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Neo-Romanticism and Ethics
Allen Gimbel

Sacramento State University, Festival of New American Music October 2005

The following lecture was given at Sacramento State University's Festival of New American Music in October 1995 preceding a performance of by Jon Klibonoff of my Piano Sonata. The Sonata is published by Seesaw Music Corp., New York. A recording of the work will hopefully be forthcoming on this site.

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I've been asked to talk with you today about my Piano Sonata, a work written for Jon Klibonoff in 1984 while I was living in New York City. It's always tempting for a composer to open a talk about one of their pieces by borrowing a line from Elliott Carter. Here's what he said in reference to his First String Quartet:

"I decided that I would just write whatever interested me, whatever expressed the conceptions and feelings that I had, without concern for an existing public". (Carter 36)

But perhaps there is not a little naiveté inherent in the final clause of that statement, since I know of no purposeful communication that does not in some way presuppose an existing auditor (theology notwithstanding). Thus, one cannot really escape his existing public even if one wanted to, and making the conscious artistic decision of ignoring them is still tacitly an acknowledgement of their existence. That, of course, is an often desirable artistic strategy, but ignoring them, which takes enormous energy, is not the same as being "without concern" for them. We are most concerned about them when they are not there.

My first conscious decision of "ignoring" my existing public occurred in 1975 while an undergraduate at Eastman, with the composition of my Cello Sonata, a piece which continues to regularly resurface even 20 years after its composition. But my act of rejection came with a fascinating twist: I was rejecting my existing public -- the mid 70s music- academic public -- out of concern for what I believed was a different, but perhaps more relevantly existing public, relevant, that is, to me and my "conceptions and feelings". For Carter, there seemed to be two publics, one that existed (apparently the entire public at large) and one that did not yet exist, and his energies were to be directed exclusively toward the latter, a desire startlingly close to--not his Transcendentalist mentors Emerson, Thoreau, and Ives--but to Wagner and his concept of the "Music of the Future." I actually acknowledged two EXISTING publics -the academic public entrenched at the time in the already-decaying worlds of serialism and its relative, indeterminacy, and, in contrast, the art-music concert-going public "entrapped" in what we composers dutifully disdain as the "Standard Repertoire".

There were (and are, of course) other publics, but my point here is to express what is probably the single most critical question that young composers must face, a question that I don't recall having been actively addressed in my student years, namely: who are you choosing as your audience? To whom is your music aimed? What sort of person might you expect to be moved, entertained, or even enlightened by your music?

Carter's answer seemed to be that these sorts of people didn't exist for him (at least in 1951), but he would hide in the Arizona desert and write the work anyway--and if that isn't neo-romanticism then I'm not sure what is. I assure you that I'm not sure what that term means myself, though it is clearly in use, thus its examination, at least, must be of some value. My piano sonata does not sound at all like the Carter First Quartet, but they actually have a good deal in common. They are both very long (38 minutes for the Carter as opposed to my 42 minute sonata), both very difficult (just ask Jon), both very taxing on the listener, though certainly in their own individual ways. Both were written in relative isolation from their respective "new music scenes": Carter's in self-imposed isolation (he could afford it) and mine in an even more-romantically roach-infested welfare hotel on Manhattan's upper-west-side as I awaited the end of a period of academic retrenchment in the mid 80's, so I could pursue not only my compositional needs but my other needs as well, namely teaching and thinking (and eating). Thus my isolation was hardly self imposed. But the similarities end when one considers again the final clause of his statement: "without concern for an existing public". I would like to term this the Modernist Clause. Since the purpose of this talk is to allow you to get to know me a bit before you (hopefully) allow yourselves to be swept away by the onslaught of my piece, I must be sure to inform you that I don't buy into this clause. Modernism, as exemplified by Carter in both his music and writings, corresponds closely to the description given by Eric Salzman in his often brilliant introductory textbook on twentieth-century music:

"Modernist abstraction...and the various forms of atonality (including athematicism, dodecaphony, non-metricality, and rhythmic asymmetry) represent the purest form of the Romantic ideal because they remove the art of music from its common shared and everyday usage...Each piece or performance strives to become its own artistic paradigm; each composer develops his or her own individual 'system'". (Salzman 206)

