Copyright ©1998 by Dennis Báthory-Kitsz
The correspondence with The Churchill Society began when they requested both opinions and technical assistance with their website. We quickly realized that, although we were both using contemporary technology, we had very different views on contemporary music. Eventually, the Society decided the correspondence was too long to publish on their site, and would refer to this site for details. So here, for the edification and education of all, are 18 significant pieces (out of more than 50) of correspondence.
The only changes were:
The original color scheme that the Churchill Society selected for its web publication of this correspondence was maintained.
The Churchill Society
was inaugurated May 10th 1990 (50 years to the Day) after Churchill became Prime Minister.
The Inauguration of the Society's web site was on Churchill's 121st Birthday - November 30th 1995
Beauty is to Art what Honesty is to Honour
Winston Churchill
Dennis Báthory-Kitsz
was inaugurated approximately nine months before March 14, 1949
The Inauguration of the Dennis's web site was on the Beethoven's 225th birthday - December 16, 1995
Omnis ars natura imitatio est
Seneca
The text in black is from the Churchill Society
The text in green is from Dennis Báthory-Kitsz
The text in blue is the Society quoted Dennis's email
The text in mauve is copy from other sources
Index
April 2, 1998
Hi Norman,
Technical matters deleted. This message references the Norman Harvey Rutherlyn essay [link went dead on 8/25/98]
I have some reflections, which you may consider for your 'letters' section.
The situation is very bad in the U.S., but after reading the speech by Norman Harvey Rutherlyn [Rutherlyn is not Norman Harvey Rogers, is he?], I am perplexed by such things as its inexcusable gay bashing (though it compliments Leonard Bernstein, who was ostentatiously gay) and its focus on problems arising from government institutions. Perhaps what is unspoken is a lament for what came to be known in America as "accessible" music, for a while heralded as "the new Romanticism". This failed dramatically, but its lessons -- and those of the explorations of serialism and early electronic music -- were learned very well, and gave us a generation of Minimalism's excitement and beauty, a time of stunning eclecticism, and a new compositional certainty and sensibility.
Pointing to a broadcast conspiracy seems diversionary, and certainly not validating. My radio show, website and cybercast are deluged with recordings from composers who have, if necessary, begged friends and family for cash to record their music in Eastern Europe; with tapes of MIDI versions of music; with music by composers who have moved to electroacoustics; and with recordings revealing every manner of struggle to get music from score to page. Unlike the claims in the essay regarding Britain, we have no Radio 3 Bastille here in America, simply a conservative National Public Radio (funded largely by private sources) which plays little academic music -- indeed, they play little concert music past 1900 of any school.
I began composing in 1964, and have struggled mightily to get some of my 500-plus compositions performed, and have just issued my first CD, an hour-long electroacoustic piece. I, like my fellow composers, rather than lament, dig in to solve the problem in creative ways. Today we are exploiting (for example) the drop in CD production costs to well below those of the LP days, we are using enthusiastic and talented players from Eastern Europe to play for us, and we have found new inspiration in electroacoustic expression.
My conclusion from these experiences is that our situation in the U.S. is like yours in that new music is not often played, and rarely played twice. But there are no intellectual cabals preventing its hearing, just an underlying Puritanism (who no longer afflict your islands since they came our way nearly four centuries ago!) that dismisses the arts in general as worthless. We are a democracy of ignorance -- with similar results to your nation.
But if the essay's implication is that certain 'difficult' musics are 'poor' musics, I certainly cannot agree, nor do I believe in any inherent superiority of 'tonal' or 'traditional' orientation (the unstated premise of much of the essay) over experimentalism, atonality, minimalism, pop-jazz-crossover, world influence, post-serialism, post-minimalism, or whatever school can be ticked off on an arbitrary list. I am, in fact, awed by the range and depth of new music I receive for review for my broadcast and website.
I fully agree that the disproportionate emphasis on performers is absurd, but the essay's promotion of the 'free market' is hardly the solution. Look what has happened in America, a situation where composers must raise their own funds in nearly all performed and recorded situations. No conspiracies bring that to bear, only the path through promotion to profit. The answer -- and the essay's author may be uncomfortable with this -- is education, but not the education he imagines. A musical education addresses sensory literacy, of which the body of Great Western Music is now only a small part ... and in the present-day sliver of that part the room to experiment, to play, to broaden experience, always exists. Though we all lament our neglected composers (here, our Partches and Harrisons and Cowells and Nancarrows, for example), nothing can turn the clock back to their time. It is past. It is history. Like Mahler, they may be discovered again. And McCartney is not their successor. Instead, a body of richly experienced music teachers can bring the panoply of well-crafted music to children, and hence to their experience as later adults in the world of marketing. Though it is probably too late for me, I am thoroughly optimistic.
Brian Hunt's article make the valid point that the problem is far from new. The American jazz musicians met the same fate of being ignored that the Rutherlyn essay suggests happened British composers. In the American tradition, rather than lament their isolation, they solved the problem: They left America, heading for Paris and Amsterdam and Milan. Indeed, American composers continue to be better known in Canada and on the European continent and now in the Far East than at home. Even your own Benedict Mason left for Amsterdam, and after decades, Clarence Barlow is considered a pan-European composer. Such is the wiser path of art over state, sensibility over nationality. Composers must make choices, and lamentation leaves only a thick residue of bitterness.
(My criticisms are not leveled exclusively at the Rutherlyn essay: the letters presented on the website are curmudgeonly, and Julian Lloyd Webber's speech is also very high on lament and very low on solution, not only dumping blame on the media, but also asking them to solve what is not their problem! James Stevens -- regardless of his composer credentials -- repeats in his article the anti-BBC stance without evidence, with silly recourse to the Salieri myth, and without eventual answers. Brian Hunt's article at least tries to search out the truth of the situation, if -- once again -- without offering a plan of action.)
I am moved to write these comments only because I have heard this song before, this lament of the un- and under-performed composer. I am one of them, but the responsibility is in part mine: I market my goods poorly, and I ask a great deal of my performers. Performers go where there is greatest applause per unit of work, and why not? That is hard to resist, and most performers have little reason to be evangelists like Kronos -- wonderful marketers themselves. The score-submitting composer musing in a remote chateau is part of the past; one of my close colleagues is one of these, slowly sinking into old age and sadness. The modern composer is, distasteful as it may be, part of an often nasty free market of hustling entrepreneurs. (I was recently advised by a successful opera composer that my second opera would never be heard unless I schmoozed the patrons from city to city.) If the free market is not present in Britain's musical establishment (as represented exclusively, if the essay is to be believed by the Evil Empire of the BBC), then there are other pathways: emigration from your beloved empire, the creation of private recordings and concerts, entering the world of the 'personal' free market (including barter), and (of course!) the Internet. I am a bit saddened by the paralysis the essay reveals.
(A postscript: The Eastwell letter's story repeats an old saw that has been going around for years in the U.S. and Canada in various guises. But I have experienced incompetent performers playing my own music so badly it was often difficult to discover notes that were played correctly and in tune -- a semitone difference would be the least of the problems sometimes. The premiere of my "Ycure" was so wretched that the 2nd oboist got lost in the 4th measure and put down her instrument for the rest of the piece, the first violist was laughing aloud -- yet, despite the crippling contribution of these performers, the audience stomped and cheered their approval. As we say in the States, "go figure".)
