Page Four SCARLET AND BLACK Friday. ’Aer B. I!“ S& B Interviews lecturer leonard Meyer ED. NOTE: The following is a transcription of an interview be. tween S d: B staff writer linda Seckelson and Dr. Lennard Mey- “ or who visited and lectured on campus this week. s it oi What is your feeling as to the legitimacy of serial and randomly or arbitrarily composed music, and what kind of audience is going to respond to these new ' avant-garde art forms? 7 Meyer: First. of all, there’s a big difference between serial mile sic and random music. I don't quite know what legitimate means. I think that complex music is very difficult for most audiences to perceive and I would be inclined to feel that there aie two mitigat- ing circumstances. First, we must give up our past expectations that we have on past art, . that everybody is going to like the some art. 1 think that one must no longer bemoan the fact that the Washerwomen does not ride the State Street car reading James anything yotl wanted, in a sense you couldnt compose because you can't compose when you have complete freedom; you must have some kind of limitation. And the second problem is that if yoii are going to write a non-tonal music, you have to be consistent and it would be unfair 'writing a non» tonal music to hit upon, as it were. by chance, combinations which be- long to the system of tonality but which you have no intentions of re- solving in your system. So the rules of serial music were devised essentially to do two things: to limit the composer's choices so that he is able to choose and to try insofar as is possible to insure that the kind of syntatical sounds which arise in tonal music do not arise in this music, so that you will not arouse false expectations of certain kinds of resolutions. More. extreme forms of serialism create real problems for the au ‘ ence. I don't think that it’s illig timate. but I think it has Certain inherent limitations dut‘.I to the li- mitations of the human mind and Joyce, I don’t think she ever will i memory. The music is very lion- . ride the State Street car reading James Joyce. Therefore, it you speak about serial music, I don’t think that serial music is going to in the forseeable future have a very large audience. llIIillllIIIillllIIillllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllIIllllllillllllIIllllllllllllllllllllll Serial Music Is Legitimale llllllllllllllllllllIIlllllIIlllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllilllllllIIlllllIlllllllllllll To answer your question directr )y, I’m saying that surely serial music is legitimate. Serial music is music which is carefully organ- Izetl, and I think that serial music has aesthetic problems, but in qua-serial music, all that the ser- Ial composer is doing is establish- lrlg certain kinds of limitations for the choices he makes. There are two problems with writing otonal music. The first problem is t'nt itivou could write redundant, it has voly lltile obvi- ous patient. But this IS in a sense compensated for by the existence of technological redundancy, in the form of tape recorders, recordings, and so on. That is, it would be impossible to learn the music oi Boulez if you Could lislen to the piece only occasionally as was the Case in the eighteenth century. But given the fact that you have recordings, it is possible to learn this music. I think that non-predictability. total non . predictability “syni- gates" the spirit of man. 0n the other hand, I think their view is defensible, namely, that its pur- poses, predictions, goals, striv- ings, which, from their point oi View, have gotten us into the mess we’re in, that the anguish that men feel is the result of the kinds of expectations they have about the world, and If you give up all these things, as you must if you’re. going to listen to , historians dom music, then you can live in ‘a kind of contemplative bliss. As tar as the legitimacy - illegitimacy question goes, i don’t know why it should be illegitimate, or on what grounds one would say it was illegitimate. , S 8; B: Traditionally, there have been two aspects in musical cre- ation. The one is composition and the other is performance. In elec tronic music, at least. in taped music, this second element is elim» inated. in your opinion how does this affect the quality of the achievement. it at all, and how does it affect the musical exper- ience of the listener? MEYER: My own feeling is that performance is very important. There are at least two serious li- mitations to taped music. One is the fact that for most listeners, the visual experience of the motor action of people in performing music is an important part of their musical experience, and this is eliminated in taped music. lllIIillllIIIlllllllilllllllllllllllllllllllllllllillillllliilllllllIIlllliiiiillllliliillllllit Canned Music— , No Uncertainty IlllllllliilllllllllllllIIIlllllllllllllllilllliliillllliittlllllilillllllllllllllIIilllllIIllli The second thing is that the ele ment or uncertainty, which is a de— iighiiul and important element in in listening to music is also miss- ing in any canned performance, whether tape or record. And the third thing which I teel is missing on a record or a tape is the possi bility of certain kinds of subtle niir ances in performance which in one sense change tlle work. it you had a canned piece and you lis- tened to it over and over again, it wears itself out- and you get tired of “X's” performance, \vhe< that it's of a Beethoven symphony oi- anytiiing else. Again, my whole thesis is lliat we face a period or pluralism oi all these tradiiicnsinot just the tradilions pt elite music, but those of folk music and popular music will exist Side by side and cone timie indelinitcly. 