I subscribe to The New Criterion, which bills itself as a
monthly review of the arts and intellectual life, [which] began as an experiment in critical audacity—a publication devoted to engaging, in Matthew Arnold’s famous phrase, with “the best that has been thought and said.” This also meant engaging with those forces dedicated to traducing genuine cultural and intellectual achievement, whether through obfuscation, politicization, or a commitment to nihilistic absurdity.
TNC gets high marks from me for its thoughtful and penetrating essays on politics and social phenomena. The rest is a mixed bag, though I usually enjoy Jay Nordlinger’s forays into the world of music. But I was lured into an irritating aural experience by Nordlinger’s (paywalled) column in the October 2022 issue of TNC, where he writes about some of the performances at the 2022 Salzburg Festival.
Nordlinger’s comments about the performances of some pieces by Béla Bartók (1881-1945) led me to place hope above experience and try to wring some enjoyment from the works of a composer whose music exemplifies a fundamental change in the sound of classical music in the 20th century: “the breakdown of the diatonic system of harmony that had served composers for the previous two hundred years.” On top of that, there’s dissonance, atonality, bombast (better suited for film scores), noise (there’s no other word for it), lack of noise (which can’t be music), and downright dreariness.
Anyway, I put on my headphones, opened YouTube, and sampled a few pieces by Bartók. Unbearable. Absolutely dreadful. And then I remembered some old posts of mine about what is called classical music, and drew on them to write what follows.
Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904) was one of the last great composers of the golden era of classical music, which began around 1700 and came to an end around 1900. What happened after that? Classical music became -- and still is, for the most part -- an "inside game" for composers, music critics, and superiority-signaling patrons and sponsors of “modern music”.
So-called serious composers began to treat music as a pure exercise in notational innovation, as a technical challenge to performers, and as a way of "daring" audiences to be "open minded" (i.e., to tolerate nonsense). But the result isn't music, it's self-indulgent crap (there's no other word for it).
Self-indulgent is also a good term for the pseudo-cognoscenti who populate concert audiences and applaud vigorously for the crap that’s on offer. It’s a way of saying, “This is good stuff, no matter what it sounds like, and my vigorous applause signals my asthetic superiority.” Underwriting the crap sends an even stronger signal — or it is meant to. But (to me) it signals “sucker”.
The challenge to be “open minded” (i.e., to tolerate the second-rate and nonsensical) is heard regularly on Composers Datebook, a syndicated feature that runs on some NPR stations. Every Composers Datebook program closes by “reminding you that all music was once new” — as if to lump Arnold Schoenberg and John Cage with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven.
But that’s enough from me (for now). This is from Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker:
As a Schoenbergian atonalist,... [Pierre Boulez] found himself dissatisfied with twelve-tone music as it was then practiced. He was bothered by the fact that Schoenberg had radicalized harmony but still treated rhythm and form in traditional, even hackneyed ways. So he began working toward the idea of “serialism,” in which durations, dynamics, and instrumental attacks were organized along the same principles that governed the twelve-tone series. He achieved a mode of writing that was, if nothing else, internally consistent....
Even in the fifties and sixties, as Boulez abandoned strict serialism and began to write in a more fluid, impressionist style, he remained a composer of vibration, activity, unrest. He set the profile of “modern music” as it is popularly conceived and as it is still widely practiced — a rapid sequence of jabbing gestures, like the squigglings of a seismograph.
(Emphasis added by me.)
This is from Miles Hoffman, founder and violist of the American Chamber Players:
The primary proposition in defense of avant-garde music of the relentlessly dissonant and persistently unpopular variety has always been that, through exposure and familiarity, we often come to appreciate, and even love, things that initially confuse or displease us. Here what we might call “the Beethoven Myth” comes into play. “Beethoven was misunderstood in his time,” the argument goes, “but now the whole world recognizes his genius. I am misunderstood in my time, therefore I am like Beethoven.” This reasoning, unfortunately, has been the refuge of countless second- and third-rate talents. Beethoven ate fish, too. If you eat fish, are you like Beethoven? But there’s a much graver flaw in the argument: Beethoven was not misunderstood in his time. Beethoven was without doubt the most famous composer in the world in his time, and the most admired. And if there were those who didn’t “get” his late string quartets, for example, there were plenty of others who did, and who rapidly accepted the quartets as masterpieces….
