Contemporary music is over, done, dead. What now?
OrchestrasFrom an essay by the French composer, Jean-Louis Agobet:
… It is not a question of abandoning the artistic ambition and the heritage of which we are the recipients, but of recognizing and accepting that today the ecosystem cannot and no longer wants to continue this adventure, what’s more, in this form. Of course a salvation exists, by retaining this artistic ambition cited above, this requirement of content. Even if it seems difficult to imagine today. To achieve this, we will have to change the container while preserving the exploration of the incredible and the desire for discovery. This model exists.
Let’s look at how haute cuisine emerged from the hushed and totally utopian space of the 1970s and 1980s. Elitist, terribly hermetic in its codes and vocabulary, the cuisine of the happy few has become incredibly open and popular without renouncing quality, creative demand and invention, but by abandoning the purity of the space in which it was deployed, by completely rethinking the discourse and the codes which accompanied it and by embracing, this is the essential, a real economic, social and referential diversity…
Read on here.
Your thoughts?
Bla bla bla…
Composers should just learn their craft properly and stop writing crap. Audiences don’t like it and musicians don’t like playing it.
My BS dectectors have blown up.
There are enough doing exactly THAT, but surviving structures from the last half century still form serious obstacles.
And what is the most important obstacle: in the regular performance practice – i.e. the concert world – there is a general indifference towards any contemporary music, because the fragile balance between the three parties: composer, performer and audience, has been broken by modernism. So, even the best new-classical composers are treated with indifference, even where they have very successful performances, because now ALL contemporary music is thrown on the heap of rubbish created by modernism. Case in point: Nicolas Bacri, who has written very strong ‘new-classical’ works, but even great performances don’t further spread his music.
Occasional light point: Frenchman Guillaume Connesson recently wrote an entirely ‘traditional’ opera, blending different styles (including the oldfashioned french chanson), which was a great success: ‘Les Bains Macabres’.
This is a part of it in concert performance, after the stage production by the Opéra Compiegne:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fWCTlQ9yYc&t=97s
Clearly a brilliant and beautiful work, can stand without blushing next to Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmelites, for instance, or Ravel’s Sortilèges. A very impressive achievement.
So, it will merely be a matter of time before this kind of thing will be normal and regular.
Agreed. No fan base, no audience. And musicians don’t want to play works that the audience don’t care for. I got into a terrible argument about 15yrs ago and essentially the argument boiled down to that we should subsidize the contemporary composer even if the only audience is the composer’s wife/husband. Really? We don’t subsidize Vaudeville or countless other art forms that went by the way of the Dodo.
I’ll get a lot of thumbs down for this but you know, the truth hurts.
Just bought one of the last 4 tickets for the London Sinfonietta next Wednesday. Old music by Knussen and Ades and some brand new music. We should have booked a bigger hall!
Composers know their craft. They can all write a fugue or a passacaglia in the style of Bach, a sonata in the style of Brahms. Just like every modern artist can draw a portrait in the style of Van Gogh.
The trick is to write something innovative that still appeals to people. Milton Babbitt, Roger Sessions, or Henri Dutilleux all wrote supremely well-crafted music. Jean Francaix, too (and his has the added benefit of being delightful). But not all of it is appealing.
With all due respect, Milton Babbitt’s “supremely well-crafted music” is exactly the sort of scheisse that has broken the compact between the composer, performers, and audience. It justifiably has earned pride of place on the ash heap of music history and as best I can tell it has no redeeming value. I can’t say I’ve heard a note of Roger Sessions but I believe it’s the same sort of atonal garbage. If these are the examples you cite to support your argument about how new music can appeal to people, well, you need to go back to the drawing board…
That said, there is one work which stands out which in my 30+ years of concert-going experience which completely brought down the house in Boston when it received its premiere in 2015. The response from the audience was THUNDEROUS – no one I know who was there has ever heard a public response to any new work like that. And I’m referring to Michael Gandolfi’s organ concerto, Ascending Light, which was conducted by Andris Nelsons. It was a brilliant piece of music, substantive and profoundly moving, and the audience “got it” in a big way. It deserves to be re-played and heard far and wide. And yet, I’m not aware it has ever been played anywhere since its premiere in Boston.
