Denis Fodor:

>Oh, I think there are quite a few listeners who are accustomed to the
>dissonant musical language (it's hard to avoid because it keeps getting
>shoehorned into programs by a recalcitrant and tricky minority that is
>for it);further, who understand it; and further still, who dislike it--
>in part because they find that it sounds contrived and unnatural.  It's
>perfectly sound aesthetics to dislike the atonal or the serial in music.
>It's perfectly reasonable aesthetics to plead something is ugly because it
>sounds unnatural.

Actually, "natural" is not a reasonable criterion for art, since art isn't
natural.  One doesn't find a Haydn symphony growing in a field, for
example.

>Especially if it's been stipulated that the hexachord is natural to
>classical music.

I'm at a loss.  I have no idea what this means or who stipulated or ...

>To be sure there's been innovation throughout musical history, and no
>doubt quite a bit of it initially struck attenders as unnatural.  The test
>then is, whether that sound remained perceived to be unnatural or whether,
>with the passage of time, it became accepted by concert goers.  The serial
>and atonal innovators have been at it for at least half a century and have
>failed to gain broad acceptance.  It's time to go on to other things.

For whom to go on? I mean, if it's people who don't get it (by which I
mean don't appreciate it in the same way they appreciate Bizet or can't
distinguish a good atonal piece from a bad one), okay.  Why not? They're
obviously wasting their time? Of course, the possibility that they will
ever get it plunges to around zero if they refuse to listen.  It just
becomes a kind of music that remains, short of a miracle, forever closed
to them.

On the other hand, there are listeners who like some of this music.
There are those composers who want to write this way.  What's their option?
It seems to me that the serial/nonserial tonal/atonal distinction is the
biggest red herring in 20th-century aesthetics of music, especially since
most people can't tell just by listening that a work is serial/atonal or
merely highly dissonant.  Furthermore, Denis voices simply a rather
thinly-disguised version of the vox populi fallacy.  If aesthetics comes
down to a crude matter of numbers, one shouldn't listen to classical music
at all, since it is definitely a minority taste.

Steve Schwartz