Boretz & Brickle December 4 at Greenwich House

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ben-boretz-and-frank-brickle-tickets-1086024290889?aff=oddtdtcreator

Boretz and Brickle
December 4, 7pm
Greenwich House
46 Barrow Street

Free TICKETS please reserve

This is a very good time to think about Benjamin Boretz & Meta-variations.

Does this make sense? –

Mission creep and boredom has caused a shift from the contextual – features particular to one work – to the general. And isn’t Ben Boretz’ *Meta-variations* the definitive text on contextually?

This first occurred to me reading Bob Gilmore on Radulescu:

“He felt, as he wrote in his article ‘Musique de mes univers’ in 1985, that to move forward from the excessively self-referential complexity of much post-war European music ‘it was necessary to “enter into” the sound, to rediscover the ocean of vibrations that Pythagoras scrutinised two thousand years ago’.”

Those stranded in the contextual universe (pre-spectral modernists), will feel that this focus on eternal verities leads to musical stasis, with emphasis on everything other than what makes things move, let along the hydrodynamics of motion on different time scales.

Jonathan Cross:

“This merits further thought: with certain notable exceptions, spectral composers have had a lot of trouble discovering ways to write melodically, or for that matter polyphonically.”

Or for that matter, with a rich sense of harmonic rhythm.

But Ben’s space is notoriously open. And I take

Ben’s being about music as a plea to remember that what the composer thinks about, those platforms of their compositional ideology, do not have to scuttle the enterprise.

I find the young composers speak much about inspiration. We all need it.

And yet the pre-spectral modernists, I think, tend to be more like Hindemith, who understood composition to be doings that can happen when one is not inspired. Hindemith student Olga Gorelli told us many times that Hindemith was concerned with teaching that – what to do, inspired or not. What those doings are is baked into many traditions that are getting lost. And traditions are always rightly in the crosshairs of young mavericks.

I can’t help feeling that it’s the same with the administrative state that almost saved us in those years 2016 to 2020. I’m sounding like TE Hulme.

Meta-variations was an important work for Frank Brickle, and Brickle’s music shows that modernist principles are not a commitment to all we vaguely associate with the *modernist surface*.

The minimalists are one example – the minimalists are modernists in principle, that is, they are contextualists, but they eschew those modernist surfaces.

Brickle’s work is another example. I used to think of him as a “post-maximalist”, lately a “pre-spectral modernist”. But we don’t need the labels. I hope we can agree that his work from the last 20 years does not sound like high 20th modernism, nor is it minimalist. And yet it upholds some and transforms some ambitious musical values that we hate to see get lost.

And it’s curious that spectral composers do tend to preserve what we describe in broad strokes, “the modernist surface”, but its grounding or its focus has flipped from contextual specifics to eternal verities.

///////////////

More:

First, is it just me, or does the shaking up of musical values have analogous shake ups in the world at large? This is something I talked about with Babbitt, and we see it in Ben’s Being About Music. A kind of *music criticism*.

When I come across music that is trying really hard, sounds pretty good, but doesn’t do anything, not a bit of anything that generally impresses me in the realm of musical doings (all that music can bring to things like syntax and semantics–huge topic) I feel at best I’m cleansed of all that baggage.

Yehudi Wyner taught Feldman that way in the 80s. He used the word, “cleansing’. Feldman’s broken symmetries I now see as a wonderful furthering and on-shoring of some important Stefan Wolpe principles.

And so I consider Feldman not cleansing of any *thou shalts*, but exemplary of a composer attuned to meaningful breakages, putting them to work in a distinctive way.

Michael Gordon’s *Thou Shalt, Thou Shalt Not*

–I appreciate that work. Minimalism purged music of bad habits. It’s cleansing, but not devoid of elegant musical doings. The doings are done very clearly, most often one or two at a time. It’s a weeding out of all that contributed to that *music that is better than it sounds*.

I think that was Mark Twain talking about Wagner, but David Lang picked it up and dusted it off and now it makes me think of him.

I’m going somewhere with this:

All my notions of what makes me happy about musical doings is my narrative, my frame, with my timeline of momentous moments in the chain of musical developments from Pertain to Boretz & Brickle.

Spectral music changes the narrative with a focus 1200 years earlier, a grander narrative – Pythagoras. That grand narrative with some deep attention to timbre and how to hear into its mysteries, with a motley collection of heroes from more recent musical past – Stockhausen, Nancarrow, Partch, and other precursors to Grisey and Murail. The narrative is on timbre pioneers.

The pre-spectral modernists clung to the musty old habit of dealing with timbres organized by the musical instruments. The spectral composers are more interested in subverting those instrumental timbres.

And despite this focus, the composers will continue to tell stories. The pissy modernists will say they are reinventing the wheel with regard to the syntax and semantics of those stories.

Mario Davidovsky & I complained together – “It’s almost as if there is no concern at all for syntax and semantics!”

syntax & semantics = story telling with all that pitch can bring to bear on that

So often that’s the modernist’s reaction to spectral stuff, but despite being focused on anything other than story telling with all that modernists brought to bear on that, spectral music does and can do that, despite itself.

The spectral narrative is so radically different, I begin to doubt that it’s possible to reinvent the wheel from that mindset. That Pythagorean nature veneration and the focus on overtones will have its stamp on everything. Whatever reinvented wheels we feel will be stamped with Pythagoras and ring modulation.

See Borges’ *Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote*.

Brickle is now ready to be the syncretist. He gets his spectral stuff not from Stockhausen & Radulescu and such, but from pop and rap music (especially Andrew Huang), and yet he has own very limpid modernist musical structuring, syntax, semantics and musical story telling in his bones. I hope we get to hear some examples of this soon. None of these works have been released into the wild just yet. I’ve only recently heard about them.

One Brickle precursor of this might be his troubadour setting, *Estat ai*, for electric guitar, theobo and voice – a work that really needs to be recorded. We are going to revive it, with the theobo part reworded for classical guitar with low C scordatura.

Some of our electronic music people were onto things that have become the focus of the spectral people. Brickle, like Babbitt & Davidovsky had players asking them for music (music written for their instruments, played in the manner for which they trained for their 10,000 hours!). They had expected to life a quiet, solitary life in their electronic music studios, but players took an interest and kept them in the world of instrumental music.

Another syncretist is Jonathan Dawe.