Why new music is in trouble
NewsWe’ve just seen a report from Donaueschingen, the world’s oldest new music festival (if that’s not a contradiction in terms), dating back to 1921.
The festival has been fading for decades.
This year’s title was ‘Alone Together.’
The subtheme was ‘um das Verhältnis des Individuums zur Gruppe als Grundbaustein in der Kunst‘ – about the relationship of the individual to the group as a foundation stone in art’.
Now that’s marketing language for the 21st century.
Genius.
pictured: 2 late men in b/w raincoats at Donaueschingen
What exactly is your point?
Norman, there is something wrong with the entire website, I keep getting redirected to random pages like T mobile, RCN etc few seconds after it loads. Tried erasing cookies and all but the problem persists.
we’ll look into it.
I keep getting redirected to a site posing as the “CableOne” company. Just close the window on that one.
Those pages may say they’re T Mobile, or McAfee, etc. — but if you look at the URL, you see that they’re not. I immediately halt the browser (Firefox, in my case), then reload it, and when I connect to the same SD page, it no longer gets replaced by the random scam. The phenomenon crops up infrequently, perhaps once every few dozen SD pages, but it’s annoying. I should see if it persists if I use a different browser. Hope this info helps with the sleuthing.
New music is in trouble because new music is so lousy.
Well sure, but I‘d far rather something of this kind than more nauseating guff about being thrilled, excited, re-imagining and journeys…
And this is why I love this website.
The two men in raincoats in the photo are the famous/infamous (!!) composers Karlheinz Stockhausen (on the left) and Pierre Boulez.
Billy: ‘Really? I would never guess it.’
and no one is interested in either except a handful plus the media
basta
The picture was taken just after they had suddenly discovered there was a note missing in Webern’s 12-tone Symphony’s tone row.
‘Alone together’ and ‘about the relationship of the individual to the group as a foundation stone in art’ reads as unintentionally very ironic.
Both Darmstadt and Donaueschingen were set-up specifically to further the ’cause’ of modernism, that is: the atonal ‘school’ of composing as it developed in the wake of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, and was seen – in postwar WW II Europe – as ‘the only possible way forward’. Especially In Germany, where the nazis had labelled all atonal works as ‘entartet’, they were considered as morally OK and thus could form the basis of a new musical art, beginning from scratch, i.e. completely cutting-off the past of the entire Western classical tradition. And they formed groups, and a ‘school’, trying to give the enterprise a respectability it never got in the reality of concert life where audiences did not warm to it.
Also, in no stylistic movement ever in music history, the mindset was more totalitarian than the 20C ‘Avantgarde’ was. So, these sonic artists were ‘alone together’ in a most defensive position, hence the specialist modernist festivals like Donaueschingen. And now modernism has turned into history, and concert life has moved-on, in all its problematic transformations, the old avantgarde has nothing to contribute, because it never had anything of musical content to contribute. It wanted something very different.
“Both Darmstadt and Donaueschingen were set-up specifically to further the ’cause’ of modernism, that is: the atonal ‘school’ of composing as it developed in the wake of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern”
This is false. Histories of Darmstadt show that the earliest years were dominated by Hindemith’s music especially, and the emphasis on 12-tone serialism leading to the Darmstadt stereotype came only later.
The early years of Darmstadt were indeed not modernist, but since most of the people running it were found to be something like ex-nazis, they were removed and other people brought-in, who moved away from all that burdened past.
(Toby Thacker, ‘Music after Hitler, 1945-1955’, Ashgate Publishing Ltd 2007)
The only group more totalitarian than the mid-20c avant-garde are the Tonalism Fascists, who just don’t want to accept there’s plenty of room for both tonal and atonal music, that both can be expressive in different but meaningful ways. It really doesn’t have to be one or the other. Some people even like both, imagine that!
I don’t agree, I prefer Boulez most of the time & when I have to attend a classical concert due to my work, I’m bored to death really. You can not listen to your cake and eat it! You have to take position… and orchestras are fascist, for sure! They force you to hear triads and scales all of the time and audiences fall asleep. Thank god we got out of all that, thanks to my favorite composer PB.
Sally
‘Atonal music’ is an oxymoron. Atonality is noise, not music. The difference between them is that noise cannot be remembered, note for note, decades later. It does not resonate. I can still remember music note for note from the 1960s, which I have not heard since then. And I can compare these memories with new recordings of the same music and realise how these new recordings often lack the most important ingredient of music in my opinion, namely emotional content or passion. What noises can one remember just a week ago? Emotion is what makes us human. The likes of Boulez seem compelled to behave in a sub-human way – doubtless they have deep psychological problems.
