[MUSIC PLAYING]
Welcome back to entitled opinions on KZSU Stanford.
This is our second segment of our conversation with Professor
Steven Hinton from the Music Department here at Stanford and our first segment.
If you were with us, you heard us discussing the career of Kurt Vile.
And what we heard there is Mack the Knife, perhaps one of his most famous compositions or songs.
And I'll ask now our guest Steven Hinton if that is indeed the case.
But first, let me reintroduce and Steven, welcome to the program again.
Thank you very much, Robert.
I'm delighted to be back.
So is Mack the Knife Kurt Vile's signature piece, would you call it?
It's the signature song from the signature piece.
It's a tune that became extremely popular in the 1950s, above all, with a revival of Kurt Vile's
best known theater piece, the Three-Penny Opera.
In the 1920s, there were other contenders for that distinction.
But nonetheless was pretty impressively important at the time.
Added to the show at the last minute to satisfy the vanity of the leading male singer in the Three-Penny Opera.
So it nearly didn't make its way into the show.
But once it did, its popularity has just been on the increase.
And I guess the apotheosis of its popularity was a McDonald's commercial.
A number of years ago where Mr. Moon was sitting at his piano and saying or rather singing,
"Eat Big Mac Tonight."
But that wasn't Mr. Moon singing there, that was better all breath to himself.
We actually had a rather wonderful voice.
We might hear that in a bit.
But I suppose Louis Armstrong, we have to hear the remake of that Mac the Knife, no?
Well, I think we should.
Following breast rendition that we just heard, I think Louis Armstrong illustrates something that we talked about in the last hour,
which is the remarkable ability of cut-vile songs to appeal to a whole range of performers.
And here's such more.
Big man, there goes Mac the Knife.
[Music]
So, Stephen, we promised our listeners that we would open up our conversation in the second segment to, you know, broader issues about music in the 20th century, so called serious music.
And continuing with the place that Kurt Vile has in the history of music, I know that one of his staunch supporters and biographers,
David Drew called him one of the great might have been in the history of music. Now what did David Drew mean when you call it Kurt Vile, one of the great might have been.
[Music]
I guess that's the kind of backhanded compliment in a way, isn't it, because our last hour was all about the very significant presence that Kurt Vile has in the musical world of the
20th century. But as far as his place in music history narrowly defined is concerned, I think that place has shifted quite a bit. When Drew began his pioneering work on Vile in the 1950s, he got to know
Lottie Lenia quite well and one of her husbands. This was a time when Kurt Vile had no place in music history. And for Vile to have had a place in music history, he would have had to have developed in a rather different way. We talked in the last hour about how he might have gone to study with Schoenberg.
And I suppose an element of the might have been in Drew's mind is the might have been a student of Schoenberg, might have become an Albert Berg or an Anton Vayburn, the member of the so-called second Viennese school of composition which played such a very central role in the writing of music history in the 20th century. One could of course say it played a role in 20th century music.
But to qualify that and say played a role in the writing of music history in the 20th century is to qualify the significance of the second Viennese school because I think that has shifted as well. And when Drew was writing in the 1950s, Schoenberg's reputation was writing extremely high. And that of his pupils as well.
Vile had not been one of his pupils in the kind of music he was doing just didn't fit into that narrative.
Well, I did a show last year with my brother Thomas Harrison who published a book a few years back on the year 1910.
Subtitled The Emancipation of Disney's and I know that that's a note.
That book is known well to you. And we've talked about this particular moment around the year 1910 with this sort of intent.
This sort of intense expressionism in the visual arts and music and perhaps even philosophy. And of course I'm remembering that there are more than one Schoenberg.
There's the expressionist Schoenberg and then after a while he reverts back to more traditional forms.
So when you say that in the 1950s and the writing of the history of music, Schoenberg was writing very high, which Schoenberg was it exactly was it the 12th-Tone Schoenberg or the subsequent more docile Schoenberg?
I think it was both following reason. I think the model for many post-war composers was Anton Vayburn, his pupil who had adopted an adapted Schoenberg's method of composing with 12 turns, which was something that he developed in the 1920s.
I'm sorry to be this kind of basic, but what is 12-tone music?