Best to you,
Dennis
April 20, 1998
Dear Mr Bathory
The following is an amalgam of views that members have given to your kind e mail of the 2nd April.
Eclecticism we have no objection to provided it is aesthetically justifiable but as for the new "certainty and sensibility", there are so few composers today to whom these epithets may be applied. You mention the incomparable Leonard Bernstein. He represents all these attributes, albeit in an idiom you may consider to be old hat.
When you talk about getting the music from "page to score", surely you mean from page to listener? And the barriers between the establishment here and Eastern Europe are not so easy to surmount. In fact no barrier is easy to surmount, above all that between the BBC music staff and first-class composers who do not fit their prejudices. To get established abroad composers have to pick up their beds and walk . . . ie to permanently to emigrate.
When you say that new music is not often played and rarely twice, that certainly applies here but, in our experience. it is not so in the USA. Just look at some of the composers you admire, Glass, Adams, Reich and Riley, etc. to say nothing of that wonderful composer we have only just discovered over here, William Bolcom.
We know for a fact that two conductors of international repute have been lavish in their praise of his Celebration for the Dead which incidentally won an international award when it was performed by the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra and how the composer was given a standing ovation on its European premier in Amsterdam. But yet the BBC still refuses to play it because he does not fit their prerequisites. Perhaps it is also due to his independent and forthright stance where their selection procedures for new music are concerned.
We refer you to Wilfred Joseph's' magnificent violin concerto which was twice turned down by successive regimes at the BBC but, happily, received its premier at the privately sponsored seventieth birthday concert in his honour just after which he died.
Incidentally, we are not homophobic. Joseph's himself was proud to proclaim his homosexuality though he was married with two daughters, and two of our greatest composers were well known the sexual proclivities Britten and Tippet. Our strictures are aimed at those "closet queens" in a position of authority who use the quasi macho strategies to disguise their latent tendencies and in particular case destroy the careers of many brilliant composers.
We wish to draw your attention to Roger de Blancke's article on http://www.churchill-society-london.org.uk/deBlanke.html and would value your comments on it. We would also value your - and your colleagues views - upon (a) the selection methods in composition competitions and (b) upon the immense difficulties composers still experience today in getting broadcast performances of their work. We will consider publishing them.
Indeed if we would consider publishing this correspondence upon the web site if we could receive the views of your members about (a)the selection methods in composition competitions and (b) upon the immense difficulties composers still experience today in getting broadcast performances of their work. We will consider publishing them.
Sincerely
Judith O'Hanlon. (Mrs) Duty Secretary
April 20, 1998
Ms. O' Hanlon,
Many thanks for the generous time you have taken to reply. I would like to offer a few expansions, but am not necessarily requesting a response from you. In most general issues, I think we agree. There are a few areas in which I fear you have been treated badly, so to speak, by the music you have been given to hear! In one area -- underlying principles -- we may in fact disagree fundamentally.
At 22 32 04 20 1998 +0100, you wrote:
The excitement and beauty of minimalism is something that escapes us. We consider is rather an excuse for not having to COMPOSE music and that it is frequently illiterate and generally thematically banal.
Just as the 'new romanticism' was a simple reaction to serialism and its cousins, so also was minimalism at its outset a reaction to academic excess. However, minimalism has fully flowered in its 35 years of existence (longer now than the classical era!). I recommend the following as extraordinary examples of the style, from the most famous composers. There are many others:
You mention the incomparable Leonard Bernstein. He represents all these attributes, albeit in an idiom you may consider to be old hat.
Certainly not! (At 49, I'm not that young!) In fact, I have conducted Chichester Psalms, and find Bernstein's work holds up very well over time. Few songs are as beautifully written as "Somewhere" from West Side Story. The Candide Overture is a gem of balance (and in seven, no less!).
To get established abroad composers have to pick up their beds and walk . . . ie to permanently to emigrate.
Yes, I was suggesting that as an option. I have considered it myself, living in Amsterdam for six months to test the waters. I found it amenable but, alas, too expensive.
So often the "new inspiration in electroacoustic music as you refer to it, is notable for its absence. So-called composers tend to use it as a means of sound effects with no consideration for the structural PRlNCIPLES of genuine musical composition which have not changed from the very first ventures into early monody to the present day.
Either we simply disagree on this notion of structural principles, or someone has abused you with some very bad electroacoustic music! Without getting into an argument over structural principles (which I believe are notably different from culture to culture and era to era -- comparing Ockeghem to Wagner is an enormous stretch, as is finding commonality in European and Chinese opera), I would suggest some pieces for extraordinary listening. I would ask you to keep in mind that electroacoustic music is often more akin to chamber music than any other style, can be quite intimate, and often stresses the compositional techniques of coloration begun by Berlioz and Ravel. If you like, I can also suggest some 'listening guidelines', if only because electroacoustic music is very much a personal music, like that for virginals or Baroque trio sonatas. If it's not too brazenly American to suggest this, I would welcome your invitation to give a series of presentations on listening to electroacoustic music. Asking for a kind of musical "suspension of disbelief", then, I offer four quite different but rewarding choices:
(I would also be delighted to send you my own first electroacoustic CD, (Detritus of Mating). I assure you that none of these is familiar territory (even if you are accustomed to the bloop-bleep school, to use our own pet term for what we once did!). However, all have clear shape, direction, architecture, sonic propulsion, and stunning beauty and expressiveness. I personally feel that Shing Kee is a true masterpiece of our age.
When you say that new music is not often played and rarely twice, that certainly applies here but, in our experience. it is not so in the USA. Just look at some of the composers you admire, Glass, Adams, Reich and Riley, etc. to say nothing of that wonderful composer we have only just discovered over here, William Bolcom.
The US is a nation of 300 million, and one would be hard pressed to name a dozen composers whose works are frequently played, and almost none who are heard on the radio (especially Riley and Bolcom). We are a country of occasional premieres and scant few second performances. I have myself written 520 compositions, received about 160 premieres, and of those, perhaps 20 second performances and (outside my own show) a few dozen radio broadcasts. Yet the most marginal 19th Century European composers -- not even North Americans -- are graced with thousands of performances and recordings. My own CD (released in March) has been praised as a beautiful, gripping, and imaginative work, but has received airplay on only four US and one Australian radio station. (Imagine if the music your orchestras and broadcasters played was exclusively North American 19th Century music!) (Don't laugh -- we did write some!)
As for "cross-over", this is a meaningless term to many of us. All musical composition is governed by the same underlying principles, from out-and-out pop to the most advanced serious concert music. Music is either good, bad, or is generally an excuse for inserting badly written popular styles into already inferior concert music. Bernstein just wrote wonderful music. We doubt if he would have accepted the term "cross-over".
