And…

…finished!

The Taruskin Challenge is officially over for me. (How about you Zach?) It’s bizarre to think about what my life was like when we started this Challenge. I was a student and hadn’t started my dissertation yet. Now I’m no longer a student, and the dissertation has been on the shelf for 10 months. I have definitely taken a considerable amount of Taruskin’s arguments into the classroom, and not just for music majors. My Understanding Music students (freshman non-majors) have heard plenty of Taruskin as well, though they didn’t know it. One of the great strengths of Taruskin’s writing is that the reader doesn’t have to guess about Taruskin’s opinion on the matter. I find that his strong argument construction makes lectures infinitely more interesting—especially when I can get my students to critique the argument and decide for themselves if they agree.

This Challenge has been a unique experience for me; I don’t think I’ll ever read a book in quite the same way again. (No, we’re not planning to launch “The Strunk Challenge” anytime soon. We’ll leave that to other enterprising grad students out there…) And the next time I read the OHWM I will do it as fast as humanly possible. I’ll get a chance to do that for the last two volumes when I teach the 20th-century graduate survey this summer. (Having my students read the last two volumes in 4 weeks, counterpoints to Taruskin, plus primary sources, articles, and other book chapters is reasonable, right?)

Now it’s time to gather up my thoughts, ruminate, and come to some conclusions about this whole endeavor. Plus there is plenty more about the last volume’s content that bears comment. I imagine Zach and I will be doing just that over the next few weeks.

Notation’s Last Hurrah?

As the opening frame to his final chapter on music in a postliterate society, Taruskin examines what he considers literate music’s last grasp for ultimate authority.

The music of two English composers, Brian Ferneyhough and Michael Finnissy, represents this final and—in Taruskin’s estimation—ultimately futile maneuver. Their music is typically incredibly dense on the page, and in some respects impossible to perform. Ferneyhough uses “nested rhythms” (-tuplets within -tuplets within -tuplets), and obsessively profuse articulations, giving off the general feeling of impenetrable intellectual prowess (or at the very least, committed laboring). Taruskin gives us a page of Ferneyhough’s string quartet to make his point, with the ominous assurance that this is “not an unusually complex page” for him (see the image below, which is similar to the one Taruskin uses on V, 477).

Ferneyhough and Finnissy form the core of the so-called “New Complexity” group of composers, which Taruskin baldly paints as a dead-end extension of modernism. When it comes to the notational complexity of Ferneyhough’s music, Taruskin confidently pronounces that “its intricacy set a benchmark that is never likely to be equaled, let alone surpassed.” (V, 476) That’s because this type of music is doomed. In a world “after everything,” the argument goes, literate music has been finally dethroned, with postliterate musical media taking its place.

The Ferneyhough example immediately made me think of another piece of music, which made the rounds among my musical friends several years ago. It’s a page of “notationally complex” music that, once a closer look is taken, turns out to be a gag (see image below; click for larger version).

The music pokes fun at far more than just “New Complexity” types. It’s an indictment of the whole lot of modernist (see the stacked articulations at the end of the third system) and post-modernist (“Gradually slide from 12-bar Blues to a more Vivaldi-like cadenza”) styles.

But above all it lampoons the idea that notational technology—and by extension literate music as a whole—holds the ultimate key to musical meaning. Notation has been so overburdened with meaning that it can become, well, just silly. Taruskin will press this point, and the postliterate alternatives that were developed in response to it, throughout the final chapter of his history.

The Taruskin Challenge’s 200th Post

 

(click on the image for a bigger scale)

Many weeks and pages after beginning our project, The Taruskin Challenge has reached its 200th post. To commemorate, I used a handy tool to create this visual representation of the content of our blog. What you see here is a scaled representation of the words in all of our posts and all of the comments up through our 199th post (all 150,000 of them, give or take). Greater size indicates greater frequency of the word (common English words like “and” or “to” are discounted). It’s an interesting and, I think, insightful way to look back over the project so far, as we approach its end.

orderliness: a precompositional blog post (à la Structures Ia)

Beauty finds find will control and in who anyone it orderliness here, in beauty it find will control orderliness finds who here and anyone (find will beauty finds who anyone it control and in here orderliness) it find in beauty finds who here will control orderliness anyone and—here it orderliness in beauty finds anyone find will and who control? Anyone here and orderliness in beauty who it find control finds will. Finds who will control and orderliness beauty anyone here find in it: orderliness in here it find will and beauty finds anyone control who [and orderliness anyone here it find control in beauty who will finds <will control finds who anyone here find and orderliness beauty it in] who anyone control and orderliness in finds here it will beauty find; control and who anyone here it will orderliness in finds find beauty>

Vol. IV Discussion—What Say You?

With very little fanfare save for the light breeze made by page turning, Vol. IV came to a close a week ago. That’s four down and one to go—though if you’re like me, you’ve peeked more than once at the final volume.

As is our custom, we’ll take a week or two of wrap-up time to comment on more of the text, as well as to perhaps ask some global questions and discuss the big points of the volume.

And what a volume it was. Prof. Taruskin rocked several boats holding the traditional thinking on twentieth century music. Some of the biggest he salvoed and aimed to sink. He moved the inception of the musical “twentieth century” back by more than a decade, redefined its central characteristics (neoclassicism, ban of pathos, irony), and argued for a repositioning of the era’s most important philosophers (notably a increasing the importance of Ortega y Gasset and decreasing that of T.W. Adorno).

The influence that these changes and challenges might have on the teaching and understanding of music history is well worth discussing, and I’d like to open up a discussion here.

Teachers: how have you used Taruskin’s arguments in your presentation of the narrative of twentieth century music? To what effect?

Students: how have Taruskin’s revisions and emendations affected the way you understand early twentieth century music?

Challenges of your own? Seconding Prof. Taruskin’s arguments? Questions or ruminations? Let’s get this comments section working—pathos and irony allowed.

A Bartók Playlist [Updated]

In the first half of his chapter on Bartók (Vol. IV, Ch. 7), Taruskin shines a focused spotlight on several of Bartók’s pieces, including Kossuth, Four Dirges, the set of bagatelles (Op. 6) for solo piano, his string quartet No. 4, and Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. Here is a partial listening list based on what I could find in the broad but inconsistent wells of youtube. Listen as you read:
[In order to save space on our front page, I’ve only included the first two pieces here. Click through to listen to the rest.]