12-tone music is music that is composed using collections of all 12 chromatic pitches.
And there's a fairly complicated set of not exactly rules, but set of methods for composing in this way.
The basic approach is that the composer devises some pre-ordained constellation of pitches known as a set or series.
This is sometimes called serial composition. And depending on which notes are next to which notes.
So, depending on the actual order of the pitches, the intervals that they have, whether they are particularly consonant intervals or more dissonant intervals, that in turn will determine the character of the music quite significantly.
But the method of composing with 12 turns that Schoenberg developed in the 1920s really grew out of a crisis in the composition of music in musical language precipitated by what is called atonality, which is the musical language that Schoenberg was using around 1910.
The emancipation of dissonance, in other words, happens in two stages. One, traditional dissonances are not resolved into consonances and thereby retain a very expressive power in the music around 1910.
And then in 1923, after Schoenberg had gone fairly fallow in his composition and everything had become rather short-winded in his music, he started devising ways of composing more extended compositions by, in a sense, creating a new first practice of musical counterpoint.
He had used dissonances, expressively, the unresolved, the emancipated dissonances. When he spoke of the emancipation of dissonance proper in the 1920s, he was referring to the way in which he could combine the notes of the series with one another and control hermetically as it were, all of their relations through the
devising of 12 turns series. So in a way it's a much more controlled, formalistic approach to the earlier, very expressive expressionist as it was called approach of the early music.
Well, perhaps we could hear something by Schoenberg, this piece that you brought in for us, what is it that we're going to hear now from his?
So what we're going to hear now is a piece called "Evatong" or "Expectation" from 1909, and this is really the text book, "Aeternal Peace."
If you think that late Wagner is fairly dissonant, this takes it to another level. This is what is called a mono drama. It is a piece with one person in this case, a woman who just like in the expressionist plays at the time, is simply referred to as "deaf how" the woman.
Well, those expressionist plays "deaf son" or "Harsenklaver" for example.
Well, I'm glad you brought up the screen, because this is a great way of thinking about this piece. Everyone has an image of the screen, and in many ways what we're seeing there is the extrusion of emotion, a very intense emotion, and we certainly hear that.
I read recently however, and I don't know whether you saw this, that Munk, when he explained that painting, wasn't referring to the individual who was screaming, but the nature around him that was producing this sound, which we typically in music history associate not with expressionism, the extrusion of emotion from an individual, but with impressionism, with the painting of nature through sound.
So we associate that more with Debussy than Schoenberg. What we have in this wonderful piece by Schoenberg is a woman entering a forest, and I know that you're an authority on forests. She enters a forest and stumbles over, well she's not sure what she stumbles over, but then she realizes it's a dead body, and what we don't really find out is whether it's the dead body of her lover,
whom she seems to have lost. Schoenberg described the piece as the experience of a second stretched into 30 minutes, so the whole intensity of experience of a moment, a moment of shock and horror, which is explored here, not just through the atonal vocal line of the protagonist, the woman,
but also by the colouristic exploration of the sound of the forest, so the forest around her, like in the Munk painting, is also screaming.
It's also screaming, and that can also be the sound of the unconscious as well as the surrounding nature.
Well I think that's exactly right. This was one of Adorno's favourite pieces of music. This for him was the paradigm of informal music, music which was produced by some kind of expressive necessity, while at the same time giving voice to the alienated individual, and he invokes this piece so many times in his writings about music, as if the whole of music history was challenged after the composition of Earth.
This was the moment of Adorno's youth where he felt that music had really reached a great high point, and he never really felt that it progressed beyond this in a satisfactory way.
I don't know refer to this in his philosophy of new music, the seminal text and one that certainly influenced a lot of people in the 1950s, he referred to this as psychological protocols, as if the composer were taking down what's going on in the subjects unconscious.
He likened the music to expressionist painting, which he said really amounts to, he caused it in the philosophy of new music, nude portraits of the brain.
So it's a society civilisation without its clothes on, as it were. This is the bare essence of the modern individual.
Well, let's get it to listen.
[Music]
It's continuous of course composed in the Wagnerian manner in that sense, it's hard to find a cut-off point.
[Music]
It's quite a distinction with Kurt Vial now, or what we were hearing earlier.
