In another conference, Mary Remmers mentioned that Dmitri Shostakovich's 5th symphony is her current favorite symphony. Imho, everyone should go through a phase where Shostakovich's 5th is their fave. Then you should move on to the 10th, which is his masterpiece, then sample the 7th, which resembles the 5th a little, then try and tackle the 4th, etc. Shostakovich was one of the last great romantic/modern symphonists. He sounds very Mahlerian to my ears, but for some reason I like the Russian version better than the Austrian one. He's more truly modern, for one thing, and his sound is more focused, more professional sounding. Shostakovich himself revered Mahler. When Stravinsky went to Russia in the early '60s, he supposedly told Shostakovich, "But we must move beyond Mahler." Shostakovich was crestfallen. Stravinsky could be a dick sometimes. Shostakovich was cruelly persecuted by Stalin and his lackeys. In the book Testimony by Shostakovich's student Solomon Volkov, Shostakovich is quoted as saying that many of his symphonies, including the 5th, 7th and 10th, have programs describing the horrors of life under Stalin. The famous victorious final measures of the 5th symphony, for example, are supposed to sound forced, as if a mass of humans were not actually rejoicing, but shouting "Our business is rejoicing! Our business is rejoicing!" In the 10th, composed right after Stalin's death, the scherzo is supposed to be a musical portrait of Stalin, and the 3rd and 4th movements are supposed to represent the near-extinction and ultimate triumph of Shostakovich himself, who is represented by a 4- note theme. What does anyone else think of Shostakovich? Which are your favorite compositions of his?49 responses total.
Gawd, you'd be in pig's heaven discussing this with our conductor, Michael. He's read the same books. When he is trying to get a specific feel to a passage he simply tells us some of what what going on in Shostakovich's life when he was writing the music. The stories are amazing. My favorite movement in the 5th is that second movement which is the closest thing I know of to crying clowns. I guess Shostakovich was being ordered to write more "upbeat" music. The second movement was his response. And of course the finale is gut-wrenching and very Mahleresk. It's a technically demanding piece to play.
((The Grexers On Stage item is not cross-posted to the Classical.cf. Should it be? Mary is appearing with the Life Sciences Orchestra tonight at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor; see the On Stage item in Agora/Music for details...))
I'm glad you inspired and started this, Michael and Mary. Shostakovich is my favorite of all 20th century composers, and I'll put up an argument to call him the greatest composer of that century: certainly the greatest of symphonies after Mahler, and the greatest of string quartets with the possible exception of Bartok. Neither of whom I much care for: I know that Shostakovich revered Mahler, and I understand the similarities, but to me their music feels very different. It's a matter of personality as expressed in the music. Shostakovich, even in his manic moments, has a pure sombreness that contrasts with Mahler's messy angst, and this is reflected in their structures: Shostakovich's clear and rigid, Mahler's falling all over the place. Some like that; I don't. I am highly skeptical, though not entirely disbelieving, of Volkovism. I am very disturbed that it's become the received wisdom, because there are serious questions unsolved, both about the authenticity of what Volkov edited, and about Shostakovich's own self-perception if the Volkov papers are real. And the mickey-mousing of the (hysterically) pro-Volkov critic Ian MacDonald is repulsive: this moment is Stalin stepping before the party congress, etc. This is a symphony, not "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." The music must stand or fall as music regardless of what it may mean. I liked Shostakovich back when everyone thought he was a Soviet hack: I still like him now that everyone thinks he's a secret dissident. It's the same music. Mary, don't be put off by the remark, "Everyone should go through a phase where the Fifth is their fave." It's just that the 5th is indeed a great symphony (especially the third, slow movement) and as the most famous it's the one people hear first, and some never get beyond it. But there's no harm in returning to it. More anon.
