Contemporary Art Music - Is it Relevant?

By Tom Aldridge

MUSIC! It's everywhere. It's ubiquitous. It's pervasive. Most of the day we're surrounded--perhaps even subsumed--by it. The youth walk the streets wearing headsets. They drive cars with boom boxes so powerful ("mine puts out 250 watts") you hear the boom through two closed windows if you're anywhere in the vicinity. Rock concerts at Verizon and Conseco are typically packed. The radio (arguably) plays current favorites all day and all night. Technology has saturated the world with music to a degree unparalleled in history. The commercialized currents of jazz, pop (whatever that means at present), rock, rap, country and western flow together, separate, then join again. Whether or not the cultural historian can make sense of it, he must concede today's music phenomenon has vitality.

In no past era has the schism between "mass" and "art" music been greater. Art music is, of course, compartmentalized as the somewhat misleading term "classical music" and discoursed on as such in the print media. NUVO places art music in its Arts Calendar section where it would seem to belong--separate from its coverage of all other Music, all other Sound--and perhaps emphasizes my point. Within the classical-music sphere exists the subset of. . .dare I say it: contemporary classical music (an oxymoron if ever there was one). To see how this category fits--or doesn't fit--within the more general term, we need to consider some background:

Classical music, as we think of it, was "born" toward the mid-19th century. It happened after Felix Mendelssohn had resurrected Bach's St. Matthew Passion in 1829 and as Franz Liszt was repopularizing Beethoven's symphonies in the 1850s, especially the Ninth, which had gone unperformed since its Vienna world premiere in 1824. Liszt also transcribed these symphonies for solo piano, so that small towns and hamlets without an orchestra could enjoy them via a touring pianist--like Liszt himself.

The notion of performing works from the past which appeared to have enduring vitality gradually took hold during the remainder of the 1800s but didn't reach its zenith till the 20th century. Thereafter, orchestras, chamber groups and opera companies proliferated throughout Europe and America, and later Latin America, Asia and the world. They were strongly supplemented by recordings, then radio, then television, then the internet. For a diverse sect of the world's populace, the best of European music created from the 18th to the early 20th century continues to attract audiences--and musicians to play and sing for them, continues to stir hearts and produce emotional quivers impossible to describe and difficult to explain. They were written by genius composers--"dead white European males"--fortunate to have been born into a culture where tonal harmony supporting the melodic line had evolved to its peak, a structure now embracing the world. Bach and Handel in the early 1700s to Ravel, Puccini and the young Stravinsky through about 1930 form an uninterrupted musical continuum for the casual concertgoer (c.c.g.). For music composed prior to 1700, audiences generally become more limited to the "connoisseur" or "aficionado" category.

Well, what about post-1930 art music, commonly encompassing the Modern era?  Answer: It's been absolutely chaotic--a hodgepodge of competing styles which have slipped past us through reaction, not evolution, as had happened previously as far back as the Gregorian Chants of the first millennium A.D. First we had the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg/Berg/Webern): serial or 12-tone music, created with great discipline. . .on paper, but with the c.c.g. rejecting it as incomprehensible. Then there was Neo-Classicism (Hindemith/middle-period Stravinsky), somewhat better accepted. Concurrently, Neo-Romanticism, (Shostakovich/Prokofiev/Copland) proved a bit more successful, producing a number of "warhorses." Béla Bartók--in a class by himself--has a strong connoisseur following, especially among musicians, but is merely tolerated by the c.c.g.

The transition from Modern to contemporary has seen such styles as microtonal (Harry Partch/Charles Ives--ahead of his time), neo-serialism (Stockhausen/ Boulez/Takemitsu/ the aging Stravinsky), aleatory and sound art (John Cage) of the '60s and '70s doing a hop, skip and a jump back to minimalism in the '80s and early '90s (Glass/Adams/Reich), that style now in decline. What remains so telling about audience responses to most Modern/contemporary works is that symphony programs must safely snuggle them in between the Classical/Romantic warhorses that attract the c.c.g. to begin with.

Last season, the American Symphony Orchestra League awarded the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra third place among major orchestras (those with annual budgets over $13.25 million) for its contemporary music programming--the major part of the orchestra's highlighting, in 2002-'03, of American music. This nice accolade within the symphonic community not surprisingly didn't translate to increased attendance, and moreover was overshadowed by the economic downturn, its effect on ticket sales and the reduction of endowments and grants endemic throughout the country (with most orchestras presently worse off than ours). No better attendance example exists than the ISO's March 7-8 program--devoted entirely to Philip Glass' monumental Symphony No. 5 (1999). Thereby left unanchored by warhorses, it produced the smallest turnout for any ISO classical series concert since the orchestra's 1984 move to the Hilbert Circle Theatre.

How to solve the dilemma? First, the gap between new mass music and new art music must be bridged, as the Kronos Quartet uniquely demonstrates for chamber music. Art composers ideally should make it on the sale and performance of their songs/pieces/works--as do their pop counterparts today--as Beethoven did two centuries ago (admittedly we are a long way from that goal). This means the former should not emanate from the halls of academia, where they've been ensconced for too many decades, where they award each other prizes in composition and the public doesn't give a damn.

Writing serious works for today's cultural climate means shedding the exhausted European heritage of nearly a century ago. Leave the warhorses where they are. Their endurance has been proven and, in any case, aren't the issue. New, vital art music will probably require new organizations, informal venues and a much relaxed dress code. There are indications they may already be starting, so keep the faith for the long haul.