Age: Does It Matter?

Age: Does It Matter?

D.C. Culbertson over the years Final photo by Mark Longaker, others unknown By D.C. Culbertson © 2001 NewMusicBox “Act your age!” “Age is nothing but a number.” “With age comes wisdom.” “He looks good for his age.” People talk a lot about age. They speak of golden years, midlife crises, middle-age spread, callow youth, being… Read more »

Written By

D.C. Culbertson

D.C. Culbertson
D.C. Culbertson over the years
Final photo by Mark Longaker, others unknown

By D.C. Culbertson
© 2001 NewMusicBox

“Act your age!”
“Age is nothing but a number.”
“With age comes wisdom.”
“He looks good for his age.”

People talk a lot about age. They speak of golden years, midlife crises, middle-age spread, callow youth, being young at heart, and nurturing the inner child. They debate the issue of physical vs. emotional vs. psychological age, speaking of “youthful” people in their 70s and “old” people in their 20s. A doctor writes a book on how to determine one’s “Real Age” based on one’s physical condition and lifestyle. And on and on… But is the issue of chronological age important when speaking about composers? Does a composer’s age influence the type of music he/she writes? At what point is one no longer considered a “young” composer, and can a composer who is chronologically “old” write in a young way?

For example, some believe that 40 is a pivotal age when a composer comes into his/her own stylistically, pointing out that Philip Glass and Steve Reich wrote their most significant works (Glass’ Einstein on the Beach and Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians) shortly before their 40th birthdays. But others are quick to point out that fellow minimalist Terry Riley wrote his most significant work, In C, before he even turned 30. Others point out composers like Pauline Oliveros, who is nearly 70 but still exploring new musical avenues, and 92-year-old Elliott Carter, who recently completed his first opera and is believed to be composing some of his best work at present.

Going further with this idea, can any generalization be made about composers from the same age group? If there is, how does their music compare or contrast with composers of another generation? Or is every composer so different that no real generalization of any kind can be made, regardless of age?

When exploring such a concept, there are a lot of different elements that need to be considered. Take musical form, for instance. Is opera popular among one age group and virtually ignored in another? Does one age group favor traditional forms like sonata-allegro or theme and variations, while another almost entirely disregards them? We hear from time to time about the impending demise of the traditional orchestra or the difficulty in getting new works for orchestra performed. Does this correspond with an increasing drop in the number of orchestral works composers have been producing over the past 50 years or is there no apparent basis in fact for it?

Is there a predominant musical style among any particular age group? For instance, is serialism more common among composers who were active during the height of the Darmstadt school–or later, or earlier? During minimalism’s heyday, the names of Philip Glass, John Adams and Steve Reich were tossed around a lot, but were most of their contemporaries also using it? And what about aleatoric music or neo-romanticism?

What kind of musical influence is evident? While one generation draws heavily on European classical traditions exemplified by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, does another prefer to look back to an earlier time and draw on medieval and Renaissance traditions? What about music from non-Western cultures, particularly if it reflects the composer’s ethnic heritage? Or American folk music? Or jazz, or rock?

Do current events, cultural or social issues show up in any particular generation’s music? Can one see the effects of events such as the Korean War, the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic or the civil rights movements mostly in the age group who lived through them, or in later generations? What about influences from the composer’s own world–poetry they’ve read, movies or paintings they’ve seen, or even dreams they’ve had?

And what is the music scored for? Does one generation favor traditional ensembles such as the string quartet and piano trio? If they do use traditional instruments, are they used in non-traditional ways, whether it be bowing the interior strings of a piano, extended vocal technique, or playing only the head joint of a clarinet? Do others concentrate on electronic and computer music? Who primarily uses instruments not normally associated with “serious” or “classical” music, such as the banjo or toy piano? What about the use of ethnic instruments or ensembles such as the gamelan? How many composers choose to disregard any tradition and use instruments of their own invention, either exclusively or in combination with traditional instruments? And which go even further and make extensive use of things not normally considered instruments at all, such as plants, turntables and auto parts?

