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PARTISAN REVIEW
blamed, as Henahan thinks, for any malaise of contemporary music as a
whole. That most modernist works are mediocre is not especially notewor–
thy: this is true of all music, regardless of when, where, or how it is written.
One can question, however, whether even the best modernist works of the
past forty years will ever join the standard repertoire. (The whole idea ofa
"standard repertoire," based as it is on a mere one hundred-fifty years of
orchestral music, may be obsolete; but that's another subject.) Instead, like
the isorhythmic motets of Dufay, secular music of the Papal court at Avi–
gnon, the keyboard music of Froberger, or the late musical graffiti of Rossini,
they will perhaps appeal only to a limited, if sophisticated audience.
In
today's
reactionary climate, it is not surprising that most modernists are writing music
that is much less forbidding than what they would have written ten or fifteen
years ago. While many former modernists have abandoned the ship entirely,
there is also a surprisingly large number of able young composers who are
writing music with modernist characteristics. I find it especially encouraging
that, unlike many of their elders (the Krenek quotation represents an ex–
treme case), these composers are more interested in the musical results they
get than in arcane (and often inaudible) compositional techniques.
The main alternatives to modernism seem to have in common an at–
tempt to pretend that the twentieth century never happened. The tribal
rituals, simple harmony, and love ofliteral repetition of the minimalists rep–
resent not only a reaction against modernism, but a desire to begin the his–
tory of music over again. The fact that (unlike the most prominent neoro–
mantics) the minimalists rejected modernism before they had mastered it
may explain the striking similarities between minimalism and the worst aca–
demic modernism.
In
modernism, discontinuity becomes a permanent condi–
tion, as obvious continuity does in minimalism; in either case the rate of
musical change is much less varied than in most previous music.
In
the worst
modernist music, the constant saturation of musical space leads inadvertently
to a sense of harmonic stasis; harmonic stasis is the favorite condition of
minimalist music. Modernism tends to avoid repetition altogether; minimalism
merely negates its potential structural power by using it incessantly in detail.
Even more revealing are the underlying ideological similarities between
modernism and minimalism. I take the central minimalist claim, articulated by
Steve Reich, to be that:
... when all the cards are on the table and everyone hears what is
gradually happening ... there are still enough mysteries to satisfy all.
These mysteries are the impersonal, psycho-acoustic by-products of
the intended process. These might include submelodies heard within
repeated melodic patterns, stereophonic effects due to listener loca-
