Chris Beckwith:

>when I refer to dissonant and atonal music as the stuff that sounds little
>better than "my alarm clock on Monday morning," no doubt I make myself
>sound like an utter philistine to some.  Truth be told, the issue for
>me isn't the ound - but the utterly predictable sense of exhaustion about
>the music itself.  Putting it bluntly - the moment of high modernism
>that Shoenberg &co are emblematic of is over - and has been for some time.

First, the main reason to listen to music is because you enjoy it.  I'd
never put someone beyond the Pale because they disliked music I adored.  As
ex-Prexy Bush showed, not everyone likes broccoli.  Not everyone likes ice
cream, either.

>Works in the present that perpetuate the form are little more than a
>sterile, academic exercise that better reflect the conservatories that
>incubate them.  Much of it is derivative in the manner of, say - to find an
>analogy in the visual arts - abstract expressionist or pop art knock-offs.
>No one can paint a Marilyn, a soupcan, or dribble paint anymore and think
>it original, yet strangely, this is precisely the state of affairs in
>serious music.  And the fact is: alot of it just ain't news.

But this is true of any style.  In that sense, style is neutral.  The
matter always comes down to the individual piece and the reaction of the
listener to it.  What really, really bothers me is the tendency on both
sides of the "Modern Music Question" to make a special case for or against
the 20th century or Schoenberg or whoever happens to be your own messiah or
devil of the moment on grand cultural grounds.  We don't make this kind of
evaluation for any other period, and I've yet to understand why people are
so eager to argue in this way about music of their own time.

>That I can tick off on but one hand the number of well-known, present -day
>living composers is, in my opinion, an appalling state of affairs.  When
>was the last time a serious composer got on the cover of Time? Indeed,
>novelists, film makers, painters, sculptors, etc get the occasional cover
>- but no nods to the composers of serious music? Certainly we might
>attribute this to the fatuousness of a culture itself which seems ready
>to swoon over an ephemeral pop sensation at the drop of a hat, but we'd
>be misleading ourselves.  In fact, this paucity of public attention, to a
>degree, is attributable to nothing less than the hidebound, reclusive sway
>of a rutted, proto - modernist / Frankfurt School sensibility that has
>become respectably enmeshed in the academic music culture.  Its grip has
>withered music.

Bushwa.  Aside from the fact that academia presently hosts all kinds of
styles - from atonalists/serialists to minimalists to neo-Romantics to
whatever - very few people listen to the music you happen to like.  How
do you account for this? Have those mean old Atonalists ruined it for
Beethoven and Brahms and the rest (or substitute your favorite composers
here)? If so, why do you personally like them? Are you more perceptive?
Have you had certain advantages? Are you merely luckier? It seems to me
that someone with your position must come up with the explanation of why
classical music in general is ignored, and furthermore ignored by the
so-called "educated classes." You're probably not going to find Robert
Schumann on the cover of Time either.  You're also not going to find many
"hard-core" figures in other arts showing up in the conversation of our
general educated classes.  I'd be surprised if many have read a line of
Machado or Jared Carter, Galway Kinnell, Frank O'Hara, Martha McFerrin,
Donald Hall, or Robert Bly (other than the Man's Books).  How many do you
think have read even a short story by Sheilah Bosworth, Nina Berberova, or
Harry Crews or seen art by Jim Dine or Red Grooms? How many would you guess
even recognize these names? To blame artists for all this is, generally
speaking, giving them way too much "credit." In another sense, you're
blaming victims alone for their predicament.  As another lister so
brilliantly noted, most of us are hedgehogs rather than foxes.  To each
his own temperament.  But don't blame the landscape or even the farmer
because you're one or the other.

Steve Schwartz