Several years ago, I attended a rather good performance of various contemporary compositions by a talented string quartet whose name I unfortunately forget. There was a pre-concert lecture, in which the speaker related an anecdote about a performance he attended in his youth. It was a piano concerto, and apparently the composer was performing from inside the piano, scratching with a piece of chalk on anything that would make a noise. Now I don't wish to seem a philistine, but for such an exhibition to be considered music, let alone classical music, seems not only absurd, but an insult to the superhuman efforts of great composers and performers throughout the centuries.
I am put in mind of this issue by having spent the afternoon re-reading sections of What to Listen for in Music by Aaron Copland. I recommend it highly, both to beginners and to those already fairly experienced in classical music. Copland's discussion of musical fundamentals (i.e. rhythm, melody, harmony, tone colour) is disappointingly basic, and those with even a very rudimentary musical background will find little enlightenment here. But his chapters on musical structure were highly helpful to me; his analysis of Beethoven's Waldstein sonata is an excellent demonstration of his principles in application; and the chapter on film music is surprisingly illuminating.
Copland's chapter on contemporary music is, of course, the source of the controversy. In general, I agree with his statements. He quite rightly encourages open-mindedness and fairness on the part of the listener: "The first thing to remember is that creative artists, by and large, are a serious lot-- their purpose is not to fool you. This, in turn, presupposes on your part an open mind, good will, and a certain a priori confidence in what they are up to." He also reminds us that the serious modern composer cannot simply imitate the success of his predecessors: "My love of the music of Chopin and Mozart is as strong as that of the next fellow, but it does me little good when I sit down to write my own, because their world is not mine and their musical language not mine."
Unfortunately, Copland's optimism in 1957 towards music's future is less tenable today. Classical music in the last fifty years has been largely a whimpering decrescendo, and whatever the critics may say, audiences simply prefer the music of the past. Russian music remained viable for a remarkably long time, but the black humour and cruelty of Shostakovich is not a facet of human experience on which most of us care to dwell for any length of time. Shostakovich was a remarkable composer, and deserves the highest praise for managing to function under the Soviet Union's appalling artistic conditions, but I pray we may never again see circumstances which would produce such an artist. Contemporary mystics like Arvo Pärt (my favourite contemporary composer, by the by) are fairly accessible, but losing one's direction in musical obscurity and uncertainty are part of the fun with them (as long ago in Debussy or in Strauss' Metamorphosen); and their emotional range is rather limited. The Atonalists have quite failed to blossom as an alternative musical reality, and their systems have proved best suited for expressing things like the squalid misery of Wozzeck or the ghoulish depravity of Pierrot Lunaire. Easiest to dismiss is the school of the blatantly loony: on Wednesday 2/12/03 begins the performance of a composition scheduled to last for 639 years. I never want to hear another whinging complaint about Parsifal.
Copland claims: "Contemporary music speaks to us as no other music can. It is the older music-- the music of Buxtehude and Cherubini-- that should seem distant and foreign to us, not that of Milhaud and William Schuman." Here I cannot agree with him. Western classical music is not an abitrary system. It is based fundamentally on mathematical ratios, and it is not merely cultural consensus which makes simultaneous sound waves whose peaks frequently coincide (e.g. a fifth) sound better to us than sound waves which are quite out of phase (e.g. a tritone). Though western classical music is not the only rational music theory humans have devised, yet it has developed in a remarkably continuous arc, from vocal polyphony, through the even-tempered scale, to Rameau's theory of harmony, to harmony's breaking point in Tristan und Isolde. It is hardly surprising that musical systems which start from principles other than the mathematics of how sound strikes the ear should sound odd to us.
Ultimately, the proof of the pudding must be in the eating, and the new music is simply not proving competetive with the old in the ears of modern audiences. I do not believe that blame can be placed entirely on the public's short attention span and shallowness. The ready availability of excellent recordings makes repeated hearings a simple matter, yet such easy familiarity is not increasing the new music's popularity. In his epilogue to Copland's book, Alan Rich writes:
If it's any comfort, half a century after my first hearing of the Schoenberg Fourth Quartet, I find that it's still "very tough"-- except that now I begin to make out the outlines of the work's principle melodies and to note when they reappear, as I do with a Mozart Quartet. The late quartets of Beethoven are also "very tough"
But the vast majority of listeners, even musically literate ones, find the close study of Mozart and Beethoven more rewarding, not to mention pleasurable, than the study of Schoenberg. Many even turn to foreign classical traditions, such as Iranian or Uzbek, hardly easy listening, in preference to the contemporary music which Copland believed should speak to us most closely.
I do not wish to seem determinedly hostile to modern music. Contemporary composers and those who perform their works deserve great acclaim for daring to attempt such an uncertain and possibly thankless feat as producing a new and original masterpiece. Serious listeners certainly ought to do their best to give new works a fair hearing. But the listener's time is not infinite, and if composers fail to produce works with the emotional range, structural integrity, and beauty of the old masterpieces, we the audience cannot be blamed for our continuing devotion to past genius.
Update: Here's an interview with contemporary composer Ned Rorem. An intriguing excerpt: "There's nothing new under the sun. And since nothing comes from nothing, we steal, and if you know you're stealing, you do your best to disguise it, and the act of disguising is the act of creation. If you're not smart enough to know that you're stealing, you're a second-rate artist, and you've made a second-rate version of some definable piece."
