That is right, like Stockhausen. “The Unanswered Question" is the most important music performed by Ives as spatial technique. Because, the flute’s Answers to the trumpet’s Question that repeats the same short motive again and again. This technique is a case of spatial separations in his music. I agree with you.
Spatial effects have been used systematically since Venice circa 1600, when there was the fashion for cori spezzati – groups of singers and musicians arranged in different places answering each other. There are even echo effects in some works such as Monteverdi's vespers.
Berlioz and Verdi both used spatial effects in their requiems, to different effects. Berlioz places four brass sections around the auditorium and these call back and forth in the tuba mirum section. The effect is awe-inspiring and thrilling.
Verdi, however, does something much more devastating. Up till the tuba mirum, the requiem has been in progress on stage, with the audience watching from the darkness of the auditorium. The tuba mirum uses an onstage trumpeter who is answered by a trumpeter at the back of the audience. Trumpets call out over the music, back and forth through the audience. The audience/performance wall comes down, the day of reckoning becomes a lived experience, not a spectacle.
Clearly, I think Verdi is the real genius here.
What a thing to say. Who is "the real genius?" Others might argue for a different composer or even--heavens no!--Charles Ives, but Ives would probably threaten me with a haunting if I nominated him for "true genius," because he turned down even the Pulitzer Prize others in the music field were scratching and clawing to obtain, saying "prizes are for boys."
Pierre Bourdieu explained assertions of "good taste" as class markers. Now let's agree that each gen builds upon others and not succumb to binaries such as "better" or "worse" because that leads to "hardening of the categories" and closed systems.
Sorry, Gloria Lee Mcmillan , I meant that between the two versions, one of them displayed genius, the other a wonderful sense of theatre.
Pierre Bordieu put forward an ideological position on good taste, which he is of course entitled to do, but to 'explain' it to people sounds, well, patronising. Why privilege his explanation over, say, Charles Rosen or Hans Keller?
And I do not believe that each gen builds on others. This is a Darwinian notion of progress, so that Mozart is seen as a step in the evolution of Beethoven and Charles Ives.
And better and worse are not binaries; good and bad are. If you could not make something better, why would composers, writers and scientists revise their work? Why would I bother to practice my instrument?
Dear Colleague Ronán Michael Conroy,
Building on another gen need not be Darwinian but merely using bits of previous works as there are many examples that composers do. E.g., "Variations in the style of..."
All positions are ideological. Bourdieu just made this visible while some continue to hold "taste" in a sort of frame beyond analysis. Of course, anybody can have a whack at it.
Thanks for your insightful remarks and taking part in the discussion!
Gloria Lee Mcmillan – musicology has been long burdened with evolutionary theory, something that is based on the idea of music as structuring the time of its performance, which ignores completely the structuring of the music itself by the time in which it finds itself.
Variations "in the style of" are fun at parties, but any musical attempt to adopt the musical language of another era must be taken in the context of the expectations of the period. A person who dresses as JS Bach, wig and all, will find that their appearance has a completely different cultural significance. For Bach was wearing ordinary, hard-wearing clothes of his day, and would have passed unnoticed in a crowd. Were I to do it, the opposite would be true.
Indeed, the neo-classicism of the twenties and thirties was an act of revulsion, a repudiation of romanticism after the horrors of the first world war. And the use of the language of romanticism by people like Martynov and Silvestrov is a turning away from soviet realism towards a language that was forbidden.
Well, then there's the only-now-emerging story of the CIA and its finding of abstract expressionism. How many US artists were silenced by not getting funds while these AE sucked the air of the the funding room?
LINK: Abstract Art and CIA
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/17/unpopular-front
The arts find ways around censors. Look at Russia, Nazi Germany, Hollywood from the 1920s on. But more difficult to find ways around no rent, food, and what have you. Economic siege is the surest way to silence. Takes longer but works best, not least because people can't see it as clearly and don't know what to point at with the fury of a hue and cry.
To be sure neither picture is Candide's "Best of All Possible Worlds." Yet not so one-sided with style aligning to virtue. Normnan Rockwell was every bit as realist as the ones in Russia and look what the oligarchs pay for his works. Latest is George Lucas who bought up many Rockwells for his new Museum of Narrative Art that seeks to break down the useless ideological sniping between abstract high art and realism, illustration and all those other aesthetic little orphans at daddy's table.
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