Audience Tastes: Threat or Menace

Jun 7 11:46 UTC 1998

Britain's "Masterprize" competition was in the news recently.  
A wealthy investment banker invited submissions of scores for
orchestral compositions of 8 to 12 minutes in length which would
be accessible to concert audiences.  (I don't think he used the
word accessible -- "programmable" or something, but everyone got
the idea.)  

The seven finalists were recorded and included in a CD with the
January BBC Music magazine.  The concert was in April in London,
at which the audience members were allowed to vote on their favorite.
The finalist compositions all seemed to be trying to create an
effect by means of inventive orchestration.  Six of them were mildly 
modernist pieces featuring dissonance, serialist manipulations of
tones, etc.  The seventh piece was a ravishingly lush seascape
in a style reminiscent of Debussy.  It won by a wide margin.  The
BBC interviewed some of the audience members afterward; the
consensus seemed to be that the seascape was the only piece you'd
want to take home and play on your CD player.

The result of the voting didn't surprise me in the least.  Oddly,
though, the critics' reaction to the voting result was one of 
complete shock.  The critic for the London Times said he was 
"speechless."  What on earth did they expect?

response 2 of 27:

Jun 7 23:37 UTC 1998

I think the finalists were chosen by a panel of musicians and
critics.  I know Vladimir Ashkenazy was one of them.  The 
competition is the brainchild of a wealthy British investment
banker and former diplomat who, I think, is trying to prove
a point.  

Right around the time this was happening, the pianist and
musicologist Charles Rosen published an essay in the New York
Review attacking the public position recently taken Julian
Lloyd Webber (cellist brother of Cats composer Andrew) that there
is a sort of modernist gestapo among music critics and academics
that effectively prevents "listenable" concert music from being
performed and, in some cases, even written.  Rosen repeatedly 
made the point that conservative composers don't have any more
audience appeal than "the most extravagant modernists."  (Rosen's
term.)  Rosen is obviously ignoring CD sales, which have always
shown that people are willing to spend much more money for 
conservative composers' music.  (Everything being relative, we
have to say that anyone now writing music that's no more advanced
than, say, Bartok or Hindemith would be considered conservative.)
But even granting that Rosen might not have been able to research
CD sales, the result of the Masterprize competition sinks his 
theory like the Titanic.  The fact is that in this one case, when
someone gave the audience a choice they voted for the old-fashioned
ear-carressing seascape.  The composition is by a British composer
named Andrew March; if you imagine John Williams in his "Close
Encounters" period, with a bit of Barber's refinement and a few 
echoes of Arnold Bax, you'll have an idea what it sounds like.
The composer, realizing that he is the target of critical outrage,
rather pathetically noted that his piece lacks any hummable tunes
and so qualifies as "modernist" in some sense. 

response 4 of 27:

Jun 8 11:46 UTC 1998

I don't know why not - there's an awful lot of it.    8-{)]

But I would certainly like to see contemporary work which was as listenable
as any of that stuff.  (Or, *more* such - it's not totally nonexistent, just
so hard to find that it might as well be.)

response 6 of 27:

Jun 8 17:40 UTC 1998

Why can't we go on programming 1700-1913 music forever? Or, 1400-1700
music for that matter? It is *completely* new to every new generation.
There is nothing "war-horse" about them if you've never heard them
before. What makes music "war-horse"? Familiarity. If there is no
familiarity, there is nothing "war-horse". 

What is really happening is an increasing accumulations of music. We
have very little from before 1400, and since then - especially with the
invention of printing - there is a continually accumulating body of
music. None of it is "old" - the first time you hear a Monteverdi madrigal
it is as fresh as the first time it was ever performed. And it is also
uncharted territory when you first enter it. 

What I find difficult is understanding how to confront the total accumulated
body of music as more centuries pass and more is accumulated. If there 
are no whole world calamities, everyone will have not just 500+ years of
accumulated music from which to choose - to learn, in fact, but 1000+
or 10,000+ years of such....how does one deal with this?

response 8 of 27:

Jun 8 20:02 UTC 1998

Your observations apply, of course, to 'fads' in classical music. If just
one person wants to enjoy a medieval madrigal, then that madrigal is just
as 'fresh' as when it was first performed. Whether people are listening
to any classes of music en-masse is not the point in regard to the
accumulation of classical music in accessible forms - mechanical, electronic
or printed. In what sense is any of it forgotten when it is all available?

response 10 of 27:

Jun 23 20:34 UTC 1998

I think that there is plenty of space in which to expand newly created 
music and yet still give due respect to tonality and (if you must) 
listenability. Experimentation is great, yet much of this century's 
experimentation was founded on abandoning these cherished aspects of 
music. 

I guess I reject the notion that you can't experiment without that 
abandonment. It *is* tiresome to hear that from academics, but maybe 
they just have too narrow an idea of what "modernist" means.