Armed with a copious list of American composers, I explored these factors and more among the age groups under under 40, 40-60, 60-80 and over 80, to see if any generalizations could be made along these lines. (Just for the record, I decided to limit my research to living American composers who write music that can be labeled “serious” or “contemporary.”) I read books, checked numerous websites, watched videos, combed through LP and CD liner notes, and sent numerous e-mails. What follows are a series of purely unscientific–but, hopefully, well researched–findings.

 

It can be a tricky matter to track down young composers, because most are not widely recorded or performed. But if the recent spate of awards given out by ASCAP and BMI are any indication, there are an enormous amount of composers under 30 writing an equally enormous amount of music. In addition to the 19 main winners of ASCAP’s Morton Gould Young Composer Awards this year, four others received honorable mentions, and seven special ASCAP Foundation Awards intended for composers under 18 where given, as well as five Honorable Mentions. Nine others were honored at the 48th BMI Student Composer Awards last June. Take into consideration all the schools and conservatories in the U.S. that offer degrees or private study in composition, not to mention young composers who are writing on their own, and the logical conclusion is that these winners must represent only the tip of the iceberg, numerically.

Despite their youth, some of these composers already appear to be well on their way to having distinguished careers. For example, 15-year-old Julia Scott Carey, who has been composing since age 5, received her first commission (from the Wellesley Symphony Orchestra) at 11, and over a dozen orchestras have performed her works to date, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

However, although it may be fairly easy to get an idea about how many young composers are out there, it’s anything but easy to make generalizations about the forms they prefer or the styles they write in. There are exceptions, such as Carey, who speaking by phone from her home in Massachusetts, describes her style as “lyrical” and “tonal–with a lower-case T.”

Some composers who are getting closer to 40 have established a trademark sound such as neo-romantics Lowell Liebermann and Daron Hagen, both of whom turn 40 later this year, neo-modernists Augusta Read Thomas (b. 1964) and Anthony Cornicello (b. 1964), or post-minimalist Michael Torke (b. 1961), whose distinct style involves frenetic rhythmic patterns, and whose pieces are often based on his musical interpretation of colors. But far more often the writing of composers under 40 shows a wide mix of styles and influences, sometimes from piece to piece and sometimes even within the piece. For example, the three movements of Voices, a clarinet concerto by Derek Bermel (b. 1967), are based, successively, on speech sounds, an Irish folk song, and Jamaican rap.

The instrumentation of these young composers’ pieces is often as eclectic and varied as their musical style. For example, the compositions of Annie Gosfield (b. 1960) include works for detuned piano, the ensemble Newband (which is primarily made up of instruments built by Harry Partch), and a work for solo piano and baseballs created for the 100th anniversary of the unification of New York’s boroughs called “Brooklyn, October 5, 1941,” after game 4 of the 1941 World Series between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Yankees.

It seemed, in this regard, that it might be a good idea to ask one of these composers, particularly a well-connected one, why they think so much variance among this generation. One likely candidate was Adam Silverman, 27, a Yale graduate and co-founder of the New York-based Minimum Security Composers Collective, which has presented works by over 20 composers in three years and who says, when asked how many composers he knows personally, “I can’t even imagine…I could rattle off 50 names easily.”

Silverman believes that one reason composers of his generation lack any kind of common language is because they’ve grown up with easy access to many different types of music through media like recordings, radio and Internet sources like Napster and mp3.com. (His influences, for example, include Ligeti, Stravinsky, Schubert, the Beatles and Torke.) They’re also the first generation to have grown up with easy access to computers, which they can use as a tool for composing, either through software manuscript programs like Finale or through music editors and sequencers. Another reason may be “possibly a negative reaction to the example set for us by the oldest living generation, who harshly divided modern classical music into uptown and downtown camps, West Coast, and East Coast, American and European… In the last 35 years, however, there has been a slow rebuilding of musical openness, starting with that of the minimalists. Today, with no chips on our shoulders, young composers stand on their legacy; not having strongly experienced this musical chauvinism from our musical peers, we are free to concentrate on the important task of developing our own styles and personal modes of expression form whatever sources we see fit.”

