Resistance and Reflection Richard Barrett in the 21st Century - Arnold Whittall [the Musical Times,...

Resistance and Reflection: Richard Barrett in the 21st CenturyAuthor(s): Arnold WhittallSource: The Musical Times, Vol. 146, No. 1892 (Autumn, 2005), pp. 57-70Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30044106 .Accessed: 10/07/2014 08:18

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ARNOLD WHITTALL

i. Michael Tippett: Those twentieth century blues (London: Hutchinson, 1991), pp.48-49. For background on Tippett's engagement with Marx and Trotsky, see Ian Kemp: Tippett: the composer and his music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp.25-39 and 325-26.

2. For recent thinking on the subject, see David Clarke: 'Editorial', Twentieth-Century Music 1/2 (September 2004 [published May 2005]), pp. 15-59, and the essays by Karen Painter and Anne Shreffler in Music and the aesthetics of modernity, edd. Karol Berger & Anthony Newcomb (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp.165-2o00 and 217-45.

3. Michael Nyman: Experimental music: Cage and beyond (2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp.170-71. For a more recent perspective on Cardew, including a critique of 'Soon', see Timothy D. Taylor: 'Moving in decency: the music and radical politics of Cornelius Cardew', in Music & Letters 79/4 (November 1998), pp-555-76.

Resistance and reflection: Richard Barrett in

the 21St century

As capitalism becomes frantic in its efforts to survive, only the armaments industry flou- rishes. Are we not fools to let ourselves be so misused? [...] If the murderous weapons of war are to be forced once again into our hands, what are we going to do with them; where is the real enemy?

So ENDS the Foreword to Michael Tippett's 'agit-prop play' War ramp, 'which was performed in various Labour Party premises in or near London during 1935'. As Tippett put it in his autobiography, written

many years later, 'during this period I was moving towards a major artistic statement of all that I felt about the state of the world. War Ramp was one attempt in this direction, but an unsatisfactory one': 'looking back at Handel's Messiah and the Bach Passions [...] led me to realise that if I could not make my big statement work effectively in the actual theatre, I could do so in a dramatic piece for the concert hall." A child of our time was the result, and (as will emerge later) not everyone agrees that it effectively confronts a 'political problem', not least because musical, aesthetic elements tend to suf- fuse the political with that strangely positive aura that pertains to all but the least successful art-works.

The dilemma of how best to relate musical expression to political conviction persists.2 Back in the 1970os those 'addressing themselves with great determination to evolving a function for themselves as musicians and a music which will "serve the struggle of the people" ' could be brought under the aesthetic umbrella of experimentalism, in 'an attempt to resolve [...] "the crippling contradiction in modern bourgeois art", namely that "those artists who have achieved a revolution within their individual artistic lan- guages have rendered their own efforts a useless nonsense, because of their works' total lack of revolutionary content".' Having used these comments by Alan Brett, an associate of Cornelius Cardew, Michael Nyman ended his Experimental music (1974) by quoting 'Soon', a 'community' song in F major inspired by Mao Tsetung which indicates the extent of Cardew's progression away from the mainstream avant-gardism of his earlier years.3

Thirteen years on from Nyman's comments, Richard Barrett took up the theme in the conclusions of his striking and still relevant essay on Cardew.

If working-class people are not in a position of awareness to accept any music in the service of socialism except the inevitable patronage offered by composers like the later Cardew, working in a deliberately simplified and banal idiom, then this is the fault of the processes

THE MUSICAL TIMES Autumn 2005 57


58 Resistance and reflection: Richard Barrett in the 2st century

4. Richard Barrett: 'Cornelius Cardew', in New Music 8y, edd. Michael Finnissy & Roger Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp.32, 31. 5. Louis Andriessen: The art of stealing time, ed. Mirjam Zegers, trans. Clare Yates (Todmorden, Lancs.: Arc Music, 2002), p.74. See also Robert Adlington: 'Louis Andriessen, Hanns Eisler, and the Lehrstiick', in The Journal of Musicology 21/3 (2005), pp.381-417. For more on 'the dilemma of how to make new art - particularly music - from within the traditions of high art without alienating the mass of fellow citizens', see Leon Botstein: 'Listening to Shostakovich', in Shostakovich and his world, ed. Laurel E. Fay (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp.355-84 (this quotation, p.373). 6. Gordon Downie: 'Aesthetic necrophilia: reification, new music, and the commodification of affectivity', in Perspectives of New Music 42/2 (2004), pp.264-75.

