Imagine yourself in a boxy concert room, with a clutter of musicians -
all hired for the occasion - in front of young.  The composer has crammed
a program with the results of his last two years of work, including three
extended compositions for orchestra, an oratorio, and a choral piece.  The
ensemble is terrible, there have not been enough rehearsals.  While the
conductor is an inspired pianist, he is not a good conductor - he rushes
the musicians.  The style of the works is novel, and it is clear that the
musicians are just rushing through parts.  The main piece on the program
is over long and not up to the standard set by previous works.

Welcome to the Academie Concert where Ludwig van Beethoven premiered two
symphonies, a concerto, an oratorio, and the "choral fantasy" - the kernel
for what later became the last movement of the 9th symphony.  Would you
have known, right then and there, that of the works, 3 would be classics,
and the fourth would find immortality some 2 decades later? It would have
been hard, the reports from the time show that the concert was a near
disaster.  Beethoven was already having problems with the "roaring in
his ears", and the art of conducting was in its infancy.

The lesson of new music is that we play new pieces, not for the present,
but for the future.  It takes years to work Bach and Beethoven and Debussy
and Verdi into the muscles, nerves, bones and memory.  The true substance
of music is found in the bodies of the musicians who play it, who can then,
in turn, convey that essence of being human to listeners.  We often can't
know what is "great music" from the first, because the test is whether it
grows in the soil of musicians and music lovers.

Let me admit that I find most composers, past and present, to be
inadequate.  But then, if you read Haydn and Beethoven on their
contemporaries, you will find that they had rather low opinions of most of
the music written in their time as well.  Haydn referred to one composer as
a "bungler", another as someone who "smeared" notes on the page.  Mozart
famously thundered to one of his students:  "there you go, standing around
like a duck in a thunderstorm".  It is, and always has been true, that
there are more people who want to be composers, actors, writers or painters
than have the ability to do it.

Let me admit that as a result, most new works, of whatever style, are
written out of the fantasy of being a composer, rather than the deep
fantasy that makes a composer.  Let me admit that the vast majority of
works should not have been published or performed.  Let me admit that there
are tremendous defects in how we choose which works are selected to be
played.

But even with all these admissions, my thoughts wander back to that
Academy concert, and to the story of how Habeneck rehearsed an orchestra
for a year to produce the first concert series of the Beethoven symphonies
which had any success, to the articles that Wagner wrote to explain how
to play Beethoven's symphonies, to the endless hours that Richard Strauss
spent in annotating bowing and phrasing marks for musicians to play those
symphonies.  The great compositions of the past are indeed a thunderbolt
realisation, but it is the work of years for those of us of lesser talent
to live up to them.  Each work of music is an act of faith.

The story in China is that a young boy comes across an old man planting
sycamore trees - that spread their branches and give shade from the hot sun
of the Yangtze River basin, and line the streets of so many cities there.
It takes a long time for one to grow, and the boy knew that the old man
would never take a minutes shade from the trees.  As if the old man knew
what the boy was thinking, he said:

"When I was young as you are, I grew up in the shade of the sycamore trees.
I did not plant them, but I had them, because my parents and grandparents
did.  So now I plant them, so that you and your children would have them."

The boy, seeing the sense of things, started planting.

Lest this seem like a mere story, realise that when Oxford University
redid the floorboards in the main dining hall at King's College, new Oaks
were planted so that when the boards rotted, there would be wood ready for
the replacement.  This was 250 years ago, those Oaks were just harvested
to replace the floor, and the forester planted a new set, destined for the
year 2250.  Most will not live, only a few will produce the true straight
wood that is needed.

This is why we play new compositions - because the musician and listener of
the year 2250 will look on the wilderness of his own time, find it limited
and confusing - and will look back on the work done in our time and marvel
at it.  We, of course, cannot see the trees for the forest, just as the
contemporaries of Beethoven could not see the trees for the forest of their
moment either.

A great deal has been made of particular styles and particular works in
our own time.  We should expect it, since the creation of great music is a
project of faith and effort, ideology grows up to sustain people who will
never see the promised land.  Many people cling to these ideologies even
more tightly than to the music, after all, the words are present and
real in a way a performance that may never happened is not.  This noise
clutters the writing and thinking on music present, and music past.  They
conisseures of wines and music must share this trait:  they must taste the
wine and not the label, because while the soil and the grapes are
important, it is the vinter who makes the wine.

So why do we need new music? Perhaps we don't:  but we owe it to the future
to continue the cycle - to maintain what is good, repair what needs work,
and to plant anew.  The future will need old music, and some of the good
old days they will look back to will be ours.

Perhaps we do not need new music:  perhaps, Mahler could imagine what it
was like to walk on the moon, and Bach could imagine well enough what it
was like to fly across a continent and touch two separate oceans in the
same day, to stare out across the geography of the cloud tops and see a
land of deeper valleys and higher peaks than can be made of rock and earth.
But they did not do it.  And it is the musicians responsibility to place
his thoughts, life and deeds into his music.

Perhaps we do not need new music:  except that much of the purpose, the
use, of music, is to teach us to march in time with what is outside of us,
with the seasons and with our fellow men.  As the world outside of us
changes, it seems, that we may need new music as well, to lead us through
those changes, so that we may navigate these new turns in the infinite
dance.

Perhaps we do not:  but the same impulse that moved Beethoven to compose
moves others in the present.  The muse is lonely, and seeks new favorites
to replace the ones she has lost.  Some of those who are so moved will
surely be inspired as deeply.  Of course, music is a beautiful goddess,
and has more suitors than even she will accept.

But it is for time to test them.

Stirling Newberry
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http://www.mp3.com/ssn