Jazz Monthly's March 1970 issue had a passionate rebuttal of an article by a Mr Peterson, who believed 'serious' music had ended fifty years previously. Clearly, people still found New Music ugly in 1970. Not just Avant-Garde and Free jazz, but atonal classical music also. At least Mr Peterson thought so.
PROGRESSIVE ABSORPTIONS / TONY SELINA
THE STUPIDITY which has gripped serious music.
That phrase has echoed down through the auditoriums of the ages. I‘d give a kreutzer if it would only end! said one critic listening to that first, enormous, movement of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, with its climactic grinding discord, those six fortissimo beats from the whole orchestra, the sheer power of the thing: all of which must have quite disturbed an audience nurtured on the classical purity of Haydn and Mozart. Had it been socially acceptable, some would probably have walked out: perhaps some did. But it had to be done, otherwise European music would have run itself into the ground under a weight of restatement and cliche. The Romantic era was born, and with it the stretching of the diatonic system to its chromatic limit.
That's what art is all about: finding out how far you can go — and men plunging further, into the dark if need be, to discover what you could never before even conceive. It is the exploration of the subconscious. When we say art ‘develops’ we don’t mean it ‘improves’; it merely changes. There is, in Arthur Koestler’s words, a change of selective emphasis, There comes a point where the artist can say no more with the language he has inherited, and it must be changed if he is to explore new territory. But those around him don’t know the language at first: they have to learn it, so there’s a time lag. The more radical the change, the longer the lag. But there are always those who, having learned the old language, refuse to learn the new, they draw a line and say ‘beyond this is nonsense’. The position of the line shifts a bit in relation to that generation, through the ages, depending on how fast is the rate of change at the time, but it always — always — moves on and passes over their graves, consigning their hatred, their fear, and their resistance, to oblivion.
It seems that Mr. Peterson, in his article last month, draws the line about ‘half a century’ ago for ‘serious’ music (let’s call it European music, it’s more accurate), imagining that some sudden change occurred about that time. What in fact had happened was simply a formalisation of a process which had been going on all through the nineteenth century. You could say it started with Beethoven, but that is a simplification. Tonality, the Diatonic System, had been quarried till it could produce no more. Some rare and beautiful gems had come from that quarry, but the'machinery got heavier, the hacking at the earth wilder and more curse-laden, until the final blows were struck by Wagner, who found the glorious Ring and dealt the death-stroke to Tonality.
That seems to be where Mr, Peterson draws his line. Where does it come in jazz? I imagine around 1959, perhaps a year or two later. 1959 was quite a year for jazz. Coltrane summed up all he had learned within a chord-structured, basically tonal system in Giant steps; Coleman dispensed with chord sequences, concentrated on melody and made The shape of jazz to come; Davis left the diatonic path and began to explore, with Kind of blue, modality, the oldest and most widespread musical system in the world. But I hope that these should surely now present no difficulties for anyone but the most determined ostrich. Perhaps about the time of Out of this world? Coltrane deliberately uses ‘ugly’ tone there — why? Because it extends the vocabulary of the music. There is an anguish, a pain, a desperation in Coltrane’s music which could not be expressed in any other way. Are these not valid emotions? Are they not to be expressed, to be taboo? Remember Lover man, Mr. Peterson? I find that very moving ( I cried when I first heard it), because of that hesitance, that ‘ugly’ tone, that cry in the throat which came from Bird’s whole being. It is just this emotional avenue (which jazz had rarely, if ever, explored before, and then you'd be back to early country blues) which is being explored now.
I THINK THIS is the crux of the problem for many people who find new music ugly. It is an unwillingness, perhaps even an inability, to find deep satisfaction in exploring new, and sometimes frightening, emotional terrain. They will not or cannot see that what is superficially ‘ugly’ can be very beautiful. Listen to the Dies Irae from Verdi’s Requiem, for instance: you cannot possibly call it ‘attractive’, ‘pleasant’, or any such word. It is a terrifying, shattering experience of the world’s end, a descent into a horrible abyss: and it is very, very beautiful. The same kind of release, of anguished vision, I find at the end of Coltrane's Afro-blue, in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, and in Cold turkey by the Plastic Ono Band, Of these three, Afro-blue is the least. savage, the most song-like. The other two are very violent, but nonetheless valuable and satisfying experiences. You cannot shut your eyes, ears and soul to such things: in art is where you sort them out, discover yourself through them: The Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom, said William Blake. There must be no taboos.