Atonal music = sonic art / sound art / Klangkunst and has to be judged aesthetically / artistically on its own merits. Listening to it as music reveals the emptiness it necessarily has.
As for psycho problems: of course…. Boulez was emotionally severely suppressed (‘I will be the first composer without a biography’), Xenakis was an engineer and fought in WW II when he lost an eye, Stockhausen as a teenager helped in a lazaret during allied bombing in Cologne trying to treat dying civilians, Bernd Alois Zimmermann was depressed and took his own life, etc. etc. All these people were damaged and moulded by their time, and their imagination – as much as it was – reproduced their experiences.
One of the tragedies of the classical music world is that it sees itself as a museum culture, and when a new work is performed, it thinks that only what sounds like ‘the modern world’ should somehow be worthwhile – as if that could possibly be a standard of quality. And then, often sonic art is played hoping it will be recognized as ‘contemporary’, forgetting the aesthetics are half a century old.
Yeah, right. They rightly call out the racket of ugly music by losers who can’t compose and thus, they are fascists.
When Pierre-Laurent Aimard presents the premiere of a work, “…selig ist…”, composed for him by Mark Andre, the festival isn’t necessarily in decline — maybe just its marketing language is. Here’s an article previewing the work: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/17/arts/music/mark-andre-music-selig-ist.html (I haven’t seen a review of the performance).
New music is thriving: just listen to ‘Grounded’ at the Met. Genius.
Oh dear….
Avantgarde is not so cool anymore, it became the very thing it should combat: institutional production of “art” by patronized self-served “intelectuals”.
New Music is in trouble, and has been for quite some time, because much of it is incredibly bad, and therefore very few people actually want to listen to it for purely musical reasons. The overwhelming majority of those who do listen to it, do so out of an injunction dictated by institutional pressure, sometimes out of sheer snobbery or out of a belief to be keeping up with what’s currently fashionable, but rarely out of a sense of genuine enjoyment. Much of this music fails to make any significant claim on our collective musical sense.
There are indeed very talented composers today, but these tend to write in an idiom that has not shun tonality altogether. Their music may not have a key signature per se, but is still driven by what one might call “tonal centers.” There are very good reasons why a Händel aria still speaks so powerfully to us today, and why we often struggle with much of so-called “new music,” and it’s not because of the facile theory according to which what we don’t understand must necessarily be profound — it’s because the attempt to eradicate tonal relationships (as well as melody) is met with extreme resistance by human understanding. Even Stockhausen, and at times even Boulez, used tonal relationships in their own music, although the latter would probably be loath to recognize it. And Schoenberg never regained a greatness equal to his Gurrelieder once he turned to atonality, although his early atonal works, such as Pierrot Lunaire or his Piano Pieces Op. 11, still remain tonal in several respects. A similar claim could be made for much of Berg’s output, which remains clearly indebted to tonality.
All true.
New music is in trouble, because it fails to produce enough good art that speaks directly to the human condition and subconscious, in a gratifying way.
The trouble referred to in the title isn’t about what the article implies.
Its cause is far simpler: there has been a large-scale disregard (for many decades now) of clear and sustained melody. Most “concert composers” avoid it. In fact, they’ve been trained to do so.
Conservatory education requires young composers to take classes in instrumentation and orchestration, in advanced harmony, in Schenkerian structural analysis, and in the technical complexities of working with electronics and synthesizer. All of this is good! But courses in melody? They hardly exist.
Songwriting courses, perhaps. (Though even these are often not required.) The study of melody against melody in counterpoint? Yes. (Though strict contrapuntal education is getting rarer and rarer.)
But melody, just so? It’s almost never studied at length and in technical and historical depth. It is not shown that elemental respect.
So, it’s no surprise that there’s been a dearth–almost a desert–of fresh, original, soaring, stirring, long-arching, surprising yet immediately convincing melody in the current world of “new music.”
We know the wonderful melodies of Prokofiev, Bartok, and other pre-WW II “new music” masters. Then there’s Barber, Bernstein and others right afterwards. But who can we name since, say, 1965 or so? Who are the recent, let alone the current, masters of melody?
Who, among the vast public of music lovers, spontaneously sings or hums their tunes?
The only people I can think of who have added richly to the history of melody are the best of our cinematic composers, such as John Williams, or the best of our popular songwriters.