It absolutely is, and the idiom is probably familiar to people who've seen a lot of horror movies.
Bernard Herman, a number of other composers David Raxson, who studied with Schoenberg,
employed this style of atonal composition in moments of great psychological intensity.
So I think quite familiar in film music, indeed Schoenberg himself wrote music in this style called
"A Complement to an Imaginary Movie".
Well, can I ask a personal naive question about musical taste, because in my original lead-in to our first segment,
a looting, I guess to a manual, that judgments of taste are judgments where you say that what appeals to me,
personally or subjectively, must appeal universally, but we know that that's not the case.
And I believe that things like poetry and music must have a healthy dose of the pleasure principle,
pervading them if they are going to survive and thrive, culturally speaking.
And do you take pleasure listening to Schoenberg?
In the same way you would take pleasure of listening to Kurt Vial or other forms of music.
If I take pleasure in it, it's a different form of pleasure, I'm sure.
I think it depends a lot on the performance as well, but are you suggesting that you do not take pleasure?
I'm suggesting that for a minute or two in a movie where there's a very dramatic moment that calls for highly expressive tense anxiety, written music like that,
that's fine, but I don't think I would settle back and listen to more than a few minutes of it with pleasure.
But that's certainly due to my lack of proper education, I'm sure.
Well, as a music historian, I'm inclined to look at this very much in a historical context as well.
And one way of thinking about this music is the kind of sonic analogy to expression is painting.
And if you think of Schoenberg's great friend, Vasily Kandinsky, around this time, his paintings are teetering on the brink of abstraction without actually being abstract paintings.
And I think this is what's going on with Schoenberg's music that he's piling on the musical equivalent of representational techniques.
In other words, expressive techniques, using all kinds of musical conventions, but it sounds quite unconventional because of the intensity.
And then like Kandinsky's music, which increasingly becomes abstract, Schoenberg begins to compose in a much more abstract manner.
And that is the transition to this 12-ton technique. But it's not entirely divorced from his early approach.
You know, in the same way that Kandinsky's abstract paintings seem like sublimated versions of the earlier paintings.
So individual shapes become almost geometric shapes, in literally geometric shapes, in some Kandinsky paintings.
So you have in Schoenberg's music these gestures of expressivity that are piled on in an almost intolerable intensity becoming sublimated in the very controlled figures of 12-ton music.
Now, for court-vial, there was some kind of historical necessity in his musical education in that he was tuning in to Schoenberg and really is considered seriously going into the same thing.
Schoenberg wanted him to go to Vienna, recognized his talent, and the early 1920s in court-vials career include a number of pieces that are written in an atonal style.
But he quickly abandons that style. And I think for him, being of this later generation, the generation born around 1900, he could have in his music gone one time.
He could have liked Schoenberg's pupils embraced the 12-ton method. And we should probably listen to a little bit of that to get a sense of what that music sounds like.
Or he could have done what a lot of artists did around that time is to think about the role of art in the new democracy, in the new Weimar Republic, and find ways of applying his musical talents to explore the music that he was doing.
He was very much caught up at the beginning of the Weimar Republic in that kind of revolutionary fervor. He could have taken him to Vienna. He could have ended up a 12-ton composer, but he took a completely different path.
I must say a path that in many ways was fairly characteristic for that younger generation. Even Schoenberg's pupil, Alban Berg, who was a little bit older, the vile used to sneak in to performances of the three-penny opera.
He could make up his mind, whether the likes of us, I'm quoting him most literally, should be composing a $10,000 symphony or a three-penny opera.
So it's really a question of whether he would have gone in the direction of become an avant-garde composer, or not become an avant-garde composer, which he wasn't.
That's exactly right. And his initial career was spent going to the avant-garde music festivals. And that's why he ended up at Baden, where they were expecting him to do something experimental in the world of musical theater.
And his experiment was precisely with the popular, something that he increasingly embraced in his career.
And I think in retrospect, this is my own entitled opinion, or perhaps not even entitled, but that he was on the winning side of the equation.
Yeah, he was. But when Drew said that he was a great mind of being, he temporarily, as far as music historians were concerned, was on the losing side.
But maybe we could listen to something that was composed in the very same year as the three-penny opera in 1928 by Anton von Vayburn, the third member of the second V&E school after Schoenberg and Berg.
This is a set of piano variations composed using the strict 12-tone method of composition.
And I think you will hear quite readily here that the kinds of dissonances that we were hearing in a Vartong are certainly prevalent.
We're not hearing major thirds or minor thirds, we're hearing lots of minor seconds and major sevens.
The vocabulary is dissonant, but there's an almost classical balance and crystalline beauty to the piano writing here.
[Music]
That is very beautiful, I'd say it's very pure at the same time as you were saying crystalline.
Yes, yes. And the favour more than Schoenberg in the 1950s when Drew was writing was the figure who young composers were seeing as the model where they were left off, that's where they were taking things up and creating after the second world war, a very exclusive form of avant-garde.
And Vile was completely out of that picture.
He just died, but he died as a composer on Broadway.
Where does John Cage fit into these two options?
Is he someone who very clearly follows in the Schoenberg line?
It's funny you should mention Cage because he studied with Schoenberg in UCLA and Schoenberg referred to him for a cage as a great inventor, not a composer.
And in the 1950s Cage took the German music festivals by Storm because he in many ways was somebody who was an earthertition of music.
And for many people it's Cage's writings rather than his compositions that are important.
The experiments that he engaged in, for example, writing a silent piece.
That's an interesting invention, but is it a composition?
I think that Schoenberg was referring to that kind of ingenuity in Cage or composing a piece called Water Music that involves literally somebody pouring water.
In other words, engaging in what later will become quite well known as happenings.
Cage was very much somebody who was challenging the traditions of Western music, but still at the same time feeling as though he was very much contributing to them as well.
You were speaking earlier about the way in which music history was written in, I guess, around the mid-century, in the centuries.
And it sounded to me like you were suggesting that the narrative was very narrow compared to all the kinds of things that were happening musically outside of the narrative.
And that there was academically speaking it could not make enough room to include this wild diversity of especially more popular forms of music.
That's exactly right.
I know we were talking about this recently, and I told you about my interest in different versions of the same textbook.
So what I brought along with me today to illustrate how the ground has really shifted quite radically in the last half-century.
I've brought along the first edition of a very famous music history textbook.
It was a textbook that I used as an undergraduate myself, and it really hadn't been revised very much when I got to use it in the 1970s.
And I've also brought along the latest edition of that, the seventh edition.
And I think this in a very drastic way illustrates the issues that I'm referring to.
So perhaps we could talk first of all about the first edition.
Here we go. This is the very last page of Donald J. Grant's History of Western Music from 1950.
The year of curt-vile dies, yes.
So it's probably written in 1949.
The ideal of art for everyone has degenerated to dictatorial regulation of style,
or the production of huge masses of cheap commercial entertainment music.
Continuity of tradition has been menaced by both the possibility of its defenders and the intransigence of the takers.
Schundag and Vayburn acknowledged tradition, but some of their younger disciples seem determined to annihilate the last vestiges of it.
Individual freedom has been pushed to the point where composers have become alienated from the majority of potential listeners.
And consequently, have written music of a subjective or esoteric nature capable of being understood only by a little circle of initiates.
However, the conflicts that are now apparent in 20th century musical practice and theory will doubt this eventually be resolved or transformed.
Just as the conflicts of the hours know, the Nuevo Muzike, these are earlier periods of music history in the medieval period,
and in the late Renaissance early Baroque, and the Brahms Wagner era were.
Every period of music has had its currents and countercurrents.
Every composer has had to take from his environment what he needed, reject what he could not use,
and restate to his contemporaries the eternal truth of music as he himself has been able to comprehend it.
So it's about eternal truth, but the options are very narrow there.
I somehow wish he had ended it without that last paragraph because I really liked what you were reading up until the however,
but it seems as if he didn't have the courage of his convictions to say that the individualism of composers has gone to great accesses,
that there's this scorn for listeners, for the majority.
There's an anti-democratic, certainly an anti-democratic strain.
And yet it seems with this last paragraph he's trying to do some damage control and say,
"Well, every composer, every individual has to find his own path and use what he needs and not use what he doesn't need."
I think he's backtrack.
I think he's having to tackle the paradox of writing a history of revolutions,
and trying to preserve the innovations as part of a tradition of innovations,
if you like, grout studied at Harvard University, and they have a wonderful concert hall.
They're called Pain Hall. It was built in 1913.
I don't know whether you've ever been there, but they have a freeze that goes around the building inside.
And right above where the conductors' head would be in a concert is the name Beethoven.
And then all these other names go around with the increasing order of importance until the back of the hall.
And I think what grout's textbook does is to give you a version of the freeze in Pain Hall.
The grout history textbook has only one chapter that is devoted to a single composer,
and guess who that composer is, Beethoven, of course.
And these other composers, Schoenberg and Beethoven, are being added here, maybe at the back of the hall still,
but nonetheless to the pantheon of great composers.
I take that, "Vile is not mentioned in this edition, first edition, or he is."
No, they basically end with Beethoven.
Yeah.
And so they don't even mention the composers who are taking their cue from Beethoven in the 1950s.
He's not ready to see how they actually fit into musical tradition.
And of course, in subsequent editions there are a number of revisions, appendices, or qualifications.
Total rewrites.
For something utterly completely different one should go to the end of the latest edition.
The seventh edition published just a couple of years ago.
The last page begins, "It is too early to know what music from the late 20th century or early 21st century will be remembered, performed, and listened to in the future,
or will influence later music.
Trends change too quickly to give a balanced or complete overview of recent music.
But it seems clear that there is a continuing tension in all types of music between finding a niche of committed listeners,
whose support will endure, and finding a wide audience.
There are few pieces that everyone knows, perhaps national anthems and film music, come closest to providing the shared musical experiences that seem to have been more common in the past.
The immediate success in enduring place enjoyed by Beethoven in orchestral music,
Verde in Opera, Duke Ellington in Jazz, or the Beethoven's in popular music no longer seems possible for musicians working today,
because the audience is so divided that such unanimity of opinion is likely to be achieved.
And I'll go down a bit, it says,
"The choices we have for music to hear and perform have become almost limitless.
So too are the possibilities for new music, with new computer software and the collage approach found in both classical and rat-ph MUSIC.
It is now possible for all of us, with access to technology to make our own music, without performance training.
In some respects, we are surrounded by more music than we can ever consume.
But perhaps we are also returning to something akin to the condition of music long ago,
when every singer sang his or her own song."
Now that is quite a shift.
Now there is certainly a place for court violin there, but also for all those interpreters of court violin singing their own song that we've spoken about.
It sounds like academic music history is unraveling there, that the categories that have traditionally sustained the understanding of the history of music just are so bewildered by the phenomena themselves,
a musical phenomena that seems like an internal collapse of the very categorization that such a encyclopedia of music is intended to provide.
I think that's absolutely right.
There's no history in the singular of music, and even the concept of the history of music is completely relativised here.
I think the poor grout, his history of music, can scarcely survive under the weight of all these what you might call post-modern qualifications.
One, there are two figures I would like to quare you about. One is Travinsky.
But first, I'd like to go back to Adorno whom you mentioned earlier.
His highly academic, snobbish concept of what music, serious music should be, and his phobia about any sort of contamination of pure music with especially consumer demand and popular culture.
He must have had a very ambiguous assessment of a composer like Kurt Vial.
Absolutely. In a way, the 1950 edition of grout that I quoted where they say the ideal of art for everyone has degenerated to dictatorial regulation of style or the production of huge masses of cheap commercial entertainment music is a digest of Adorno's attitude to music.
This is an attitude that certainly changed over the years, but it became sharpened in the post-war period with the appearance of the book that I referred to already, very influential book for all kinds of people, critics, scholars, composers, the philosophy of new music,
where even the music of Stravinsky in that book was considered to be in kahoots in a way with the forces of reaction and restoration.
So Schoenberg is the progressive historical force, Vayburn in some ways even more. Stravinsky is considered somebody who for various reasons on the side of...
Well, the whole book is conceived as what he calls an "excursus to the dialectic of enlightenment".
And so we have the forces of progress and the forces of reaction and Stravinsky has the very unfortunate assignment of illustrating the latter tendency.
