On 7 November 2008, Kyle Gann posted a provocative article on his blog condensing and expanding upon remarks he made at a new music festival at Sacramento State University. In the piece, Gann calls for more respect to be accorded to an aesthetic he (with some reluctance) calls “music of the Absolute Present.” The Pantheon of Absolute Presentist composers is defined by a “maverick” bunch who had to fight against the musical establishment for any ounce of respect. Among these composers are Erik Satie, John Cage, Morton Feldman, and the early minimalists. Absolute Presentism takes its aesthetic bearings from Zen Buddhism and strives to make music free from memories of the past and premonitions of the future so that the “absolute present” can be accessed unmediated. Absolute Presentist composers like Gann write music “in measure 185 [that] doesn’t commit [them] to writing anything particular in measure 202″; they “avoid musical karma” and are inclined to “move from one thing to the next without any causality.”
Gann opposes Absolute Presentism with nineteenth-century Romanticism, an aesthetic which hogs the respect of the musical community. Romanticist composers “aim in their music for a kind of organic emotional curve whereby the music spends most of its time crescendoing or decrescendoing in intensity, with some sense of climax and often resolution, often symbolized by increasing dissonance or complexity.” Interpreting the term broadly, Gann labels composers like Brahms, BartÃ³k, and Corigliano “Romanticists,” even though their affinities with historical Romanticism are not easy to pin down. Basically, by “Romanticism” Gann means “organicism,” and such an organicist orientation describes much of what we know as the standard classical repertoire. While I will continue to use the term in Gann’s sense, I would like to register one objection up front: the standard classical repertoire is neither musically nor aesthetically monolithic; neither Satie’s music nor Cage’s is a virgin birth, however much devotees of these mavericks might like to think so.
Gann probably feels about Romanticism how I feel about Absolute Presentism. I would never quarantine all Absolute Presentists south of Fourteenth Street; nor would Gann banish Romanticism from the universe. I like In C, and I’ll bet he likes Beethoven; certainly both Terry Riley and Beethoven count as “mavericks.” I consider myself as open-minded as the next guy, and I have no reason to believe Gann is any different.
Nonetheless, I find Gann’s remarks highly unsatisfactory. His take on the aesthetic politics of music is skewed and hagiographic, and his Absolute Presentism is undernourishing as an aesthetic. Viewed through any sensible frame of reference, Gann’s Absolute Presentists are not as marginalized as his post suggests, and there is nothing in Absolute Presentism which obliges anyone in a position of power to concede its equivalence with Romanticism and set an “equal time” agenda accordingly. In the end, Gann’s post is just the sort of exercise in arbitrariness he suggests is behind Romanticism’s privileged status. Read the rest of this entry »