Stirling Newberry writes:

>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.

There is a fundamental issue at stake:

>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.

Contemporary composition sows the seeds for a new future while holding
open our links to the past.  Interest in our musical future secures the
meaningfulness of what has passed.  Herein lies the saddest thing about
the modern music world:  that we look more to the past today than was ever
the case in previous times.  In Haydn's time the Academy of Ancient Music
played Handel.  The music of a generation prior to Haydn was already
'ancient'.  Today Bartok and Berg are frequently thought of as being
'modern' composers.

Look at the concerts of Wilhelm Furtwaengler in Berlin and you will find
numerous premiers of works by composers long forgotten.  Even if we look
upon him as a conductor of Bruckner, Beethoven and Wagner we forget that
these composers were from a generation of musicians not far removed from
Furtwaengler's time.  Not only that but he conducted world premiers of
works by contemporaries such as Strauss, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Hindemith
and later included Bartok in his repertoire late in his life.

Compare this to our modern conductors.  They conduct repertoire dominated
by music written by composers far more remote in time to theirs than had
ever been customary amongst musicians during the first half of the 20th
century.  Today the concerts of major orchestras seldom contain premiers
but are full of the usual Beethoven, Mahler, and Mozart.  Yet they play
this music with a lifelessness that makes even the youngest of music lovers
envious listening to the recorded mono masters.  I recently found myself
over the moon listening to a dry mono recording of Schoenberg's 'Variations
for Orchestra' by Scherchen, a work commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic
and premiered by none other than Furtwaengler himself.  Part of today's
lifelessness is in my mind a consequence of the failure of modern musicians
to pave the path to a new musical future.  They have never put their necks
on the block fighting for a contemporary composer, which in Furtwaengler's
case involved championing Hindemith in the face of open hostility from the
Nazi establishment - indeed nearly putting his life on the line for it.
Today's musicians find it all too cozy to play music all too widely
accepted by the Establishment in the same old cozy manner.

Audiences too have lost the art of listening to a new composition.  They
go only to concerts of music they already own a dozen CD versions of.
Contemporary music is frequently so expensive to record that the smaller
independent record labels that publish them consider themselves to be doing
well it they manage to recoup their losses.  And so the vicious cycle
perpetuates itself.  It is high time we come to fully recognize just how
much poorer we are for the modern indifference to contemporary music.

Satoshi Akima
Sydney, Australia
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