Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Like our ancestors we will finally be judged by our culture, and by the arts which are that culture’s issue. But today’s civilization seems unique because of its smaller sub-divisions. Concepts grow extinct and are replaced so rapidly that generations shorten to decades. In art as in engineering, Monday’s triumph becomes Tuesday’s cliché. The shrinking time-span leads to mass specialization which in turn makes culture stress more than ever the power of novelty.

     What is novelty? Can it be represented by substitution, by improvement? In art, at least, there is no improvement, no substitution, although the properties of creation are never identical. We cannot have meaning except in relation to the past. Now the past grows harder to pinpoint with the present so subject to change. The 1900s, however, have reached a peak high enough to survey the last sixty years and to speculate on the next forty. From that height one observes a recent recapitulation of the first half-century.

     The recapitulation began with the atomic explosion of 1945. Children of that time were weaned into an era accepting incredible facts of science as casually as children of the first war accepted ‘facts’ of fiction. Today’s youth replaces art with scientific imagination; even science-fiction lacks lustre next to realities of space travel. Space is the new romance while art appears unreal, though, of course, it is no more unreal than mysteries found through a telescope, than attitudes maintained through tranquillizers. Reality fluctuates as science progresses, and though the latter’s function is to instruct, art’s is to reflect; and any art, no matter how apparently off-centre, necessarily mirrors its period of production.

     Still, for a lot of people our music sounds very confused indeed, as though to balance with a shifty present it needed to force itself toward new approaches. How new these actually are we shall try to discover.

     There are three dominant trends in modern composition: jazz, experimental and conservative.

     The present state of jazz recalls Madame Chanel’s remark: ‘Fashion is beauty growing ugly, art is ugliness growing beautiful.’ If her bon mot holds true it seems especially so in the art of jazz, whose very nature interrelates composer, performer and audience more than other music does. Here composition changes with each performance, performance styles alter as frequently as Chanel’s, and these styles are usually initiated by the chief consumer: youth. At present youth accepts deep listening without song or dance. The frenzy jazz once provoked has subsided. But what appears ‘cool’ probably applies to the frail crust protecting warm hearts. Warm or cool, these young hearts are in dead earnest about what they hear as a workable innovation, namely the fusion of jazz and classical procedures.

     Today is always tomorrow’s yesterday. How quickly the life and death of Ma Rainey, of Bessie Smith, even of Billie Holiday, became souvenirs to the middle-aged, while to most young they are not even legends. Yet their vocal styles swept a continent and were deeply felt by many a symphonist.

     In America, jazz and so-called serious music were planted and grew simultaneously from quite independent seeds. Yet from the start men like Gottschalk borrowed elements of the same slave songs that evolved into Blues. At the turn of the century MacDowell, a comparative sophisticate, was borrowing heavily from negro tunes; and by 1914 others such as Carpenter were writing what they frankly called symphonic jazz. The plant had bloomed, spreading wildly through the States and overseas. During the twenties it was particularly fruitful for concert composers including Ravel and Milhaud, Gershwin and Copland.

     But the ‘jazzness’ of jazz eluded them all. The French simply translated the trimmings into language which remained essentially French. Gershwin lacked technique for integration, his larger pieces being at best medleys of marvellous pop songs. As for Copland, his was an intellectual attempt to shake off European influences by Americanizing his palette with native colours. He was better equipped than Gershwin for patterning solid pieces from folk ideas, but they too sounded more gallic than negro, more like the Frenchified version than the real thing. For though each of these men grew up where sounds of jazz were daily fare, none sprang from the environment which had created such sounds of necessity.

     Ten years later the jazz world itself fell into a reverse trap by using its improvisatory style in larger-scale works. Improvisation is best when brief. An ambitious fantasy of, say, Duke Ellington sounds less like a tight construction than a disjointed rhapsody, and retains the virtues of neither.

     The demarcation point between the two musics blurs increasingly now when the jazz man is more often an ivy leaguer than a poor negro born to the tradition of jam sessions. Like his predecessors, he seeks to reconcile a natural penchant for jazz with a cultivated training in composition.

     Jazz is a player’s art, not a composer’s. Or better, composer and player are one: their simultaneous execution is changeable, the performer is master. What we call classical is an unchangeable expression whose performer must be servant. To some, these distinctions represent artistic aims that remain psychologically divorced. Others find them hair-splitting, since music is music after all, and its multiple aspects are uniting.

