Female Schatz wrote:

>A few months ago I heard a live performance of David Ott's concerto for
>two cellos.  It was a very modern composition and one could easily have
>told that it had been composed in the latter half of the 20th century
>without knowing who David Ott is or anything of the sort.  It had much
>to offer and much merit to it, but after a while it simply became too much
>to listen.  During the intermission that came right after the concerto, I
>asked the person I was with for an opinion of it.  The reply I got was that
>it was just "too too" which summed it up rather well.  It was a challenging
>piece to listen to but it was too dissonant, too staccato and too much of
>other things to be something that most people would want to listen to for
>pleasure.  I think that a lot of modern classical music has gone too far in
>the directions of dissonance or other features for the majority of people.
>While I would not say that it is bad music, much modern classical music is
>clearly "too too".  I think that may have had the effect of driving some
>people away from the genre.

I had to jump on this thread because I have played a performance of the
above work.  I've known people (my spouse included, when I first met her)
who thought that much music of the 20th century, especially Bartok, would
fall into the category of "too dissonant, too staccato and too much of
other things to be something that most people would want to listen to for
pleasure." The Ott is a lot less dissonant than many acknowledged signature
pieces of the 20th Century, e.g.  Pierrot Lunaire, Bartok's 4th Quartet.
So dissonance is in the ear of the listener.  Carl Ruggles is perhaps the
most "dissonant" composer of the 20th century.  He bathed in it, shot it
directly into his veins.  Will his music stand or fall because he loved
dissonance? One can avoid dissonant music, but only at the expense of
never knowing what a composer may do with it.  It's the same as writing off
Picasso because his people (some of them) don't look like people.  Now that
we might be in the 21st century there are many who are still writing off
the art of the 20th.  Did 2 or 3 generations of composers and artists
consign themselves to eternal oblivion because they got off track?

I don't know whether the Ott is a good piece or a bad one.  But its
dissonance level has nothing to do with its quality.  However, it may have
something to do with who will or will not take the time to discover its
other virtues?

I mentioned having read a Tovey article on Bruckner in which he
acknowledges the composer's structural faults, which are plainly obvious
on first hearing.  Here's another area where it's possible to be quite
judgmental.  If we demand structural integrity, we'll never find what
makes Bruckner tick.  Mussorgsky? Couldn't orchestrate worth diddly.
Tchaikovsky? Too crass.

Intellligence and education have less to do with self-imposed aesthetic
limits than one might think.  Schenker plateaued out at Brahms.

Bottom line: If one lets personal prejudices and preferences dictate
what's acceptable, one never finds out what the possibilities of art are.
One can't expand one's awareness of what meaning art may have in our
lives by limiting to one's personal preferences.  One must stretch.  Art
connoisseurship cannot be equated to whether or not one likes broccoli.
The question then becomes, what, if any, are the rewards of broadening
one's experience? We may find that after many hearings we still do not
"get" some music.  I'm kind of that way with Babbitt.  I don't however take
the "ignorant and proud of it" approach (and I certainly am not accusing
the above writer or anyone else of doing the same).

Chris Bonds