Denis Fodor replies to me:

>We've always been beholden to the past, because that's all there is.
>The present is fleeting, ephemeral, and the future hasn't yet arrived.

By that definition, Birtwhistle is the past as well.

>Efforts to break radically and suddenly with the aesthetics of the past
>are therefore ill advised.  "Music of the past," as Messrs Copland and
>Schwartz term it, is an organic whole, the music of the one period smoothly
>developing into the music of the succeeding period.  ...  The trouble is
>that modern music, or at least the pushy part of it, has been/is composed
>in deliberate and flagrant rejection of what went before.  As Anti-Music,
>it seeks to be the very antithesis, the in-your-face, to yesterday's music.

I don't doubt that there have been breaks in certain composers' works such
as Denis has described.  However, I fail to see this in most composers,
even those labelled "pushy." I fail to see a break with the past in
Birtwhistle, for example, or Varese.  In fact, I find their music to have
much in common with 19th-century Romanticism, just as Schoenberg's did.
However, I also find that my sense of the past goes on a bit longer than
most people's.  As for "Anti-Music," this is simply pique.

>The movie business isn't nearly what it once was precisely because the
>heaven stormers insisted on making films that the general public could
>not abide and therefore ceased to attend.  And let's face it, there's
>really no reason to put up with Birtwhistle when you can have Beethoven
>or Orlando.

The only reason to put up with it is because you want to.  Besides, there
are always people telling me to be satisfied with limited choices.  Why
should I be satisfied with less when I can have more?

>A great deal of modern music is simply not fitted to fill large halls or
>to have large sales in the form of recordings.  When it is performed in
>large halls or played as recordings on classical radio stations it may
>occasionally provide a welcome a change of pace.  But when it's force-fed
>to audiences in the cause of cultural correctness it provides at best
>yawning ennui, or at worst the feeling that one is being stuffed like a
>Strasbourg goose..

You know, I really don't complain when I have to sit through the Eroica
and the other top 40.  I'm polite.  Sometimes, depending on the performance,
I'm even interested.  There's so little of new or unusual music played at
all, you'd think that someone could say "what the hell" and zone out for
20-30 minutes while it went on.  In other words, I wish others would extend
to me the courtesy I regularly extend to them.  Instead, I hear loud bitter
complaints of "cultural Stalinism" on those infrequent occasions when
anything remotely unusual - Nielsen, Bartok, Stravinsky - is played.
Given the performance figures of new and old music, which of us is being
force-fed?

Steve Schwartz