Oddly, Bernstein is considered one of the pioneers and few successful early practitioners of crossover (the term came into play very strongly when he composed his Mass). Again, the notion of common underlying principles may be true if one's view includes only European-derived concert music. And perhaps I was not clear in my explanation. It is a rare artist who writes successfully in multiple idioms as did, for example, Frank Zappa -- even though he was known primarily for his pop. Likewise, because minimalism derives strongly from African and Javanese influences (as first introduced in North America by Cage et al.), it may in fact present an empty appearance to those who attempt to attribute strictly European principles to it. With the exception of the occasional Haydn hemiola and the much earlier use of isorhythm, for example, there is little in the European-derived repertoire that includes shift of phase as an underlying principle, whereas it is essential to minimalism (and its partial heritage in Africa and the South Pacific). Similarly, the linear concerns of age-old, sophisticated raga have no equivalent in the West, yet are inherited in much contemporary compositional thinking since the days of Messiaen, as part of sophisticated melodic weave found outside concert music only in the jazz of Parker. I was about to make some suggestions for listening in this realm, but it is too difficult a task in that we may well disagree on where principles are derived and which should be, so to speak, 'in effect' when a composer works! Without a common starting place, my suggestions may do more harm than good.
We do not follow your claim that American jazz musicians had to move to Europe to be recognised. All our jazz guys had to go to the States to find out about the music and to seek recognition.
"Prophets without honor in their own land", so to speak. Look at the era of what is called 'jazz banishment' in America -- 1945 through 1965, roughly. American jazz musicians fled to havens like Paris, where their work was understood and admired. Yes, your jazz musicians would naturally have to come to the US for the 'real thing', and would have the added cachet of being foreigners. But by and large, American jazz in mid-century was characterized by empty houses here and our musicians leaving the country for extended periods, sometimes for good. (I attended one of Louis Armstrong's last concerts. Only 30 people were in attendance in a 600-seat hall.) It's worth checking jazz history to realize just how hostile an environment it can be here in the US to work creatively.
As for the article by James Stevens, it was not intended as a personal cri-de-coeur. As we understood it he meant it as a pointer for the new man coming into the post of Controller of BBC Radio 3 hoping it would help this new broom to sweep clean.
Thanks for the clarification. I'm unfamiliar with your artistic politics.
We refer you to Wilfred Joseph's' magnificent violin concerto which was twice turned down by successive regimes at the BBC but, happily, its premier at the privately sponsored seventieth birthday concert in his honour just after which he died.
Do you know if this has been recorded, and is it available in the US?
Incidentally,we are not homophobic.
Thanks for that clarification as well. However, I must say that those comments ring very badly in the American ear.
We wish to draw your attention to Roger de Blancke's article on http://www.churchill-society-london.org.us/Prize.html and would value your comments on it.
I have just read it, and find it difficult to separate his vitriolic comments ("unpleasant and spiky so-called music" and "absurd minimalist practices") with the rest of his argument, with which I might agree, but would not support because of the interweave of what is to me reactionary nonsense with legitimate complaints about poor administration and inept judging (also issues separate from each other). Perhaps the mixing of separate issues is just a stylistic norm unfamiliar to me. However, having dismissed a large body of music with generalizations, de Blanke (in my mind) invalidates his position by being a kind of stylistic sore loser.
But I will try to clear the remainder of his essay from my mind and concentrate only on the proposition: that listeners should be voters. This has an entirely different set of fatal flaws. Let me explain what I mean by selecting what may at first appear to be random items:
What are the implications of these five points? That the listeners in the 1990s have been incapacitated to the point that they can no longer make the informed choice de Blanke would like to see. Why? It is not that they are unwise or uneducated, but rather that a series of events have conspired to keep them shielded from 75 years of shifting musical currents. Change is difficult; cataclysmic change (the closing of a century's artistic gap) is utterly terrifying.
Let me explain briefly why I make the particular five points above. The latest manifestation of self-sheltering is the tailored on-line news services. One can build a shell to keep out the unwanted thought, to avoid the disagreed-with viewpoint, to sidestep the uncomfortable news. Take that together with mass customization, and you see a populace interested in building a personal environment, so to speak, consisting of reflecting mirrors -- one's self-image is multiplied until it seems important, one's whims are gratified, as the world makes things 'just for you', revolves around you. When public radio is brought into play, one sees the gratification process put in action: "I will give you what you want so you will contribute more cash," and so the cycle of mainstreaming entertainment to upscale audiences begins -- i.e., more mirrors. How does the abandonment of the Latin Mass fit in? Here, the gratification was provided, the mystery vanished, the ritual was damaged, and -- astoundingly -- no new understanding was generated. The revision was a failure, and provides evidence of the ineffectualness of uninformed action. The cycle I abbreviate here was begun (compositionally) with the phonograph itself. When Victrola records cost $1.25 each in 1910, how many did one purchase? Very, very few. When one had made a material and (subsequently) a psychological investment in one's correctness in buying that record, what did one buy next? Something new? Rarely. Instead (as exemplified by techniques from Dickens' serial novels published in magazines through Christie's series of individual novels through Hollywood's cascade of movie sequels) one bought the same thing until one tired of it. What, in the meantime, had the composers done? Composed the same thing? No, they had not. They had gone on. And so, over the years, the public moved increasingly far from the act of composing, and from its fruits.
Admittedly, my construction above is quite brief, but my point can be summarized this way: The audience has been buffeted less by art than by commerce away from the main streams of musical creation. Facing new music became an increasingly alien task. Commerce encouraged the rubric of "I know what I like" and "I want what I want when I want it", validating nearly a century of dis-involvement with the birth of art. So the audience was not disenfranchised from the broadcaster, but from the music itself.
And -- ironically -- the broadcaster was just as disenfranchised from the music, just as debilitated!
And so styles have marched by, with no consistent attention, and with many listeners struggling only to find the familiar -- and finding it in the past. The solution, if there is one, may be to give 1000 composers 1000 figurative swords and ask them to battle it out, and choose among themselves who will never be heard again. Ask them not to vote for, but to vote against. Ask them to explain what they compose on the street corner at rush hour. Ask them to play their music on the subway on a boombox. Have them carry the music back to the listener. Absurd as it sounds, it is no more untenable than asking an ossified broadcast bureaucracy or an 'ignorant-ized' public to vote.
We would also value your - and your colleagues views - upon (a) the selection methods in composition competitions and (b) upon the immense difficulties composers still experience today in getting broadcast performances of their work. We will consider publishing them. We will consider publishing them.
I will ask our guest composers to write directly to you. I have no comments on (a) because I do not enter competitions, and only occasionally submit my work to juried shows. As for (b), let me note this: There are approximately 200 composers in our state of Vermont (population 650,000). We have a public radio network of three stations broadcasting 24 hours a day. During an average week, not one single work from Vermont composers will likely be broadcast. Of the 'top ten' concert composers in America, not one will be heard. I was lucky enough to have a piece broadcast last week -- but only because the clarinettist was being interviewed on a program generally dedicated to European classical music. Our own program (Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar) broadcasts two hours weekly on a small local station, with taped rebroadcasts on some other stations, and of course our regular cybercast and archived shows. Because shows are so few, internationally famous composers (such as Michael Torke) have been our guests. How bad is it? With hundreds of affiliates and three major public radio networks (National Public Radio, Public Radio International, and Pacifica), there is not one single nationally broadcast program that regularly includes new concert music. Yet Canada -- one-ninth our population -- has a weekly two-hour show.