Here are some bits of Gandolfi’s concerto:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tur_j4RveLo
A work of, let us say, questionable taste….
John, do you think it appropriate to give an opinion of a work on which you have only heard excerpts, which neither delineate the scope nor the overall l impact of the work?
Would you think that appropriate of a critic who similarly “reviews” one of your own works, who makes a snide comment without actually having heard it?
I heard the work – and it’s STUNNING. And the “excerpts” do not remotely convey what the work is or do it justice. And more than 5,000 other people heard Ascending Light in Boston over three concerts. I had several friends at both of the other concerts I did not attend, and all of them said the same thing – the audience response was THUNDEROUS and they personally were incredibly impressed with the work. In my opinion, it’s very special.
Oftentimes the public doesn’t get it right. But there are plenty of times when the public does. And this was one of those times in my opinion.
Mmmm……. I know that good ears get quite some information by hearing a minimum of 5 minutes of any work. This is not enough to have a fully-fledged ‘judgement’ but can offer enough signals as to language, taste, type of sentiment. Nothing more, nothing less. And then: audiences are not the ‘final arbiter’ of any artistic judgement. Any audience success can be either right or wrong, depending on so many variables. I know this also of my own works of course.
Sniff sniff . . .
Even though you’ve never heard the compostions by Roger Sessions, you’re content to pass judgement on his works. Very peculiar.
You are correct. I’ve never heard a single note by Roger Sessions. I’ve read or been told that his music is atonal. I have yet to hear a SINGLE ATONAL WORK that I have wanted to hear again, have enjoyed at any level, or had even the slightest curiosity about. For me, atonal music is sonic torture. If Roger Sessions’ music is atonal and I hear it, then perhaps it might be the first atonal music I’ve ever heard that I can even slightly enjoy. But the odds of that happening are even worse than a million-to-one.
I do not like atonal music. I get nothing from atonal music (but a headache). I never want to hear any more atonal music for the rest of my life. I believe that atonal music is a perverse joke that has been played on a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals who think there is any value in it.
If those statements make me small-minded, I accept that.
“I believe that atonal music is a perverse joke that has been played on a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals who think there is any value in it.”
This is actually a bright comment.
The problem is that listeners of classical music listen tonally, and sonic art is supposed to listen to atonally, that is: as pure sound patterns. You have to forget a couple of ages of music to be able to do that, or to be entirely unmusial i.e. not used to listen to music. It is the experience of music that hinders enjoying sound art.
Music has a psychological dimension that is missing in sonic art.
But there is sonic art that has real aesthetic qualities – although it is rare – and one of these works is Morton Feldman’s ‘Coptic Light’ which is like a decorative ‘carpet’ of sound:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgS37X4P2hM
Any composer who insists on using 12-tone system, in whatever way, is throwing-up a big barrier, for himself and for any audience.
I’d be all for it. I haven’t heard it, but I’ve heard some of his wind ensemble pieces and they are very good.
One problem with orchestras is that never mind the failures: They rarely even repeat their successes!
I could ask what you mean by this but I know what you mean. “I don’t like anything that doesn’t have a tune you can whistle because I don’t understand it. I don’t like it so clearly nobody else does.” And I say this as somebody who is admittedly pretty solidly in the neo-Romantic style of composition. If you go to a concert of Schnittke, Ligeti, or even Glass and expect to hear Mozart then yeah, you’ll probably have a bad time. However, people going to hear that music know they are going to hear something more challenging and tend to enjoy our at least appreciate the experience more.
I’d push back on your notion that musicians hate playing new music too. Most musicians that I’ve dealt with love new music because it’s something new. More and more musicians are experimenting with extended techniques and the only musicians who I ever hear about not liking playing new music are people that have been playing for many decades and are close to collecting their Social Security checks if not already collecting.
I think it’s people with this mindset that really is what drives people away from new music. It tells them that the only good things to listen to were written by people who are long dead or things that were written yesterday but sound like they were written by someone long dead. It’s a very close-minded view of what music can and should be and I think that people are more receptive to even the more out there things then you give them credit for.
Your response is fairly typical of one from that little crowd.
Blame the people who are not interested in playing it or listening to it. It’s our mindset, right?