Maybe they should have more respect for some music (not all) written for 
commercial purposes, suchs as movie scores. Most of this is very 
listenable, by necessity, yet I don't think it is the same as music 
written 100 years ago. At least not the best of the lot. Academics look 
down their noses at it, but I think it may be pointing towards the 
future of new music.

response 12 of 27:

Jun 24 01:26 UTC 1998

There is really a tremendous amount of very listenable 20th century music.
Off the top of my head I can name at least 20 composers who still have
enthusiastic audiences (including me). Copland, Bernstein, Sibelius .. the
list goes on and on. But they're all dead. I can't think of a single living
serious composer (okay, there's Philip Glass) who has an audience. I listen
to the few remaining classical radio stations fairly regularly, and they
certainly don't play contemporary composers. There's a good reason, that
someone mentioned earlier in this discussion. Once, under the pressure from
academic critics, you throw out harmony, rhythm, melody, tone, you also throw
out your audience. And it's pretty hard to build a musical career when you've
got no listeners.

response 14 of 27:

Jun 24 11:03 UTC 1998

Lots of 20th century composers wrote music that's both "listenable"
and well-written, including some masterpieces, like Stravinsky's
Symphony of Psalms, Britten's War Requiem, Barber's Adagio for Strings, 
Sibelius's symphonies, Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by 
Thomas Tallis, Shostakovich's 10th symphony, Bartok's Concerto for 
Orchestra, Prokofiev's 3rd piano concerto, Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on 
a Theme of Paganini, Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe.  Each of these pieces 
is composed in a style so original and idiosyncratic that you can't 
mistake it for anyone else's music.  It's "new" music, music no had 
ever heard anything quite like when it was first performed.  Here's 
a list off the top of my head of some 20th century composers whose 
music you might like if you can't stand self-consciously "modernist" 
music of the atonal and arrhythmic variety:

Claude Debussy
Maurice Ravel
Francis Poulenc
Samuel Barber
Aaron Copland
Igor Stravinsky
Howard Hanson
Benjamin Britten
Jean Sibelius
Alan Hovhaness
Roy Harris
Ralph Vaughan Williams
William Walton
Dmitri Shostakovich
Sergei Prokofiev
Paul Hindemith
Carl Orff
Bela Bartok
Zoltan Kodaly
Ottorino Respighi
Arnold Bax
John Adams
Sergei Rachmaninov

response 16 of 27:

Jun 26 14:14 UTC 1998

Thanks, md, for the list. Is it necessary to point out that, except for John
Adams, every one of the composers on your list is dead? I love them all and
would listen to them forever, but where are there any living classical
composers?

response 18 of 27:

Jun 26 23:40 UTC 1998

Re #16, Gorecki, Maxwell Davies, John Corigliano, Ned Rorem,
Tan Dun, are all fairly conservative and listenable, although
your guess is as good as mine how good they are.  There are
lots of others.  The former minimalists are all turning into
neoromantics, I hear.  

A classical composer is someone that writes the music you find
in the "Classical" section at the CD store.  The music tends to
be relatively cultivated compared to pop music.  Except for a
few negligible exceptions, the music is characterized by changes
in tempo, volume and key signature rarely heard in pop music
or other non-classical music.  Some of it you can whistle, some
you can't.  Much of it is cast in such traditional forms as
rondo, theme and variations, sonata-allegro, etc.

,
I mean, "."

response 20 of 27:

Jun 28 13:35 UTC 1998

Classical music based on folk tunes -- for example, Aaron Copland's
Appalachian Spring -- is classical music based on folk tunes.  And
pop songs like "Full Moon and Empty Arms" that are based on tunes
from classical pieces (a melody from the 3rd mvt of Rachmaninov's 
2nd piano concerto in this case) are pop songs based on tunes from
classical pieces.

Actually, "a lot of classical music was based on folk tunes" is an
understatement: one popular theory has it that classical music has
its origins in folk music.

response 22 of 27:

Jun 28 19:46 UTC 1998

I can't imagine where else classical music could have had its origins, other
than in music that people were already playing and dancing to.  
Aren't there any pieces composed that are not in a particular genre?  OR
mixture of genres?  Can't you just write music that is not in some
compartment?

response 24 of 27:

Aug 26 20:58 UTC 1998

Heard Stravinski's Rite of Spring in Oregon (Eugene) last week, introduced
as part of a series of concerts on jazz. Mostly ragtime when I was there. But
the Stravinski had the full orchestra, more than 100 pieces, including six
big timpani. Well done, ranging from the quiet introduction to those timpani
as loud as thunder. The audience went wild -- standing ovation, cheers,
repeated bows by the musicians. And, of course, I was right in there with the
rest of the audience. I'd gone wild when I first heard it in the dinosaur
version, years ago. As the program notes pointed out, there hasn't been
anything like it before or since. I think that's the problem we're dealing
with here. Not that there isn't any modern, non-traditional music, but that
the modernist stuff we've been hearing is do deadly dull. (Yes, of course,
*anything's* dull in comparison with Rite of Spring, but not *deadly* dull.)