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?

27 responses total.

Agreed.  Especially, though ... who chose the finalists?

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. 

Btw, at some point someone is going to have to ask this question,
so I'll do it now: where do we go from here?  I really believe
the competition is a kind of turning-point.  You can't ignore
audience rejection of modernist music any longer, or, like Charles
Rosen, pretend it doesn't exist.  It's now there for everyone to see,
and it has to be addressed.  We can't go on programming music from
1700-1913 forever.

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.)

"Listenable" contemporary music is not all that hard to find
but it does require some work and attention the first few
times through the piece.  So if "listenable" means effortless
then there is a problem.

For someone trying to take their first few steps into
uncharted territory I'd suggest almost anything by 
the Kronos Quartet.  But I've also witnessed about a quarter
of the audience not return after a Kronos intermission.

I don't think feeling comfortable with old war-horse melodies
is a concept dedicated to classical listeners though.  Even
the most long-lived popular composers have the same problem
to some degree.  Go to a James Taylor concert and all the
audience wants to hear is Sweet Baby James.  If Mr. Taylor
dedicated the entire concert to a soon to be released album
folks would be bummed.

Sounds trite and it is trite but change is hard.  It's 
even harder when the tickets cost $50 each.

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?

Re: accumulating music:  Obviously, not everything will be remembered as well.
I think most people can name more Romantic composers than Baroque or
Renaissance. Some styles from those early periods still sound good to people
accustomed to more recent music, some of those styles are less accessible and
are being forgotten. I have trouble believing that there will be many
serialist composers remembered in a hundred or so years. 
For that matter, things pop back into memory again after a while. Gregorian
chant had a bit of a revival after being pretty much ignored for ages. Maybe
Monteverdi is next; maybe in five hundred years or so Serialism will come back
up again.

Re: "listenable":  What's wrong with listenable music? Unadventurous audiences
are a problem, _cliched_ music is a problem, but if people want to go back
to writing real melodies and suchlike, more power to 'em. While music's
getting less ivory-tower-ish than it was for a while, I think people are still
a bit too wary of accessible music.

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?

What is "listenable modernist?"  Is Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" listenable?
Is it modernist?  Its premier was said to have touched off a riot.  Who knows,
new listeners of it today might also riot, not realizing how old it is. 
Also, "listenable" requires some learning and appreciation by the listener.
There is much I could listen to today and appreciate (e.g. Rite of Spring)
that I probably would not have before college.  But it *is* tiresome to have
academics continue to harp that you can't write anything modernist and
listenable, all the melodic variations have been used up, etc.  At the same
time, academics should have the freedom to explore new and different ways of
writing music, for its own sake.  They just shouldn't expect everyone to love
to listen to it, or pay for it.  There's the problem...

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.

I just discovered Walton's non-modern 20th century music (thanks to John
Morris' record donations).  Not all the good music was written by 1900.

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.

Certainly not.  I'm about as negative as anyone toward most "modernist" music
(and most self-consciously "serious" music generally in this century); yet
I have to say that among all the clatter there is quite a lot of really nice
stuff. IMNVHO.

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

Re #13: jmm slipped in - my "certainly not" related to the previous resp. 
(And Picospan didn't even *tell* me.)

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?

Define 'classical composer'.

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, "."

A lot of classical music was based on folk tunes.  Some current
popular music is based on classical tunes - is it classical?  If
it is based on folk tunes what is it?  Are there hybrids?

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.

Right.  It's a variation on a theme of the Border's scam.
Every book in their store has the same words, only the
order changes.  You plunk down good money for a collection
of words in different order.

Music is the same rip.

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?

Big question mark to #21.  Re #22, of course you can compose
mucis that's "not in some compartment."  There's nothing wrong
with Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, et al., repeating the
same formal structures over and over again, however.  

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.)

Incidentally, the riot that happened at the "Rite of Spring" premire was 
not because of the music; critical reaction to the music was the most 
favorable reaction to that performance... the riot was due to the dance, 
which portrayed ritual murder and rape.  The audience didn't like that 
at all.  

I really like "modernist" music... I'm of the opinion that traditional 
harmony really hit it's peak with Mahler, Scriaban, and Wagner.  They 
took teh tonal languge as far as it could go.  So the next generation of 
composers was left to discover a new harmonic languge.  There were any 
number of answers to that ranging from the very "listenable" Debussy to 
the free atonality, and later serialism of Schoenberg.  Maybe because 
I've studied most of these techniques, I can really get into the music, 
though this is not to say that I would want to turn it on to listen to 
it as background music.  For example, Charles Ives' fourth symphony (an 
amazing peice, for anyone who's interested... I highly reccomend it), is 
heavy... not something you listen to over dinner.  

I had an interesting experience at a string quartet concert the other 
night.  I was seated next to an older woman, and the quartet played a 
peice of Anton Webern's, which had several movements which used 
serialism, and the rest used free atonality.  After the peice, which was 
right before intermission, she asked me, "As a girl of the 90's, do you 
really like that kind of music?"  We got to talking about it, and she's 
been trying to understand it, but, she just can't get her ears used to 
it.  My question then is, do we like tonality becuase our ears are used 
to it?  

As far as "listenable" composers I might reccomend some of Ives' easier 
to handle works (even the 4th Symphony, for the adventurous), like the 
first string quartet, some of his songs (like "The Children's Hour", or 
"The Things Our Fathers Loved," or "The Cage."), The Unanswered 
Question, The Holidays Symphony, maybe the first Symphony.  (But if you 
want to avoid atonality, I would tell you to stay away from teh piano 
music... particularly the "Concord Sonata.")  The nice thing about Ives 
is that he usually gives a program to go with his dissonances, where 
they happen, and he quotes a lot of hymn tunes.  Somebody else I might 
reccomend is little known composer Michael Kurek (he's the head of the 
theory dpt. here)... he's got a CD out, and I think his first string 
quartet is on a Blair String Quartet CD.  

Thanks for the recommendation.  I haven't heard of Michael Kurek.
I'm always eager to listen to new music that others give high marks
to.

Stravinsky himself once remarked that the riot at the premiere of
Le sacre was at least partly due to the spectacle of all those
"pigtailed Lolitas" prancing around the stage.  But the current line,
that the music had nothing to do with the riot, is simply wrong.  The 
music had everything to do with it.

In answer to your question about tonality, I believe it's possible
for one's ears to get used to just about anything.  I love Eliot
Carter's music, for example.  But when some nice person asks me how 
I can listen to that horrible stuff, I feel as if I'm saying, "Sure, 
it all feels like someone pounding a nail into your head; but there's 
clumsy nail-pounding and there's artful nail-pounding, like Carter's 
Concerto for Orchestra."  In other words, we can get used to anything.
What I've been wondering lately is if we're on the wrong track.

I think the difficulty people have understanding music from other cultures
shows that yes, we do mostly like what we're used to. I tend to have pretty
adventurous taste in music, but there are some sorts of foreign music that
I can't make any sense of, and I doubt this is because they're "Bad 
Music" - they're just not what I'm used to. On the other hand, I've made
myself get used to some kinds of music that I used to not understand, and once
I knew the music well enough to pick up on what was going on I liked it a lot.

What I don't really like, though, is the argument that "if you try, you can
get used to it" as a justification for intentionally difficult music. So I
guess I'm with you in the "are we on the wrong track or what?" camp.

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