I came across this book, Music After Modernism, a collection of essays from 1979 by pianist and critic Samuel Lipman. The book revolves around the fact that the classical music repertoire pretty much ends around 1930, indeed with not much after 1900. That sounds about right, and indeed the point is made stronger when we realize that this has barely changed in the nearly fifty years since. Wagner, Brahms, and their contemporaries were pretty much the end of the line, and Lipman discusses how composers of later generations have mostly failed to break through, along with what that implies for performance and interpretation of classical music, now that the paucity of popular new classical music has led to a separation between composition and performance.
Why did this happen? Here are a few competing stories, none of which quite works for me:
1. Compelling new classical music was being written throughout the nineteenth century, and then came “modernism”: a valuing of difficulty for its own sake, a dissociation between composers and audiences, echoing similar modernist developments in literature, visual art, architecture, etc. There’s something to this–It’s T. S. Eliot in the canon, not Stephen Vincent Benét, and the Museum of Modern Art and similar museums are full of all-black paintings and the like–but there’s something missing too, in that modernist classics by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, etc. are still popular and readable, and the mainstream of what could be called “serious fiction” remains tied to audience approval. Similarly with visual art and architecture: abstraction and brutalism haven’t been the only game in town.
2. Just as Western church music and folk music were largely superseded in the eighteenth and nineteenth century by art music (what we now call “classical music”), this in turn was superseded in the twentieth century by jazz and then pop. There’s some truth in this–as a friend once said to me, “If Beethoven were alive now, he’d be rockin'”–and much has been written regarding the musical depth of the jazz jam and the pop song–but I respect Lipman’s unwillingness to go far along this path: as a performer and student of complex classical scores, he might well appreciate pop music for what it is, without wanting to put Duke Ellington or Paul McCartney or Suzanne Vega or Brian Eno on the same level as Mozart and the like. Also, the continuing existence and development of high-quality pop music doesn’t address the question of why there hasn’t also been a continuing stream of new and new-sounding classical music. Symphonies and concertos and the like continued to develop and remain listenable in new ways after the death of Mozart, so why not so much in the past hundred years? It’s not from want of trying.
3. Some say that classical music since 1930 has been just fine. This is the tack taken by music critic Alex Ross in his 2007 book, The Rest is Noise, which celebrates many different strands of difficult twentieth-century classical music and places its composers in their cultural contexts. The Rest is Noise tells an appealing story that I’d like to believe, but the fact remains that I, along with many other classical music listeners, don’t find this recent music listenable in the same way as the nineteenth-century classics–and this seems different from, say, the listeners back in the day who thought that Beethoven was fine but Chopin went too far, or who couldn’t appreciate Debussy, or whatever. The difference is that, back then, the repertoire moved on and incorporated the new, in a way that hasn’t been happening for the past century. Concert directors keep trying, mixing in the new with the familiar old stuff–for example, here’s an upcoming program at the Pittsburgh Symphony:
Verdi: Overture to La forza del destino
Grieg: Selections from Suite from Peer Gynt
Huanzhi Li: Spring Festival Overture *PSO Premiere
Grieg: Piano Concerto
The piece by Li is from 1955. I was curious so I went on YouTube and listened to a performance. It was pleasant enough, actually sounded like it came from the nineteenth century. I guess that composers can write like that when they want to! I don’t know enough about music to evaluate the piece; I’m guessing that Lipman would characterize it as an uninspired pastiche and that it wouldn’t particularly interest Ross, whose critique of the modern concert repertoire is not just that it doesn’t feature much of the new but also that it turns its back on the avant-garde.
Some important part of the story has to be the different ways in which people encounter music. Many writers have discussed how the experience of music has shifted over the past century or so from playing music, to listening to music, to background music–and this all affects how we hear music and how we talk about it. The story is clear enough. Until very recently in music history, if you wanted music you had to sing it or play it yourself, or go somewhere where people were performing. Changes in performance spaces corresponded to different developments of musical style and content. Records and radio made it possible to just listen, and to listen to a much wider variety of music than you’d encounter in your daily life or even going to the occasional concert. And then, as the decades progressed, we gradually moved to the modern condition of music always being available in the background.
