ABSTRACT
Stockhausen’s notoriously arrogant aside to Morton Feldman - ‘ [I] once told Feldman that one of his pieces could be a moment in my music, but never the other way around’ 1 - is indicative of an attitude that cannot comprehend true simplicity in music. A simple ‘moment’ can be recognized as such only when posited against another, more complex moment. In Stockhausen’s music simplified moments are either set against other moments of greater complexity, or they fulfill a complex role in the total structure of the work; whereas Feldman’s simple work is a complete field in which moments of greater and/or lesser simplicity, if they occur at all, have no intended relational significance in the traditional sense. In what we call experimental music - loosely speaking, the music of the Cage ‘tradition’ - simplicity is something approaching a constant, an absolute, although there are obviously degrees of simplicity, just as there are degrees of complexity. Still, simplicity is not one alternative to be selected from the vast reservoir of means of expression or techniques upon which the avant-garde composer can draw as occasion, instrumentation, or compositional situation demands. The straightforwardness of most experimental music, which usually finds the most direct route to the effective presentation of the chosen sound material, might be interpreted by an outsider as a reaction to traditional and modernist intellectual complexity. But it has not simplified the complex technical paraphernalia which makes European art music respectable; it has quite bluntly ignored that paraphernalia, since the aesthetic, structural, and expressive requirements of the so-called New Simplicity demand the development of a totally different, independent (some might say naive, innocent, and simple-minded) compositional methodology.