7. Richard Barrett: 'Tracts for our times?', in The Musical Times (Autumn 1998), p.23. The quotation in the next paragraph continues from this one.

of exploitation and stultification dealt out by the ruling classes to serve their interests. It is not good enough to assume that people who are expected to make rational and informed political decisions are at the same time incapable of being rational and informed about the culture of their projected society. It is unfortunate that most people are not in a position to come into contact, let alone sympathize, with radical musical ideas.

This follows closely on the claim that 'the politicization of music must be re- thought, the solution lying in integrating with the working class rather than either cheering it on from the sidelines or lecturing it from above, however much one may thus cut oneself off from existing modes of dissemination': and Barrett declares, 'the idea that music somehow stands outside the realities of the class system is an illusion; therefore the style of an engaged socialistic music should be one which is accessible, here and now, to the working people.' Then comes the crucial question: 'but what style is that?'4

The answer (not advocated by Barrett) that 'revolutionary content' is not merely consistent with, but positively requires a late-Cardew kind of acces- sibility, is part of the Lehrstiick tradition, extending from Hanns Eisler and others early in the 20th century to, most obviously, Louis Andriessen - at least before the abrasiveness of works like De staat gave way to the aim of making 'beautiful pieces which can console people ': and it is possible to trace a clear distinction between responses which regard the political relevance of such works as authentic and responses which, at their most extreme, general- ise dismissively about 'aesthetic necrophilia' and 'the commodification of affectivity'. In this reading, only the 'constructionism' of total organisation (as essayed briefly in Europe by Boulez and others around 1950) adequately resists 'arbitrary power': and this kind of music therefore remains the only path to salvation, the only adequate vehicle for appropriately political, revolutionary content.6

In 1998 The Musical Times published an article in the form of an interview by Richard Barrett which included the following perspective on modernism. As far as I am concerned, the 'modernist project' is still in its early stages, at the beginning of what Konrad Boehmer (paraphrasing Monteverdi) has referred to as the 'terza prattica', crucially informed by what is becoming an 'age of digital reproduction', beginning from the invention of electricity, in the same way as modal music has its roots in the human voice and tonal music in instruments. It is far too early to speculate meaningfully on what the implications of this may end up being. Nevertheless we ignore it at our peril.7

Those who hold different views about the ways in which the evolution of music should be historically interpreted might find 'peril' a rather strong word. Can failing to respond actively to a contemporary issue in the arts really be so momentous? For Barrett, who belongs to a tradition of artistic enact- ment with roots in drama extending from the ancient Greeks to Edward Bond, pursuing the modernist project means resisting the evaporation of meaning, significance and process which often appears to be the defining characteristic of contemporary art, indeed is actually celebrated in the rhetoric


8. Christopher Norris: 'Marxism', in New Grove, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 2001), vol.I6, p.20, col. I.

9. Richard Taruskin: 'The poietic fallacy', in The Musical Times (Spring 2004), p.10. Further page references in text. See also Taruskin's Oxford history of western music, vol.2: the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp.13-14. io. Michael Graubart: 'Fallacies and confusions', in The Musical Times (Autumn 2004), p.23.

of postmodernism. It does not mean scouring the cultural past for attractive, amusing and above all 'accessible' trouvailles, or retreating from reality into mysticism. It does not mean rediscovering tonality as if one would 'rediscover' that the earth is in fact flat or that the sub- conscious does not exist or that mass and energy are not 'interconvertible' or that 'the Lord upholdeth all that fall and raiseth up all those that be bowed down'. It means abandoning all affirmation save that the work of art exists, as a token of thepossibility of human dignity.

The fervency with which the rejection of affirmation is affirmed here sets up an intriguing tension with the kind of Marxist aesthetics which Christ- opher Norris associates primarily with Adorno, and connects with a view of art - Schoenberg, Berg and Beckett are instanced - that holds out 'against the lure of a false utopia by expressing without compromise the harshness and alienation of contemporary life'.8 For readers beginning to contemplate the history of Western music according to Richard Taruskin, it might be even more useful to underline just how completely Barrett's words contradict the attempt to claim that modernism is a primary example of 'the poietic fallacy: the conviction that what matters most (or more strongly yet, all that matters) in a work of art is the making of it, the maker's input'.9 At its simplest, Taruskin's view of history requires eager acquiescence in this basic 'either/ or': the maker's input doesn't matter, the consumer's response does. As he elaborates the point: 'ever since the middle of the i9th century, the idea that one is honour-bound to serve the impersonal aims of history and the need for art to evolve has been one of the most powerful motivating forces, and one of the most exigent criteria of value, among composers and critics' (p.20). And one of the most extreme results of this way of thinking, the emanci- pation of the dissonance, has been to erode the kind of audible distinctions 'that make musical meaning esthetically available to all' (p.29).

