Far-out Music’s Theory Out

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30892, 27 October 1965, Page 14

Far-out Music’s Theory Out

Last week it was noted that while musique concrete had some measure of public acceptance in decorative applications, electronic music was still too far out for the ordinary music listener.

The same could be said of a lot of other new music, whether 12 tone, aleatoric or serial. The trappings of traditional Western composition have been left far behind and there is nothing familiar vertically, in the harmony, or horizontally, in melody, argument or form.

The musical far-out are firmly entrenched in Europe, backed to a large extent by Germany which has five state radio stations generously endowed with funds and some 70 very active music publishers. The American composer Virgil Thomson describes the sounds as a “music of the Common Market, a neutral voice without folklore attachments that is the voice of the new international Europe.”

The critics are cautious. They are both blessed and inhibited by the historical knowledge that past critical pronouncements - on the avante-garde, on musicians like Monteverdi, Beethoven, and Berlioz, have turned out to be chaff before the wind.

They also know that a work which sounds cacophonous and disordered could be very carefully worked out so that every last detail is related to every other, even mathematically.

“We no longer have the certainty and unselfawareness which enabled the old critics to thunder and denounce and predict the end of music as

people knew it,” said David Cairns, a “Financial Times" critic. “Criticism which comes from incomprehension is not criticism, however much it used to pass for it." The voice of the far-out is a German magazine called "Die Reihe” in which composers explain their theories in scientific terms of sets and subsets, parametres, variants, formants, resultants, time periods, periodicity and aperiodicity, the continum and random choice. Illustrated by formulae and charts, this all looks very impressive.

As it was a bit much for musicians without scientific training to cope with, the editors of “Perspectives of New Music” got John Backus, a physics professor with musical training, to have a look at “Die Reihe.”

After going through the back issues carefully, he concluded that at an awful lot of pretentious terminology was being thrown around and that most of it had no scientific meaning at all. These composers, Stockhausen especially, were calmly inventing their own terms and definitions, misusing authorities, and drawing improper conclusions from inadequate data. “Technical jargon without technical meaning.” Backus reported. “Dismal display of ignorance . . . pure bluff . . .

designed mostly to impress the reader.” Backus’s remarks have been reprinted in the British “Composer” with some of the replies. The amazing aspect is that the far-out and their supporters are more amused than anything.