The Reconstruction of Rome

The Score

In The Score, American composers on creating “classical” music in the 21st century.

I.

The year was 1977, and this 23-year-old composer arrived wet behind the ears to take up residence at the American Academy in Rome — home abroad to American artists and scholars since 1913 — as the youngest recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship in Musical Composition. Elliott Carter, one of my heroes, had led the jury, and my String Quartet, a half-hour escapade in kinetic complexity, had apparently impressed them enough to send me there. My composing studio was in the Casa Rustica, rebuilt on the site of a 16th-century villa known as Casino Malvasia, where Garibaldi was defeated in a decisive battle by French forces in 1849 and near where Galileo demonstrated his “instrument,” later known as the telescope, in 1611, training it onto the dome of the Pantheon a little more than a mile down the Janiculum Hill.

In the cradle of Western civilization, I came to understand the reasons why ‘art music’ had become the mess it had.

Thirty-four years later —in June 2011 — I sat in the Bass Studio as a resident at the same American Academy, beginning to write these words, perched high on the old Aurelian Wall, turtles and lizards as my companions, feeling the same fierce energy that surged through me those years ago.

Courtesy of Robert Beaser The garden patio outside the Bass Studio, American Academy in Rome (June 2011).

Certainly, much has changed. Everything is wired now. Information hurls at us, where before it was buried in the stacks of the academy library. The food served now in the outside Cortile is all sustainable, much grown in the fragrant gardens beneath the studio; and the innocuous front gatekeeper of the past has been replaced by a more ominous (yet cheerful) dark-suited, sunglass toting, “Men in Black” type, with an earpiece — a sign of America’s precarious politics.

But many things haven’t changed much at all: the Acqua Paola fountain near the Chiaraviglio apartment where I lived still gurgles, the Aurelian Wall still snakes lazily through the umbrella pines of the grounds of the venerable McKim, Mead and White academy complex; and the archeological dig begun in the 1930s down the way at the Largo Argentina — site of both the premiere of Rossini’s “Il Barbiere di Siviglia” and the assassination of Julius Caesar — is still best known to local Romans as one of their main bus stops.

But living in Rome for a year in the ’70s changed me forever. Giacinto Scelsi (“the Charles Ives of Italy’) was there back then (I used his Steinway piano to compose). He would sit at his dual Ondolias in his apartment overlooking the Palatine Hill, recording primordial drones and spacey improvisations onto reel-to-reel tapes; Frederic Rzweski lived here, too — his variations on “The People United” worker song mixed Lizstian virtuosity with leftist political edginess and made a big splash everywhere.

Back then I used to trek up to see the gentle Goffredo Petrassi in his elegant apartment for lessons and lunch. I sat with Luciano Berio in Lukas Foss’s studio at the Villa Aurelia, as he lamented, “life is too short to have to sit through the mindless repetitions of those minimalists.”

That was also year I came to understand the reasons why “art music” had become the mess it had: a Faustian marriage of Hegelian teleology and apocalyptic 20th-century world wars. For a young composer entering into this world the sanctioned choices felt impossibly narrow.

The composers, Chester Biscardi, left, and Robert Beaser, at the Foro Italico, Rome, before a concert of their orchestral music broadcast by the Orchestra Sinfonica della RAI, Rome, Dec. 1977.

I also understood for the first time what it meant to be an American. The mass expatriation of Europeans during the Second World War sent many seminal figures to the academic institutions of the States, at which they carried the torch of 12-tone music for decades. It was not as if the American mavericks of the time were all in lock step with the academics — John Cage, Harry Partch, Morton Feldman, La Monte Young, Terry Riley were powerful counterforces; fascinating to me, but I wasn’t a minimalist.

The “maximalist” composers of a generation or so before — Rorem, Kirchner, Druckman, Crumb, Bolcom, Corigliano — were working carefully on their delicate balancing acts. George Rochberg, whose 12-tone “Second Symphony” from the 1950s was one of the most gripping orchestral works of that time, came out with a personal manifesto in the liner notes of his 1971 “Third String Quartet,” declaring his break with the dead-end path of academic serialism. It inspired me profoundly, but I was interested in neither the path of quoting music from the past nor of being a body-double of Beethoven.

Here were the rules from the dark heart of 1970s orthodoxy:

No octaves. Ever.

Pre-compositional charting: required.

Never repeat anything.

Nothing linear.

Continuity or atmosphere verboten.

Basically, if you want to sing, join a choir.

Don’t let any revisionist historian tell you otherwise — it was a closed system. The battle lines were clearly drawn: tonality versus atonality, serialization versus alleatoric/open form/conceptualism. Jazz, rock and pop were kept under apartheid (Gunther Schuller’s Third Stream notwithstanding). We were still very much in the cold war. It was all comfortingly black and white. The hard part for me was to find the music in the midst of it.

