GEORGE EDWARDS
tion, slight irregularities in performance, harmonics, different
(sic)
tones, etc.
421
This quotation, with its glorification of the accidental results of a rigid
process, is strikingly reminiscent of the Darmstadt manifestoes of the fifties -
compare the second sentence with Krenek's "impersonal mechanisms which
will furnish ... unpredictable situations." Despite the desire of minimalism to
reject modernism in its entirety, the two share a preference for impersonal
means and random result. Is this the best lesson minimalism could have
learned from the twentieth century?
What, besides opportunism, accounts for the current wave of neoro–
manticism? Henahan quotes Boulez as saying in an interview:
I am sure that as long as you haven 't absorbed the history that comes
before you , you can't go very far.
As
we say in France, you are open–
ing doors that are already open.
Oddly enough, this unexceptionable echo of Santayana is one of the
"dead-end" dogmas Henahan objects to! The sheer ineptness of much
neoromantic plundering of the past seems to bear Boulez out, and to arouse
the suspicion that for some composers the allure of past styles is due to never
having learned about them in school. Yet the neoromanticism of such able and
diverse composers as Del Tredici, Harbison, and Schwantner is a natural
reaction against the narrowness of much recent modernism, not a coherent
movement with defined methods or goals. Those who insist on "opening
doors which are already open" will be hard-pressed to compete with Erich
Korngold or Max Steiner, let alone Richard Strauss. But it seems likely that
much neoromanticism, like Stravinsky's neoclassicism, will prove to have
been less a return to the past than a continuation of a modernist approach by
other means.
We must credit minimalism and neoromanticism for the fact that our
musical institutions are now more willing to perform new music than at any
time in the past forty years.
In
addition, there has been some revival of in–
terest in conservative composers who were out offashion during the second
modernist phase. Even older modernists like Babbitt and Carter are at last
getting some of the public attention they deserve. But for virtually all other
composers who are unable or unwilling to write easy, accessible music, the
situation is as grim as ever.
Indeed, while we can rejoice that so much new music is performed (or
lament the new music that isn't), we can only guess what the audience actu-
