process and ideology
We haven't talked much about process lately, so a little update. Recall, if you will, the state of my manuscript:
Each chapter has a full, solid draft; each chapter also has a supplemental file that contains a list of everything I want to add to it. At first, I had the "stuff to add" in comment boxes in Word, but the documents would become incredibly over-encumbered with comments, and I couldn't keep anything straight. So now, when I realize that something needs to be dropped into an existing chapter -- an anecdote from a new interview, a bit of material I uncover while researching something else -- I add it in to the relevant “to add” file.
The major revisions I've been doing over the past month have basically been mashing the "to add" and the "draft" documents together. I start by going through the entire "to add" document, removing material and placing it in the relevant section in the actual chapter draft. The "to add" documents are often huge -- a couple of them were 50+ pages, containing all matter of interview transcripts, archival material, random musings, etc. It takes a while. Once they're all in the chapter draft itself, I work on weaving the new material into the prose, slowly kneading it in (is this the right metaphor? whisking it?) until it makes sense. Sometimes this has led to a full-on rethink of the chapter. That's the case with the one I just finished up, Chapter 5, on the All-Stars. I didn't love how the chapter was framed, or how the major sections I had in it were laid out; as I brought in the new material, I reworked everything. It used to start with a boring anecdote about earned income; now it starts with a riveting description of when Julia Wolfe's Lick was performed at Tanglewood in 1994. Maybe.
And now I’ve moved on to some busy work, before tackling writing my lengthy conclusion/epilogue (I’ve been gathering my thoughts on it for a while, and the writing will want to spill out very soon). I spent the last couple days going through every chapter and double-checking and correcting quotes from my interviews (70+ interviews for the manuscript, FWIW); compiled a full bibliography (that’s still a very rough draft, but we’re getting there) of secondary literature, interviews, and archival sources; and started gathering and thinking about what photos I’ll want to use, and reaching out to various folks to get more.
One thing I’m thinking about all the time, if it’s not clear from the past few newsletters, is pinpointing the ideologies of the many people and institutions I’m writing about: what, at their core, they believe, and how it links up or doesn’t to the politics of the day. This isn’t easy, and it requires precision. Much of the really fascinating recent work on new music that’s done so tends to focus on the ‘60s. There is so much political foment in the air in that decade, so many composers aligning themselves with utopian movements or not doing so, that it can become quite clear where various composers stand on an ideological spectrum, and how they see their music’s relationship to politics. That gets a bit foggier, I think, as we move into the ‘80s and ‘90s; there just hasn’t been as much writing on (contemporary classical) music and politics in this period, political stances can seem more opaque, social movements aren’t in the forefront of the American imagination, and the Cold War’s over-ish. That David Lang essay from last week is an exception: it fits extremely neatly within a political moment around the turn of the 1990s. Charles Wuorinen is another exception: he wears his politics on his sleeve, and in my funding chapter I examine how clearly his pubicly argued thoughts in this period (e.x. this) align with the neoconservatism articulated by the critic Samuel Lipman (in his writing for Commentary and The New Criterion).
The “ideology” of “Bang on a Can” is more complicated, less straightforward, and in many ways the subject of my entire book, so again, you’ll have to wait to find out my full take on it. But it was helpful for me, in revising Chapter 5—and thinking about the All-Stars as not just a touring, rock-inflected chamber ensemble, but also an “ideological project” that instantiates an idea of what new music should be and how a new-music ensemble should work—to revisit Robert Adlington’s fantastic work on the politics of new music in ‘60s Amsterdam. This article is a nice short version (respond and I’ll email you a PDF), and I highly recommend his book on Andriessen’s De Staat as well as Composing Dissent. Adlington carefully breaks down the politics of Louis Andriessen, one of the most important musical influences on Bang on a Can, and those of the Orkest de Volharding, the ensemble that Andriessen co-founded, which represents a big influence on the Bang aesthetic. Here’s the gloss I have on Adlington in Chapter 5:
While living in Amsterdam in 1992, Wolfe wrote Arsenal of Democracy, an abrasively antiphonal work, for the Dutch group Orkest de Volharding, who had visited Bang on a Can’s festival in 1990. In a program note, she described the ensemble as “loud and tough” and “organized in a socialistic framework—everyone has equal say, everyone arrives at consensus decisions.”[1] Andriessen had co-founded Volharding in 1972 as a political street band, one that prized itself on self-determination and the working rights of its performers. Volharding had emerged from the “Movement for the Renewal of Musical Practice,” a grassroots association of Dutch musicians who, inspired by the militant socialist activism that swept through the Netherlands in the late 1960s, sought to replace the authoritarian orchestral establishment of the Netherlands with a more democratic culture of small ensembles.[2] “The music must be the property of the guys who play,” Andriessen said in 1973. “It should not be that as the composer you are the employer and they are the employees.”[3]
[1] Wolfe, Arsenal of Democracy, undated program note, https://juliawolfemusic.com/music/arsenal-of-democracy.
[2] See Robert Adlington, “Organizing Labor: Composers, Performers, and ‘the Renewal of Musical Practice’ in the Netherlands, 1962–72,” Musical Quarterly 90, no. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2007): 539–77.
[3] Quoted in Adlington, “Organizing Labor,” 567.
The British new-music ensemble Icebreaker maintained a similarly democratic ethos (they had a whole manifesto they gave to composers to wrote for them!) and Michael Gordon wrote Yo Shakespeare for them right around the time that the All-Stars were formed (1992).
But do the All-Stars share the politics of Volharding or Icebreaker, even as they share their general aesthetic orientation? Is Bang on a Can a democracy?
Georgia knows.