This is not ignorance speaking. I quote from the following email, received just after yours came in today, from the leading producer of jazz programming on public radio in the US:
Unfortunately, I don't have any optimistic news about public radio and new music. The stations that program "classical" music are tightening their formats and leaving out much of the classical repertoire as well as most 20th century work. The news/information and jazz stations are also "focusing" their formats and removing programming elements that don't appeal to their "core" audiences -- the listeners who spend more time with these stations than with any other. This is bound to put most programs that stretch the boundaries at a disadvantage, unless, like Car Talk or Garrison Keillor, they can prove that they attract more of these core audiences than the programming that surrounds them. You probably know John Schaefer at WNYC, who used to produce a version of his New Sounds program for national distribution, now does his show only locally. The problems are legion here. Marketing may show off the occasional Glass or Reich or Riley or Adams, but for every one of those fine composers, there are a dozens unperformed and unbroadcast.
And apologies in advance for any parts of this note that are unclear; I improvise my writing, and sometimes my fingers get out of sync with my thoughts.
Best to you,
Dennis
April 23, 1998
Ms. O'Hanlon,
The new edition (May 14, 1998) of the New York Review of Books (not the New York Times Book Review, but a different publication, ISSN 0028-7504) has just arrived in my mailbox.
The eminent performer and classical scholar Charles Rosen has written an extensive repudiation of Julian Lloyd-Weber's Davos speech entitled "Who's Afraid of the Avant-Garde?". This is an extraordinary essay, and addresses many of the questions that we have discussed in our email -- from the perspective of a world-class performer who has not only played with hundreds of ensembles including the BBC Symphony, but has also written groundbreaking scholarly (and surprisingly popular) books on the Classical era and other styles.
If you cannot obtain a print copy, the New York Review publishes an on-line edition one month after the print publication at http://www.nybooks.com/
How prescient our exchanges have been!
Best to you,
Dennis
April 24, 1998
At 10 04 04 24 1998 +0100, you wrote:
Dear Mr Bathory
Could you kindly airmail us a copy of your CD please to:-
The Churchill Society Music Department, 18 Grove Lane Ipswich Suffolk IP4 1NR England.
Yes, I will get it out to you today.
The members will collectively reply when they have "collected" their thoughts together after the recent bout of musical(?) e mail correspondence.
It's amazing what happens when one puts thoughts on the Web, isn't it? Here at Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar, we also get a great deal of email about the composer essays and interviews posted on our site.
Best to you,
Dennis
April 24, 1998
The Churchill Society
c/o 18 Grove Lane
Ipswich Suffolk
IP4 1NR
Attn: Judith Harvey-Rogers
Dear Ms. Rogers,
Enclosed is my compact disc, Detritus of Mating, which you requested.
In our extended correspondence, I have offered to provide listening pointers for electroacoustic music--which one of the Society's emails suggested did not represent satisfactory musical composition, and was perhaps a refuge for untalented or deceptive composers.
Because of that opinion, I am going to do something that I have never done in my 34 years of composing: I will describe how I have composed something, with details of its structure, and how it 'works' for me.
Let me first quote from my email to you: "I would ask you to keep in mind that electroacoustic music is often more akin to chamber music than any other style, can be quite intimate, and often stresses the compositional techniques of coloration begun by Berlioz and Ravel. If you like, I can also suggest some 'listening guidelines', if only because electroacoustic music is very much a personal music, like that for virginals or Baroque trio sonatas."
Detritus of Mating is 63 minutes--intimate, but not casual listening. Like a symphony, it is not background music.
There are familiar and unfamiliar musical techniques used in creating it. The familiar ones include motif/theme and variations, development, fugue and stretto, harmonic modulation, etc. I will describe how these function inside the piece later in this letter.
Elements that are not well-known to concert music listeners fall into the general areas of stochastic (statistical) music, algorithmic (mathematical) music, formants, and sound manipulation. I dislike these terms because they seem so alien to the how composers really think and work, but they are the heritage of a generation of 'scientific' thinking about music, and we're stuck with them.
They are neither formidable nor unmusical. Let me translate, very generally. Summaries and translations can be misleading, and for that I apologize, but they can also be helpful for the inexperienced listener.
Naturally, all of these new words, technologies, and ideas lead to certain new (or at least re-cast) structures of music. Here is an area where I suggested we might disagree. If you'll stay with me, though, perhaps I can be helpful in at least making sense out of where some composers are going.
If composers have at their disposal more tools than the traditional set of melody, harmony, and rhythm (which can be refined and expanded to include counterpoint, orchestration, etc.), then what happens? New ideas come along to use those tools. The problem is that these new ideas have gestated over many years in the minds of composers, but the listener is only present at the ultimate birth of the music. Because there are no intermediate performers, electroacoustic music asks that the listener simply accept it for what it is--final, fixed, and complete.
Now let me turn to Detritus of Mating, which is composed with many of the techniques I've described.
Because electroacoustic music is not limited to the standard set of acoustic instruments, then the composer must select source materials to work with. I have always struggled with my source material, because I have felt it was important to use something familiar enough to resonate with the human spirit without outright imitation of what is done just as well with live instruments.
In this composition, I chose the voice: mine, my wife's, and the sculptor (Pavel Kraus) for whom the original composition was done. The motifs were not extended, but rather the numbers from 1 to 20 spoken in Czech, plus a little additional conversation with Pavel. These are like the scrape of a bow on a violin string, or air passing through two pieces of cane into an oboe, the raw material with which I set out to composer this piece.
I then embarked upon imagining a composition with a long, slowly building arch of sound, one that would encompass the listener without ever being boring. I would even, I thought, add a little salt and pepper in reverse--samples of acoustic instruments and classical or romantic harmonies at strategic points in the composition.
Next, I began to score the music. You may ask, what is there to score, for is it not just a pile of sounds? I believe that no composition of substance exists without coherency, and communication is hardly possible without something the listener can be involved with. For me, that means a structure and a plan, and the use of techniques reaching back to the days of monody.
The score, on the other hand, is hardly familiar looking. More akin to a piano roll (indeed, sound-sequence screens are often called piano roll notation), this linear score identifies the length of each sound clip (for lack of a better word) and how it will be manipulated--varied and put into harmony or counterpoint. It reads from left to right, and the clips sit on lines, but one sees representations of the sound waves rather than a graphic of the note names. It requires a strong familiarity with the sound clips and how they will sound together. There is no way to 'read' this score in the same way one 'reads' standard notation--it is merely the positioning that one sees.
Below is an illustration of a part of the score to one of Detritus of Mating's stereo pairs. Note the guide numbers at the top, equivalent to measures--this is no small score!
Here are the (rather prosaic) names of four of the 72 clips derived from the recording of the numbers being spoken--again, no one has ever heard these names but me, so this is a special revelation to the Society about the inner workings of a composition's creation--and descriptions of how they came about:
You can see there is something like harmony, but where is the melody, you ask? Later for that: it will come. Realize that what I have described above are only four of the 72 transformations I created from the original vocal motifs. The piece is at the 'notebook' stage of composition--though instead of a staff book filled with pen scratches of symphonic instruments, I have nearly four hours of sound sketches from which to compose the final piece.
I must leave out how the 72 transformations were made. They involved an intimate listening to the original voices to get their 'feel', and to discover what was especially unique about each voice, and each syllable. I could then enhance, stretch, compress, and re-color the sounds, much as I would find the essential nature of a melodic contour and re-mold it for each instrument or ensemble. It is a formidable chore; indeed, traditional scoring is much simpler, because all the composer creates are directions--not the actual sound itself.