But this explanation of Modernism conflicts markedly with a more recent version put forth by the eminent music theorist Joseph Straus in his enlightening book, "Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition". In that work, he sets out to prove (following Harold Bloom) that Modernism stems not so much from a rejection of the past, but rather from a productive anxiety about it. Straus writes of "...the deep ambivalence felt by artists contemplating the past...Artistic ambivalence is often worked out compositionally through a conflict between old and new elements, and through an attempt by the new elements to subsume and revise the old ones". (Straus 11-12)

Thus we see two conflicting messages regarding the meaning of what it is (or, perhaps more accurately, was) to be Modern. According to the first formulation, in order to have been accepted into the community of Composers of Modern Music, with all the fame, prestige, and financial reward that that entails, one needed to remove the music from its "shared usage", that is, to reinvent the language with every new utterance. In other words, the composer had to actually strive to attain the condition that Milton Babbitt terms "contextuality":

"Contextuality...has to do with the extent to which a piece defines its materials within itself...You're going to have very little that you can carry with you from your memory of former pieces, very little that you can carry with you from your experiences of past music. In other words, it is not very communal...Imagine you're listening to a tape of a language that you have never heard in your life and of which you know nothing. It has no relation to any language that you know at all, so you cannot possibly extrapolate in any way whatsoever from any of your past language knowledge or habits...That is the contextual situation. Now I've concentrated on what I have to regard as the musical core of our crisis. This is it. It has splintered our musical society..." (Babbitt 167, 171-2)

As a developing young composer, I had felt this splintering intensely. I could see no reason to participate in the lynching of the music that I was learning to love and beginning to understand. I felt that there was something vacuous in much of the new music that I was hearing (and, I assure you, studying with as much care as I could), and I even began to develop troubling suspicions about a good deal of the music presented to me as radiant exemplars of Classical Modernism.

Many of these suspicions were purely musical. They are probably most concisely described, again, by Milton Babbitt:

"...the performer now picks up a piece and wonders, 'Is this a wrong note or not?'" (Babbitt 169)

I began to see my predicament as a composition assignment out of the Twilight Zone: "Compose a work which no one can understand except yourself. Be sure YOU understand it, though: there will be a quiz (or article, or dissertation, or jury, or interview, or lecture). Use lots of dissonance, non-metricality, and rhythmic asymmetry. Give it a cool title (preferably in an obscure language with a roman numeral after it). Then go home and listen to Beethoven, Op. 135: what a piece!"

I was additionally bothered by what Babbitt described as a lack of communality and what Carter presented as a lack of "caring". These are, in a sense, political issues, and they appeared to me to be somehow nihilistic. I am not a nihilistic person--most of the joy of music for me is in its sharing: this is probably why I love teaching (and, when I was able, performing). Thus I think I now understand why the version of Modernism as espoused by Carter and Babbitt could not appeal to me. My work depends on the possibility of communication, and, indeed, insists upon it--not a speculative communication, but a communication of some immediacy.

I entered Juilliard in 1978 with these thoughts in my head. On the faculty were, among others, Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt. But things were clearly beginning to change. I was not alone in my misgivings, though stating them still could be a risky affair (something which never bothered me, however) . This was the year of George Rochberg's Concord Quartets, and the times of David Del Tredici's Alice cycle (completed 1981), Frederic Rzewski's People United Will Never Be Defeated (1975), and my former teacher Joseph Schwantner's "neo-tonal" works. The symphonies of Allan Pettersson were just beginning to become known in the U.S. (I was a dedicated collector and listener of them at the time, and still am). My closest friend at Juilliard was another, now very well-known composer who has been called a "neo-romantic," Lowell Liebermann.

