John Smyth in a thoughtful post quotes Daniel Boorstin:

>"In this long quest, Western Culture has turned from seeking the end
>or purpose to seeking causes--from the Why to the How.  Might this
>empty meaning from our human experience?"

I doubt it myself.  Most of the How leaves the Why intact.  What I would
say is far more characteristic of the century is the unwillingness (I
believe well-founded) to universalize the personal.

>There are a few things that I have mentioned before regarding Contemporary
>CM scene.
>
>1) Composers seem so self-conscious about those that came before them.
>(Yes, I know but Brahms only had Beethoven.) Every piece has to be
>ground-breaking because it's what made composers of the past stand out.

Only for some composers.  The bigger problem (and potentially the greater
glory) is the lack of a musical lingua franca.  I also wouldn't agree that
most composers feel the need to break ground (as far as the culture at
large is concerned).  In fact, I believe this applies to very few - Varese,
Seeger, Ruggles, Berio, for example - and the output of such composers
tends to be small.  However, very few composers (especially those who don't
make a living from writing - almost everybody) want to repeat themselves.
The rewards of writing classical music are largely internal ones.  They
have to be, since external rewards are so meagre and far between.

>2) It seems as though in the last thirty years that we have more "doctors"
>than "patients." In other words, the second half of the 20th Cent.  will
>probably be recognised more for its quality of commentary on CM rather than
>its quality of music.  (Stirling, just think how much music you and I could
>have written in the time it took to write these postings.)

Probably about 3 measures.  Prediction is a sucker's game, as far as I'm
concerned.  I hope what John describes is not the case, if the relative
quality of music criticism and composition means anything.  I believe there
are great composers - "great" in the sense that I like their work as much
as I like work that others have called great - writing even as we speak,
many born after 1950.

>3) Since composers are now so enstranged from their audience, Critics
>have become the midwives and middlemen of artistic creation--the result
>being similar to pouring too much fertilizer over a plant.  (Critics,
>terrified that they will be lampooned by future generations for being
>too conservative, ie., Mahler's detractors in the Vienna newspapers;
>end up overcompensating in the other direction.)

This is stereotypical.  I read plenty of critics who dump on new,
unfamiliar music - perhaps even with good reason.  I happen to a lot
of new music, and I dislike or am bored by most of it.  I don't care
what posterity thinks of me, because I will never meet posterity and I'm
interested in enjoying myself now.  However, like all stereotypes, there is
some weird grain of truth.  It's quite true that people who like new music
tend to be more enthusiastic than those who don't and tend to listen to and
think about more of it.  Thus, they don't hear a new work "cold," as many
audience members do.  They have a sharper sense of context and a greater
experience with music that moves and works differently than the Real Music
(pat.  pend.) of the 18th and 19th centuries.  However, this applies to
Renaissance and medieval music aficionados as well.  I'd be willing to bet
that most people are as bewildered and bored by this music as they are by
that of the monstrous and artistically bankrupt 20th century.

>Don't all of these observations fit Boorstin's assertion that our
>current preoccupation is with the How? Modern artists look to critics and
>commentators for past *causes* that led to success, and then focus soley
>upon repeating the formula.  Are the adjectives we hear about regarding
>modern CM--"sterile", "better seen than heard", "written for a computer"--a
>result of composers forgetting to tackle the question of *Why* and
>therefore draining their art of meaning?

Not really, since I can't think of too many composers who actually work
this way.  Believe it or not, most composers want an emotional response,
just as earlier composers did.  "Sterile," "better seen than heard," and
"written for a computer" are not, generally speaking, adjectives that
composers apply to their own music.  In other words, these terms are as
toxic to them as they are to others.

The problem can be reduced to four possibilities:

1.  Bad music one dislikes
2.  Good music one dislikes
3.  Bad music one likes
4.  Good music one likes

I realize that I'm implying that standards exist to tell good music from
bad, and I admit I don't know what they are.  However, most people strongly
believe that such standards exist, so I state the argument in convenient
terms.  What we are really talking about is the meeting of work with
audience.  The second and third possibilities are the problemmatic ones.
I'm sure we can all point to our own private examples taken throughout
music's history.  I ask what makes us any different from our ancestors in
this regard.  Why should we be any less bewildered by the unfamiliar? As we
all know, "sterile," "mathematical," and "paper music" were applied to many
composers of the past we now revere.  Sure, we like Beethoven and Brahms.
Perhaps our progeny will like Webern and Carter.  Of course, there are a
lot of people who like Webern and Carter now, just as there were those who
liked Beethoven and Brahms at the time.

