"Totalism" and/or Postmodernism

It is fruitless to recount how many times we have discussed the unwillingness and resistance of prominent Minimalist and Impressionist composers, to name a few types, to categorization.  For example, composers such as Steve Reich, LaMonte Young, Claude Debussy, and Maurice Ravel have struggled against labels thrust upon them by critics or musicologists.  Seemingly in contrast, the group of New York avant-garde composers consisting of Mikel Rouse, Kyle Gann, Michael Gordon, and John Luther Adams have emerged as a self-branded group of "totalists."  Notably, it is Kyle Gann who wrote both the textbook chapter on Totalism and the official Grove Music Dictionary article.  Seemingly, this group aims to differentiate themselves from the minimalists with their aim to create both surface rhythmic vitality and a complex blanket of background activity.

I feel like I haven't listened to music that strikes me as odd or weird for years (my brain is warped maybe?), but while listening to Michael Gordon's piece "Four Kings Fight Five" I kept thinking, "This is really strange music.  I've never heard anything like this before."  Surely this feeling of oddity was compounded by the somewhat inadvertent realization that for the first time in a music history course, we were listening to a genre of music uniquely belonging to the generation of my parents.  The prevailing sense of metric struggle, pseudo rap/spoken lyrics in "Dennis Cleveland" by Mikel Rouse, and tonally fresh timbre created by the oboe, clarinet, percussion, electric guitar, two violins and viola in "Four Kings Fight Five"somewhat creepily reminded me of the popular music from the 1980s and 1990s.  The timbre achieved by Gordon in "Four Kings Fight Five" by combining oboe, clarinet, percussion, electric guitar, two violins and viola proved to be a stunning combination.  My ears tricked, I was convinced that the oboe had transformed into a cyborg or alien computer thrust upon the earth to subjugate my brain with its endless beeping and other electronica effects.  To hear a genuine example where the acoustic realm portrayed the complexity of the Age of the Computer was simultaneously gratifying, impressive, and difficult to sit through.

However, I was very surprised to hear the huge chasm of contrast when I switched to John Luther Adams' "Dream in White on White" and Larry Polanski's "Lonesome Road."  How could we have teleported to such a different sonic universe, but still read about it in the same chapter as the other self-proclaimed Totalists?  "Dream in White on White" presents a shimmering, high-range frequency, glistening world of frigid flatness with horizontal layers of charcoal, gray, blue, and white.  Ultimately I decided that this piece could fit into the Totalists' definition if the words "rhythm" were replaced with "overtones."  John Luther Adams creates a sound palette that at first listen seems light, subdued, but then the listen gradually realizes that the composer is presenting a tonal concept with great depth of color and overtones from the harmonic series.  Perhaps this composer ought to fall more in line with the Postmodernists or even Neo-Romantics since his music does carry a strong programmatic element.

Robert Rauschenberg's piece "Erased de Kooning," 1953

Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting, 1951. House paint on canvas, 72 x 72 in, four panels. Collection the Artist's Estate

In his provocative article “White Noise: Race and Erasure in the Cultural Avant-Garde,” musicologist Lloyd Whitesell posits that a rhetoric of negation, or that of cultural erasure, influences the work of American avant-garde artists. The fascination with nothingness that influenced Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage seeks to dissolve all historical and social contexts in a quest to return to a tabula rasa, or blank slate. Thus, according to Whitesell, John Cage’s goal of stating, expressing, and achieving “nothingness” originated as a subversive effort to “jettison the traditional systems of signification of Western musical culture.”

This resistance to the bourgeois aesthetic tastes of Western art may be viewed as a desire to return to [or rather, to impose] a cultural vanishing point. To solidify this point, Whitesell draws on sources spanning 150 years that comment on the artists’ desire to eradicate or destroy conventions in order to return to zero. Whitesell quotes composer Harold Budd writing in 1970: “Ever since (a long time ago) I’ve pushed and pushed toward zero: Running it all down, a kind of on-going process of removal. There’s an enormous difference by the way, between Monotony and Boredom. Boredom, it seems to me, is trying to make something interesting. Monotony is making nothing interesting” (172).


