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beyond harry partch 1981 Most of American culture sees art as a variety of entertainment, and “serious ” art as a not very successful variety of high-class amusement. Note the adjective: an interest in serious art is seen as a credential for identification with a higher social class. The government, and the majority of the people, thinks that art should support itself like any other commercial enterprise and that if a minority wants to indulge in aristocratic pretensions it should pay for these without subsidy. A minority, mostly wealthy, has never given up an aristocratic stratification of society and supports an art which imitates European culture in competition with it. With the decline in Europe of political institutions directly based on aristocratic models, the artist, freed somewhat from servility to patrons, tended to become a kind of culture hero. It is as though aristocratic behavior retreated into the arts. The moneyed minority in America which supports, for example, symphony orchestras and opera companies, keeps this view alive in the face of its rejection by most of the society. But for generating a sense of belonging to a comfortable elite, or for purposes of upward mobility (which at a certain altitude becomes social climbing ), Beethoven or Debussy or Tchaikovsky or anyone else whose music has undergone the metamorphosis into museum pieces will serve much better than a living composer.And Europeans are vastly better than Americans,even if they are still alive, because it is understandable if they are aristocratic. As a result,most composers in the USA are supported by the only widely acceptable form of subsidy: posts as teachers in college and university music schools. While the general musical life of the country mirrors the state of the world by reminding us constantly that there are many musics, most music schools still operate as if European music (and mostly that of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) were the only music of significance. This hegemony is challenged by jazz programs that transcend the “fun and games” state, and in a few places by performing groups growing out of ethnomusicological 244 on other composers programs. Its most serious challenge has come from active groups of composers ,who may be bent upon perpetuating the traditions of concert making and attendant musical activities but who are committed to overcoming the resistance to new repertory and to changing musical performing practices. But this activity only affects the professional world indirectly except in rare instances. Even the efforts of composers’ societies seem to have relatively weak effects. Sufficiently resourceful people can always create enclaves and cliques, but how much wider than that will the interested listening public ever grow to be? Just how long does the cultural lag have to get before we ask ourselves seriously if the gap will ever close? These questions were raised by Gunther Schuller in an address to the American Society of University Composers in the spring of 1980. But where I part company with Schuller is that I heard no hint of a way out of this cul-de-sac in his address and I have heard none in his music, unless what he proposes to do is to abandon concert music in the European tradition for jazz or ragtime or some other more popular music. These seem to me weighty questions, and the finger pointed at us composers by Schuller to accuse us of having helped to bring about this situation seems not altogether unjust. Much so-called new music does not really deserve the wider audience it complains about being denied. If the only alternative to this is the endless replay of “the classics” or an attempt to rewrite them or to quote them or even to parallel them, we have already abandoned the serious effort to keep concert music alive. I would be unhappy to see this happen. I would like the tradition of Western concert music to continue to develop among the world’s musics in a future in which its dominance will have ended. But can we possibly regard the present state of concert music in this country as a state of health? Questions of this kind assailed me right from the outset of my composing career, not least because of my contact with Harry Partch. I remember writing to him soon after I read his book, Genesis of a Music, that I had long felt that the very scale we were using had condemned contemporary composers to an ever-narrowing effort to exhaust...

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