Taruskin's recipe for 'a view of "serious" music' that turns aside from the poietic fallacy and, once again, 'takes adequate account of its function as a communicative medium' (p.34) appears not to require the final solution of an elimination of atonality and serialism, a re-enslaving of the dissonance. Yet he clearly doubts whether contemporary (late-modernist) pluralism is enough to ensure that 'music [...] may once again - perhaps, eventually - become one of the arts that matter' (p.34). 'Matter', that is, to more people than is currently the case? Michael Graubart, in his response to Taruskin, was pre- pared to concede that, even if the attempt to align the poietic fallacy with idealistic organicism in Schoenbergian composition is misguided, the second arrow in Taruskin's quiver, the 'historicist fallacy' hits its target. This, Grau- bart comments, refers to 'the idea that music must continually develop on- ward and upward and that the value of a composer's work is to be judged by the development in style that he has engendered'.0 On the face of it, this is not totally distinct from the kind of development proposed by Barrett in 1998. But would such a development - if it actually happened - ensure that



60 Resistance and reflection: Richard Barrett in the 2st century

II.Published in the BBC Barbican Hall programme for ii February 2005.

12. Ivan Hewett: Music: healing the rift (New York & London: Continuum, 2003), p.i65. Unless otherwise indicated, further quotations are from the same page. See also Hewett: 'Fail worse; fail better', in The Musical Times (March 1994), PP.148-53. i3. See especially 'True authority: Janacek, Schoenberg and us', in Reviving the muse: essays on music after modernism, ed. Peter Davison (Brinkworth, Wilts.: Claridge Press, 2001), pp.7-30.

musical meaning is no longer 'esthetically available to all'? Why should it be assumed that the meanings generated by the 'terza prattica' should corre- spond, technically, to those of its modal and tonal predecessors?

If a composer's social, political and aesthetic perspectives have 'the possibility of human dignity' at their centre, this need not render the possibility of uplifting individual listeners - a kind of positive alienation - an unrealistic prospect. Barrett writes of his recent orchestral work NO (resistance and vision Part z) that it involves 'music which offers firstly resistance to the insidious penetration of corporate values and, therefore, "dumb- ing down" into all aspects of culture; and secondly a vision of how music (and, by extension, its social context) could possibly be otherwise'." Similar values appear in his 1998 declaration that my compositions are as simple as they can possibly be. I am constantly trying to find ways of making them simpler without losing that sense of desire which motivates them, without competely losing the truth they are attempting (though I dare say largely unsuccessfully) to apprehend and express. I think of music as 'internal realism'. Is there any evidence that the human mind is any more rectilinear, any more simple, than the world it tries to grasp? (Barrett 1998, p.23: see note 7).

THE DIFFERENCE between Barrett's angle on the human mind and Taruskin's is extreme, and although Taruskin seems not to have en- countered Barrett's work, Ivan Hewett gives an indication of what a

Taruskin response to Barrett might be like. In a Musical Times article (1994), then in a book (2003), Hewett anatomises a music which 'tries to achieve what Samuel Beckett (Barrett's intellectual mentor) achieves in literature; namely to strip away all the comforting illusions of existence, and reveal that, when thus reduced to its "essence", the human personality is nothing more than an impotent echoing hollowness."' Nothing very dignified about that, and Hewett piles on the negatives with the image that Barrett's music 'fights against an inevitable downward trajectory towards extinction by vain little acts of memory and splenetic self-assertion' - alluding, no doubt, to the brief glimpses of Schubert in Vanity and of Beethoven in Tract.

Hewett accepts that 'there is a political dimension to Barrett's music, which seems to be as much an attack on "bourgeois" complacency as it is a comment on a more general human condition.' There are affinities here with Roger Scruton's celebration of bourgeois aesthetic values,'3 and the associated argument that the principal problem with a Barrett-style 'attack' is its apparent rejection of 'Utopian' ideals. Writing about Helmut Lachenmann's opera, Das Miidchen mit den Schwefelhiolern, Hewett declares that 'the Utopian hopes of this aestheticized Marxism are so tremulous, so full of mute pathos, that they often seem more like hopelessness - when they don't tip over into outright nihilism, as they do in the case of Barrett, whose music seems a


i4. 'Contemporary German composers', in Tempo 231 (January 2005), p.67. 15. See Richard Toop's notes with Etcetera CD KTCII67 (I993). i6. Julian Johnson: Who needs classical music?: cultural choice and critical value (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p.90.

perfect illustration of the Psalmist's line: "Hope long deferred maketh the heart sick"' (p.I67).

