RETURN OF THE COMET

fl (picc), cl (Eb, Bb, A, bs cl), 2 vln, vla, vcl, cb, kbd
Duration: 24:30
Date of Composition: 1986

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PROGRAM NOTES: Comment on the Comet

 A piece like Return of the Comet would have been unthinkable before the disruption of modernist styles that began during the 60s. Pop art, minimalism, the sensibility of camp, the influence of semiotics and deconstruction, all of which to some degree constitute what we now call postmodernism, brought about a challenge to the aesthetic positions that kept modernist music in a preeminent position since the l920s. Thinking modernism to have reached an impasse, I composed Return of the Comet in hope that it would add to this challenge. Thus, I consider, in some ways, my Comet a critical work (if not rebellious, as some would have it); critical, not of a political or social structure, but of a locked-in aesthetic position, which, by the mid-70s, brought newly composed music to the point of irrelevance.

This critical posture of the Comet was made possible in part by the way it came to be written in the first place. It was composed on commission from Spectrum, the London-based contemporary ensemble, renowned for its brilliant performances of high modernist 20th-century works that are as difficult for the players as for the average concert audience. My point of departure was to write a piece that would take advantage of Spectrum's spectacular facility with difficult scores, yet would be immediately likable by a non-specialist audience. The immediacy of Tchaikovsky' s music might subconsciously have been my model - or just as well that of Schumann, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Verdi, Puccini, Copland, Gershwin. Such immediacy, until recently critically suspect in serious art of the 20th century, is usually confined to the realm of entertainment or pop culture - movies, rock and television being the staples.

Thus, the problem, as I saw it, was how to avoid banality and schlock on one side and kitsch and commercialism on the other. Or, looked at from another perspective: how to achieve quality without treading the singular long line of tonal and rhythmic complexity that historians draw from Gregorian chant to polyphony, Haydn, Beethoven, Wagner, Schoenberg, Webern, and therewith plot the present and the future of musical necessity. Quality in music had so long been considered predominantly in terms of the newly invented, the adding on in a historicist sense, that any other element that might give a piece life had been lost in modernist discourse. Radical invention, it seems, insures only one quality in art - that the work will master (and cannibalize) the past, and perforce elude the trite and commonplace. The requirement was to find new axes along which to position alternative critical elements in order to make a new piece relevant to a larger (non-specialist) audience.

With technical innovation removed from a primary position, other properties had to be brought to the fore. One related problem that came into play was the relationship of mastery to the way modernist styles tend to subordinate traditional compositional techniques. The history of Western music composition is in one sense the story of mastery, power and subjugation, and ultimately one of gender and sexual identity. It is self-delusion to write music today without an acute awareness of feminist theory and its criticism of our "patriarchal" masterpieces, their closed form, and perfect authentic cadences. This raises the dilemma of employing mastery (technical competence) while calling mastery itself into question. One shudders at repeating the simplistic denial of mastery that the punk art movement has exploited in various media. Is it too much of a semantic stretch to posit that one might consider mastering the notion of mastering? But as Foucault pointed out, power (mastery) can be good, and necessary, if only to caution the use of power.

In more concrete terms, Return of the Comet addresses this problem by undermining at least a few of the signs of power found in the standard masterwork. An example might be the final section, in which a Bartokian build-up leads one to expect a resolution in line with "causal-chronological coherence," but instead leads to a repetitive frenzy followed by an extended finale that might well have come from a dowdy, mid-19th century English overture. The concluding cadence clearly alludes to the repeated dominant-tonic progression, characteristic of the grand concert style, but instead of the final 'masculine' cadence, the last chords are bumped over an eighth note to the 'feminine' position and outfitted with an accent. These are small details, perhaps, but I do think they constitute a deconstructive strategy.

