Left behind (2)

So which do you think the classical world needs more: more major orchestras playing contemporary 'classical'* music, or MoMA-type orchestras to cater to those crowds? I still remember vividly the debacle when the NY Philharmonic played Penderecki's 2nd Cello Concerto exactly a year ago**, in between the 6th Brandenburg Concerto and Beethoven's 5th. From what I could tell of the audience, it's no wonder the drinks line was so long during intermission. I wonder if nearly as much good would come out of, e.g., the Philharmonic continuing to force this stuff on a captive audience, as would come from orchestras which cater to a somewhat different audience.

*I put 'classical' in quotes because I'm not at all convinced that a coherent line can be drawn between what we usually call classical music and a lot of the music of the 20th century.
**Or suchabouts - it was the night of the Yale-Harvard Game, which is tomorrow, so it must be the same time of year :)

Quick answer, off the top of my. More than standard orchestras playing new music, we need groups playing up to date new music for the contemporary art audience, and the people who listen to out-there indie rock. MOMA orchestras, as you put it, though these groups can be much more flexible in their instrumentation.

If the big orchestras want to play any role in the current world, and thrive in the future, they should start doing the same thing, but for the future health of music itself, it doesn't matter much whether they do or don't. For their own health, and for the financial future of their musicians, then it does matter. But I'm willing to take a hard line here, and say that, on the whole, mainstream orchestras haven't done much for at least 30 years now even to keep up with current musical styles, let alone help music take its natural course of evolving new ones, to fit the evolving culture.

Once again, the art vs. music argument. I don't think this is a valid comparison. You can stroll through a museum, take in the art you like, ignore the art you don't. You can't do that with music. Once they close the doors to the concert hall you're stuck whether you like the music or not. For this reason, musical organizations cannot follow the example of visual arts institutions. Music critics and such would do well to discard this line of reasoning and try to figure out how to get audiences to find their inner adventurousness without relying on methods used by other disciplines.

And btw, I think the early audiences for Glass and Reich came much more from the dance world than the art world.

Early audiences for Glass and Reich came generally from the downtown arts world, which included mingling crowds from dance, art, and theater. (Oh, and downtown music, too, which included a lot more than Reich and Glass. Google Tom Johnson, and read his collection of reviews from the time, to see how that was.)

I was there. Because the visual art world was so much bigger than the modern dance and downtown theater communities, it played a larger role. Read the Glass chapter in John Rockwell's seminal book "All American Music" to see something about how that worked.

As for the differences between art and music, fine, I've said the same thing many times, and am going to repeat it in my next installment. I agree with you, except -- in past generations, and in musical arenas other than the mainstream classical world, what you talk about hasn't seemed to be a problem. For close to 40 years now (as I've had to repeat many times), I've seen excited audiences turn out for new music. As they did all through the 18th and 19th centuries, when new music was far more the norm than it is now. These audiences didn't fidget because they were forced to sit there until the piece finished, instead of walking on, as they might in a gallery. They loved what they heard, Again, I was there. It would be hard, I think, for anyone who was at '70s performances by Reich and Glass to think the art gallery comparison carried any weight at all. The question here is matching the music to the right audience. Once you do that, people are more than happy to go along with what they hear.

There is one important point about Lindberg that you don't mention. When he was a student in Finland, the dominating tradition there was the Sibelius tradition, and the most respected composers were Rautavaara and Sallinen, who both wrote mainly tonal music. So for him, tonal music was the music of the previous generation, not something new and interesting.

An interesting point. The same was true for American composition students in the 1950s., and for American composers. This was the time, after all, when Copland and Stravinsky started writing 12-tone music.

So what you're saying might imply that Finnish music -- in the '70s, when Lindberg was a student -- was (very, very roughly speaking) a generation behind developments in the US, and also the rest of Europe. Since young French and German and Italian composers -- to name only those three countries -- felt the same pull away from tonal writing in the '50s.