But in order to gain acceptance, try I did; even my polyrhythmic, klangfarben “String Quartet,” which earned me the right to be in Rome, had hidden tonal hierarchies. What I wanted more than anything was my freedom — from the tyranny of Pierre Boulez’s ranting, the Darmstadt avant garde, the hyper-neurotic intellectualization of the East Coast academics and even the burgeoning self-conscious, wink-and-nod postmodern irony that would appear in subsequent decade. I didn’t want to have to choose between uptown and downtown, black and white. So I got out.

Living for a year in one of the wellsprings of Western civilization helped me find the courage to look inward, to locate that which was particular to me. Visiting the Brancacci Chapel in Florence, Masaccio’s elemental frescoes rattled me — so stripped of artifice, lyric, human and bare. How could I find such clarity in my own music? Where could I find notes that spoke the truth?

When I was young and first infatuated with music, it was its capacity to combine taut syntactical structures with pure visceral pleasure that hooked me. I grew up on a steady diet of AM radio, Motown, jazz, musical theater, campfire folk songs and Leadbelly, but it was playing timpani in the Boston Youth Symphony that finally blew my mind open to the riotous theater of orchestral color.

To be true to what made me a composer in the first place, I needed to learn to speak in musical sentences again and find ways to cobble them into paragraphs. The continuous variations of earlier 20th century composers — Sibelius, Bartok, the speech inflections of Janacek — were jumping-off points. I needed to create simpler syntactical structures, material that would be comprehensible, arguments that could be combined in provocative ways and recontextualized throughout the course of a piece.

I never completely abandoned the modernist dictum of originality; but the surface in music — powerful and seductive as it may appear at first blush — was not the only thing that mattered to me. I began to see how influences from the past and present could become useful tools from which to fashion a new hybrid language. Soon I began using Jelly Roll Morton piano licks, Latin American joropo rhythms or Appalachian folk tunes as building blocks for my new works. The realization that it was the context, not the musical elements, that needed to be “new” was the magic bullet that helped me relearn to speak in phonemes and to combine them in unexpected ways.

That was what started in me in Rome. The intervening years, filled with creating new works, programming and promoting American music, looking out from my little desk in the Bass studio, seem like the blink of an eye.

The way things were back then seemed so immovable — like the Trajan’s Column. But it was just that we didn’t get up close enough to see the cracks, or how subversive the art that hid beneath its stone facade actually was.

But we got our wish (be careful what you wish for). The barriers are down now; rules are out, no more orthodoxy. Our solutions have become our problems.

II.

A younger generation of composers, whom I teach and interact with regularly, are indeed wrapped up in the present time, and their battles appear far less black and white. One of the younger fellows at the academy last year said that his main struggle was the “creeping irrelevance of being a composer in the first place.” Composers today have complete access to the entire cosmos of sound and the means to deconstruct and reorganize it, without boundaries. Finally, everyone can be a composer. There’s an app for it!

Yan XiaoThe author teaching a Master Class at the Beijing Modern Music Festival, June 2012.

The reducing of the world to binary digits has likely had a more profound effect on us than the invention of movable type. It impacts the core of how we make and perceive music. Sophisticated notation software lets the composer hear everything input instantly through MIDI playback, even if it’s practically unplayable by actual human beings. Whereas in the ’70s, Jacob Druckman would need to laboriously lift his Cavalli quotes and place them by hand into his paper score, we can now rip music or sounds, wholesale, from any source to use as the basis for a new piece. Logic Pro software enables us to layer complex technolike tracks and simulate meta, sampled orchestras — fake orchestras that have on more than one occasion fooled a jury of the most discriminating composers into thinking it was the real thing.

These superprograms and algorithms are a far cry from the primitive, painstakingly hand-cut analog electronic studio tape pieces of Bulent Arel, or the crystalline cascades in Davidowsky’s Synchronisms (one of those modernists I fought against in Rome). The flattening of history has been achieved in extremis, and the notion of authorship and intellectual property in music is being ambushed. With centuries of music now reduced to malleable digital files, the craft of written composition that has existed since the invention of early notation is being directly challenged.

Several decades of cultural relativism has helped to hasten the decline of the dominance of Western canon; now a multiplicity of styles and musics, commercial and conceptual, synchronic and diachronic, coexist equally. This condition is likely here to stay. The post-enlightenment notion of the singular creative genius may be yielding to a more porous, village-driven process. Collaboration in the arts is becoming fashionable again.

When I go around the world giving master classes, I see every premise of composition practice under siege. Why do I need to write my piece short score before I orchestrate? Why do I need to learn counterpoint? Why do I need to listen to Toru Takemitsu? I write it this way because I like the way it sounds. How do you answer that?

Why do I need to learn counterpoint? I write it this way because I like the way it sounds. How do you answer that?

For centuries composers have been reacting to the prevailing orthodoxies and shifting paradigms in response to them. What do we do now that there are no windmills to tilt at?