Have I exaggerated the intensity of the distaste that so much modernist music has aroused? No, sad to say, not if we keep certain factors in mind. One is the strength of the needs, the intensity of the desires, that we fulfill with music. Our expectations of music—expectations of the type nurtured, reinforced, and satisfied for generation upon generation—are enormous, and enormously important to us, and when those expectations are disappointed, we take it very badly indeed….
Inevitably, however, we return to the fact that there’s something basic to human nature in the perception of “pleasing sounds,” and in the strength of the tonal structures that begin and end with those sounds. Blue has remained blue to us over the centuries, and yellow yellow, and salt has never started tasting like sugar. With or without physics, consonances are consonances because to most people they sound good, and we abandon them at great risk. History will say—history says now—that the 12-tone movement was ultimately a dead end, and that the long modernist movement that followed it was a failure. Deeply flawed at their musical and philosophical roots, unloving and oblivious to human limits and human needs, these movements left us with far too many works that are at best unloved, at worst detested. They led modern classical music to crisis, confusion, and, in many quarters, despair, to a sense that we’ve wasted decades, and to a conviction that our only hope for whatever lies ahead starts with first making sure we abandon the path we’ve been on.
From a distance of centuries, knowledgeable observers can usually discern when specific cultural developments within societies or civilizations reached their peaks. The experts may argue over precise dates and details, but the existence of the peaks themselves is rarely in question. In the case of Western music, we don’t have to wait centuries for a verdict. We can say with confidence that the system of tonal harmony that flowered from the 1600s to the mid-1900s represents the broad summit of human accomplishment, and that our subsequent attempts to find successors or substitutes for that system are efforts—more or less noble—along a downhill slope. [But the joy of “serious” music began to diminish around 1900, when many leading composers (e.g., Mahler and R. Strauss, following the lead of Wagner and Bruckner), began to deploy tonality in pretentious, ponderous, and dreary works.]
What lies ahead? Nobody can say, of course. But with the peak behind us, there’s no clear cause for optimism—no rational cause, anyway, to believe that another Beethoven (or Berlioz or Brahms…) is on the way. And even if he were on the way, in what musical language would he write when he got here? The present is totally free but totally uncertain, the immediate past offers little, and the more distant past is . . . past. And yet, irrational creatures that we are, we keeping hoping for the best, and it’s right that we do. We owe it to Music. The good news is that there are many composers today who, despite the uncertain footing, are striving valiantly, and successfully, to write works that are worthy of our admiration and affection. They write in a variety of styles, but the ones who are most successful are those who are finding ways—often by assimilating ethnic idioms and national popular traditions—to invest their music with both rhythmic vitality and lyricism. They’re finding ways to reconnect music to its eternal roots in dance and song.
Rhythmic vitality and lyricism. That’s what it takes, and that’s what’s been missing from most “serious” music for the past 100 years and more.
Martin Kettle, writing in the The Guardian, drew on Peter Van der Merwe's Roots of the Classical: the Popular Origins of Western Music makes the following points:
[Van der Merwe] reckons that by 1939, the year of Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, the flow of music that is both genuinely modern and popular had all but dried up. Van der Merwe nods towards Khachaturian, late Strauss and the Britten of Peter Grimes — and, er, that's it. For the general public, he argues, classical music ceased to exist by 1950.
There will be an interesting argument about when and where the line can be drawn. That it can be drawn somewhere (1940, 1950 or 1960 hardly matters) is, however, beyond serious dispute. At some point in the past half-century, classical music lost touch with its public.
At the start of the 21st century, we can see what went wrong more clearly. What went wrong was western European modernism. Modernism is a huge, varied and complex phenomenon, and it took on different qualities in different national cultures. But an essential feature, especially as Van der Merwe argues it, was to turn music decisively towards theory - often political theory - and away from its popular roots.
The pioneer figure was Arnold Schoenberg, with his theory of the emancipation of dissonance (which, as Van der Merwe cleverly points out, also implied the suppression of consonance). But it was after Schoenberg's death, in the period 1955-80, that his ideas achieved the status of holy writ.