Hewett may be right to argue that Lachenmann 'risks alienating listeners for whom his music seems to disdain the poetic or aesthetic'. Yet it is precisely because such risks are worth taking that Hewett's attempt to associate the opera with 'aestheticized Marxism' and 'outright nihilism' do not convince. My own conclusion, that this is 'an opera of majestically arctic bleakness, cal- culated to challenge and shame the era of commodity worship and global warming','4 aims to avoid confusing bleakness with nihilism, which would strictly speaking not concern itself at all with constructive reactions to the 'fantasy-transcendence' of Hans Christian Andersen's declaration that the little match-girl and her grandmother 'were with God', something which Lachenmann manages to expose in all its 'damaging emptiness'.

Similarly, when Barrett uses the title of a painting by Roberto Matta, 'ne songe plus a fuir' ('dream no more of fleeing'), which can be felt 'to depict a dark, troubled atmosphere within which anthropomorphic figures are immersed in attitudes of desperation, imprisonment and oppression, surely influenced by the often brutal recent history of the artist's home country (Chile)',5 he can hardly be accused of indifference to matters affecting the role of art in the modern world. Rather, it is very much the opposite case of a kind of utopian idealism which is generated by convictions about the need for artists to respond without compromise to fundamental matters affecting politics and society. Only if 'nihilism' is interpreted in a post-Nietzschean way as embodying 'utopian' aspirations to change the world (by implication: for the better) is the label worth using. So Julian Johnson's ringing declaration - 'art is fundamentally utopian: it embodies the human hope that the world and we who inhabit it might be remade. As such it is critical of the here and now even as it redeems it"'6- is surely echoed in Barrett's thinking when he writes of NO that 'this music is composed "against" the orchestra rather than "for" it, although at the same time it is intended to be composed "for" the meaningful participation of musically-engaged people in a large group, which, whether this particular music even begins to achieve its objectives or not, is what an orchestra should surely be.' Idealistic optimism could scarcely be more palpable than when Barrett says (in an unpublished interview) that 'I'm trying to make the kind of music I would want to hear were I in the audi- ence, and I don't regard myself as somehow on a higher plane of existence than the people listening': and his rejection of cynicism is unambiguously evident in the claim that 'I'm much more optimistic about humanity than many people who write happy music.'

Barrett has no hang-ups about giving listeners accounts of his compositions which describe the sequence of events in the kind of broad gestural and textural terms - 'sound forms' - that most listeners without the benefit

THE MUSICAL TIMES Autumn 2005 6I


62 Resistance and reflection: Richard Barrett in the 2zst century

17. The identification of repetitions is more significant than that of Ct: no other comment involving pitch identity ensues.

of long-term technical education can take or leave for all music - modal, tonal and post-tonal. Here is his commentary on NO.

NO can be divided into six main 'scenes'. The first consists of a six-times iterated sound- form on brass, woodwinds and percussion which becomes more internally differentiated as it expands in duration, with a high C sharp held by violin throughout."7 [...] The second expands downward in register from the high violins to an 'impossibly' complex string texture, which is then heard again, this time layer by layer, alternating with a sequence of harmonically static 'choral' events as its timbres gradually mutate. The third scene (beginning with an irruption from the percussion) generalises this alternation into a fragmented and interwoven form where the orchestra is divided into seven heterogeneous groups of between four and 25 instruments. The fourth, longest and 'slowest', focuses on unfolding further the melodic thread which began with the high violins of the opening. The fifth builds up a canonic structure, which eventually collapses into the sixth, itself a continuation of the series of outbursts in the first, this time disintegrating into a 'pointillism' of noises.

Despite the profusion of scare-quotes aimed to point up the ambiguity or incompleteness of the allusions or definitions provided, this note identifies a succession of audible characteristics - continuations, varied repetitions, con- nections, references back - primarily in terms of texture and tone colour, and Barrett's assumptions about the listener's technical expertise don't advance beyond a generic reference to canon. Moreover, he leaves listeners with the option of contemplating how such a scheme works as a 'response' to the situation mentioned at the start of the BBC note: that NO has something to do with a view of the Iraq war as an act of terrorism perpetuated by 'the US government and its allies'.

AT THE SAME TIME, the dedication of NO to the English-born writer Edward Bond, rather than, say, 'to the innocent victims of terrorism

in all its forms', suggests cultural as well as political perspectives that extend beyond and behind the immediate issue of an unjust war begun in 2003. As Barrett puts it in the unpublished interview, 'I'm asking: what is a socialist artist to do? and trying to frame that question in musical terms', given that 'we can learn a lot from the political art of the early- and mid- twentieth century, which tried to answer it and ended up wasting too much time and energy on a concept of "relevance" inherited from the systems of thought they wanted to escape from'. In the same interview, Barrett says of NO that 'my objective is total imaginative freedom and total structural con- nectedness at the same time, that is, nothing happens which isn't part of the overarching network of formal relationships, but at the same time a situation is created in which "anything can happen".' Sensing the possible challenge to perception of such a framing formula, Barrett then provides a question 'for the imaginative listener'. 'Does something like NO cohere at all? Does it cohere too much and become a string of structural platitudes?' As if in answer, he then discloses more technical generalities about the piece, in