As a non-musician who loves music but almost always listens to it while doing something else (as right now!), I think it’s clear that the experience of hearing music is so different in these different settings that it completely changes what makes music work, or sound good. For example, Music for Airports is great in the background–that’s its whole point–but it could be kinda boring to hear in concert. Beethoven or Dvořák symphonies have a lot more going on.
And then there’s modern music of the sort that Alex Ross likes and Samuel Lipman didn’t. To say this more carefully: Lipman does like a lot of modern classical music–he mentions a bunch of American and other composers who wrote classical music in the decades from the 1930s through the 1970s, not the super-avant-garde stuff or the minimalists or the straight-up throwbacks but what he sees as natural developments, music that he as a performer and listener appreciates. But he recognizes that classical music audiences are not interested in the modern classical music that he likes–and that audiences are also pretty much not interested in the modern classical music he doesn’t like, either. Ross, on the other hand, has something good to say about all sorts of new classical music from the past century, and he takes a much more positive take, always pointing to some performance or another where the audiences seem to be lapping it up.
So what’s going on?
It’s my impression that, in general, music is more interesting to play than to listen to. Combinations of notes that don’t sound like much can be interesting to explore, and playing music is a form of exploration or experimentation: even if you’re playing a piece note by note, at each step you’re implicitly experimenting in that you always have a choice to play it differently. Beyond this, I can well imagine that some music can be more interesting than to compose than to listen to or even to play–indeed, it’s not hard to compose patterns of notes that are unplayable by a human using traditional musical instruments. So some of the development of modern music has to be a move from interesting-to-listen-to to interesting-to-play to interesting-to-compose.
To return to the move toward ambient music: for me, all sorts of things, ranging from pop to jazz to classical, work in the background. It depends on my mood. When I’m working, it’s helpful to have music happening so that, when there is a lapse in my concentration, I can hop onto the moving train of music and then hop off a few seconds later and go back to work. In the absence of any music, I’m more likely to get stuck.
If the only way I encountered music was to sit and listen to it and do nothing else, then I think I’d listen to a lot less pop and a lot more classical music, because pop music is typically more repetitive–there can be great riffs but less going on overall. Conversely, if I want to focus on the words, some repetition in musical structure is helpful; more to the point here, I can appreciate a pop song without having to focus on it.
None of this really answers the question of why classical music since 1930 did not develop in the way that it had in the previous two hundred years in the manner of other serious and popular art forms, with mini-upheavals within a larger tradition. I can’t quite bring myself to go with Ross on this one: sure, concert programmers are conservative and keep going with audience favorites, but they’ve had a hundred years to promote new work, and that new work doesn’t have that staying power: it’s sometimes interesting, sometimes sounds ok, but it’s not stuff I’d like to hear again.
Also I think there’s one more thing going on, which is we (music audiences, as well as musicians and critics such as Lipman and Ross) aren’t just looking for good music, and new music; we’re also looking for good stories. The brash young upstart, the smooth crowd-pleaser, the sense of progress and development within the culture. Lipman isn’t looking for someone who will write music that’s just like Wagner, and he’s not just looking for music that’s the logical successor to Wagner’s; he’s also hoping to encounter the story of an exciting new composer breaking through. And when Ross champions various modern classical music of the twentieth century, a big part of the appeal are the stories. I’m not saying that Ross doesn’t sincerely like the music; I just think it’s like with sports, that the narrative is important–the narrative within each composer’s career and how that fits in with the larger development of music.
Even if we have lots of old music to listen to, it’s hard to give that up, in a similar way as that it wouldn’t be the same to just watch classic football games on tape delay.
Here are some of my related posts on the general topic of what we we like in music:
Why do we prefer familiarity in music and surprise in stories?
How Music Works by David Byrne, and Sweet Anticipation by David Huron
This guy is to music as I am to statistical graphics
Genre fiction: Some genres are cumulative and some are not.
The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars
Who are the culture heroes of today?
Cohort effects in literature (David Foster Wallace and other local heroes)
P.S. Just to emphasize: I’m pretty much the opposite of an expert on this topic, so feel free to point me to relevant arguments in this area. Thanks.
