Fear of Music

Why People Get Rothko But Don't Get Stockhausen

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Contents

Schism

October 2007. The Tate Modern, London. Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth is on exhibition in the sloping, forbiddingly cavernous Turbine Hall. The "Shibboleth" consists of what appears to be a long, zig-zagging crack running through the floor of the hall, which grows from barely more than a scratch in the tiling at the hall's entrance, to a much larger fissure, like a miniature canyon, some 30 or 40 metres wide at the point where most visitors congregate. As you enter the hall, attendants press leaflets into your hand reading "Warning: Please watch your step in the Turbine Hall. Please keep your children under supervision." Come the end of the year and 19 lawsuits have been brought against the Tate Modern by visitors claiming to have been injured by this exhibit.

Today, however, nobody looks at all put out by the schism in the floor. The Tate Modern, very probably the UK's leading tourist destination, is packed, with practically every demographic, every continent, represented. Do a 360 degree swivel and they are all there. In the cafe seats overlooking the Turbine Hall, a pensioner munches diffidently on a damp sandwich. Slumped against the far wall are a couple of down and outs, clutching warm tins of lager, taking in the human traffic. To and fro pass old Americans, young Europeans, huddles of women, single men, families with infants in buggies, retired couples, foreign students, and excited school kids. One tourist and his wife dutifully read aloud in monotone the notes to Shibboleth in the leaflet forced on them, as if reading an instruction manual. "Walking down Salcedo's incised line ... particularly if you know about her previous work, might well prompt a broader consideration of power's divisive operations as encoded in the brutal narratives of colonialism, their unhappy aftermaths in postcolonial nations, and in the stand-off between rich and poor, northern and southern hemispheres."

Now, here I observe an altogether different schism – between the notes and the reality out on the floor. People are enjoying Salcedo's exhibit, enjoying it thoroughly. They marvel aloud at the technical aspects, revere the leap of "creative imagination" it took to conceive of such a thing, such a breach beneath their very feet. They stand astride the schism and snap each other on their mobile phones and digital cameras. They stick their hands down the schism. Since the work of art in this particular case isn't a solid object but an absence of solid object, is that schism, that bit of fresh air they've just stuck their hands in, the work of art? Are they, therefore, in technical, naughty breach of the Do Not Touch rule, that invisible force field which still surrounds gallery art?

One young lad snatches his hand in and out, as if afraid that the curators have set up some sort of electric shock device for transgressors. What no one is doing, if their cheerful demeanour is anything to go by, is contemplating the brutal narratives of colonialism or their unhappy aftermaths in post-colonial nations. This is not because these good people are indifferent to colonialist brutality or its after-effects, or too stupid to make the connection. It is simply, one suspects, that the connection has been hitched on, as an act of piety, to validate and lend a proper conceptual gravitas to this particular artistic act, to satisfy the needs, spoken or otherwise, of everybody involved – the artist, the curator, the sponsors Unilever, the director of the Tate Modern Sir Nicholas Serota, even the visitors who are comforted to know that there is some latent, morally nutritious purpose to their joyride down this fissure, freeing them up to enjoy it – as spectacle, subversion, fun. And after all, why not? There is, after all, insufficient data inscribed in the Shibboleth itself to make its ostensibly didactic purpose an effective one.

I amble around the rest of the gallery. I should say, I'm no Man Apart from the Common Herd, disdaining the unwashed populace gawping at these priceless works of which they have no comprehension. In the expressions of my fellow visitors I detect the same mixture in them that's buoying me up and weighing me down – the barely stifled urge to yawn deeply, coupled with a sense of serenity and curiosity, a sense of a mental cloudiness that no amount of forced concentration will dispel, coupled with the occasional, piercing shaft of epiphany and joy in the face of, say, a Chirico, the sense of having somehow been fed and watered at a deeper level, coupled with a craving for a cup of tea and a blueberry muffin. I tag onto a group being led around by a kindly, in-house guide, who explains in plain but not inaccurate terms the significance of the replica of Marcel Duchamp's urinal, signed "R. Mutt". Was the urinal violating the cordoned off, sacred space of the art gallery, or, more likely, freeing up ideas of what sort of thing was admissible in the gallery, and by whom? Another work, by the recently deceased American minimalist artist Sol LeWitt presents a new and special set of problems. The work consists of a matrix of white lines, chalked in geometric and criss-cross fashion across a number of blackboards. What's most noteworthy is the way in which this piece must be transported, should another gallery, say, in Paris, wish to exhibit it. What would then happen is that workers at the Tate Modern would scrub out the lines on the boards they had erected, thereby erasing the work. It would then rematerialise in Paris, redrawn by their gallery's people, following strict instructions from the artist. The "work" here is not the physical thing but the "immaterial" concept, with great lengths travelled in order to preserve its sacrosanctness.

