Double 70s

Dan Albertson

[June 2025.]

[With warm congratulations to the newly minted doctor Fang Ge 方戈.]

Oh, but tell me, how do I say?
I woke up and it’s yesterday

– Television, “Guiding Light” (1977)

Anniversaries of rounded numbers, when applied to the living, are reminders of decline as much as potency, serving to point out the continuing relevance, or overdue obsolescence, of their celebrants. The two subjects of this article were born in different seasons in 1955 and both, alas, fall into the second category.

M:

Our beloved Walt Mundkowsky left five years ago. His acerbity never softened with age, and we love him even more for it. Dig into his archives here.

D:

Pascal Dusapin, perhaps the signature composer of his generation in France, though by no means its most talented (oh, but that hair, you say! As usual, one must not conflate frequency of appearance with genius), has long since lapsed into musical irrelevance. Last sampled here, he has subsequently plumbed worse and cheesier depths. What happened to the sense of urgency and the compact power of three or four decades ago, when the titles and their durations were equals in pith? What happened to Aks and Cascando and Fist and Itou and so on? In straitened situations, one could even defend some of the later Solos for orchestra and a stage work or two, but for 20 years or more, the palette has narrowed, and the emotional range – in translation: the cringe factor – has broadened while the musical content – read: the invention – has diminished. Sure, sure, a composer, a human, matures, pursues different passions. No one argues for more of the same, but is it too much to ask for some semblance of quality control?

He has, nonetheless, inspired some choice bons mots. One, from the late Richard Toop, referring to his then-recent listening habits, reads: “The worst was Dusapin’s appalling violin concerto Aufgang (Untergang would be more like it).” The other, from a composer not to be identified, one with a vast, perhaps endlessly rich imagination (and you know who you are), goes approximately as follows in English: “If you read a program note that prepares you for Xenakis and what you get is Saint-Saëns, Dusapin must be the culprit.”

H:

Toshio Hosokawa, a Pierre Boulez wannabe in his ambition to be a cultural emperor, has been stalled since the 1990s in an orchestral style that, while endearing once or twice, has now gone on for work after work. Circulating Ocean is apt not only as the title of one such piece, but as a metaphor for what he does, these narrow tides he churns over and over.

Unlike Dusapin, Hosokawa was never brilliant. Early works, whether for chamber forces (often centered around the string quartet) or mixtures of Japanese and western forces, tend toward dryness, an austerity founded on Europeans appreciating the faux orientalism of the Japanese in their midst. Later works, less buttoned-up and of a more personal nature, show only the limitations of his imagination. Hosokawa is ultimately a reactionary, not only in style, but also in his role as cultural arbitrator of the most cliquish, obsequious sort.

When composers become institutions – no, are enabled to become institutions – the question is no longer one of creative necessity, as there is no imperative. No, it is merely about the continuance of a set of formulae, and by extension the accrual of capital alongside this repetition: artists in autopilot, with the right political connections to continue their treadmills to senility. The paradoxical nature of this situation, not unique to our times, is that the less distinctive one’s voice becomes, the more celebrated said artist becomes. Let us phrase it as follows: the factor of adoration increases as the factor of creativity decreases. Success proves to be a failure. Jean-Paul Sartre, for all his faults, was right in refusing to become an institution, because once one is an institution, game over.