Wild Thing

In a NewMusicBox feature from February of this year, Evan Johnson set forth a very perceptive taxonomy for American and European composers. He suggests that the archetypal American composer writes music that responds only to her own creative criteria, whereas the work of her European counterpart is engaged in a dialectical discourse with its musical ancestors, both recent and distant. If you buy into this dichotomy (which I’ve simplified considerably here), the onus is on American composers—who are free, so to speak, to operate in an historical vacuum—to come up with interesting creative criteria. If we can deny responsibility to hundreds of years of European music, to what, ultimately, are we answerable? What were Harry Partch’s criteria? What are La Monte Young’s? What about Morton Feldman’s, Earle Brown’s, John Cage’s?

They were weird is what they were—inexplicable, iconoclastic, and just plain strange. Not strange like Pierrot Lunaire, though, nor even like LICHT: Strange like fiberglass dinosaurs along the freeway. Strange like the Great Plains and ARPANET and Aaron Burr. That’s a high bar: Anyone can reject European influence, but how is it possible to write music as new and fresh as the above composers’ without developing equally bizarre sets of reference points?

It’s intimidating, is all I’m saying. The sheer oddity of a Partch, say, or a Charles Ives—can you synthesize that? Without that crucial intrinsic hard-wired singularity, can one hope to be a truly American composer? Is it time to find a new line of work?