It's not all violence, though, as Mr. Peterson would know if he listened to more new music than I suspect he does. There is exploration of the mystical, the awesome chilliness of the universe, the contemplation of a single state of mind which is the core of Eastern music,the effect of silence, of ‘stopping’ time. You could not possible now attempt such things within the tonal system. Beethoven got about as near as one could in the final quartets, and, significantly, many people still find them difficult, a century and a half later. But to‘do it he had to break a lot of rules — as he always did! Parker had to break the rules, Coltrane and Coleman had to break the rules, Schoenberg made some new ones (which are now being themselves broken), and new doors, opening onto new and exciting landscapes of sound, were opened every time.
‘In abandoning tonality it has abandoned meaning’, says Mr, Peterson. Now, the meaning of music, its emotional message, comes from a number of basic attributes of the human voice: pitch, interval, rhythm. When we cry, scream, sigh, moan, laugh, whisper, we combine these elements in a way which becomes intrinsically associated with the emotion. So these elements — one could add volume and sound quality — are the basic stuff of which music is made. Many refinements may be developed to add other layers of meaning, more complex communication (polyphony, harmony, counterpoint, tonality), but they are not the essence: they cannot exist without the basic elements. What happens, usually, is that one or more of the basic elements atrophies for the sake of the complexity. Thus rhythm gradually shrank in importance during the Renaissance, as it did in jazz after the New Orleans era, and Parker had to revive it, Sound quality (so basic in African and, to a lesser extent, in medieval music) lost favour in the same way. All that most new music is now doing is to explore these neglected qualities like texture and density and rhythm, to get back to the roots, if you like, to discover what we can conjure up out of the dark corners of our ‘minds. with such ‘primitive’ techniques. For me, it’s a new ‘renaissance’.
One of the things I've found when learning to listen to new music is that as you expand your capacity for experience your appreciation of the older music increases in a way unbelievable until it happens. Listening to Pharoah Saunders’ Tauhid made me relisten to Coltrane with new ears; listening to Ayler’s Ghosts sends me back to Parker’s Ko-Ko and Bird gets the worm, to find even more intense pleasure. And when I heard Schubert's Death and the maiden quartet the other night, I realised that my joy, my ability to be transported by that masterwork, had been nurtured on Bartok’s six quartets, especially the fourth.
So what have you to lose, Mr. Peterson? Nobody’s out to destroy your world, only add to it. Saying that those of us who have pretensions to be moved by such new music (or other art) are only fooling ourselves is surely just a rationalisation of fear, of puzzlement. I can assure you, Mr. Peterson, that alone in my room, wailing, crying and shouting with joy to that last, beautiful cadence of Afro-blue, I am not fooling myself; when I sit mesmerised by the waves of Stockhausen’s Gruppen, or fascinated and delighted by the crystal clarity of Webern's Five Pieces for Strings, Op.5, I am not fooling myself, when I lie on my bed and float, bodiless, in Georgy Ligeti’s Requiem, I am not fooling myself. A few months ago, Mr. Peterson, I heard Mike Osborne with Louis Moholo and two basses at Bedford College in Regents Park. They took about fifteen minutes to warm up, and then they let rip: for an hour. For that hour I stayed at the back of the room and danced, whooped and yelled with joy. I hope you get that kind of feeling from your music, Mr Peterson. It’s got nothing to do with fashion, or ‘pinning a reputation’: it’s just an open mind, a willingness to learn. Buddhist chant to Blues, Medieval to Cecil Taylor, I've got ‘em all. I'm not bragging; I feel lucky, I just want to learn. I can’t see how anyone obsessed with music, or even just interested, can draw any lines. You can’t dismiss thousands of years of music, from Indian to our own Medieval, as ‘meaningless’ because it’s not tonal. There are so many ways, so many areas of our minds, whole worlds of experience and emotion that we can barely imagine as, we move through the surface of everyday life. Listen to it all, Mr Peterson. It’s all there, waiting for us to explore, if we are willing.