The upshot was a deliberate renunciation of popularity. The audience that mattered to modernists (even the many who saw themselves as socialists) ceased to be the general public and increasingly became other composers and the intellectual, often university-based, establishment that claimed to validate the new music, not least through its influence over state patronage. Any failure of the music to become popular was ascribed not to the composer's lack of communication but the public's lack of understanding.
Not surprisingly, the public looked elsewhere, to what we are right to call, and right to admire for being, popular music. This embrace started in the early 20th century with ragtime and jazz and reached its apex with rock'n'roll, whose great years belong to that same period, 1955-80, when modernism ruled in the academy....
Classical music survived, after a fashion. But it has less to say about today. It endures overwhelmingly on the strength of its back catalogue and performance tradition, not of any new creativity. Having failed to persuade the public to embrace modern music, it has sustained itself only by rediscovering the music of earlier epochs and - though this is arguable - by learning the lessons of the modernist deviation.
I draw the line much earlier than 1950, and I certainly exclude the ponderous pair of Richard Strauss and Benjamin Britten from the list of classical composers who wrote in a popular style. Dvořák was the last classical composer to do that consistently.
Music can be serious, but it needn't be boring or depressing or just plain unlistenable. But a trip through the list of 20th century composers turns up relatively few who wrote music that's endurable. Among the many 20th century specialists in boredom, cacophony, and nonsense are John Adams, Béla Bartók, Alban Berg, Pierre Boulez (encore!), John Cage, George Crumb, György Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Anton Webern.
If you want to hear how a true master delivers what might be taken for “modern music”, while keeping the listener enthralled, listen to Ludwig van Beethoven's Grosse Fugue, op. 133. Beethoven composed the piece in 1825-6. I daresay that in the intervening 196 years no one has come close to matching its dazzling blend of sobriety, inventiveness, and élan.
Is there a cure for what ails classical music? If there is, what might it be?
ArtsJournal.com once published a 10-day blog, "Critical Conversation: Classical Music Critics on the Future of Music". It "tackled the question what/where/are the Big Ideas in classical music?" The blog "involved 13 prominent American music critics”.
One of the critics, Greg Sandow (then at The Wall Street Journal), offered this:
A new Big Idea would be very welcome, at least to me — a reintroduction of performer freedom, but to what now would be considered a drastic degree. You can find examples of this in old recordings, especially by singers. Look at Ivan Kozlovsky, one of the two star tenors at the Bolshoi Opera during Stalin's rule. To judge from films and recordings, he's clearly one of the greatest tenors who ever lived, measured simply by technique, breath control, range (all the way up to an F above high C, with Cs and C sharps thrown out like thrilling candy), phrasing, and expression....
But what makes him most unusual — and, to many people, quite improper — is that he sang at least some of the time like a pop singer, using lots of falsetto, almost crooning at times, and above all taking any liberty he pleased, slowing down and speeding up as the mood suited him. To my ears, he's mesmerizing when he does that. You can't (to bastardize an old cliche) take your ears off him. And when he does it in the Duke's opening solo in the duet with Gilda from Rigoletto, he nails the Duke's character as no other singer I've ever heard could do. You don't just theorize that the Duke is attractive to women; you feel it, and want to surrender to him yourself. Or, perhaps, run away, which is exactly the kind of dual reaction a man like that would really get....
[Kozlovsky is] in part just a sentimental entertainer. But what sentiment, and what entertainment! And what perfect singing. When he croons "O Mimi tu piu non torni"..., some people might roll their eyes at the way he slows down at the peak of the phrase, but you can't ignore his genuine feeling, or his perfect control as he slowly dreams his voice into the lightest of pianissimos.
Singing like that would be absolutely forbidden in opera today. No teacher, no coach, and no conductor would let any singer try it. And yet, if someone stepped out on the stage of the Met singing that way, the audience would go insane. The applause wouldn't end. And opera would come back to life.
And so would classical music come back to life if more composers were to reject self-indulgence and write music for the unfeigned enjoyment of audiences.
But I'm not counting on it. "Serious" music (like other art forms) is dominated by the academy. And the academy -- for all its socialist cant -- scorns "the masses". Academicians (and their fellow travelers at the podium and in the loge seats) would find it hard to maintain their air of mysterious superiority if they were to produce works that "the masses" could actually enjoy.
Here’s a rollicking example: Dvořák’s String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, Op. 96 (“American”).