Mechanisms and Shadows
Three composers muse on life and Western art music

edited by  Clement Jewitt

In August 2002 an article by Geoffrey Hindley was posted to the MusicPsyche Discussion Group entitled Keyboards, Cranks and Comm-unication: the Musical Mindset of Western Technology, which proposed that ‘the mindset of western art music is at the core of modern world techno-culture.’[1]

The argument was supported by examination of the singularity of western art music, which is distinct from all other ‘high musical traditions’ in being polyphonic, using ‘unnatural’ tuning and a fixed semitone sequence, pre-composed closed forms, an elaborate and highly prescriptive notation, and a machine as its chief instrument.

The history of western mechanistic instruments begins with the hydraulis, which metamorphosed into the organ, that ‘uniquely western machine … [which was for centuries] the largest mechanism, even including the city or cathedral clock, in any European town.’ Next came the organistrum and its popular successor the hurdy-gurdy, offering evidence for the development of the crank in Europe, and then the accordion, taken up by European folk music tradition which has for centuries welcomed mechanistic music making – the only one in the world to do so. And then of course to clavichords, harpsichords and pianos, the keyboard applied to strings.

Among other contrasts Hindley also adduces to support his thesis the immediacy of sound to the senses as compared to vision, natural tunings versus tempered, and the maintenance of tradition as prime operative in all musics except for the western, which values innovation. The latter is supported by complex highly specific notation which, in the context of European technological strivings may be seen also as a manifestation of that Western holy grail, the labour saving device, enabling performers to escape the chore of learning the music, thus releasing energy for novelty.

The article fanned sparks in the psyche of the Canadian composer John Burke, and the resultant ‘channellings’ (his word) in turn drew responses from Maxwell Steer and Clement Jewitt. The three of us found we were sailing in formation across the same ocean signalling energetically to each other. These interchanges we now present to you, slightly edited, feeling that the triangular pyramid with Hindley at the apex was an alchemical furnace which ‘had us in the grip of our collective daemon’ (John’s words again) crystalizing nuggets which here we share.

1. Where from and wherefore? Thoughts on Hindley

I shall argue that the mechanical habit of mind; that the characteristically western pattern of thinking in terms of progressive development; that the habit of innovation; that even the basic principles of ‘R & D’, originated with the new mindset evolved in and by the western European tradition of art music. If the proposition be accepted, it will be seen to be no coincidence that music and technology are the two all pervasive western exports to the world at large.

JB: And it therefore stands to reason that Germany , which has produced some of the greatest machinery in the world, should have produced some of the greatest music in the world. It has also produced in recent times some of the worst abuse of patriarchal power in the world—the shadow side of the musical/technological marvel. One wonders whether there must be some mysterious linkage in these three elements.

MS: My own insight into this strange concatenation was guided by an art exhibition that visited Birmingham a couple of years ago called The Kingdom of the Soul. It featured the German tradition of metaphysical or symbolist art that stemmed from Arnold Böcklin. The catalog explained that he was the focus of a 19^th century group of expatriates who thought of themselves as the DeutschRömer, that is the spiritual-cultural heirs of the mythical Holy Roman Empire that originated with Charlemagne.[2]

Its fascinating to listen -inter alia- to Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder & nearly all Mahler and hear being ‘yearned into life’ that very quality of nostalgic fantasy about a mythic courtly past that the Nazis were to load with such deadly freight a couple of decades later as the ‘third’ empire. Nor should it be forgotten that in Shaw’s paean to all things Nietzschean, The Perfect Wagnerite, of which he published five versions 1898-1923, he is extraordinarily explicit in anticipating the arrival of a ‘superman consciousness’ within persons (as enlightened as GB Shaw) who could be relied upon to act ‘rationally’, having dispensed with the mental fog of religion and social convention! How much did it surprise Shaw, I wonder, that it was Nazism rather than the Bloomsbury group which proved the more pregnant force?