Never blame the composers, empowered by irresponsible critics and administrators, for shoving this trash down our throats.
If you go to a concert to hear music by Glass, it’s because you are looking for something more challenging than Mozart? Absolutely foolish snobbery on your part and it’s not more challenging at all.
Who decides what is crap and what isn’t?
I know exactly what’s crap but I can’t say it if I don’t want to be fired again.
Sally
Crap for you may be roses for someone else.
The overwhelming majority of the audience and the musicians decide.
He is not talking about the “craft” of writing music but the Art. Perhaps you don’t understand the difference. The same can unfortunately be said for almost all the arts. They are over at least for now.
Especially when they’re driven by computer software/programs.
Oliver is 100% correct
to 99.99999999999999999999% of the population, everything Schoenberg, Webern and Berg wrote is crap.
Do you agree?
“Ivory tower, self congratulatory, high nose response coming in 3….2….1….”
He complains:
“Là où la littérature, l’architecture, les arts plastiques, le cinéma, la photographie, la danse et la gastronomie, ont trouvé une place dans l’espace public et les médias, rien dans les canaux audiovisuels, la presse, les espaces communicants, n’apparait concernant cette fameuse ”musique contemporaine”. En voulant s’isoler, rester dans un entre-soi sinistre, toxique et une économie irréaliste, elle n’est quasi nulle part.”
(Short translation:) there is no contemporary music heard in the public sphere, while the other contemporary arts have found a place there. By isolating itself into a sinister, toxic and unrealistic economy, it has become irrelevant.
But he is a specialist of the sinister and toxic himself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5cqDJ1qBjg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcM7BjFbGhQ
It’s brilliant stuff, a kind of sound art which wants to become music, struggling in its morbid suffocation, and – interestingly – picking-up the language of early 20C Viennese expressionism: Alban Berg, middle-period Schönberg. One would like to say: yes, go on, further back! There you find real music. But ideologies and historicist thinking within the network prohibit such thinking.
Typical French is his comparison with haute cuisine, as if this were an art form (it is not). From an elitist cult, haute cuisine evolved towards an open, diverse one where accessibility and freedom reigns without comprimising quality (? here, my PA rolls with her eyes).
He complains about ‘the industry’ where marketing blurbs express the mission of performing bodies to include new creation etc. etc. which nobody believes, including its authors, just window dressing. And that ‘we’ – performers? composers? audiences? music lovers? – are responsible for this situation. Contemporary music is finished, in a world which is mutating all the time. Quoi faire?
Then he advocates that composers accept the enormous diversity of distribution of today and drop ideologies, leave their isolated mental space, and accept contemporary reality. He finished with the wish, for himself, to no longer live under any authority – i.e. to be free.
He appears to argue from a position within ‘the establishment of new music’, the network of contacts, performers, commissioning bodies, comitees, which is rather separated from what can be called ‘the central performance culture’ which is mostly run as a business, an industry: ‘classical music’, and more often as not as a restaurant: serving the clients: the audiences. So, actually here Agobet’s ideal has already, to some extent, been realised – only, with ‘old’ music, not contemporary music.
So what is ‘a realistic approach’? That seems to be clear: write music which in terms of language does not deviate too much from the average qualities of what is the general fare of the central performance culture, to be able to engage with audiences. Because if you have something worthwhile to say, it’s OK to use a language which is comprehensible, this does not hinder personal expression. This means: competition with music that has already stood the test of time, so much talent is required to avoid being compared negatively.
This is already done for many years, but has only been ‘heard’ and ‘seen’ incidentally, and not as something like a movement. In the visual arts, there is already a realist/figurative movement developing, but the museums of modern art continue to ignore it and stuff themselves with the nonsense of conceptual art which is not art at all. In contemporary music, composers like Jonathan Leshnoff, Aaron Jay Kernis, Jake Heggie, Reza Vali, David Matthews, and in France (!) Guillaume Connesson and especially Nicolas Bacri, are pioneering with a new music that simply connects with the musical traditions as they were florishing before the onset of modernism, so: somewhere early 20th century. Because that was the last flowering of Western music.
https://www.amazon.com/Classical-Revolution-Thoughts-Century-Expanded/dp/0486814483
Adolf literally spoke of modernism being sick and morbid, etc. etc. He postured himself as the savior who would purify and redeem Western culture. He also tied modernism to Jews who he claimed had no culture and thus wanted to destroy Western culture. Stalin and Mao also purged what they saw as degenerate art that didn’t fit the monolithic ideologies they imposed of society. And we hardly need to speak of the theocratic purges of culture we see today including book bans in the USA.