I hope Mary isn't put off by my remark that everyone should go through a phase when Shostakovichs 5th is their favorite symphony. I certainly didn't mean it as off-putting. All I meant was that I sincerely empathize with Mary's comment. I went through the same phase when I was in high school. The music is *so* dramatic. It has an emotional urgency that just grabs you and won't let go. (Btw, I took Mary to mean that it's currently her favorite *symphony*, period, not just her favorite Shostakovich symphony.) I am a bit skeptical about Volkov, too, especially in view of Shostakovich's own son's criticism of Testimony. Like you, I loved the 5th back when I believed it really was "a Soviet artist's reply to just criticism." And I will never be able to think of the "Leningrad" symphony as anything other than the war momument Shostakovich first unveiled it as. I'm a hopeless Bartok fanatic, btw, so I will never admit that Shostakovich's quartet series is the equal of Bartok's, even if it's true. ;-)
Some specific Shostakovich issues: What do you think of his piano music? His series of Preludes, which I haven't heard in years, knocked me sideways when I first heard it. Do you have a favorite symphony? A favorite symphony excerpt? My favorite is the 10th. My favorite Shostakovich moments are the buildup to the brutal march, and the march itself, in the 1st movt of the 5th; and the thermonuclear war (how did he know, back in 1930-something?) followed by that long, long pedal C and the beating heart that slowly falters and finally stops, in the last mvt of the 4th.
And I think the greatest single symphonic movement he ever wrote is the first movement of the 10th. I wouldn't argue if you said it was the greatest symphonic movement of the 20th century. Mahler came close, in the last movement of his 6th. I'd nominate a Sibelius or a Vaughan Williams movement, but those are personal tastes that I doubt many other listeners would agree with.
I'm not all wounded by Michael's comments as he pretty much has my experience pegged. I'm one of those folks who started exploring classical music when I was well into adulthood. I bought my first classical recording in 1981. I will seek out a copy of the 10th and see how it goes. But first I'd like to tarry here, letting moments of the 5th roll around my memory for a few more weeks. Then I'll go back and listen to my last most favorite symphony, Mahler's 9th. But most of all I realize that calling anything a "favorite" is pure drama.
Zackly. Nothing wrong with it, though.
Actually, I'm gonna make the shameful admission that almost the only Shostakovich I know is his piano music. The first time I heard his Preludes & Fugues, I was pretty underwhelmed -- I was expecting either Bach or Bartok, and I didn't really get much of either. But this is a fantastic piece. The pretty melodies and baroque forms lull you into thinking you're listening to something well-behaved and Classical, but there's some serious derangement lurking under some of them.
I actually have heard little of Shostakovich's piano music. Rather a gap, I admit, but I'm not a real big piano fan and I tend not to follow up piano music unless it struck me heavily on first listen, and Shostakovich's didn't. (Prokofiev's did.) I'll agree with the general consensus that the Tenth is his greatest symphony. The greatest symphony by the (all-around) greatest symphonist makes it surely one of the half-dozen or so greatest symphonies of the 20th century. And what's striking, given that the 20th century in classical music was self-advertised as the infinite extension of complexity (Webern packing worlds into nutshells, that sort of thing), is - especially if you look at the score - how plain and simple, and devoid of that kind of analytical complexity, the Tenth is. Shostakovich's greatness lies in his breadth, his wide-scale vision - that's what makes a great symphonist great - and in his emotional effects. For a specific, watch how the DSCH motto emerges out of similar phrases (inversions, transpositions, etc.) earlier on in the work. It makes the final motto kind of inevitable, rather than sticking out like a sore thumb, as many composers' special themes are. (If anyone reading this doesn't know what the DSCH motto is, I'll explain on request.) I have one very fond memory of the Tenth, and it says a lot about what Shostakovich means to me. I often take my Walkman and a few classical CDs with me on trips. Not too long ago I was in Hawaii, staying on Waikiki. It was pleasant enough in some respects, but the endless Hawaiian music, nice enough in small doses, began to get on my nerves. Especially the hotel elevators, which had a very small repertoire playing constantly at high volume. So one afternoon I drew the shades in my hotel room, doused the lights, put on my earphones, and listened to Shostakovich's Tenth in the dark. The sense of cool, clear refreshment was overwhelming.
DSCH = Dmitri SCHostakowitsch, as it's spelled by the Germans. There is a German convention that allows you to spell things using musical notes. D S C H would be D E-flat C B. Those four notes appear as an innocuous-sounding phrase in the second theme of the 3rd movement of the 10th. The phrase eventually detaches itself, and engages in a quarrel with a five-note horn theme that keeps reappearing, like a stern warning, whenever poor DSCH tries to have a little fun. At the end of the 3rd movement, DSCH is reduced to a terrified whisper in the piccolo. It comes back halfway through the finale, literally with a vengeance, when it obliterates the "Stalin" theme from the scherzo with a fortissimo blast by the whole orchestra. DSCH seems a bit shocked by this, and takes a while to recover its composure, but eventually it joins a jaunty march tune and preside triumphantly over the concluding measures. It all sounds rather tedious and didactic when you spell it out like this. When you listen to the symphony, it knocks you right off your feet. Shostakovich used the DSCH motto in several other works, most notably in the 8th quartet.
