What did Milton mean by his music?

- 372 What did Milton mean by his music? How it looks now, from here Benjamin Boretz Starting from impenetrable, beyond anywhere ever travelled, a cold sonic monolith, way out beyond Webern, Varese, Cowell, Cage, none of the ways in led in, experience that disallowed experience, in 1953, the Composition for Viola and Piano; in 1955, the Three Compositions for Piano; in 1957, All Set at the Brandeis Jazz Festival; by 1959, the Compositions for Twelve and Four Instruments - the latter at the first Princeton Seminar; at the off-Broadway Nonagon Gallery, a “composers’ showcase” pairing of my old Brandeis guru Harold Shapero’s piano music with some of Milton’s; someone says, about Milton, or, his pieces, I wasn’t sure, “clean, clear, and to the point” -- the ways in when they developed developed not via unmediated sound like almost every other music in my life (discounting the constant babel of propagandas which assuredly had their effect in turning my ear on or off of whatever historic, exotic, far-out wavelengths I could discover) but via the appeal of a complex philosophical rationale, a conceptual interpenetration being materialized between the rivetingly deep new thought in which I was most absorbed around and outside of music, and the intransigently pitiless multiform complexity of the music, now spanning, by 1961, Partitions, Vision and Prayer, Composition for Synthesizer. I could hear the music because I could see the point. Or at least a particular point, one I could infer out of my own metaintellectual rather than music-intuitive perspective, more or less the point that I wrote in my 1964 Nation article explicitly about Milton, thoughts that started from the intersection of his discourse with the resonance of my own thought and reading, and with the insistent electric charge of listenings to his music. Milton was, of course, mostly known and notorious for his invention of previously unenvisaged compositional devices, derived from previously unimagined modes of construal of traditional and post-traditional pitch-structural music. And it has been these devices and construals which metastasized into the compositional/ theoretic world of musical intelligence and ingenuity which evolved in his name, on his account, and in his image. His solutions to problems of structure and his invention of means of structuring became a rhizome of limitless invention and an ideology of unlimited imaginative-structural possibility for a very powerfully focused music-intellectual culture. But: does the fact of structural preoccupation entail an aesthetic of structural preoccupation? Does the fact of the pervasive presence of transcendent formal ingenuity imply an aesthetic of pure formal ingenuity? Is depth of structure its own episteme? The depth I experience in Beethoven is certainly a depth of structure; everything is contained within, manifested as, structure; but the particular musical depth of those structural events does not seem to be the output of an exclusive preoccupation with structure in se; other, equally deep structural moves would emanate quite discrete musical depths. Is that perhaps - 373 What did Milton mean by his music? why the more we fathom the depths of structure the closer we feel we’re getting to the depths of what motivates the structure, the ontological determinant beyond the structure “itself”? If I as an intently listening music receiver could not follow Milton’s structures by paths of motivation rather than paths of data-configuration, or, rather, could not motivate the paths of data by intuitions of a meta-motivation, my mutual opacity with this music signified to me not the absence of such motivation but a limitation of my imaginative capacity to locate within my perceptual resources a unique intuition, a truly new-musical mode of being which could not be “musicalized” under any of the mental filters of “modernity” - not the aesthetics of ugly, brutal, or urban-industrial, not the strenuous crucible of radically reinvented classicism, not any of the super-, neo-, counter-, metaphysically idealized romanticisms, nor vivid theaters of evocative imagery, nor even any of the post-catastrophic militant inverted conventionalities of the assorted politicized serial insurgencies camping in the capitals of Europe, on the streets of downtown Manhattan and San Francisco, Berkeley, and assorted outlier American university campuses. And not even through Milton’s...