Many of these young composers also differ from their older colleagues in a way that reflects a pre-20th century tradition: actively pursuing careers in performing as well as composing. Bermel, for example, was the soloist when the American Composers Orchestra premiered Voices. Gosfield, in addition to frequently collaborating with artists such as John Zorn, also directs her own ensemble. And New York-based Dave Douglas plays trumpet in no less than six ensembles, from a jazz quartet to Sanctuary, which he describes as an “electric octet.”

However, most of the music of the under 40 crowd does not seem to draw on political or social issues. Two exceptions to this are jazz composer Don Byron (b. 1962), whose outspoken political views inform virtually every composition he writes, and Robert Maggio (b. 1964), who said in his notes to the CRI disc Gay American Composers, “I write music that matters to me–music that explores my internal emotional life and the relationships between individuals. As with all important facets of my identity, my homosexuality has an influence on my music, at times directly affecting the pieces I write.”

 

Composers born during the 1940s and ’50s came of age in an era where the barriers between “serious” and “popular” music, as well as jazz and avant-garde music, started to break down drastically and there was a noticeable increase in the use of experimental techniques. Not every composer born during this period chose to follow these trends, naturally. Some even reverted to more conservative idioms. For instance, while the early works of John Adams (b. 1947) like Shaker Loops (1978) are minimalist, his more recent ones, like the 1991 opera The Death of Klinghoffer, are more through-composed and in a more conservative, post-modernist style.

But many composers in this age group have found a signature sound world and have pretty much remained identified with it. Glenn Branca (b. 1949) writes for “orchestras” of up to 100 guitars, many of them altered or specially built in different keys. Stephen Scott (b. 1944) started composing for “bowed” piano, where a group of pe
rformers use fishing line or horsehair to bow the piano’s inner strings, in 1976. Ellen Fullman (b. 1957) has been primarily associated with The Long String Instrument, a wooden box with 85-feet wires that creates tones with deep frequencies. Stuart Saunders Smith (b. 1948) frequently incorporates non-traditional percussion instruments into his music, from kitchen utensils to pieces of scrap metal to tree branches hung with glass wind chimes. Since 1990 much of Phil Kline‘s music has been composed largely for “boom box orchestra,” a group of portable tape players. Meredith Monk (b. 1943), who has been associated with extended vocal techniques since the 1960s and has created a significant body of works exploring this terrain for her own ensemble, has only recently explored the possibility of writing works for other ensembles including the orchestra.

Electro-acoustic, electronic or computer music are the preferred mediums for many of composers in this age group such as Daria Semegen (b. 1946) and Pril Smiley (b. 1943), both of whom were associated with the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Although composer and electric guitarist Paul Dresher (b. 1951) has created works for conventional instruments, some of his most important scores, which he performs with his own ensemble, combine electric and acoustic instruments to create a new type of chamber music. Another electric guitar playing composer Steve Mackey has also developed a unique style through combining the electric guitar’s sonorities with those of acoustic instruments. Scott Johnson (b. 1952), since his John Somebody (1980-82) in which an electric guitar imitates repeated fragments of voice recordings, has continued to explore and refine the technique of turning pre-recorded conversation into recognizable melodies through repetition and imitation for the past two decades. Charles Dodge (b. 1942), since his landmark Earth’s Magnetic Field (1970) in which the musical material from computations involving changes in the earth’s magnetic field, has been creating provocative music with computers incorporating such diverse ideas as synthetic speech-song to altering historic recordings of Enrico Caruso. Another computer composer who has been obsessed with the fine line between verbal communication and music-making for many years is Princeton-based Paul Lansky (b. 1944). Laurie Spiegel (b. 1945), who began her career performing folk and bluegrass music on the banjo, and began exploring the possibilities of computers in works such as Appalachian Grove (1974), has rarely gone back to acoustic instruments since then.

Other composers who initially concentrated on electronic and electro-acoustic music have modified or grown away from their original approach. For instance, Ingram Marshall (b. 1942), whose earliest compositions involved tape experiments, now frequently mixes live acoustic instruments with electronic processing. And Elodie Lauten (b. 1950), who originally worked exclusively with the Fairlight Computer Music Instrument (CMI), now composes for a lot of music for solo acoustic piano and has even created a work for Baroque period instruments.