PROGRESSIVE ABSORPTIONS / TONY SELINA
THE STUPIDITY which has gripped serious music.
That phrase has echoed down through the auditoriums of the ages. I‘d give a kreutzer if it would only end! said one critic listening to that first, enormous, movement of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, with its climactic grinding discord, those six fortissimo beats from the whole orchestra, the sheer power of the thing: all of which must have quite disturbed an audience nurtured on the classical purity of Haydn and Mozart. Had it been socially acceptable, some would probably have walked out: perhaps some did. But it had to be done, otherwise European music would have run itself into the ground under a weight of restatement and cliche. The Romantic era was born, and with it the stretching of the diatonic system to its chromatic limit.
That's what art is all about: finding out how far you can go — and men plunging further, into the dark if need be, to discover what you could never before even conceive. It is the exploration of the subconscious. When we say art ‘develops’ we don’t mean it ‘improves’; it merely changes. There is, in Arthur Koestler’s words, a change of selective emphasis, There comes a point where the artist can say no more with the language he has inherited, and it must be changed if he is to explore new territory. But those around him don’t know the language at first: they have to learn it, so there’s a time lag. The more radical the change, the longer the lag. But there are always those who, having learned the old language, refuse to learn the new, they draw a line and say ‘beyond this is nonsense’. The position of the line shifts a bit in relation to that generation, through the ages, depending on how fast is the rate of change at the time, but it always — always — moves on and passes over their graves, consigning their hatred, their fear, and their resistance, to oblivion.
It seems that Mr. Peterson, in his article last month, draws the line about ‘half a century’ ago for ‘serious’ music (let’s call it European music, it’s more accurate), imagining that some sudden change occurred about that time. What in fact had happened was simply a formalisation of a process which had been going on all through the nineteenth century. You could say it started with Beethoven, but that is a simplification. Tonality, the Diatonic System, had been quarried till it could produce no more. Some rare and beautiful gems had come from that quarry, but the'machinery got heavier, the hacking at the earth wilder and more curse-laden, until the final blows were struck by Wagner, who found the glorious Ring and dealt the death-stroke to Tonality.
That seems to be where Mr, Peterson draws his line. Where does it come in jazz? I imagine around 1959, perhaps a year or two later. 1959 was quite a year for jazz. Coltrane summed up all he had learned within a chord-structured, basically tonal system in Giant steps; Coleman dispensed with chord sequences, concentrated on melody and made The shape of jazz to come; Davis left the diatonic path and began to explore, with Kind of blue, modality, the oldest and most widespread musical system in the world. But I hope that these should surely now present no difficulties for anyone but the most determined ostrich. Perhaps about the time of Out of this world? Coltrane deliberately uses ‘ugly’ tone there — why? Because it extends the vocabulary of the music. There is an anguish, a pain, a desperation in Coltrane’s music which could not be expressed in any other way. Are these not valid emotions? Are they not to be expressed, to be taboo? Remember Lover man, Mr. Peterson? I find that very moving ( I cried when I first heard it), because of that hesitance, that ‘ugly’ tone, that cry in the throat which came from Bird’s whole being. It is just this emotional avenue (which jazz had rarely, if ever, explored before, and then you'd be back to early country blues) which is being explored now.
I THINK THIS is the crux of the problem for many people who find new music ugly. It is an unwillingness, perhaps even an inability, to find deep satisfaction in exploring new, and sometimes frightening, emotional terrain. They will not or cannot see that what is superficially ‘ugly’ can be very beautiful. Listen to the Dies Irae from Verdi’s Requiem, for instance: you cannot possibly call it ‘attractive’, ‘pleasant’, or any such word. It is a terrifying, shattering experience of the world’s end, a descent into a horrible abyss: and it is very, very beautiful. The same kind of release, of anguished vision, I find at the end of Coltrane's Afro-blue, in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, and in Cold turkey by the Plastic Ono Band, Of these three, Afro-blue is the least. savage, the most song-like. The other two are very violent, but nonetheless valuable and satisfying experiences. You cannot shut your eyes, ears and soul to such things: in art is where you sort them out, discover yourself through them: The Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom, said William Blake. There must be no taboos.
