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On Ages
by Keith Snyder
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I'm in a Starbucks on the University of Buffalo campus. I am drinking a venti chai soy latte. Except for me, the people at these concerts and lectures fall into two groups: those to whom "venti chai soy latte" sounds like a beverage, and those to whom it still sounds like a string of nonsense syllables. I am the only person of my age I've seen here.
The composer Charles Wuorinen lectured today. I was late. I told my wife I loved her this morning, which was not said in so many words, but by chatting with her until it was too late for me to make the lecture on time. It's about a half-hour walk from my room at the Motel-6, over the freeway overpass, down the long, serpentine campus entry road—an exercise in practical geometry: how few straight line segments can I make from a winding, largely deserted road of X curvature, Y length, and Z width, and how much time do I lose when I have to interrupt the segments so I don't get run over?—and across the campus to the Baird building. I'm walking about an hour and a half every day; two and a half if I return to my room between the morning lecture and the afternoon or evening concert. It makes me feel as though I'm admirable for the effort, and the breeze is nice.
Today I planned. I have my laptop computer with me, the copy of Difficult Loves (Italo Calvino) that I bought at the university bookstore yesterday, and my cell phone. The cell phone is mostly because it shows the time on its LCD display, and I feel less stupid looking at it in public than pulling out my travel alarm clock. I'm experimenting with hanging out at Starbucks during the bulk of each day. Today is Saturday.
The . . . what are they . . . the new adults were gathered in small clusters as I left the lecture hall. Wuorinen irritated them. He irritated me, too, but I don't take it personally; his thoughts were brilliant, his erudition is admirable, and his reasoning is utterly sound. He reminds me of my favorite quote from the book on the Futurists that Richard Zvonar gave me as a wedding present. I'll go look it up later so I can get it verbatim, but it was along the lines of: "I have no doubt as to the brilliance of their ideas and the mediocrity of their art." It's not an entirely apt quote to use about Wuorinen, since I don't think he's mediocre, but I haven't heard anything I wanted to hear again in either of the two pieces of his I've heard so far (a brass quintet and the seven-movement thing for piano, marimba, violin, cello, clarinets, and flutes he conducted last night). Today's lecture explained to me why I didn't get much from them: Though I'd imagine he'd disagree, and cage his disagreement in arguments of quantifiable criteria, he believes in self-expression as its own end and high calling. He's no doubt a genius. He'll no doubt be remembered, and I won't. I still think he's wrong.
I admired his lecture. Where I thought Donald Erb's music was beautiful, but didn't get much from his talk, the opposite was true here. Wuorinen got the kids (not kids; whatever they are; whatever age this is) arguing, even if it was just the post-presentation expression of their affront at his chosen phrasings and his frank self-admiration, some of which may have been voiced primarily to amuse the man himself. By the end of the lecture, the tension in the audience wasn't hostility, but barely repressed, bridling impatience. He pushed their buttons. Mine, too, but I've been around enough brilliant, opinionated cranks for whom I have affection that I don't take the pose as seriously as the position. And Wuorinen was dead right in all his observations—"Our [school] system can't even teach us to read words; it's ridiculous to think it could do it with music." "It's not fair to blame the blue-haired symphony ladies or the opera queens...because by definition, a public or audience is something that's waiting to be led. What's lacking [from people in positions of influence] is any visible sense of aspiration or leadership." "[When academia allows equal consideration to all views], low things are not elevated; high things are pushed down."—but he was wrong in his very thinly veiled contempt for what he calls "regurgative" art. He repeatedly clarified that his view of pop composition—and, in fact, anything with a diatonic, serial, or Cageian basis; that is, anything with a syntax that's been used before—is that "there's nothing wrong with it." Then by following up with things like "I don't accuse them of lack of aspiration; I accuse them of incompetence," he made it clear that there is something wrong with it.
"Incompetence" in what, exactly, I don't know. I assume incompetence in making the kind of compositions that rigorously fulfill Charles Wuorinen's reasoned criteria for . . . well, for whatever it is Charles Wuorinen likes, I suppose. He didn't mention what that might be while I was there, but as I said, I'm older than the students, and I have reasons for coming to things late.
