BOARD NOTES WEEK 4

**WEEK 4 PART 1: ADMIN; REVIEW AND

SCHERZINGER

REMINDERS FROM LAST WEEK

--PRE-WWI:

--Breakdown of rationality (Stravinsky: rhythm and

harmony; Schoenberg primarily harmony).

--Both with a sort of depressing modern scientific

overlay (Stravinsky “biologism”; Schoenberg
“psychoanalysis”).

--POST-WWI:

--Both retreat into a dryer style meant to “reclaim

rationality.”

--Stravinsky = neoclassicism; Schoenberg 12-tone

music.
SCHERZINGER

(--Forewarning: complexities ahead.)

--CLARIFICATION OF TERMS:
--Modernism: deliberate striving for newness
and originality. (Note that this font is “futura.”)
--Autonomous music: music that claims to be
only about itself (i.e., to have no larger
meanings, to be entirely—or nearly--abstract).

--In asking, “what did autonomous music really

mean?”, Scherzinger is not being contradictory:
everything is meaningful on some level; even the
act of claiming to be meaningless is significant in
some way, and thus meaningful.

--BACKGROUND TO SCHERZINGER:

--Scherzinger is a present-day musicologist who is

using an earlier scholar: Theodor Adorno.
--Scherzinger departs from Adorno's views in some
ways, but I have chosen not to pursue that. (I
mention this just in case you spotted it in the essay
and are confused by it.)

--Adorno (and thus Scherzinger): music we are

discussing here (be it 12-tone or Neoclassical) was
charged with political meaning in its time.

--To fully understand the argument, we must review

the fact that Adorno grew up in fascist Germany;
he fled the scene and thereafter spent his life on a
sort of "fascist watch," trying to identify ways of
thinking and acting that, while not outwardly
immoral, were "in sync" with fascism. Top on his list
was an unthinking, passive outlook on the world.
--Adorno feared such thinking because he saw how
easily this mindset could slip under the control of
totalitarianism.

--Thus the value he placed on "difficult music": it jars

you out of complacency; it fights the power simply
by refusing to go down easy. This is the gist of
Adorno's work, and it is on the foundation of
Adorno that Scherzinger argues for the political
impact of modernist music.
--In short, the argument is that this music was
engaged in a symbolic—and even practical—act of
resistance against totalitarianism by “being
contrary” (i.e., by being difficult).

--WHY DOES SCHERZINGER FEEL IT NECESSARY

TO REPEAT ADORNO’S ARGUMENT?

--Because by the late 20th century, those earlier,

“modernist-autonomous” composers were starting
to get a bad name (we’ll be covering this).

CODA: DIALECTICISM

FINALLY: IN SUPPORT OF THOSE

“REACTIONARY” AUDIENCES
**WEEK 4 PART 2: RUTH CRAWFORD SEEGER

--1901-1953; Chicago and New York, with some

study in Europe.

3 TOPICS HERE

TOPIC 1: STRING QUARTET 1931, MVT. IV AS

AUTONOMOUS MODERNISM

--Note: At this point in the lecture I outlined the

structure while clarifying that you would not be
responsible for the details. I asked you to listen
through it with the score.

--The significant take-away is that while the

particulars of this movement share nothing with
what Schoenberg, Stravinsky, or other
contemporary composers were doing, it is in that
same spirit (i.e., rational, abstract organization of
music minus—as “abstract” implies—any commitment
in regard to expression).
TOPIC 2: MODERNIST MUSIC IN AMERICA AT
THIS TIME

--Think of this as a transitional time: America was

long looked down on when it came to art music,
and is just starting to find its legs.

---Thus: Seeger is simultaneously joining the

European modernist movement here while
deliberately keeping her distance.

TOPIC 3: SEEGER AS A WOMAN COMPOSER

(PARTICULARLY IN AMERICA)

--There had long been institutional and cultural

barriers against women composers in the west.

--These were exacerbated by modernism, because

there was this commonly accepted stereotype in
circulation that women lacked the intellectual rigor
to structure thoughts and music (the cliché,
restated, was that women were emotional beings,
whereas men were rational).
--This explains why one scholar has referred to “the
boy’s club of modernism,” and it highlights just how
remarkable it was that Seeger was able to make
her mark in this most male-dominated of musical
eras.

CODA

--Later in life, Seeger became more interested in

preserving folk traditions than in composing
modernist music;

--Her stepson, Pete Seeger, would become a leader

in the folk-music movement of the 1960s and
beyond.
**WEEK 4 PART 3: IVES

--Ives's program notes for the 4th of July, from New

England Holidays (“no date”):

It's a boy's Fourth--no historical orations--no

patriotic grandiloquence by grown-ups--no
program in his yard! But he knows what he's
celebrating--better than some of the country
politicians. And he goes at it in his own way...
It starts in the quiet midnight before and grows
raucous with the sun. Everybody knows what
it's like--cannon on the green, village band on
Main St., firecrackers under tin cans, lost
finger, fifes, clam chowder, a prize-fight, burnt
shins, parades (in and out of step), saloons all
closed (more drunks than usual), baseball
game, pistols, mobbed umpire, runaway horse,
and the day ends with the sky-rocket over the
church steeple, just after the annual explosion
sets the Town Hall on fire.
PSYCHOLOGICAL

--Keep in mind (from Ives’s description above) that

this is not meant to be a literal acoustical record of
a 4th of July;

--Rather, Ives is putting us inside the boy’s head; it’s

a psychological rendering of the 4th.