It’s a reminder of why we should be wary of absolutists of any groups who want to see society purged of of values they reject. Given the rise fascist ideals in countries like the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, France, Hungary, Austria, and the USA, it’s little surprise that such attitudes appear in this often highly reactionary discussion group.
Give it a rest, Jeremiah. Take your leftism elsewhere.
Notice that I criticized Stalin and Mao as well as Hitler, but I am categorized as leftist by the tubular visioned “Alphonse.”
Adolf was a vegetarian and abstained from alcohol. Must I now smoke havanas and feast on steaks to show that I am not a fascist?
The ‘connection’ of fascism with classical art and with abhorrance of modernism is exactly one of the causes of the disaster of modernist ideology which was a top-down authoritarian, and yes, fascistoid movement in all the arts and in architecture. It is all a grave misunderstanding and ignorance.
If a deranged mass murderer happens to like Mozart and to dislike Schönberg, this does not in the slightest have a bearing on both Mozart and Schönberg.
The problem of contemporary music has many roots, and the reaction to fascism is one of them.
The issue is not which music Hitler, Stalin, and Mao liked, but that in their absolutist lack of tolerance, they imposed their preferences on others.
Sounds like total drivel. Recalling the Morecambe and Wise lampoon of Previn, I know all the words but not in that order.
This is a debate which, on the one hand, would require a very long discussion, but which on the other hand comes down to one simple thing: just write good music which people actually want to listen to — as do many composers today, perhaps not too often in classical music, but in many other genres, notably jazz and film music. And it still is “contemporary” music in the literal sense of the word: music written in the same era as the audiences who might listen to it. But “contemporary” has now become a genre in and of itself implying that true serious, legitimate music written today needs to be atonal and that tonality is simply unacceptable — if not reactionary. This experiment has not worked too well, as very few people (including many professional musicians) actually choose in their spare time to listen to works which music history books may tell us are important landmarks of contemporary music, and this for the simple reason that many of these works fail to resonate within us in the same manner as Bach, Beethoven — or, closer to us, someone like Arvo Pärt — can. Undoubtedly, such a position might be laughed at by many professional composers, however the joke is actually on them, because most of them will never reach a similar degree of recognition to these composers now deemed as passé. It has always struck me how “contemporary” music never seemed to question the fact that the modern temperament might be indissociably linked to tonality, and that if one wants to write a truly atonal language, one should perhaps free oneself from the twelve-tone system altogether (as some have tried to do, albeit for the most part unsuccessfully, because the human ear cannot discern well intervals smaller than a half-tone, nor takes much pleasure in it). But, as Schoenberg himself claimed, there is a lot of good music that can still be written in C Major — indeed it has, and continues to do so, albeit perhaps not in the field of sheer “classical” music, which has institutionalized “contemporary” music as the only viable and respectable musical language that may be written today. In my opinion, this experiment has failed miserably, and as the author of this article states, that’s mostly due to an ideological stubbornness and frankly, to a form of snobbery that is often insufferable. It is often comparable to contemporary art, which outside a few exceptions has its own fair share of bad artists and charlatans. Lastly, in the past, composers had genuine craft — which can no longer be said for today’s composers, and that is another angle in this debate that deserves much attention.
That makes a great deal of sense to me.
In the educational trajectory, oldfashioned craft is mostly looked-down upon as entirely outdated and useless, so: gifted students have to learn it by themselves, and only the most gifted and persistent can do that. They will find themselves ‘in the street’ however, and excluded from any career opportunity. Unless they go into film music, but the craft of that is only taught at a few places, and it also leads to exclusion from a serious career in the concert world.
