Anthony Newman is a beacon in the music world. He was very kind to give me his time for this interview back in 1995. Then as now, I find his views on contemporary music prescient and thought provoking.

Newman interview - 1995

P: What is your view on what is happening in new music today?

T: It's a scramble characterized by a very unsettled esthetic question with many diversified aesthetics. There are people who are completely intellectual and atonal, and people who are child-like and minimalist, people that write music that sounds like Handel, and people that write music that sounds like Brahms. It's a very unsettled time with a lack of a continuous esthetic.

P: People that write music like Handel?

T: Yes, there is a certain contingent of today's musical audience, that is at least in this country, I would say church music people, choir people who would find it just fine if you just wrote the way Handel wrote. It sounds fine really.

P: Where is contemporary music going?

T: Well, contemporary music will go where the next dominating personality is, and the next dominating personality, if he has an element of success with his life, could in fact bring contemporary music to a true esthetic that is survivable. If this person is a great personality but has no particular possibility for success in his life, then the scramble will continue either until a personality who has that possibility arrives, or until someone revives this music, whatever that is, to breakforth.

P: And what will the effect of that music be in a larger way?

T: Well, first of all the music will appeal to every man at some level. That is a very important consideration. And that there will be many, many attempts to block it because contermporary music is really backed into power and money issues. But public taste will ultimately prevail, as it always does. Public taste meaning audiences, meaning amateurs, meaning people that study in music schools. That is, if they're not pushed into something, they'll make their own choice based on their own like or dislike.

P: What was the positive effect of serial music?

T: Serial music. Well, first of all because it seperated the parameters of music into rows. It made it possible to actually identify what music was in terms of it's constutient parts, and therefore one can use elements of that even in writing tonal music. Which is very different from traditional music is the sense that you can, for example, seperate tessitura to specific areas of pitch. If you do it in tonal music it has an interesting and very curious effect. But serial music in itself has been a complete flop.

P: What about the rhythmic effects of serialism?

T: The one really good thing from serialism is rhythmic because rhythmic serialization of course occurred already in the isorhythmic motets in the 1400's. Then it was forgotten and then revived by Stravinsky in the Rite of Spring. Not many people have taken much attention to it since that; Messian in his earlier works, I must say in his later works too, at least up to 1950, and Bartok occasionally with his rhythmic rows. I think that if one is presenting music where the tonality is not particularly strong, that one can make up alot for that by using a powerful rhythmic kind of entity.

P: What about the influence of non-western music like Balinese rhythmic series?

T: Indian too. Well I think that is all in the contribution of rhythm, and that has served to isolate rhythm from what one associates as a sort of servant capacity in older music. It's also simpler in older music. By older music I mean classical period. By doing that it has actually made it a brilliant thing, which it wasn't before. Stravinsky was the first person in this century to do it, then Messian in his earlier works, and then Bartok. I'm trying to think of anybody else. I can't really come up with a name past that I think is imposing. Perhaps it would be Berio a little bit.

P: What is the purpose of sound music like Ligeti?

T: Well I think it is to promote the feeling that anything is music. If you seperate it in a certain way. For example, take the roaring in this car and then amplify it at different pitch levels, speeds and filters. This then produces that kind of effect in that what one is simply doing is focussing completely on a small aspect of what one hears normally, as a concommitent aspect of a great many other phenomenon. Does that make sense?

P: Give an example.

T: Well, here we are talking in this car and the car is making this noise and there's traffic going by, so all three of those things are going on. But if we seperate just one element and run it through filters and slow it down and speed it up, then in those kinds of people's terms you have a kind of music, I think.

P: Material for a sound piece.

T: Yes.

P: What traces of that music will endure?

T: None of it.

P: Nothing? Not the Ligeti Chamber Concerto?

T: I don't think so, because when you isolate like that, what you end up sensing is that the music is more an effect of bringing out a certain level of emotion which is very one sided. It's an experimental procedure, often successful within what it's trying to do. I think Ligeti is very successful in what he is trying to do. But because you don't come either from the feeling of "I remember a beautiful melody from it," or that "I was exalted by it ", or touched in the heart area, the heart chakra by it; I don't think, for that reason, it has much survival possibility.

Now you know if you want to view survivability in a grand way you can say: Now before the world ends there will be many golden ages of music, probably. And as each golden age occurs and finishes then what came from the prior golden age will be refined down more. So that what we consider the monumental works of Beethoven or Mozart or Bach, through the next golden age may only survive down to ten or eleven. It depends upon the way you want to look at it. If you say well, Debussy. How many years will Debussy survive? Well, five hundred years? two hundred years? If we look at Ligeti in that school, then I think you can say well, with some promise maybe it will survive fifty or sixty years, which is not bad for an aesthetic of this time which is so chaotic.

P: How did Messian solve the hamonic problem?

T: He did as a young man, but then he abandoned that for whatever reason. I think he solved it quite well in his organ music, and in some of the bird pieces, but they tend to be random sounded and sort of equivocal.

P: What is the great challenge of harmony today?

T: To return. We are looking for it to return. In various different guises we are looking for it to return. Stravinsky had it return in the Rite of Spring, not that it was lost for very long during that period. But between 1900 and 1910 music started to fall apart in a harmonic way. So I think that Stravinsky found another way of expressing harmony which was to make every part of the Rite of Spring one chord. They could be quite odd chords too, from the standpoint of traditional harmony. I don't think they relate one to the other at all.

