Stirling Newberry in more than one post got me thinking and affected the
review I was writing on Sony's reissue of Barber's music.  I've decided to
split the review into two posts.  This one provides the background to the
review:

It would be nice, I suppose, if we all heard with our ears alone, but we
don't.  It's a truism to say that we bring preconceptions - often having
little to do with music per se - to new work.  I certainly don't exclude
myself, since I have more or less definite ideas of what I want music to
do for me.  Furthermore (and fortunately), no one segment of listeners -
lay, performer, academic, critic, or composer - determines a reputation,
although certainly these segments influence one another.  When we talk
about a reputation or even about preconceptions, we must always ask the
question "among whom?" Keep in mind during the following discussion, that
exceptions abound within groups.

The lay public likes to think it has no ax to grind, other than wanting
to hear something wonderful, but in fact various factions sharpen several.
There are, of course, the No Real Music after Mahler group and its
counterpart, the No Real Music before Vivaldi gang.  One also watches the
battles between opera maniacs and symphony die-hards - red ants and black
ants occasionally tearing into (when they aren't ignoring) one another.
There's the small but intense new-music crowd, some of which struggles hard
to maintain Hip and Cool.  Academia, as a term of opprobrium, refers to a
comparatively small community, which functions like any small town - a
combination of boosterism of one's own and intense intramural rivalries.
Most of these share, if not taste, an argumentative approach.  We tend to
find wholesale praise or wholesale condemnation of entire genres, periods,
styles, and composers, rather than consideration of individual works.  Now,
I contend that the latter constitutes the only legitimate basis of
aesthetic judgment.  Those who disagree should stop reading now, because
the rest of this will only aggravate you.

Composers to me constitute an odd group.  A good many definitely have
their own agendas.  Careerism plays, I believe, a small part, but, on the
other hand, I haven't surveyed every composer out there.  More important,
it seems to me, is that composers (or any artist, really) value what they
can learn from and use.  Vaughan Williams - by me a very fine composer
indeed - notoriously remarked that Mahler was "a tolerable imitation of a
composer." To him the great figure of early Modernism/late Romanticism was
most likely Sibelius.  Although one looks in vain for a direct influence of
Finn on Brit, nevertheless I believe both share a similar outlook on what
a symphony is, for example - one which differs from Mahler's "symphony as
world." Britten and Shostakovich, however, adored Mahler's music, and their
own symphonic works show the unmistakable signs of influence.  If you don't
listen carefully, you could easily mistake parts of Shostakovich's Fifth
for Mahler.

All of this, of course, affected Barber's reception.  Barber had been
known for a few pieces:  namely, the First Essay, the violin concerto,
Overture to "The School for Scandal", some songs, and his mega-hit, Adagio
for Strings.  He had written all of these fairly early on, in the Thirties.
After this, he steadily expanded an essentially song-based idiom, mainly
through a very personal take on Stravinskian neo-classicism.  He never lost
his ability to produce a good tune, but his harmonic and rhythmic range
broadened to include more exposed dissonances and jazzier pulses.  To this
day, I doubt most of the public knows the second or third Essays, the
cello or piano concerto, the Capricorn Concerto, the piano sonata, Toccata
Festiva, The Lovers, Antony and Cleopatra or the magnificent Prayers of
Kierkegaard.  Yet, one could never call him avant-garde, and one detects no
trace of specifically postwar trends in his work.  He belongs to a fairly
large group of great talents, all of whom started before World War II, and
who, rather than throwing over the traces, explored and extended from the
point of their earlier work:  Harris, Diamond, Piston, Thomson, Walton,
Milhaud, Poulenc, Hindemith, among others.  In general, all these musicians
found themselves between the rock of the new-or-nothing and the hard place
of the mossback.  You would have been pressed to find, after 1965, the
names of any of these men on a concert program, and probably not their
recent work.

In looking for reasons why the neoclassic idiom was so derided after the
war, I can come up with very little other than a natural hankering after
the New and Novel Masterpiece.  Perhaps one might also mention youth
worship.  Very few young composers - those born after 1930 - were writing
in that style, and very few older composers were producing jolts.  The last
major jolt of the public for a new work by an older composer seems to me
Britten's War Requiem, from the early 1960s, which overwhelmed nearly
everybody at the time and cut across the various factions.  I find highly
revealing of the state of affairs from the Fifties through the Seventies a
remark by Aaron Copland, to the effect that it had been a long time since
we had a surprise from Hindemith or Milhaud.  It didn't seem to occur to
Copland that "surprise" might have been an odd criterion.  Dodecaphony,
space music, and aleatorics offered to many composers a way of coming
up with new sounds and avoiding what felt like the cliches of classic
Modernism.  To some, it also seemed the Next Step Forward, a term that
indicates a belief in progress in the arts, a dubious proposition.  Last
time I checked, Homer wasn't necessarily a poet inferior to Hollander nor
Bach a composer less than Babbitt.  Some critics, following Adorno, began
putting forward dodecaphony especially as the music of our time (and accept
no substitutes), most expressive of the Zeitgeist.  First, I don't see how
any work of art can not be of its time.  Using an "earlier" style itself
says something about the time.  Second, the Angst-ridden music produced by
most of the avant-garde had very little to do with especially American
optimism in the Fifties and Sixties.  Third, postwar composers generated
their own set of cliches.  In short, the avant-garde confused the merits
of a technique with the merits of a particular composition.

Steve Schwartz