"Maximum Clarity" and Other Writings on Music

On Context

on context 1968 Thinking about music is not nearly so clean-cut and so specialized a problem as some of us university musicians seem to think it is. There is no doubt that the role of music in our lives, the place of art in our values are undergoing profound changes. This ferment is part of a much larger and more pervasive process, a global technological and social revolution. We are flooding the world with people. Technology is building a kind of ark to get humanity through this crisis. It will take all the ingenuity of avant-garde thinkers to invent for us new ways of living appropriate to the new conditions. And if we are not utterly to lose all civilizational continuity it will take careful selection, uprooting, and transplanting of traditions to maintain anything of the past in our new situation. In the center of this violent process of change, the United States is struggling to mature culturally. Our role in the larger context of the world is transitional (out of regional identification into global identification). This translation must not be made nationalistically nor exploitatively.It must not be made egotistically. Insofar as we build imitatively upon our European heritage, we maintain at the root of thought and action a number of dualistic pairs of opposites which have long roots in European cultural history. Chief among these are the individual versus the collective, traditionalism versus experimentation, conscious intellect versus nonverbal intelligence. The parent of these supposed opposites is Aristotelian dualism, so fundamental a philosophic bias in Western culture that recent tendencies to break its monopoly upon our worldview seem to some people to threaten the bases of civilization itself. Although we act as though the world should learn from us, we in the United States nevertheless, again and again, have exposed our culture to influences from the rest of the world, in a sense few Europeans either understand or will be willing to accept. We are constantly welcoming the very things that irritate us. At present there is widespread interest in oriental thought, and this is breaking down our dualism. Americans have perpetrated some double-thinks by trying to turn “either–or” into “both–and.” We cling in many respects to our outmoded isolationism at the same time we feel called upon to teach much of the world how to live.We tend to insist simultaneously upon cultural cooperation and competitiveness. We often deplore, as if to European parents, our lack of deep traditional roots and the absence of cultural uniqueness which our polyglot population produces. But just these lacks are what can enable us to cut Europe’s apron strings and come of age. In the arts, typically the vanguard of civilization, we can see that this has already taken place.What has happened is not the emergence of just another national style, like those of Europe, but an annihilation of boundaries. The state of the arts in the United States does not presage an era of world domination by North American culture,but rather the end of all such dominations . All traditions belong to me if I claim them. Equally, none of them belongs to anyone. An intellectual world in which Jesus and the Buddha, Confucius, Moses, and Aristotle, Immanuel Kant and Sri Ramakrishna rub shoulders is proof against Christian, Semitic, and Nazi exclusivities, to name only a few virulent forms of prejudice. The state of music reflects this situation but, as is typical of the arts, at a further stage in the process than that of the majority of human activities. The musical world in which Machaut, the Beatles, Wagner, Ravi Shankar, Pete Seeger, Bach, and Xenakis meet is only as far from me as my record player. This musical world, too, is proof against takeover by any such exclusive points of view as tonality, serialism, indeterminacy. Attempts to move Vienna to the USA or New York to England are just as seriously in error as the attempt to move the United States into South Vietnam. There is much we can learn from each other and much help we can give each other,but only if we stop acting like missionaries.It isn’t up to anybody as stupid as we are—as I am, as you are, as any group of men is—to improve the world, to save mankind from destruction, to guarantee the future of music. In this fluidity the one thing we can be sure of is change. To attempt to...