Bill Pirkle wrote:
>Is it true to say that all music was avant-garde at one time? Especially
>major genres. If so, then why would we even consider rejecting it today.
>Does is not have a chance of being the classical music of the future?
The thing is, there is avant-garde and avant-garde, and the scale of
judgement of these things, I mean, how different a piece has to be before
it is regarded as "cutting-edge", has changed out of all recognition since
the classical period.
To explain: Up to the 20th century, all respectable art, including music,
was expected to be pretty much the same as what had been produced before.
The great innovators of music, such as Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, and
Wagner, pushed the language forward by only very small steps compared to
their predecessors. Staying essentially always within the precepts of
what was considered common-practice harmony and counterpoint, their music
has much more in common with each other's than the differences of style
which separate them. You only need to look at music criticism of the
19th century to see that even very subtle innovation was resisted to an
astonishing extent: you get critics savaging composers for some tiny
technical "breach" that the the critic has got a bee in his bonnet about,
such as the writing of consecutive sevenths.
This all changed during the course of the 20th century. Attitudes went to
the opposite extreme. It became very difficult for composers, like other
artists, to be avant-garde enough to satisfy many opinion-formers. Often
it seemed that everyone had to produce something unrecognizably different
from what anyone had written before, to the extent that, between about 1970
and 1990, it seemed that you couldn't be respected as a composer if you
didn't invent your own notation which no-one else understood, and had to be
explained in long prefaces to scores.
This atmosphere, carrying with it the implication of continual erasure
of the traditions of the past, and preventing the accumulation of bodies
of music in new, but self-consistent languages or styles, against which
new pieces can be judges as good or bad examples, it seems to me is not a
condition conducive to the production of great art. In art, like society,
I hold that gradual, evolutionary change, rather than revolutionary, is the
most constructive. It is also that which has the most chance of bringing
public opinion with it. So we need to get back to a more balanced attitude
with respect to the virtue of innovation as opposed to developing and
working within well-understood traditions. Looking at musical history, it
seems to me, far from the oft-repeated dictum that "great music is always
innovative", a case can easily be made that some of the very greatest music
was produced by somewhat backward-looking composers, of which the two who
stand out most, I suppose, are J. S. Bach and Johannes Brahms.
To answer Bill's questions, we should be prepared to consider accepting
or rejecting anything. Avant-garde pieces of today do have a chance of
becoming the classical music of the future, but so do a lot of other
things: tonal classical music of today, some jazz and pop, to name but
three. I suspect that, with all this competition, there won't be room for
very much of today's avant-garde music amongst the classics of the future,
but we will have to see.
David Arditti
|