Rock and popular music is also a strong influence in much of the music written by this age group. Glenn Branca (b. 1949) and Rhys Chatham (b. 1942), who were both originally performers in rock bands, have been created large-scale compositions using rock aesthetics and rock instrumentation for decades. Bonham for eight percussionists, by Christopher Rouse (b. 1949), was inspired by the late Led Zeppelin drummer. Julia Wolfe (b. 1958) described her Lick as being directly inspired by the Motown and funk music she grew up with. (Wolfe, along with fellow Druckman students Michael Gordon and David Lang, also founded the Bang On A Can Festival, with the aim of trying to break down the Uptown-Downtown polarity, in 1987.) Laurie Anderson (b. 1947), who like Philip Glass has enjoyed great commercial success, frequently works with rock musicians such as Peter Gabriel, Lou Reed and Adrian Belew. However, as she said in John Schaefer‘s book New Sounds, “I don’t think of [my music] as rock in any way, but it’s sitting in the rock bins in record stores, and there are people on it who do rock.”

It’s also not uncommon to see works inspired by current events and popular culture, both serious and frivolous, among composers of this age group. Michael Daugherty (b. 1954) is a particularly good example of the latter, with extroverted works like Desi (inspired by Desi Arnaz) (1990) or Elvis Everywhere, whose scoring includes four Elvis impersonators. Many of Laurie Anderson’s pieces include satiric or humorous social commentary, often with a feminist slant, such as Beautiful Red Dress. A number of African-American composers have written pieces inspired by important figures in black history; including Adolphus Hailstork (b. 1941) and Anthony Davis (b. 1951), whose opera X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, was composed in 1985. And it was primarily composers of this age group who contributed to The AIDS Quilt Songbook, a cycle of 15 songs commissioned by the late baritone William Parker in 1992.

 

Many of the prominent American composers between the ages of 60 and 80 continue to pursue the trademark styles and techniques for which they initially became known. These styles and techniques, however, are as varied as the entire field of American music.

For a significant number of composers in this age group, serialism remains a vital compositional frame of reference. Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt were extremely influential teachers for a whole generation of composers and their compositional legacy continues in the music of Charles Wuorinen (b. 1938), whose music is as structurally complex and demanding as that of his teacher Babbitt while as classically balanced as that of Sessions. Donald Martino (b. 1931), Benjamin Boretz (b. 1934), Henry Weinberg (b. 1931) and Peter Westergaard (b. 1931), all also former Babbitt students, have each remained strict serialists throughout their careers. Although in recent years, even composers as uncompromising as Mario Davidovsky (b. 1934) seem to have softened a bit. Curiously, Babbitt’s most famous pupil Stephen Sondheim (b. 1930) never composed serial music but has continued to cultivate a unique personal language for the Broadway musical for over 40 years.

During the formative years of the composers born in this generation, the most viable avant-garde compositional alternative to serialism was the music and philosophy of the late John Cage whose advocacy of indeterminate musical processes still informs the works of his disciples Christian Wolff (b. 1936) and Earle Brown (b. 1924). The Fluxus movement of the early 1960s, which took Cage’s compositional methods to an even more extreme realization, led to confrontational works by Yoko Ono (b. 1933) and George Brecht (b. 1925), but nowadays there are few strict adherents of the Fluxus aesthetic these days, although the singular career path followed to this day by La Monte Young (b. 1935), often cited as the founder of minimalism, can be traced to his earliest conceptual pieces during his involvement with Fluxus. Cage’s experimentation and the Fluxus movement both played key roles in the development of the so-called “Downtown” music scene in New York during this time as opposed to the more established, academically-oriented “uptown” one. And while the uptown-downtown divide is no longer a geographical reality, the aesthetic divide still informs a great deal of the music of composers of this generation.

Arguably the most important new style that emerged and has continued to flourish from composers of this generation is minimalism. La Monte Young and the three other composers primarily associated with the minimalist movement in music–Terry Riley (b. 1935) a classmate of Young’s at UC Berkeley, and two Juilliard trained composers: Steve Reich (b. 1936) and Philip Glass (b. 1937)–were all born within a couple of years of one another. All four were strongly influenced by non-western music: Young, Riley and Glass by the music of India and Reich by African drumming and Hebrew chant. And while the austerity of each of their early styles has blossomed into musical languages that are far more malleable, each composer retains an instantly identifiable signature sound.