I stroll around the rest of the galleries, milling curiously, appreciatively, dutifully, rapt with boredom, fascinated and fatigued, just like everybody else – works by Luc Tuymans, Marlene Dumas, Fiona Rae. Some of the more abstract works, only decades old, seem dead and encrusted in their frames, like flattened-out fossils, products of a vanished, utopian era. I look at Max Ernsts's Celebes, with its docile, elephantine, machine-type figure beckoned away by a headless mannequin. In a moment of fleeting smugness, I do recall looking at this same picture at the old Tate Gallery on Millbank, back in the mid-Eighties, in relatively sparse company. But were those really better times?

The corridors of the Tate Modern are rife with marketing stratagems and messages designed to catch the corner of the eye. Apparently, "The Tate sends 250,000 email bulletins each month."

That's good, you suppose. And then, there is a timeline, set out in the same perkily handwritten font as you see displayed out the more whimsically minded coffee outlets at city railway stations.

It's a timeline of modern art throughout the 20th-century and beyond, an inky shoal of the great and good swimming through the 20thcentury and into the 21st – from Picasso through to Rae, Chapman, Emin and even Christian Marclay and Mike Kelley, who cross over between the visual and sound arts. The time line is interspersed with reminders of what else was happening in the 20th-century at any given point, be it Josephine Baker, World War II, or The Beatles.

For many, the holy of holies of the Tate Modern is the Rothko Room, featuring the Seagram Murals. Assisted, unfairly perhaps, by being bathed in a half-light, Rothko's murals go some way to transcending the limits of the canvas, simulating the all-enveloping, dark ambient, abstract effects of a certain kind of music. Rothko speaks, gloomily, of emulating Michaelangelo's Laurentian Library in Florence, constructed in the 16th-century and there's the same sense of being "trapped", in a chamber in which total absorption is compulsory but the experience is deeply compelling. It's more than a hush that descends upon the random collection of strangers assembled briefly together in the presence of Red On Maroon. It's as if the painting is surpassing itself, emitting inaudible, cryptic but urgent drones. Brian Duffy, the sound artist and creator of "circuit bending" avant pop group The Modified Toy Orchestra, believes that the secret of Rothko is his supreme acumen in the abstract domain. "The first time I walked into Rothko Room I felt depressed; but in fact, to be so in control of your medium as to get exactly the right frequency of light to make me feel depressed is a masterstroke, showing complete control of his medium. He's a craftsman of frequency. He's saying something that couldn't be said any other way."

Mark Rothko, like many artists, had a strong association with contemporary and comparative musicians of his day. John Cage had his Robert Rauschenberg; Rothko had his Morton Feldman, who wrote a beautiful, commemorative piece on the opening of the Rothko Chapel in 1971 in Houston, Texas. What, then, of the Tate Modern's musical dimension? In the main shop, art, photography, cinema, sculpture, design, architecture, are all well represented in the books section, sternly overlooking the sillier plethora of souvenir scarves, mugs, etc. But music? Well, there's a solitary CD by Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner, and a small selection of CDs on the LTM label, collating scratchy recordings of the Futurists, interviews with Surrealists and the like. And that is your lot.

The success of the Tate Modern, since its opening in 2000 on Bankside, is indisputable. Transformed from what was a miserably blackened, imposing but ignored husk of a former power station, it's now one of the vital engines in Thameside London's regeneration as one of Europe's main tourist attractions, linked by a new pedestrian bridge and nestled amid a flotilla of new restaurants. Much of its success is down to the dark, contemporary arts of marketing and (re)branding and to the enterprise and zeal of Nicholas Serota. It has a nice selection of drinking and dining options and commanding views. However, the Tate would not, could not, be the phenomenon it is today had there not been an acceptance by the general public of contemporary art in all its forms – abstract, conceptual, non-figurative, collage. You could send out all the emails you like, flag up the featured artists in as whimsical a font as you please, the Thames could be twinkling turquoise beneath you, but the precondition for getting people through those doors has to be a genuine desire on the part of a great many of them to come and see some avant garde visual art. Their reasons for wanting to do so may be open to doubt and debate, the levels of their comprehension and appreciation varying but what is beyond dispute is that the Tate is regularly crammed to the rafters because people haven't just learned to tolerate the likes of Pollock, Rothko and De Kooning – they're willing to give up their precious afternoons to come and behold their works. Sure, you will still find the odd, disgruntled voice of dissent in the letters pages of the Telegraph, the grandparent whose views on modern art are informed by 1970s Daily Mail articles fulminating against piles of bricks in galleries subsidised by the Arts Council, as well as the annual parade of huffing and snorting against some chap dressed as a bloody bear winning the Turner Prize. There are even The Stuckists, who with an eloquence and purpose not to be sniffed at, have set up their own rearguard action against the nonfigurative tendencies of modern art. However, the fact is that it is commonly understood that it is simply not done, when confronted with a piece of abstract expressionist art, to yelp, as did Tony Hancock in The Rebel, "Who's gone raving mad here, then?"

