Alt-Classical Riposte

I’m afraid that Brian Sacawa’s blog post on the “alt-classical” movement – and let me say that that moniker does make me bristle, smacking as it does of hipsterrunoff snark – seems somewhat myopic and reductive, particularly read in conjunction with Matt Marks’ comment on the same subject.

Brief recap of story to date: In response to Sacawa’s exploration of whether or not the alt-classical scene– in which composers of new music draw liberally from contemporary pop sources (harmonically, rhythmically, texturally, otherwise)—is a passing trend, Marks suggests that in fact, this movement away from “uncompromising” sonic landscapes is actually a welcome unshackling of new music from its long-held snooty academic dogma that shunned any hint of diatonicism.

Sacawa sets up a binary between alt-composers, whom he views as being of a generation comfortable with the incorporation of pop music into their scores, and the cat-bearing Wuorinens of the world, whose “Who Cares if They Listen” philosophy was borne out of the self-ghettoizing attitude that pervaded and continues to pervade certain classical music institutions, both academic and otherwise. And while he acknowledges that pop-influenced “classical” music (are these descriptors ridiculous or what?) is nothing new, citing Bang-on-a-Can and minimalism as predecessors, he attempts to tie the current movement to a changing of the guard at universities, suggesting that the new pedagogy offers a more laissez faire approach to concert vocabularies.

But I’m afraid that something is being lost in this discussion. To my ears, pop music has ALWAYS been a crucial element in art music, from the Quodlibet of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, built almost exclusively on two popular tunes of its time, to the ethnomusicological efforts of Bartok which saw Magyar and Hungarian folk tunes incorporated and transformed into any number of scores. The vernacular can be traced through the work of nearly every canonic composer from Bach to Bartok, and for good reason: if music, following Adorno, holds up the mirror to society and transforms it, then naturally part of that societal landscape includes vernacular sounds. What has changed, or been lost, is the craft with which vernacular sounds are introduced into the concert realm.

The dark time that followed WWII (I chose Bartok as one of the bounding composers for a reason, his death coming just months after D-day) was, I trust, a blip on the radar that tracks the conversation between concert and vernacular forms, a blip whose genesis is worthy of its own essay, and has probably been written about sufficiently by now. Suffice it to say that between World War II and the emergence of American minimalism, there was indeed a new attitude toward the vernacular which supposed that its inclusion in classical music was somehow déclassé. But with the emergence of American minimalism, and its various offshoots, that moment is gradually dissolving into memory. And thus we have this new alt-classical jam.

What concerns me is that whereas in the music of many of the dead white guy masters, wherein the incorporation of folk or pop music occurred in the form of an ecstatic and transcendent transformation, much of what’s being written in the post-minimalist or alt-classical downtown New York scene today seems to me to amount merely to quotation, music that simply borrows another text and plops it down in a new setting. This music is often pleasant to listen to, but ultimately thin, lacking proper architecture and thorough procedure.

Now I should state that there are more than a few examples of contemporary composers who are incorporating the vernacular into their work to great effect. The first who comes to mind is of course John Adams, whose career-long trajectory away from minimalism and toward a rich and deeply personal musical language is worth tracking in the broader context of this conversation. In Adams’ stunning pocket clarinet concerto Gnarly Buttons, strands of Americana, jazz, and pop float everywhere, yet he manipulates these gestures to the point where they have vanished before you have fully recognized that they were ever there. Like the molecular gastronomist pulverizing some familiar food and serving it to you in a test tube alongside a handful of other nearly unrecognizable ingredients, Adams knows how to trigger nostalgia without giving you something you’ve already tasted or heard.

Thomas Adès, too, despite being thought of in some circles as “uncompromising”, strikes me too as deeply connected to the vernacular. The oft-cited third movement of his first major orchestral effort, Asyla, contains a pulsing and disco-like four-on-the-floor bass drum motif amidst an otherwise chaotic and brilliantly complex landscape, letting us know that yes, Tom likes to go to da cluuh. I cannot tell you why the gesture is effective, but I know that it has something to do with its judicious use, and that its incorporation into an already rich sonic tapestry is such that, unlike a lot of the alt-classical music in question which asks simple poppy gestures to carry a great deal of weight, Tom’s bass drum is just one thread amongst many ideas and thrives accordingly.

It should be said that part of what makes Adams and Adès successful in this mode is that they are applying uncompromising procedure to vernacular music that they clearly love. When academics had a stranglehold over what was and was not acceptable vis a vis vocabulary in classical music, they were encouraging the marriage of, to put it crudely, uncompromising materials to uncompromising procedure. I have no doubt that the recasting of the vernacular by my peers into the concert realm is done out of a similar genuine love of this music we grew up with, but I wonder whether or not we have paid our dues in developing a craft that supports it sufficiently in the context of concert music.

The odd thing about the shift from pure minimalism to a post-minimalism that more explicitly quotes pop music is that as the music once again becomes more harmonically complex, the architecture and procedure seems to become shoddier. It is as though the engineer, looking at a simple but totally functional machine, attempts to add one more bell or whistle, and in so doing renders the machine clumsy and ineffective.

Ultimately, what I am proposing is this: I am, obviously, as a songwriter and composer, deeply wedded to the vernacular, and thus a champion of its incorporation into art music. But I do believe that many composers of my generation are procedurally lazy or even inept when it comes to the application of a certain kind of craft to the concert-transformation of our beloved pop music. If this movement is going to create lasting work—and it will— we must reinvest our energies in cultivating more rigorous procedures through which to put our raw materials.

Some, including John Adams, who has generously championed my music, have I believe speciously and cynically suggested that composers of my generation are writing overly accessible indie-alt-classical-whatever in an attempt to be marketable, to be heard, et cetera. My slightly different take on the matter is that these composers are quite sincere in their appropriation of familiar pop forms, but do not have the facility to transform their experience of those sounds into something transcendent. I challenge myself and my colleagues to go deeper, to create a new music that is of our time without being lazy or sloppily diatonic, to remain connected to the things we love while transforming them into something that transcends the source, rather than something that serves as pale imitation.