Interestingly, I have never been called a "Neo-Romantic". The closest I have come was in a review of my Cello Sonata some years back by Scott Cantrell in which I was called a "self-professed" Neo-Romantic. I hope you have noticed by now that I am confronting the problem of my piano Sonata in somewhat Historical terms--I teach music history, and in fact have used my piano Sonata as an exemplar of what the textbooks now acknowledge as a bona fide Movement. Here again is Salzman:

" (Neo-Romanticism) often suggests an attempt to pick up the thread of expressionist tonality just before it was overwhelmed by atonality, serialism, and neo-classicism...(These composers) seem to have wanted to return to a crossroads miles back, in order to choose a different path than the one previously taken. In so doing, they perhaps hope to create a new history from an old past, maintaining the viability of traditional musical institutions and forms while renewing the compact between the composer and the traditional musical public". (Salzman 209)

I think that any of the composers I recently mentioned in this context (including myself, of course) would be hard put to deny that this is an accurate description of their artistic stance. Salzman's description, however, appeared in 1988, four years after the completion of my sonata (and six years after it was begun). So even though, as I have described, these ideas were certainly "in the air." they were not yet an "ism".

And so I retired to my roach-infested welfare hotel to write a piano sonata for a most remarkable pianist and friend, Jon Klibonoff. Already the term "piano sonata" presents a double whammy. The notion of sonata presupposes a "traditional musical institution" (the genre, sonata) and form (the sonata form). And the notion of writing for the piano, a nineteenth century invention, presupposes an "old past". Indeed, the Japanese composer- and pianist--Yuji Takahashi recently wrote that "the piano was a nineteenth-century music synthesizer...(and) has become obsolete as a music synthesizer" (PNM v.30 #2, 86-7), ostensibly because of its limited timbral palette, or, alternatively, because of its "pianoness." with its rich historical implications.

But I live for those historical implications, because You know what they are. I want my listener to know that Jon is playing a piano Sonata, and I fully expect my listener to have heard other piano sonatas (this, of course, limits my audience already). And, actually, this last point is an important one: I can't really imagine this work being dealt with in any meaningful way by a non-classical-music-oriented audience. I really don't want this understood as a value judgment--rather, it is a factual description of composer choice, artistic license, if you will. My materials are derived from the European Romantic and Post-Romantic tradition-and the piano is one of those materials.

Now that I have set up the context for the piece, I can now describe briefly the kinds of things that happen in it. The work is based on a Bach chorale, Ich freue mich in dir" (#52 in the Riemenschneider collection). You will not hear the chorale in the sort of Post-Modernist collage-type setting of a George Crumb or 1960's George Rochberg (or, for that matter, 1990's John Zorn). Instead, the chorale is deconstructed into a fragment, namely its first 5 notes (C#, D, E, F#, G), which are linked into a non repeating chain of linear, sequential intervals. Not only is the chorale not stated, but neither is its real tonality, eventually to be E major: instead the first cadence is on its dominant, B. A contrasting thematic area ensues, constructed on the chorale-fragment's twelve-tone complement, which becomes a gloomy ostinato--gloomy in the sense of an infection. And the remainder of the work is concerned with playing out the battle between an unspoken chorale and its unspeakable antithesis. The eventual solution, however, is not a synthesis: rather, the antithesis finds its own resolution, and the chorale, which has been trying to find its voice since the piece's opening, finds something else instead: a recomposition (not a decomposition), a rewriting, something new, but something derived--not something borrowed.

This is the scenario. But what does it sound like? Or, as any listener to a new piece is really asking, whom does it sound like? Or, as a historian might ask, what are its influences? Unlike some of my Modernist predecessors, many of whom were attempting to reinvent the wheel with every gesture, I not only welcome but insist on these questions. Much of the piano writing derives undeniably from the virtuoso tradition of Liszt (particularly in his more hair-raising moments). The emphasis on linearity in the first movement probably stems from my early study of the theories of Heinrich Schenker (as a related aside, when Milton Babbitt was asked who the century's most radical composer was, he answered: Heinrich Schenker). But I later discovered that the concept of a rising structural line producing an emergent tonality was executed with breathtaking brilliance by a source you might not be expecting: Gabriel Fauré, in the first movement of his late, very great Second Violin Sonata (also in E major). I am speaking of keys--but the thematic antithesis involves a partitioning of the aggregate, and the two sets' various transformations stem from the work of Schoenberg. Of course, Berg used a Bach chorale in his Violin Concerto. But that chorale speaks--mine does not, until it is rewritten. The notion of an incomplete-able thought seems peculiarly Scandinavian (the symphonies of Pettersson are filled with this, and it probably stems there from Sibelius, his Fifth Symphony in particular.) The third movement is structured as a set of double variations, a form also used by Beethoven in the third movement of his Ninth Symphony, a piece that can be read as having a similar overall scenario. And the chorale, of course, is by Bach.