Contemporary art is headline news. When Hugh Grant sold on his Andy Warhol portrait of Elizabeth Taylor in 1963 at a huge profit in 2007, it was all over the papers and TV for days. Granted, this was in part because of the triple whammy of celebrities involved – Hugh, Andy, Liz. However, in May of 2007, there was a series of record-breaking purchases of post-war art. Francis Bacon's portrait Study From Innocent X fetched $52.6m (£26.5m) at Sotheby's in New York – almost double the previous record for a Bacon work. There followed a price of $72.8m (£36.7m) for Mark Rothko's 1950 work White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose). 15 artists saw new auction records set for their work, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose untitled work from 1981 fetched $14.6m (£7.4m), almost three times his previous best. This showed that for whatever reasons, recognition of the value of contemporary art has come a long way since 1916, when Hans Arp, one of the first abstract artists, was commissioned to paint the entrance to a girl's school in Zurich. The principal was so appalled by the non-representative blobs of colour they offered, that he at once ordered for the offending frescoes to be painted over with a mercifully figurative work entitled "Mothers, Leading Children By The Hand".

Today, modern art is accepted at all levels, from pavement to penthouse corporate. But what has become of its musical equivalent? Both music and the visual arts entered upon their eras of modernity in the first decade of the 20th-century – modern art with Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'Avignon, in which one of the female sitters' faces looks to have been violently supplanted by some sort of African mask. Around the same time, Arnold Schoenberg is composing the very first of his "atonal" works, thereby bringing the whole harmonically developed structure of classical music crashing down. A few years later, Luigi Russolo writes his Art Of Noise Futurist manifesto; jazz's birth pangs and development en route to its own "dissonance" become increasingly audible, via correspondence, Kandinsky and Schoenberg try to establish some sort of art/musical synaesthetic Gesamtkunstwerk.

And yet, today, their fates are very different. In his formidable survey of 20th-century music The Rest Is Noise, New Yorker critic Alex Ross, touches on this. "While the splattered abstractions of Jackson Pollock sell on the art market for a hundred million dollars or more ... the equivalent in music still sends ripples of unease through concert audiences and makes little discernible impact on the outside world." The same people who flock from miles around to mill in the presence of abstract art run screaming, hands clasped to their ears like Munch females, from "abstract music". Well, perhaps that's to overdramatise their response. More likely, on the rare and fleeting occasions on which they bump into such music, perhaps by accident on Resonance FM, they'll dismiss it with a "what's this racket? Turn it off!" Or calmly operate the switch themselves, turning towards some more temperate destination on the dial.

A measure of contrasting contemporary attitudes towards the twin avant gardes can be found in responses to the death of Karlheinz Stockhausen. The obituary writers gave him a respectable send-off, but Private Eye's EJ Thribb offered the following, In Memoriam.

"So. Farewell Then Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Famous modern Composer.

All together Now Bing. Bang!

Three-minute silence Knock. Knock. Beep. Plonk. Bang! Whirrr ...

I hope I Have got This right."

Meanwhile, the Guardian obituary was followed up by a one line letter from one its correspondents suggesting that a fitting tribute to the late composer would be to stage one minute's cacophony.

All of this could be added to a pile of similarly wheezily labouring mirth, much of which is collected, in cartoon form, on Stockhausen's own website. A 2004 cartoon in The Guardian shows a surgeon explaining to his patient on the operating table, "No, it's not Stockhausen – we've just dropped a tray of surgical instruments." One can only hope in all charity that there was some additional bit of context that might have made this even half-funny at the time. Another shows a piano tuner asking the owner of the Steinway. "When did you first notice that your Mozart sounded like Stockhausen?" The late Punch magazine added a couple of their own. A jogger's curiously squiggly progress is explained by the fact that he is listening to Stockhausen on his Walkman. Another cartoon features upstairs neighbours po-going about randomly and smashing a ping pong ball hither and yon as their downstairs neighbours complain, "It sounds like those bloody idiots upstairs are playing their Stockhausen records again."

Now, there is nothing wrong, in principle, with anyone taking an irreverent dig at the High Arts. It does little to abate the smirkers, it must be said, when the press release on Stockhausen's demise contains the following sentiment, penned by one of his adorers; "On December 5th he ascended with JOY through HEAVEN'S DOOR, in order to continue to compose in PARADISE with COSMIC PULSES in eternal HARMONY, as he had always hoped to do." However, the jokes I cite above I found offensive not as a lover of avant garde music but as a lover of comedy. They are feeble – but it is such a cultural given, a default setting, that Stockhausen be automatically derided, that no one apparently feels the need to work very hard at the quality of jokes at his expense. Stockhausen, you see, is a joke – or so goes the (un)thinking.