If the question is about tonality (the relationships between tones), then it has to be concluded that this is not a ‘human cultural construct’ but a biologically-embedded phenomenon, based upon mathematics and automatically picked-up by the human ear, because the physics of sound show a structural hierarchy (the harmonic series). So, ‘tonality’ is simply reality and writing music without it, avoids interrelationships of tones, and thus lacks musical meaning and thus is mere sound art. Regular audiences of Western classical music correctly do not hear much into that, so it mostly leaves them indifferent, although they may enjoy nice colourful patterns, as forms of decoration.
“It is scientifically proven that when the cows listen to the music of Mozart, they make very good milk. When they listen to contemporary music or avant-garde music, they make acid milk. Or maybe ricotta.” – Riccardo Muti
When I listen to Boulez, my favorite composer, I have all kinds of physical sensations I cannot share here!
Sally
Contemporary composers are like home chefs who have dreams of creating haute cuisine but who can’t even make an onion soup or an omelette.
Julia Childs’s famous story about her final exam at the Cordon Bleu is illustrative: she busied herself all over the kitchen making “filers de sole a la WaJewska, poularde Toulousaine, sauce Venetienne”; but on exam day, she was simply asked “to write out the ingredients for oeufs mollets and creme renversee au caramel”, and she didn’t know.
She could not even write out the ingredients to the most basic of dishes. Contemporary composers can’t even write out a basic melody.
The difference is Julia Childs learned; contemporary composers keep burning the toast and keep serving it.
Imagine a restaurant that serves only bad experimental cuisine, and restaurant critics who insist on getting half their meal composed of new, bad experimental dishes.
Such is the model of the classical music concert hall and industry today.
A concert hall is NOT a restaurant.
Completely agree. I would add that out of sheer snobbery, the music community even goes as far as denying itself that it might actually be enjoying a particular piece, simply because doing so might not be in keeping with “acceptable” norms, while insisting on suffering through painful repertoire that nonetheless has gotten a stamp of approval. A lot of this comes down to sheer peer pressure. It truly could provide material for a new Milgram experiment, where people would be pressured to say that they like a given piece and most would conform, simply out of fear of being shun by the community.
About time. Time to start writing baroque music again!
? Who wants to hear the endless boring concerti grossi of Antonio Fussili or Joachim Alzheimer? If we have Vivaldi, Corelli, Lully?
Who wants to hear boring new tonal works by [redacted] when we have Mozart, Brahms, Mahler?
Yes that is the challenge, it can be done, but of course it’s not the music of [redacted] or worse, [redacted]. Also it requires serious ears and not those of [redacted].
Cannot compare music to cuisine in this age of technology. Today we still cannot experience food via a simulation using a recorded medium. In a sense, culinary art is the one true performance art still remaining.
Is there an English translation?
Right click and you’ll see “translate to English.’
What happens in the world is painful enough; why should I listen to painful music? And to be honest, more than 90% of contemporary music is pain for my ears – compositions of legendary composers like Stockhausen included. It is horrible, unlistenable and unfortunately sometimes even subventioned by federal institutions. If that crap wouldn´t be subventioned, maybe the composers would write more music which is balsam for the ears and the soul.
Composers compose for themselves, hope to get a commission and a recording contract.
The Devil’s Dictionary has a ready-made definition for the 90% of contemporary music you decry: “a stench in the ear.”
Also “undomesticated music”
There is no shortage of composers it would seem. But I would agree that nothing they write seems to be “sticking.” While I do not entirely agree with Oliver’s dismissive comment, it would seem that the bulk of composers today who are lucky enough to get performances are all in the process of backtracking from where music seemed to be heading circa the 1950s. The consequence is that those committed to normal (meaning, academic) notions of progress don’t regard this contemporary music as truly contemporary. The powerful and lingering legacy of Theodor Adorno. If neither the elites nor the audience like it, well then it isn’t much of anywhere.
If there is hope for those who do like to explore the new, perhaps it lies in unearthing the decades’ worth of music rejected by Adorno and the elites and giving it not just a second hearing but in many cases, a first hearing. The music would be “new” but not contemporary.