I8. Andrew Dell'Antonio: 'Introduction', in Beyond structural listening?. post- modern modes of hearing, ed. Andrew dell'Antonio (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press, 2004), p.ii.

relation both to a 'serial' pitch substructure and to a symmetrical tempo- structure - of which one hears the result rather than the processes themselves. This audible realisation is a function of 'clear formal subdivisions' which are 'a symptom of the work's expressive identity, with what could be seen as an increasingly desperate attempt to give a voice, and thus a structural syntax, to an inarticulate sense of urgency. The music isn't trying to find peace, or closure, or resolution, it's trying to find an expression of non- acceptance, of refusal. Hence those structural convulsions.'

The point here is that those 'structural convulsions', and the expressive factors which create them, are audible, while the 'structural syntax' is not. But Barrett is hardly the first composer whose music takes audiences 'beyond structural listening', accessing a world in which 'incoherence, discontinuity, situatedness, alienation, and subjectivity' are 'features of the listening experience - but perhaps', as Andrew dell'Antonio suggests, 'these features can be seen as "structural" after all?'"8 Another of Barrett's recently completed compositions, intended as part of the on-going resistance and vision project, the nine-minute Lost (2004) for piano, also offers a structure in which the results of a dialogue between basic systematics and expressive spontaneity can be heard. Barrett's initial comment that 'one way of describing this music might be as a labyrinth with transparent walls' focuses the dialectical elements, and the challenge to the listener: 'its structural interconnections are indeed quite convoluted and its sound-texture diaphanous, but this latter quality isn't necessarily as much help in "finding one's way" as it might appear to be.' Diaphanousness is most explicit in material resulting from 'a systematic generative procedure where the pitches of a quasi-serial sequence in the left hand form the "fundamentals" for a constant permutation in the right hand of the first eight even-numbered "natural" harmonics, to produce a stream of mostly wide and more or less consonant dyads'.

Those dyads take their place within a wide range of contrasting textural 'states', ranging from staccato monophony to smoothly intricate polyphony, and from relatively stable successions of 'rational' rhythmic patterns to hyper-elaborate, 'irrational' projections against the basic = 66 tempo. But it's the convolution which enables the labyrinth to exercise its proper function of anxiety-creating disorientation in the traveller/listener: 'this centre however has become "lost" within a proliferating network of interpolations, extrapolations, interruptions and so on, while at the same time defining the particular "introverted" quality of the whole piece'- a quality most palpable in its predominantly but not exclusively soft dynamic levels. Ex. i shows the final three systems of Lost, in which the conclusive dyadic 'progression' from rhythmic complexity to simplicity takes place.

Although Barrett's music tends to avoid explicit allusions to the com- fortingly familiar sign language of generic, rhetorical archetypes with long




Ex.I: Richard Barrett: Lost, ending (Reproduced by kind permission of United Music Publishers Ltd)

histories, the various literary and pictorial associations he acknowledges help to establish the kind of paradoxical expressive aura found by Robin Freeman in Earth for trombone and percussion (1987-88): 'full of humour, in spite of its evident pathos, infectiously black and utterly typical of its composer'.'9 Expressing admiration in such terms might lead on to claims that Barrett is


19. Robin Freeman: 'Richard Barrett, compositeur maudit manque', in Tempo 190 (September '994), P-43. It is also possible that a view of narrative in terms of fundamental dramatic archetypes would provide an effective context for the interpretation of meaning in NO and Lost. See Byron Almen: 'Narrative archetypes: a critique, theory and method of narrative analysis', in Journal of Music Theory 47/I (Spring 2003 [published Spring 2005]), pp. I-39.

20. This paragraph refers to my discussion in 'Problems of reference: celebrating 2004', in The Musical Times (Autumn 2004), pp.25-39. See Adorno's 'The aging of the new music' in Essays on music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press, 2002), pp.i8i-202.

