Letters to the Editor

What You Say

WIGGLE ROOM

Hey Brian, build your compost heap and they will come [Editor's Letter, "Reusefulness," Brian Howard, June 17]. You don't need to buy worms or anything fancy. Just put a frame of some sort filled with compostables over a crack in the cement and the worms will find it. It might take 'em a while, but they'll be fruitful and multiply. I've been doing it that way for six years and any pot, bucket or even a shoe that is sitting near a crack soon has a gaggle of worms under it, year round. Good luck!

Your story on the WXPN layoffs begs some added information and interpretation [Naked City, "A Million Stories," June 17]. First, they pulled the trigger on those layoffs almost immediately after WXPN hosted its annual NON-COMM conference, which draws radio, record and music people from all over the country. Layoffs before the conference would have surely soured the atmosphere, especially as several of those laid off were there representing for WXPN.

Also reading between the lines of WXPN station manager Roger LeMay's comments on why they are dropping the Y-Rock brand — when he says "the audience was not really showing up" for the night hours it was on — what he is really saying is that the attempt to draw a younger audience than the ever-graying audience for WXPN's regular daytime programming simply did not work. And even if they had drawn a younger audience, there is the open question of whether [that audience] would have supported the programming with donations to the station. That younger audience figures to have less disposable income than the grayer crowd. Also that demographic is notoriously fickle, and trying to capture that different generation is very difficult. It risks alienating a generous portion of the audience that gives them their dollars.

I picked up a copy of City Paper today, and was immediately drawn to the title of the Suite Spot column [Music, "Habeas Corpus," Peter Burwasser, June 10]. Rochberg is an excellent composer, and I completely agree with the sentiment that an ability and desire to write in different styles does not make one a traitor to the "genre" the composer is placed into by their peers and listeners. However, as Mr. Burwasser was extolling a composer who broke free of this idea, he was also encouraging stereotypes about Rochberg's previous works, Arnold Schoenberg and 20th-century music in general.

Serialism was not invented by Arnold Schoenberg. His students, Webern and Berg, were the actual creators of a system for writing "serial" music. Schoenberg simply developed a "12-tone technique" that he used to take his musical ideas and put them on paper. He did not create matrices that showed all possible retrogrades, inversions and retrograde-inversions of the original 12-tone row, and did not follow the "rules" of serialism later set forth by his students (which they didn't even follow themselves). Schoenberg was constantly driven to depression by this type of analysis of his work and of music in general. ... Also, I am a firm believer in his idea that any music involving tones must be tonal. Atonality and dissonance do not exist. They are simply ways of classifying musical ideas to which our ears are not yet accustomed. In Gregorian chant, a major third was "atonal," and the tritone was banned by the church as the "devil's interval" for hundreds of years.

Classification of music is typically worthless, unless one is trying to provide a very general overview of music history, both because it allows us to generalize about a composer without actually listening to what the composer is trying to say, as well as the fact that the labels always change years later. No one called Led Zepplin "classic rock" in the 1970s. Don't get me wrong; most of the information was great! But I believe the words "atonal" and "serialism" are simply ways of explaining something one doesn't understand, and that they create a distance between the composer and their prospective listeners. A person who reads this article and has no previous knowledge of classical music is not going to go out and find music by Arnold Schoenberg or George Rochberg because Mr. Burwasser has already placed them into categories of which the general public is afraid.

So, thank you for the attempt to justify Rochberg's change in style, but in order to expose people to the great music of these composers, we must first make sure they aren't afraid of it.