http://bsa-prose.blogspot.com/2010/11/lyrical-dissonance-sean-ali.html)
Opening the Gates:
A Response to Ali's "Lyrical Dissonance"
When reading one of my favorite creative writers (and musicians), Sean Ali, on "Lyrical Dissonance" I could not help but disagree with the reductive characterization of voices in the contemporary music world. Though in many ways one of the strongest critical pieces on the blog, it is so characteristic of a method here on the Bridge Blog that utilizes great associative freedom in its prose aesthetic, but clings to some awfully dogmatic archetypes in its structure and conception.
Ali leaves us with a rather staunch paradigm for understanding the current trends. First off, to classify things still in terms of dissonance vs. tonal, harmonic, pretty music is, I believe, quite dated, not only because the association of dissonance with the downtrodden has been blurred, if not shattered long ago, but because composers (in every medium) are no longer compelled to confront such a schism. There was for many years, in the middle of the twentieth century, a prevailing vogue in the classical conservatories that was prohibitive of the triad. They would laugh at you for a triad because the conservatories were concerned mainly with the practices of serialism. But that time has past.
Ali mistakenly associates the dissonance of serialism with the "Avant-Garde" while in fact no such association holds. Serialism as a school that grew out of modernism was from its inception formalist and traditionalist. It's techniques were quite explicit and it eschewed influences outside of itself. Most importantly it took a distinctly non-avant-garde stance towards the role of art within society (see Babbit, "Who Cares if They Listen") For our understanding of Avant-Garde let us stick to the Frankfurt School conception that unifies it with its social context: art that pushes boundaries. Perhaps this confusion in Ali's paradigm is attributable to his role as an improvising musician of a certain credo, which certainly embraces dissonance, but moreso as an element of chance (in a Cage-ian way) than any pre-supposed emancipation of the harsher intervals. In this, Ali's music,and my own work with him, Eliot Cardinaux and Flin VanHemen, (see myspace.com/sonic.chilidog) is most definitely Avant-Garde. Through its open approach to form and content it challenges notions of hierarchy as well as the very notion of value judgments, instead taking a subversively humanist standpoint that holds that all sincere expressions are whole and valid. This music, though it may at times bear a superficial sonic resemblance to serial works is about as far from serialism as it gets.
And dissonant idiomatic choices alone do not qualify music as modernist. Ralph Shapey embodies that truth with his music of (0,1,6) tonalities and other dissonant sonorities, (he, who dismissed Messiaen's music as saccharine and maudlin) while continuing the practice of repetition and return and the use of classical forms, all of which had been finally and utterly rejected by the Second Viennese School. It is for that reason that Shapey proudly wore the badge of "radical traditionalism".
Next, the claim that "any modern music that allows itself to be infuenced by the wealth of the past is derided as being traditionalist" practically (inadvertently) denies the existence of post-modernism in music. In jazz in particular we can point to the example of a number of piano trios who tear down that barrier, most strikingly, Keith Jarrett's standards trio, which is anything but traditional. There is also Jason Moran's work and that of the Bad Plus, both of whom draw on material from the past, examining it in fresh light, deconstructing it, allowing its inner reflections to illuminate new angles. Dave Douglas with his series of tribute albums in the 1990's brought new freedom to mainstream jazz composition, while looking back, and provided (along with a host of other downtown musicians) a refreshing foil to the neo-traditionalist movement that did exist at the time. It is no real surprise that the music of the downtown scene of that era has finally proved more enduring than the "Young Lion Thing", but that makes it no less relieving.
The defense of the "pretty chords" in music dates back to the sixties, when it comprised a part of minimalism. The unapologetic triads of Philip Glass assert the claim boldly. Others, like David DelTredici, made their triumphant return to the idiom of traditional tonality enriched by twentieth century sensibilities with regard to form and structure. He called his music neo-romantic.
But what we see now in the "classical composition" world is generation of composers unhindered by the schism, and it brings a sigh of relief. No "pretty" music has ever been so unremitting as Glass's, which often seems to be self-conscious of its own incessantness . But young composers like Ryan Francis (see myspace.com/ryanfrancis) have no problem composing sentimental short works of great beauty or of using fleshed out major and minor tonalities.
A teacher of post-tonal music theory at the City College of New York once instructed my class that if you want a precise definition of tonality, you can really only apply it to the cannon of 'Bach to Brahms'. Therein were the composers who used tonality, as it is understood to be a music rationally defined by the notion of a tonic chord and a common practice dictating the ways in which one might go away from and approach the tonic. By such a definition, music based on a series of major seven chords, pretty and palatable as it may sound, would be distinctly atonal. More broadly however, tonality might be thought of as a measure of degree-- to what extent a piece of music is defined by a tonal center or tonal centers.
As chromaticism made its brimming appearance with Beethoven and was boiling over the top by the end of the nineteenth century, it became apparent that harmonic functionality was an extremely relative identity. While Shoenberg may have made a quantum leap then, spawning a new path for composers that was more concerned with the rational development of music than the surface sound of it, it took several more generations for most people's ears to catch up to the late romanticism of even Wagner. Bebop according to George E Lewis existed in a post-wagnerian idiom, employing its flat fives and nines.
It is a combination of factors that liberates our generation from the paradigm of dissonant/consonant as well as a number of other onerous schisms. First, as I have shown, that schism hasn't applied for many years, though some may have defined themselves within its terrain. It was late romanticism more than any other movement that showed the true relativity of harmonic thought, and no piece is a more shining example than Schoenberg's Verklate Nacht. But more currently, we are children of the information age, the iTunes age, where all the history of music is available to us in a single playlist and shuffle mode is taken for granted. As composers we can finally work from the basic elements of music up in any way we want to. We have total freedom from (and with) tradition. The tempered tuning system has in one sense exhausted its possibilities, but progress is far from being sought primarily though alternate systems or through microtonality. Rather, conceptual approaches, the historical perspective, exploration of the lands between genres and mediums, and of course the integration of electronics into an organic soundworld, these are the elements that make music modern now.
I have mentioned in the course of this paper, composers, spanning three hundred years who were aces of lyrical dissonance-- Beethoven, Wagner, Schoenberg, Charlie Parker, Jason Moran, Ethan Iverson of The Bad Plus. Let's not be mired in the debates of the past, thus reinforcing shattered conservative notions. That said, intuitively Sean Ali creates music of the utmost quality and most wonderful rebelliousness, which only goes to show the nature of art as opposed to criticism: that art will continue to refuse definition and to embody a flippant attitude, even when singing praise. The act of creation itself encompasses destruction and it's what this does to the psyche of the creator that causes the glint you see in the eye of a truly contemporary artist. Jason Moran has it, and so do the Bad Plus and Ryan Francis, and so does Sean Ali.
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