Six Tanglewood Talks (1, 2, 3)

Author(s): John Harbison

Source: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Spring - Summer, 1985), pp. 12-22
Published by: Perspectives of New Music
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 SIx TANGLEWOOD TALKS
(1, 2, 3)*

JOHN HARBISON

PREFACE

T HESE Six Tanglewood Talks WERE GIVEN as seminars during the first two
weeks at the Berkshire Music Center in 1984.
These texts represent only what was written out. They were delivered with
many interpolations. There was little attempt at any subsequent cosmetic work;
they are left to represent the spirit of the seminars.
Each talk was followed by or interspersed with recorded pieces. The discus-
sions which followed were very lively, and encouraged me to type up the talks.
I am grateful to my colleagues on the composition staff, Gunther Schuller
and Theodore Antoniou, for providing the forum, and to the Tanglewood
administration, headed by Dan Gustin and Richard Ortner, for ideal condi-

*Talks 4, 5, and 6 will appear in our next issue.

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 Six Tanglewood Talks (1, 2, 3) 13

tions. Most of all I am indebted to the twelve composition fello

Bill Coble, Sidney Friedman, Stefan Fulenwieder, Tim Gelle
Laura Karpman, Todd Levin, Steve Mackey, Steve Martland,
and Dan Schroycns. They reacted to many points, and especi
which followed the talks.

Music FOR THE Six TA,LKS

I. Harbison: Mottettidi Montale Libri III, IV

II. Adams: Harmonium

III. Davies: Symphony No. 2 1, 2

IV. Tippett: movements from four pieces as indicated in the text.

V. Wyncr: On This Most Voluptuous Nght

VI. Sessions: Concerto for Orchesta

N.B. Thirty tapes from my own collection, music from the last ten years,
were made available to the Fellows through the Berkshire Music Center
libraryl. Reference was made to them in my interpolated remarks, and in
the discussions.

I. HisFTORY

Recent research with songbirds has shown that when they are raised from
infancy away from other birds they make only a weak semblance of their song,
without fantasy, variety, or confidence. But when they are placed among other
mature singers they develop their own individualities, progressing from imita-
tion to subtle but intense variants of the ur-song of their species, variants too
subtle for our species to detect without long training.
The story of the songbirds meant something to me, though I do not know
whether we have any right to an analogy: it seems to support the proposition as
we begin to work together at Tanglewood-that some things about our art might
be taught, and learned. But cven if we do tcach and learn something, or by
some other means discover ways to xvrite music, we are destined to produce,
even in full maturity, only subtle variants imperceptible to those on other plan-
ets, ringing small and momentarily momentous changes in the great collecti\ve
song on which our civilization has worked for centuries.
This suggests a fascination with history, and a respect for its force. My father
was a historian. I answered this in the usual way, by being very poor on the
subject, ev\'en uninterested, until he died. Then nothing seemed more interest-
ing: I have come to bclieve that a composer begins early constructing his own

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14 Perspectives of New Music

history of music, one which has nothing to do with the of

writings of Wagner, Debussy, and Stravinsky attest to the
tice and, increasingly in modem times, composers from
have also written history to lead inexorably to them.
We must do this.

We must begin with the standard version. We can't i

Haydn or Beethoven or Wagner or Berg from our studie
appeal to us. We must study and learn "the classics" on
means that our eventual, personal history will be too par
But very soon, as we go along, our appetites take more
At each stage of life the hierarchy seems inviolate; then
years later it has shifted. At each moment we must mobili
past behind us like support troops.
Here is how it went for me: in adolescence Mozart Strin
Cantatas, Stravinsky Symphony ofPsalms, Bart6k Concert f
groups: Kern and Gershwin songs. Oscar Peterson, later
freely admit the Four Freshmen, Nat King Cole. This is
able time. Everything from these years is indelible. If w
teaching music we'd do it then, and before, and then lea
During college: more Stravinsky, some Hindemith an
and Mozart even more preponderant. Discovery of Monk
my teachers' will-suspicion that Wagner might be both co
After college: Schuitz a revelation of five hundred more
Schoenberg likewise but the price higher. Verdi, from
standing to adoration, triggered by Sessions' remark "on
worth the whole Ring to me" (this from a lifelong Wagn
tral, due to my performances of over forty of his cantatas
estrangement due to a discovery that I couldn't perform
Out of school, on my own: forbidden fruits like Vare
Scarlatti; none challenge Bach or Schumann or Stravinsk
they suggest I may not be who I think I am.
Early maturity: finally ready for Schubert, who wrote t
genre he really tackled. English music, especially Tippe
Finally grown up to Sessions. Demanding more and mor
but parodoxically hearing something in some of the mini
Along with bearing witness to these changing appetites c
potential theoretical framework. My first important redr
ary places the Second Viennese School at the end ofan era, n
(This harmonizes with an astrological conclusion of Yeats
with Toynbee.) This done, Monteverdi also shifts into a
positional task becomes one of rebuilding and reconnecting
ing a dialectic line.