CJ: Another vector to this could be that, if the national temperament of Germany may be allowably, if sweepingly, categorized as predominantly based on the intellect, with feeling relatively undiffer-entiated, as contrasted with France, predominantly centred on the feelings (the finely differentiated feeling tones in classic Moulin Rouge presentations as compared to the lads’ night out in a Bavarian Bierkeller—which is by no means to critique the power of the Gallic intellect, only its character) then we have a possible route to comprehension, given the I hope widely accepted understanding that thinking ungoverned by feeling is unprotected against anti-humanitarian tendencies, leading at worst to outright evil in the name of some ‘principle’, but of course leaving the positive creative side of intellect still free, not necessarily in the same individual.

Perhaps supporting this, Leonard Schlain in The Alphabet versus the Goddess[3] presents a comprehensive and persuasive argument for the notion that the onset of specifically alphabetic writing, totally abstract once the Greeks had stripped the remaining pictographic vestiges from it, and situated at the very centre of the culture, provoked predominance of left brain analytic thinking, required to comprehend the writing. And hence by an argument I think it not necessary to elaborate here, lead to dominant patriarchy.

European Zeitgeist

In the great monodic traditions the art of the musician consists in exploration and exposition of the sound world that lives in the mystic body of wood, gourd or shell strung with gut. Compared with the keyboard and the festooned mechanisms of western wind instruments, these were organic members of the natural world. Modifications of their structure were, if not blasphemous, then pointless since the vocation of the musician was to enter and understand their musical world and not to ‘improve’ it.

JB: If a culture is producing the best high performance motor cars in the world, it is literally trying to go someplace. If it is similarly producing the best high performance music in the world, then it would seem evident that it is trying to go someplace. But where? What has motivated this extraordinary phenomenon of musical progressive development, innovation, inexorable expansion of ways and means, with its attendant wrenching changes of psychic state—not to mention the exponential inflation of the ego of the art music composer—that is unique to the West? Where did we think we were going? What did art music think it could do?

MS: It thought it could be God! Certainly, in their own way both Wagner and Berlioz thought that, Beethoven having finally burst the shackles of regal and religious patronage, they were free to create music that truly expressed the scope of man as the supreme being of the universe. How interesting tho, that both were deeply ‘infected’ by their own gods, that is, that the personal psychology of both men was deeply interpenetrated by a level of perennial consciousness -the dear old Collective Unconscious- that gave them a sense of ‘the sublime’, as the Gothick movement called it.

In such traditions, through the bard, humankind could approach the music of the spheres, the musical structure of the world. The acoustic mysteries of interval and mathematics were linked to the secrets of the universe. The almost innumerable gradations of vibrational pitches between the unison and the octave were ordered into complex scales – Arab maqqam, Indian raga and Greek tropoi (‘tropes’) or ‘modes’ as they are called – each held to embody and express its own microcosm of sentiment, mysticism or expression.

JB: What was the metaphysical aspiration of Leonin and Perotin when in the 12^th century they began ‘turbocharging’ the plainchant with their duplum, triplum and quadruplum organum? Were they intuitively aware of the energetic healing properties of chant[4] and were trying to ‘amp up’ the effects for the benefit of their parishioners? Was art music in the West now assuming the daunting task of spiritual transformation that in the East was addressed through yoga and meditation? In the spiritual technologies of Tibet the peaceful and wrathful deities are processed internally; in the West such things might be mythically worked out in chromatic harmonic splendour on the opera stage at Bayreuth . Or were we (to return to the engineering metaphor) blindly supplanting the former primal esotericism of the heart with a ‘guy thing’ esotericism of the head?

Has not the overly yang trajectory of art and science in the West—with all its patriarchal excess—just about run its course? Is it not time for a massive reinfusion of the healing yin energy that with those first contrapuntal experiments 800 years ago at Notre Dame has increasingly retreated underground, to become the disenfranchised, unlived life of Western music, resurfacing in shadow form in Mozart’s Queen of the Night and the lunar feminine eruptions of Schoenberg’s Pierrot and Erwartung?

