Plaisirs et Musiques

The Pleasure of Modernist Music de Arved Ashby Editeur : University of Rochester Press 416pages/75$

Que de la gueule, et t'es pas cap...!

A choper dans les brocantes improbables et autres marchés muzikals...

The debate over modernist music has continued for almost a century: from Berg's Wozzeck and Webern's Symphony Op.21 to John Cage's renegotiation of musical control, the unusual musical practices of the Velvet Underground, and Stanley Kubrick's use of Ligeti's Lux Aeterna in the epic film 2001. The composers discussed in these pages -- including Bartók, Stockhausen, Bernard Herrmann, Steve Reich, and many others -- are modernists in that they are defined by their individualism, whether covert or overt, and share a basic urge toward redesigning musical discourse. The aim of this volume is to negotiate a varied and open middle ground between polemical extremes of reception. The contributors sketch out the possible significance of a repertory that in past discussions has been deemed either meaningless or beyond describable meaning. With an emphasis on recent aesthetics and contexts -- including film music, sexuality, metaphor, and ideas of a listening grammar -- they trace the meanings that such works and composers have held for listeners of different kinds. None of them takes up the usual mandate of "educated listening" to modernist works: the notion that a person can appreciate "difficult" music if given enough time and schooling. Instead the book defines novel but meaningful avenues of significance for modernist music, avenues beyond those deemed appropriate or acceptable by the academy. While some contributors offer new listening strategies, most interpret the listening premise more loosely: as a metaphor for any manner of personal and immediate connection with music. In addition to a previously untranslated article by Pierre Boulez, the volume contains articles (all but one previously unpublished) by twelve distinctive and prominent composers, music critics, and music theorists from America, Europe, Australia, and South Africa: Arved Ashby, Amy Bauer, William Bolcom, Jonathan Bernard, Judy Lochhead, Fred Maus, Andrew Mead, Greg Sandow, Martin Scherzinger, Jeremy Tambling, Richard Toop, and Lloyd Whitesell

Echoing the title of an earlier book (Henry Pleasants' The Agony of Modern Music, a dreary compendium of all that was wrong with the world of modern music), this new volume serves as both a retort to Pleasants' gloomy old report of falling skies, and gives notice (by use of the radical word "pleasure") that many of us have found the music of the twentieth century and beyond to offer far more than intellectual satisfaction. Pleasants' own personal "agony" has been a real pleasure for many other listeners, and it's high time that someone said that out loud (or in print, anyway).

Arved Ashby, a musicologist teaching at the Ohio State University, has edited a superb compilation of essays that contribute greatly to the ongoing conversation about musical style and musical values that is currently raging in and out of concert halls today. What pleases me most about this volume is its writers' refusal to adhere to the standard musi-political norms that one has come to expect; boundaries are crossed and recrossed, ultimately blurred entirely. Musical eclecticist William Bolcom defends staunch serialist Donald Martino from critical assailant Richard Taruskin and others. Milton Babbitt, the arch-serialist hyper-intellectual composer who is frequently blamed for all that has gone wrong in the musical academy, is defended from himself. The diverse team of writers display an impressively broad and healthy grasp of music in all of its manifestations, not simply "classical music," whatever that presently means in our culture. Nits could be picked (and have been by other reviewers), but the fact of the matter is that this is a much-needed volume whose primary purpose is to provoke discussion and thought on all sides. The writers are first and foremost music-lovers, and that standpoint informs all of the essays. Urgently recommended