference if not outright derision.

So deeply dysfunctional—if not always transparently antagonistic—was twentieth-century modernism's relationship with the past and the concert-going public that simply composing melodic music in a particular key that listeners might enjoy became virtually anathema. Rather than acknowledge and remedy the "anxiety of influence" that fueled their antipathy towards tonality, modernist composers continued on the offensive. As late as 1979, the first paragraph of Charles Wuorinen's Simple Composition, intended as a textbook for music students, took direct aim at tonal composers: "While the tonal system, in an atrophied or vestigial form, is still used today in popular and commercial music, and even occasionally in the works of backward-looking serious composers, it is no longer employed by serious composers of the mainstream. It has been replaced or succeeded by the 12-tone system."

Of course, Wuorinen was a disingenuous propagandist following in the footsteps of Boulez, who in 1952 flatly asserted, "Every musician who has not felt—we do not say understood, but indeed felt—the necessity of the Serial language is USELESS."³ As the first director of IRCAM (1970–92), "the largest center of scientific research in the world completely dedicated to the technology of musical creation," one might expect Boulez to have acquired a far less dogmatic, scientifically informed point of view. But in a 1993 interview with Andrew Carvin and Joshua Cody for the Paris New Music Review—nearly a quarter of a century after Georges Pompidou appointed him to his IRCAM post, Boulez remained resolute in his disdain for any "explicit reference to the past; because I think that's useless."⁴

This inveterate fixation on innovation and undisguised hostility towards historical influences in the arts have become the very definition of modernism—"a self-conscious break with the past and a search for new forms of expression."⁵ However, elementary logic and physical science readily expose the modernist myths that have demonized history and raised novelty to the status of a quasi-cultic fetish.