Steve Schwartz (in reply to me) on the avant-garde:

>>I dislike their outlook as much as I dislike their music, and in
>>particular I dislike their claim to be the only valid musical expression
>>of the 20th century.
>
>Well, not many of them made that claim. Certainly very few make it now.

Quite so.

>>I agree with those previous postings which expressed the opinion
>>that this attitude has done serious harm to CM in the second half of the
>>20th century.
>
>The attitude is particularly stupid and ugly (no more stupid and ugly,
>however, than the same sort of attitude from the other side)

I'm not aware that anyone ever tried to stop avant-garde music being
performed, or tried to prevent those (few) people who enjoy it from
listening to it.  Hypothetically, if that happened, that's wrong too.

I don't think the Brahms-Wagner wars are a good comparison.  The Wagner
experts on the list may correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is
that both sides were trying to get publicity for themselves, not to stop
the other side being heard.  They seem, on the whole, to have done a fair
amount of good, both in attracting audiences who came to see what all
the fuss was about, and in promoting composers who might otherwise have
remained obscure (Bruckner comes to mind here).  The only losers were
composers like Kiel who refused to get involved.

The other point which makes it a bad comparison is that in the case of the
avant-garde, there is no "other side" - there was no single coherent group
opposing the avant-garde.  There were several groups - pupils of Vaughan
Williams, imitators of Prokofiev and Shostakovich, imitators of Bartok and
Stravinsky, serialists who adapted Schoenberg's methods to their own ends
- and several uncategorisable individuals.  Lumping them all together and
labelling them "bad guys opposed to modern music" is absurd.

>You could always listen to music other than the avant-garde stuff, if
>you took the trouble and sought it out.  I heard most of the interwar
>neoclassical American music I know for the first time in the 1960s and
>1970s, supposedly the time of the "commissars'" hegemony.  If you're
>waiting for the music to come to you nicely served, you've got a long wait.
>You've got to be willing to seek it out.  If you're not, don't complain
>about the commissars.

As well as being willing to seek it out, you've also got to think that
there's something worth looking for, and have some idea as to where to
find it.  The first Piston I heard was a radio broadcast in the late 1980s.
If I'd waited for any more to be broadcast, I'd still be waiting.

Being lucky helps, too.  I only heard Barber's 1st Symphony when it turned
up as a filler on a CD. Like Piston's 2nd, it's now a favourite.

It's notable that these pieces date from the 1930s and 1940s.  I came
across them in the early 1990s, and I suspect that they're still not all
that well-known.  A hundred years ago, most listeners would have known all
about the major pieces from the 1830s and 1840s and would have had a pretty
good idea about the 1870s and 1880s too.  Something has changed, and
although it is simplistic to look for one and only one cause, trying to
identify a major cause of the change is reasonable.

Earlier in the thread, someone (I forget who) claimed that the history
of music in the 20th century was a change from live art music to recorded
popular music.  It's not so.  The availability of recorded music is real
enough, and is IMO no bad thing as it enables minorities to listen to
whatever music they choose.  The suggestion that art music is more "live"
than popular music is wrong.  AIUI, festivals and concerts of popular
music attract audiences of hundreds of thousands, and the "thrill of a
live performance" is part of the attraction.  If the "thrill of a live
performance" is missing in CM, that might be part of an explanation why CM
is a smaller part of music as a whole now than it was a hundred years ago.

Another explanation that I don't accept is that CM has changed from
a "participation" activity to a "consumer" activity.  Firstly, opera,
concertos and symphonic music always were "consumer" activities.  Secondly,
AIUI the change from chamber music as a participation activity to chamber
music as a concert doesn't coincide chronologically with disappearing CM
audiences - Mozart's string quartets were written to be performed, but
Tchaikovsky's were written to be listened to.  Thirdly, there are many
more people now with enough leisure time to learn a musical instrument
than there were a hundred years ago, but when they do, it isn't generally
CM that they choose to learn.

Instead, I'd suggest that, on the whole, people are more interested in
concerts as an experience than as concerts as just music, and also that
they like to be able to say that "I was there when ...".  Saying "I was
there when Beethoven conducted the first performance of his 9th symphony"
would be something; saying that "I was there at a performance of
Beethoven's 9th (but Beethoven wasn't as he's been dead for a hundred and
thirty years)" is less impressive.  The performance might be better today,
but the experience as a whole is less memorable.

Compare this with "I was there when Boulez conducted ...", to which likely
replies are "Was it really as bad as they say?" and "Who's Boulez?".  I
don't have a complete explanation as to why CM is a minority taste, but
I'd suggest that two important parts of the explanation are that (a) no
composer today is as well-known as Beethoven or Tchaikovsky were in their
lifetimes, and (b) those living composers who are at all well-known write
music which is unappealing on first hearing.

Peter Varley
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