John Zorn's arcane challenge
By Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Dec. 1, 2000) -- There is an inherent challenge in Arcana: Musicians on Music, a new collection of two-and-a-half dozen essays about music, written by contemporary musicians and composers and edited by John Zorn (Granary Books, 379 pages, $24.95). The challenge is implied in the word "arcana," which means secrets or mysteries, and it is akin to the challenge implicit in the very act of music criticism: how to put into words the abstract and non-verbal notions that comprise music and the act of music-making.

In the book's preface, Zorn, himself a composer, musician and theoretician of sorts, makes the challenge explicit when he says that the book is in large part a response to the woeful failure of music critics to write intelligently about a generation of musicians and composers engaged in creative and experimental music-making of the kind that generally gets labeled "avant-garde" or "downtown" (such labeling is itself the subject of much discussion in the book).

The book, Zorn writes, is "an act of necessity," a corrective to "an unfortunate injustice, the incredible lack of insightful critical writing about a significant generation of the best and most important work of the past two decades."

Musicians are not necessarily the best equipped to write about music in general, or their own music in particular, as Zorn freely admits. But if "Arcana" reveals only one thing -- and it reveals much more -- it is that this group of musicians, including Gerry Hemingway, Scott Johnson, Anthony Coleman, Myra Melford, Elliott Sharp, Mark Dresser, Bob Ostertag, John Oswald and Guy Klucevsek, are more than up to the task.

Their essays are thoughtful, stimulating and provocative, and if they are intended in some way to make readers want to listen to their authors' music, then they have succeeded. (A list of recommended recordings is included in the appendix.)

A brief glance through the footnotes alone show these composer/theorists to be a well-read, intellectual bunch, well-versed in writers including Stephen Jay Gould, Antonio Damasio, Italo Calvino, Theodor Adorno, Frank Lloyd Wright, George Steiner, Paul Celan, Sander L. Gilman and Albert Einstein. As one might assume from such a weighty, impressive list, the writing in "Arcana" isn't always easy-going. In that, it is a match for the musical works of many of these composers, works which require a level of concentration and attentive listening far beyond that required by the three-minute pop songs (which as one writer points out, actually contain only about 30 seconds of musical "information") or the few dozen familiar "greatest hits" of the European classical repertoire to which most of us are accustomed.

That of course, is precisely the problem, and several of the pieces in "Arcana" examine how we got to the point where serious music, which once was synonymous with popular music, is instead now synonymous with obscure or difficult music. The irony is that this new music, often called "avant-garde," speaks with contemporary eloquence to our everyday situation. More than pop, rock, blues, jazz or traditional folk - all of which the new music incorporates -- it is the music of our time and place.

"The musical present," writes Chris Brown, "is multiplicity," and the eclectic strategies, concepts and stylizations of these contemporary composers and improvisers reflect the reality of the global village. The music of these new composers, writes Larry Ochs, "has been concerned with the integration of composition and improvisation using non-traditional forms and/or alternative devices...." It is music that "uses any and all resources available," music heard in alternative spaces and recorded for boutique labels, music rarely if ever heard on the radio except perhaps on the most adventurous of college or community radio stations, music that rarely if ever accepts any preconceived notions of structure or form, music that freely coexists with and plays with other forms (dance, film, poetry, performance art), music that freely builds upon the Western art tradition as well as a panoply of other cultural traditions and which employs the techniques and approach of jazz improvisation. It is music which doesn't recognize boundaries between high and low, art and pop, but rather seeks to connect or exploit the connection between these perceived antitheses.

It is also music that by its very definition -- and by the fact that it is made by serious musicians and composers raised on rock and schooled in Western composition --contains within it the potential to save so-called classical music from the demographic time bomb that threatens it with extinction. In "The Counterpoint of Species," which could be considered the keynote essay in an eclectic work ranging from highly technical descriptions of musical techniques to artist interviews to poems, Scott Johnson suggests that this genre-defying or genre-fusing approach is more in keeping with classical tradition than not, and that the classical establishment would do well to acknowledge this and embrace it.

"In a very important sense, the use of elements from popular music is more in keeping with the classical tradition than their exclusion by mid-century, post-classical modernism," writes Johnson. "Now these vernacular influences and instruments are gradually ceasing to be a novelty among serious composers, and are well on their way to becoming a basic option in the vocabulary of a new generation."

There is nothing new about making art music out of folk. Brahms and Schubert, writes Johnson, "could work both ends of the system, penning popular parlor pieces and lofty symphonies alike ... Theirs was a period when serious and popular, professional and amateur music-making were related dialects." Yet somehow, the very establishment that grew out of this tradition and which now is so scornful of "crossover" attempts (many of which, of course, are worthy of scorn, as they are about money and not art) is simply cutting its own throat, or cutting itself off from its source of potential vitality, both in terms of audience and creativity.

"Talk of high and low culture has become a self-fulfilling prophecy," writes Johnson, "and in obeying it the classical tradition has turned its back on the very capacity for importation and hybridization which fueled its rise." But the essays in "Arcana" are about much more than the high-low debate. Myra Melford writes eloquently about music as the aural equivalent of architecture, about how growing up in a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house has forever molded her view of music's potential for creating a space "not only structurally and esthetically satisfying, but that also allows for the individual listener or player within it to have her own experience .... that brings one back to one's Self, that affirms one's deepest feelings of longings," and how Wright's theories of organic architecture inform her approach to organic growth in improvisation and composition.

Not everyone writes with such abstraction. Guitarist Marc Ribot, whose eclectic resume includes his own guitar-noise compositions as well as work with the Lounge Lizards, the Jazz Passengers, Tom Waits, Elvis Costello and the Klezmatics, writes humorously of the aesthetics and morality of guitar feedback and distortion. Composer David Mahler discusses the very practical concerns of a composer's need for space, time and money, while noting the damaging effect that everyday noise has on the appreciation of music. Guitarist Elliott Sharp describes how learning about Fibonacci numbers affected his music, and John Oswald talks about the affect of new technology on composition.

David Rosenboom's essay, "Propositional Music," strongly makes the case for music as "an ideal discipline within which to explore the essential qualities of human knowledge." Rosenboom shows how every composition implies a model or vocabulary, and acknowledges that these models have grown perilous over the last half-century.

"Achieving a clear understanding of 20th-century music can be particularly difficult, partly because the cognitive models associated with it have evolved at an accelerated pace and have split into a plethora of developmental streams," writes Rosenboom. "For the adventurous at heart, however, this is precisely what makes ours one of the most exciting and exhilarating musical epochs in which to live and one which brightly illuminates the collective human intellect, body and spirit."

Much of the writing in "Arcana" remains arcane, as will much of the music. But arcana aren't necessarily to be avoided. Life is full of mystery, and what better way to explore its secrets than through the unfathomable new sounds mapped out by contemporary composers?

[This column originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Dec. 1, 2000. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2000. All rights reserved.]

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