Ian MacDonald, the "hysterically pro-Volkov critic", has a web site called "Music under Soviet rule" at http://www.siue.edu/~aho/musov/musov.html if anyone wants to read some of his rather caustic commentaries...
Anyone who wants to hear the DSCH motif in situ, I'd recommend you start with the 8th Quartet, probably his greatest, which has it even more conspicuously all over the place than in the 10th Symphony. I didn't think that badly of MacDonald, even with all his mickey- mousing interpretations, after reading his book "The New Shostakovich" (which, if you take it with a grain of salt or two, is actually helpful to understanding the works, and which takes a judicious position towards Volkov). But reading his above-mentioned website caused me to change my mind about him. While we're naming favorite Shostakovich symphonies, I'll put in a plug for the Eleventh. The second movement depicts the 1905 Winter Palace massacre (or the Soviet invasion of Hungary, or whatever exercise of intense evil that you prefer), and is the single most hair-raising piece of music I've ever heard. I've heard this symphony twice in concert, once conducted by Semyon Bychkov, who has a distinctive way with this music; and a third time under unusual circumstances. A pair of Russian musicologists concocted a score for Eisenstein's (silent) "Potemkin" by stitching together large chunks of Shostakovich, including most of the 10th & 11th symphonies, parts of the 5th & 8th and a few others. The San Francisco Symphony played this live to the film a few years ago. Highly effective, and I hope this score is, or will be, issued with a tape or DVD release of the film. However, if I were going to pick a single movement as a sample of what a Shostakovich symphony sounds like, I'd still go with the 3rd movement of the Fifth. Any other candidates?
I find it hard to listen to the third movememnt of the 5th. I'll hear the first few notes, and my mind rapidly fills in the rest of the movement. Then I have to sit there and actually listen to it, in slow motion. Makes me impatient. At a performance by Bernstein and the NY Phil in the late 1950s (soon after his celebrated first recording of it came out) I saw a guy a couple of rows up doze off during the 3rd mvt. When the finale started, he looked like someone waking up to a bombing raid. I always had a special affection for the middle movements of the "Leningrad" symphony. They're both slowsoft-fastloud-slowsoft, but different enough to make a nice contrast, and very, very Shostakovichoid. (What's the adjective, anyway?)
[At that same performance, a friend of mine who brought binoculars with her (we had student balcony passes] swore that at the stupendous climax of the 1st mvt, when the whole orchestra seems to scream "NOOOOOOOOO!" fortississimo, Bernstein threw his head back and thrust out his tongue straight up in the air. I didn't notice that, but I have to say I never saw him work up a sweat the way he did with that piece.]
One more Shostakovich 5th anecdote, as an example of the expressive power of his music: When my kids were very young we'd sometimes play the "happy or sad?" game with music. My seven-year-old son and I were driving somewhere and the Shostakovich 5th came on. At the beginning of the march section in the 1st mvt, when the horns and then the trumpets play the march theme at the very bottom of their ranges, I said, "Hey, is this happy music or sad music?" My son listened for a few seconds, then said: "It's *mean* music."
"Mean" music. Oh, that's good. I like that passage, but I'm not sure I could have come up with as precise a way to characterize it. Anyone, no matter how little they know about Volkov or the other evidence, can participate in the Shostakovich interpretation game by one simple act. Listen to the finale of the 5th. Do you find it joyous, brutal, sarcastic, forced, something else, or any combination of the above? That's what the whole controversy boils down to, really. Before Volkov, the finale was considered an attempt at joyousness that doesn't quite come off: a flaw in an otherwise great work. (And a believable flaw, as joyous finales in minor-key symphonies have always been problematic. Beethoven worked on the "Ode to Joy" of his Ninth for thirty years, and many people still don't think it measures up to the rest of the work. Early audiences really rolled their eyes at the finale of Brahms's First. And Tchaikovsky, in his Pathetique, and Mahler, in several works, worked themselves into contortions to avoid writing attempted joyous finales.) But Volkov's Shostakovich says, "Precisely! It's the enforced joyousness of a terrorized people: it's supposed to not quite come off." A startling reinterpretation when first proposed, and still in ways difficult to wrap one's mind around. Just purchased: Maxim S. conducts his father's 6th, Prague Symphony Orch.,, on Supraphon, along with suites from "The Golden Age" and "Katerina Izmaylova", neither of which I had. So far I've listened to the 6th. The later movements are OK, but the first is too damned slow and doesn't hold together.