I read recently about a study (which unfortunately I have no recollection of where I read it) that showed that listening to music while working tended to enhance productivity UNLESS the worker was also a musician. I that case, the music distracted the worker and reduced productivity. In my personal case, this seems right. My main job is statistical analysis and programming but my hobby is bass and guitar. I am immediately distracted by the bass line in any music. My wife complains that I don’t listen to the lyrics of a song, and it is true, I tend to be lost in the bass line and have no idea what the song is about.
“enhance productivity UNLESS the worker was also a musician.”
Ouch. I resemble that remark. I’ve been playing music since I was four. And can’t multitask music with anything else: the music either gets all, or none, of my attention.
I’m a fully amateur and play way too many instruments poorly, but same same. Basslines, keyboard, guitar solos, drum fills, it all is gonna sap my attention. And I always am composing improvisations to go along with the song in my head. The partial exception is sort of space music and spiritual jazz and gnawa trance and similar.
Interesting. Though I’ve never made my living playing music, I have made money doing it. And opened for Dizzy Gillespie in one band I played with and for BB King with another. I have no trouble using music as background, though, depending on this and that, this or that bit of music my siphon my attention to whatever I’d been doing.
“as a performer and student of complex classical scores, he might well appreciate pop music for what it is, without wanting to put Duke Ellington or Paul McCartney or Suzanne Vega or Brian Eno on the same level as Mozart and the like. ”
I’d put Charlie Parker, Sonny Stitt, and the rest of the bebop and hard bop improvisors at the same level as Mozart and the like. If you look at what the boppers were doing (study transcriptions of their solos) you will see that they were doing classical melodic composition in real time, using standard classical melodic techniques (octave displacement, enclosures) to create melodies. In real time at insane tempos.
Also, Ellington actually was at the same level of Mozart as a composer. (I agree with what you are saying, you just put one incorrect example in there: Ellington really was as serious a composer as the classical blokes. It’s just that that aspect of his music isn’t known as well.)
Agreed that classical died not long after 1900. I personally put Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904) as the last great (and last listanable) classical composer, but opinions differ.
David:
Lipman is no longer around to have this discussion with us, but I think he’d accept that there are many varieties of music that had enduring musical value even if he did not personally appreciate it. He was talking about classical music because that was his love.
As I see it, the question is what happened to complicated compositions for western instruments that are popular?
The thing that looks like that for me are modern film scores. People willingly listen to them, the composers can become very wealthy (look at John Williams or Hans Zimmerman) and have sold out performances, but modern orchestras often do not play them.
The problem with sitting in an orchestra hall and listening to the score for Oppenheimer is that music is supposed to serve a larger creative piece. Maybe this closer to Opera, which is also rarely performed without the full staging?
I agree. I think popular classical music lived on as an accompaniment to film. While such pieces have great moments, they don’t hold up as well without the films. I guess you could stream the film with the live orchestra.
“I guess you could stream the film with the live orchestra.”
This is a thing!
https://tickets.coloradosymphony.org/7558
I agree with this as well. Many classical composers moved into composing music for the movies. And there were great film scores from the 1930s, especially Korngold. Addinsell’s “Warsaw Concerto” for the film “Dangerous Moonlight” is regularly performed in concert settings. Bernard Hermann did some masterful scores and there are others.
Chapter 7 of the Mauceri book I mentioned elsewhere has an extensive discussion of classical composers who fled nazi Europe and became movie composers. In his introduction, he states,
“And then there was Hollywood. From 1933 onward, and almost without exception, its major film scores were composed by refugees who had fled racism in Europe and Russia. These men were defined as Jews by the Third Reich, though most were non-religious.”
Mauceri is a big fan of Korngold and his book has an through discussion of Korngold’s life, career, music, and the varying course over time of critic’s views of his work.
I think there were two trends that acted together to diminish classical music in the 20th Century.
One was a pervasive trend in all forms of art that I call “bored with beauty.” Another person might call it “bored with clutter,” YMMV. The best example is brutalist architecture.
The other trend that roughly coincided with that was a movement towards using music to evoke very specific emotions. The link between music and emotion is anything but new, of course, just listen to Hildegard von Bingen. When you listen to Bach, its masterful, its beautiful, it makes you feel good. But I don’t think of Bach as taking control of my emotions the way some more modern (and simpler) music can. Somewhere in here belongs Mozart’s Requiem, arguably an early piece of truly modern music in that it is intended to take control of emotion. The trend of increasingly emotional content continued through Biedermeier. By the time of Dvorak, this trend was taken about as far as it could go.