If we approach the entire history of Western classical music in Jungian terms, as one would view the life cycle of an individual, one could perhaps see plainchant as the stage of infancy or unconscious wholeness, unconscious egolessness. Music’s subsequent technical expansion could then be seen as the process of individuation, the development of conscious ego, adamantly establishing one’s place in the world. At some point this external power, outward bound agenda inevitably runs into trouble (or as Joseph Campbell put it: having reached the top of the ladder one realizes it’s against the wrong wall), which seems to happen around the time of Wagner’s Parsifal. The subsequent midlife crisis of 20^th century music is the story of a confused and oftimes desperate attempt to locate, reclaim and integrate a newly empowered feminine energy into a newly defined transformative role for serious music—a task as yet incomplete, but as we enter a new millennium perhaps within our grasp.

At that point we will have come full circle—the fruition of the Hero’s Journey—returning now to a new place of conscious egolessness, our previous efforts toward external power having been transformed into a healing quest for authentic power, power for the benefit of others. And with it the best response to the question of why Western music, unlike its Eastern counterpart, left the safety and security of the contemplative tradition of plainchant to take a millennium-long walk on the wild side.

CJ: Music history as Jungian life cycle! Terrific! As a devout Jungian myself (apologies Carl, I know you refused the apellation) who in the last several years has been working with a Jungian based model of the psyche,[5] I wish I’d thought of that!

Schlain’s thesis could apply to the adventure of Leonin and Perotin as an aspect of the reasons why, having in mind Hindley’s gloss on the ‘verticalizing’ of the musical concept from its purely horizontal, linear shape.

MS: I’d hazard they were partly having fun with new (conceptual) toys but also that they felt they were contributing to the advancement of Christendom. It was the high period of ‘scholasticism’ in Paris —of which they were the musical counterpart. Its also the period from which the earliest European (religious) dramas date. In the post-millennial period there seems to have been a genuine Europe-wide religious fervour (or outpouring of spirit, depending on how you look at it), of which Hildegard is a preeminent example, which expressed itself materially in cathedral-building and, alas, the Crusades. In a way the music could be looked at as reflecting the imperialism of the age, just as the bombastic power of the symphony orchestra did the aspirations of the 19^th century.

CJ: And which may be also associated with the masculinisation (hence imperialism) resulting from the re-literacising of Europe then gathering way, at least among the educated cultural leaders, following the so-called Dark Ages when only largely closetted monks kept the literary tradition barely alive, but the rest of the people (happily?) lead lives without reading matter. We may note the at least equal status of women then, recorded in the Troubadour tradition as well as historical facts about noted women occupying powerful positions. This too is part of Schlain’s argument. So the ‘guy thing’ would follow from that re-assumption of literacy.

Midlife crisis

MS: Wouldnt you say that that a ‘reinfusion of the healing yin’ is already in process? Its interesting that D’Indy bought early instruments and made students of the Schola Cantorum play on them. Perhaps that’s what attracted Satie to it? Also that Respighi, whose sound-world is synonymous with opulence, collected early instruments and loved to play chamber music on them. Then again there is the extraordinary conjunction of Dolmetsch developing the instruments needed for a kind of musical preRaphaelitism in Haslemere against the backdrop of Europe ’s collective self-destruction in WW1. Bear in mind also that Landowska commissioned her first harpsichord from Pleyel before that war.

 I would locate the first explicit inciting act of this ‘phase-reversal’ to Debussy’s encounter with the Javanese Gamelan at the Paris Exposition of (1898?) —so you could say that while the phallocratic dynamic of European ‘civilisation’ created by masculine scientific objectivism in the 11/12^th centuries reached a peak, musically, with the Nazi Strauss, a counter-balancing movement had already arisen with Debussy’s insistence on the primacy of feeling, and his assertion of the significance of subjectivity.[6]

I would make the case that this ‘new’ strand in Eurocentric music, which arose spontaneously in several unrelated composers (Debussy, Ives & Varèse, not to mention Stravinsky) was a restatement of the irrational first brought into European consciousness by the Gothick movement in the late 18^th century, where two homosexuals (Walpole & Beckford, again, acting independently) apparently found that the searing rationality of Enlightenment science left no room for imagination or personal expression. Searching for what they called ‘the Sublime’, that is a validating sense of otherness within, they re-articulated the age-old human need for non-rationality as the womb of creativity—as Lorca said, ‘duende [twilight, ambiguity] alone makes us live.’

