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a.s.u.c. keynote address 1987 Being here reminds me pointedly of the American Society of University Composers meeting in St. Louis in 1967 when the membership rejected the narrower focus of many of its founding members and set itself to represent the actual state of American music as reflected in colleges and universities. I remember in particular the aggressive stand of PeterYates, who very strongly pushed for a broad and representative society. It was especially memorable for me because Peter was chairing a panel on microtonality, which was the first time I had publicly spoken about the then-recent change in my work which set me upon the path I have followed ever since. I suppose what I have in mind is to reassert something of that moment for us here. But all any of us can do is to state where he individually is, at any given moment. I cannot presume to sound a keynote for American music in general, or even for this society in particular. What I must do is to make my own position as clear as I can, and hope that this will resonate in other minds. My principal compositional technique, extended just intonation, has its roots in the radical departures of Claude Debussy,whose harmonic language approximates, as well as can be in equal temperament, a movement from overtone series to overtone series, with an emphasis upon higher partials. There is some mixing of series polychordally and some evidence of the use of a principle of inversion, which generates a system of Otonality/Utonality analogous to Harry Partch’s.In contrast,Arnold Schoenberg,both in his atonality and in his serial pitch usage, seemed to be intent upon exploiting the unused portions of a closed system of pitches. His work is, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the first example of a compositional technique which takes the twelve-tone tempered scale for exactly what it is. In all earlier music it represents an acoustical compromise to facilitate instrumental design while still making possible extensive modulatory flexibility. Schoenberg is an example of a radical thinker motivated strongly by a claustrophobic sense of nearly exhausted resources. Debussy, in sharp contrast, seems motivated by an expansion of harmonic resources and a greatly widened horizon. But for Debussy’s revolution to have been achieved fully, the tempered scale would have had to go, in favor of extended just intonation, so that the overtone structures would have been unambiguously recognizable as such. The sense of brilliant colors provocatively mixed which generated the comparison to Impressionist painting would have been enormously heightened. It is well known that Debussy himself did not welcome the designation “Impressionist” but would rather have preferred “Symbolist” in recognition of his great debt to Stéphane Mallarmé. In Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard, Mallarmé pushes toward a new syntax and format: almost a new language, like that other famous symbolist James Joyce, who goes substantially further than Mallarmé, particularly in Finnegans Wake. The profound influence of Mallarmé upon Pierre Boulez has been acknowledged; that of Joyce upon Luciano Berio less explicitly. In his twentieth-century history, Geoffrey Barraclough has described Symbolism as the last great European literary movement to achieve worldwide dominance. After it, third world and Marxist influences displace western European on the world stage. Symbolism , as the word implies, has an almost mystical dimension. Mallarmé and even Marcel Proust have been described as secular mystics, and Joyce, while scarcely a mystic,devoted enormous effort to replacing Christian myth with a much wider cross-cultural mythology. Evelyn Underhill, in her study Mysticism, observes that mystics surface almost always in the final cultural phases of civilizations, when the breakup of one culture begins to be accelerated by the birth of a new one. It is obvious that the early twentieth century was such a time, and on a worldwide scale. Barraclough’s observation about Symbolism gains focus and intensity from such a context.It is interesting that Partch, the first exponent of extended just intonation, was aggressively antiEuropean and anti-Christian, acknowledging many more Asian and African influences than European ones. Before a new culture can fully replace an old one, there must be actively disintegrative forces to clear away the old ways. It seems to me that the indeterminate movement in American music of the sixties was such a force. It is epitomized by the work of John Cage, whose very philosophy and theory of composition undermine traditional...

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