Protest

I want to protest, really loudly, the Boston Symphony's newly announced programming for next year. This will be James Levine's first season as music director, and he's packed it with bristling modernist works:

• DUTILLEUX Tout un monde lointain
• LIGETI Lontano
• CARTER Micomicón
• CARTER Symphonia: Sum fluxae pretium spei
• CARTER Sonata for flute, oboe, cello, and harpsichord (on a Boston Symphony Chamber Players concert)
• LUTOSLAWSKI Cello Concerto
• LUTOSLAWSKI Concerto for Orchestra
• LIGETI Cello Concerto
• BABBITT Concerti for Orchestra
• HARBISON New work (world premiere; BSO commission)
• WUORINEN Piano Concerto No. 4
     (world premiere; BSO commission)
• BIRTWISTLE The Shadow of Night

There are also older modernist pieces -- Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, for instance, and Stravinsky's Movements for Piano and Orchestra. And then there are two new or newish pieces that don't fit the modernist mold, one by William Bolcom, and a world premiere from Yehudi Wyner. Plus something by Michael Gandolfi, a Boston composer whose music I don't know.

Now, let me dispose of one possible misunderstanding. I'm not saying I don't like these pieces. Some of them might be to my taste (or yours), and some might not. It's what they represent as a group that bothers me. They're all examples of a modernist style of composition that hasn't been current for decades. To suddenly jump in a time machine, and present them all as important, presumably cutting-edge contemporary programming -- God, it's so out of date, so retro, so 20th century! By announcing these programs, the BSO turns its back on the current state of new music.

(In fact, come to think of it -- what's the average age of these composers? Is the BSO playing anything by anybody under 40? Michael Gandolfi, born in 1956, is, by far, the youngest of all of them.)

New music is far more varied than you'd guess from the BSO's programs. It's far more truly contemporary, and -- no small thing, as I'll explain in a moment -- far more accessible. Orchestras, I'll insist, have a serious responsibility to present the full range of contemporary work, not just one old-fashioned slice of it. The BSO audience is drastically misserved here. And so is all of classical music. One problem we have is that new works don't get around; hardly anyone (except, I think, artistic administrators of orchestras, and possibly music publishers) is in a position to hear or sometimes even hear about every significant premiere. Orchestras could make things a little better by programming pieces that had big success elsewhere, or at least by letting their audiences hear composers who'd begun to make a splash. The BSO, by turning the clock back 30 years, is making things worse.

And then there's the problem of accessibility. I'm not -- absolutely not -- saying that orchestras should play only easy pieces. But this modernist style has absolutely no audience. It doesn't appeal to mainstream classical concertgoers. They don't have modernist taste. (Neither, for that matter, do the people who run orchestras. Once, at an American Symphony Orchestra League conference, I spoke about new music on a panel, and polled the people who came to listen about their interests in art, film, and literature. They didn't spend much time reading Finnegans Wake, or seeking out films by Godard and Antonioni. Why should anybody think they'd listen to Birtwistle, Carter and Babbitt?)

Nor does this modernist style appeal to the new audience classical music is looking for. In my experience, this new audience wants things with (among many other things) more rhythm.

And worst of all, this modernist stuff never even appealed to the one audience it conceivably might have had, which is artists in other fields, and intellectuals. If this audience for Carter et al existed, the BSO could proudly say it was doing something for music that, admittedly, few people appreciated -- but those few people were some of the most important artists and thinkers alive. But this isn't the case. In fact, as it happened, when the minimalists came along in the late '60s and early '70s, they had this audience, or anyway a part of it; so did John Cage, in the '50s and '60s. Stockhausen, a modernist who's now out of fashion even among other modernists, and isn't on the BSO's programs, once inspired musicians out on the edges of rock and jazz. But the BSO's modernists never, as far as I know, inspired anyone. (Though it's true that Ligeti got wide exposure on the 2001 soundtrack -- which I don't think made the rest of his pretty lively work work more popular).

Now, this lack of an audience is, when you think about it, pretty interesting. Some modernist composers (Ligeti, Stockhausen, Webern, Babbitt, Boulez) can by my lights be pretty wonderful, even if the school as a whole is deadly. So why didn't they find any audience? You could even argue, if you liked, that their failure to find any audience might be a powerful virtue, or at least an intriguing curiosity. What power could their music take on, from being composed in such privacy? (Or, on the other hand, what power could have been leeched out of it, because it was composed to please other composers, and to get grants -- though this, I think, applies more to minor, strictly academic modernists, not to anyone the BSO is playing.)

But this conundrum calls for a symposium, or maybe a museum show (as I once suggested for serial music, in a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education), not a full-bore assault from the Boston Symphony, which I bet won't even acknowledge the problem, in any of its press material, or in program notes.

And what happens if these pieces -- especially in such bristling profusion -- alienate the BSO's audience? What service to new music will that be? The BSO might actually make its audience think it hates new music, a possibility that makes me feel sick. Far better to proceed the other way -- program pieces by Steve Reich, Michael Torke, John Corigliano, Christopher Rouse, Michael Daugherty, David Lang, Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, David Del Tredici, Tan Dun (his wonderful piece, with video, about his Chinese musical heritage, which the BSO itself premiered), Philip Glass, George Crumb, Louis Andriessen, Ingram Marshall, John Adams, Joan Tower, Todd Levin, and a whole host of other current composers, whose work the audience might respond to. And then, having established that new music can be stimulating, introduce the modernists. That way, the audience might listen with open ears.

But as things stand, I fear that the BSO's programming will go down like unleasant medicine: "This is good for you. Shut up and listen." We've been there before. That's what contemporary classical music used to be like, a couple of decades ago, and no one who remembers those days -- and who isn't a modernist composer, or one of those composers' few acolytes -- wants them back.

(Footnote: How do I know this is Levine's own programming? It might surprise some people, but music directors don't always plan everything their orchestras play. Sometimes they only program the concerts they themselves conduct. But in the BSO's case, the programs are clearly Levine's own work. Modernism is well known to be his taste, and the programs he's conducted with the Met orchestra -- and, to a lesser extent, with the Munich Philharmonic -- look fairly similar.)