From this perspective, the slow fade of classical music can be attributed to a lack of versatility, as strange as that sounds for an entire orchestra! Jazz can evoke subtle emotions that classical music cannot reach, for me at least. The rise of guitar-based music deserves a mention here as well, a single instrument that arguably can elicit more emotion than an entire orchestra.
One name that comes up for me in this context is Joni Mitchell. Like Mozart and Beethoven, her musical genius would have allowed her to create anything she wanted. (This is a person who took mail-order guitar lessons, decided that the structure of western music was not to her liking, and basically came up with her own structure.) And the genre of choice was guitar-based, jazzy, modern music.
One element could be, as you pointed out, the presence of cheap streaming of all sorts of music, classical and modern. Young people nowadays who haven’t seen paucity of music get attached to whatever they happen to like. What people happen to like is generally the stuff that’s “easily” comprehensible and widely available. It helps that today’s stuff is in bite-sized amounts. I’ve had several cases of people telling me how classical music is too long and boring. It’s boring to them because it takes time to develop and doesn’t have lyrics, which means that punch of meaning from pure music takes effort to extract, which comes from practiced listening, for which there’s no time or inclination, and so on in circles.
Whenever I’ve been to western classical music concerts, I’ve mainly seen people who must have been part of a radio-only generation. These concerts were also free for students and had cheap tickets overall, so snobbish overpricing isn’t a factor.
So the number of young people inspired to create new classical music is nowhere close to those who want to create the stuff that’s in vogue, like pop.
I can’t comment now because I have to go teach my course “Composing like Beethoven” (literally). I will try to make a more substantive comment later!
Wins thread already. But I know you can top it.
I am far less of an expert in this area than Andrew. However, I found this post interesting and I have two observations.
First, noted conductor John Mauceri’s book, The War on Music: Reclaiming the Twentieth Century addresses related questions. In the introduction, Mauceri asks:
“Why, therefore, did the classical music canon end when it did—unlike every other art form that has continued to grow with new and seemingly timeless works throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first?”
The book examines this question from several points of view. I cannot easily summarize his conclusions but it is an interesting work. Mauceri is dismayed by the cultural divide between classical and popular music and would like to see a world without this divide.
Second, I sometimes listen to music when I am working. I find that I cannot listen to choral music—even in languages that I do not understand—if I am trying to write. In contrast, I can listen to choral music when I am programming.
This isn’t something I’ve thought deeply on, but couldn’t it be the case that the lack of innovation from a composition standpoint is explainable in a cost and options standpoint? To explain, composing a symphony with dozens of parallel lines is clearly far more complicated than composing something for fewer instruments. It’s also wildly more expensive to put on the concert, even for the purpose of “hearing if it works”. You necessarily need dozens of expert performers. American Blues music grew out of poverty and used the most inexpensive instruments to hand. The Beatles only needed two people to get started and only four for most of their time together. The innovations in electronic music are even cheaper in terms of time and labor count.
Chris:
It’s true that there’s a lot less money, fame, and glory in classical music composition than there used to be, but there are still many talented musicians who are trying to compose in this style. The problem seems to have something more to do with some inherent challenge in composing music which is interesting and listenable without merely being imitations of past styles.
Right. Innovation in symphonic classical music is almost certainly harder (like order of magnitude+ harder). So if these other styles of music have lower barriers to entry and are siphoning away some fraction of the potential talent, then we may not be shocked that innovation is slow/non-existent.
It actually brings to mind the sole group I’m familiar with even roughly in this space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel%27s
I wonder if/how the argument changes when smaller ensembles, such as chamber music, are included.
I often listen to KDFC (90.3 FM in San Francisco), where, at least at the times I’m listening, I’d guess 80% of the time the music was written before 1900. But the rest of the time it wasn’t!
Let’s see, in the past two hours they’ve played pieces by:
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Antonio Vivaldi, John Powell and Stephen Schwartz, Peter Tchaikovsky, Johann Sebastian Bach, Giacomo Puccini, Leopold Mozart, Eunike Tanzil, Nancy Bloomer Deussen, Giovanni Palestrina, Alex Baranowski, Johann Hummel
“Peter Tchaikovsky”, that’s kinda funny.
