Page Four

SCARLET AND BLACK

Friday. ’Aer B. I!“

S& B Interviews lecturer leonard Meyer

ED. NOTE: The following is a
transcription of an interview be.
tween S d: B staff writer linda
Seckelson and Dr. Lennard Mey-

“ or who visited and lectured on
campus this week.

s it oi What is your feeling as
to the legitimacy of serial and
randomly or arbitrarily composed
music, and what kind of audience
is going to respond to these new

' avant-garde art forms? 7

Meyer: First. of all, there’s a
big difference between serial mile
sic and random music. I don't
quite know what legitimate means.
I think that complex music is very
difficult for most audiences to
perceive and I would be inclined
to feel that there aie two mitigat-
ing circumstances. First, we must
give up our past expectations that
we have on past art, . that
everybody is going to like the
some art. 1 think that one must
no longer bemoan the fact that
the Washerwomen does not ride
the State Street car reading James

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

anything yotl wanted, in a sense
you couldnt compose because you
can't compose when you have
complete freedom; you must have
some kind of limitation. And the
second problem is that if yoii are
going to write a non-tonal music,
you have to be consistent and it
would be unfair 'writing a non»
tonal music to hit upon, as it were.
by chance, combinations which be-
long to the system of tonality but
which you have no intentions of re-
solving in your system. So the
rules of serial music were devised
essentially to do two things: to
limit the composer's choices so that
he is able to choose and to try
insofar as is possible to insure
that the kind of syntatical sounds
which arise in tonal music do not
arise in this music, so that you
will not arouse false expectations
of certain kinds of resolutions.
More. extreme forms of serialism
create real problems for the au ‘
ence. I don't think that it’s illig

timate. but I think it has Certain
inherent limitations dut‘.I to the li-
mitations of the human mind and

Joyce, I don’t think she ever will i memory. The music is very lion-

. ride the State Street car reading
James Joyce. Therefore, it you
speak about serial music, I don’t
think that serial music is going
to in the forseeable future have
a very large audience.

llIIillllIIIillllIIillllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllIIllllllillllllIIllllllllllllllllllllll

Serial Music
Is Legitimale

llllllllllllllllllllIIlllllIIlllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllilllllllIIlllllIlllllllllllll

To answer your question directr
)y, I’m saying that surely serial
music is legitimate. Serial music
is music which is carefully organ-
Izetl, and I think that serial music
has aesthetic problems, but in
qua-serial music, all that the ser-
Ial composer is doing is establish-
lrlg certain kinds of limitations for
the choices he makes.

There are two problems with
writing otonal music. The first
problem is t'nt itivou could write

 

redundant, it has voly lltile obvi-
ous patient. But this IS in a sense
compensated for by the existence
of technological redundancy, in the
form of tape recorders, recordings,
and so on. That is, it would be
impossible to learn the music oi
Boulez if you Could lislen to the
piece only occasionally as was the
Case in the eighteenth century.
But given the fact that you have
recordings, it is possible to learn
this music.

I think that non-predictability.
total non . predictability “syni-
gates" the spirit of man. 0n the
other hand, I think their view is
defensible, namely, that its pur-
poses, predictions, goals, striv-
ings, which, from their point oi
View, have gotten us into the
mess we’re in, that the anguish
that men feel is the result of the
kinds of expectations they have
about the world, and If you give
up all these things, as you must
if you’re. going to listen to

, historians

dom music, then you can live in
‘a kind of contemplative bliss. As
tar as the legitimacy - illegitimacy
question goes, i don’t know why
it should be illegitimate, or on
what grounds one would say it

was illegitimate. ,

S 8; B: Traditionally, there have
been two aspects in musical cre-
ation. The one is composition and
the other is performance. In elec
tronic music, at least. in taped
music, this second element is elim»
inated. in your opinion how does
this affect the quality of the
achievement. it at all, and how

does it affect the musical exper-
ience of the listener?

MEYER: My own feeling is that
performance is very important.
There are at least two serious li-
mitations to taped music. One is
the fact that for most listeners,
the visual experience of the motor
action of people in performing
music is an important part of their
musical experience, and this is
eliminated in taped music.

lllIIillllIIIlllllllilllllllllllllllllllllllllllllillillllliilllllllIIlllliiiiillllliliillllllit

Canned Music— ,
No Uncertainty

IlllllllliilllllllllllllIIIlllllllllllllllilllliliillllliittlllllilillllllllllllllIIilllllIIllli

The second thing is that the ele
ment or uncertainty, which is a de—
iighiiul and important element in
in listening to music is also miss-
ing in any canned performance,
whether tape or record. And the
third thing which I teel is missing
on a record or a tape is the possi
bility of certain kinds of subtle niir
ances in performance which in
one sense change tlle work. it you
had a canned piece and you lis-
tened to it over and over again,
it wears itself out- and you get
tired of “X's” performance, \vhe<
that it's of a Beethoven symphony
oi- anytiiing else.

Again, my whole thesis is lliat
we face a period or pluralism oi
all these tradiiicnsinot just the
tradilions pt elite music, but those
of folk music and popular music
will exist Side by side and cone
timie indelinitcly.

5 & B: The anthropologist A. L.
Kroeber reels that style change in
ciVlllZzilion takes place when the
eXlsling style has been fully ex-
ploited, has reached a point of ex-
haustion. Do you agree with this
theory?