CJ: My thoughts above on national character apply to your remarks on Debussy – who was taken to hear the Gamelan by Satie. Can we trace something of the long heard differences between German and French music (dismissive German historians, etc) with this in mind? In other words Debussy as the continuator of tradition as well as the innovator.

2. Where to, and how ? New music today

JB: In other words: what now for serious music in the 21^st century? Here in North America (I’m in Vancouver, so perhaps I reflect a ‘west coast’ bias) spirit, healing, consciousness as they relate to music—whose time has surely come—is pretty much the domain of traditional devotional/liturgical and new age music as well as the borrowings
and blendings of world music. Classical music, certainly contemporary music, on the other hand is for the most part still the preserve of old paradigm thinking with its anachronistic Faustian politics, and dualistic, Marxist/materialist world view. Gratuitous shock-of-the-new may have passed but the sardonic surfaces of postmodernist nihilism aren’t much of an improvement.[7]

I am very interested in hearing from European composers about any stirrings in their world in the direction of merging the more radical achievements of 20^th century new music with the aspirations of authentic transpersonal, shamanic or energy healing modes of transformation. I mean, something beyond the eastern European holy minimalist school, which is perfectly fine, of course. More, say, along the lines of a fusion of Sai Baba and Xenakis, if you’ll forgive the impertinence!

CJ: Sounds similar to the situation here, although, the work of Jonathan Harvey and others duly noted, I perceive a trend among contemporary composers who wish to avoid the unfeeling hegemony of the heirs of post-Schoenbergian dialectics specifically in order to grasp elusive feelings and soul or spirit, of tending to work modally or in some version of the diatonic tradition (eg Gia Kancheli from Georgia) or to borrow from other cultures (eg Alan Hovhaness your side of the pond, and several around Europe, including myself to a small extent). One who is actively seeking to reconcile the extremes of the intellectual approach with the feeling tones of tradition (if that’s the dichotomy) without middle-of-the-road compromise is the Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür, though I don’t think he’s seeking any shamanic goal. Another composer whose works I warm to is also Estonian, Peteris Vasks, and his works do seem to have the glow of inwardness about them.

The warmth is empathic feeling. I have to confess to a personal difficulty with separating the perception of emotion from perceiving specifically spiritual emanations from music, which is my shorthand for what you describe as “authentic transpersonal, shamanic or energy healing modes”.

MS: I agree. Its like the church telling you that Christ loves you—it means nothing unless a member of that body actually real-ises it in your experience.

JB: Agreed… For myself, I have been trying to do both—to the ire of some.

MS: I grew up in the Glock era of  Radio 3 when you absolutely couldn’t get airtime unless you were a serialist, and the more rebarbative the better. But I guess P Maxwell Davies’s evolution is exemplary, from his first, much admired, O Magnum Mysterium (which I thought the Emperor’s new underpants) to his later symphonic music.

Have you, John, ever come across Easerley Blackwood who is, according to the web, Professor of Music at Chicago U? In the 60s/70s he used to give occasional recitals of ‘second Viennese’ music on Radio 3 that were electrifying; playing Webern so that rhythms were absolutely alive and newly minted. By the same token I’ve never heard anyone who could make Boulez et al sound as musical as Phyllis Bryn-Julson—her ability to marry the extremities of her range timbrally is unsurpassed by any other singer I’ve heard.

