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July 25, 2014 • 12:12 am Comments Off on A New Look at New Romanticism

A New Look at New Romanticism

Jacob Druckman in 1986; photo by Irene Haupt

This summer’s 65th anniversary season of the Aspen Music Festival is keyed to the theme of “The New Romantics.” Here’s the feature essay I wrote on current manifestations of “New Romanticism”:

In the summer of 1983, the composer Jacob Druckman triggered something of a mild shockwave in the musical world by programming a festival interrogatively titled “Music Since 1968: A New Romanticism?” This would be the first of two annual new-music festivals that Druckman curated around the rubric of “New Romanticism.” Both were given by the New York Philharmonic during his tenure as the orchestra’s composer-in-residence.

Druckman’s manifesto-like essay introducing the program declared that “the tide began to change” among composers during the mid-1960s, and that amid the profusion of recent new works could be discerned “a gradual change of focus, or spirituality, and of goals.”

He adapted Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous dichotomy of the logical, rational “Apollonian” versus the ecstatic “Dionysian” as representatives of the polar impulses driving creativity (both gods, it’s perhaps helpful to recall from ancient Greek mythology, being sons of Zeus and thus half-brothers). The recent tidal shift, argued Druckman, was toward the “Dionysian qualities” of “sensuality, mystery, nostalgia, ecstasy, transcendency. Whether this new music will be called ‘Neo-Romantic’ or some other term is yet to be seen….”

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Filed under: aesthetics, American music, Aspen, style

August 24, 2013 • 12:27 pm Comments Off on The Color Revolution

The Color Revolution

Increasingly in this centenary year of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, we’re coming to see how much of modernism has involved an unpredictable marriage of the avant-garde and commercialism. Serge Diaghilev was a daring impresario but also a canny businessman. As for Schoenberg’s “air from another planet,” people who tend to write off atonality nowadays forget its far-reaching presence in film scores.

The management of color, too, turns out to have played a significant role in retuning tastes to the modern era. Regina Lee Blaszczyk’s The Color Revolution gives a fascinating account of color as a potent psychological and social tool manipulated by “color engineers.”

Blaszczyk’s lively history of the modern era’s preoccupation with color and her discussion of color’s influence on innovation in industry and design make me wonder how this shift affected perceptions of music as well — contemporary and canonical. Her focus is on American industry, which took important cues from the Paris scene. But Blaszczyk mentions other developments and influences from Europe, such as Alexander Scriabin’s experiments with color projections synchronized to his scores.

“Ever since Isaac Newton, people had been fascinated by the apparent analogy of the seven steps in the musical scale and the seven spectral colors in the rainbow,” writes Blaszczyk. This line of thinking even led to attempts at social engineering:

During the Enlightenment, a mathematician named Louis-Bertrand Castel dazzled Paris society with the first color-music instrument, an ocular harpsichord that diffused pigment light through windowpanes at the strike of a key. In 1893, a British inventor named Alexander Wallace Rimington had patented a Colour Organ that used gas jets and arc lamps to generate colored light as an accompaniment to musical instruments; the idea was to translate musical tones into visual hues. Rimington’s taste-making objectives presaged those of Albert Munsell: he hoped to sharpen the senses of the British working class and to teach them to prefer the palette of the Chartres rose windows over the crass aniline shades of Manchester calicos.”

In the mood for a little Klangfarbenmelodie?