The notion of ‘contemporary’ is poisoned by Western historicist thinking, i.e. the idea (or feeling) that ‘history’ is an autonomous force directing artists to do this or that, instead of making their own free choices. This thinking comes from German 19C philosopher Hegel who introduced the idea of a ‘Zeitgeist’ which would drive history. And seeing the developments of science where progress seems to confirm that idea, artists tried to follow suit and try to be ‘of their time’ and ‘be progressive, modern’. But in art there is no such thing as progress, only accumulation of means. History is the result of choices.
And then, given that the contemporary modern world is not particularly great or beautiful, ‘being of one’s time’ is not a good thing at all.
May it only be performed once.
Analogy to haute cuisine unfortunate. Despite its pretentions n high prices etc., at least the food tastes good n gives eaters pleasures. Modern music for the most part is boring, irritating, bombastic, n tastes like s&*t, all with heaps of pretentions n arrogance. You are the idiot for not liking it or “understanding” its deep meanings.
Although it is very hard to extract meaning from French essayists, the message seems to be that the music isn’t dead, but the conditions in which it is created are obsolete, damaging and constricting. Or more simply, don’t put new wine into old bottles.
I recollect both John Adams and Phillip Glass lamenting the same 30 years ago (albeit without the forced/false analogy of cuisine and music). In the visual art world this has become a quarterly refrain.
quite brave to tell the truth even by a composer as it’s indeed finished but no one wants to admit- only free entrance can lure the few who are curious (not even but they want to pretend being open minded…) as no one really enjoys it – the main themes of our tint are covered somewhere else but definitely not on an opera stage – the woke media won’t like to hear it, neither the liberals but anything else is a big lie
What now? Find neglected composers from the past and play and listen to their music of course. We’re long overdue for a festival of Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfern-schplenden-…
And there’s always PDQ Bach!
RIP Peter Schickele.
Plenty of buzz words. Content, zero.
He needs to listen more to Rautavaara’s Angel of Light…
I want to hear from John Borstlap on this subject. Seriously.
My dear fellow, if a tune should occur to you, don’t hesitate to jot it down!
– Ralph Vaughan Williams
In a similar vein, Gustav Holst wrote to Vaughan Williams about an encounter with a composition student: “I got square with one ultra-modernist, wrong-note merchant, by pointing out that I was an old fogey” and that “he’d better humour me and even, occasionally, write a good tune.”
Classical music took a bad turn after WW11. It became something to study and not listen to. Overly academic to a fault. Our ears don’t care about the notes you are avoiding! Boulez, Babbitt, et al…. after 80 years of thinking they could train our ears to hear this music, they never managed a way to be modern while connecting our ears to our hearts. Funny about the modern movement, how we can look at Kandinsky or Pollack and feel something profound. But the ears and eyes are two different things. What looks like meaningful chaos sounds like dish-pan racket.
Typically French, very abstract, more concerned with the framing of music, rather than its style and content. Also French is the use of food analogies to explain and describe music (didn’t Boulez once say that Shostakovich is the third pressing of Mahler, using a term usually used for olive oil?). The translation seems poor and awkward, which doesn’t help matters.
First of all define “Contemporary music” – does that include things like Henryk Gorecki, Philip Glass, Arvo Part, film scores (some of which sound pretty experimental too), modular synth music? , current jazz/pop/… ? Last time I checked they were HUGELY popular. Or are we only talking about serialism and atonality? Having to guess what the man is writing about is making his article pretty elitist.
You can find people today who think Debussy sounds like he didn’t know what he was doing. You just can’t please everyone and there is room for multiple styles of music. In some cases it can help to explain the idea behind the music to create some appreciation/curiosity, sometimes it can help to accompany it with visual or theatrical elements.
I doubt one can teach people to have an open mind. That’s something only they can change in themselves and it starts with intense curiosity.
Music keeps evolving and elements of “contemporary music” will keep on influencing it. To think that today’s composers don’t know their craft is a gross over-generalization.
Let me accept your invitation on this. As a callow youth I used to look forward to contemporary music on concerts, hoping to hear something new and interesting. As the decades passed, I did not hear a single new piece contemporary music in a live concert that was not fecal waste matter. With each new work, I felt my intelligence was being insulted.
Now YOUTUBE is my friend. When I see a concert program, I can usually either find a recording of a new work or at least samples from the composer.