21. Opera (February 2003), p.2I5.

22. Patricia Hern, commentary in Edward Bond: Lear (Methuen: London 1994), p.xi. Further page references in text.

one of the few contemporary composers to keep faith with Adorno's requirements for a new music that is not 'ageing', a music which avoids 'an affirmative sound' and creates 'something actually distressing and confused', resisting 'stabilization' and expressing rather than suppressing the 'anxiety that gave shape to its great founding works'. Adorno also claimed, in 1955, that 'what is needed is for expression to win back the density of experience, as was already tried during the expressionist period, though without being satisfied with parading the cult of inhumanity under the guise of the cult of humanity.' For Adorno, the only authentic artworks worthy of the world after the Holocaust 'are those that in their inner organization measure themselves by the fullest experience of horror'.2

HEARING PATHOS (and black humour) rather than nihilism in Barrett is to allow for the possibility that he matches (if only in part) these stringent requirements. This is not to argue that music less radically

'new' than allowed for by Adorno cannot legitimately engage with the hor- rors of Auschwitz, 9/11, the Iraq War or the 2004 tsunami. But the critical consensus seems to be that the result will be legitimate only if the musical idiom involved is not, to quote Hugh Canning's comments on Nicholas Maw's opera Sophie's choice (2002), 'too cosy and comfortable for the subject'.2" Critical discomfort with Sophie's choice was as much the result of un- ease about the use of Styron's novelistic attempt to confront 'the fullest experience of horror' - Canning viewed the novel as 'a fairly sordid (even miso- gynist) bonkbuster' - as of the style and duration of Maw's opera. But did the music totally fail to evoke the spirit of Beckett or Bond - that is, of tragedy, with a cruel, savage, bitter rather than enobling aura, or make it im- possible for audiences to respond as they are expected to in Bond's 'epic/ rational theatre' - with 'a movement from angry recognition of the injustices and irrationalities still brutalising society, towards a belief in man's ability painfully to push aside the dead weight of a decadent system and live rationally, with dignity and humanity, in a socialist world'?22

Where Sophie's choice is closer to the operatic world of Puccini or Britten than to Nono or Lachenmann is in its refusal of stylisation and instruction. In Bond, by contrast, 'idea, expression, reaction: the pattern is didactic. Bond requires the theatre to teach truths which he feels cannot be taught through the traditional institutions of state, school and church, since these are crip- pled and corrupted by capitalism and the bourgeoisie, defenders of the status quo'. And what goes for theatre applies, as Bond sees it, to art in general. 'Art [...] is not to be seen as an ornamental and essentially frivolous retreat from the soul-destroying business of living, nor as an elaborate, self-justifying distraction for aesthetes and intellectuals, nor as a complacent celebration of contemporary civilisation' (Hern, p.xii): and - despite the dogmatic tone of




such assertions - for Bond himself this appears not to entail a dour, sermon- ising, kill-joy aesthetic stance. 'Art is always optimistic and rational - in this way: it makes the present relationship between people easier to understand, by destroying cloaks of sentimentality, hypocrisy and myth, and it makes the potential rationality of these relationships more certain. It does this partly through its choice of subject - but the important thing is the integrity of its objectivity' (Hern, p.xii).

Those comments occur in a programme note for one of Bond's collabo- rations with Hans Werner Henze, We come to the river (1976), an opera whose music - for those who remember it - might seem to have risked the ephe- meral aestheticisation of political, revolutionary aspirations - the failings Hewett finds in Lachenmann. The ease with which Henze's opera was digested and forgotten by non-socialist establishments might nevertheless be ascribed to a degree of naivety in the sheer directness with which its ideology was exposed. Another recent allusion to political naivety can be found in Christopher Fox's claims about Tippett's A child of our time: the work may have been inspired by the escalating antisemitism of the mid-i93os but Tippett's libretto refuses to confront this as a political problem, choosing instead to render it in terms of Jungian individualism. Lacking an intrinsic need for collective expression A child of our time has to invoke the legacy of the quite different struggle of Afro-American people to supply the missing ingredient.23

All this is questionable. Tippett's work was indeed 'inspired' by pre-war antisemitism: yet its subject was not the political consequences of that particular form of ideologically-motivated violence, but the futility of an- swering violence with violence, and the need to understand the individual (but socially-rooted) psychological motivations for such socially significant acts as Herschel Grynzpan's. If the St Matthew Passion 'works' through placing the crucifixion of Christ in the frame of Christianity's subsequent 'reception' and ritualised interpretation of that event, Tippett's naivety might have been aesthetic rather than political - to behave as if the events around which his work was to be based should be accorded comparable significance to the events recounted in St Matthew's Gospel. Fox asserts that commentators on music should be willing 'to analyse the political significance of composers' musical decisions' and also aspire 'to read works as ideological constructions within their historical context'. It's probable, however, that the second task is a good deal easier to perform effectively than the first.