I'm obviously in love with the 5th, having played 2 movements (1st & 4th) starting in high school, and many years beyond, and knowing the entire symphony from recordings. While the finale is great, and fun to play (challenging, but what the heck?! :-), I truly admire the 1st movement, in terms of multiple treatments of the theme. Yes, there are quite nasty, jackboot overtones to the aforementioned section of the horns and then trumpets, which is accompanied, don't forget, by low piano rythmn (1 2& 3 4& etc.) to darken the mood further. I could go on forever on that movement. Another favorite work of DS for me is Festive Overture. As far as IS's comment to DS about moving on from Mahler, it reminds me acutely of me showing one of my scores to the late Prof. Bill Albright at UM in a composition class, to be told "we don't need another Mozart". I.e. traditional, tonal music has all been done, you must find new ways to express yourself musically. Of course this is a new point of view that would make any small town boy resist. And it's a very academic position on things. But it was all for the better: Having to actually write "contemporary" music gave me an important appreciation for other musical forms, even if I don't choose to listen to them often or write that way. But it's a hoot that IS's Rite of Spring is considered "contemporary" to many people, even though it was written in 1913. But I digress. I have to admit that my favorite composers are Russian: Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Moussorgsky, Borodin, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, others.
Re "we don't need another Mozart." Actually, in one sense, we've had several more Mozarts. Mendelssohn, for one, was a Mozart: he had Mozart's level of fluent genius, and there's a somewhat Mozartian air to his music. But I'm sure that's not what was meant. We don't need a carbon copy of Mozart, to be sure, but that's because a carbon copy - of anyone - wouldn't be any good. It's not the same as saying tonal music has "all been done" - that's nonsense. First, tonal music thrived for a century beyond Mozart, and in fact it continued to thrive throughout the 20th century despite the attempts of certain crusty academics to pretend it didn't. See Shostakovich, for one example among many. Second, Arnold Schoenberg himself said that there's plenty of great music yet to be written in C Major. Third, if we don't need another Mozart, we most certainly don't need another Anton Webern, and yet little mechanical Weberns is exactly what the music schools were trying to churn out for a while there. Write what you want. Be as daring, or as conservative, as fits _your_ soul. Don't let anyone tell you something is obsolete. If people want to write it, and listen to it, nothing is obsolete.
PS: if people still consider "Rite of Spring" to be ultra-modern, maybe that has something to do with the music as well as the audience? The notion that the unpopularity of some modern music (not that Stravinsky is unpopular) was solely the result of some mysterious balking by the collective audiences of the world doesn't hold up.
Isn't most popular music tonal?
Re: #21: Yes, by far. In fact, it might be hard to find something popular that isn't tonal. Rite of Spring has much that is "tonal" to it, but also much that is foreign to most listeners. Re: #19: Well, if you're in a composition class at UM, and want a good grade (and more importantly, want to learn something new), you better not write particularly conservative or tonal! :-)
I read in a book on twentieth century music that there were two types of composers - the ones who wrote original creative music that were supported by teaching salaries and fellowships and the one that wrote tonal music that were supported by the proceeds from their music. The book is written by a composer (a 20th century composer). I suspect tonal music is more common in the second category.