--How to hear that circumstance:

--The opening is in the middle of the night: the boy
is dreaming of the day to come (melodies are half-
formed, the music soft and fuzzy).
--The bugle-call that happens a few minutes in,
probably give us the boy waking up to face the
day.
--The “piano drumming” (partially replacing actual
drumming) is Ives’s way of conveying this “one-off”
from reality, as is the use of strings in marches that
wouldn’t have included them in Ives’s time.
--The final explosion, while definitely sounding
explosive, is also “one-off”; Ives tells us that he
wasn’t so much trying to recreate the sound of an
explosion as mix together musical elements similar
to how chemicals are mixed to make an explosion.

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY

--1874-1954.

---Grew up playing organ and piano.

---Had a musically inclined father who may or may

not have been experimental in the way Ives himself
would later be.

--Studied composition at Yale.

--He continued to compose, but officially went into

business as an insurance salesman and made good
money.

--In middle age he developed heart trouble; retired

early and went about organizing and promoting
his music.
--Moral: a bit more at the periphery of musical
developments in his time than we tend to view him
now.

IVES AND GENDER ISSUES

--Ives was the product of a long history in England

and then the US of viewing men-who-make-music as
“suspect” (meaning “effeminate”).

"As a boy I was partially ashamed of

music, an entirely wrong attitude but it was
strong,--most boys in American country
towns, I think, felt the same...And there
may be something in it. Hasn't music
always been too much an emasculated
art?"

"Is the Anglo-Saxon going "Pussy"?... the

do-it-proper boys of today...the femaled-
male crooners...Is America gradually
losing her manhood?"
--Sum: Ives was obsessed with this kind of talk, and
clearly meant his dissonant, robust music as an
expression of “manliness.”

--Judith Tick (a musicologist) has studied this and

arrived at an interesting perspective:

--First, Ives was tapping into common talk of his

day. Women were becoming more involved in the
musical world (as teachers, performers…), and
men had begun to talk about how this was
effeminizing music (“feminine” became the
equivalent of “bad,” “masculine” “good).

--Second, Ives wasn’t going after women

composers (he praised the music of Seeger, in
fact). Rather, he was using this language as a
weapon against whomever and whatever he didn’t
like: record companies, concert societies, other
composers, and, ultimately, the European tradition.

(--Tie in to an earlier point: it was important to him

to say that he had learned about experimentation
from his father, not from contemporary European
composers.)

LOWBROW/HIGHBROW

LOWBROW IVES

--His incorporation of popular tunes and band

music.
--His anti-European attitude was also anti-intellectual
at its base; in this regard he was a populist.
--His misogynistic language was itself a play for
lowbrow culture.

HIGHBROW

--Remember how central it was to modernism to be

an “original”; Ives positioned himself as the
ultimate original.

--How? By claiming not only to have worked in

isolation, but by claiming to have come up with his
innovations before other composers.
--Here I took a detour to your 5-page reading (an
excerpt) from Gilmore. It’s a quick survey of Ives-
scholarship.

--Note how vibrant Ives-scholarship is; he’s a

thriving industry in musicology.

--Pay particular attention to the reference to

Maynard Solomon’s article on Ives and “veracity.”

--Not everyone agrees with Solomon, but he makes

a pretty strong case that Ives fudged the dates of
his compositions in an attempt to convince the
world that he wrote them earlier than he did (he
made multiple lists with composition dates on them;
he wrote anecdotal notes on the manuscripts to
suggest they were written earlier than they were;
he cut the watermarks out of some manuscript
pages; he added dissonances to works after the
fact…).

CODA: TRANSCENDENTALISM
--This movement was strong in New England in the
19th century (Thoreau, Emerson), and one can
detect it in Ives’s words and music.

--It stressed the “unity” in “community,” in short. It

was a belief in the innate goodness of humanity,
which manifests itself in public events.

--Thus the 4th of July!

**WEEK 4 PART 4: CONCLUSION (HEADING

INTO HIGH/LOW CROSSOVERS)

--Next week we’ll spend some time on composers

reaching across the highbrow/lowbrow divide.

--This won’t amount to denying the divide’s

existence; to the contrary, the divide’s very
presence will explain what the composers are up
to.

--As for ending this week: Stravinsky’s Rag-Time is a

good first step for us, since Stravinsky’s motives are
so clear:
--Remember that around WWI he began his retreat
from meaning, one that would eventually result in
Neoclassicism.

--What better way to strike out in this direction than

to explore music that Stravinsky, like so many
others, viewed as meaningless (ragtime and
emergent jazz)? I’m referring to the work on the
syllabus, Rag-Time.

--It is fair to think of this as music-about-music (that’s

reference to our previous discussion of Stravinsky’s
Neoclassicism). Relatedly, in its distortion of
ragtime, Stravinsky’s music is not unlike the art of
Picasso, who adorns the cover of the score: