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The holidays can be a time for family reminiscences, and that's true even
in music, which has its own kind of family life. Alan Feinberg, for instance, gave a
brainy, brawny piano concert at the 92d Street Y in December, featuring works by some of
the members of his own musical family. These happened to be atonal composers from what I
used to call the "complicated music gang," people who ruled the small,
contentious world of new classical music in New York during the '70s and '80s. Even when
they made me itch, they were part of my own artistic community, and now that they've been
dethroned, I wanted to hear them again. How do they sound, now that they've lost their
power?Wait, though -- to be fair, I should note that Mr.
Feinberg played wonderfully, that he didn't plan this concert as a glance back at the
past, and that his program included savvy looks at Beethoven and Chopin, intended not as
contrast or relief, but as explorations of the same kind of musical intelligence he finds
in the itchy stuff. Certainly he made his point, though for me, he was helped by a welcome
reversal: The members of the gang sound less formidable than they used to, precisely
because they no longer can demand that we ought to like what they write. For that reason,
a critic now can simply say that the Sonata No. 3 by Charles Wuorinen is indigestible, no
matter how firm its musical construction might be. Another third sonata, by Roger
Sessions, seemed earnest, but gray. A new work, "Czeched Swing," by George
Edwards, was harmlessly appealing. And all these composers were eclipsed by the patriarch
of their once-mighty clan, Milton Babbitt, whose work emerged, against all odds, as light,
fresh and charming.Who woulda thunk it? Mr. Babbitt was the gang's
most bristling theorist, a man whose name was never mentioned in the same sentence as the
words "musical pleasure." Yet he's the one who didn't pale next to Chopin and
Beethoven. Mr. Feinberg played three of his pieces, "Partitions," "Playing
for Time" and something with a title that could have come from an e. e. cummings
poem: "Minute Waltz (or) 3/4 = 1/8." These works bounced unpredictably
all over the keyboard and flowed at an equally unpredictable and always changing pace. All
this irregularity, though, was as easy as a shifting breeze. It sounded friendly --
curious, intrigued, and conversational.That's partly because Mr. Babbitt has invented his
own kind of musical speech. His colleagues haven't given up the musical gestures of
past centuries, familiar ones like a surging lunge ones toward a climax, dressing them in
heavy clotted harmony that roughens them and slows them down. Mr. Babbitt, on the other
hand, frees each note to dance with any partners it finds. He’s a master of delight,
and it’s time someone said so.
The night before I’d been to yet another family celebration, a Philip
Glass retrospective at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, though of course Mr. Glass
belongs to quite a different family. He rose to fame while the complicated gang still
ruled, but as their opposite, even their enemy. He had an audience, after all, and they
didn't. His music, simpler than theirs, had real appeal, which they resented, thinking
that if it was popular, it must be shallow. I wondered how Mr. Glass, too, would hold up.
His music thrilled me in the '70s and '80s, but would it now?
It took me back, in fact, as did the concluding extract from "Einstein on the
Beach," the mammoth theater piece that first made Mr. Glass famous. That music
hurtled, too, and I remembered how alive I'd felt in 1976 when I heard its now legendary
New York premiere at the Metropolitan Opera. Wall Street Journal, January 12, 1998
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