Easley Blackwood, Jr. (1933 - 2023)

[John Boyer]

The Chicago-based pianist and composer Easley Blackwood, son of the noted bridge player, died on January 22.

His works up to age 50 are in an atonal style, although listening to some of them tonight they seem more highly chromatic than truly based on tone-rows. Call them freely atonal, like late David Diamond.

But in the 1980s he would have a change of heart and began a sort of chameleon-like existence, writing works in the style of other composers, though without actually sounding like imitations or pastiche. Thus, his two clarinet sonatas sound like Reger, while his Fifth Symphony and Third String Quartet recall Sibelius. His Second Viola Sonata suggests Bartok, and his massive 40-minute Cello Sonata sounds for all the world like something written in Robert Schumann's day.  His goal, he said, was to write something that Schubert might have written had he lived into the 1840s.  Of all his works, it's the one that fits most comfortably into our remit, followed by the clarinet sonatas. 

[eschiss1]

2022?...

[John Boyer]

2022?...

Oops!  2023, of course.  That will require a moderator edit to fix. 

[Mark Thomas]

No need to now . I have a Cedille recording pairing Blackwood's First and Fifth Symphonies and the contrast is certainly very stark with the latter, as John writes, for me a much more palatable listen. It's still clearly a work of the 20th century but is tonal and the harmonic language and restless string writing certainly do recall Sibelius. Thanks for the Cello Sonata tip, John.

[Alan Howe]

How many composers went down the cul-de-sac of serialism before selecting reverse to write music that audiences can actually relate to? After all, we remember a certain composer stating 'there is still plenty of good music to be written in C major'!

[eschiss1]

Schoenberg, for starters... (edit: if you mean "turn their back on 12-tone music with a big self-congratulatory flourish and went and never sinned again", no, but Schoenberg's late output has a number of tonal works in't.) (Edit 2: I'm looking at you, George Rochberg...)

[Alan Howe]

Quite so.

[John Boyer]

How many composers went down the cul-de-sac of serialism before selecting reverse to write music that audiences can actually relate to? After all, we remember a certain composer stating 'there is still plenty of good music to be written in C major'!

In the notes to the Cedille recording of the Cello Sonata, Blackwood made these very telling observations on the subject during a chat with James Ginsburg:
--

James Ginsburg: Despite your history of composing radical atonal works, you now refer to Arnold Schoenberg as the Karl Marx of music. What do you mean by that?
 
Easley Blackwood: Like Marx, Schoenberg spun out an array of theories that have now been proven historically incorrect. Though not a Marxist, Schoenberg's ideas sprang from the same source as Marx's: Hegelian philosophy. Schoenberg saw the evolution of music as a combination of theses and syntheses, with each synthesis bringing music to a higher plateau. He believed there would be a liberation from the tyranny of tonality which would bring something akin to a musical utopia, although he doesn't actually use that word. He thought audiences and musicians would come to accept his new dissonant language if they listened to it enough and became familiar with it, and that his music would come to be played at least as often as the music it was intended to supersede. Eighty years after Schoenberg first enunciated these beliefs, it has not happened. This despite considerable efforts by many musicians, composers, and even the Rockefeller Foundation. There is a small body of established, purely non-tonal music which consists almost entirely of dramatic pieces depicting degradation, mayhem, the ravings of a madman, and people cast into grotesque or abnormal roles -- the limit of what atonal music portrays effectively. The number of first-class, large-scale, entirely non-tonal works that are abstractions can be counted on the fingers of one hand. So as with Marx, history has proven Schoenberg wrong.
 
James Ginsburg: Are you concerned that some may complain that your "conservative" Cello Sonata lacks "cultural relevance"?
 
Easley Blackwood: I think the people who believe that music must have cultural relevance are looking at a very narrow aspect of musical expression. What is the cultural relevance of Mozart's cheerful last piano sonata, written during a very turbulent time in Europe? The pieces Beethoven wrote in 1814 and 1815 don't reflect the upheavals of that Napoleonic era. Nor does music become more tranquil between Napoleon's defeat and the revolutions of the 1840's. This notion that music must be culturally relevant is really a post-WW2 phenomenon invented largely, I think, to justify the emerging body of dissonant atonal music. I can't tell you how many times I have heard the argument advanced that because we live in an ugly, decadent age we need ugly, decadent music. As you can see, I don't agree with that. Even in my most radical atonal works my goal was to create something attractive. And, just as with my reactionary Cello Sonata, those works express only musical ideas -- a perfectly legitimate objective for a composer as far as I'm concerned.
--

It's important to note that Blackwood did not disown his earlier dissonant pieces -- he was happy to see them recorded along side his newer tonal pieces. 

You can hear samples of the conservative sonatas for cello and clarinet, along with the similarly conservative 3rd Quartet at the Cedille website -- and the dissonant stuff, too.  : )

[eschiss1]

The subject is not really in our remit but I believe Blackwood factually mistaken about the range of 12-tone music, especially since no two composers understood the idea the same way...

[Alan Howe]

He believed there would be a liberation from the tyranny of tonality

...by imposing (à la Boulez?) a different kind of tyranny? That way lay madness.

[eschiss1]

Given that Schoenberg never taught his students twelve-tone composition, afaik, unlikely.

(A lot of beliefs are attributed to people that they don't seem to have had, or about which one might say "... it's complicated". I've read a large selection of essays by Schoenberg and another book (and part of another) and can only remark that Blackwood's remarks at best apply to the composer at one point of his career- in his 50s, on the verge of solving a problem* and probably only in part.)

*Brief edit-- see next comment.

[eschiss1]

*Important edit: the thing about twelve-tone is that it came, for Schoenberg, out of a problem. Continuing to write tonal music wasn't for him, at the time, but just writing free atonal music produced only - for him - brief works - longer works only happening where a text was present to, as he put it later, help him in finding a source of (short and long-term) coherence. Tonality and common-practice - even stretched, as by Wagner and Reger - harmony - was a means to that end of coherence, but it, not tonality, was the goal. (And he never claimed that using a twelve-tone set magically achieved it, either. But it helped him try to find new means to obtain it. As he noted in at least one essay meant for teachers, a list could be prepared of things that aided and things that worked against coherence, however tonal a piece might otherwise be - like suddenly jumping register, or dropping an instrument and bringing it back -in- another register (without bringing some similar instrument back nearby), contrasting similar enough themes and dissimilar themes (e.g. in a rondo, if varying the rondo theme, not making one of the variations too similar to the contrasting refrain unwittingly), ...)

(As (the much-missed, imho) Professor Claudio Spies once pointed out in a class I took, Mendelssohn even at a very early age knew a number of these things- the orchestral arrangement of his 8th string symphony is careful to bring the winds back near where they were dropped after long rests, e.g., for continuity/coherence...)

[Alan Howe]

Given that Schoenberg never taught his students twelve-tone composition, afaik, unlikely.

He didn't have to. But it seems that Boulez came to the same sort of conclusion about where music had to go. Now, that is tyranny.

[eschiss1]

I'm not just thinking of Berg and Webern qua students; and agreed .

[John Boyer]

Schoenberg thought the glorious revolution would come of its own.  Boulez and his disciples wanted to impose it by force. 

But returning to Blackwood, his disillusion with atonalism is understandable.