Could be. Some of the most popular composers took occasional teaching jobs -- Aaron Copland at Tanglewood, e.g. -- but probably not because they needed the money. Certainly not in Copland's case. There was a lot of money to be made in listenable concert music. If Samuel Barber had stopped composing altogether after writing the Adagio for Strings, he still would've been set for life. Ditto Roy Harris and his 3rd symphony. I don't think Vaughan Williams had a teaching career. Did Benjamin Britten teach? Stravinsky never held down a teaching job apart from a few Harvard lectures, even after he "converted" to serialism, despite the fact that he never made much money on The Firebird, Petrouchka and Le Sacre (due to lack of copyright agreements with the Soviets). The serialist/aleatory/stochastic/noise crowd were mostly academics in this country, and their audience was and is very limited. It got so bad that Milton Babbitt (who taught at Columbia University, I think) felt compelled to write a sour-grapish article entitled "Who Cares if You Listen?" A few serialst apologists like Alfred Rosen have tried to make the case that serialist music does attract large audiences, but they're just whistling in the dark. No orchestra will ever survive programming such music, because almost everyone finds it unlistenable. One exception that I know of is the American composer Elliott Carter, whose modernist credentials couldn't be more impressive, and who was able to live on a family fortune rather than teach. But even his music, for all its difficulties, has a visceral dramatic quality that you don't often hear in the academic composers. It's like serialism tamed, or serialism pressed into emotional duty. Anyway, the path Shostakovich took was the one his temperament led him down. He always seemed to me to be one of the most honest and direct of all composers.
resp: 22 - That's about what I thought. They're less interested in teaching composition than in enforcing a particular style. Part of the rhetoric is that tonality is old and serialism is new. After 50 years of enforced serialism in the academy, and some 90 years after Schoenberg worked out the system, there's nothing new about serialism. resp: 23 - This book sounds as if it's promoting a false dichotomy, between tonality and creativity. Plenty of tonal music is highly creative, plenty of non-tonal music is completely devoid of imagination. (In fact, apply the principles of serialism to all elements of music, as some composers do, and you can write works without any thinking in them at all.) I'm not talking about dumbing-down and writing contentless pseudo- Hollywood sludge here, but there is nothing wrong with writing music that some people want to listen to. If no audiences are responding to your music, you have in fact failed to communicate. (Serialists used to say they were writing for the future, but the millennium - long past their expected utopia date - has arrived, and they're less listened to than ever before.) In the words of Tom Lehrer, "If you can't communicate, the very least you can do is shut up."
A couple of thoughts:
1) Contemporary ("20th century") music is not limited to "serial" ("12-tone")
style, by any means.
2) If a contemporary (atonal) style is the way you feel you want to express
some/all of your musical self, then all means do so, whether or not anyone
else appreciates your music or listens to it. All I ask is that you give your
best effort to create high quality atonal music - atonal doesn't mean you can
simply do anything you want to, and it's automatically "good". Also, just
because *you* choose to express yourself atonally, do not scoff at others who
wish to try to express themselves tonally, even if you smugly believe that
everything has already been done in the tonal arena.
Kevin, while your point no. 1 should be evident to anyone with a cursory knowledge of 20th century music, you might be surprised - or you might not - at how fiercely was being denied for a while, at least for post-WW2 work. Those who persisted in writing non-serial music were dismissed as relics of a previous time who refused to acknowledge that the calendar had changed - as if it were the calendar that dictated the style of music - and refused "to acknowledge the necessity of writing serial music" (that's my best memory of an actual quote from, IIRC, Pierre Boulez). Or they were ignored altogether. This totalitarian attitude scared even Stravinsky and Copland into writing serial music, anxious to be "with it" and fearful that they'd be marginalized as clueless old coots. Later there was a period when the music scene was pictured as a battle between the Webernian strict serialists and the Cagean anarchists, and anybody else - even free serialists like Elliott Carter - were depicted as likely to get caught in the crossfire. Sort of like the fate of conventional liberals and conservatives in the 30s, when some people tried to force everyone to choose up sides: fascists or communists. Those days are long since over, but they were pretty intense for a while there. Look at an average academic modern-music history textbook from the 1970s and see who and what it discusses for post-1945 composers. Your point no. 2 is a direct rebuttal at these people.
I read somewhere that most composers felt obligated to base their music on the current or immediately preceding style so that they would be accepted.
Ah, but accepted by whom?
I believe Polonius said it best: To thine own self be true. Of course, peer pressure can be fierce and fearsome...
Polonius was a pompous old bore.
Re 29 - presumably by other composers following the same logic. This sort of logic also coerces owners of houses to only remodel them in a style that other people are remodeling in, because it must be what everyone else wants. We have friends who have been living with dark blue wallpaper because if they changed it their resale value might go down. They prefer white.
Shosty has done some other pieces ("arrangements", if you must) based on
Russian folk songs or dances. I've played the band arrangements. Fun to
play, great to listen to.