     If jazz and classical are the same it should be self-evident. Then why breed them like horse and donkey? The mule is complete in itself (though it cannot reproduce), while jazz combined with classical always sounds like jazz combined with classical, not like a unified offspring. One cannot mate inherent rigidity with inherent looseness. These musics have always traded casual mannerisms, but in their grander unions either the spontaneity is stifled by restriction or the framework crumbles from the spontaneity.

     Jazz performers are always being called ‘ahead of their time’. Could it be the public who’s behind the times? Actually both are of their time since reaction and progress must exist together as polar forces impelling any generation. But the compositional progress claimed by the ‘progressive’ Brubecks and Kentons is speculative: their harmony is usually of the Debussyists, their melody basically Schubertian, their rhythm behind Stravinsky’s of fifty years back, and their counterpoint clearly modelled on Bach’s. Only in scoring are they ‘ahead of the times’, an overhauling of orchestral method being jazz’s prime contribution.

     But that contribution is no small matter. The sound is inimitably one of jazz itself, and sound after all is the heart of music. Not only instrumental innovation but the never-duplicated manner of its execution is what makes jazz jazz. Special instruments are played in special fashion: it is not the tune but the way with a tune, not the basic material but the coloration which identifies this music. And collective improvisation has no counterpart in classical realms. Jazz musicians are not ‘interpreters’ but creative executants — a taboo cognomen for ‘long hair’ performers who presumably obey the composer’s dictates.

     The status of jazz has risen quickly and no musician of any breed is entirely immune to it. Maybe it is the vital music of today. But the vitality has been there from the start.

     The experimentalists are of three schools: serial, electronic and chance. Their aims are not unrelated and their practitioners on good terms.

     Serial composers are the progeny of Schoenberg, who originally codified chromaticism, naming it the twelve-tone series technique. His followers have systematized not only tones but every variable of sound. The result, known as integral serialism, is hailed by Krenek as ‘the composer’s liberation from the dictatorship of inspiration’.

     If the health of jazz lies in its attraction to the ear, some maintain that serial music appeals only to the eye. Indeed, antagonists say that the ‘rightness’ of serial sound relations is less important than the ‘rightness’ of theoretic relations, since it is all mathematically predetermined. A huge responsibility falls on any audience when final pitch is granted meaner value than the principles determining that pitch. If the necessity of each note in a whole piece becomes explicable before composition, the eventual tones will minimize sensuality; if carried to extremes the music would lack not only tone but sound — beautiful on paper perhaps, but not so intriguing to listeners.

     At first glance the champions appear to have made their own rules, thereby avoiding the real problems of music writing. Actually their devices are neither especially novel nor gratuitous. Advertised as ‘experimental’, atonality nevertheless dates back fifty years, and the pre-canonic moulds into which it is generally poured are nearly as old as music itself.

     The revival of formal chromaticism is less defendable in the US today than in Europe. A decade ago American musical history reached a turning point and refused to turn — or rather, made a complete about-face. The government encouragement of the thirties and isolation of the early forties released America from foreign cultural yokes and forced her to rely on the home-made. Her music began soaring to independence. But around 1950, with the renewal of international highways, reaction set in. Europe reawakened into the past and took up where she’d left off, notably with the twelve-tone system which in America had atrophied. At the cue we abandoned a general path, resuming the European one with an acquiescence misnamed ‘progressive’.

     Twelve-tone music and its derivatives are not only historically but economically more European than American. The rich and powerful air waves of central Europe provide the main outlet for all music there. The subsidized radio directors are highly disposed toward serial music and their plump commissions extend uniquely to composers of similar disposition. So young musicians, who like to be heard and always need money, comply by writing the sort of music expected of them. This applies as well to electronic and chance music. America has no such subsidies, but she does have electronics, and probably thought up the music of chance.

     Electronic music means the mechanical fabrication of hitherto unheard sonorities and their formal combination. The results are remarkably effective. But like jazz effects, these open new frontiers of scoring rather than composition. Scoring is a practical craft, not an art. However one classifies electronics, their invention has high theatrical calibre and sometimes contains the special thrill identified solely with art works. Perhaps the layman would be more indulgent, the initiate less defiant, if they ceased disputing this expression’s validity as music. The definition is less to the point than the effects of organized sound which can be moving.

     Electronic origins go back some forty years to the percussion experiments of Varese and Cowell. They developed logically with the mechanisms of our age. The outcome is no revolution in language but one of music’s dialects with the syntax still indefinite, the vocabulary small.