The guy is a remarkably effective lecturer. My disagreement with him is not intellectual—throughout, his logic was unassailable—but philosophical: I agree that art should arise foremost from artist as individual. Where I part ways with Wuorinen's thinking is that he doesn't seem to share my sense of what an individual is: just one instanciation of a species, neither primarily unique nor primarily similar. I have little patience with art that sits entirely on either of these facets of human existence. The conscious philosophy that drives much art music insists "I am and must be different from you"; the unconscious philosophy that underlays much pop music assumes "you are and must be the same as me." I think either, taken alone, is a crippled view, the one in an emotional/social sense and the other in an intellectual. My belief is that I'm me, and I'm also you.
Yes, I have reduced this to a dualism, necessarily a false one. Sorry.
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Here's a nearly unrelated tangent: Why did heart and soul go out of fashion in art? No crap about how it's outdated "Romantic" nonsense, please; that's only true if you believe that people get their emotions solely from the philosophies we ascribe to their centuries. They don't. Frankly, I've heard more unmitigated babble from grown people about "passion" and "soulmates" in my T1-connected information-age lifetime than I've ever read in Romantic literature. And I've been as guilty of it as anyone.
Don't think it's so? Why do so many people leave their mates for bodiless entities they meet on the Internet? Forget about theorizing; go ask a few. "Passion" and "soulmate" are the words you'll hear, and you'll hear them a lot. AOL chatrooms—only just barely 20th-century objects, let alone 19th—are filled to overflowing with people who ache for precisely those two things. We're a burgeoning nation of anguished Werthers who don't kill themselves, male and female both. The 50% divorce rate isn't because people are *less* melodramatic about their emotions and *more* realistic about their expectations.
People of my culture—late-20th-century American—reject the notion that marriage is primarily predicated on companionship, love, and mutual respect and assistance. We got it into our heads that the most central things in a marriage are lust, passion, an explosive meeting of souls. These are big things. Great big emotional moments. Huge swooning gestures. And then we got it into our heads that each of us "deserves" these things. And then we got it into our heads that they should happen all by themselves!
What? This is the same culture in which we claim to reject foolish Romantic notions? In which we make art that supposedly reflects our more enlightened, less idealistic views? In which we have a greater understanding of ourselves?
Is our art supposed to reflect what we think we've supposedly learned, or who we really are? High divorce rate is one of the quintessential, defining, unique developments of the twentieth century. There are no grander, more tumultuous, less time-and-place-based emotions than the ones building to and receding from a divorce. How can we reconcile that inarguable truth on the one hand with a belief in the obsolescence of large emotional gestures in art on the other? The failure of the Romantic ideal isn't that it was wrong; it's that we somehow thought we could have the ecstacies without doing the work. So is it the case that upon finding we can't, we've withdrawn into irony or detachment, into near-autistic obsession with forms or into a wounded cynicism that excuses emotional unavailability?
Is ours an age that hasn't worked through its issues? (And how do you feel about that?)
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Maybe the thoughts contained by the next century will address how to have passion in our lives (and art) in a healthy, integrated way, neither deified nor derided, neither hailed as a stamp of validity nor mumbled apologetically as a source of embarrassment. Just something that happens sometimes in life, among all the other things that happen too. I'd like that. I surely would.
Maybe it's time to stop trying to conform to some well-intended notion about what this century was supposed to be, and start trying to see clearly what it was. After all, it's over.
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On my way to the campus, I cross a culvert where brown whitewater flows from below my feet down a wide concrete ramp, between half a dozen staggered ten-foot trash-catching, turbulence-pacifying concrete teeth, and into a placid canal. At the bottom of the ramp, where the flow hits the pool, four softballs, two empty plastic beverage bottles, a stripped, bat-sized tree limb, and an bobbling, unpeeled orange circulate in the bubbles, emerging and submerging. That's someone's afternoon down there. The water flows in the direction of the concrete teeth, but these objects congregate upstream, exactly where it seems they wouldn't. Obviously, something I can't see is going on.
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Keith Snyder
June in Buffalo
Starbucks
June 10, 2000
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