No contemporary composer has made more transparent reference of the 23. Christopher Fox: review Bach Passion model than John Adams. This has been used to explain the ab- of The Cambridge history of sence of Nixon in China-like naturalism in The death of Klinghoffer (1989- twentieth-century music, in The Musical Times (Spring 91), a work in which 'reflection dominates, in the sense both of meditation 2005), p.95. and remembrance' and whose 'oracular and metaphysical' choruses have


24. See booklet notes by Michael P. Steinberg with Elektra Nonesuch CD recording 7559-79281-2 (1992). 25. David Schiff: 'Memory spaces', booklet notes with recording of On the transmigration of souls, Nonesuch 7559-79816-2 (2004). On The death of Klinghoffer, see also Richard Taruskin: The Oxford history of western music, 5: the late twentieth century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp.522-23. Taruskin believes that Steve Reich's Different trains 'is almost unique among artistic memorials to the Holocaust in its successful avoidance of pomposity and false comfort' (p.503).

been explicitly compared with those in A child of our time. Perhaps because, according to Michael Steinberg, the work was begun 'when the United States was lavishly supporting Saddam Hussein' and completed 'while we were dropping "smart bombs" down Baghdad ventilator shafts',24 its degree of apparent sympathy with Arab, Palestinian causes has been read as antisemitic. (For one later commentator, 'the opera's Palestinians appear to be noble victims, its Jews seem to have stepped out of an episode of Seinfeld.'25) Nevertheless, it was Adams who was turned to for an 'official' musical response to 9/ I - On the transmigration of souls (2002) - and David Schiff has written of Adams's success in 'redefining the relation of music to non-music and of the concert hall to everyday life'. With the Ivesian example of 'creating imaginary utopian venues, usually by layering different sounds' in mind, Adams's 'sound-over-sound texture connects [...] to the mass media', and is therefore 'more successfully populist' than Ives, though 'without sounding in any way like popular music'. Schiff's conclusion is that 'Adams breaks down the divide between the high-bourgeois culture that created orchestras like the New York Philharmonic (and the repertory they play) in the nineteenth century and the mass culture that took its place in the twentieth. He has created a music that mirrors and exalts the public wisdom.'

Many awkward questions arise from such a judgement: how, and by whom, is 'the public wisdom' to be definitively established, and who can de- termine the ways in which music 'mirrors' that 'wisdom'? Is Adams's ability to identify with broad currents of feeling so different from Carl Orff's in 1930s Germany? One might also dispute the sweeping claim that mass culture replaced high-bourgeois culture in the 20th century, as well as debating whether the work's 'careful, therapeutic course from the secular to the sac- red, leading to a vision of redemption', and its answer to Ives's famously unanswered question in the form of loud repetitions of words like 'love' and 'light' make (or were intended to make) quite the affirmative impact, in com- parison with the moments of orchestral 'anguish', that Schiff's rhetoric requires them to make. In other words, for Schiff's interpretation to work, On the transmigration of souls must be seen as embodying a glib, Larkin-like optimism ('what will survive of us is love'), and to embody, rather than question, the kind of 'affirmation' whose abandonment is, for Barrett, the key to art's ability to function as 'a token of thepossibility of human dignity'.

Like Adams, Tippett might have met one of Bond's criteria for politically- viable art - 'optimism' - while being less sanguine about the other, rationality. With Barrett, too, it is by no means clear that the wholesale rejection of metaphysics is involved, or any determined resistance to a 'vision' extending beyond music in society into the realms of utopian transcendence, even if at the same time he has some sympathy with the Nietzschean claim that modern art should seek to solve 'the problem of transcendence' by




26. See Matthew Rampley: Niettsche, aesthetics and modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.I22. 27. Johnson: Who needs classical music?, p.I28 (see n.I4).

28. Raymond Geuss: 'Berg and Adorno', in The Cambridge companion to Berg, ed. Anthony Pople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), PP.43, 47.

29. See the composer's notes with Naxos CD 8.557937 (2005), and also Rodney Lister: 'Peter Maxwell Davies's "Naxos" Quartets', in Tempo 232 (April 2005), pp.2-i2.

30. Stephen Pruslin: 'Second Taverner Fantasia', in Tempo 73 (Summer 1965), reprinted in Peter Maxwell Davies: studies from two decades (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1979), P.27.

abandoning certainty for ambiguity.26 For that matter, is transcendence a problem that needs to be solved? As Julian Johnson argues, music-as-art shapes our perception of the world, not by pretending to speak of the real world but by its construction of imaginary others. It sheds light on our present reality precisely by being conspicuously different from it. [...] Art transforms reality in order to keep alive the possibility that it might be otherwise, and thus art is an agent of social critique and of individual transcendence.27

It is indeed difficult to imagine how any composer who lives in the 'real' world can indulge in facile optimism about the possibility of integration in, or reconciliation with a society in which mass culture defines itself in op- position to 'high-bourgeois' values. Following Adorno, Raymond Geuss has written that 'the basic sadness of Berg's music shows that he is not "re- conciled"; his "resignation" is that of a person who makes utopian demands on life and sees them eternally unsatisfied, but does not give them up.' At the same time, however, as Geuss notes, art is 'by its very nature [...] affirmative. The very fact that an internally coherent, aesthetically satisfying work has been produced tends to promote reconciliation with the world.'28 Yet, just as music has moved on from Berg, so claims about affirmation and reconciliation remain to be contested, especially for a composer like Barrett who seems unable to find much consolation in the world of nature - still less to find it, as Maxwell Davies does, even when nature as a force for consolation is itself under threat.