And so on. What is perhaps most striking is the fact that none of these influences (and there are probably others) are American. But I would like to suggest that I think that the piece is unquestionably American (and not only because this is a Festival of New American Music). An American brought up in the pop culture of the late sixties and early seventies (I was at Woodstock) cannot have the same view of these materials as his contemporary European counterparts. And so the inevitable question arises: Why would a young American be interested in these kinds of materials?

If one takes a holistic view of twentieth century music, it would be easy enough to draw connections between the kind of Modernism documented by Straus in his book, the Modernism of the Second Viennese School with their sonatas, suites, and canons, or the neo-classic Stravinsky with his encyclopedic style transformations. But I do not believe there is a connection, and I would suggest that this might have something to do with what I termed earlier the Modernist Clause, that is, a Clause emanating from the second generation of primarily Post-War Modernists, the most influential of whom made their careers in America. Because of this locale, there was no audience of sufficient musical literacy to communicate with, and so the only communication possible would have been with oneself, or, as Salzman puts it, an audience of "adepts, connoisseurs, critics, and scholars". (Salzman, 194)

But the extreme alternative, a popular audience without broad experience in the musical culture that I loved, many of whom brought up to regard the very notion of art-music with suspicion, would not be a viable alternative for me. And so this brings me back to my earlier comments about a composer's audience choice. If I choose an audience who have their hearts in the art music of the European canon, rather than what seemed to me to be the current domestic choices (avant-gardism, pop music, or, perhaps, jazz), then I would have to find a way to give those listeners a musical experience with which they could in some way identify. But at the same time I would have to give them a reason to listen to my piece rather than to, say, the Liszt B minor Sonata. And this is the problem that confronts the currently codified group of composers classified by the textbooks as Neo-Romantic. And, let me assure you, these are genuine compositional issues, and they are by no means trivial.

So why did I have a problem in accepting the policies of my Modernist mentors? I am only now beginning to understand, but it may come down to this: being "without concern for an existing public" seems to me to be tantamount to saying "I'm not talking to you. I'm only talking to myself. And I can't believe you're not listening! (And even if you did listen, you wouldn't understand me anyway, since I invented my own private language)". Historically, you will not encounter this sort of attitude in the European Modernists of the early part of the century. But it appears to be endemic to post-war America, and there seemed to me to be something unethical about it. I begin with the assumption that an artist strives to communicate, and without the notion of communication they cease to earn the designation of artist. Equally importantly, there is no question that the artist has the right to communicate with the audience of his or her choice. I felt that the policy of communicating with no audience represented a dark choice indeed.

What probably sets the "neo-romantics" apart from the New Music mainstream is simply that they have chosen a non-politically-correct audience, an audience that continues to respond to predominantly European (read "non-American") works of another time and place, a repertoire that nevertheless continues to speak to some people, and whose messages are apparently not depleted. But the neo-romantics--most of whom are American--cannot speak in the language of the past (even if they wanted to, which they don't), and thus, like the early modernists, must rewrite it in the spirit of their own time and for their own audience: realistically, they have no choice.

Daniel Kingman, a well-known figure in the Sacramento musical community, wrote in 1989:

"Scholars, critics, and journalists make isms. Composers do their best to make music...It is when composers themselves become as much committed to isms...as they are to music that their art is in danger of becoming either tediously hermetic or self-consciously outrageous-in either case irrelevant to the basic artistic TRANSACTION between artist and public on which art is based". (PNM v.27#1 124).

My sonata clearly belongs in the section of Eric Salzman's book devoted to "Neo-Romanticism"--clearly an ism. But there is definitely some irony in the fact that this ism was created in order to attempt to restore "the basic transaction between artist and public on which art is based", in reaction to the "tediously hermetic or self-consciously outrageous". This basic transaction went out of fashion for awhile--I hope that you will hear my Sonata in the spirit of its return, a return which nevertheless reserves the right to be demanding. Thank you.

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