This desire to return to zero expressed by Rauschenberg’s “Erased de Kooning” reminds me of an old computer program drawing program for children, Kid Pix, that I used in elementary school circa 1994. I remember that the program featured many creature ways to return to zero, to that blank screen. You could choose between a dump truck graphic that drove onto the canvas and carted away your drawing one block at a time, or for the more impatient juvenile artist, you could opt for the stick of dynamite that blew everything into oblivion. When I think about John Cage or Ernest Hemingway’s famous quote that substitutes every noun in the Lord’s prayer with “nada,” I imagine choosing the dynamite icon, watching and hearing everything I had created explode, and above all, how fun and addicting this was. (We especially liked the option of filling the screen entirely with large, colorful dots because it produced a very satisfying underwater, bubbling sound effect and filled up the screen in a matter of seconds instead of troubling to actually draw something original. This of course enabled us to blow everything up even faster).


The unique and provocative aspect of Whitesell’s article lies in his argument that this effort to return to a cultural vanishing point carries with it a message tinged with racial underpinnings.  Whitesell argues that most white artists have engaged in a characteristically European practice of cultural appropriation, that is, drawing extensively from sources of exoticism or cultural “otherness” for inspiration.  His examples of this practice range from Pablo Picasso, to George Gershwin, to Steve Reich, to the black-faced minstrel shows of the nineteenth century.  


Whitesell’s argument achieves a unique perspective because he asks his readers to shift their focus from the subjects in the foreground (Ex: an “Uncle Tom” or other African American “messenger” character), to the underlying white background.  His reasoning is that white artists use black or culturally “different” subjects as a vehicle for self-description and self-reflection.  (Hence, our focus in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is really not Uncle Tom who exists as a rather flat character; Harriet Beecher Stowe’s motive in writing the novel becomes the focal point).  The practice of including an African American spiritual messenger is incredibly common in literature; in the movie “O brother! Where art thou?” we see a blind African-American man on a chain gang as the symbol for the Greek poet Homer, to name one.


Furthermore, Whitesell sees that avant-garde fixation on nothingness as a cultural fixation on European whiteness (though seldom acknowledged).  What makes the "background" blank is a paradox: the combination of perceiving cultural whiteness as both the neutral stasis and as the medium for expressing universal humanity.  The assumption that a white-man's symphony like Beethoven 9 serves as the "universal message for humanity" can be seen as an extension of a Wonder Bread white-bread culture.  


Therefore, Whitesell argues that the process of cultural erasure in musical styles like minimalism still follows the Euro-centric goals of goal-oriented process and spiritual transcendence.  While a common characteristic of minimalism is its overall "featurelessness," Whitesell argues that this is a subtle nod toward whiteness and a fixation on purity.  


Although Whitesell alludes to Western Christianity as a mechanism of European drive, I was surprised that he did not equate his theories about "whiteness" with the allegory of the bride of Christ as the perceived moral ideal.  To dress as a [virginal] bride in white is to proclaim a lack of blemish, of stain.  Frequently, this becomes an another unfair double standard for women in that white is also seen as the quintessence of female evilness, as depicted by the White Witch of Narnia and other wintry, sexually frigid, albeit powerful females.  This concept of venerating "blankness" seems exist as a predominately masculine European ideal.  Thus, to return to the blank is to return to the realm of neutrality, that is, the sphere of the European male.  Females who share this goal-oriented, expressionless, and somewhat ruthless tendency toward cultural erasure might be depicted as cold, soulless, and inhuman.

Crossover: The Avant-Garde in Rock

If you asked me a week ago to name a “crossover” work, I would probably have come up blank, but examples in the text about bands like the Beatles, Frank Zappa, Yes, and the Who branching out from their rock roots provided some relatable examples for me since I am familiar with the music of these mainstream groups.  

The Beatles' Stockhausen-inspired tape collage Revolution No. 9 from their "White Album" provides a good springboard for venturing into the crossover realm.