Do you agree with that? No. Not at all.
I think the whole model is rather bogus. I'm very interested in Adorno because he was such an influential historical figure and I'm very interested in his writings on music because he was so superbly knowledgeable.
And there's a lot of critical insight there, but I think his theories are extremely problematic indeed.
As far as his relationship with Kurt Vayler is concerned, they knew each other quite well in the 1920s.
Adorno was a music critic felt that he should be supportive of what Vayler was doing, but even then had trouble doing so.
We started with Mac De Nye from Three Peni Opera. Adorno wrote a fairly famous and notorious review of Three Peni Opera where he declared its popularity to be based on a misunderstanding.
In other words, the snobbishness was shining right through there. He understood it and the notion was that if people liked it, they were liking it for the wrong reasons.
Yes, my deeply rooted animosity towards Adorno has now been reactivated when I hear a quote like that.
The utter snobbism and scorn of the individual.
On what basis could he assume that he knew better than the people who loved that opera?
Yes, and I think his snobbism only got worse and it also acquired a fairly heavy dose of anti-Americanism when he came to this country and was writing vehemently against the so-called culture industry.
By that time he had been an apologist if you liked for Cook Vial and with friends like that, etc, etc.
But in the 1950s, Vial had just been completely in Adorno's views subsumed by the culture industry.
If you look at a lot of Adorno's writings where he grounds his own musical experiences,
it's a little bit like his championing of Evartong. He refers a lot to the authentic experience of his youth.
And there's something about his particular kind of bourgeois upbringing that informed his musical sensibilities.
And he never forsook that. He really saw his childhood as in some ways the most authentic thing.
And he's not the only one that it's a very recurrent sort of syndrome.
A moment of authenticity followed by a fall into authenticity.
Yeah, well, in a way that is a microcosm of his historical...
If the macrocosm of history that the Frankfurt School has a tendency to see in terms of music around 1780 having reached a point of perfection.
Just for a brief moment, it was possible to write something like the Magic Flute where high and low came together where there was a universal musical language, etc, etc.
And after that, history went to the dogs.
And what I don't understand about these Marxists, lofty Marxists like Adorno and Virto Brecht is, in Adorno's case, he's so anti-demotic and anti-populous.
And it's fine to be anti-culture industry and consumers, culture and so forth, but something like those idioms that you were talking about in our first segment that Kurt Viles so creatively,
we appropriated from popular music, Phocht, Jaz, Ragtime, all these things.
How can one be so disdainfully in regard to that, and consider that contamination?
Well, I don't want to lapse too much into biography here, but in both Brecht's case and Adorno's case, it is interesting to learn in Brecht's case, for example,
that in a way he was a recovering music lover, that he had been absolutely enamored of music and then spent the rest of his life trying to overcome his addiction to music.
In Adorno's case, although he wrote music criticism which was very much in accord with his critical theory, in private, he really loved Jaz music and used to perform it at home on the piano.
So it was his dirty secret.
You also told me something about the relationship between Brecht and Vile, which struck me as very true to my somewhat suspicious attitude towards Brecht, which is the extraordinary imbalance in terms of the royalty percentages that he insisted on did Brecht,
where he was getting the big bulk of the royalties, like 65%, then Kurt Vile was getting 25% for having written all these beautiful music, without which none of these pieces would have had nearly the popularity that they did have.
What's that all about?
Yeah, we're into equality.
Yeah, well, the social justice.
So while Kurt Vile was getting 25% of the royalties, Brecht was getting 65% of the royalties until Elizabeth Helpman got some also for the translation until somebody filed a plagiarism suit against Brecht for having used the German translation of some text by Vile that were inserted into the 3-pinny opera.
So Brecht actually lost that one and had to seed some of the royalties to the translator of the Vile.
It all ended up rather nicely because the translation of the translator did rather well from the popularity, even though he was just getting a few percent, he was doing very well from the popularity of the 3-pinny opera.
With the proceedings, bought a vineyard in Austria and produced a wine called 3-pinny drops.
But yes, the principle was that Brecht made the money where he could, and there's a poem of his, says, "How can one be friendly and unfriendly time?"