It's not all violence, though, as Mr. Peterson would know if he listened to more new music than I suspect he does. There is exploration of the mystical, the awesome chilliness of the universe, the contemplation of a single state of mind which is the core of Eastern music,the effect of silence, of ‘stopping’ time. You could not possible now attempt such things within the tonal system. Beethoven got about as near as one could in the final quartets, and, significantly, many people still find them difficult, a century and a half later. But to‘do it he had to break a lot of rules — as he always did! Parker had to break the rules, Coltrane and Coleman had to break the rules, Schoenberg made some new ones (which are now being themselves broken), and new doors, opening onto new and exciting landscapes of sound, were opened every time.
‘In abandoning tonality it has abandoned meaning’, says Mr, Peterson. Now, the meaning of music, its emotional message, comes from a number of basic attributes of the human voice: pitch, interval, rhythm. When we cry, scream, sigh, moan, laugh, whisper, we combine these elements in a way which becomes intrinsically associated with the emotion. So these elements — one could add volume and sound quality — are the basic stuff of which music is made. Many refinements may be developed to add other layers of meaning, more complex communication (polyphony, harmony, counterpoint, tonality), but they are not the essence: they cannot exist without the basic elements. What happens, usually, is that one or more of the basic elements atrophies for the sake of the complexity. Thus rhythm gradually shrank in importance during the Renaissance, as it did in jazz after the New Orleans era, and Parker had to revive it, Sound quality (so basic in African and, to a lesser extent, in medieval music) lost favour in the same way. All that most new music is now doing is to explore these neglected qualities like texture and density and rhythm, to get back to the roots, if you like, to discover what we can conjure up out of the dark corners of our ‘minds. with such ‘primitive’ techniques. For me, it’s a new ‘renaissance’.
One of the things I've found when learning to listen to new music is that as you expand your capacity for experience your appreciation of the older music increases in a way unbelievable until it happens. Listening to Pharoah Saunders’ Tauhid made me relisten to Coltrane with new ears; listening to Ayler’s Ghosts sends me back to Parker’s Ko-Ko and Bird gets the worm, to find even more intense pleasure. And when I heard Schubert's Death and the maiden quartet the other night, I realised that my joy, my ability to be transported by that masterwork, had been nurtured on Bartok’s six quartets, especially the fourth.So what have you to lose, Mr. Peterson? Nobody’s out to destroy your world, only add to it. Saying that those of us who have pretensions to be moved by such new music (or other art) are only fooling ourselves is surely just a rationalisation of fear, of puzzlement. I can assure you, Mr. Peterson, that alone in my room, wailing, crying and shouting with joy to that last, beautiful cadence of Afro-blue, I am not fooling myself; when I sit mesmerised by the waves of Stockhausen’s Gruppen, or fascinated and delighted by the crystal clarity of Webern's Five Pieces for Strings, Op.5, I am not fooling myself, when I lie on my bed and float, bodiless, in Georgy Ligeti’s Requiem, I am not fooling myself. A few months ago, Mr. Peterson, I heard Mike Osborne with Louis Moholo and two basses at Bedford College in Regents Park. They took about fifteen minutes to warm up, and then they let rip: for an hour. For that hour I stayed at the back of the room and danced, whooped and yelled with joy. I hope you get that kind of feeling from your music, Mr Peterson. It’s got nothing to do with fashion, or ‘pinning a reputation’: it’s just an open mind, a willingness to learn. Buddhist chant to Blues, Medieval to Cecil Taylor, I've got ‘em all. I'm not bragging; I feel lucky, I just want to learn. I can’t see how anyone obsessed with music, or even just interested, can draw any lines. You can’t dismiss thousands of years of music, from Indian to our own Medieval, as ‘meaningless’ because it’s not tonal. There are so many ways, so many areas of our minds, whole worlds of experience and emotion that we can barely imagine as, we move through the surface of everyday life. Listen to it all, Mr Peterson. It’s all there, waiting for us to explore, if we are willing.
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