Reflections of an American composer

Musical Times, Autumn 2003 by Whittall, Arnold

Code breaking ARNOLD WHITTALL Reflections of an American composer Arthur Berger University of California Press (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London, 2002); viii, 270pp; L29.95, $44.95. ISBN 0 520 23251 8.

It might be thought that the eminent American composer, critic and teacher Arthur Berger - ninety in 2002 - owes the world a more substantial autobiography than this somewhat impressionistic sequence of essays. But Berger's preferred mode of prose has always been the relatively short review or article, and after reading this volume I would judge that a straightforwardly connected and chronological narrative would be unlikely to reveal more about the basics of his way of thinking about music and musicians. The book's eighteen chapters, plus a short selection of his concert reviews, offer a wealth of sharply-drawn anecdote about a huge cast of characters - Tovey, Boulanger, Koussevitsky, Mitropoulos, Thomson, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Copland, Bernstein, Babbitt, Cage and many others: but we never lose sight of the fact that these are the reflections of a composer, albeit one who has never had the luxury of avoiding all other professional duties and activities.

Berger avoids detailed analytical commentary on his own work - readers with access to earlier decades of The Musical Times will find that Bayan Northcott's seventieth-birthday essay (May 1982) is still illuminating - but he provides enough aesthetic and technical background to give a strong sense of what his concerns and beliefs as a composer are. The interweaving of distinct topics that the four-section structure imposes keeps you on your guard as to which particular hat the author is wearing at any given moment: but even when the precise identity of the hat is obscure, there is always a clear tone of voice, and consistent adherence to the code of creative values and practices in which Berger's professional life has been rooted. Who could not raise three cheers for the indefatigable partisan who can write in all seriousness that 'one of the most disastrous blows to American music's support in the second half of the twentieth century was Leonard Bernstein's decision to devote his not inconsiderable musicianship and conducting prowess to Mahler' (p.214)?

One particularly characteristic early comment is as follows:

works that lean heavily [...] on

compiled folk music - even those

of Stravinsky and Bartok - are liable

to give up their secret too easily.

This music can have its appeal to a

discriminating listener, but some of

us also want music that is tougher and

more challenging (p.15).

At the same time, however, Berger has remained enough of a Boulanger disciple to base his 'ambivalence' about Ives on the Carter-like judgement that 'his music is the product of the spontaneous outpouring of highly charged emotions at the expense of elegance of detail' (p.31). The art of composition therefore becomes a matter of balancing the toughness, the challenge, with the kind of 'elegance' which is not incompatible with a degree of 'density' - even of complexity: the kind of ideal balance we find in Berger's favoured examples of Mozart and Stravinsky, perhaps.

From this perspective, Berger is not too happy with recent trends in which he sees a progression from new Romanticists and minimalists to what- without naming names (Rouse, Corigliano, Mackey?) - he declares to be 'a nondescript manner' (p.38). He does not express a view about John Adams's reinvigoration of Sibelian or Mahlerian symphonism, but the way he treats his broader themes - the question of 'reinventing the past', primarily from a Stravinskian standpoint, and the need for music theory not to jettison accepted terminology, like 'chord', without very good reason - reveals deep scepticism about experiment for experiment's sake. His determination to remain detached from the creative and critical thinking of such long-term associates as Milton Babbitt and Benjamin Boretz, with whom he worked closely in the early years of Perspectives of New Music, is as strong as it ever was.

The source of Berger's tough-minded pragmatism, and his scepticism about academic ('scientific') thinking, can be found in his experiences as a journalist in Boston and New York, working alongside critics like Olin Downes who, Berger wryly declares, 'was a master of the art of reversing his position without seeming to contradict himself' (p. 77). It was only in 1952, at the age of forty, that Berger joined the faculty of the four-year old Brandeis University and began to experience the delights of such tasks as putting the case to the administration for a PhD in Composition. The whole business of the relation between intellect and inspiration which makes the role of composers in university music faculties perennially problematic spills over into Berger's narrative of the crises that afflicted the Princeton-based Perspectives. It is ironic that, while it was in vol.2 (1963) of that journal that Berger's most famous contribution to musical scholarship - 'Problems of pitch organisation in Stravinsky' - appeared, his lack of empathy with the objectives of his expupil Boretz, especially in the flowerpower years when JK Randall and Elaine Barkin were prominently involved, left him relievedly on the sidelines during the great leap forward in Stravinskian octatonic studies (van den Toorn, Taruskin, Straus), which gave great status to precisely the kind of nationally-rooted, folk-resonant art-music ethos that Berger has little time for. It would be interesting to know what he thinks about the recent evidence of an anti-octatonic backlash, as in Dmitri Tymoczko's argument that even those works favoured by octatonic analysts (Petrushka, Rite, Symphony of psalms) 'are less octatonic than they have been made out to be', and that 'we need to expand our ideas about Stravinsky's compositional methods' (Music Theory Spectrum, 24/1, Spring 2002).