Of Art and Artifice: Style and Technique in the Music of Morris Rosenzweig

Of Art and Artifice: Style and Technique in the Music of Morris Rosenzweig ? % Brian H?lse Against the subjectivity of men stands the objectivity of man-made artifice, not the indifference of nature. ?Hannah Arendt I. Particularity Applied to the tonal language of common-practice music, Arendt's words neatly capture a dialectical relationship between invention and the collective assumptions of a cultural context. Tonality stands not as natural law, but as a broadly accepted artificeof human construction. The artistic act in this context reifies an artificially closed universe?the sub The Music ofMorris Rosenzweig 173 jectivity of the creative act is subjugated to the 'objective artifice' of tonality. In a global society, tonal artifice can hardly be seen as an abso lute. Its objectivity restswithin themusical horizon, rather than standing for it.Given the cultural and musical pluralism of our time, there isnoth ing in the way of common practice (or shared cultural understanding) that can approach the monolithic versimilitude of tonality's closed sys tem. Despite the persistence of various ideologies, establishing a contex tually defined substitute for common practice becomes an inescapable task for today's composer. Drawing fromArendt: understanding the nor mative boundaries of tonality as mere artificewithin the vast musical horizon does not remove the necessity of itsdialectical function.We are not now faced with the indifference of nature, nor can we ever be. The contemporary composer is likely to approach thisproblem inways largely dependent on individual circumstance. In Morris Rosenzweig's case, a number of factors are brought to bear: his native New Orleans, his background as a horn player and conductor, the popular music of his generation, and the aesthetics ofmusical modernism. No single influence is completely determinative. As a student of Mario Davidovsky at Columbia in the 1980s, Rosenzweig absorbed aspects of Davidovsky's characteristically nimble, immaculately crafted style, but at the same time he maintained an individual voice. Where Davidovsky is preoccupied more with the fundamental building blocks of sound (a by-product of his electronic-studio days) Rosenzweig releases his instrumental writing, allowing more sustained prototypical actions. Yet a similarly colorful, anthropomorphic quality isdistinctly salient in both composers' music. Rosenzweig shares traitswith another inimitable modernist, Stefan Wolpe. Describing Wolpe's gestural language, Christopher Hasty invokes the term particularity, "the creation of luminous moments alive with individual, particular character."1 His characterization resonates with Adorno's notion of contingent particularity, individual moments being "part of the totality of thework that opposes totality."2Wolpe's distinc tive compositions evolve in an incessant process of self-opposition, a quality found inRosenzweig's music. Events are conceived as multidi mensional objects with a high degree of autonomy. Pitch and rhythm coordinate symbiotically,maximizing the uniqueness and purposefulness of events in contrast with others. Properties of texture, phrase structure, and similar character-defining attributes applymore forcefully to individ ual, particular events than to any overall, concerted behavior. A multiplic ity of self-certain, contradictory events characterizes the surface, as opposed to a unitary texture of continuous gesturing. These contradic tions, forming as they do the substance of musical action, continuously act in opposition to the larger continuity?Adorno's state of totality in 174 Perspectives of New Music opposition to itself.But aswill be observed, attributeswhich pervade an entire work, those technical elements promoting the overall coherence and continuity, are a special preoccupation of Rosenzweig's?for the viv idness of particular events depends not only on distinctive, momentary qualities, but on the degree towhich events protrude from a backdrop of normative action. J=132 EXAMPLE 1: DELTA, THE PERFECT KING, MEASURES 1-19 The opening ofDelta thePerfectKing (1989), a concerto forhorn and chamber ensemble begins as shown inExample l.3 (Asmusical examples are presented, the reader is encouraged to listen to specially prepared recordings, which are available at www.operascore.com/rosenzweig.) Five short, deliberate articulations C-B-D-B-D are followed by a leap down to F. Then silence. The cello enters nonchalantly?an accompani The Music of Morris Rosenzweig 175 ment to a most eccentric tune in the horn. It seems a strange way to pro ceed after the opening figure. Yet in the quirky, rusticmanner of the first two particular...