What really bothers me is the idea that music should be mostly immediately
accessible to any intelligent person.  It strikes me as a variant of the
attitude prevalent among many lawyers that lawyers can understand anything
worth knowing.  I'm also bothered by the fact that most people's music
experience is passive - they haven't had the joy of working to perform a
score.  This seems truer now than in the past.  Most people who listen to
music can't read it and have little clue as to how it's put together.  I'm
not surprised, particularly, that most difficult new music makes so little
sense on first hearing.  But why should it make sense at a first hearing?
Why shouldn't a composer expect the audience to work? If you don't know
How, you have less of a chance of knowing Why.

>If there is one thing that people seem to miss in the line of contemporary
>music most respected and initiated by Schoenberg--you know what kind I am
>talking about) ...

Not really.  But Schoenberg has become a bugbear - one of the most hated
and least heard composers in all of music.  If you're talking about
difficult, dissonant music, a lot of it has nothing to do with Schoenberg.

>..., it would be whimsy; wonderment.  Nothing fires up the
>imagination more than trying to answer Why--seeking our end or purpose.

Then I would suggest that people aren't listening to the right contemporary
composers, if that's what they want.  Listen to Adams, Knussen, Larsen,
Daugherty, Schiff, and a raft of others.  Frankly, I find little whimsical
in Bruckner and Wagner, for example.  You want ecstasy? Try Rosner, Rouse,
Tavener, Paert, etc.  etc.  Isn't Hovhaness still writing?

>Do we simply know too much nowadays? I mean, its fun to write about a
>plague with frogs and locusts, but who wants to write about test tubes and
>viruses?

Very few composers do write about test tubes and viruses.  They write to
evoke the same general feelings as Bach, Schumann, Debussy, and Mahler.
The Eternal Questions are just that.  Finding the cure for polio doesn't
answer Socrates's question "What is justice?"

>I think that the real problem is that not a long time ago, composers,
>(as a voice of the Church or not), were prophets and "seers" in their
>own way--explaining our ends and purpose, or lapses in experience and
>understanding, with music.  The difference is that today composers seem to
>have given up *seeing* for their fellow men and have instead endeavored to
>become prophets and seers for their chosen art in and of itself.

They see for themselves and hope that there's enough congruence in the
experience of their audience, just as most artists honest with themselves
and not certifiably insane have done since the Renaissance.  I happen to
"get" a lot of contemporary music.  The Why is usually not a problem for
me.  On the other hand, I've got close to forty years of listening,
relistening, and study behind me.  Of course, the fact that in my youth the
standard repertoire mostly bored the earwax out of me helped.  The people
remote from me were the Big Names - Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert,
Schumann, Brahms, Chopin, Wagner, Bruckner, Verdi, and so on.  Those people
have been the "hard cases." Decades of continued listening and study have
made most of them at long last accessible to me.  Now, I *could* have
blamed Monteverdi for ruining everything, just as people are now blaming
Schoenberg, but I would have missed a lot of music.

>Oscar Wilde once said that artists don't walk among the crowd, they are
>the bystander that observes crowd.  I believe that many modern artists,
>in search of the How, have taken it one step further--they have become
>observers of the bystander.

What you've described is the critic, not the artist.  If that's your
point, then you haven't heard what modern artists are telling you.
Besides, if they're trying to avoid sounding like anybody else (as you
contend earlier), they can't be taking from the "bystander" now.  The
position contradicts itself.

I have a lot of problems with Wilde's formulation anyway.  It's really
just a rehash of earlier ideas of the Romantic artist, probably at its most
noticeable in Byron and, earlier, Klopstock.  It leads to ethically dubious
positions.  Some artists have been outsiders.  Others haven't.  Some of our
greatest artists have thought of themselves primarilly as craftsmen: that
is, what separates us from Mozart is not his fineness of soul, but the fact
that Mozart can write superb music and we can't.  Joseph Holbrooke (and
I'll undoubtedly raise hackles here) thought of himself as the Lonely Great
Artist who felt more finely than other composers.  Unfortunately, he wrote
exceedingly uninteresting music.  Vaughan Williams (whom Holbrooke thought
of as "one of the dull ones of our profession") thought of himself as a
citizen and a friend.  He disliked talking about his Great Soul and in fact
often denied he had one.  Fortunately, he left behind music that continues
to move many people.  If he was proud of anything, it was of the hard work
he had put in to master his craft and to write.

Steve Schwartz