The world of “new music” concert composers is a world which has turned its back on as crucial as any element in music. Mozart minus melody? Beethoven? Bach? Debussy? Brahms? Ravel? Shostakovich? Mahler? Haydn? Chopin? Monteverdi?
Inconceivable!
Sincerely,
Edward Green
Professor Emeritus
Manhattan School of Music
While “lack of melody” is an explanation that many readily turn to, it doesn’t seem supported by developments in the pop music world, where Autechre concerts regularly sell out, and Merzbow has been booked for major festivals. Try humming the tracks they have made over the last decades.
Time will tell. Let’s check in, say, in 5 years and see whether Autechre and Merzbow have sustained their appeal, or not.
What a non-sequitur of a reply. Merzbow has been around for over four decades now, Autechre’s less conventional direction for a quarter of a century. Whether these artists have sustained appeal indefinitely is irrelevant to the fact that they have established truly popular, commercially successful appeal even without pursuing conventional melody. Therefore, what keeps audiences away from comparable modernist-classical composers may be other sociocultural factors than melody in the music itself. (I’m doubtful whether even certain melodic classical composers will stand the test of time in the wake of current and possible social revolutions.)
Typo on my part earlier. I meant 50 years. The ability to remain deeply communicative and cared for after the distance of several generations tends to point to enduring artistic value, and bit just a more temporary (even generational) appeal.
They will, if they are capable of getting to the roots of the Western classical tradition (in the widest sense) in an authenic, i.e. personally honest way. The difficulty of this is not technical (because everything can be learned from the existing repertoire), but of personality structure. The great works of the past are born from a world with very different psychology, and much of that has been lost in the modern world.
Great point. There is a giant box of romantic compositions that moment-to-moment are nice but, due to the lack of melody, are totally forgetable. I am puzzled why John Williams’ concern works are so devoid of melody that feature that makes him such a great film composer. If the audience ain’t humming it after the performance, it’s likely a loser.
There’s a long history (alas) of composers who get (for lack of a better word) “embarrassed” by their melodic gifts as they work on what has been called “serious” music. (All sincere music is serious, obviously. ) With the result that their more purely “absolute” concert works are stiffer, less truly melodic than their “pop” music–and suffer because of it.
Think of Arthur Sullivan, for example. Or Vernon Duke. Or Miklos Rosza. Or Bernard Herrmann. Or (in the jazz field) Charles Mingus. Or, in the rock field, Paul McCartney and Billy Joel.
Williams is hardly alone.
The desire to be “impressive” — in the academic sense — can take over, without a person even being conscious of it.
One sees the sad phenomenon to a degree in Copland and even in Bernstein. Gershwin was largely on track to avoid that baleful split in his musical output, but died too young to accomplish the complete synthesis he was after: the oneness of structural sophistication and wonderfully immediate melody.
(Which is exactly what we see in all great composers, such as the people I mentioned in my initial post.)
What a pity! What a model Gershwin could have been.
And if you don’t believe me, just look up what Arnold Schoenberg said in honor of Gershwin right after his death.
Edits: I meant “enduringly,” not ensure. Also “few” and far between, not free….
Thanks for correcting all this before posting. The errors arise from typing while on a moving bus in NYC traffic.
This comment handles much too low standards.
Hardly any audience member hearing Debussy or Ravel or early Stravinsky for the first time, let alone Szymanowsky, can ‘hum’ the melodies. yet their works belong to the standard repertoire and are much loved everywhere, even in the UK. The notion is better suited to music like Rossini’s but that is a very restricted area of musical melodic writing. And who can hum the melodies of Monteverdi’s very popular operas, or his Vespers?
Maybe ‘melody’ is not the best term. Since Wagner, composers broke free from ‘melody’ in the sense of no longer writing carefully-ballanced X-bar phrases that listeners could immetiately hum. Because it is very restricting and often very banal. But after Wagner there was a lot of free melodic writing. For linear writing one needs to have a gift and people with that gift prefer entertainment music where there is money for it. The splintering of education in composition means that musical values have been forgotten, it has turned all into intellectual plodding, and that is how the results mostly sound.
“since Wagner composers broke free from….melody”??? what about wonderful Puccini? Bartok choral music? Ravel songs? Poulenc more songs and opera? Elgar and his oratorios? Rachmaninoff symphonies and concerti? Mahler (all his songs…), so many of his wonderful melodies… R. Strauss, Villa Lobos (!!) Holst!