By the '70s, and certainly by the '80s, the pull went the other way, at least in the US. Young composers began to get tired of the atonal style, which seemed stiff and old-fashioned, and started turning back to tonal music, or at least the harmonies of tonal music. (Glass and Reich, obviously, weren't at that time writing music that much resembled the tonal music of the past, even while they used its chords.)

So this helps me understand Lindberg. But at some point, shouldn't he open his eyes and see what's going on outside Finland? Especially if he's going to come and take a composing position in the US. And, for God's sake, especially in NY, which has been a big center of post-atonal composition. Of course, we in the US don't know nearly enough about European composition (say "spectral music" to a gathering to musically knowledgeable people in the US, and you'll mostly draw a blank). But still Lindberg, coming here to the US, should have learned more about where things stand here.

Thanks for this, Greg. Of course you're utterly and completely correct, and you say it beautifully. I'm tired of trying to say it and being written off as a lunatic, but you have credibility in circles I don't.

Coming from you, Kyle, this means a lot. I think you know far more about these things than I do. And some people think I'm a lunatic, too, so maybe we'll just have to share a padded room in the loony bin. If I do have credibility, let's see if it translates into any other big institutions trying out the things I suggest.

I have one objection to the comparison. I certainly think lessons can be learned from the visual arts and their institutions. My experience, however underinformed it probably is, doesn't match this narrative though.

For me "The Painted Word" was an effective critique, as well as the old saw "imagination without skill equals contemporary art". I think that in terms of self-referential sterility, and creating works of art for a small, self-inflating "in crowd", the visual arts can easily give classical music a run for its money. I attended one Whitney Biennial, and though I found a few things interesting there (I still remember Eiko and Koma for example), I certainly did not take in the overall event as a riot of inventive styles that interact porously with popular culture. Rather, it struck me as a parallel universe of a culture that, however many people may walk through, was basically talking to itself. If it took from contemporary culture, it didn't end up leaving any mark on contemporary culture as a result that I could see.

I don't chill out at home with Kirchner and Wuorinen but I would take a concert of their works to a contemporary art show any day. If ideological, at least these guys were serious and writing music for aesthetic goals that they felt strongly about. Maybe I'm just not informed enough, but at a contemporary art show I always feel like I'm looking at gimmicks, tired attempts to court controversy, and self-referential commentaries.

A friend of mine since diapers is a classically trained painter and our interesting conversations have continued unabated since. He's very envious of certain aspects of contemporary classical music. There's a basic standard of craft that is still left. I think it's well described as follows. Let's say a Young Concert Artists jury gets together, an eclectic group of classical musicians hearing an even more eclectic group of applicants. While the final winners may not have been agreed upon by everyone, it's highly likely that they would all agree on who did and did not comport themselves with basic competence in the auditions, even if their interests or specialties were well outside of the jury.

In visual art, from what my friend and his circle tell me, such a basic standard of craft is completely gone. Art schools in fact are often seeking a return to rigor but with the vanishing of any standards they can't find solid ground to stand on to begin such a return to rigor. This account always gives me pause. It's not a road I'd like to see classical music head down. I think it's a difficult road for a discipline to come back from. I see no danger whatsoever of it right now, and I certainly agree with your thoughts on Golijov. But I think emulating the culture of contemporary visual art might be the fastest way to get there.

When I make these broad comparisons, there's always the danger of painting with too broad a brush. (Or doubling the melody line with too many instruments, losing all subtlety in the process.) So forgive me if you thought I was saying everything is right with the visual art world. I guess the same thing happens when I defend contemporary culture in general from unwarranted attacks. If I say that there's a lot of creativity in the world today -- in response to people who say there's hardly any at all -- I certainly don't mean to imply that all the creativity leads to great work, or that the culture doesn't also have major problems.

