Steven Stucky - Music Without Borders

In 1938, the great British music writer Donald Francis Tovey set out to describe what he called “the main stream of music”: the shape and history of the central canon of “classical” music, a repertoire that everybody could agree on. How quaint, how naïve, how thoroughly impossible Tovey’s project sounds to us now, more than seventy years on. At the very moment Tovey was constructing his main stream, Hitler was preparing to overrun Czechoslovakia, then Poland. Political and social cultures were about to fracture - and soon, musical culture fractured, too, perhaps never again to be reunited into anything like a single stream.

We are still the inheritors of that fractured planet World War II left behind. Old assumptions failed. Empires crumbled. Adorno’s march-of-history narrative (or even poor Tovey’s), in which progressive art would naturally displace reactionary art, modernism would triumph over tradition, was laid bare as a hollow shell, more ideology than substance.

You and I, eager listeners now to new music in the 21st century, find ourselves stranded beyond the end of history. We reached the last station, the end of the line. We got off the train and starting exploring on foot, where the pathways are not well marked. And yet instead of feeling lost, we love it here! The demise of a modern music establishment - of a path laid down for us, of a main stream - has left us incomparably richer, able to savour as many styles and aesthetics and genres as we like, free now from apologizing for “high” culture or “low.” We are consumers now in a largely democratized market place.

Winnipeg’s New Music Festival has become one of the best in the world precisely for embracing this new, messy, pluralist reality whole-heartedly. For the 2010 edition, we will hear composers hailing from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, the US, Ukraine, Venezuela. But more than that, there are composers whose roots go back to the Inuit people, Greece, Russia, Brazil, and beyond. There are composers whose lives spring from classical music, folk music, jazz, rock, electronica. This is music without borders. But it is not music without connections, satisfying resonances, conversations going on between one music and another.

Take the idea of history. Perhaps a phrase like my “end of history” line above is more rhetorical flourish than serious analysis; in the political sphere, at least, history is marching grimly along even now. But the necessity of an historical imperative, the force of a progressive (or even a conservative) narrative, is something we working composers and musicians and listeners now live without. Instead, there is a strong sense of living and working amidst the glorious wreckage of past civilization. Valentin Silvestrov, a courageous survivor of Soviet-era artistic repression, tells us that he writes only codas, because “fewer and fewer texts are possible which . . . begin at the beginning.” I love the fact Tim Brady’s ironic, multi-media extravaganza My 20th Century sits in the same festival as my Second Concerto for Orchestra, which - with its allusions and homages and inside jokes - is my 20th century. In our very different ways, Tim and I are processing our “post” condition, exploring that territory beyond the end of the line.

Another striking trend in this year’s program is the almost complete absence of abstract titles, indeed of music that claims in any sense to be “absolute.” That’s another antique idea that has gone the way of the typewriter (or of poor old Tovey, for that matter). The 2010 festival is full of music that looks outside itself to draw inspiration from painting (Luc Leestemaker inspiring composer Vincent Ho); from landscape (Arctic Postcards, Arctic Dreams, Language of Water); from popular culture (both Les Paul and Jimi Hendrix turn up this week); from mysticism and spirituality (John Tavener, Christos Hatzis); from poetry (my own Radical Light). The mixed, the motley, the impure, the eclectic: this is the musical landscape that affords us so many pathways in our new century, and such satisfying ones. Where better than North America - where we are (almost) all immigrants - to celebrate the hybrid, to explore the uncharted?

The disappearance of the main stream, the absence of the canon, the banishing of the already-anointed masterpiece, the uncertainty that accompanies every new piece: these are liberating to us listeners. In the face of the new, habits fail. We cannot appeal to received wisdom to help us sort the eloquent from the merely self-indulgent, the profound from the meretricious, the prophet from the charlatan. Nor can the professional critic (we soon realize) do the job for us; he is as likely as the next listener to be spectacularly wrong about a new piece. No, we are utterly, bracingly alone with our insecurities in the face of new music. Here, perhaps, we can recapture something of the delicious mixture of exhilaration and bewilderment listeners must have felt at the first performance of Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique in 1830, or of Debussy’s Prélude a l’après-midi d’un faune in 1894, or of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps in 1913, or of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra in 1944.

Will any of the new works we hear this week be masterpieces? Will any of them be added to a new canon, join a new main stream? Mercifully, the questions are irrelevant; they’re not our problem. Our task is not to predict the habits of posterity but to respond to the here and now. Genuine composers will somehow make themselves understood. Their works are communiqués addressed from human beings to other human beings. However surprising or alien their language, their humanness is sure to touch, to move, to enrich the open-eared listener.