Alan Dudley conjectures...

>It seems likely to me that composers to-day can allow themselves the
>indulgence of writing music which takes longer, and more effort, to be
>appreciated.

I'd turn this around and say that I see it, instead, as a matter of
*needing* to compose music that will satisfy listeners after several
re-hearings -- no challenge for composers prior to the recording era.  I'm
no composer, nor even learned about composing processes, but as a listener
it's clear to me that since recordings now let us re-hear music, its making
has had to be altered considerably.

Many composers would previously only hear their own or others' work once
or twice in their lifetimes, whereas now listeners like you and me can and
sometimes will do that before mid-morning!  This repetitiveness of an enjoyable
piece of music in the recordings era goes so far as to risk making that music
wear thin, and bore.

My feeling is that previously, themes would be uttered, varied, developed,
inverted, and so forth, but for listeners to 'get' the music's sonic structures,
its main theme(s) had to be comparatively explicit, at least becoming the
piece's most prominent feature(s).  This cannot be so in the recordings era,
for the reason given.  In more recent music the theme(s) may, as usual,
precede or follow the variations, developments and modifications, but its/their
explicit utterance cannot be as prominent nor stand for so long doing its
schtick at centre-stage.  In fact, it often becomes very peripheral, and can
even be something of a teasing game where its iteration is hardly the point.

A far greater proportion of many contemporary compositions I can think of
is characterized by sound-making that's seemingly arbitrary, chaotic and
nearly incoherent than is conceiveable for pre-recordings era music.  After
such 'playing at the edges,' the theme(s) at some point generally starts
to come within reach, and the logic or raison d'etre of those other sounds
chosen by the composer and interpreter(s) -- i.e., their music -- will then
begin to take some shape ...even retrospectively.  This retrospective 'making
sense' of what transpired before has always been the case, of course, only
perhaps not to the same degree: for instance, what Oistrakh does within
Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto is something inconceiveable, at least
to me, regarding any concertante work by Dvorak.

In Schnittke, to take a better (since more radical) example, this
extra-thematic sonic content often overwhelms the theme(s), which may
eventually coalesce in a single brief utterance of seemingly very minor
import.  In fact, other themes with no seeming relation to the main structures
of the composition may waft in and out.  Some can find this domination of
arcane noodling-around quite annoying; I certainly did just ten, eleven years
ago.  And yet my feeling now is that the music's sense does come, as you
say, after those repeated listenings, and there's something vaguely silly
about expecting this to be otherwise.  My guess is that Schnittke's own reply
to such perplexity would be: how else would you have me compose in the
post-recordings era?

Bert Bailey