Now my composition diverges because of the purpose of the original work. Let me explain. The original Detritus has six channels, which brings me to the question of spatial relationships. Before jumping in, I'll offer a bit of food for thought: Where is the melody in the last movement of Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony? I will guess that you could hum the tune. But, startlingly enough, it is not played by one instrument! Rather, the notes are, one at a time, tossed back and forth between first and second violins. In the composer's day, those violins would have been sitting opposite each other on the stage, handing the melody off across the gap in front of the conductor, one note at a time. It was startling, and very forward-looking (but lost with today's orchestras, where first and second violins sit side-by-side).
But because electroacoustic music does not depend on performing musicians, the sounds can be moved to wherever they are most effective ... which brings me back to the original six-channel Detritus. It was part of a gallery exhibit, where visual space is important. To underscore that space and to overcome the staticness of an exhibition, I let each pair of six sets of loudspeakers have its own personality, its own musical content. The six channels were divided into three stereo pairs. Each stereo pair had a complete, integrated (but thin) composition to itself. Importantly, each composition was of a slightly different length.
Here is where electroacoustic music can explore very different worlds. We all know that a fugue consists of different voices entering at specific intervals to create a larger, complex, and rich contrapuntal structure. In a world where harmony is not the primary driving force, however--such as electroacoustics--, it is possible to change only the entry points of the fugue to make a new fugue. These three sets of stereo pairs start together, and gradually (because they are three different lengths) shift out of phase with each other over the course of weeks and months. Each visitor to the exhibit has a new sonic world presented, and frequent visitors hear a different world from the last one they experienced. This is impossible with concert music, if for no other reason than the musicians cannot play for days and weeks at a time! Suffice it to say that this is not gimmickry, for without knowing it is taking place (and no one but me did know that), a listener accepts the music at face value, as the sonic world that it is.
The copy of Detritus of Mating that you have before you is one version of that sonic world, fixed and complete. It is, in fact, the way the original score for it reads, the audio ur-text, so to speak.
In sum, here is what happens in the piece. This is a kind of structural analysis one might perform on a Beethoven sonata, for example, but quite abbreviated. The piece is divided into three large movements (again, this is the first time I have revealed this):
That is, in brief, the action in Detritus of Mating. Ultimately, there is no need to know this, just as there is no need for a listener to know that Beethoven may be performing a I-III modulation in the first movement of the Sixth Symphony¸ or that Bernstein creates a double fugue in the second movement of Chichester Psalms. The piece rests on its own strengths, apart from academic analysis.
I bring you to this point if for no other reason than to dispel the notion that composing with electroacoustics is talentless or facile, as an email from the Society stated: "So-called composers tend to use it as a means of sound effects with no consideration for the structural principles of genuine musical composition which have not changed from the very first ventures into early monody to the present day."
The basic principle which has not changed is that music is communication in sound, one that requires a creator or sender, and an audience or receiver. The language is a learned one--as my mother might tell you, who finds classical music of any era utterly opaque and stressful.
Each period has brought new discoveries, from chant to organum to counterpoint to harmony to orchestration to development to modulation to texture; each period has contributed new thinking, from word-based monody to parallel movement to independent voices to poetic structures to clockwork motion to accompanied song to sonata form to symphony to music drama to Klangfarbenmelodie to electroacoustics; every era has contributed new musical elements, from melody to mensuration to harmony to texture to polyrhythm, from modes and ficta to scales and odd tunings to equal temperament to microtonality. I cannot hope to understand which principles, save that of communication between maker and hearer (even if they are the same person), have remained unchanged.
But I do know that the seeker will find beauty.
Thank you for your interest in this discussion. I hope that, with this preface, Detritus of Mating--and other electroacoustic music--may be rewarding, inspiring, surprising, and ultimately worthwhile to you.
Best to you,
Dennis Báthory-Kitsz
May 12, 1998
Dear Mr Bathory-Kitsz
I have been asked to compile a report from the various comments made by members of The Churchill Society's music committee who have now have listened to Mr Dennis Bathory-Kitsz's CD and read with care his various interesting and thought provoking emails.
All agree that he should he should be thanked for his contributions to the society's discussions and congratulated on the erudition and profundity and plausibility of nearly the whole of his argument. However, most feel that the conclusion to what he has to say about his own integrity - and that of other composers working in a similar medium - does not in any way contradict the society's original argument. If anything, his contentions strengthen their contention, that it is only the building blocks - not the principles - of composition, that have changed.
The committee members hold that these views have come into being as a consequence of the cloning type teaching theorems of certain academics in University Music Departments and Music Colleges. The society holds that musical creative imagination is an unusual talent - one that cannot be taught for it is a gift - given only rarely by the Gods in abundance to a single individual; and even then, requiring of that person a real understanding of the nature of music, the accumulation of a wide musical knowledge and experience; and a disciplined painstaking and refined discernment in composition.
The very raison d'etre of the society's Music Department - the re-establishment of real music - is because of this fundamental conflict of views within the musical world.
I am asked to include in this reply to you a quote from a recent letter the society sent to the London Times Newspaper. (Unpublished)
27th April 1998.
To The Editor
THE TIMES
Sir,
"Performed" modern composers blame their neglect on the laziness of listeners to repeatedly listen to their music to appreciate it. They continue to claim that both Mozart and Beethoven were misunderstood upon the occasion of some of their first performances.
The claim was - and is - false, for it fails to distinguish between the reaction of the fashion conscious concertgoers of the day - the quality of the first performances - and the presence - or otherwise - of musically educated people.
The truth is that there have been very few occasions when a worthy new work has failed to make its mark after a first class performance.
It is now 65 plus years since this claim was first made as being the cause of the public's dislike of modern music and yet the public still dislikes the work of most modern composers.
The established composers are established because they have their own instantly recognisable distinctive voices and because they had - and still have - something important to say.
Few modern composers have any recognisable voice. Is that because they have nothing to say?
The real tragedy is that there are composers alive today who have something to say and do so in their own quite distinctive voices but who are not allowed to say it by the Fuhrers' in the New Music Selection politburo of BBC Radio 3.
These composers are starving and in despair at the failure of Classic FM to have brought Radio 3 sharp against real new music competition.
The (privately spoken) tales of woe from members of The Composer's Guild and members of the Association of Professional Composers over the last 30 years in respect to the inadequacies and indeed injustices of Radio 3s New Music selection procedures are many and very distressing, but they fear the consequences of speaking out.
Mr John Spearman, Chairman of Classic FM (with its 8 million listeners), boasts that he has appointed the The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to "a residency at Classic FM" (whatever that means). But what he fails to inform his listeners is that the orchestra has to find a sponsor before any concerts will be broadcast.(Norman Lebrecht, Daily Telegraph 11th December 1996)
There is good music, poor music, and bad music - and stuff that cannot be described as music. It is the absence of a correct name for each category that is one of the root causes of today's musical chaos.
But the corruption of children's aural inheritance spans all classes and is immensely sad.
John Tavener is right when he speaks of the nation's culture in ruins.