You think of harmony as an entity with energy, as you think of melody as an entity with energy. Then you think that the energy of harmony is that upon which the melody rides. And when the two are well engaged together then it produces musical energy of a higher level. So when you don't have harmony, I think it's not possible to produce higher musical energy.

P: What constitutes a melody? There are some people who will say there is a traceble melody or line in Ligeti.

T: Well I think it's always interesting to ask the man in the street what melody he hears.That way, instead of fooling ourselves about more sophisticated, quote-unquote things, just ask the ordinary music lover what does he remember from it. It cuts through all the crap, you know,f trying to make it that, "well there's melody in everything:'

P: How will music be able to have another golden age again? With commercialism ...

T: I think it's the change of the ages. We are entering the Aquarian age and I think it's a more positive age than the one we've come out of. And that when the great guides that rule music send the guides down to help people write music then we'll have another golden age.

P: Explain your own evolution in composition.

T: Well I started as a person who wrote fugues when I was 19 and 20, and then I entered the Harvard stage and I wrote music that I didn't much believe in, really. Then after the Harvard stage I entered an experimental stage and gave up. I thought, well I'd just rather play old music. Then about ten years after that when I was about 35 I got a commission for a large orchestral work which ended up back in the experimental stage.

P: The Orchestral Cycle?

T: Yeah, which I threw away. And then after that I ended up back in the sort of Harvard gentle atonality stage, and know I'm back to writing fugues (laughs). Everything is cyclical.

P: What do you think of jazz and improvisation and how it has evolved in this century?

T: I think jazz and popular music are the antipode of serious classical music, quoteunquote. And they are a very interesting alternate to what is generally unacceptable really: serious music. A gulf which did not exist in the 18th century, or not much in the 19th century either, really. Popular tunes found their ways into serious music, and serious tunes found their way into popular culture. So I think jazz and rock music is all very simple harmonically but much more acceptable by the general person.

P: All jazz simple harmonically? The forms are simpler but the harmonies can be very complex.

T: The result of them sounds very complex, but the basic progressions are all very simple. Art Tatum, for example, sounds very brilliant and almost not tonal. It's always brilliant and rhythmic. Brilliant is another issue that contemporary music has forgotten about; writing fast music. Few contemporary works are ever quick.

P: Some of John Corigliano's music is quite virtuosic, like the flute and clarinet concertos.

T: Well that's an exception. How many people have written movements where there is constant fast motion, like in an ancient piece? Not very many people. The reason for that is that you have to go back to figures which one would think of as old-fashioned: scales too. Because you can't play fast notes in odd scales. No one has the patience to practice them, they don't fit into the fingers.

P: Getting back to tonality, scales and harmony. How will it be different?

T: Well, I think that people will tend to use electronic instruments, first of all, with serious music. But the harmonies will be much sinpler, the scales will tend to be modal often, like mixolydian mode. And against simpler uses of six-four's, parallel six-four chords. Bartok does a fair amount of that.

P: What about the issues of key structure and larger harmonic motion?

T: I think one is so foreign from that as far as writing in this century, that you have to reestablish it as a kind of graph outline in advance and say this is where the first area will be and the second one will be here, etc., so that you just go there because you've said that that's where you would go. Rather than a natural motion there, because most people have lost that tendency for whatever natural motions meant.

P: How does the study of older harmony and counterpoint inform a composer in modern music today?

T: Well, I think that what one learns from studying that procedure is what harmonies sound best adjacent to one another. Then by making substitutions for them you can arrive at a modem style. Stravinsky unquestionably did that, and Bartok did it by instinct.

P: Would you say that for any melodic gesture there is always a harmonic gesture as well?

T: Yes, for any gifted person in music it signifies a harmonic gesture. Of course it did in old times but when Mozart thought of a sweet melody, there was always a harmony that came below it. Even though he may have sung just the melody. The harmony was added concurrently, really, and on the same clock. So I think that one can add extra notes in progressions, which sound very satisfactory and have a different feeling about them. And yet one feels that's music too.

P: These extra notes, can we label them?

T: Some times they are harmonic notes, sometimes they are substitutions for dominants. With the effect of a dominant, I-V -1- V-I, except that you take a different V and substitute it for the traditional V, repeat it, and it has a V like quality. On top of which it will generate a different melody, but also a melody which also has some intriguing energy potential.

P: A simple example of that would be a tritone substitution?

T: Yes

P: What could be another substitution for that V-I energy?

T: Well you could substitute, for example, a diminished seventh chord with a whole tone on top. Like E-G-B flat-C sharp, and add a D sharp. a very good dominant substitute. Also, one of my favorites is a double set of them which is B-F-B flat-D-Gsharp-C sharp. A real pungent, nasty dominant. Because it has two tritones in it, it feels like a dominant. And that particular one moves very well to IV sonorities, but it moves very nicely to E flat, for example.

It's curious that we are studying this all so scientifically because music in the olden times was just improvised, it fell out of everybody's fingers. Now we are analyzing everthing, dissecting it and looking through it. It's a very curious age we have fallen into. To actually be working out dominants in a very theoretical manner. It's so different from the traditional kind of music which all came out of someone sitting down at the piano and finding something.

P: How did Mozart's study of harmony with his father differ from the study of harmony today?

T: Much less experimental. In the peginning stages it is exactly the same, the same harmony, the same problem with fifths.