Without having read the whole article, it's tricky to make detailed comment, but my immediate thought on reading


Was that perhaps Kramer is looking for the avant garde in the wrong place? That the true avant garde isn't the one that calls itself such (and appear to be the object of Kramer's article) but is elsewhere, somewhere in those stylistic and technological phenomena that have overtaken it.

A flimsy thought, perhaps...

I think the third point (re Benjamin) is well-made, even if not especially profound. If (as it possibly isn't) current praxis in postgraduate studies is any indication, there is certainly this tendency for theoretical support to come in waves. It seems to be Benjamin's time now just as a few years ago it was Foucault's. This tendency doesn't devalue the work of either theorist of course, but it does risk devaluing a lot of the work that invokes their names. (It often makes tiresome reading, too.)

Indeed, not an easy article to get hold of at present. I'll try and put a few other quotes - obviously for copyright reasons I have to limit the amount I post from it.


Agreed to all of that. In many cases, when composers or writers make particular claims for their works, it's only natural that some critics will judge how well such claims are borne out by the works themselves. Shadowtime is not a radical work in a political sense (in the way that Benjamin's work most certainly was) nor particularly deals with what I see as the central materialist and dialectical aspects of Benjamin's work (turning him more into a type of esoteric quasi-Kabbalistic mystic), but still contains some fascinating music. 'Avant-garde' or 'cutting edge' have become little more than marketing tools, though; to be meaningful they need to be reassessed in contemporary terms, not least to do with the relationship between new work and the whole institutionalised, economic and aesthetic superstructure it inhabits.

Here is one more quote from Kramer:

'The idea that this work would upset its audience seemed to please both the composer and librettist, who also seemed to take it for granted. Good avant-gardists both, they cast themselves as the enemies of a complacency based on a thoughtless clinging to those demolished Enlightenment values. "Listeners," Ferneyhough informs them in a program note, "must let go of a fixed notion of what constitutes musical form" if they are to grasp Shadowtime. "Many," says Bernstein, "will no doubt be befuddled," but although "there have been a lot of very clear books written on the subject of this catastrophe ['the black space of what happened to Europe between 1940 and 1945'] ... can anyone say that they truly understand what happened?"
      Maybe not. But the befuddlement never materialized. Neither did the antagonism. Judging from the reviews, those who didn't like Shadowtime - apparently the majority - were respectful but lukewarm [Kramer seems to be basing his opinion mostly on the US press here; the French, German, and to some extent British reviews were much more positive - IP]. Boring the opera may have been; shocking it was not. It would have been far more shocking as a number opera. As an avant-garde production, it was merely predictable. Ferneyhough and Bernstein seemed to harbor nostalgic hopes of re-enacting the 1913 premiere of Le Sacre du printemps [On what basis can Kramer make this leap of reasoning? - IP]; what they got was the equivalent of a dud at the movie box office.' (p. 44)


I'm no big fan of Kramer's writings, especially in his book Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, finding them overwritten and grounded upon a range of unquestioned and rather dubious assumptions, whilst the level of actual musical analysis is rarely that high. However, I'm interested in the fact that New Musicologists have rarely attempted to look at very recent works in what might loosely be called a 'modernist' tradition (perhaps because most of them declare that such music is thoroughly irrelevant, preferring the 'hellzapoppin' nihilism' (McClary) of John Zorn instead?). When this does (inevitably) start to happen (and maybe Kramer here represents the beginning of such a tendency - he has also written in some detail on Carter), I think the results will be quite cataclysmic and cause a lot of ill-feeling.

As far as Bernstein's implications in terms of understanding what happened in Europe between 1940 and 1945, it is probably the most written and thought about subject in the whole of human history. Certainly few nowadays would be so presumptuous as to claim their interpretation to be definitive, but I cannot see how Bernstein's work can be seen to constitute an advance of the vast range of penetrating scholarship on the part of historians, philosophers, political thinkers, and so on. Let alone how it might present some type of perspective as might help understand how to prevent such a thing happening again. In terms of the mystification of the Holocaust (the subject of Norman Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry and to a lesser extent Peter Novick's The Holocaust and Collective Memory, also touched upon in Richard J. Evans's Telling Lies about Hitler), I could see how Bernstein's mystification could indeed be seen as part of this trend.

I find the later Kramer quote the most objectionable: his remarks on Shadowtime's intentions are just supposition, and on its reception unrepresentative.

I'm still left with the feeling that Kramer is just setting Shadowtime up as an avant garde strawman.

Thanks for posting more of the article Ian.

And related to TimR-J's point:
What I find interesting, and puzzling, is that when Kramer says that “The avant-garde has become as stylized as classical ballet”, I think he is referring specially to the Second Viennese tradition, which Ferneyhough can understandably be situated. I have a lot of time for that particular tradition, but does it have exclusive rights to the avant-garde term? Aren’t there more abstract and timeless notions one might infer– first wave of experimentation, resistance to commercial pressures etc.

This is a common New Musicological strategy, a wilful misuse of synecdoche, in which they take a few select examples from something they very loosely call 'modernist' or 'avant-garde' (often not even from music but from a few comments by the composers in question, frequently taken out of context) and use those as the basis for totalising comments about this supposed phenomenon.

For those of you with an academic server (so with access to articles in periodicals), you might like to look at the following, one of the most blatant examples of this (Susan McClary's article 'Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Musical Composition'):

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0882-4371(198921)12%3C57%3ATPTCOA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z

For a reasonable response to this, though which I think rather skirts around the real issues concerned, see:

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract;jsessionid=F8876981718932B1AF281D5CDDC58B54.tomcat1?fromPage=online&aid=298894

(and if you want a sentence-by-sentence critique of that article of McClary, e-mail me!)

By the way, I should point out that Kramer's article isn't solely, or even mostly, about Shadowtime. That only appears in the opening section, the rest is about Ives's Orchestral Set No. 2 and Cage's Imaginary Landscape No. 4.

But, do we think Kramer might be onto something when he says that the Second Viennese tradition, in which he is situating Ferneyhough, "is not infinitely extendible"?
I don't know the answer, but I can understand to some extent where Kramer is coming from; although I love Ferneyhough's music, I do find its concerns old fashioned.

So, now I wonder what work today (and from what you say about the older composer Ian, perhaps we should be looking towards younger generations here) might, as Kramer characterises the avant-garde, "break through the traditional norms of artistic, rational, and social order" ?

I'm not looking for a list of composers.
Rather, I wonder whether this notion is still relevant/important today?
(as it was when the term came about)