Spot On, but a Little Late

[UPDATE BELOW] From David Byrne, as part of his response to Zimmermann’s opera Die Soldaten onÂ his web site:Â

There are lots of books exploring what the fuck happened with 20th century classical music, when many composers willfully sought to alienate the general public and create purposefully difficult, inaccessible music. Why would they do anything that perverse? Why would they not only make music that was hard to listen to, but also demand, as in the case of Zimmerman, that the piece be performed on twelve separate stages simultaneously, with the addition of giant projection screens and other multimedia aspects? Were these composers competing to see whose works could be heard and performed the least?Â Why would anyone do that?

Having closely observed the behavior of New York’s downtown, avant-garde music scene for a few decades, I can say that this impulse is not limited to academic classical composers. There are many musicians and composers of experimental works who seemingly compete for the title of most obscure and most difficult for the listener, and even record collectors like to play along. In this world, any trace of popularity, however slight, is distasteful and to be avoided at all costs. Should a work become unexpectedly accessible, the artist must then follow the piece with something completely perverse and disgusting, encouraging members of the new, undesired audience to walk away shaking their heads, leaving behind the core of pure and hardy aficionados. This is elitism of a different sort. If one can’t be fÃªted by the handful of patrons at the Met, then one can be just as elite by cultivating an audience equally rarified in the completely opposite direction. Extreme ugliness and unpleasantness becomes the mirror image of extreme luxury and beauty.

This passage suggests that Byrne has not closely observed the behavior of the Downtown scene for a few decades, for had he closely observed it, he would have noticed that a broad swath of Downtown music – not all of it, admittedly – has been devoted to music of great beauty, clarity, and accessibility. (Not that those are the only musical virtues: some of the music included in the above critique I’m probably a fan of.) From a certain angle, clearly the only angle from which Mr. Byrne sees it,Â that multifaceted creature Downtown musicÂ has been encapsulated as the world of John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, and their cohorts, who during the 1980sÂ unfortunately succeeded in obscuring the fact that Downtown was first the world of Steve Reich, Charlemagne Palestine, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Anderson, Elodie Lauten, William Duckworth, and a few hundred others. Byrne’s eloquent attack is pitch-perfect as far as its appropriate target goes, and still relevant; still, he’s about 25 years late in failing to recognize that hundreds, perhaps thousands of composers had already agreed with him by 1980, and set about doing something about it.Â Quite a bit about it, actually.

UPDATE: I guess I broke one of the main commandments of musical culture: Thou shalt not disagree with a Revered Pop Musician, even when he ventures an amateur opinion on a subject that Thou knowest more about than he does. But it’s so, so easy to write this kind of blanket condemnation of 20th-century music: “Oh, those awful composers, they were elitists, they wrote ugly music on purpose, yada yada yada.” It’s so easy.Â It’sÂ soÂ easy.Â Anyone can join in. Everyone knows the words by heart. And what does it do for composers? Makes us feel bad. What does it do for music lovers? Confirms the bad opinion they already have of new music. Meanwhile, thousands of composers have rebelled against that awful stereotype, and have labored mightily to write music that cares about its audience, that wants to seduce people, that gives generously of the kinds of beauties music can offer. Many of them can’t get their music distributed because the powers in charge still think that the old ugliness is some guaranteed sign of quality. I’ve spent my life trying to convince people that music is out there. What good does it do for someone of David Byrne’s stature to come along and tell people that all the old stereotypes are still in place, and we should avoid modern music because it’s all elitist and ugly? Of course he didn’t say that it all is, but he alluded to no counterexample, painted everyone he touched with the same brush, and segued smoothly from 1957 Zimmermann to the present as though it were all the same crap. He has nothing hopeful here to say about anyone. What good does it do us? Surely someone as insightful and talented as Byrne has something better to do with a blog than shovel more dirt onto those of us composers who’ve spent decades valiantly trying to dig music out of the hole it fell into.