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John Rockwell, All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century (Knopf, 1983) Reissued by Da Capo Press in paperback in 1997. Rockwell has sweeping and well-meaning intentions, but from what I could stand of this book, and from what I could gather from book reviews, he comes off as an idiot in every section, be it his comments on serialism (a rigorous system of writing music in which elements are ordered according to a predetermined sequence), or his rock criticism (i.e., an account of how Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young "specialized" in "innovative harmonies and song structures" without truly revealing anything). Each chapter is dedicated to one of 20 select musicians spanning from the 1950s to the late 1970s, and he attempts to fertilize some of the later chapters on folk, rock, and performance musicians with the classical serialists we trudge through in the beginning. It makes for boring and at times really painful reading. "Musical Americanists" turn out to be simply American Composers. "Arranging the twelve notes of the chromatic scale in horizontal patterns, and constructing pieces from permutations of these patterns" is really nothing more than composing melodies. He even goes so far as to give us excuses for the stuff he writes: "Rock critics...come most often from a literary background rather than a musical one, and hence feel uncomfortable with musical description and analysis." The literary John Rockwell gives us a lot of empty space, word-cages that might be fun to fill if I ever go to prison. If you like Elliott Carter, David Byrne, Milton Babbitt, Laurie Anderson, John Cage, Neil Young, Philip Glass, and/or Ornette Coleman, I hope you like them a lot before reading this book. MORE: Rockwell on Linda Ronstadt and Rock Critics as Populists |
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