Up until this past decade, I still felt as though the artistic values that had shaped me were more or less shared by others in my generation and tethered to those of the past. Composers were coming up with their own solutions, but at least there was a tenuous consensus of sorts. The de-skilling that took hold in the ’80s — passed from the downtown school to Bang on a Can — postmodernism, the spectral school, were all still dealing with basic principles of constructing music common to our history, even if it was wildly bifurcated into conflicting camps. Then something happened at the century’s turn. It feels as if a train has left the station.

We are clearly moving toward a post-literary, virtual world. This next generation is becoming adept at taking small bits of information, unformed, and assembling it into larger asynchronous maps, of nonlinear order. The very nature of ideation has shifted, and the results are showing up everywhere, in grids and nesting theories.

For years, technological innovations have spurred composers. I myself have served on the front lines as artistic director of the American Composers Orchestra, programming its Orchestra Underground series at Zankel Hall, commissioning and creating performance opportunities for composers with an eye toward reimagining the orchestra and rethinking its very premises. A healthy collective community is a great boon for making interesting art. Our new toys need to be used wisely: many works I hear seem to be created from the outside, stimulated by external concepts and sources, collected and assembled — rather than forged from an inner voice, cut out of whole cloth, from the imagination within.

Though I know it is not completely true, it sometimes seems that composers have just stopped remembering on purpose. With access to most information more or less 10 seconds away, it’s ironic. And it is convenient, as it can give one the illusion that they have reinvented the wheel, when really, at most, they may have just changed the tires. But this river of change runs deep, and making striking art will require a special sort of fearlessness, and asking of hard questions, from composers.

III.

PHOTOGRAPHER?The American Academy in Rome, June 2011.

Rome is certainly not at the center of this virtual world; instead it is the fount of the artist as the “protean force,” whose individual genius, as chronicled in Vasari’s “Lives of the Artists,” can create narrative of immense and compelling scale. As chaotic as it is, Rome, where materials are still king, where a lone artisan might carve a fresco into an obscure corner for no function or purpose at all save that it is sensually pleasing, is diametrically opposed to this cloudlike assemblage, to this synchronic thinking. For years people have visited the city to understand a life based in the senses and to learn to make art from it.

My hearing seems to have changed. All sounds are tonal and euphonious to me.

There may well be a battle now after all. As we fundamentally change the way we process information, it is possible that high-art music could disappear altogether, replaced by some nebulous stew. Forget about the question of notation versus improvisation — that’s so 20th-century — the divide (and it’s not exactly new) is between composing with notes or without notes. Still, it seems logical that no matter what changes from the outside, there are essential truths that will stay constant. And no matter what the palette is, I find it counterintuitive to believe the human beings would ever lose the need to create art that is somehow in their own image.

History is not our enemy: a Renaissance Italian architect might have looked at a Roman house and said, “Here is a form that I can use for my own purposes.” The result would be anything but a copy — but a playful riff on the prevailing orthodoxy. We can always learn from what came before us, but we actually need to look at it. Young composers don’t even have to look so far back — I would be thrilled if they started with the last 10 years.

In my own music, I have continued down striated paths, which began in Rome nearly 35 years ago. I still write with a pencil, still use notes. I am still trying to find the simplest and most direct line. I like to take familiar things and turn them on their heads: deconstructing a Hungarian folk tune and making a whole other piece from its fragmented components in “Evening Prayer” or weirdly bumping together Andalucian flamenco and bluegrass guitar picking in my “Guitar Concerto.” Seemingly irreconcilable opposites can inhabit the same world, woven into a musical fabric from the inside out, creating dialectic, momentum, unity in variety.

Recently I have started playing around with Logic Pro, using it primitively, to retest my comfort zones. I am going to back to improvising more, something that I used to do for hours alone at the piano — but now using soft midi patches, creating layers that I can manipulate and prune. It helps to stretch my hearing and break some of my old habits in construction, timing and continuity; but I still write everything down on paper.

In Rome I began work on a new symphonic work, commissioned by the Juilliard Orchestra. I wanted to explore this genre again perhaps because it is something that seems near impossible to do right now. Orchestras have been dropping off the map at an alarming rate in the States. In Italy there are hardly any left at all. All those old arguments from the ’70s — tonality versus atonality — have oddly less meaning now. My hearing seems to have changed. All sounds are tonal and euphonious to me — no matter if it’s Bjork, Babbitt or the New York City subway. Whether or not it is possible to find a way into the large-scale symphony might be less about external conditions, or new ways of ideation, and more about internal ones. Nothing is impossible: we just need to question everything, imagine strongly.


Robert Beaser

Robert Beaser is a professor and chairman of the composition department at the Juilliard School and artistic director of the American Composers Orchestra in New York. His compositions have been commissioned and performed worldwide and have earned him numerous awards. He was elected as member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001. More audio samples of his work can be found here.