I have a friend looking to go to a first symphony concert. I can go to the New York Philharmonic’s we site and I the following program:
• Katherine Balch, New work (New York Premiere–New York Philharmonic Co-Commission with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra)
• Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto No. 2
• Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 5
#2 & #3 look good for a first concert, but what about #1? I can’t find that exact work but I can find many examples of the “composer’s” work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tczl9MdcmNM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBfkuZsjez4
If I made my friend sit through such garbage, he and his wife would never come back to a concert.
As a result of my YOUTUBE filter it has been years since I have gone to a symphony concert.
Symphonies have spent several generations teaching audiences that NEW MUSIC==BAD MUSIC. This has resulted in stagnation in the repertoire. Let’s look at the somewhat dubious source of the WQXR classical countdown.
https://www.wqxr.org/classical-countdown-2023/
Note the total lack of atonal music. The only contemporary music on the list comes from the annual spamming of Karl Jenkins (2000). We have to go back to 1957 for West Side Story. Then 1943 for Appalachian Spring.
During the dark days of the Alan Gilbert reign, it was clear that he had a circle of artsy-fartsy friends who produced new compositions for the emperor to wear. I had hoped that things would improve under Jaap van Zweden—but they only got worse. The orchestra served up its Project 19 farce that only served to demonstrate woman can write bad music just as easily as men can.
Part of the problem is audiences. An orchestra could put farting pigs on stage and still get an ovation. I have only heard an audience boo a new work once (Xenakis Kreqrops, that the WSJ described as the sound of a surgical ward before anesthesia). If it’s bad, at least sit silently and let the 6 guys orchestra left do their usual standing ovation on their own.
We are seeing a general decay in the arts along the lines of what occurred at the end of the Roman Empire.
If the NY Philharmonic really believed in this contemporary music, they would do a last-minute pull of the Rachmaninoff 2d Cto. and replace it with an encore of the new work by Katherine Balch.
I dare you NY Philharmonic to do it. No, I double dog dare you to do it.
Ah… I have not thought of that:
“As a result of my YOUTUBE filter it has been years since I have gone to a symphony concert.”
The internet actually undermines the credibility of modernist music / sound art as far as symphony concerts are concerned. But that is rather rare anyway with orchestras.
It should be remembered that a new conductor is usually ASKED to play new pieces from the local composers community, and that community mostly tries to present their most promising prodigy. I think Van Zweden is just being kind and polite.
I totally agree that pairing these three works doesn’t make sense; the Balch piece – and I know nothing about her – is basically a “see we DO play modern music” token before getting to what people really came to hear. They’ll play ten minutes, take a 7-minute break to reset the stage, and then move on with the piano concerto.
I would drop the Rachmaninov (which I never care to hear again), and program two 10-15 minute newer (but somewhat known pieces) to frame the new piece in a similar sound world. Then after intermission it’s a whole new world with Tchaikovsky 5.
Of course these days if you don’t have a soloist, ticket sales drop a lot.
Placing the new piece at the beginning of the program is, of course, hoping that the audience won’t flee the hall. It is the OOMP – the Obligatory Opening Modern Piece. It demonstrates the deep contempt of programmers for anything new, of whatever kind. Nobody expects that a new piece could stand in the shadow of ANY repertoire piece. The rare work who would achieve that feat, would also have to overcome the insufficient rehearsel time, so it must be short and slow.
Any thoughts on Mason Bates piano concerto? ….coming up next month…
In 2001, Milton Babbitt wrote a song for tenor Robert White called “A Lifetime or So” that could be part of the American Song Book.
https://on.soundcloud.com/UoFZB
He probably composed lots of other songs in that vein too which he never allowed to see the light of day. Babbitt also had an encyclopedic knowledge of 1930’s popular songs and liked to brag about it. But, alas, what Glenn Gould derisively called “Princetonian Babbittry” is the only side of this composer most people know about.
Milton Babbitt could write stuff like this when he wanted to. He also taught Stephen Sondheim how to do it.
Thus my point above about how modern composers have the craft – but the days of writing fugues like Bach ended with Bach.
But these were Bach fugues. Mozart fugues and Beethoven fugues are quite different, as is the superb fugue in Liszt’s B-minor sonata.
