MUSIC : A Thoroughly Post-Modern Weekend

From architecture to theology, post-modernism is clearly a concept whose time has come--and maybe fled again, if the avanter-than-thou-garde in various fields laying claim to post-post-modernism can be believed.

In any case, post-modernism in matters musical came to academia in a big way last weekend, with a three-day symposium at Pomona College. The event offered four concerts, four panel discussions, a keynote address, an organ mini-recital and showings of “Zivitar,” a video for electronic violin and computer processed images.

The affair was subtitled “Celebrating Contradiction and Diversity,” and that it did. Part of the college’s centennial observances, the symposium at times seemed a series of festive Old-Grad Nights.

Diversity was amply provided for, particularly in the music making, including as it did the premieres of works by seven Pomona-trained composers.

Contradiction seemed inherent in the post-modern concept itself, at least as defined and practiced at Pomona. Ultimately, post-modernism seemed no more than a marketing ploy, a relabeling of a product that wasn’t selling well under the modern label.

According to Wiley Hitchcock, the musicologist who delivered the keynote speech, modernists sought a radical break with the past, while at the same time considering the development and progress of their own achievements as historical necessities. Post-modernists, on the other hand, make no claim to absolute or transforming innovation and are open to the influences of all musics, past and present, placing an emphasis on accessibility.

The latter aspect seemed crucial, for the core of the post-modern position came down to this: Modern music is forbiddingly complex stuff that audiences don’t like; post-modern music is nice, tuneful--and often tonal--things that audiences do like.

Hitchcock capped his presentation by playing a recording of Jean Hasse’s “Moths”--a piece whistled by its audience--and projecting a copy of its graphically notated score. By any standards, including most of the criteria mentioned by Hitchcock, “Moths” is a resolutely modern work--the sole post-modernizing factor Hitchcock cited was the simple fact that its performer/audience responded with generous applause.

Accessibility, however, is a subjective, exceedingly relative quality, and one that says more about an audience than a composition.

However it may seem through the tunnel vision of hindsight, all eras appeared stylistically diverse to those living through them. Pluralism was quite as characteristic of music 60 years ago as it is today.

Indeed, most of the aspects of modernism described at the symposium--particularly overachieving complexity and stylistic imperialism--are characteristic only of the various serial schools.

If variety is not an exclusive attribute of current music in the United States, it was nonetheless made quite apparent in the Pomona repertory. The college has had a hand in a remarkable crop of composers over the decades, and welcomed nine of them home at the symposium, regardless of how shadowed their music might be by the specter of modernism.

John Cage, who entered Pomona College in 1928 and dropped out after his sophomore year, was the oldest and best known of the group, and surely one of the most staunchly pioneering modernists ever. In an interview with The Times prior to the symposium, he confessed his puzzlement with post-modernism.

His utterly characteristic “Music for 14” is an “indeterminate work in progress,” according to the composer’s note, with only two of the parts newly composed for the occasion. The performers were dispersed throughout Bridges Hall of Music, with a large battery of percussion onstage.

The result was a constantly shifting sound environment, visually stimulated by the percussionists’ activities, which included dribbling a basketball and juggling. What the bowling pin and orange traffic cone in the center of things symbolized was just one of the ambiguities of the effort.

The most immediately satisfying pieces were two song works, Morris Haigh’s “The Hinge of Day” cycle on poems by Emily Dickinson, and Susan Blaustein’s setting of Yeats’ “To Byzantium.” Both employ similar accompanimental forces and dabble in word painting, but their texts inevitably suggested disparate treatments. “The Hinge of Day” was a light, rhapsodic reverie, while “To Byzantium” proved surprisingly declamatory, in a knotty, dense instrumental context.

The works for larger forces, David Leedy’s “Pastorale” for chorus and piano four-hands and David Noon’s “Tropical Deco” for orchestra, get high marks on the post-modernism accessibility scale. Both are glib, tonally centered pieces--”Pastorale” spiced with an emphatically untempered tuning, “Tropical Deco” in a jazzier mode with strong hints of Bernstein and Copland.

Gene Carl’s “Claremont Concerto” and David Chaitkin’s “Pacific Images” mine a nondescript instrumental vein. The former is an extended clarinet meander punctuated by piano and string quartet, while the latter offers uninvolving Impressionism filtered through pretty Hollywood scoring.

Though not apparently premieres, two other works by composers with Pomona College in their pasts figured in the programming. Daniel Kingman’s “Autumn” Quartet, No. 3 sounds almost conservative enough to have been written for the college’s opening, while John Rahn’s violently buzzing “Kali” kept the post-modern conferees abreast of modern electronic potential.

The student and faculty performers that Pomona rallied for the event showed a department of strength and unexpected depth. Bridges Hall of Music, not to be confused with nearby Bridges Auditorium, offered resonant acoustics and unobstructed sight lines.

The College Symphony and String Arts Ensemble, conducted by Peter Jaffe, handled Noon’s pops razzmatazz ably, turned in a creditable “Firebird” and a somewhat stodgy account of Milhaud’s “La Creation du Monde,” and delivered clean accompaniment in Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins.

The astringencies of Leedy’s tuning system in “Pastorale” seemed most noticeable in the piano part, crisply dispatched by Margaret and Karl Kohn, while Jon Bailey conducted the College Glee Club in a buoyant, well-blended performance. Karl Kohn led another group of singers in three brightly sung madrigals by Marenzio.

Of the faculty artists, soprano Gwendolyn Little made the most of her opportunities, singing with supple wonder and yearning in “The Hinge of Day.” Though occasionally overwhelmed by the busy accompaniment in “To Byzantium,” she rose to its challenges with hortatory fervor.

The late, much-lamented Sequoia Quartet was nearly reconstituted Saturday afternoon, when violinist Miwako Watanabe, violist Brian Dembow and cellist Robert Martin joined faculty member violinist Yoko Matsuda in Kingman’s graceful, faceless “Autumn” Quartet and Schubert’s C-minor “Quartettsatz.” Their efforts began in a strident squall, but soon settled into rich, ripe playing.

The next day, Matsuda and Watanabe took the solo assignments in the Bach Double. They delivered a warm, serious, beautifully balanced, utterly astylistic reading.

If the inclusion of music from bygone eras seemed padding at best, there was a surprising stylistic omission. If Minimalism and its offshoots continue their remarkable growth in adherents and sophistication, future musicologists may note this not as a period of diversity, but of the establishment of Minimalism as the mainstream of late 20th-Century music.

The symposium, of course, did not promise to represent all music today. As a stimulating, albeit uncritical airing of ideas and new music, it worked; as an attempt to define, in either word or sound, a new period in American music, it did not.

The trouble seems a matter of adjectives. The consensus that a new era has been reached is probably true, but what to call it? With nothing better than “modern” to describe the music of the first half of our century, what remains to its successor but “post-modern”?

The symposium did remind us, though, that at least four decades worth of composers are still busily at work, in a variety of media and styles, and that young people with talent and zeal still gather to perform their music.

With that, all is well. We can wait for adjectives.