So… Coleridge-Taylor is post-1900 but not by much. But Powell and Schwartz, that’s 21st century (“Wicked: How to Loathe Your Roommate”). Eunike Tanzil, too…who, strangely, has no Wikipedia page; born 1998! Nancy Deussen is (was) late 20th century, until just now I didn’t know she died several years ago. Baranowski is younger than I am.
One source of relatively recent classical music on KDFC is film scores: several John Williams pieces get pretty frequent play, as do some by Howard Shore (Lord of the Rings; The Hobbit). Some people might complain that this sort of thing is far too middle-brow, but I am not one of those pompous asses. Sure, these pieces were composed to have mass appeal, but so was music for The Magic Flute. So was Shakespeare, for that matter.
Every year, the listeners vote to come up with the “Classical California Ultimate Playlist” (nothing to do with Ultimate Frisbee, alas). I think this isn’t KDFC-only, I think the vote is among several California classical stations. The list is very Beethoven-heavy in the top ten. The first post-1900 piece is… ah, I thought maybe Satie “Gymnopedies” might make the cut but it’s 1898. [Note added later: there’s a _lot_ of stuff in the period 1880-1900, way more than I would have guessed before seeing the list; it might be the most popular 20-year interval outside about 1802-1822 with all that Beethoven.] So, OK, Stravinsky “The Firebird” (1910), which is 12th. Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” comes in at 18, Ravel’s “Bolero” is 22, Ravaei’s “Latif” surprises at 26th (I had never heard it, or even heard of it, I think, until just now when I saw it on the list. I’m listening to it now, it’s very nice but it wouldn’t make my top 30, maybe not my top 300). After that there’s a bit of a gap to Marquez’s “Danzon #2”, coming in at 38. Gershwin “American in Paris” at 44, Joaquin Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez” at 48, Scott Joplin “Bethena” at 49, Shostakovich’s “Jazz Suite #2” at 56. Obviously I could go on like this for quite a while!
So…that’s 8 post-1900 pieces in the first 50, does that prove anything? And what about my earlier list of composers whose pieces were played in the two hours before I started this comment? Specifically, do these support or contradict “the fact that the classical music repertoire pretty much ends around 1930, indeed with not much after 1900”? I’m going with “contradict.”
It’s certainly fair to say that the vast majority of music that is identified as “classical” and enjoyed by people who like “classical music” was written before 1900, butthe claim that the classical repertoire “pretty much ends around 1930” is much too strong. Four of the thirteen pieces played on my local classical station in the past two hours were written after 1930! (However, those pieces are shorter, on average, than the other pieces played in that time period, so if we count the number of minutes rather than the number of pieces we might find a ratio closer to 15% than to 30%).
Classical music isn’t nearly as popular as it was 150 years ago, I’ll grant you that. But “ended after 1930”, pfft, pas de tout.
There are two levels to this, the overall decline in classical music’s popularity/prestige and the developments in classical music post-1930. They’re related but not the same. I won’t go into #1 except to say I was at a string quartet recital the other night and almost everyone was over 60 or so (including me). Sign of the times.
Now about “modern” music. (1930 is almost 100 yrs ago; when Beethoven wrote the Eroica symphony, if he were operating on the same time frame he would have regarded, e.g., most of Handel’s output as “modern”.) As it happens, I grew up imprinting on mid-20th century composers, esp. Bartok. I just can’t imagine how someone could say, for instance, that his Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste is not a masterpiece. I could go on with other names, but one is enough. Does Bartok on a program scare away potential audiences? I don’t know the answer, but one thing I do know is that you’ll hear a lot of Bartok-ish stuff in film scores, and no one seems to flinch. (And some real Bartok, like the opening sequence of Being John Malkovich.) Especially in scary moments, Bartok is go-to scary. And, while much of the later avant-garde music was forgettable, a lot of that technique has become mainstream in film as well, and there are plenty of A-G-ish masterpieces too.