Norman Harvey Rutherlyn
The committee holds that electro-acoustic methods of composition - together with any other synthetic methods of attempting to construct a valid musical form, tend to be used as a cop out - a means of dodging the demands of genuine musical composition. Even the scores of Stomu Yamash'ta and Ryuichi Sakamoto become acceptable as an ancillary to film or theatre. But then, extra musical ingredients can make the most threadbare music become acceptable - for instance, Philip Glass's score for Paul Shrader's film about Yukio Mishima. Out of context this work amounts to very little, yet within that film its obsessive pre-occupation with minimalism (i.e, a single unaltering motif) exactly parallels Mishima's own obsessive attempt to create a personality right outside of his true bent.
The collective view was that Mr Bathory-Kitsz is totally at sea, when he refers to "communication between maker and hearer" as a principle. This is simply misuse of words.
This process is an "effect" and if the principles employed to achieve that effect are good and sound, then the effect will be productive and gratifying . In other words, if the principles evoked by Mr Bathory-Kitsz himself are adhered to - and assuming the material creatively devised is original, stimulating, thought provoking - then the result will be good communication.
Re the CD Detritus of Mating.
The collective view was that, apart from the title (which has no apparent relevance to the material employed) one can have no argument about its structural authenticity. The structural principles employed are without doubt, beyond criticism. But they thought the material was tending to be rather cliche-ridden and each motif is done to death. The work would have been far more emotive had the material not been drawn out to unjustified lengths. Mr Bathory-Kitsz asks for it not to be listened to as background music yet this is exactly what he invites, for there are no contrasting sections. They held the view that it was not for nothing that the classicists' devised sonata form and symphonic movements. Basically, they thought this a good piece but over long for its content, saying the listener can assimilate the message in a fraction of the time it perseveres.
Dear Mr Bathory-Kitsz
I am to ask you if you would agree to the text of your emails to us and our replies can be paged as a debate on our website with a LINK to your site to enable all to listen to your music? The complete text to be approved by you in writing (and the committee here) before being paged.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Yours faithfully
Judith Harvey-Rogers
May 12, 1998
At 00 49 05 12 1998 +0100, you wrote:
I have been asked to compile a report from the various comments made by members of The Churchill Society's music committee who have now have listened to Mr Dennis Bathory-Kitsz's CD and read with care his various interesting and thought provoking emails.
Throughout this debate, I have attempted to refrain from being judgmental, but rather to explain, to clarify and, I had hoped, to open doors. The response from the Society is full of judgment, and the letter to the London Times sounds as if, in the past month, I had written not a single syllable that was understood. I am rather disappointed; I hope the Society doesn't simply enjoy howling at the moon!
With regard to the London Times letter, as the cliché goes, repetition does not make something true. I have better authority than my own to debunk arguments about quality and popularity, especially that made in the latest New York Review of Books article by musician and writer Charles Rosen. I referred to this in an earlier email, and I hope you've had an opportunity to read it by now.
As for the popularity question, composers always seem to get into trouble with someone. Ockeghem and his pals got in trouble with the church because their words couldn't be heard. Beethoven got in trouble with the critics who were used to the restrained balance of their own coming of age--but the hungry public wanted something else. Hindemith was adored by critics for his musicianship and erudition--while the public ignored him then and now. And today the minimalists are popular--and academe is livid about it. But this argument is pointless from either side; it's too bad defenders of contemporary composition find themselves squeezed to argue it.
Likewise it is diversionary to conflate taste and quality, a mixing that appears frequently within the articles and essays the Society has written or reprinted. I expect the members of the Society simply aren't going to be in the audience for Philip Glass, which is a matter of taste. But to translate taste into an issue of quality ("the most threadbare music") is to advance an insupportible equation.
You say, "Few modern composers have any recognisable voice. Is that because they have nothing to say?" The voices are clearly recognizable. I can hear them, and I am far from alone. If you cannot hear composers' distinct character, cannot hear what they have to say, is that their failure, and does the failure rest with the listener? Communication is an important criterion in evaluating music, but taste creates a high 'noise level' in the signal! Perhaps these composers are not to your taste, but (I repeat) that does not reflect on their quality. Perhaps, indeed, they are not recognizable because you do not have the tools to do so, just as my mother has neither taste nor interest in acquiring the tools to listen to Mozart, rejecting all concert music as too long and too harsh. I admit that I do not have the tools to hear the distinct creative voices in country or bluegrass. And though I'm fully equipped to listen to Dufay or Mozart or Beethoven or Mahler, I have lost interest and rarely listen to any music written before 1950. Taste and tools at work!
Likewise, you say, "The claim was - and is - false, for it fails to distinguish between the reaction of the fashion conscious concertgoers of the day - the quality of the first performances - and the presence - or otherwise - of musically educated people." Now that post-serial styles have gained popularity with the public, with music-makers, and with academe, what is left of this argument? It evaporates. To have objected to music that was unpopular with the audience provided an opportunity to search for the reason behind that seeming failure. But now the Society objects because it has gained popularity with the wide swath of musically aware people. What are we to make of that?
Based on the rising tide of public enthusiasm for new music (looking at record sales of Pärt, Glass, etc., and sold-out performances by Kronos as only a few examples), this comment is also demonstrably false: "It is now 65 plus years since this claim was first made as being the cause of the public's dislike of modern music and yet the public still dislikes the work of most modern composers." If you mean 'modernist' composers of the previous generation, you may be correct, though that is changing as listeners unfamiliar with the contemporaneous debates of the 1920s through 1950s come of age; but then, many eras of transition (Ars Nova and Rococo, for example) struggled with popular attention. The 'public dislike' argument is ripe for retirement.
Furthermore, you have not addressed at all the critical stalling effect of recorded and broadcast music on, respectively, the first and second generations of post-Post-Romantic listening audiences.
Regarding this notion--"The collective view was that Mr Bathory-Kitsz is totally at sea, when he refers to communication" between maker and hearer' as a principle. This is simply misuse of words."--does the Society suggest that communication between the composer and the audience is an invalid principle of composition? This is a stunning statement, considering that the Society so strongly emphasizes the end results of this very communication (the size of the listening audience, in particular) to bolster its arguments. I can only assume that they object to the extrapolation from particular to general; the process is not, as the Society says, 'an effect'. Without communication as a guiding principle of composition (or any artform), the composer is only a mason respecting the laws of gravity and the chemistry of mortar. If the Society's members believe the composer's choices largely live in an ideal realm of theoretical principle, I won't argue. My point was merely that a partner in communication--that is, an audience, real or imagined--lives inseparably inside the compositional process, the choices made, and, indeed, the artistic growth of the composer. The result is found there in the notes, even if the Society feels this does not adhere to a more narrow definition of a 'principle' of note-assembly as taught in, say, Gradus ad Parnassum.
As for the Society's comments on Detritus of Mating itself, I can only say that it was sent for educational purposes, not for the Society's critique. In the realm of electroacoustics, the members appear to be (perhaps even admit to being) neophytes, just as I am a neophyte in any attempt to understand and intelligently comment on rap or raga. I would not expect critique, but rather comments on what members of the Society had been learned from it. I am disappointed that I do not read of learning in these comments, but only a search for reinforcement for the Society's hypotheses. It is also curious that the Society's comments address the older (and less significant) content of the music, ignoring its true emphases, which include the development of texture and the distortion of apparent time. Certainly it is true that one can hear as little as one wants to hear, but to make any comparison at all with the classicists is, well, silly. (Even the Society's esteemed members couldn't have personally known Mozart!)