Of course, a great many composers of this generation neither adopted minimalism nor followed the avant-garde paths of serialism and indeterminacy, but either remained adherents of or defiantly returned to the American tonal tradition of composers like Samuel Barber and Howard Hanson. Dominick Argento (b. 1927), Ned Rorem (b. 1923) and Lee Hoiby (b. 1926), all of whom are primarily known for their operas and songs, have consistently created music throughout long careers in a neo-romantic, conservative style. Although David Del Tredici (b. 1937) began his career writing atonal music, his style also switched to neo-romanticism after he began an 18-year series of pieces based on Lewis Carroll‘s Alice books, beginning with Pop-pourri (1968).

Others, whose style has been labeled “post-modernist,” including six prominent composers born within a year of each other–William Bolcom (b. 1938), Barbara Kolb (b. 1939), John Harbison (b. 1938), John Corigliano (b. 1938), Joan Tower (b. 1938) and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (b. 1939)–write music which reference a wide variety of style
s incorporating such diverse idioms as romantic orchestral music, dissonant modernism and jazz, into an predominantly tonal idiom. One of the most difficult to categorize composers, George Crumb (b. 1929), whose music is equally related to neo-romanticism and post-modernism as well as to the legacy of John Cage and experimental music, has throughout his career pursued a unique musical vocabulary with incorporates unconventional musical notation, unusual instrumentation–for classical music, at least–such as the banjo or the toy piano, or unorthodox methods of playing.

Finally, many of these composers, have pursued lifetime careers in electronic music, a field of music that was essentially born as many composers of this generation reached adulthood. Morton Subotnick (b. 1933), who in 1967 created the first piece of electronic music commissioned for commercial recording, Silver Apples of the Moon, on the Buchla synthesizer, has built his entire compositional career on exploring the possibilities of electronically-generated sounds. Experimentation with electronically generated or manipulated sound has also been the major lifetime focus of Gordon Mumma (b. 1935) and Alvin Lucier (b. 1931). Most compositions by Jean Eichelberger Ivey (b. 1923), founder of Peabody Conservatory‘s Electronic Music Studio and one of the first women active in this field, are scored for one or more instruments with tape. The works of several other women who use tape as a primary medium reflect an interest in the concept of music as a meditative or healing medium, such as New Zealand-born Annea Lockwood (b. 1939), whose sound sources are often drawn from nature, her life partner, Ruth Anderson (b. 1928), and Pauline Oliveros (b. 1932). Robert Ashley (b. 1930), who has been at the forefront of electronic music for the past half century, has over the past two decades, refined his electronic sonic vocabulary to create a unique new form of opera in which he performs with a regular ensemble.

Social awareness has played a key role in the works of a great many of these composers, stretching across all of their stylistic differences. Ashley’s recent opera Dust takes on the issue of homelessness in America, while Joan Tower’s series of Fanfares for the Common Woman celebrates womanhood. African-American Valerie Capers (b. 1935) based her dramatic work Sojourner (1981), which she described as an “operatorio,” on the life of ex-slave and abolitionist Sojourner Truth. Reich drew on both his childhood memories of bicoastal train trips between his divorced parents’ homes during World War II and the trains that transported Jews to death camps for his Different Trains (1986). And gay composer Corigliano was one of the first composers in this age group to write a work dealing with the AIDS epidemic, his Symphony No.1 (1990).

 

Perhaps the real secret to a long life is not vitamins or exercise, but composing. After all, there are at least a dozen composers over 80 in the U.S. at present who continue to be active while many of their contemporaries in other fields have long since retired. (Leo Ornstein [b. 1892], the eldest of these “elder statesmen,” stopped composing in his 80s, but continues to thrive in other ways at the ripe old age of 108.)

All these composers except Ornstein came of age during the late 1920s and early 1930s, when a number of significant groups and publications devoted to new music, such as the International League of Composers and Henry Cowell‘s journal New Music, were appearing. Radio and recordings were making all types of music more accessible to the public for the first time. And during the 1930s a number of significant European composers including Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Krenek and Bartók settled in the U.S.