FWIW, I think the Romantic era left us with a template of what the emotional arc’s of music ought to be and what we should listen to them for, and what is disruptive about later approaches (beginning with Debussy) is that quite different templates are at play. A second factor is that a lot of classical music can’t be fully appreciated without knowing some of the tweaks composers are playing on the forms and expectations their music brings up. That keeps getting more complex, and it’s true that it’s getting harder and harder for non-musicians to keep up.
Pop music has similar issues but they show up in reverse, where audiences are turned off by the old stuff. That’s worth discussing. Jazz is in the middle, with audiences that can’t take the new *and* others that can’t take the old.
These are all just speculations.
Andrew and I went to a classical music concert at the Kennedy Center when we were in high school, and most of the audience was over 60 then too.
I read an interview with a famous orchestra conductor (can’t remember which one) who was asked how often new compositions got played. His answer: “Twice. The first time and the last time.”
Having played in amateur orchestras for many years including a number of “world premier” performances that quip sounds about right.
Anon:
Lipman discusses this! He’s fine with new compositions being included in the program, but he didn’t want that to happen by neglecting what he considered to be excellent American classical music written during the 1930-1970 period. He also had some interesting things to say about performance: for an unfamiliar work to be performed well, it’s important for the performers to be well prepared.
A very interesting post! just a couple of comments
1. Modernism is by no means as avoided as one might suggest. Listening a a recent Piano Competition on the radio, I noticed that
for the free selection (which at one time would have probably been a Chopin or List piece), competitor after competitor chose a piece by Messiaen,
to show off the skill.
2. The high Modernism period is not as long as you suggest. In music it was really the 1950s, when as someone commented about Stockhausen, he reconsidered his entire
musical practice for every single piece.
3. I would recommend the book “Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music” (2007) by Yuval Taylor and Hugh Barker, although it is about popular music rather than classical music.
These is a axis in taste that runs from novelty to authenticity. Glenn Gould said that the essence of music is new music (I can’t find the quote now), and I am firmly down this end of the axis. Authenticity seems a weird concept
for music and the “authentic, period instruments” movement just bemusing. Perhaps worth one listen before moving on.
However, I think that is is clear that the “period instrument” movement emerged as a backward-looking response to modernism. A sort of counter-reformation.
4. Your post hits on some very interesting points. We have all noticed that people who appreciate new literature, modern art, etc, can be found listening to
very conservative music. The pop music of their youth and a bit of Mozart. Why music has such an atavistic tendency is a mystery.
Back from teaching! I am probably about 70% on Lipman’s side, and 30% on Alex’s.
I think there are four interlocking things happening here, all of which you and others have mentioned.
1) Around 1900 composers realized that a lot of their inherited procedures were arbitrary and conventional. Composers started searching for new and more general ways to think about music. This turned out to be a hard project involving a lot of wrong turns. I actually think there were some really basic facts that people simply missed — as a result they were essentially trying to invent languages without knowing basic grammatical categories.
2) This got tangled up with a lot of bad metaphysics that encouraged composers to explore techniques that didn’t really lead to enjoyable music.
3) Around the same time, there was a massive technological shift from notation-on-paper to recording, allowing musicians to bypass traditional notation-based education (and distribution systems). Non-notated styles like jazz and (eventually) rock overtook notated music as the cultural vernacular. So the popular audience simply moved away.
4) Notated composition was left to a small group of musicians who shared the same basic philosophical outlook (believing, like Alex, that everythingw as fine). These musicians coexisted with classical music performers who by and large focused on the Bach-to-Brahms tradition.
I think there is some possibility that composers might start writing music more recognizably connected to earlier styles. But it is a long process, and requires developments that are partly intellectual and partly sociological.
FWIW, I agree that Duke Ellington is on the same level as Mozart.
This all sounds somewhere very close to exactly right. For example, the twelve-tone idea was simply intellectually inane and dead wrong from a perceptual standpoint (i.e. what it means to be “music” for a human, how the human auditory and perceptual systems work), an arbitrary, unfounded stupidity. That did an enormous amount of dammage.
Inversely, this speaks to the unspeakably amazing brilliance of Bach and Mozart and friends, who were able to figure out human-relatable harmony without the insights of modern neuroscience and psychology.