AS IT HAPPENS, Maxwell Davies's Third Naxos Quartet, composed in March and April 2003, shares with NO the external context of being

affected by the invasion of Iraq, an event of which the composer has spoken with unrestrained bitterness. Thus, although his characteristically conflicted music could without further cues be associated just as easily with the disorientation of the serious artist in (mass-culture dominated) society or the dangers of mistreating the natural environment, the composer's notes direct listeners as explicitly as Barrett's to the Anglo-American perfidy. In Davies's case the crux is a sermon of reproach to the indifferent, complaisant majority, and he ends the work with a hidden setting of Michelangelo's lines: 'while damage and shame persist/it is my great fortune to neither see nor hear/so please do not disturb me, and speak quietly.'29 Here, perhaps, we have the kind of irony defined long ago by Stephen Pruslin when discussing the appeal of Mahler to Maxwell Davies: an irony 'not in the sense of its modern misuse as "cynicism" but in its original meaning of a sense of contradiction which is implicitly tragic'.30 There is a similar spirit at the end of the quartet's abrasive third movement, 'Three Inventions and a Hymn', where the concluding hymn is marked 'stucchevole'- 'nauseating'.

The sickening hymn is the kind of explicit generic deconstruction which


31. Preface (2000) to UMP Barrett catalogue.

Barrett shuns. For him 'scouring the cultural past for attractive, amusing and above all "accessible" trouvailles' is to be complicit in the evaporation of meaning rather than to reinforce and renew it. It can therefore be predicted that his plans for the other parts of resistance and vision, as a music-theatre project, will not involve explicit parody, still less the 'populist' fusions of Adams. Yet that does not mean that he necessarily has no time for a 'music that mirrors and exalts the public wisdom', if 'wisdom' relates not so much to a preference for low-art entertainment, or even to Adams-style 'fusion', as to the long-cherished ideal of an innate and inherent 'human dignity'. Barrett had Prometheus bound (as well as Mahler's Seventh Symphony) in mind during the composition of NO, and the result is music in which a Bond-like, ideologically-motivated optimism and rationality does not seek to escape confrontation with their dark and disturbing opposites. But acknowledging these perspectives is itself more rational than negative. As the Barrett per- former Carl Rosman has wisely observed, 'it may give rise to a statement that is all the more affirmative for refusing to accept blindly a conventional range of illusions'.3' All in all, it's a good time to agree that, not only does Barrett not serve imperialism, but his music is far from inaccessible to listeners, once appropriate signals are recognised. It is not, of course, as accessible to non- specialist performers as much modal, tonal or other post-tonal music. But in 'the age of digital reproduction', where the new new music is most at home, even that is not a reason for calling down anathemas. We ignore it at our peril.

Arnold Whittall's books include Musical composition in the twentieth century (OUP, z999) and Exploring twentieth-century music: tradition and inno- vation (CUP, 2003).



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Issue Table of ContentsThe Musical Times, Vol. 146, No. 1892 (Autumn, 2005), pp. 1-120Front MatterLetters [pp. 2-3]In Memoriam [p. 3-3]Berg's Sketches and the Inception of Wozzeck: 1914-18 [pp. 5-24]Elgar and Academicism 2: Practice Beyond Theory [pp. 25-41]Pocahontas in the Alps: Masonic Traces in the Stage Works of Franz Christoph Neubauer [pp. 43-56]Resistance and Reflection: Richard Barrett in the 21st Century [pp. 57-70]Playing the 'great game'?: Maxwell Davies, Sonata Form, and the Naxos Quartet No.1 [pp. 71-81]Shakespeariana in a Thomas Weelkes Dedication from 1600 [pp. 83-91]Book ReviewsReview: Native & Colonial [pp. 93-97]Review: Recalled to Life [pp. 98-100]Review: Don's Delights [pp. 100-102]Review: Third Way [pp. 102-104]Review: Problems & Perfections [pp. 104-105]Review: Beyond the Enchanted Realm [pp. 106-108]Review: Beyond the Baroque [pp. 108-110]

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