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A musician I greatly admire, Pierre
Boulez, argues fervently that music must be felt as pure experience—ripped
from anecdote, story or event. He assaults the conventional critics: “Shall
we ever make up our minds to disregard contexts and to forget
the factors so relentlessly insisted upon by the history books?
Shall we ever manage to ignore the circumstances, banish them
from our memories and bury them in oblivion and take the interior
essence of the work as our guide?” (Orientations, p. 261)
He goes on to insist that music exists on its own terms outside
of history, much in the way mathematicians insist that mathematics
is outside time and technology.
Yet Boulez confesses that he wants to
affect the time in which he lives—and the future as well.
“Everyone’s ambition is, roughly speaking, to remain
a presence in the affairs of his day and in future utopias.”
(p. 521) How can I be a presence without being engaged? As a musician,
how can I avoid engaging my music in the moral and political struggles
of my day, and in the deepest emotions and paradoxes of humankind?
My answer is simple: music can’t
escape the world around, the “profane” context. This
answer would surely be understood by those who wield power, starting
with the church hierarchies of the Middle Ages. Even before them,
Plato in The Republic banned certain musical modes. That was no
accident. The wielders of power have always bent music to their
purposes.
I can’t deny that music, ripped
from its context, can be appreciated by audiences—or played
by performers—who have no knowledge of the composer or his
time. But this abstract appreciation pales next to the impact
of great music expressing its time and expressing, beyond that,
the more timeless themes of political and moral passions. Think
of Berg’s Wozzeck, Beethoven’s Fidelio, Hindemith’s
Mathis der Mahler or Britten’s War Requiem. But
don’t forget the dark side: engaged music can also be a dreadful
rationalization for the worst in ourselves.
An activist art—which is by no means the only art—illuminates
events that may seem incomprehensible—incomprehensible, that
is, until touched by an artist who can invoke another level of
understanding.
In the Elegy I am trying to do just
that in order to illuminate the terrifying events of the last
two-thirds of the century. To that end my musical medium is improvisation.
That is, I use a repetitive musical language similar to the Baroque
figured bass. For melodies, I incorporate fragments of popular
tunes. In our time these tunes serve to mask an underlying and
painful reality. However, inverting this, we can try using popular
melodies to unmask hidden realities and emotions. And that, in
turn, may help us come to grips with the incomprehensibly cruel
ironies of our time.
Such uses of music, of course, can be
easily burlesqued. For example, movie music may appear to increase
tension, delight, fear or pity. But the creation of music for
film is almost always dominated by the constraining commercial
demands of the film industry. Such music rarely stands alone.
Successful music of the kind I’m describing will transcend
the “anecdote” or event. Think of Schoenberg’s
Survivor from Warsaw. Here Schoenberg certainly succeeds in presenting
the unspeakable through music—and then transcends that to
assert an indomitable faith. The Shostakovich Piano
Trio, another piece that reshapes our moral understanding, weaves
in haunting Yiddish melodies to help paint a canvas of rage, terror,
madness and hope.
Can the emotional power of music reshape
moral and political judgments? I say it can—and, since time
immemorial, it has. And music should be used for that purpose,
without apology by composers, audiences or critics.
The Elegy is improvised around sixteen scenes from the Cold War.
My notes sketch the barest outline of these scenes and a few of
their musical connections:
BOMBAST: The first use of nuclear weapons
at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That opening cataclysm defines the
cold war era with its attendant fear, terror, hubris and braggadocio.
The atom is unleashed less to end the war than to show the Soviets
who is to be boss in the postwar world. The sense of terror is
created through pounding bass and continuous discord—a lumbering
Leviathan emerging from the sea. The theme reoccurs throughout
the Elegy, an arrhythmic harsh bass, sometimes plucked and occasionally
accompanied by the screams of an anguished treble at the piano’s
upper reaches. (track 1)
WE’RE FIRST: A surge of self-congratulation
in the United States. But this self-congratulation is accompanied
by the overhang of war and fear: fear of depression, fear of being
left behind, and a deliberately fomented fear of communism. Popular
songs of the period, songs like “To Each His Own” and
“I Walk Alone,” echo these fears. (track 1, cont.)