5 & B: The anthropologist A. L. Kroeber reels that style change in ciVlllZzilion takes place when the eXlsling style has been fully ex- ploited, has reached a point of ex- haustion. Do you agree with this theory? MEYER: Yes, Ki‘oeber feels also that a style must constantly grow and develop or it will grow decadent and die. lt scents to me that this is not the Case. The the- ory is a very douhlhil thing, part- ly because the exhaustion theory involves a kind or value judg- merit about style. What would con— stitute the exhaustion or a style? One could sayrthat it nobody wrote in the sryle it would be considered to be exhausted. It’s true that soon- er or later styles change, but I don’t think that this inevitably happens. If you look at other cul< tures, it becomes. clear thay they have been much more stable Styl- istically than Western culture for the last 500 years. "that doesn't mean that other cultures haven’t changed at times but there have been long periods of stability. The other thing that happens is that and anthropologists looking at other cultures tend to discover in them the kinds of de- vclopments seen in Western cul- ture and than analyze them in those terms and create parallels. Tlle thesis that an art form must develop or it dies or decays is an extrapolation from recent \Vesterii history. Mr, Foster Monday at the coffee hour sug- gested the possibility that things will converge. Certainly is is pos sible that things today will con- verge. The thing that I’m consid- ering that nobody else wants to consider is that maybe it won't con- verge, and I think that there are all kinds oi signs that things won’t converge in the near future. ‘Convergence.’ Nol Expected lllllllllllllillllIIIlllllllIIllllllIIilllllliilillllliiilllllililllllllilllliiiillllllllllllll s 8: B: What are they? MEYER: First Of all, the; demise of the idea of progress which has been a force for con- vergence and change in this sense. The decline, and the emphasis on individualism, which has also been something which made for con-. vergence and for dependence on earlier styles. AlSo, in some sense the paths toward some sort of convergence seem to me have been exhausted. It’s agiless. Btu, the important thing about the guess is that it changes one’s whole view of what the present is like it you make that guess. That is, it you keep looking at the present as though you expected convergence, then you look at Stockhausen on the one hand and Samual Barber on the other aild say "which is going to Win?" Pluralism creates anxi- ety only when you expect it to be monistic. But once you say you're going to have a “pluralis tic status," then your whole atti» tude toward what’s going on in the world becomes less anxious. S 8: Now that we’ve “done Kroeber i " do you have an alter- native hypothesis tor the catise of style change? tlllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllltlllllllllllllllltlll ‘Gh Gawdl' Wild Question IlllllllllllllllllillllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllIIIlllllllllilllllllllllllllillllllllllillll MEYER: 0h Gawd, that’s R wild question! First of all, I think that there are differences, and he would make tyhese distinC< thins, too, between changes which take place within a style, which he calls kinetic changes, and changes which take place among various styles . . t In music, tor instance, what happens in a Style is that you start off with a style which has, for the sake of learn- ing, a very high degree of redund. ancy. As the listeners in that cul- ture leam that style, it becomes less redundant, and you reach a kind of stable period in the style, and then at some point, the ire formation rate increases again and you have a very low redund~ ancyt What culture changes is the rate of change, not primarily the direction. After all, the Classical style runs through the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution but the style does not undergo ally basic change. Now what happens between styles is another question, and I’m not at all sure what Causes those changes. It doesn’t necessar- ily follow that there is a one to one correlation between culiule and style. llllllllllllllIIllllllllnlllltIIIlllllllllillllllltllllliliillllliiillllllliilllllliilllllltn Style Evolution Big Question .llliiillllllilllllllIIllllllillllllltlllillllllllllllllilillllliiilllllliiillllllilllllliiillll Those who say that there is such a Correlation have done so because they equate representa< tional Content with style. It’s quite clear that David, for instance, was in a veiy simple-minded sense in< . fluenced by the French Revolution or by the Napoleonic Era because he paints Napoleon and he paints the Death of Marat. What one is interested in in Beethoven is not whether he had half-baked notions about freedom, which he lllCOinOi‘v ated into the Ninth Symphony, but how does the style evolve. Dickens was thematically coil- Cei‘neti with the events of his day, but the question you have to ask is why does he put words to- geiher the way he does. One oi the interesting evidences, at least in literaure, against the one lCl one correspondence theory is that if there were a one to one CDi'l'ES' pnndence between culture and lit- erature, then the vernacular lang- uage would be the same as the art language at all times. But in tact vemacular language deviaies ii-nm art language. They may con- verge at certain points, but then they separate. So I’m by no means certain as to how styles evolve, what starts them off , . . Once a style he gins it tends to have Its own way of moving. While it may he pos- sible to talk about exhausting a style, . . . ! dont think that it is necessarily the case that a style does become exhausted. It might become exhausted. While styles may change, it isn't a law of hi9 tory that they must change. PATRONIZE OUR ADVERTISERS.