Peter Varley replies to me:

>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.

Hypothetically? It happens.  Why do you think people complain every time
a composer whose name they haven't heard before appears on a program? They
complain because they don't want to go to a concert which doesn't guarantee
all the music they would like.  Well, I go to a lot of concerts with music
on it I don't care for (some of it written by Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms),
and you know what? I don't complain at all.  In fact, I'm grateful for the
opportunity to hear music I don't like, because - God forbid - I might
learn something.

>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.

Essentially, it almost always comes down to turf.  The performing resources
are scarce, the creative supply is large.  Think of how many symphonies are
produced annually in the US alone.  How many, assuming that they're all the
greatest symphonies since Mahler's 9th (we don't know, so let's assume the
best) will be played? Then there's Bernie Chasan's Concerto for
Blackboard+.  Some atonalists proclaimed the death of tonality to create an
opportunity to get played.  Tonalists cried "foul" and "you big bullies"
for the same reason.

>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.

Yes, and so is lumping the avant-garde into the monolithic Evil Aesthetic
Empire.  You will have a hard time getting a quorum at the meetings of the
cabal.

>>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.

Exactly.  If I waited for a concert to hear the Webern Symphony, I'd still
be waiting.  As to "something worth looking for," I refuse to generalize.
If I had followed my musical instincts, I never would have turned on to
Brahms, because I wouldn't have heard the work that turned me around.
It's expensive to proceed this way, I admit.  But I believe that all
art involves a risk, not only for the creator, but for the audience.  The
generalization reduces the risk, but not only of failure but of epiphany.
So I've heard a lot of stuff I don't care for, from all periods, but I
don't mind all that much.

>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.

It might have been me, so let me rephrase it.  The change is from live
music to recorded music (and a reduction of active performance to passive
listening) in terms of how most people encounter music and from art music
to pop in terms of what engages the interest of the average educated class.
Charlie Rose interviews Mariah Carey, not Elliott Carter or, for that
matter, Benjamin Lees.

>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.

Not really.  A lot of opera and symphonies were performed in piano-vocal
and 2-piano editions.  As we know, Liszt arranged all the Beethoven
symphonies for piano.  All of Brahms's symphonies, for example, came out
in 2-piano arrangements (by the composer himself).

George Bernard Shaw in his "Musical Autobiography" tells how he went
through all kinds of music at the piano - opera, oratorio, symphony,
chamber music.  He knew an awful lot of music long before he heard it
in the concert hall.

Steve Schwartz