BREAK UP OF EMPIRES: Old empires disappear.
The Germans, Dutch, Japanese, British and French leave the US
as top dog and inheritor of European leftover imperialism. Propping
up crumbling empires proves an empty purpose, one that makes a
mockery of our Wagnerian nationalism in the face of the intricate
political cross currents of the real world. (track 2)
THE KOREAN WAR: Launched to the drumbeat
of the Soviet menace, a forgotten war of devastation is fought
to a standstill— leaving a million dead, fifty thousand of
them Americans. The war is conducted under the shadow of the atomic
bomb. The Wagnerian sentiment is reduced to a series of terrifying,
seemingly mindless screams of violence. (track 2, cont.)
THE EISENHOWER YEARS: A balancing act
of managing the American State while riding the military-industrial
complex. Similarly, the Communists’ twentieth party congress
struggles with Khrushchev’s partial attempts to reform communism.
For Americans, disparate lives are held together by dance songs.
(track 3)
GOING TO THE MOON: The president launches
the Apollonian adventure: is the nation lured by sci-fi fantasies,
by the thrill of unimaginable distances, or by the incomprehensibility
of nothingness? (track 4)
ASSASSINATIONS: The sixties are marked
by the assassinations of the Kennedys, King, and Malcolm, among
many others. Fear, paranoia and a deep sense of loss prevail.
The murders become emblems of the time. People feel caught in
uncertainty and a sense of subterranean, fatal forces pressing
their way to the surface. The nuclear refrain, the drumbeat of
the looming Soviet menace never lets us rest or reflect. The pulsing
of the arrhythmic plucked bass theme recurs. (track 5)
WE SHALL OVERCOME: Juxtaposed with the
assassinations is a time of hope and possibility, a time of upward
motion and struggle. The hopeful shouts of “We
Shall Overcome” become a world call for liberation. (track
5, cont.)
VIETNAM: The inexplicable war, the quicksand
swamp that seems to have no bottom. An increasingly divided America
sings cacophonous and lumbering tunes intermingled with snatches
of patriotic songs from other wars, all framed by the keening
moans of the Indochinese. (track 5, cont.)
PEACEFUL RESPITE: War’s end brings
a time of introspection and aloneness. Braggadocio is put on hold.
The aloneness remains. The beginning phrases of “Dancing
in the Dark” are heard. We see only our make-believe images,
jumbled shards of cracked reality. (track 6)
THE NIXON WATERGATE: Paranoid power-mongering,
secrecy, fraud and the vengeful state within the state. Songs
of illusion, delusion and the detritus of war. (track 7)
ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS: Carter’s
fumbling attempts to take the high road in the face of moral decay,
Vietnam defeat and oil cartel greed. Hopes of American rebirth.
(track 8)
NUCLEAR LIES: The continuation of the
overarching theme, symbolizing the onward march of nuclear warhead
hoards and nuclear proliferation, accompanied by nuclear waste
and the delusions of nuclear disarmament. Harshly percussive piano
underlies the clash of these images. (track 9)
REAGAN FLUFF: A cartoon world of Hollywood
Americana and golden oldies as the Soviet Union collapses. The
U.S. keeps on dancing in the darkness of the Cold War. (track
10)
GORBACHEV’S COLD WAR ENDS: THE
passions of Russia, heard through Scriabin, try to tell us something
of a nation’s anguish. But who can hear as we dance and dance
and dance? (track 11)
HOPE TRIES TO ESCAPE ITS BOX: We dream
of the end of manufactured menaces: Those dreams are brought to
earth again in a new circle of war, the Gulf War—and a president’s
“Boola Boola” that leads to the end of the Elegy. (track
12)
For reasons that I hope are obvious, the Elegy’s ending is
unresolved. In this separate piece, a kind of improvised tone
poem, I’m using a very different palette and a very different
image. The image, or perhaps even better, the mood I’m trying
to convey is the halting acceptance and unquenched yearning found
in prayer—prayers that encompass our passions, our hopes,
our future. (track 13)
— Marcus Raskin
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