The battleground

I've heard composers of my teachers' generation call it "the speech"--that revelation that composers of their teachers' generation had, and that they all like to share their particular version of when they speak on their music--that moment when they cast off their modernist/serialist training to regain a relationship with tonality and the tradition.

By my teachers' generation, I mean roughly composers born in the mid-1940s to late 1950s; the composers of their generation, then, were born in the 1920s or '30s. If the great serialist apostasy of my teachers' teachers took place, say, in the late '60s or early '70s--Rochberg's String Quartet no. 3 of 1972 is often considered a landmark in this regard--this was too late to much influence the training of my teachers, many of whom were in graduate school in the '70s. Most of them now say they were forced to write serially to be taken seriously; Claude Baker tells the story of giving a class presentation on Hindemith's The Craft of Musical Composition and being booed.

My teachers found their own way, and of course now are free to write as tonally or non-tonally as they like without fear of ostracization. But it's clear that their teachers' late rediscovery of tonality, as well as general recognition of the minimalist revolution taking place concurrently outside of academia, came too late to save them--not just from stylistic funneling, but from an inculcation into the thought patterns of mid-twentieth-century musical politics. My teachers recognize today's stylistic egalitarianism, but their musical worldview was deeply shaped by the tonal-atonal battle, and this dynamic resonates in their discourse still today.

I mention this because it contrasts so drastically with the assumptions of composers of my generation--those born in the late '70s to late '80s. I've found invariably amongst my peers that, once we reach a certain level of musical knowledge and sophistication, the polarizing effect of the atonal/tonal debate simply disappears. I make the qualification about "knowledge and sophistication" because many of us responded quite negatively to dissonant twentieth-century styles when we were younger, and had to do some learning before they started to make sense. But in all most all cases, they eventually did, and now those styles sit in our toolbox with all the others, on the same level of the bookshelf, with no stigma attached to any.

In terms of stylistic opportunity, we are on equal footing with our teachers. None of us feel any compunction to write in one style or another to better fit with the general cultural atmosphere. But that underlying worldview, those deep thought patterns, these still separate us. Because our teachers, even if they no longer consider tonal/atonal a major aesthetic battleground, still organize their compositional approach around the primacy of PITCH LOGIC. I'm making an immense generalization here, I realize, and I don't deny that there have been many exceptions to these trends. I only mean to suggest that, when we eventually look back at the turn of this century, one of the things that will separate composition on the two sides of the line is the extent to which pitch structures are considered operative. My teachers grew up in a time when your chosen organization of the twelve possible pitches meant everything; my peers came of age listening to music more for form than for content in this respect, and as a result consider our building blocks to be less individual pitches than instruments, melodies, rhythmic patterns, gestures.

Or maybe it's altogether too early to speak for my whole generation. I suppose I can only speak for myself.