Would someone have a recommendation for a CD of Shosty's (love that) 10th?
I have Karajan. It's okay, but I liked my old Ormandy/Philadelphia LP better.
Re 32 and earlier: Of course, many composers (I'll cite Barber and Rachmaninoff as examples) have been harshly criticized for not being "contemporary" enough and not following current stylistic trends, but their music is so appreciated now (by most people) that we're glad that they were bold enough to just write what felt right for them and not what was bold and modern. Thank goodness for that!
And thus we see those once accused of the greatest cowardice being acknowledged as the most courageous, for the courage of being willing to stand there and withstand being called cowards.
I'm not sure it much matters one way or the other. Would you rather listen to bad music from a brave composer, or good music from a coward? No, come to think of it, that isn't a rhetorical question after all. I'd like to hear some answers to it.
Things like moral character, bravery, kindness and compassion don't seem related to musical ability. Would Beethoven have been a better composer if he hadn't been an antisemite? Somebody once remarked that most of Stravinsky's music sounds as if it had been written by "a bitter little man," which in fact is what he was. But is it worse music for that? This courage vs. conforming thing is suspect. In response to an interviewer's question about his old-fashioned style, Barber once said, "I keep doing, as they say, my thing. I believe this takes a certain courage." That sounds very noble, but I wonder if Barber could've done anything other than "his thing" even if he wanted. I don't think he knew how to do anything else.
I maintain there are only 2 kinds of music - good music and bad music. Notice I didn't mention anything about "written by".
I was going to say it's more of a continuum than simply good vs. bad, but even on a continuum there has to be a point above which everything is more or less good, and below which everything is more or less bad. If you add "within a given cultural context" I might agree.
Somewhere in the preceding few posts, the question of the composer's moral character seems to have gotten detached from the quality of the music. That's not what I, for one, intended. It's not whether the composer is brave or a coward in a vacuum, it's what kind of music he writes and whether he's considered brave or cowardly for doing so. This is the Shostakovich item, and I've already said that I don't care whether he was a hero or a toady, I still like the music. But in the current discussion, the positions are somewhat different, and the bravery question is intimately tied to opinions about the quality of the music. One opinion is that the conservative composers were cowardly, and wrote bad music; the other opinion is that they bravely stood up to accusations of cowardice, and wrote good music. While I suppose it would be possible to argue that they were brave but bad, or cowardly but good, nobody says that: and the opinion of the music's quality is held up as proof of the opinion of the composer's character. md reports an opinion that Stravinsky's music "sounds as if it had been written by 'a bitter little man.'" Sounds as if. That's an opinion about the music, not about the man (who could be of totally different character: Beethoven's Second sounds cheerful, while Beethoven was at that time profoundly depressed). Whether sounding bitter is a bad thing for music to be is another question; but if it is a bad thing, then yes, it is indeed worse music for that. Could Barber have done something other than "his thing"? I don't know about him particularly, but in general the answer is often yes. He could have been shamed into silence by a perception that he was out of date: Elgar was. He could have been intimidated into writing the current style, especially if he were young and impressionable: scads of postmodern composers had serialist early periods, and for that matter scads of serialist composers had neoromantic early periods, before they found both the self-understanding and courage to be themselves.
I've read that Barber was practically silenced in his later years, although I don't know if it's accurate to say he was shamed sinto silence. He did feel that his music was out of date and that he was marginal. There was one disasterous premiere (Antony and Cleopatra) that must've cost him a lot of self-confidence. He fell into depression and alcoholism, and he probably died believing that his music, other than the Adagio for Strings, would never be widely performed. (I doubt he ever lost his belief in the *quality* of his music, only in its programmability.) The silliest example of someone placing a doctrinal template over the world is the great Pierre Boulez, who refuses to perform or even listen to the music of Brahms because he finds it "bourgeois and complacent." I'll bet he has a secret collection of Brahms CDs that he listens to when no one else is around, like a guilty pleasure.