Whatever. I’ve always disliked orchestral music: it just seems nuts to put together that many talented people in a manner that you can’t hear what each is individually doing. Four is about the right size for a group, six if they take turns (Blue Trane does the big sound thing on the theme and then individual solos; the best of both worlds.). Another problem with orchestral music is that it’s too long and too repetitive. Beethoven’s endings are unbearable. Some people seem to like that, though. I’m more of a Dead Head than I should admit, and when my mom, back in the day, and my SO nowadays take a brief listen and complain that it’s boring, I have to admit they’re right: the Dead really did repeat riffs. A lot. (The ending to Terrapin Station makes uncle Ludwig seem almost concise. Almost) Watching the audience in Dead and Company performances, though, I see how it’s working; they’re just enjoying the sound and grooving out to it. But the lyrics are inventive, the solos lovely, and there’s a lot of variety across the tunes.
Still, small group music with at least some amount improvisation is an absolute requirement here. So classical seems even deader than it actually is. Sure, every once in a while, someone will come along with a lovely new take on something classical. At one point, there was a new (Polish woman, if memory serves) violinist who did gorgeous, new, wonderful things with the Bach sonatas and partitas. But, for the most part, classical’s been dead for 120 years or so.
Requiescat in pacem, Sic transit gloria, Semper ubi sub ubi, and all that.
If only David and I weren’t separated by 12000 miles or so. I’m pretty sure we’d be going to shows together and jamming on weekends… sigh.
I’m a big Grateful Dead fan and yes they can do all sorts of repetitive stuff, but you have to understand it in the context of something similar to John Coltrane, or Alice Coltrane, or Pharaoh Sanders, or Gnawa Trance. The point is *grooving*. That’s why Branford Marsalis fit right in and became a fan favorite (well, that and the fact that he’s an amazing musician who is much much more innovative and flexible than his slightly more famous brother).
https://youtu.be/my-1HAGiytA?si=aK1mbhZkpmNuBlbI&t=2203
When it comes to classical orchestral stuff, we have to remember that the main reason for big orchestras was VOLUME. You have 8 violins or whatever because one violin would be too quiet to hear from the back of the hall prior to amplification. I absolutely agree with you about the preference for small group, though I think I can extend beyond the 6 of your upper limit. I enjoyed the hell out of the Sun Ra Arkestra back in December (not sure but must have been 15-20), and a year ago we saw Western Standard Time Ska Orchestra here in LA and that was a blast, must have been about 20-25 people on a tiny stage. But it’s definitely a lot of taking turns, and it helps a bunch to have good sound-engineering.
But yeah, a show like Emmet Cohen with piano bass and drums is sublime. We also saw Omar Sosa on piano with a horn player and bassist. Those small group dynamics are something else.
It’s actually an amazing time to be a Jazz fan right now.
“But, for the most part, classical’s been dead for 120 years or so.”…. that is ridiculous. It’s possible that a higher fraction people hear classical music now than at any point in history. When most classical music was being written, you had to go to a performance to hear it, and most people couldn’t afford that. Now if you want to avoid it, it would be hard: you would have to pretty much give up movies and a lot of TV shows, among other common places to experience it. And although some of those movie and TV scores use music from back in the day, many use new compositions.
You don’t like classical music, that’s fine. But to call it “dead” when it is heard by tens of millions of Americans every single day, that’s just not true. You could say ragtime is dead, I think that’s true: you can easily go weeks without encountering it and I don’t think there’s any radio station in my area that plays it except maybe as the occasional novelty. I’m sure there are other genres that were popular 100 years ago that are “dead.” But classical is not one of them.
I don’t dislike classical: I kvetch about it’s excesses; the major symphonies, Mahler are a tad overmuch. But from the Bach Sonatas and Partitas through the Dvorak string quartets, I had great fun playing it. Well, trying to play it…
What I don’t like is post-Dvorak “serious” “classical” music. It’s “dead” in the sense that no one’s writing music that follows the Bach to Dvorak musical sensibility. It’s the Bach to Dvorak musical sensibility that has died. That stuff’s great. No complaints whatsoever. (Well, I’m into small-group improvisational music nowadays, but that’s my problem, not Vivaldi’s (anyone perverse enough to write 17 bassoon concerti can’t be all bad).)
To a certain extent, I’m sympathetic with the blokes trying to write serious music in the post-Dvorak period. It’s art, and in art, you have to do something different, and remaining in the Bach to Dvorak* sensibility and still doing something different is hard.