MEYER: Yes, Ki‘oeber feels
also that a style must constantly
grow and develop or it will grow
decadent and die. lt scents to me
that this is not the Case. The the-
ory is a very douhlhil thing, part-
ly because the exhaustion theory
involves a kind or value judg-
merit about style. What would con—
stitute the exhaustion or a style?
One could sayrthat it nobody wrote
in the sryle it would be considered
to be exhausted. It’s true that soon-
er or later styles change, but I
don’t think that this inevitably
happens. If you look at other cul<
tures, it becomes. clear thay they
have been much more stable Styl-
istically than Western culture for
the last 500 years. "that doesn't
mean that other cultures haven’t
changed at times but there have
been long periods of stability. The
other thing that happens is that
and

 

 

anthropologists

looking at other cultures tend to
discover in them the kinds of de-
vclopments seen in Western cul-
ture and than analyze them in
those terms and create parallels.
Tlle thesis that an art
form must develop or it dies or
decays is an extrapolation from
recent \Vesterii history. Mr, Foster
Monday at the coffee hour sug-
gested the possibility that things
will converge. Certainly is is pos
sible that things today will con-
verge. The thing that I’m consid-
ering that nobody else wants to
consider is that maybe it won't con-
verge, and I think that there are
all kinds oi signs that things won’t
converge in the near future.

‘Convergence.’
Nol Expected

lllllllllllllillllIIIlllllllIIllllllIIilllllliilillllliiilllllililllllllilllliiiillllllllllllll

s 8: B: What are they?

MEYER: First Of all, the;
demise of the idea of progress
which has been a force for con-
vergence and change in this sense.
The decline, and the emphasis on
individualism, which has also been

something which made for con-.

vergence and for dependence on
earlier styles. AlSo, in some sense
the paths toward some sort of
convergence seem to me have
been exhausted.

It’s agiless. Btu, the important
thing about the guess is that it
changes one’s whole view of what
the present is like it you make
that guess. That is, it you keep
looking at the present as though
you expected convergence, then
you look at Stockhausen on the
one hand and Samual Barber on

the other aild say "which is going
to Win?" Pluralism creates anxi-
ety only when you expect it to
be monistic. But once you say
you're going to have a “pluralis
tic status," then your whole atti»
tude toward what’s going on in the
world becomes less anxious.

S 8: Now that we’ve “done
Kroeber i " do you have an alter-
native hypothesis tor the catise of
style change?

tlllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllltlllllllllllllllltlll

‘Gh Gawdl'
Wild Question

IlllllllllllllllllillllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllIIIlllllllllilllllllllllllllillllllllllillll

MEYER: 0h Gawd, that’s R
wild question! First of all, I
think that there are differences,

 

and he would make tyhese distinC<
thins, too, between changes which
take place within a style, which
he calls kinetic changes, and
changes which take place among
various styles . . t In music, tor
instance, what happens in a Style
is that you start off with a style
which has, for the sake of learn-
ing, a very high degree of redund.
ancy. As the listeners in that cul-
ture leam that style, it becomes
less redundant, and you reach a
kind of stable period in the style,
and then at some point, the ire
formation rate increases again
and you have a very low redund~
ancyt What culture changes is the
rate of change, not primarily the
direction. After all, the Classical
style runs through the American
Revolution, the French Revolution,
the Industrial Revolution but the

style does not undergo ally basic
change.

Now what happens between
styles is another question, and
I’m not at all sure what Causes
those changes. It doesn’t necessar-
ily follow that there is a one to
one correlation between culiule
and style.

llllllllllllllIIllllllllnlllltIIIlllllllllillllllltllllliliillllliiillllllliilllllliilllllltn

Style Evolution
Big Question

.llliiillllllilllllllIIllllllillllllltlllillllllllllllllilillllliiilllllliiillllllilllllliiillll

Those who say that there is
such a Correlation have done so
because they equate representa<
tional Content with style. It’s quite
clear that David, for instance, was
in a veiy simple-minded sense in<

. ﬂuenced by the French Revolution

or by the Napoleonic Era because
he paints Napoleon and he paints
the Death of Marat. What one is
interested in in Beethoven is not
whether he had half-baked notions
about freedom, which he lllCOinOi‘v
ated into the Ninth Symphony,
but how does the style evolve.
Dickens was thematically coil-
Cei‘neti with the events of his
day, but the question you have to
ask is why does he put words to-
geiher the way he does. One oi
the interesting evidences, at least
in literaure, against the one lCl
one correspondence theory is that
if there were a one to one CDi'l'ES'
pnndence between culture and lit-
erature, then the vernacular lang-
uage would be the same as the
art language at all times. But in
tact vemacular language deviaies
ii-nm art language. They may con-
verge at certain points, but then
they separate.

So I’m by no means certain as
to how styles evolve, what starts
them off , . . Once a style he
gins it tends to have Its own way
of moving. While it may he pos-
sible to talk about exhausting a
style, . . . ! dont think that it
is necessarily the case that a style
does become exhausted. It might
become exhausted. While styles
may change, it isn't a law of hi9
tory that they must change.

PATRONIZE OUR
ADVERTISERS.

 