So he almost was justifying his appalling behaviour by referring to the condition of society.
But as we were saying in the last segment, "The Power of Love" that Kurt Vile believed in, I think it's of a different order than alienation, defamiliarization, and this sort of assault on the sensibility.
Yes, I think Brecht is always warning about being seduced and keeping cool.
I don't think Vile has the same kind of fear of that.
So, Stephen, we got to 1950, this is the year in which Vile dies, and you read from the recent 7th edition of the music history about all the kinds of things that have been going on since then in the sphere of music.
Do you see any way of telling a more or less coherent story of what happened in the latter half of the 20th century in so-called high cultural music forms?
Or does it all splinter into an impossible array of individual styles and experimentations?
It's really hard when you don't have the benefit of considerable hindsight or when you aren't overlooking history from a relatively great height to discern the principal contours.
It seems to me that there have been some significant changes after about 1960 towards what one might call a pluralism of styles where composers don't feel any more that kind of dictate of history.
This is typically called postmodernism and that would be a very blanket way of describing various trends.
One of those trends has been very much the reaction against what we might call the maximal approach of composition I'm using a term which has been discussed at Great Length by my colleague at Berkeley, Richard Tauruskin, who has written a history of Western music up to the present.
What he sees as a reaction against maximism is a minimalism, but nonetheless a minimalism that's very aware of itself of making a historical contribution.
Where I suspect our perspective has changed quite a bit is that the kind of music history that growl to a company who has written up to this point has always been accompanied by an anthology of music.
That is to say by a literate tradition of serious music defined as music that is transmitted through notation written down by the composer and then transmitted to later generations through the ages.
I think where my own discipline is going very much now is away from looking purely as music as text and much more music in cultural context and looking at the whole issue of performance with the singer singing his or her own song.
As we wrap up our show, I know that we want to hear for our Exodus the voice of Kurt Viled himself.
How much time do we have?
We have a couple of minutes before we play the tune.
Well, we should begin to wind down then.
There's a lot we haven't covered and I would have loved to have talked more about recent trends.
We cut that one rather short, but we should go back to Kurt Viled and wrap this up.
In the 1940s, when he was involved in these pieces, he was very much a collaborator working on these shows.
We talked about one touch of Venus and in some ways being a quintessential vial piece of dealing with the whole business of love in the modern world.
It's not exactly an outtake, but it is a spin-off of the production around this time vial actually got into a studio and recorded the song that we heard speak low when you speak love.
I think it conveys wonderfully here the warmth of Kurt Viled's personality.
He is singing the piece and he's also accompanying himself on the piano.
You can also feel the way that he is indulging in the romantic harmonious that he has adopted and adapted from 19th-century music and implanted into the context of
1940s New York musical theatre.
Before we hear that, though, I think you are coming on.
I really feel that I've learned a lot in these couple of hours, really.
I feel like I've discovered a new hero of Kurt Viled, about whom I knew many people vaguely that he was the origin of so many of these remakes by Louis Armstrong, the doors and so forth.
I feel that I now have a new star in my constellation.
That's wonderful discussion.
That's wonderful Robert.
I don't tire of championing Kurt Viled's cause and it's been a real pleasure to be on the show and to be for this once on the other side of the iPod.
That's good.
We're looking forward to your book on Kurt Viled when it does indeed get wrapped up soon.
This summer, I hope.
We'll be back in the summer this summer and then we published a reminding our listeners that we've been speaking with Stephen Hinton, a two-part show on modern music and Kurt Viled in particular.
Please tune in to entitled "Epinions Next Week."
Here we go with Kurt Viled singing his own tune.
[music]
When you speak alone, our summer day with us away, to soon, to soon, speak alone.
When you speak alone, our moment is with like ships at least.
We'll sweat the pothos.
Be close.
Darling, speak alone.
Love is the spark lost in the dark.
Who's so, who's so, I feel, wherever I go.
That tomorrow is near, tomorrow is here, and always to soon.
I'm his old and loved boy.
We'll be back in the summer, and we'll be back in the summer.
This and everything and who's so, who's so, I weigh.
Darling, I weigh.
Will you speak alone to me, be close to me, and soon.
[music]
[ilconized Noise]