There was a time when the greatest tradition of Western culture was performed for emperors and kings, when children were trained from birth and wrote operas by twelve, in service to this great crusade that is the most abstract of arts. Now, we have arrived at the “post” prefixture, with slow-moving minimalism and perpetually cinematic crescendos that perform from our laptop speakers when we are trying to chill. I don’t say this to bemoan the decline of the west — I quite like post-classical music. I’ve listened to Richter’s recomposition of Vivaldi hundreds of times. I enjoy those Icelanders who release music directly under their recognizably-Icelandic full names, music that critics adore likening to the landscape of its origin.
I’m quite interested in how this happened. There seems to be a big-bang moment many identify with Satie’s Gymnopedies. A gorgeous composition that, unlike many of those by his French impressionist contemporaries, continues to find airtime in various courts like the massage parlor, Sirius XM radio, or YouTube study playlists. Like the post-classical of today, its chord structure is simple, slow (one might say glacial, were there enough reverb added in post), and repetitive, as is its melody. Contrast with the French impressionists — still pretty, but denser works full of dynamism. My favorite of this era is Fauré. “Aprés un rêve” is done a great disservice when it is listened to out of a Spotify playlist on a highway drive, but I can’t help myself.
Why did the Gymnopedies make their way into our popular artistic consciousness? Why did this consciousness’ abstractions become less baroque, less sweepingly romantic? A plausible reason is that artistic faculty and audiences’ taste reacted to an increasingly hyperstimulating environment. Fauré, Debussy, Ravel were all composing in the early 20th century, as was Satie — but it’s Satie’s peace that we have held onto in post-war, high-tech society. War dashed away sweeping romanticism. It was in film that it was recovered, and it is in film that most people have a connection to the classical tradition, and it is also in film where music was irrevocably tethered to the concrete. It was instrumentalized (haha).
People go about their lives stimulated. Our attention does not land on objects deliberately, but is constantly catcalled by economic agents around us. There is less time and desire to gaze out at “La mer” in inspiration. Post-classical music drew on Satie because the attentional energies demanded of audience and composer are different than what they were; not less, per se, different. Our attention is a different flavor than that of a French tone poem in a recital hall. Post-classical’s minimalism and dynamic compression are meditative reprieves from the anxiety default of the burnout society. Composers search inward for sound and find glaciers carving tracts through the hypervaried terrain of their mind.
It also seems incorrect to call post-classical artists ‘composers.’ They are producers. It is as important to the aesthetics of post-classical music that the compositions be recorded and effected in that particularly intimate way. Nils Frahm’s live “Over There It’s Raining” is awash in static. The gain on the mic has been cranked to capture the gentleness of the performance. The simplicity of the style probably masks the labor of composition, but I still feel like the modern composition process is quite different from the sort of craft composers of yore would hone until their deaths. Processes of production, of layering effects or manipulating synth envelopes and filter cutoffs and resonances, all these are experimental. Notes and sound happen simultaneously. The artist does not lean over a billiards table, wine drunk and sweating, scribbling onto staffs more notes only reproduced in the mind. Artists pluck their MIDI controllers and fiddle with knobs until the sound from their monitors matches the object their intuition is reaching for. This too is due to the attentional differences of the era. Experimental processes are more schizophrenic than the demands of notation.