Here we go again

Kyle Gann writes about a trend surfacing among young composers — a new yen for dissonance, complexity, various forms of musical noise. I've been noticing this, too, and wondering what to make of it. Composers who came of age in the sixties and seventies rebelled against their elders by rejecting dissonant modernism in favor of minimalism, neo-romanticism, and other reaffirmations of simplicity. Now the world has turned upside down. The composers of the sixties and seventies generations have become the establishment; they are, to their own distress, figures of authority. Perhaps it's not surprising that some of the youngsters are headed in a different direction. As Kyle suggests, the raucous underside of the pop world — noise punk, hardcore metal, and so on — is pushing them along. And if middle-aged composers of a tonal persuasion tell them they're on the wrong path, they will surely keep on going.

I love extreme dissonance in improvised form, when it's produced by AMM, Sonic Youth, and any of their countless spawn. That kind of noise can have joyous, liberating effects on the tired brain. (I once played keyboard in a six-piece noise collective called Miss Teen Schnauzer. The climax of our single public performance was built around a tape loop of the opening chords of Die Frau ohne Schatten. We opened for Sebadoh, which was very cool.) But its classical equivalent, the density dance, often makes me squirm: all that raw, rebellious expression so easily turns into yet another intellectual game, simply in the act of figuring out how to write it down. These days, I get much more excited when I hear something totally fresh produced with relatively simple means — this captivating new piece by Judd Greenstein, for example.