Another critical strategy in Return of the Comet is one that works against the tension our culture has set up between "programmatic" and "absolute" music. Despite its programmatic title and its frequent use of narrative musical continuity, Return of the Comet tells no story. Titles are important in that they set up expectations and help define the music, but in the present case, most of the music was written before the title was thought up. As I worked on the piece, the return of Halley's Comet happened to be the news; thus the title was something of a coincidence. Later, however, when going through the completed score, I was able to conjure a series of pictures, depicting a celebrated return of some kind of cosmological event. The opening music brought to mind the enormity of the evening sky. In a subsequent passage, the stars are heard coming out, followed by discursive musings on the empyrean realm. After a few false alarms (it's perhaps an airplane), the comet finally appears, more melodramatically in musical terms than in nature. Perhaps the last half of the work is a general reflection and celebration of the event as a whole. In any case, like an opera star, the comet leaves the stage to a concert ending.

Overall, Return of the Comet is an excursion, instead of a story-telling or narrative form that presents a large-scale problem demanding a conclusive solution. Claude Levi-Strauss's contention that "narration always involves the transformation of one set of semantic oppositions into another, less radical one through a mediation or a series of mediations" could be taken as a meta-definition of most traditional musical forms, including sonata and fugue. The Comet eludes this 'masculine' need for a final resolution, presenting, instead, a series of problems followed by a series of often-dissociated solutions. The result is a presentation (not representation) of musical states, parallel by the unreeling of the emotional states of joy, delight, pathos, mystery, etc., all occurring as samples, not as integral parts of a structure. This is possible because of its references throughout to past musical idioms (and styles). While orthodox modernism repudiates extra-musical explanations and depends primarily on a self-validating, self-contained formal structure, postmodernist styles often use well-known musical codes (think of opera and movie scores), which, unlike many modern works, guarantee a lack of obscure meaning. Return of the Comet presents the past musical codes in terms of the present by combining, for example, an extension of Rossinian bowing techniques with minimalism, pointillism with ostinato, electric keyboard with acoustical instruments. Elliott Carter’s technique of joining sections through metric modulation is used along with the Mendelssohnian scherzo, German Sturm und Drang, and serial permutations of diatonic phrases.

One could argue, I suppose, that Return of the Comet is slight on substance and heavy on style and manner. But the dazzling surface of many postmodern styles often throws essence (substance) into question. Substance and essence, it would seem, are just code words for what the deconstructionists call the meta-text, or hidden meaning, which involves interpretation and further involves some spokesperson or expert telling us what an artwork really means. There is a conscious effort by many postmodern artists to avoid layered meaning, that is, a superficial surface covering a profound truth. "Why is it not possible in music, (as in the other arts) to raise style, reference, presentation and performance to primary positions, playing off of one against the other, cross cutting, combining, using musical patterns, energies, tensions, and resolutions for themselves instead of as carriers of a deeper meaning? Music (as Stravinsky might have said at one point in his career) that, through self-reflection, celebration, and perhaps excess, proclaims its artifice. In this sense, one could even appropriate modernism as a vehicle for a postmodernist style.

Much of the musing above came after the composition of Return of the Comet and after its early performances puzzled many composer colleagues and pleased many a non-specialist listener. During its composition, I thought more about directness and clarity of intent, making the implicit explicit, avoiding ambiguity, and instrumental idioms and performance than the ideologies associated with postmodern art. I've been told by a few respected musicians that Return of the Comet is fun music to play. It turns out that its speedy melodramatic fervor is a musical cliff-hanging act for the performers. Whatever the possibilities today of composition as an art in itself, performers, when near the edge, most always project a heated up enthusiasm. Enthusiasm, not obscurity, gets close to the point. I recall a quote by Hubert L. Dreyfus about Foucault that seems to sum up our new postmodern direction: "…there is a kind of ethical and intellectual integrity which, while vigorously opposing justifications of one's actions in terms of religion, law, science or philosophical grounding, nonetheless seeks to produce a new ethical form of life which foregrounds imagination, lucidity, humor, disciplined thought and practical wisdom." It is perhaps a viable path for our new music. -James Sellars Hartford, Connecticut-1995