What is extraordinary to me was the remarkable symbiotic relationship between the totalitarianism of Communism and the a-tonal-itarianism of Serialism. The fall of the Wall was absolutely synchronous with the last gasp of a tottering movement—which people like Schnittke (for whom I carry a big torch) had done so much to dislodge.

CJ: There is a group of young(ish) French composers who have emerged from under the shadow of Boulez, who may be described as post-spectralists, working with modernist procedures and spectralism as just parts of the compositional toolbox, which is the way it should be. They are in their individual ways putting melody back into the discourse, often using stepwise movement which avoids being heard as diatonic by the use of intervals from higher up the harmonic series. Here we are back with notions already aired on the French character, a concern with la ligne which perhaps traces back through Debussy to 19^th century opera and older French traditions. I will mention Philippe Hurel, Philippe Leroux and Thierry Blondeau (a truly beautiful clarinet quintet by the latter). I don’t yet know whether as a group their music has the properties John inquires after. With colleagues I’m setting up a concert of some of their music next June in Birmingham , many of which will be first performances in this country, we believe. Hopefully I’ll have a clearer perception after that, pace the perceptual difficulty we all agreed upon.

JB: It would seem Grisey for his part was strenuously opposed to any extrasonic narratives around music (crudely paraphrased from a program note of a piece recently performed here: ‘we’re musicians pure and simple… we’re not about musical astrology, musical acupuncture, musical tarot, blah, blah, etc…’). Physics, pure and simple, evidently. But that’s fine. I feel the sudden vehement emergence of abstraction in the arts at the beginning of the century was an intuitive urge to return the arts to a place of healing energies in contrast to the bourgeois sentimental social function and storybook narratives of the previous century. I don’t think that the West at that time was ready for it, but now with awareness of acupuncture, feng shui, healing touch, etc now virtually mainstream perhaps something new can come in.[8] Xenakis seemed to have a wild pythagorean purity about him, but he was after all a Marxist.

The Labyrinth

JB: For myself, I’m writing music to accompany the walking of the ( Chartres ) labyrinth, a contemplative practice that has enjoyed a considerable revival beginning in San Francisco ’s Grace Cathedral and now widespread in the US . The music usually heard in this context again tends to be traditional devotional or new age; my approach will be to use the language of contemporary music in an innovative and appropriate way.

CJ: I’m very interested to hear about this. Of course the Chartres labyrinth is above ground, unlike its ancient world models. I came across a remark recently, whose authenticity I have yet to establish, to the effect that in the ancient world, Crete for example, there was a tradition of chanting while walking the labyrinth (in the dark), changing the note as you turned back on yourself down the adjacent passage, so that you could keep some count of where you were: the implication being that part of the purpose was to submit to the transforming pressures of darkness, which links this in my mind with the ‘incubation’ interests of the Pythagoreans and others, whereby initiates spent time in a dark cave, that leading to transformations.

JB: Fantastic… ancient corroboration of the intimate relationship of music with the labyrinth geometry, which seems to be inescapable when one starts working with the latter as a living ritual. Seemingly labyrinths have a different connotation to North Americans than to Europeans, to whom it is an obscure part of ancient or ecclesiastical history. Over here it’s more like a crop circle… I see it as a non-concert situation that is a perfect laboratory for working with the subconscious minds of the participants, and I’m trying to do this in a homeopathic way. By that I mean to use music (in this case for string quartet) as a carrier wave for a transpersonal intention that is empowered by and embodies the essence of the extraordinary journey of Western music. Naturally this is dependent more on the soul work of the composer than what is normally talked about in the conservatories, although it certainly includes the latter. In any case my recent experiences have convinced me that there is an extraordinary alchemy possible when sacred music and sacred geometry meet at the labyrinth.

CJ: The detail goes like this: the (aboriginal?) Minotaur labyrinth at Crete [9] had seven loop passages to the eighth position, the middle. If toned from C to C, entry is at E, moving down through D to C, then jumping to F, then another jump to B, followed by A and G, with a final jump to C, the octave, which may be seen as representing the goal of a full descent into the unconscious, the Minotaur then standing for the unknown and therefore fear inspiring contents.

