September 2009

Thom Mariner
Co-publisher, Express Cincinnati & EXP/arts

First, it’s important for you to know that I am a professional musician. I love and have performed all kinds of music…well, at least most kinds! The impetus for this column comes from the fact that I long for the thrill of hearing a new piece of art music that just knocks me off my feet. I would like this to be a regular occurrence, whether at the CSO, the Opera, the CCO or VAE. The way things stand, new music is the exception rather than the rule at most concerts – submitted almost apologetically because organizations are afraid, and perhaps rightly so, that the audience won’t accept it. How did we get to this point? At what juncture did composer and audience go their separate ways?

Recently I came across a copy of Leonard Bernstein’s 1966 book “The Infinite Variety of Music.” In reading Bernstein’s second sentence my mouth dropped completely open. “The famous gulf between composer and audience is not only wider than ever: it has become an ocean.” I was dumbstruck. I have been mulling over this issue for decades. The amazing thing to me was that someone incredibly famous had thought the same thing more than 40 years ago.

What Lenny (my new buddy!) and I mean by “the gulf” is the ever-widening gap between A) what many contemporary “art music” composers create and Z) what most audience members are able to absorb, appreciate and/or enjoy on first hearing.

The breach…

Bernstein identified World War I as the line of demarcation for a paradigm shift in the relationship between composer and public. Prior to that, he believes, there was a level of mutual dependency between a composer and the public. Composers needed to make money from publishing and public performances. Audiences excitedly anticipated premieres of new pieces. Following The Great War, Bernstein says this relationship became increasingly a matter of “composer vs. public.”

While I agree with Maestro’s observation and his timeline, I was disappointed that he did not seek to identify the impetus for such a tragic divorce. There is no question that music was headed for a tumultuous intersection leading up to WWI, given the way Debussy, Richard Strauss, Schoenberg, et al, pushed the envelope of tonality to its breaking point. Schoenberg’s serialism technique – with its completely new rules for writing music that expanded and mutated the listening experience – was an almost inevitable result.

Freedom for composers…

What is surprising, and telling, is that serialism, and the increasingly intellectual compositional experiments it fostered, continued to flourish for decades. Composers flocked to try their hand at this new musical language, in spite of ongoing audience rejection and alienation. My hypothesis is that this unfettered experimentation was propagated by composers who no longer needed to cater to public tastes to make their living. Could it have been the recently established policy of academic tenure – being able to hold one’s position on a permanent basis – that freed many university-based composers to disregard their audience?

The university as laboratory…

No doubt a valid reaction to the abuses of university donors who were intent on shaping academic policies, the concept of tenure first emerged at the turn of the 20th century as a means of protecting academic freedom. In 1915 (right smack in the middle of WWI) the American Association of University Professors issued a declaration of principles—the traditional justification for academic freedom and tenure. Under these guidelines, “only committees of other faculty can judge a member of the faculty.” The unforeseen consequence of this in all the arts is that – free from having to rely on acceptance by the public for a living – composers, poets, artists and choreographers could experiment as they wished, only having to impress their intellectual colleagues in order to maintain employment. Universities became a safe haven for artists of all types looking for a secure, comfortable environment in which to practice their craft. Before you start slinging arrows, let me acknowledge that, while this may have been a great thing for artists, perhaps it was not so great for the performance-going public. The dynamic of interdependency, once such a vital part of the creative equation, became almost irrelevant as a result.

In 1958, avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt wrote a now infamous article in High Fidelity magazine defending the solitary laboratory environment of the university as a place for unbridled musical experimentation. He equated music with other advancing fields of knowledge, such as physics and mathematics, claiming that the average lay person does not understand cutting edge developments in these fields either. What Babbitt failed to consider, however, is that art – without the ability to stir the emotions or soothe the soul – is really only an idea, a concept or theory. A key purpose of creating “art” is to express one’s emotions, to share one’s views with others, and to hopefully move them. Otherwise, what is the point? Imagine if Edison had felt as Babbitt, and simply toyed with his experiments rather than finding a way to apply them in the real world. Theories take on meaning only when applied.

The issue here is that a lot of composers surged ahead unchecked in their experimentation, but so what? If a tree falls in the forest…?

Pushing back…

A number of prominent composers bucked the avant-garde and wrote music that spoke to audiences. Think Barber, Copland, Menotti, Britten, Stravinsky, and, of course, Bernstein.
But the damage was done during a 50-year period in which art music audiences diminished and popular music flourished, coinciding with the emergence of radio, TV and recordings that made it easy to exploit what was trendy.

The Minimalist movement (Phillip Glass, John Adams, et al) that unfolded in the ’60s and ’70s was a direct reaction to “the gulf.” And there is certainly a strong trend in recent years toward a compositional language based more in expressiveness and beauty. Consider the works of Pärt, McMillan, Sametz, Schwantner, Saariaho, Rautavaara, Ades, Golijov among others. How do we get these gifted, approachable composers into the ears of more people?

Audience apathy…

The challenge is that, on the other shore of the gulf, we find much of the potential audience for classical music. Some were simply left behind and lost interest. Others turned their attentions to the popular music and jazz that became such a force mid-century.

Fewer and fewer people learn the language of music each year. It’s challenging for someone who does not have at least some understanding of the language to appreciate the intricacies of a composer’s art. It’s even difficult to talk about music without a shared knowledge base. What percentage of people is able, these days, to knowledgeably debate the relative merits of a symphony premiere or a modern opera? It’s not part of what most of us learn growing up.

Without this context for comprehension, a complex new composition is merely waves of sound to most people, nearly impossible to ingest and evaluate at first hearing. It’s like hearing someone speak a foreign language; the patterns do not register. The response is often polite, reserved, almost dutiful applause. Why do we accept music so passively? Where is our passion? Can you even imagine a modern recurrence of the full-scale riot during the 1913 premiere of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” when some people loved it and others recoiled in horror?

Whether you agree with my premise or not, the gulf exists. So what do we do about it? How do we repair this breach? How do we re-ignite the passion of the relationship between composer and audience? What can performing arts organizations and composers do? What can audience members do? What can we as a society do?