I haven't liked the last couple of Whitney Biennials, and in many ways the art world is a very easy target for anyone looking for silliness, pomposity, supposedly deep thoughts that aren't very deep, and also the lack of craft that you mention (certainly apparent at the last Biennial).

But it's also true that the Biennial attracts a wider crowd than mainstream contemporary music concerts (not wider, though, than the Bang on a Can marathons). I think I'm right to say that it's tucked more deeply into our current culture than mainstream contemporary music concerts are. And in any case, to understand what's gong on we have to look more widely than our particular taste. To give an example from a very different ballpark (and from something I'll blog about in the future), I thought Hugo Weisgall's "Esther" was pretty awful, as an opera, when I saw it at the New York City Opera. But I can't deny that they produced it wonderfully, that they appeared to be selling huge numbers of tickets, that they had a vibrant Jewish Singles Night going on, on the promenade, the night I went, and generally that the company shows every sign of renewed vitality. Even if I didn't like the piece, and might in the future quarrel with the company's artistic direction, if they continued to produce new pieces I didn't like.

I keep reading this and thinking that there was something going on in society as a whole that was fueling this sort of movement across all boundaries in music. I've said it before, but the way you describe the rise of atonality, how it became the Abstract Prestige Music, and how many composers of that sort of avant garde music ended up drifting back into tonal stuff just parallels the whole prog-rock experience almost perfectly, right down to the timing. I think there is a a great deal to be learned from pulling back form classical/art music and asking, "Where else have we seen this sort of evolution occur?"

Progressive rock -- its arrival, how it was received by audiences, who the audience was, the critical reception, and the drift back to tonality that culminated in melodic rock ... It's the exact same thing.

And again, that makes me wonder what was going on in society at large that caused these two so similar evolutions in two forms of music that were barely on speaking terms with one another. Somehow, there was some subtle message being sent in the world at large that seeped into both worlds of what was considered prestigious, how one presented something to an audience, and what the purpose of art was.

I'm unfamiliar with movies, dance, books, and the general art world, but it wouldn't shock me if a similar process wasn't at work in the same time frame in them as well.

Greg, I really wish that the discussion you were promoting here included less of what amounts to the canard that all of the 'cool' kids are writing 'tonal' music again, unlike those European squares like Lindberg.

You imply that Lindberg's lack of acknowledgment of Bang-on-a-can and other sympathetic composers is somehow a slight against them, that somehow their embracing tonality is so incredibly relevant to the discussion of the evolution of Lindberg's language that they are tantamount to the elephant in the room.

The reality is that Lindberg is charting quite a different course than the 'alt-classical'scene, and just because he is using triads again doesn't mean he's coming late to the party. He's just at another party. Magnus Lindberg is never going to come even close to sounding like David Lang, because they are coming from utterly different aesthetic stances. That's a good thing, I'm sure you would agree.

You have--inadvertantly--made it seem for those who did not have the benefit of attending, that Lindberg was discussing rediscovering tonality for himself. Obviously the truth is more complicated. Lindberg has, over many years, developed a personal language that incorporates aspects of spectral, 12-tone, and tonal elements together, and that's pretty interesting. 'Returning' to tonality isn't the only way to be writing relevant music, and most of the time a composer's thought process regarding their choices of personal language go much deeper than that. Lindberg has found his own way forward, and I'm sure you are appreciative of how his voice represents another interesting instance of the current landscape.

I've said -- maybe not enough -- that I'm oversimplifying.

But to be honest, I don't find Lindberg all that interesting. His music isn't bad, purely as music, but as an artistic statement, it leaves me mildly uninterested.

That's my own taste, of course, and doesn't have to be anyone else's. But I have to say that I'm wary of the "balanced" approach (as someone here called it) to evaluating new music. Fine, let's look at all styles and all composers, but let's not forget that the differences between them can be crucial, in terms of where the music fits in our culture. And where it fits in our culture is going to be the key to attracting any notable audience to it.

This is elementary, I think, in other arts. Why do we resist it in classical music?