And perhaps musically we also have there a model of the tetrachords.[10]

The View from the Edge

JB: The Eastern orthodox tradition and its contemporary musical emanations certainly have offered an impressive ‘outsider’ response to the stranglehold we seem unhappy with. In my own way I have felt the need and possibility of using quasi-tonal materials partly to get the listener to the first stage of attending to a deeper transmission. But more than that, the psycho-acoustic treasure known as the major/minor triad is not to be dismissed lightly. Despite Boulez…

I have a pet ‘outsider’ theory vis-a-vis 20^th century music, sufficiently occult even for Colin Wilson, that posits Mahler/Schoenberg as the shadow response/ manifestations of what I see as Wagner’s patriarchal psychosis about the evolutionary betrayal of the feminine healing energy in music (Wagner being my theoretical crisis point of the 1000 year trajectory of Western music) that expressed itself in his odious anti-semiticism, but which I dare say was not quite what it seemed (Wagner in the real world needed and honoured Jews, and they, especially the conductor Levi, revered him.). In other words, perhaps the ‘Jew in Music’ wasn’t really the issue for Wagner: it was what he wasn’t honouring as an insecure, over-the-top Teutonic patriarch vis-a-vis his own anima. [Ah, to be Jung again…] Wagner himself, great artist that he was, intuited the shadow dilemma and responded, however gropingly, hopefully, with the Grail legend and his unrealized Siddhartha-themed stage work. The torch then passed to the great outsiders of the the 20^th century, Schoenberg (via Mahler) and Stravinsky—the wild-eyed desert mystic and the Siberian shaman—to bring forth a new dispensation, which of course they did, albeit briefly, in the riot-provoking visionary works of c.1912.

A Jew and a Russian—precisely the two outsider ethnicities that subsequently spoke to Hitler’s shadow issues. The remarked-upon effeminacy of Wagner and the new revelations about the ‘hidden Hitler’ and his early demimondaine activities in the underground gay scene in Vienna bear some looking into.

MS: But this is surely to criticise Wagner for his merits! All male creators have to have an ‘abnormally’ feminine temperament otherwise they would be as insensitive to the current of the spirit as most men! I think too that a certain naivety is very helpful to a composer because if someone hasn’t been taught The Best Way To Do It they’re quite likely to discover something authentically personal—which is often what tips the scales.

I saw a tv documentary recently about this ‘hidden Hitler’. It was no big deal: he was just a young drifter looking for a role in the world, poking his nose (and I doubt that it was anything more!) into various lifestyles. According to this documentary, the thing that changed his ‘luck’ was when by chance he gave an impromptu speech about Jews in a beer cellar. Hitler was electrified by the response because in touching a nerve that evening he realised he had discovered a source of personal power. And the sequel is all too well known.

I’m afraid I have very little affection for germanic music between Weber/Brahms and Berg/Webern, so I see the real banner carriers for the spiritual essence of ‘preconceived music’ as Debussy and Stravinsky followed by Janàcek, whose true position as a ‘sleeping Bohemian knight’ emerging from under the hill is one of the most resonant of the 20^th century. Given the power of that myth it is no surprise for me to watch two other Slavs slowly unfold their true stature in the century after their deaths, Szymanowski and Martinù. It was really due to Mackerras that Janàcek found a foothold in the psyche of the British musical public, and if Szymanowski does likewise it will be due to Rattle.

CJ: Thinking of myth, the 20^th century new music preoccupation/ fascination with percussion, read conventionally as borrowings from the exotic and/or subversion of traditional focus on pitch and line—the pursuit of colour, may be also (or more deeply considered, funda-mentally) a search for the repressed feminine, something chthonic, a reconnection with earth, the ground hugging snake as ancient feminine symbol—with menstrual blood as archetypal generative, watering the earth—transformed into the reviled and feared dragon/devil by mascul-inised Christianity. Now percussion seeds a return to the earth via reversing that path, symbolised by sounds redolent of thunder, earthquakes, waterfalls. Visiting my brother in Uganda some years ago I noticed how often it was the women at ordinary collective events who spontaneously produced drums. Like cooking, day-to-day celebration of the sounds of the earth(mother) seemed to be regarded as women’s work, while at the prestigious ceremonies the men took over and shone heroically.