> While I suppose that it would be possible to argue that they were brave but > bad, or cowardly but good, nobody says that: and the opinion of the music's > quality is held up as proof of the opinion of the composer's character. I suppose what I wonder is _why_ nobody says that. It can't just be that one says nice things about a great artist. Some composers are considered "polite but good," others "rude but good." Some are considered "generous but good," others "mean-spirited but good." Why is courage, of all traits, so tied up in our opinion of an artist's ability? One reason why people talk this way, I think, is the impression that any artist has a "true style," and that discovering that style leads to good art, while deviating from it leads to bad art. But I'm not sure I believe that. Elgar had another choice besides writing in his chosen style and falling silent -- he could have chosen another style. Maybe he would have written badly in it, but maybe he would have written well. (Consider Stravinsky, who jumped on every bandwagon that came along, and made good music in almost every style he tried). It doesn't help matters any that you can't tell whether an artist was courageous or not just from his work. How do you tell a brave new direction from a cowardly pursuit of popular approval? How do you know when a composer's sticking to his guns and when he's terrified of change. The standard approach seems to be to call the successful styles "bravely chosen" and the unsuccesful ones "cowardly."
orinoco: the hidden comment in my post was that there's an assumption that the (perceived) success or non-success of the music as music is the clue to the composer's courage. Pulled out into the light like that, this is an odd argument, and I take it that you're agreeing that it's odd. Certainly in other fields of endeavor, the Brave But Wrong is a commonplace: war, for instance. General Northern opinion of Johnny Reb is that he was very brave but totally misguided. The Cowardly But Great seems less common ... but I'm sure he exists. That Elgar had a third choice was something I addressed: "intimidated into writing the current style" is what I said. I do not think this often leads to good music. Stravinsky changed his style many times, but that was the kind of composer he was. Less chameleonic types shouldn't be thought less of because they couldn't follow his example. He wasn't intimidated into becoming a primitivist in the 1910s or a neoclassist in the 1920s, nor was he sheepishly following fashion: usually he was leading it. Becoming a serialist in the 1950s was another matter, though: then he really was intimidated into it (so was Copland), and the music really does suffer thereby. Stravinsky was a great enough composer that the results aren't totally worthless, but Copland was not so lucky. Or it could be that Copland's powers were failing anyway. md: I disagree with almost everything Boulez says, but I'll defend his right to say it. I've been accused a few times of lying about my own opinions for politico-cultural reasons, so I won't assume that Boulez is lying about his. I'll assume that he erects his cultural theories over the substance of his honest opinions, as I do mine, and that he really does hate Brahms. His comments are probably just the easiest way to verbalize the reasons. I wouldn't say that the reason I dislike Lawrence Welk is because he sounds "bourgeois", but I think my reason is pretty much the same as Boulez's on Brahms. What I find offensive about Boulez's opinions is the way he erects them into dictats, and presumes to enact the cultural standards of his time. Cultural standards can only be determined by observation.
A recent (within the past couple of years) interview with Boulez has him admitting that "I guess we [i.e., we serialists] went too far in ignoring the audience." What a horrible thing to have to admit when you're pushing eighty. Brave of him to 'fess up, although there's no way he could've continued pretending to ignore the layers of dust piling up on serialism of the "fuck the audience" type.
It's almost more dismaying that he admits it. Why couldn't he have figured it out earlier?
There *is* a niche market for "old-time modernist" music, like Pli selon pli, Carter's post-1950 concoctions and so on. The mistake of people like Pierre Boulez and Charles Rosen is in believing the niche was bigger than it really was. Lock yourself in a hothouse with all the other old-time modernists and their fans and that's what happens. Also, there is their equally unrealistic hope that audience taste can somehow be "elevated" by education and by repeated exposure, a silly elitist-wannabe idea that says more about their own pretensions than it says about audience taste.
It is true, as the high modernists kept pointing out, that music of the past that was generally disliked at first came to be accepted later. However, they exaggerated the extent of the dislike (you can always find a bad review of anything if you look hard enough), and adopted absurd standards, like claiming that folks would be whistling "Pierrot Lunaire" in the streets by the year 2000. In the end, the public seemed to be willing to go so far and no farther. "La Sacre du Printemps" seemed to be about the limit. Possibly the most delightful musical phenomenon of the 1970s was watching modernists running out screaming, clutching their ears in agony, from music that _they_ couldn't stand but everyone else liked. Minimalism most obviously, but Shostakovich also qualifies. He was sneered at for decades until a few intelligent musicologists, like Richard Taruskin, invented the musical equivalent of reader-response theory and asked, "If it's so contentless, then why does it move people so?" (The simple answer, of course, is that it isn't intellectual content that makes music succeed, it's emotional effect.)
You have several choices: