janzen@sunfun.DEC (Thomas E. Janzen CSS GNG CWO 714 850-7849 SUNFUN::JANZEN) (08/17/84)
Subject: Why contemporary music is so popular: Comments on Greg Paley's article. My comments are marked with a "Greater-Than" symbol. There are two points that have come up several times with regard to contemporary "classical" music that I feel compelled to argue with. >We call it >contemporary, avant-garde, experimental, or electronic, never classical. First; one hears continually the notion that the situation of the public vs. the contemporary composer is really essentially the same as it was for most of the now-recognized major composers of the last centuries and that, therefore, those composers and works which are now shunned are likely to be recognized as masterpieces a hundred years from now. Those who really like to read in depth about the musical past rather than swallowing the more superficial and shoddy examples of musical "scholarship" >For example, The Lexicon of Musical Invective by Nicolas >Slonimsky, which is an awful fraud; people have alwasy loved new music. and perpetuating facile myths know that this only applies to a small minority of actual cases. >I never claimed that. There were music appreciation-racket (cf. >Virgil Thomson, The State of Music) courses then, to ruin taste. >Don't forget the proportions you're talking about. A very tiny >proportion of the population attended concerts of new music in >the last century, just as now. There were concerts of old music >all the time. Not as old as now, but 50 years or so. Mozart and Schubert didn't die in poverty because nobody was able to appreciate their music; rather they suffered from their own squandering of their financial resources and inability to prevent unscrupulous publishers and "patrons" from taking advantage of them. The works of Wagner weren't booed or ignored because they were too harmonically adventurous. A major segment >My experimental music has never been booed or ignored. >People love listening to me play. of the public which heard them were enraptured by them from the start and caused them to be perpetuated. Those critics which took exception to them did so for the same musical and philosophical reasons that critics today continue to attack them. The debacle >You're reading the wrong critics. Newspaper >critics are just entertainment section journalists writing to >be entertaining. Look at the fraudalent-Pulitzer-winning >Martin Bernheimer. This was the other Pulitzer fraud that year. >When I have read Bernheimer's column, I have never seen him write >about music, about the way music affected him, or about its >technical trappings. I have never seen him refer to a measure number, >to the sound of a particular soloist. He writes gossip about >behind-the-scenes politics in establishment music, especially >about conductors changing chairs and singers refusing to sing >at the last minute. Martin Bernheimer is no more a critic than >Rona Barrett. Note here that orchestras killed themselves >with musical necrophilia long ago, and ceased to have significance >in music about 1930. over the world premiere of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" is often quoted, but a minimal amount of research into the story uncovers the fact that the public reaction was primarily directed at the current ballet politics and the actual staging rather than being due to the inability of the audience to comprehend the music. In fact, the disturbances began so early in the performance that the greatest likelihood is that the majority of the audience present were unable to hear the music and judge it one way or the other. >No argument here. The Rite was well-received soon after this >premier. Sensitive people love new experimental music. People like new >startling things that excite them. The second point that I've seen raised is that music of the same greatness as the last century's is being constantly written, but that the public is too uneducated to appreciate it. This has a degree of plausibility in an age where this sort of education, and the humanities in general, are being chopped out of high school and university programs right and left in an effort to convert education into an extended form of job training. However, there is something dreadfully wrong with >You've got this turned around. There were no music-appreciation- >racket classes until recently. It is these classes that kill >music appreciation. In music-appreciation-racket courses, >accounting majors learn to believe that what music is acceptable >and representative of an educated person's taste can be handed to >them on a silver platter. They are taught to accept authority, >rather than go out and actively seek the art they love for themselves. >Note that many educated people listen to classical music because >they think they should, as part of defining themselves as >college-educated people. It's a status symbol, like a big car. >Actually, contrary to what people are taught in school, >Being a good listener is an experimental affair, just as is >composing. Good listening habits are: buying records of music >you've never heard of, performed by unknowns; not leaving in the >middle of a concert of new music because you didn't know what to >expect; not going to concerts of music you've heard; not buying >records of music you've heard on the radio; deliberately putting >yourself in the position of listening to something you've never >heard. >It's worth pointing out here that a South African researcher >documented 8,000 women composers of concert music in the world. >If we carelessly extrapolate 2 or 3 men composers to 1 woman composer, >there may be as many as 24,000 to 32,000 composers of concert music >in the world. If each of these produces about 30 minutes of music >a year (this is likely to typical) then there is about twice as much >music being written as hours in the day to listen to it (if it were >all recorded). There is no excuse for an ordinary listener to listen >to the same piece twice. There are sufficient new records of >experimental music (all the record stores I visit carry them, and >those stores are profit-making, so I infer that experimental music >record sales contributes to that profit; I know the experimental >music sells because I see the turnover when I browse once a week) >such that a listener need never hear the same piece more than once. an art that necessitates that the observer play extensive intellectual glass bead games in order to derive any expressive >All good art carries ideas of importance. content from it. Much contemporary music has deteriorated into this sort of sterile amusement for the composer and the elite few who can "get it", if even they do (or are we back to the Emporer's new clothes?). >It is sufficient to say that people DO enjoy experimental music, >they DO applaud and cheer at concerts of experimental music, >they DO, of their own accord >purchase expensive tickets for those concerts, >and purchase record albums of new music. Experimental music >survives the test of free-market capitalism. New record >labels of experimental music are being started all the time. >Cf. Cold Blue records, Los Angeles. The greatness of Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner, Verdi, and even in more recent times the better works of Britten, Stravinsky, Virgil Thomson and Charles Griffes is that they present something to a broad panorama of the reasonably sensitive public (i.e., those who can sit for five minutes and listen to anything other than THUD..THUD..THUD). Those with no penchant for intellectuality could appreciate the surface beauty and powerful emotionality which is being expressed directly, rather than encoded in a >Do you mean like the experimental composer, Harold Budd? series of tone rows and clusters. >Who still composes with rows and clusters? I don't. On the other hand, these composers also made use of technical resources in such a way as to provide the musicologist and academician something to probe into. >There are 30,000 composers; there is no time to probe, only to listen! >Scholarship is worthless. Let us only make music. Don't analyze it. >I thought you objected to music that required an intellectual initiation >to understand, and here you go on about academicians! When a contemporary work with this depth of appeal surfaces, it has no trouble finding an appreciative public. You can't, however, throw just anything at the public and expect instant recognition if it does not at least come half way toward communicating with them. It's as if you were to sit a group of people who speak and understand only English at a lecture conducted in Finnish and then chide them for not being thrilled at what they heard. >Let them come to me, and join the many others that enjoy my experimental >music. - Greg Paley > Commented by Thomas E. Janzen Digital Equipment Corp. 3390 Harbor, > Costa Mesa CA 92626 Thu 16-Aug-1984 09:53 PDT
greg@olivej.UUCP (Greg Paley) (08/20/84)
I've read this "response" over three times and I'm still bewildered. The author clearly had certain points he wanted to make on the net, which is fine, but I still can't grasp where any of these had any direct relationship to my article, which was being commented on. I certainly have no interest in knocking "experimental" music, as he wants to call it (my use of contemporary "classical" was purely to distinguish it from pop & rock - I don't know who Mr. Janzen's "we" is who never use the term "classical" but there's another sizeable "we" that still use the term to describe anything performed by a symphony orchestra in a concert hall) or put a damper on anything new. I was merely observing the fact that the ticket-buying public which packs the hall for Beethoven performances will leave a hall nearly deserted for all but a handful of "contemporary" performances, and I was supplying my hypotheses as to why. - Greg Paley