Len Fehskens asks, replying to me:

>As I have pointed out repeatedly in the past, the advent of high quality
>recordings of an extraordinarily diverse repertoire has fundamentally
>changed the role of concert performances.  Those of us who want to
>listen to new music listen to recordings of it.  A concert performance
>is not the ideal way to hear much modern music, which often needs to
>be listened to repeatedly and, to some extent, studied.  Music which is
>immediately apprehendible is almost always dismissed as lightweight
>or trivial.  You can't have it both ways.  Yes, concert performance may
>have once been the *only* way for listeners to hear the latest music,
>but that is no longer the case, and it's a nonsequitur to assume that
>because it was once the only way it must always be the best way.

I think this is an either-or.  There is music, admittedly rare, that is at
mostly comprehensible and not lightweight: Britten's War Requiem, for
example.

>Nowadays people go to concerts to hear music they already know and
>love, in live performance, because it's an experience that is
>qualitatively different from listening to a recording in one's home.
>Why this upsets so many people is beyond me.  Why is it considered damning
>to analogize the concert hall to a museum? People don't go to museums to
>see the latest paintings or read the latest literature.  Does that mean
>museums are to be ridiculed as the venue of philistines?

Philistines do go there, as well as those of us who are aesthetically pure
of heart.  There's nothing wrong per se with knowing and understanding the
past.  I think it a bad idea - from either side of this argument - to raise
up one period of music at the expense of the other.  I'm neither willing
to trash Bach so I can raise Boulez nor eager to dump on Brahms in order
to glorify Gubaidulina.  But art is a living thing.  It changes as it
moves on.  In this case, the ability to remain in the past, and the
not-very-recent past at that, has cut people off from the present.  The
artist no longer speaks to a general audience.  I hear both artists and
audiences complaining about that, but what I hear from audiences runs along
the lines of "Why aren't they writing Mahler's 11th or Brahms's Fifth," or
in the case of even fairly wide tastes, "Why aren't they writing Vaughan
Williams's 10th or Copland's Fourth?" Consequently, you get the phenomenon
W.  S.  Gilbert pointed out in his little list: "There's the idiot who
praises in uncompromising tones / All centuries but this, and every country
but his own."

>>The past should be listened to, and I and my best buddy Aaron are
>>talking about degree.  The interest is abnormal in that in just about
>>every "natural" or untutored enthusiasm for art, the desire is to hear
>>or see something new.
>
>But the new in cinema, literature, painting, sculpture etc. is largely
>comprehensible to those familiar with its antecedents.  The same cannot
>be said of much modern music.

I disagree strongly, in that most people don't know the antecedants.  We're
not talking about a rupture that happened in 1945, but one that happened
around 1900.  The break has gotten worse, not better.

>The situation in music is as if every new poem were in the style of
>e.e.cummings' most "out there" work, or every new novel tried to surpass
>Joyce's "Ulysses" in complexity and subtlety.  Writers, poets, sculptors,
>directors, etc.  who express themselves in familiar, traditional modes are
>not denigrated for being derivative or insufficiently innovative.  Why is
>music held to a different standard?

I guess we have different ideas of comprehensibility.  I don't consider
Cummings "out there," and "Ulysses" isn't that difficult.  Further we don't
hold music to a different, more difficult standard.  If anything, the
musical public holds it to an easier standard: music shouldn't be that
difficult.  There are plenty of poets - John Hollander, Kermwood Elmslie,
Frank O'Hara, for example - who do push their art on a regular basis.  Why
should music be any easier? I think I know the historical reasons for this.
I simply ask whether a composer should be frowned upon simply because he or
she is difficult.

>>On the other side, the audience seems to expect to hear pieces they
>>immediately understand, to put in almost no work whatsoever.
>
>See above.  The fact is that compared to other forms of expression,
>today's music seems seems to require a disproportionate effort to
>understand.

I doubt it.  I have made minimal effort to understand it.  I may be lucky
in that I liked modern and contemporary music before I knew how it was put
together.  Perhaps there is something called personal taste after all.
On the other hand, I had to work like a dog to understand Haydn, Mozart,
Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms, who all sounded bland and
predictable to me.  But I put in the effort, because it was important to me
to be comfortable with the past, and it took me decades to finally "get"
the music.  I'm not sorry.  I wish, however, that people would put in a
similar amount of time to become comfortable with what's out there now.
I'm not holding my breath.

>No one complains about the best of today's movies or novels being
>"misshapen messes".

Well, actually people do complain.  But, then, not everyone agrees about
what the best movies are.

>>Classical music is marginal in this culture anyway, even among the
>>so-called educated.
>
>Unquestionably the case. The interesting question is why?

I've tried to suggest not *the* reason, but one reason.

>>People embarrassed to admit that they hadn't read the latest Paul Auster
>>novel
>
>Who's Paul Auster?  And I read an awful lot.

See, you're embarrassed.  Paul Auster wrote, among other things, Mr.
Vertigo.  They've even done TV shows on him.

>>couldn't even name the last three winners of the Pulitzer for music.
>
>I can't name them either.  Why?  Because I don't care.  And I listen
>to Kernis, Gubaidulina, Rautavaara, Kancheli, Birtwhistle, ...   Winning
>the Pullet Surprise seems more a matter of politics than substance.

Undoubtedly politics plays its part, as it does in probably every public
award.  I don't sneer at William Faulkner because he won a Nobel.  I don't
discount a work because it won something - that seems to me a little
perverse.  I'm glad you listen to all those people and I hope you enjoy
them.  But I'd say you're pretty unusual.

>>I speculate it's at least partly because classical audiences seem stuck in
>>the not-even-recent past.  In other words, nothing new's happening, so why
>>get interested?
>
>No, most of the otherwise sophisticated people I know aren't even
>interested in "old" music.  They're not interested in *any* art music.

That's exactly my point.  If nothing's happening now in music, why learn
its past? It's one point of view among the intellectually trendy.

Steve Schwartz