It amuses me to imagine great popular artists swarming the record stores to buy recordings from composers like Varése, Stockhausen, Penderecki, Webern, Cage, and Feldman, and then citing this music as a significant musical influence.  Frank Zappa drew extensively upon avant-garde artists like Varése for inspiration in addition to more popular sources, such as 1950's Rhythm and Blues.  A lifelong autodidactic learner, his self-taught compositional style reflects his unique fusion of jazz, orchestral musical, and musical concréte.  This video of "A Zappar Affair," which was recorded by the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra in 1984, reflects a style of orchestration that strongly alludes to Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring."  (Admittedly, the cover art is also very suggestive of a pre-modern, possibly pagan sacred rite.  The image of the bull summons mythological connotations as well).

A contemporary example includes the collaboration of Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood with Polish composer Penderecki.  The recent album includes Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” and Greenwood’s orchestral adaptation “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” and “48 Responses to Polymorphia.”  If you would like to check out this album, here is the link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00722ZH5W/ref=as_li_ss_til?tag=ateasearadisit00&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as4&creativeASIN=B00722ZH5W&adid=1X73485GH6PDARYR6A4G.

In the Classical world, we currently see accessible composers like Michael Daugherty writing music in a crossover style.  Daugherty's music employs parody and humor in pieces like "Dead Elvis."  "Dead Elvis for Solo Bassoon and Chamber Orchestra" (1993) includes bassoon, violin, Eb clarinet, trombone, contrabass, and percussion, and most notably requires the bassoonist to dress as an Elvis impersonator.  Works like "Dead Elvis" easily fall into the crossover category, but it is dubious that the spirit of this particular piece falls into the realm of the avant-garde.  On the other hand, I have chosen to include it in this blog since the theatrical elements, unique instrumentation, and use of irony allude to practices used by conceptual artists.  (As is the case with most post-1960s works, it is hard to imagine a "Dead Elvis" or a Michael Daugherty without predecessors like John Cage and George Rochberg).

Crossover: Interfaces with Rock and Jazz

Gann’s discussion about the intermixing of rock and jazz with the avant-garde was useful for a person like me who grew up with parents who never listened to popular music, particularly 1960s to 1980s rock.  Most often I feel intensely naive and that I am ignorant of any music that is the “popular” kind since we grew up hearing classical, jazz, and sacred music.  In other words, if a style of music could be found above the 91.5 range of the radio dial, I never heard it in my formative years (excluding the small slice of pop hits that I recognize from years of riding the school bus).  That being said, it was helpful for me at the beginning of the chapter “Interfaces with Rock and Jazz” to get a general overview about rock’s origins.

If we switch our focus from rock to jazz, it seems apparent that the trend has moved in an opposite direction.  As jazz has matured, its progressive artists ventured into avant-garde terrain in a manner that more closely resembles the European-influenced approach of Classical composers in first half of the Twentieth Century (or, before John Cage, in other words).  Rather than simplifying the harmonic language to favor rhythmic variation and minimalist techniques like rock-avant garde-classical composers like Laurie Anderson and Rhys Chatham, the jazz composers progressed into free jazz.  This jagged, jarring, harmonically dissonant style more closely resembles works by Babbit in its complexity and lack of accessibility. 

Here are videos of "O Superman" from Laurie Anderson and "Guitar Trio" from Rhys Chatham.

This is a huge contrast to the direction that jazz artists chose to embark at this time.  For example, an artist like Charles Mingus, seems to effortlessly flirt with the classical side and avant-garde while remaining an iconic jazz bassist and composer due to his multiethnic background, varied musical training, and abstract complexity in his jazz writing that seems to harken back to the rational serialism of post-tonality in the 1940s and 1950s.  

When one considers the racial injustices to which Mingus was subjected, it becomes obvious that this Chinese-American, African-American, Swedish-American man would have had an equal probability of achieving great success in the classical world as an orchestral cellist, bassist, or composer to what he actually attained as a jazz bassist.  It astounds me that an individual that is only 1/4 black was still known primarily as a black man in 1960s America.  My husband, who is a quarter Japanese, a quarter Dutch, and half Mexican seems, so varied in his ethnic background that it is inconceivable for him to be pigeonholed and discriminated against solely for being Japanese.  For this reason, a fusion of styles in Mingus’ music seems inevitable, expected, and organic, for this is the kind of music that a racially and socially unjust world might squeeze out of its most talented, albeit less privileged, individuals.

Is it possible that rock always provided a venue for the mainstream while jazz originally evolved as a cultural bastion for those relegated to the fringe?