Recovery

At the beginning of Chapter 8, “Recovery”, Rutherford-Johnson returns to 1989, the starting point of his journey, to reflect on the nostalgia felt by avant-garde composers after the fall of the Berlin Wall, especially in Eastern Europe and Russia. This is perhaps the first instance in the book where we have a clear historical distance which allows us to analyze and comprehend the music of that period in more profound ways than what our sensorial responses enable. While works such as La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura by Luigi Nono may strike us as yet another large-scale harsh-sounding inaccessible piece, the history of the piece’s compositional process and the circumstances in which it was written facilitates the understanding of its wandering and haunting nature. Not only the comprehension of the context in which avant-garde pieces were made grants us access to a deeper meaning, but it also draws our attention to the context itself.

As quoted by Rutherford-Johnson, violinist Aisha Orazbayeva regards this piece as “a piece at the end of a century… looking back way to the very beginning but imagining and thinking of the future at the same time”. Perhaps the beginning that Aisha refers to is the ending of the Second World War, which lead to the Cold War and the conflict between liberal capitalism and socialist ideologies. Perhaps the beginning can be traced as far back as the First World War, which leads to the raise of the communist revolution and fascist movements that would trigger off the Second World War. Regardless of where it begins, La lontananza looks back to the struggles of the past and offers us a critical rereading that sometimes “pretty sounds”, as Charles Ives would put it, are not capable to offer. Indeed, La lontananza is unpalatable for most tastes, but aren’t the consequences of human greed and cruelty hard to listen to as well? Even so, we need to be reminded of our atrocious actions if we hope to never repeat the same mistakes, and for that reason, pieces like La lontananza is not only meaningful but also necessary.

Rutheford-Johnson points out that after the fall of the Berlin Wall the state-funded structure that provided composers to experiment was quickly dismantled, and that avant-garde music lost its oppositional force due to the rather artificial homogenization of ideologies. The gap was rapidly filled in with the more digestible spiritual minimalism, however, the questions that avant-garde music screamed for answers were left unanswered, the uneasiness was swept under the rug. By ignoring the past so quickly we are at the risk of making the same mistakes once again, and the current world political-ideological conflicts, more recently and alarmingly in Bolivia, are a testimony that we lost sight of the importance of these questions too fast. The cringing sounds and disjointed rhythms of avant-garde music have a purpose: to remind us of our past mistakes, our collective regrets, and of our bestial behavior.

During this semester we were all mesmerized by the complexity and ugliness of avant-garde music in many instances, but we shouldn’t let our instinctive reactions get the best of us. The pain caused by the ugly sounds is just the result of friction between the bones in our ears reacting to dissonances. Beneath this pain lies a deeper meaning we are invited to explore, a reflection of the human soul in its totality. Avant-garde music is necessary. Unbearable times call for unbearable art, as times of peace call for art that celebrates peace. However, by ignoring the sacrifices needed to achieve peace we may incur in producing meaningless, devoid of purpose superficial entertaining.

Music is for the soul, and sometimes the soul needs to scream.