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 Six Tanglewood Talks (1, 2, 3) 15

The full availability of four centuries of history, plus music

cultures and from popular culture, is a recent resource for com
slows and confuses our development. We must early and ruthle
understanding what is for us, and what is distracting. The older we
we must telescope and distort it for our own purposes. It should
use texts for setting; freely, lovingly, and brutally.
With this in mind I have examined my own changing but odd
hierarchies and found in them a broad unifying bias.
I prefer what I would call the Philosophic Mode to Voice (or
Early in our careers as composers we are urged or we urge ours
our own voice. That self-conscious position is favorable to some,
many more. I would prefer that voice be a by-product of maturi
ness, rather than a heightening of idiosyncracies which can make a
"striking" but will diminish range and staying power. The luxury
vegetating, and stealing must be granted to all young composers.
seize it they will have to do it later, when it carries fatal risks.
comparisons will illustrate my two categories.

Personality The Philosophic Mode

Monteverdi
Schfitz
Handel Bach
Telemann Rameau
Liszt Schumann
Copland Sessions
Britten Tippett
Messiaen Carter
Webem Schoenberg
Davies Birtwistle

No quality difference is meant here, only sympathy. The "voice" composers

tend to be recognizable early and always. They devote much energy to the mak-
ing of the imprint. The philosophers tend to "sound like themselves" only
gradually, and to place little priority on when or how they arrive. The first group
engrosses more as we are hearing their music, the second more after we have
heard it.

I want to be a composer of the philosophic mode, which I think requires a

sophisticated harmonic language, an ability to re-imagine melody as a guiding
force, an inventive formal sense, a willingness to be misunderstood, and much
patience. As such I will say just about anything to justify the category.
But after we choose lineage, our colleagues past, present, and future, via
appetite, whim, and involuntary reflex, and justify it by schemes like this one,
we have only begun; we have to transmute what we have chosen into some-
thing we can't find anywhere else.

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16 Perspectives of New Music

To do that we need maturity. That doesn't mean we ha

and Mendelssohn had it as teenagers. But in our era it is h
again; we are too protected from birth, death, filth, and
fling availability of four hundred years of musical materia
barriers.

So we must mature ourselves. This, more than our musical development, is

where we need mentors. And we need contact with a cultural heritage hardly
breathing in the society at large. Although all composers should be able to sight-
read a Bach fugue, conduct Varbse's Octandre, write down complex chords in
dictation, it may be even more determining that they read War and Peace, the
Bible, all of Shakespeare, and today's best poetry. The history of music simply
doesn't contain any major figures who lack this intellectual curiosity, and I
believe I can hear in a new piece whether its composer experiences a pressing
inner life, or whether he is merely successful at projecting individuality or
"musicality."
Nor would I exclude from this characterization an attachment to popular
culture as long as it is avid and not passive. My own penchant for AllMy Chil-
dren and Rockford Files is attached somewhere to my pursuing of Dickens' novels;
if you love serial narration, and want music to have it, you have to take it where
you can find it.
Music cannot teach music without the help of a complicated woven life fab-
ric. In the one talk I had with Luigi Dallapiccola he spoke of his discovery of a
kinship with Webern in the early forties and his joy at that feeling of commu-
nity. But I remember even more clearly his illustration of that feeling with a long
quote from the Divine Comedy, delivered without hesitation or effort, and
remember thinking then, this must be what a composer is.

II. USES OF POPULAR MUSIC

Concert music makes up only a tiny percentage of the music played and heard
today, and accounts for an even smaller percentage of the revenues earned by
music. To most of the people in the world, music is TV music, movie music, and
above all pop music (the latter recently having also taken on a visual form).
These musics are elective-someone has caused them to begin by buying a ticket
or turning on a set or record player. There is also a great deal of nonelective
music, played in supermarkets, airports, hotel lobbies, and even outdoor public
spaces. It is clear now that most people regard music as an accompaniment to
something: at best an enhancer, like a wine at a meal, at worst an environmental
accident which can create habits and dependencies of a passive kind.
Although ambient music is an important sociological subject, I want to
address here that "vernacular" music which is experienced and retained, and
which becomes an important part of people's lives. Such music is major com-
petition for concert music. It is also a potential nourishment for concert music.