In any case, I thank you for the opportunity to engage in this debate, and wish you best of luck with the continued growth of music in your country.
I am to ask you if you would agree to the text of your emails to us and our replies can be paged as a debate on our website with a link to your site to enable all to listen to your music? The complete text to be approved by you in writing (and the committee here) before being paged.
You have my permission to include the entire correspondence on your website. My only requirements are that the one significant correction I emailed to you be made; that comments typed *like this* be replaced by italics; and that my American grammar, punctuation, and spelling be maintained. I would also appreciate a link to my personal page as well as the Kalvos & Damian site where you first found me .
Many thanks,
Dennis
From the Webmaster
The Secretary informs me that the Music committee will wish to extend this debate with a paragraph referring to Mr Rosen's recent article.
From May 12 through 15 there followed a comedy of errors as several webmasters ("H.B. Beaver" and "HWB", among anonymous ones) vied for the title of who could lose the most material and format it least successfully. Unfortunately, since everyone used the return address of "Duty Secretary", there was no clue how to get email to the right person. I re-formatted and re-sent the web documents several times, and then threw up my hands. The correspondence then continued like this...
May 15, 1998
Dear Mr Bathory
I appreciate your efforts re corrections and the time it has taken.
Do not fear: please be assured that nothing will be publicly paged until you have given your consent in writing.
I think the committee wish to study Mr Rosen's article. I am recommending to them a different approach to paging this interesting subject. ie, that you put the case for the latest new music - including recorded excerpts from your own work - all of which I presume you will be able to formulate from the large amount of textual work you have already done with us re this matter; and the society's music committee makes whatever case they wish to and then you each exchange and after any amendments you both wish to make both cases are paged after each agree they are satisfied with the presentation. Then public participation in the debate can sought.
I'm sure they will agree that is a better way of putting differing viewpoints across rather than engaging in what could appear as an undignified or semi acrimonious dispute. I will let you know their decision in the middle of next week.
Sincerely
HWB
May 28, 1998
Dear Mr Bathory
Report from the Music Committee.
I have been asked to compile a report from the various comments made by members of The Churchill Society's music committee who have now have listened to Mr Dennis Bathory-Kitsz's CD and read with care his various interesting and thought provoking emails.
All agree that he should he should be thanked for his contributions to the society's discussions and congratulated on the erudition and plausibility of nearly the whole of his argument. However, most feel that what he has to say about his own integrity - and that of other composers working in a similar medium - does not in any way contradict the society's original argument. His statements strengthen their contention that it is only the building blocks - not the principles - of composition, that have changed.
The committee members hold that the views he expressed have come into being as a consequence of the cloning type teaching methods of academics in University Music Departments and Music Colleges and how the Bathory type "music" is now so far removed from the origin of all music - the human voice with its marvellous ability to express emotions - later to be supported by hand-made, expressively played musical instruments - that it is not music - it is sound effects - one person likening it to the sounds heard in the London Underground system when the trains were echoeing through the tunnels and buskers playing far away.
The committee consider his advocacy of what he claimed could be the music of the future is contrived; and feel sure that this is why this type of electro-acoustic music and the supporting arguments fall on deaf ears of the concertgoing public. So devoid of emotion is it that it must be sound effects . . . . buttressed with esoteric arguments designed to influence like minded people. This is why the musical public refuse to listen. It is literally inhuman.
The society holds that musical creative imagination is a gift which cannot be taught. It is given only rarely by the Gods in abundance to a single individual, and even then, requires of that person an intuitive understanding of the nature of music, and almost always a mature experience of life itself. We hold that composition is a disciplined - nearly always a painstaking structural undertaking requiring a wide musical knowledge and refined discernment if it is not to be a pastiche of other composers' styles.
The very raison d'etre of the society's Music Department - the re-establishment of good music - is because of this fundamental conflict of views.
I am asked to include in this reply to you a quote from a recent letter the society sent to the London Times Newspaper.
The Times article printed above is reproduced again.
The committee holds that electro-acoustic methods of composition - together with any other synthetic methods of attempting to construct a valid musical form, tend to be used as a cop out - a means of dodging the demands of genuine musical composition. Even the scores of Stomu Yamash'ta and Ryuichi Sakamoto become acceptable as an ancillary to film or theatre. But then, extra musical ingedrients can make the most threadbare music become acceptable - for instance, Philip Glass's score for Paul Shrader's film about Yukio Mishima. Out of context this work amounts to very little, yet within that film its obsessive pre-occupation with minimalism (i.e, a single unaltering motif) exactly parallels Mishima's own obsessive attempt to create a personality right outside of his true bent.
The collective view was that Mr Bathory-Kitsz is totally at sea, when he refers to "communication between maker and hearer" as a 'principle'. This is simply mis-use of words.'Principle' is not the motive that inspires one to compose music. In other words, if the principles evoked by Mr Bathory-Kitsz himself are adhered to - and assuming the material creatively devised is original, stimulating, thought provoking - then the result will be good communication.
Re the CD Detritus of Mating
The collective view was that, apart from the title (which is distasteful and has no apparent relevance to the material employed) one can have no argument about its structural authenticity. The structural principles employed are without doubt, beyond criticism. But the committee thought the material was tending to be rather cliche-ridden and each motif is done to death. The work would have been far more emotive had the material not been drawn out to unjustified lengths. Mr Bathory-Kitsz asks for it not to be listened to as background music yet this is exactly what he invites, for there are no contrasting sections. They held the view that it was not for nothing that the classicists' devised sonata form and symphonic movements. Basically, they thought this a good piece but over long for its content, saying the listener can assimilate the message in a fraction of the time it perseveres.
A few other comments were made in respect to his views - where he uses "principle" it has been pointed out that this is not the motive which inspires one to compose music - nor is it the effect that it has on the audience - that is a re-action.
"Taste" is not a definition of quality. Lots of people like Oasis, Blur, Glass, Del Gredici, Michael Nyman. That does not mean they are any good. Sinatra was great; so was Bernstein, Ligetti and Dutilleux and Bolcon. These are good composers who write good music that is rewarding to listen to.
A simple but excellent definition of music is "that which enters the ear with facility and leaves the mind with difficulty".
The committee think that it should not comment on Mr Bathory's CD on the web site but instal a link to his web site.
Sincerely
Judith O'Hanlon.(Mrs) Duty Secretary
May 28, 1998
Ms. O'Hanlon,
I have just received an email almost identical to that from May 12, except for the addition of a few paragraphs.
I'm not quite sure what's going on. Last I heard, after the exchange of 10 additional emails and after my considerable effort in proofreading and HTML correction, that our exchange would be available on your site, along with your comments on Charles Rosen's article.
Perhaps this last email was in error.
Best to you,
Dennis
May 28, 1998
Dear Mr Bathory
I am not sure what you received but I compiled a report of the committee individual reviews and sent it back to each for confirmation. You will receive it within a day or two.
With kind regards
Judith O'Hanlon.(Mrs) Duty Secretary
The "Report" was forwarded yet again on June 6 by Judith Harvey-Rogers (one of the several Duty Secretaries...) without comment, and my patience with this month-long confusion was wearing a tad thin.
