Chapter 10 - Aspects of Confluence between Western Art Music and Ethnomusicology

Summary

This essay represents a turning point in my writing on music. Up to this time, I had written mainly technical papers, reviews, and books on music theory. Of course, in classes and convention talks I had discussed the relation of the study of non-Western art music to recent concert and electronic music. In fact, some of the ideas of this text were tried out as early as 1984 at the Society for Ethnomusicology’s national convention at the University of Florida in Tallahassee.

The kind of activities and interests that I identify as an “ethnomusicological perspective” to composition have become commonplace in the United States and elsewhere since I wrote the text in 1993. I also discuss some differences between American and European musical practices and attitudes that seem to have remained largely invariant over the years. The essay will also shed light on some of my remarks on the current state of American music in the “Overture.”

As we survey Western Art music of this century from our own fin de siècle standpoint, we are struck by its ever-proliferating diversity. Whether one attributes the present pluralism to compositional “contextualism” as does Milton Babbitt, describes it like Leonard B. Meyer as a “fluctuating stasis,” or simply deems it “postmodern,” the fact is that there are dozens of aesthetic paradigms simultaneously flourishing today in Western art music alone, each with its own dedicated creators, performers, critics and ideologies. And despite the almost violent sequences of aesthetic change and fashion that distinguish the twentieth century, each new compositional orientation has tended to survive rather than being superseded by the next. Having been informed, for example, that serialism, aleatoric music, stochastic process, East/West fusion, minimalism, and/or the “New Romanticism” are dead, one quickly discovers that such pronouncements are inept, for all of these directions still evolve, each producing new music and continuing to work on its own set of postulated technical problems.

Once contemporary art music’s pluralism is acknowledged, one notices that the ecological balance among contemporary music cultures is hardly static, but rather quite fluid. Each culture is aware to various degrees of accuracy and acceptance of the doings of the others.