One thing all these men have in common is that each has mapped out an individual path and established a distinct style of his own. (Sadly, Vivian Fine, the only composer qualified to be an elder stateswoman, died in a car accident last March at the age of 86.) Sometimes these paths have resulted in a respected career in academia, and sometimes a style that adheres strictly to an established tradition. Other times it’s resulted in a maverick.

Leon Kirchner (b. 1919) is one composer that fits the first category. Although his style has never adhered to one particular musical fashion, he has always placed great importance on basing a piece on a sound musical idea and adhering to equally sound principles of structural development. David Diamond (b. 1915), who taught at Juilliard for over 25 years, also stressed the importance of a solid theoretical background, both in his and his students’ music. Ironically, although Elliott Carter (b. 1908) also enjoyed a long career at Juilliard and has won two Pulitzer Prizes to date, his teachers during his undergraduate years at Harvard were less than enthusiastic about his radical, uncompromising music–possibly influenced by his friendship with Charles Ives, who he met at age 16–eventually sending him to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger. The trip resulted in a brief fling with neoclassicism, but soon Carter returned to his old style, characterized by metric modulation, pitch organization, partitioning of various musical aspects and the concept of mathematical vs. psychological time, feeling that it provided a more appropriate way to depict the atmosphere of post-World War II America.

A number of these elder statesmen are primarily associated with the use and development of serialism. The 3 Compositions for Piano (1947) of Milton Babbitt (b. 1916) was one of the earliest examples of total serialism with regard to pitches, durations and dynamics, and the work which immediately followed it, Composition for 12 Instruments, serialized timbre as well. Despite the fact that he has also written electronic music and influences from other music, such as jazz, are evident in pieces like All Set, Babbitt continues to espouse the importance of serialism. George Perle (b. 1915) also continues to write in the 12-tone style, although he describes his music as “twelve-tone tonality” rather than serialism per se.

George Rochberg (b. 1918), on the other hand, switched from strict serialism to a neo-romantic style after his son’s death in the 1960s, a move which generated a great deal of hostility from some of his colleagues and was welcomed by others. In fact, although Rochberg himself discounts it, he is often considered the founder of the post-modernist movement. However, although he may be modest about his influence on younger composers, he is far from hesitant about criticizing them. For instance, in his 1972 essay “Reflections on the Renewal of Music,” he put down what he described as “the gross, generalized, nonspecific principles of today’s avant-gardists,” adding “There can be no justification for music, ultimately, if it does not convey eloquently and elegantly the passions of the human heart.”

In contrast to these, Henry Brant (b. 1913), while he did teach briefly at such August institutions as Columbia and Juilliard, has been a radical since he began writing music for pots and pans as a child. Most of his music is scored for huge, unusual ensembles–one example is Orbits, for 80 trombones and organ–in equally huge and unusual spatial arrangements. At age 80, he went even further afield and invented a Tenor Cello and Mezzo-Violin, for which he has written several ensemble pieces. The highly eclectic style of Portland-born Lou Harrison (b. 1917), who early on abandoned the New York scene for California and was especially influenced by a 1962 trip to the Far East on a Rockefeller grant, has included everything from music for gamelan to a symphony featuring vocals by pop singer Al Jarreau and texts in the universal language Esperanto. Harrison is also highly unusual for this generation regarding his personal life; not only did he come out openly as a gay man but, starting in the 1970s, began to publicly support the gay rights movement.

Even more interesting is the case of Gian-Carlo Menotti (b. 1911), who has been criticized in some circles for music that is too accessible and tonal. His output, which consists almost entirely of operas–for which he writes the librettos, another factor that has earned him criticism–was disparaged in conservatory circles for years. Recently, however, although his production of new works has slowed down considerably, a number of his earlier operas have been revived successfully and have been taken more seriously. The Consul, for example, in which a woman in a nameless Communist-like country repeatedly tries and fails to get her husband released from prison, seems far more relevant to recent political events than it may have been when it premiered in 1950. And it’s a rare city where at least one performance of his 1951 Christmas opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors, isn’t held every year.