A Narrow Vision of the Future of Modern Music

James McHard’s The Future of Modern Music (Iconic Press, 2008) is a failure at several levels. The author fails to make a strong case for what will happen in the future, as the title suggests, he fails to make the case for the legitimacy of the trend he singles out for exaltation (“sound-based composition”), he fails to provide the novice listener of modernist music with the tools one needs to understand even his privileged sub-set, he fails to write engaging English sentences, and he fails to edit his typographical-error filled text. Besides that, the book is biased to the kind of music McHard writes (though he never mentions it, the back cover reveals it) to the exclusion of other many exciting trends in recent music. Perhaps he could have titled the book “The Evolution of Sound-Based Composition”, but that does not make the grandiose and foolish claim he foists off as apparently self-evident. There is a positive aspect of the text. McHard has effusive praise for many neglected composers and specific works; this could indeed inspire the novice listener to give the works a careful listen. Yet the flaws are so glaring that I cannot imagine him winning too many converts to “sound-based composition”. The book will not be taken seriously among the music academy (not surprisingly, he rails against the academy in several passages), and should irk the layman with its shoddy presentation.

The publisher, Iconic Press, has let slip hundreds of small errors in things such as spacing between words, italics, boldface type and underscores, as if the text had been copied from the source data of a website. This is, of course, distracting for the reader, at best. The minimum of investigation reveals that Iconic Press “a division of J & A Music Enterprises Inc.” is McHard’s own company, and the book does indeed derive from an evolving website (futureofmodernmusic.com). These errors could be forgiven if a sterling content was being exposed. But the reader is distracted, again by the writing style, which seems to come from a college freshman (of today’s ilk, which is to say, unpolished and incomplete); it is unlikely that McHard passed a draft through anyone with a writing background. Too many of his sentences are confused or confusing. For example, p.366 “They brought dense chord clusters into play to introduce a depth sense.” I count two levels of redundancy in the beginning and middle of this remark and a nonsensical ending (does he mean “sense of depth”? If so, does he really mean that all music before the cluster-harmony composers was two-dimensional?) Some of his stylistic problems stem from the scope of this massive tome (413 pages), in which he simply tries to do too much (while actually proving very little). It is clear that he is writing for the new music listener and not the recent music historian or contemporary composer, yet his summaries of major 20^th Century composers are brief to the point of ridiculous for any audience. He packs in all sorts of information unrelated to his thesis, thus bewildering the reader with each vignette. Claiming the book is an aide to the layman listener of new music, McHard avoids a lot of technical jargon except when discussing the music he feels is most important. For example, when discussing Varese, he writes, “it was the clashing densities and planes of sound…” (p. 356) This is one of many clues that he is trying to dazzle the reader with empurpled prose without sufficient explanation – which, in fact, does not help the curious listener approach the music at all but may put them off. This listener will feel outside of the inner circle who may understand the music. The form of the book is lopsided with this revisionist history introduction of new music composers, from which a brief conclusion emerges. That’s right; there is no central argument save for the arrogantly titled 14-page chapter “Conclusion, The Future of Modern Music, a Heretic’s Perspective” (and, no, he does not explain what is so heretical about his vision). As if he realizes the imbalance, McHard attaches more discourse on his thesis in an appendix entitled “Perceptual Transformations in Modern Music,” where it seems too little too late. This is the worst example of where his prose drowns under the weight of its own verbose meandering.

Even if the typos and style were reworked to his advantage, McHard would still need to introduce more evidence to support his argument. He claims that “sound-based” composition will “rescue” new music because it is based on human perception (as opposed to the composer’s conception.) This sounds thrilling, but he gives no empirical evidence from the concert hall (no audiences are lining up to hear these allegedly “auditory phantasms”) or from the lab (he marshals no data from the field of cognitive psychology). No, McHard repeatedly asserts that his “sound-based” composition is the doorway to the listener’s mind, and takes it as proven early in the book. He refers to “research into the very nature of sound itself” being done in European labs as the key to the future of music without getting too specific about this murky endeavor (does McHard’s hero Gerard Pape connect audio cables to lab rats until they hum show tunes?) While I have no doubt that “sound-based” composers are thinking very carefully about the timbre and the harmonic spectrum, their music is not necessarily musical, and this is the downfall of the McHard’s thesis: asserting that one’s music is grounded in perception actually guarantees nothing but another piece of music for listening. The question remains: does the piece work? Well… sometimes yes, sometimes no. There is no question that McHard is a true believer, but his writing failed to convince me to enter his magical sound-worlds with a justified sense of wonder. Here is a man who has derision for Wagner, R. Strauss and “German formalism” (he stops there, but one wonders what he thinks of Schumann, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, etc.) and begins the history of “sound-based” composition with Janacek (!?!) While he has scorn for serial composers (but only some of them) for missing the point of the musical experience, he implies that Beethoven et al. are guilty of the same crime, when in fact their music has received the critical acceptance of audience and musical professionals for being both structurally sound and wonderful for listening. For music to be more than just sound, the mind must be engaged, and the conceptual is necessarily working along with the perceptual (or sensual). McHard and other “sound-based” composers’ emphasis on the latter, to the exclusion of the former, seems to deny what is actually going on in our minds in favor of what is going on in the vibrating air.

So, what is really going on here? McHard is a free-lance American composer who has spent time studying with the three composers to whom all music points (in his view): Iannis Xennakis, Julio Estrada and Gerard Pape. (Incidentally, Estrada’s is one of two brief pieces of advance praise for the book on the back cover, and why wouldn’t he give it, being the focus of music history as he is here?) Through the mess of describing things about composers since Janacek, he certainly does identify a trend toward elevating timbre to and past the status of pitch and rhythm in the last century with some composers. Along the way, he falls into the trap of considering walls knocked down because one man wrote something different, when if fact the audience may or may not go along with it. Along the same lines, he considers something taught to us all, or a previous musical parameter now dispensable merely because one composer tried something different and attracted some students to do the same. Once these walls are allegedly gone and the old parameters seemingly jettisoned, he feels that he may insert whatever he likes (in this case, timbral changes) as the new melody, harmony and form. It does not seem to occur to McHard that perhaps melody, harmony and form were not used up and that Cage did not actually succeed in teaching us all that all life is music (and therefore none of it is). Perhaps there is something about classical music which taps into the way the mind works even though Bach had no computer programs to help him understand the sonic spectrum. Conversely, the latter “sound-based”
compositions are not attracting throngs of enraptured listeners, as McHard seems to promise will happen. Some of us listen carefully and fairly to these pieces and walk away unmoved because of how little there is (McHard seems unaware that many sensitive listener’s deplore Cage and his followers’ work as pseudo-intellectualism, or that the joke is really on us). A music theorist I know declares many of these instances of sound-based composition as nothing but “the messaging of the harmonic spectrum”. Depending on the individual piece, there may indeed be nothing more there. Ultimately, the success or failure depends upon many factors, and interesting program notes may not have any bearing upon our enjoyment. If McHard’s narrow vision is correct and the near future, at least, is dominated by “sound-based” composition, then we will have plenty of vapid ear candy indeed. Let us hope that more articulate people than McHard will notice what is missing and compose music that is both interesting and sounds good, as the masters of the past have always did and the masters of today continue to do.

Timothy Melbinger, June 2008