MS: The issue of the re-irruption of shamanic consciousness in the 20^th century is brilliantly and, I think definitively, described in Michael Tucker’s Dreaming With Open Eyes.[11]

JB: Alas, c.1912 the West wasn’t ready for that massive infusion of radically new energy, and after the miscarriage of the Great War, both society and art eventually returned to more formalist, dominator culture values. Thus the desert mystic and the Siberian shaman become the popes of their respective orthodox domains in the ‘30’s with Moses und Aron (Judaism/dodecophony) and the Symphony of Psalms (doctrinal Christianity/neoclassicism). But now, approaching 2012, perhaps we have a window of opportunity to pick up the lost thread once again and carry it forward to its potential fruition.

CJ: Who else but an ‘outsider’, not party to the power base of the ruling cabal, can find the courage to expose his/her own soul in subversion of that leviathan? Parallels with other realms of endeavour abound: many of the most profound scientific advances were initiated by workers outside the mainstream, unsupported by the gatekeeper senior figures. I take some comfort from that as, somewhat like Maxwell, I am a composer who watches purveyors of empty rhetoric gain the plaudits. Fickle fashion will in time ignore them anyway, if not ‘the judgment of history’.

Probably the necessary orientation, as you both seem to be implying in at least some of what you write, is to consciously withdraw from active pursuit of mainstream ‘career’ in favour of following the soul work we have been exchanging views about, in the faith emanating from inner conviction that this is the path that will (eventually) win out, or at the least survive as part of the long lineage of the esoteric threading back through all the materialistic dominances, part of the perennial tradition, sometimes lost, apparently, but only apparently lost.[12]

MS: Or is it not a ‘tradition’ but a reconnection to an archetypal experience of art, which underlies everything from neolithic painting to Steve Reich? This week I read of someone saying that the guy who invented the wheel was probably an artist experimenting with shapes for his own amusement.

CJ: Yes, ‘archetypal’ makes sense.

Returning to the ‘outsider’ motif, a young English composer, Edward Rushton, beginning to make a public mark, who lives in his wife’s native Austria, reports that in his perspective the English new music scene is relatively tolerant compared to Austria where the old avant-guard, ensconced in the chilly heights of ‘higher’ learning, still largely have a stranglehold. Consequently, as his music avoids the cerebral excesses of modernism without slipping into post-modernism, he is being performed here, but hardly at all in Austria .

JB: Again, the need to be an outsider, from the central European tradition. Eastern Europe , Scandinavia , England , and of course the Americas … Perhaps that’s from where the revolution now must come. The Austro-German tradition is still too addicted to its dominator culture reference points to really see the value in anything outside of itself, unless it’s an extreme detour from their art music monopoly, such as Cage, or a condescending appreciation of some musical cargo cult.

CJ: This reminds me of Rudolf Steiner’s remark that it would be the English to whom would fall the task of renewing music into a more spiritually oriented state.[13] If I recall accurately he indicated the century following as the time for that unfolding… Were his remarks Euro-centric? I don’t know, but certainly they can be interpreted as a relocating of the torch of the future away from Austro-Germany, away from the centre of Europe .

JB: It seems that we in the new world are predisposed to think of serious music outside the box, outside the social roles and propri-eties—and issues of legitimacy derived from lineage—that Europeans might consider basic. Thus Ives, Cage, Partch, Feldman, Reich, Glass, etc.—figures who seem to come out of nowhere and perhaps for that reason proclaim a compelling message. It’s as if in the new world there is permission or a mandate for a serious music composer to imagine the state of being that s/he wishes to impart to the listener and work back-ward from that to invent whatever ways and means are needed to do the job. My feeling is that in Europe the opposite tends to be true: one starts with the lineage, the weight of tradition, the social context (there isn’t one in art music in the new world) and then one tries to steer that in new directions.