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 Six Tanglewood Talks (1, 2, 3) 17

All the most vital forms of pop music stemmed from jazz or
jazz has now become relatively limited in public appeal. The j
bles, even overlaps with the concert music public; it is even m
music public, gradually emerging from years in the ghetto und
Early in the century jazz was not esoteric: it gave birth to the
American popular music. This popular music was created by
forces, the musical comedy and tin pan alley writers, and the
and phonograph record performers. The unit of currency wa
best of which originated as theater songs. A tune became a "
interpreters played and sang it, each in their own way, and m
sheet music were sold. (The sheet music represented the orig
version of the tune, rendered in the exact detail the compo
requiring an advanced performer to play it at home). A tune
dard" when this process continued over many years, through
the tune literally entered the popular subconcious. Each era w
tribute a few standards, hardy emblems of the vitality of their
It is these standards that I began playing, solo and in groups,
inheritance I took for granted, though I was very aware of the
these perennials. They were often as demanding as an
remember working hard to make sure that all the harmonies
bridge of Body and Soul, that the common tones which brough
lous transitions back to the A sections of The Song Is You and A
Are were given enough weight, that the second chord of Foq
diminished chord but a minor sixth (I was shocked and gratef
on that by a fastidious trumpet player). It was a hard exhilarat
and more exhilarating than the learning and performance of
parts ten years later, because it was a living language. What m
were fortunate to be sharing was a late flowering of a disciplin
demanding improvisor's art, based on the melodic and harmo
some of America's greatest musicians-Kern, Gershwin, Rog
ren, Van Heusen, and many others. To this day I'm told, by
experienced the same kind of background, that we are still
those changes."
The late fifties were the last time this was a culturally centr
who later became composers of concert music-Kraft, Sch
Schuller, Martirano, and countless others-were still close to
when they went out to play those standards on their jazz job
I remember sensing the presence ofa powerful interloper ar
the first rockers began moving us out of our club! About th
musical comedy, the fountainhead of the best songs, began
teenager I was already aware that "the standards" I carried in
becoming less a shared common "melos," more the propert
tened among the Hit Parade tunes for something I thought h
found Too Late Now!

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18 Perspectives of New Music

But it was too late, that song was by Burton Lane, surviv
age.
The tunes were gradually being replaced by the groups, or the hero perform-
ers, who were bigger than their tunes. It isn't Heartbreak Hotel or Hound Dog
that survive as cultural artifacts, it is Elvis Presley or his posthumous doubles sing-
ing them. Sheet music disappeared or became hopelessly primitive. The song
became the record: few tunes circulated among performers, they were instead
identified definitely with a single recorded performance, which that performer
tried to duplicate exactly in live performance or lip-synched to the record. The
beat, the harmonies, and the forms emphasized clear reiterated shapes
("hooks"), root position chords, and hypnotic, crushing pulsations, phys-
icality and presence above all.
Partly through this drastic grammatical simplification, partly through new
marketing techniques, pop music found a wider public than ever before. In
spite of the anachronistic presence of some actual tune-writers, like the Beatles, I
became aware of a steadily-narrowing vocabulary as I taught, through many
years, a course called Practical Harmony for nonclassical musicians. I will never
forget the response to one of my assignments-the writing out of a lead-sheet for
Nice Work If You Can GetIt, giving the melody only. I was glad none of the class
had ever heard Gershwin's version. I thought they would be thrilled by his eva-
sive, dapper strategies. Their versions were unanimous, firmly in the mid-seven-
ties root position cut. I then played Gershwin for them; they were deeply unim-
pressed, found him "complicated," "weird," and "wrong." I knew I was in
alien country.
Soon after, I was asked by a very gifted composition student and "crossover"
pianist to show him what I heard in "all that grey music" I like-Bach cantatas,
thirties Stravinsky, etc. He was himself already an accomplished handler of
"gesture," "areas," and "colors," and was asking out of genuine curiosity and
good humor that will eventually carry him over all obstacles. I chose Cantata 23,
one of the greatest, and greyest, and we went virtually bar by bar. Then the
Stravinsky Symphony ofPsalms-I think it stayed grey for him, while it glowed for
me.

