Professor Argersinger's War
The future of true classical music, art music, is at stake.

BY GARY LINDSEY

If you are passionate about anything, if there is a subject that has provoked you to debate, raised your blood pressure and given you the sense there are few who see your point, you have something in common with Professor Charles Argersinger. Hit the topic of classical music, TRUE classical music, ART music… and you’ve struck a chord. “We are fighting for the survival of classical music,” is the precise statement I remember him making. It wasn’t just the words but the passion and conviction which made me want to tell his story.

The sum total of everything I know about classical music is thanks to Professor Argersinger over the course of several interviews. We started with the basics. While the expression “classical music” is often applied by the public to any musical era prior to modern times, technically it only applies to western European music of the eighteenth century. Therefore, the general term “art music” is more appropriate to noncommercial music of any historical period.

If you are vague about the terms “true” and “art” as they pertain to classical music, a discussion with Charles Argersinger will solve that. “Art music,” he will tell you, “is designed to inspire humanity for the ages. Upon the thousandth hearing of a work by Bach, for instance, we are still discovering new meaning. In contrast, commercial music, by definition, is designed to be understood completely when we’ve heard the music only a few times. After that, we set aside the current top-40 hit and buy the next one and the next one. While one type of music is not necessarily better than another one, there is a clearly marked distinction between them and their intent.” In the book Future Shock, Alvin Toffler describes commercial music to be an artifact of our “throw-away culture” based on planned obsolescence. “We must not miss the distinction.”

Dr. Argersinger is a composer and coordinator of music composition and theory at Washington State University and he lives, breathes and composes true classical music, the type that, according to Argersinger, is in jeopardy of being lost unless his battle to save it is successful.

I believe anyone who knows Dr. Argersinger would describe him as contemplative and thoughtful. He appears so, in part, because of the silver and gray beard which he says is, “expected for a composer.”

I haven’t known Argersinger long enough to know if he’s always needed glasses or whether he’s always squinted. I see him remove and replace his bifocals with the mechanical precision which makes me believe years of practice have perfected the routine. I imagine, also, that years of scripting music created his occasional squint.

In the midst of a meaningful exchange, Argersinger may take long breaks from eye contact. His thoughts seem connected to muscles that cause his brow to furrow and eyes to scrunch. His mind is like a computer; after all, math is a favorite pastime. You can see him doing a mental “google” search for the precise language to help him make his point.

Charles comes by his passions, composing and mathematics, naturally. As a child growing up in Phoenix, Arizona, he was tutored by parents who were mathematicians by profession and musicians by hobby. He recalls trying to emulate the compositions of Mozart and Beethoven at the age of nine or ten. Charles’ younger sister, Nancy, is also a musician. She plays the oboe and is married to Jeffrey Hass, director of the Indiana University Center for Electronic and Computer Music.

The Argersinger legacy of math and music continues. Argersinger’s son, nine year old Forest, just started taking clarinet lessons and spends at least an hour a day doing math with his dad. Dr. Argersinger sets aside another hour for baseball.

Argersinger’s wife, Jana, also works at Washington State University as an associate editor of two scholarly journals in the English Department. Jana and Charles met at Arizona State while he was working on his master’s. He was a teaching assistant for one of Jana’s classes. “She was so beautiful and smart,” Charles recalls. He admits he had ulterior motives when he wrote across one of her papers, “you need to see me about this assignment.” She did. The rest, as they say, is history.

After attaining his master’s and the love of his life at Arizona State, Charles got his Ph.D. and a critical part of his composer’s family tree at the University of Minnesota. “Every composer,” Charles says, “can trace his or her lineage. When a student composer chooses a grad school, he or she chooses a composer as much as a school.” In the world of composition, the world of composition, the legacy matters; and so does the philosophy of the composers in your family tree, because their beliefs, in some way, become your own. And so it was with Argersinger and his mentor, Pulitzer Prize winning opera composer Dominick Argento.

On Argersinger’s website, the description of his family tree reads as follows: “As a student of Dominick Argento, Grant Fletcher, Paul Fetler, and Ronald LoPresti, who were in turn students of Hugo Weisgall, Ernst Krenek, Paul Hindemith, and Bernard Rogers, Argersinger is guided by aesthetic beliefs which spring from the compositional genetic code he inherited.”

So what is this “code” or belief that Argersinger shares with Argento and the others on his family tree? “I believe that the power of music flows from the analogy it presents us with for the drama of our everyday lives. All the tensions and resolutions we experience throughout our days, from the smallest scale to the largest, are mirrored in the abstract language of music,” Argersinger says. “If contemporary art music is so constructed as to deny any resolutions, by whatever mathematical system, then that music loses much of its meaning to humanity. Our lives and our beloved music are governed by the fluctuations of tension and release.”

The antithesis of Argersinger’s style is composition derived from a purely mathematical formula, music Argersinger describes as “unendingly dissident, strident and severe. The beauty of math,” says Argersinger, “does not give rise to the beauty of music. Compositions derived purely by mathematical formulation bypass the part of the psyche we call intuition.”

At the heart of this difference are pivotal changes in the way music is nurtured in the United States. Simply stated, during the 20th century, universities became the patrons of composers. Many, if not most of these composers, Argersinger contends, are producing purely academic music which he calls “overly dissident, without a tonal center and mathematical in nature.” And there is the brutal reality of numbers. The bottom line is, there are more of them than there are those who share the convictions of Dr. Argersinger. Considering the composer’s family tree phenomenon it’s not difficult to see why the professor believes his style of classical music is in jeopardy.

Argersinger is fighting back. He took matters into his own hands 14 years ago and started the New Music Festival at Washington State University. Each February the event recognizes original composition by faculty and students and presents new work by nationally known composers who create the kind of art music Argersinger wants to promote. His goal is to raise the event to international prominence so that his message and the composers’ works might be heard. Beneath the struggle is this simple expression which summarizes why Charles Argersinger is putting up the good fight: “ I think our modern society would be greatly enriched by embracing contemporary art music, particularly that which is intuitively designed to mirror the human experience.”

To read more about Professor Argersinger and to hear samples of his work, visit his Web site at http://www.charlesargersinger.com