MS: Well you live there John, so you’d know. My take on it is that in Europe the high priests of high art music are ring-fenced by national cultural institutions to a degree unknown in North America . Once established, the Boulezes & Berios & Birtwistles are fairly well looked after by the national broadcasters—a phenomenon that I would imagine is unknown in North America !—and are likely to receive their fair share of the public honours bestowed on cultural figures. But there is in general, I think, nowadays, a desperate predictability to much new art music because as public support for the conservatoire æsthetic ebbs the discourse is increasingly underwritten by academe and thus literate values, rather than emotional ones, are the principal criteria. The Guardian critic remarked of the 2000 SPNM/London Sinfonietta ‘State of the Nation’ weekend that ‘there were 25 premières, of which 24 might have been written by the same composer.’ In Britain there is, notoriously, almost no middle ground between metronomic music, uncompromising avant-gardism and the conservatism of an ageing musical public. To judge by my ‘hedgerow’ teaching practice I seriously wonder whether classical music is a ‘spoken language’ any longer. Our commercial radio, Classic FM, has been piling on listeners, as a result of never challenging its listeners ears – unlike Radio 3, whose recent expansion into World Music will, I predict, have a tremendous long-term gain for breaking down the artificial division between ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’ music.

I hazard that the difference between us and N America is that its size and capitalistic character makes the kind of intellectual thought-consensus practised by the European music establishment impossible. You don’t seem to have anything like the BBC or the RTF or the WDR to assert any cultural norm. As a result North American composers have to make their way in a more indifferent yet less trammeled environment.

In this regard I am wholly outside the European model, for I am a composer who never found a teacher and therefore had to work out all my values for myself – hence Music & the Psyche. I have therefore always empathised strongly with the scorn of such pioneers as Ives towards the sacrosanct canon of the European tradition. As a young man I seriously thought of emigrating to the USA , but I had no contacts and finally reflected that altho I was completely unacknowledged here, at least I had a social network, whereas if I were to go I wouldn’t even have that! At all events, what I have drawn from 20thC American experimentalism has been, I think, a certain quality of bloody-mindedness in keeping on with my own furrow—even tho my personal idiom isn’t of that character at all.

JB: My own response to all of this has been to internalize the accepted journey of Western music, from plainchant as a cathedral chorister as a child up to my encounter as an undergraduate in Montreal with the lineage of Messiaen and Boulez via several of their more accomplished students. Then, in the last decade, to take a heterodox journey into the esoteric spiritual dimension of sound, music, healing and consciousness. So for me the mission is to somehow put together the astonishing story of Western music’s thousand year trajectory into an unforeseen place of power and sophistication with the sonic driving, the calling in of the helping spirits—the healing intention—of the shaman’s drum. Music as medicine. I have found myself strongly drawn to people who see sound and music as a form of subtle energy—chi, prana. In fact I eventually became a Reiki master myself in pursuit of this. Susan Alexjander, Fabien Maman and Don Campbell are some of the musicians who have influenced me most in this regard.

So at this point I’m trying to locate in my own terms the mysterious nexus between the aesthetic and the energetic domains of music. I sing in a harmonic men’s choir here… Overtoning, the nasal sounds of Tuvan music as in the Jew’s harp, Igil, etc. Again, shamanic work—oddly, it seems the helping spirits are most suitably, practically, called in with overtones and nasal sonorities! Practical psycho-spiritual music making, at least in that traditional society…

CJ: There are plenty of developing European composers who collapse early under the sheer weight of the histories we have discussed, let alone strive to marry them to ancient roots—simultaneously the new opening path. May your back prove sturdy, and the flame of your will bright enough for the task. You articulate the heart of our matter, however we individually tread the path of manifestation.

Aug – Oct 2002