     The last experimental school is the ‘farthest out’ and best revealed through the person of John Cage, leading exponent of an attitude contradicting Ravel’s that ‘In art nothing is left to chance’. He also contradicts his serial colleagues who deal with totally predictable situations. Chance music is truly existential: it supposedly eliminates beginnings and ends and retains just the middle, the Now. Since existentialism derives from (and is really as old as) the Zen Buddhism currently in style, it’s no wonder the Chinese Book of Changes has influenced Cage and his friends, whose music is dictated by a throw of dice. The school’s dissenters feel that when all is surprise, nothing is surprise; the unexpected alone cannot make a work. They add that chance elements operate in all artists who forage among semi-conscious alternatives. But anyone can throw dice: it requires no taste, no talent, no training.

     In Manhattan there is now a Theatre of Chance. There has long been painting of chance, poetry of chance, and a vast prose literature of chance which is really what we used to call stream of consciousness. But it all resembles conscious variations on age-old material co-ordinated by that sense of form inevitable to every art. Despite intentions, it is no chance that one ‘work of chance’ surpasses another.

     Composers of chance along with those of serial and electronic methods are, for the moment, the ‘in’ musicians forming a front against the conservatives. These last-named incline toward tonality, toward a harmonic texture, a neo-romantic style, and a neo-classic form. They are not ‘far out’, being neither researchers nor innovators. Conservative is probably an inappropriate word, but then so are conventional or conformist. For it is conventional to be ‘in’; and since the Ins are all ‘far out’, being far out is actually conformist. They call themselves the Post-Avant-Garde because they’re more interested in results than devices, more involved with sound than procedure, more concerned with being better than with being different. Hence they are different as they sail over present vogues to a point of expressive freedom beyond. Indeed, self-expression might be the chief point in their favour — though it can hardly be considered ‘new’.

     Jazz, chromatico-electronics, and diatonic neo-classicism signify more than mere trends: far from being radical, they are quite official. Since 1914 little basic change has occurred, only a categorizing of these three fields. No new forms have been invented, just new jargons — each one now wholly academic and encouraged at our better schools.

     Possibly music has evolved as far as it will while staying what is agreed to be music; maybe it now must broaden like roots rather than heighten like foliage, like space-ships away from mankind. For though mankind’s present indifference to art may be either a cause or an effect of that art, the fact remains that audiences are on the downgrade. The rift between composer and public really began almost 300 years ago when music became less of a community affair than a personal one. (That was when the critic first showed up — to bridge the gap.) What remains of active listeners is culled mostly from the scientifically-oriented who are unsure of what to expect. They have diverse estimations of the new.

     The opinions of people who know about music and know what they like are not of chic nor ignorance but of the questioning mind. Some feel that music is a still-blooming fruition of yesterday. The majority see it in decay from the refinement of means dominating ends. The pseudo-science of new music, they say, is less compelling than the ‘pure’ science it stems from; and anyway, music is not a science but an art. Several object to what they call dehumanized concentration on form over matter (although dehumanization is itself a human concept). Some understandably complain of an artist’s increasing withdrawal: the public by definition resents the private. But while such resentment once was weighted with curiosity, it now is mated with tedium. The regret is not that new composition disturbs or shocks but that it bores.

     Composers today are suspiciously articulate: many pass more time explaining than composing. Their complex solutions must be clarified to a public that doesn’t really want ideas about the thing but the thing itself. If a recent London critic can be believed, the current state of music presents a variety of solutions in search of a problem, the problem being to find somebody left to listen.

     The future’s measure of our creative pulse may well prove to be the sciences. They have seduced many an artist (yet cannot afford to be seduced by art). One doesn’t criticize a method, just the method’s results. Poems and pictures are already retreating from methods of obscurantism. Music: not yet. But then music always lags behind the other arts, and all art lags when the world is in trouble.

     In any case there is little truly new in composition, the language having been complete for about a half-century. Of music being composed, the finest isn’t worried about novelty-at-any-price. It is worried about expressive innovation. With the standardization of both audiences and composing techniques, individual expressivity seems about the one lasting goal.

     The true advance guard is freedom — that of being honest about one’s own creative logic on one’s own terms. Little such freedom exists when art grants priority to style over content. The liberation will doubtless come, as in the past, through a great man. I, for one, do not yet perceive him among musicians; fresh talent today is busy elsewhere. But let us hope he will arrive before the dwindling need of formal beauty finally vanishes.