Sure, “modern music” is tagged with a lot of unlistenable works, but part of that problem is how it’s presented. If you play a ten-minute piece but a little-known Canadian composer right before Yefim Bronfman comes out to play the Bartok 2nd concerto (that’s exactly what the OSM did in a concert I heard last year), it’s quickly swept aside and forgotten; you have to frame it properly.
But modern composers can write highly compelling works. But a lot of them have probably given up on the orchestra, since most professional orchestras aren’t going to risk 45 minutes of a concert program (and that expensive rehearsal time) on an unknown piece, unless it’s John Adams. Look instead at the wind ensemble: David Maslanka is basically the Beethoven of the wind ensemble; his 10 symphonies (and the wonderful “Child’s Garden of Dreams”) are core rep for every decent college wind ensemble and military band. Carlos Simon, Michael Gandolfi, etc., are writing highly compelling works that get played a lot and audiences (and bands) love them. Though not a lot of people go listen to wind ensembles.
As much as I loathe twelve-tone serial music, nothing is worse than the new-fangled “microtonal” nonsense – which can be divided roughly into two camps: the neo-Pythagorean just intonation/whole number ratio obsessives like Ben Johnston et al., and the “equal temperament” folks like Ezra Sims, who divide the chromatic scale into increasingly minute equal steps (24 tones, 48, 72, 96, etc.) Does anyone else know what I’m referring to?
Alas, I do know.
In their desperate search for progress, they focus on minutae, like microscopic research in physics, to find new territories. It is a materialistic approach, born from fear of getting stuck in musical languages which are already there, and are ‘exhausted’ in possibilities. This is the result of thinking that music is exclusively in the language. But as we know, in literature any writer uses normal language to say personal things, and that is also possible in music.
I wonder how many people took the time to read Monsieur Agobet’s full essay, or more than that, took time to find any of a plentiful sampling of his music. They might find it of the sort many — I think — are railing against. Not a lot of C Major there . . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5cqDJ1qBjg
It’s really hard to tar a generation of composers with the same brush. Decades ago I thoroughly enjoyed Thea Musgrave’s opera Mary Queen of Scots, as did audiences in Stuttgart, some northern UK cities with a Scottish Opera production and the USA. Some years later I invited her to conduct her horn concerto with Barry Tuckwell as the soloist for the orchestra I was managing. I doubt if more than a handful in those audiences for the concerto had any idea of Musgrave’s music, but it was obvious from the receptions that they had enjoyed it.
Personally, though, I agree that far too many contemporary composers forget that they are writing for their music to be played and heard by audiences and ‘enjoyed’ by them – for one reason or another.
When a composer writes with the purpose of giving pleasure to his/her audience, the danger is that he will compromise the quality of his writing, in an attempt to gain success. The best composers in the past (which we still perform) wanted to SHARE their musical imaginings, assuming that they themselves were part of a culture where composers, performers and audiences shared the same basic assumptions of the art form. The structures of musical language as they found them, were no hindrance and any requirements or limitations of any occasion were transcended.
When an assumed musical language has become impenetrable for general audiences, the language has to be adapted. Which does not mean ‘dumbed down’, but often this is exactly what composers nowadays do. The sophistication of a language like, for instance, Mozart’s, which is both complex and easily accessible, is very hard to achieve in the absence of a living musical tradition with such parameters.
At the end of the 19th century, there were many composers (now forgotten) who exercised in what they thought was serious composition, trying to imitate Beethoven, because that was what they had learned at the conservatory. The results must have been dry and academic and Debussy protested against such imitations of tradition that wanted to be ‘learned’, so he proclaimed that music should give pleasure in the first place, through beauty. Highly subjective requirements that cannot be specified. And his own music is both pleasurable, sophisticated and musically profound. Such qualities are only possible with truly gifted composers, and they are very rare.
The problem is most living composers mistake novelty for originality. And let’s face it, even their novelty – screeching strings, sound effects, noise, etc – is pretty tired at this point and hasn’t really been “novel” in decades.
What now? Return to the core, the classical tradition that has never died out and never will. Center yourselves, leave the fringe, and do the really hard work of writing good, timeless music. It’s a lot harder than you think.