June 10, 1998
Dear Ms Harvey-Rogers,
I have now received the same "report" for the third time -- once from you on May 12, again from Ms O'Hanlon on May 26, and yet again from you on June 8. On May 13, I began an extensive correspondence with one H.B. Beaver in which I copy-edited the text in careful detail and corrected extensive formatting (and attribution!) errors in the web page version of our exchange.
There are now been three separate sets of email correspondence on the same nearly identical "report", significantly ignoring both my detailed response of May 12 and the important article by Charles Rosen in the New York Review of Books, as well as the corrections and amplifications made by me from May 13-15 (which included a graphical file, the May 12 commentary, and a web-formatted version of my postal mail.)
Either the Society has a very confused organization, with three cooks stirring the correspondence pot, or its members wish to end the correspondence with the incomplete and startlingly flawed "report" of May 12, reiterated on May 26 and June 8. I have expended considerable energy and expense in addressing clearly and concisely each point made by the Society, yet the response has been in generalities exacerbated by a pointless (not to say unpublished!) letter to the Times, the last of which reveals not a millimeter of reinvigorated understanding or artistic growth since our first correspondence eleven months ago on July 26, 1997 (and continuing over an exchange 46 -- yes, forty-six -- emails).
Perhaps, logic failing, the Society's members are at heart not upset by violation of principles, but by a changing artistic world in which they have simply misunderstood those principles They now must relegate themselves to reiterating arguments long moot. In fact, I fear the Society will misrepresent me on its website by publishing its conclusions (the "report"), but by failing to include both my written correspondence and the clear refutation made in my email of May 12 (attached again below). Therefore I am formally withdrawing my permission to use any of this content until (and if) the matter is corrected.
I have appended my comments of May 12 below, and can forward the entire email exchange with H.B. Beaver (or any or all of our emails up to this 47th one) as a reminder to the Society of the effort that has already been expended by me on your behalf.
Cordially,
Dennis
June 10, 1998
Dear Mr Bathory-Kitsz,
Thanks for yours.
The first report was sent for your comments. The second report - re-written taking into account the committees views about your comments was e-mailed accidentally to you before it had been seen by some other members for their final comments.
The report that you have just received is the committee's final say on the discussion. They cannot enter into further debate.
The office has to oversee the new web page and ensure that both points of view are put in a fair and interesting way for visitors to the web site.
The society is happy to page the debate - but not before you agree the text of your side - thus you need not fear we shall mis-represent you.
There is clearly a strong disagreement . . . and this will make for interesting reading.
It is important to keep your case as short as is consistent with comprehensive quality. We shall be happy to include your images.
Holidays are commencing in the UK so there is bound to be some delay.
Sincerely
[unsigned]
June 10, 1998
The edited HTML file and graphics I sent earlier will have to do. I'm sorry the Society didn't address Rosen's article.
Dennis
July 18, 1998
Dear Dennis.
A Link has been made to your web site and is in The Music Department of the Index (Half way down the Page) on http://www.churchill-society-london.org.uk/Webmap*.html
We much appreciate the amount of time you have given - but feel the best thing we can do in the circumstances is not to publish the discussions but give a direct link to your site.
Good Luck.
Yours faithfully
Norman Harvey Rogers
Secretary
So there it seemed to end. The Society named for bravery instead beat a retreat behind a bunker of platitudes, ignored Rosen's important article, and the only place you'll find this correspondence is right here. Since this correspondence was exchanged, by the way, an extensive thread spurred by the absurd Julian Lloyd Weber "Davos" speech has taken place on the rec.music.compose newsgroup. Look it up!
In fact, however, the story didn't quite end. Word reached the Society that they hadn't quashed the discussion by keeping it off their website: they got email from Dr. Matthew H. Fields. Norman Harvey Rogers sent a note in surprise to Fields, with a copy to me for publication. At his suggestion, Dr. Fields' comments will be added shortly.
August 31, 1998
Dear Dr. Matt,
Your two abrupt e mails have been brought to my attention.
I founded The Churchill Society. I am the composer of The Churchill Music and I started The Music Department because the neglect in the UK - especially by the BBC - of so many first class British composers is unknown to the British public.
I have taken part in all the discussions re the above matter - I have seen all the important correspondence relating to it.
I see from your e mail that the correspondence between the society and Dennis Bathory-Kitsz has been published on the web without the committee being informed (?) . . . . but in the event we have no objection.
Let me assure you that both Julian Lloyd-Webber's, Charles Rosen's, and the more recent George Steiner BBC Proms Lecture have been read carefully by the committee members and with other articles are filed for ready reference by them.
There were reasons for deciding not to use up our limited web space by publishing the correspondence. Please remember the Music Department is only one aspect of the society's raison d'etre.
The reasons were as follows.
That the arguments put forward by Dennis Bathory-Kitsz, Charles Rosen and some of those by George Steiner in his recent lecture on the BBC are not new - they have been repeated ad nauseam in the UK and have failed to impress both the public and the majority of practising musicians. For years now most modern music performed in the UK is publicly politely ignored - and privately scorned. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. The public are often made to look ignorant by the media - but the public are collectively sensible and not taken in for long. It is not lost upon them that there is no longer any new popular style music broadcast in the UK - known formerly as Light Music. Why not they are beginning to ask?
"Beauty is in the eye (ear) of the beholder" . . . the modernists have had a good run these last 25 plus years trying to make people understand their work: but the fact remains, they have failed to win the hearts and minds of the public and created in the process a climate of disrespect for composers. Thus it is that today's audience for serious music on BBC Radio 3 is now too small to be measured statistically. That speaks for itself.
Dennis Bathory-Kitsz, Charles Rosen and George Steiner all studiously avoid the core of Julian Lloyd Webber's thesis - when he said words to the effect that the tiny clique in control of the selection of new music in the BBC have for far too many years now, frozen out important British composers who did not share their musical prejudices.
The society has given Lloyd-Webber's view prime space on its Music Department web site because his argument is pertinent to the sorry situation in the UK. The reason his Davos speech made such an impact in the UK was because something said publicly on music - for a change - rang true in the ears of the public.
Lloyd-Webber's claim that "For thirty years the BBC has lamentably failed in this respect . . . to the great hurt of both the public and composers" is irrefutable. It deserves the wide publicity the society will continue to give it.
The debate in the UK is not so much about whether the musical avant garde is right or wrong: it is about the failure of BBC Radio 3 (force funded by the British public) for the last 30 years to commission and bring before the public, first class performances of all types of important new musical composition. It is as simple as that.
The society is totally opposed to any form of censorship. It is interesting to observe how our demand upsets the avant garde.
Had your arguments been new, they would have been published by us.
Thus it was that the steering committee of the society felt it was best - and fair to both sides - to leave unpublished all the correspondence - both ours to him - and his to us. Had you asked whether we would have agreed to your side publishing all the texts the answer would have been - and is - yes - please do so.
I trust you will add this letter to the correspondence.
With kind regards.
Norman Harvey Rogers
General Secretary
So perhaps that's it at last. Norman Harvey Rogers lumps me and Rosen together as if we have should address his view of the BBC as he interprets it from the "core of" Lloyd Weber's thesis. He drops the strange notion of "musical principles" he introduced, forgets the dialog on electroacoustics or minimalism as well as the effects of recording and broadcasting, and returns to chew the "irrefutable" old, dead bones of the avant-gardists and modernists -- waving the red flag of censorship in the process.