Am I making too much of these and other encounters ifI begin

questions?
1. Does the root position, static harmony, the modal triadic droning in
Duran Duran songs mean I should worry about an atrophy of purposeful har-
monic progression among young concert composers?
2. Does the young pianist who rides roughshod over the deceptive cadence
at the end of the Mozart G Minor Piano Quartet do so because Kiss has a reper-
toire of four chords and that isn't one of them?
3. Is the young cellist whose choreography is better than her timing, who
does notfeel the drop to Eb early in the Schubert Quintet, mesmerized by the
gestural, exaggerated monotone of David Bowie?

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 Six Tanglewood Talks (I, 2, 3) 19

4. Does the distance from ForAll We Know to BeatItsignify

end of structural hearing?
Each generation believes deep down that the other gener
somehow wrong-maybe good but unnatural, unfaithful to
perception finds double force with popular music. Pop mus
music of adolescence, sometimes prolonged adolescence. Ever
their pop music was the last good pop music, because they fee
were the last good early years. Adults nurse their generation's
ories to their dying day because their most irreversable mome
pulse. But then on their dying day it all dies, all except the sta
things that have achieved an artistic life, because for the most
ciations with events and emotions, not durable free-standin
This is the poignancy of pop to each generation: its mortality
why pop music dates so comically and touchingly, so even t
decade seems so quaint and unhip.
This is why I will always believe Teach Me Ton~ghtis a wond
it is); it is a blonde in forty crinolines and extra makeup
taught. This is why the only popular music we can honestly an
rate into our compositional style is that of our own adolesc
ishable icon we seek to enshrine in something more durable, t
to strip it of its nostalgia and trap only its vitality.
It is up to you to find out what to do with yours, and me w
take us the rest of our lives.

III. Ca-TICISM

The dignified and correct position on music criticism for the

be this one: "I don't read the critics, I don't care what they say
bly affect me." I regard it with suspicion, just as I do the pron
intellectual friends: "I never watch television, I can't imag
would watch television."
Both carry an air of moral superiority, in fact they are morally superior, but
we degenerates who read criticism (maybe not within the first week), or watch
TV, suspect that such lofty indifference to the health hazards of our culture may
not always be on the level.
I read music reviews, my own and others, and consider them important fac-
tors in the survival struggles of our profession. Some years ago I attempted not
to read them, but found that the ones from "important" papers, especially the
cruel and disparaging ones, were always clipped and mailed to me by close
friends and relatives. I also found my curiosity killing me.
I am also not going to claim indifference to what I read. Though I seem
either unwilling or unable to alter my approach to answer or fulfill the evalua-
tions, and thus have found myself impervious to them in actual artistic action, I

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 20 Perspectives of New Music

am anything but impervious in emotional terms. I admit t

weeks of work to insults and misunderstandings, even
respect. And if the writer is one I believe in, I wind u
professions.
The reasons: sensitivity to public humiliation, inability to find effective ave-
nues of response. Also on more vulnerable levels: all composers have some
insecurities and doubts, and critics, good and bad, will, by luck or perspicacity,
occasionally hit them on the nose.
I am also not going to claim indifference to praise. I am especially happy
when a good listener cares for what I have done. I have also accepted with pleas-
ure praise from someone whose view I would otherwise not regard seriously!
Which of us has not dismissed a given critic as a charlatan, then when he says
something positive, we abjectly clip it and include it on our dossier? Those
words, those pieces of paper become legal tender or filthy lucre in our struggle
for recognition and economic survival, they become a chronicle of our defeats
and victories, and yet they have so little to do with what it is really about.
We know we can never satisfy the critics, because they want something that
they already know about, that is easy to write about, or that confirms their own
inner plans for music. And they can never satisfy us. We want to be loved, but
worse and more, we want to be understood, even if not loved, and that, in art as
in life, is simply asking too much.
Since critics give, over and over, their perspective on what happens when a
new piece is played, it might be useful to hear a composer's version once. He
writes a piece over a period ranging from days to years, something he feels pas-
sionately about, so much so that to send it off to performance can be a kind of
bereavement. The reaction he cares most about will be the performers', because
they are his lifelong partners, and are able, if they wish, to sustain him through
anything. Also interesting, if less definitive, is the reaction of the listeners at the
concert. Their very presence puts a kind of pressure on his piece that he wants
and needs. If he is experienced he learns to sense their attention, or distraction,
and to value their most intense reactions, measured less in curtain calls than in a
look in the eyes, or an undisguisable engagement that suggests more than
"interest" or correct deportment.
When the concert is happening and when it ends, there is an ephemeral but
very nourishing sense of what happened, which the composer tries to evaluate
and keep alive, in all its fragility, assisted only by the memories of some of the
ear-witnesses to the event. Even if the piece was for large chorus and orchestra,
witnessed by three thousand, its brief physical corporeality is hardly a match for
the critic's blunderbuss next day.
To the reading public, which is hundreds of times larger than the audience,
which heard the piece, the critic declares what he thinks about it. "Congratula-
tions on your Toronto review" says a distant acquaintance who passes in the
street, or "Sorry to hear about the New York performance." The Toronto per-
formance may have been indifferent, the New York one good, it hardly matters

