Stirling Newberry:

>And yet what Griffiths wrote - and the Times published, without rebuttal
>on an equal footing - is exactly the same thing.  People who don't support
>Boulez are not contemporary, they're accomplishments count for nothing, and
>anyone who is worth listening to is indebt to him.  All real music lovers
>have to agree on this.

Just as there was an avant-garde, there is a derriere-garde, and it
seems to me that critics like Griffiths--assuming this is characteristic--
represent the latter.  They are hyping what was new as if it is still new
and coming, and this is not the case with the music of Boulez.  (Or maybe
it is more like whistling in the dark, keeping hope alive.) The young
Boulez and his friends said "Schoenberg is dead." Not sure what followed,
but I assume something like "Long live Webern." He's dead too.  Some of the
innovations of these composers have passed into the general creative stream
of musical optioins, to be sure, but music has moved on, and even Boulez
has mellowed enough to conduct Bruckner--which amazed me when I saw this.

If you look at the history of musical criticism, it seems to me that being
behind the times is a frequent characteristic.  Critics can be behind the
times by standing with old firebrands even when their embers barely glow,
just as much as if they stood with stodgy mossbacks.

Jim Tobin