Postscript

with PETER DALE

<< Rhythm and Timbre

Like it or not, the dust is now settling on the 20th century, the modernist age, the music of Stravinsky, Schönberg, Bartok, Britten and Boulez. It's all over, bar the shouting. Even the term 'modern' now sounds quaint, and the fact that it was ever used at all (implying as it does that there can be nothing still more 'modern' to say or do after us) sounds ridiculous, arrogant, silly.

The music of the end of the century sounds uncannily familiar, so much like that of the beginning. Birtwistle is so much like Skryabin (but running on diesel and much more sensitively), Tavener is so much like Rachmaninov (but without the motor of pulse), Takemitsu really is neo-impressionist, Rautavaara lately has begun to remind one of Warlock in his Curlew phase, MacMillan continues the line back to Tallis through Vaughan Williams (in his Job mode). The symphonic Maxwell Davies has always sounded like the rugged Sibelius. Elgar's Third Symphony has made its appearance. Nobody has quite sloughed off the shadow of Mahler, least of all Messiaen, though the lines are so much clearer and (unusually for a 20th century composer) the irony quite gone.

The mistakes and blind-alleys of modernism are gradually coming into focus. I'd hardly dare to suggest what they are (were) - so soon is it after the event - but I must try. Here is a very, very provisional summary: the recovery of rhythm and rhythmic energy, and the restoration of timbre into, at times, pure, context-free sound for its own sake. This is all very well, but recovery and return to our roots became entangled with archaeology and deconstruction. Music in some hands became a sort of geology, and the ruder and more ancient the rocks the better. Or the deconstruction took the form of making music from its sub-molecular particles only - another kind of archaeology really. And it was all so serious, and so dry, and (I think now) so mistaken. Always to wave the flag of Progress and The New, and to overlook the fact that biological development almost always takes place at or above molecular level, and rarely, if ever, below, was to have chased a false god.

And the very pursuit of The New - as if simply to be new automatically meant that it was better, more advanced, more relevant, more accessible - was always foolish, was always driven by the vanities of advertising and commerce rather than the verities of art. Similarly, hitching your wagon to the train of The Progressive was always going to look callow to historians of the future: while the century as a whole has periodically descended into unspeakable barbarity on a scale and with a frequency that was certainly 'new', it was hardly ever going to look like 'progress' when seen overall.

On the other hand, irony has been one of the great achievements of modernist music - rarely comfortable or comforting - but honest and true to ourselves in the way that so much self-indulgent music of the past, with its postures of the heroic, the romantic, the achieving against the odds, and so on, never was. Between primaeval unarticulated chaos (of sound) and the myth of order and architecture informing all (the music of the spheres in the platonic ideal that still attracts and fascinates us), modern music has rarely managed to force more than a draw. So be it. At least it has been, as the modern architects say, true to its materials, and also, somehow, true to ourselves, warts and all. That's how it feels to me.

Copyright © Peter Dale, August 22nd 1999