The classical melodic writing as heard in Mozart and Beethoven and their contemporaries is based upon regular phrasing and repetition of phrases and motives (Mozart was a master in on one hand writing regular phrases and unexpectedy deviate from the grid). Later-on that kind of structure got more loose and by the time of Wagner’s later operas, melody got free from regular phrasing, although often it is felt under the surface. And often composers returned to it to great effect (like in Ravel’s String Quartet).
Of course I didn’t mean melody in the limited 4-square possibility of melody (though Beethoven, among others, made clear that great melody can still happen that way.) Nor does effective, excellent melody need obvious symmetry. Otherwise, what would one do with great Gregorian chant, or with Marcabru, or the best of Bebop? And effective, moving, ensuring valuable melody can even be atonal–though, so far, the examples are free and far between. (Berg and Boulez gave some; Messaien and Varese, too.)
So let’s not set up strawman, but look at the issue straight: has there ever been, and can there ever be, a great composer who was not a 1st-class melodist?
Stravinsky? He mostly borrowed melodic material from other music. And the older he got, the less melodic he became, ending in atonal modernism. In the 2nd half of the last century, ‘melodic’ was equalled with ‘outdated’ and ‘banal’.
Malcolm Arnold?
Not in trouble. Consider: MondayEveningConcerts.org , RunningAMOC.org , …
In my youth, I eaglery awaited new music at concerts in the hope to hear a great piece played for the first time. Instead, for decades orchestras simply insulted the intelligence of the audience with either random noise or (in a small minority of cases) counterbalancing with bland nothings intended not to offend (if you don’t like that atonal stuff, take this and like it). Orchestras have spent nearly a century training audiences that “New Music” = “Bad Music.” They have beaten the dead horse and sodomized this corpse, yet they continue on the path of alienating audiences. Of all the premiers I have heard over the past 50 years, I only came across one that I thought was worth a second listen. And after a second listen, I realized it was not that good.
Audiences share the blame as well. Today’s audience will applaud pigs farting on stage. They have been trained to clap for anything. Only once, at the NY Philharmonic, did I attend with an audience that booed a new work. If it’s bad, and you want to be polite, sit silently after being abused by an orchestra.
As dubious at they are, orchestra managers should look at year end radio countdowns of the most popular works chosen by audiences. Take note of how many Pulitzer prize winners of the past 60 years make the lists or even works composed over that time make the lists. Something is wrong here
if orchestras really believed in their “new music” they would play encores.
New music has lost the trust not only in its audiences but its performers as well. Can these con artists even write a fugue? It seems highly unlikely that they can even modulate from C major to A minor. In fact I know of one Grammy award winner who couldn’t do it in his final exam at Curtis, yet he wins awards for writing pieces inspired by laughing gas he was given during a tooth operation.
As an amateur trumpet player I love contemporary music, but where is it all heading to?
Yura
(They/them)
It’s not the world’s oldest new music festival. Nordic Music Days began in 1888 and is still going strong. The 2024 edition begins in Glasgow, Scotland, today.
When I was studying music in the late 1960s, my professor told us that by the end of the century juke boxes would only be playing serial music. He sure got that wrong on two counts!
Further to my earlier comment on the difference between music and noise, I think maybe a bit more explanation is needed. From a scientific point of view, only these two states exist, so the term ‘melody’ does not represent a third state. Melody means music. The term ‘scientific’, in this context, means trying to fit all the known information into a single theory of the nature of music. It is this: the response of the DNA of a sentient being to any event can be represented musically, as a resonating vibration that affects all the molecules of this being. This is why it is easy to ignore noise, which only affects our ears; but it is not easy to ignore music. This applies to other mammals as well.
I believe Russian composers especially understood this. For them, simple forms of music, which we in the West call melodies, were not as important to them as the general mood of the music.
This mood is how organisms survive, I believe. If one’s mood is positive i.e. a positive emotion, then we react in a certain way, which helps us make the right decision for survival.
It follows that if we had no emotions, we would not respond at all and therefore would be like machines, which only follow instructions. Just for the record, for what it is worth.
Agreed.
Classical music as a genre has a very strong psychological / emotional component. Actually, all music of this type is a form of psychology in sound. All stylistic structuring, all technique is in the service of conveying an emotional impression, because in our emotional field, there is also intelligence and perceptiveness to ordering. While listening to classical music, our emotions are ordered and given meaning. When music succumbs to mere sound, this emotional dimension is lost, and what remains is sound patterns, which can be interesing or not. But it is not music as had been understood since Medieval times onwards and which has produced one of the great achievements of the human mind, whatever the woke crowd thinks.