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 Six Tanglewood Talks (I, 2, 3) 21

at that point, amid the realization that we are dealing with an

power. We wait for follow-up performances against which the cri
can be checked. The piece may wait years-for the cycle to be r
met people who have formed rather detailed impressions of my
poser without ever having heard a note of my music. I was recen
about a job by a distinquished member ofa board oftrustees who
been reading some of your recent reviews-but we decided
anyway."
The etiquette is: we send our pieces into the world, anyone says whatever he
wishes in print, and that's the end ofit. Any further response from us must take
the form of a new piece. A critic-friend once said to me "All you want is praise,
you don't really care about our standards." I disagree. Here is some unsolicited
advice for that friend and his colleagues.
1. Stop using the excuse that deadline pressure prevents higher-level work.
We also have deadlines of all kinds, and can't presume to make any excuses on
their account.

2. Spend at least a year writing without reference to categories and labels.

(Minimal, conservative, romantic, etc.)
3. Offer a statute of limitations of two years to every composer about whose
enterprise you have formed a fixed judgement.
4. Revise a judgement up or down in one of your columns, if you see the
necessity, in order to tear your cloak of omniscience.
5. Do a set of record-reviews without looking at the names on the disc.
6. Tell your readers, when appropriate, that you don't know what to think
of something, you don't get something, or you think that some of the things
you don't like may actually be good.
7. Think of yourself as a musician squarely in the community of musicians,
not as a man-on-the-street who knows nothing but knows what he likes, or as a
Superior Court Judge above the battle.
8. Decide that to continue writing you must work as hard in music as any
composer or performer you review-whatever is necessary-piano practicing,
score studying, historical reading.
9. Don't belittle your economic and career-making power, or you will use it
unwisely. Know that though you can't kill a composer, you can make his life
fully miserable, economically, psychologically, and socially.
10. Paradox: Don't fear to write strictly and severely if your full conviction
requires it, especially about your friends and acquaintances; if you can't, all your
work will devalue.

11. Insist on professional standards within your discipline. Hire young

people with a sense of a calling, with passion about music, with excellent musi-
cal educations, and with a sense of the potential nobility of their profession.
12. Insist on your profession's great heritage, on E.T.A. Hoffman, and
Grimm, and Thompson, and Tovey-its capacity for more than daily reporting
of fads, trends, and personalities.

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22 Perspectives of New Music

13. Write with fervor and devotion, rather than superiori

Though you are supposed to sell, the reflection of societal cynic
only the shortest term market solution.
14. Let the necessity to condemn a serious artist cause as muc
as it will in him (or her).
15. Give up all your hyperbolic phrases for Lent, and let
shades regain currency and value.
16. Let your biases and points of view ring through glorio
vigorously as possible, and you will be able to deliver only e
and clean wounds.

It is harder to write good criticism than to write a piece! The composer fol-
lows his appetites, instincts, technical expertise, and blind faith. The critic can
use all these, but he is remcting rather than fertilizing, and is responsible as a com-
poser is not. The critic has some heavy burdens to bear: he is as likely to disap-
pear as the composer is, but if he endures it can as well be for his mistakes as for
his insights. When he is most influential, our musical culture is at its most bar-
ren and confused.

The evaluation of new pieces is the only vitalizing aspect of the critical profes-
sion. Though much of the critic's time these days is taken up with celebrity
interviews, and reviews of performances of pieces played countless times before,
the critic (and the performers and the public) are only fill participants in the
flow of music history when concerned with music of the present. This is why
the honor roll of critics is eighty percent composers: Berlioz, Schumann,
Debussy, and in the early part of this century, Virgil Thomson, Arthur Berger,
and Charles Ives. If composers wish to affect the present state of music criticism
they must begin writing again themselves.

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