Whatever, something enormous changed in that universe around the start of the 20th century, some of us don’t like it, and we suspect that the people who claim to like it like the idea of it more than the music itself.
*: To my ear, Dvorak (my favorite of the classical blokes) is the classical bloke who managed to be the most different yet still remain solidly within the style/tonal sensibility. But no one (that I know of or ever hear about) after him figured out how to do that in any other way. Go figure.
There is a logarithm here: 10 violins are about twice as loud as 1 violin. So an orchestra is five loud string instruments (= 50 players), and then 2-4 of everyone else (= 15-30 other folks). It developed back when human labor was cheap, there were lots of orphans, and they were all trained to play instruments so they’d have useful skills. Now, yes, it’s much closer to being economically insane. Amplification changes everything, as do electronic sounds.
Bach and Mozart pretty much inherited the (shared) musical language they spoke: it was “invented” by culture (plus a few innovators like Corelli). Then they stamped it with their own personal style. But they weren’t trying to do what Schoenberg did, which was inventing an entirely new language from the ground up. That’s very, very hard — especially if you’ve been raised to think that Hegel is a good example of scientific thinking.
I don’t agree with the main point of the post (sorry). Music constant evolves just as the classical approach (Haydn) evolved through Mozart, into Beethoven and onto the romantic with Schumann and Brahms. The 20th century is not bereft of great classical music. Certainly opera has been alive and well with new compositions with Puccini and Strauss linking to the past and onto Berg, Poulenc, Barber and others. One cannot ignore Shostakovich who composed to great chamber and symphonic music. Henryk Gorecki’s Third Symphony is staggering and emotionally draining. There is a lot of fascinating choral music Yes, there were more titans in the 19th century that are listened to today but that happens with large data sets. Of course “entertainment” has changed and will continue to do so.
I agree that Shostakovich entered the canon. He is a really interesting example in that regard. I also agree that there was a lot of interesting music composed in the 20th century.
On the other hand, of the composers in your comment, I would say only Berg was ever once talked about during my undergraduate and graduate education, and none are really of interest to the graduate-student composers I currently teach. The gap between the composers you list, and what the majority of young composers are interested in (with “young” being a variable that picks out the relevant cohort going back half a century or more) is large.
There is also the very strange phenomenon of incredibly influential composers like Hindemith who have been totally forgotten. Choral music is a largely independent tradition, because the inherent difficulty of singing complex chords limits the reach of modernism.
This is why I said I only 70% agree with Lipman. The phenomenon is real but it is more a decline than a death.
No one I think has mentioned Philip Glass, but he is a “proper” 20th century classical composer. Some of his best music IMO is written for films (“Music from the Hours”) or dance (e.g. “In the Upper Room”).
It’s possible to see a continuity between Bach and Glass in the almost mathematical precision of their constructions which is (at least superficially) apparent in their single piano works – for example compare Coversart very beautiful version of Music from the Hours ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heu9tD0dzkY ) and Glenn Gould playing Bach (e.g. Goldberg Variations or Partitas).
Glass is not part of “The Canon” though and perhaps one of the positive aspect of this and other post-19th-century classical music is that it fits itself into a meaningful context without the pomposity associated with how we have enganged with classical music – as if trying to maintain that connection with the past (large, dressy orchestras and dressy audiences etc.) that in reality has been broken. I think Glenn Gould said that he disliked audiences (not as individuals but as a collective) and concert going (he didn’t like that concerto soloists were expected to “show off”) and that was one of the reasons he stopped live performances in preference for studio performances.
Pre-20th century classical music is awesome and wonderful but maybe the 20th century saw a realization that there wasn’t really the possibility of much of a continuity between now and that past and that in general we choose different things to engage with.
I am a fan of Glass up to a point (about Akhnaten). He really pointed music in a new direction, and some of his pieces are really really cool, and inspiring to me personally.
Listening to The Hours, though … it doesn’t really strike me as interesting. Vivaldi, Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, etc. … that stuff is interesting, and hard to do. Very few undergraduate composers could make a fugue anywhere near as compelling as those in the WTC, or a sonata anywhere near as interesting as a Beethoven sonata. That’s why they’ve survived. My sense is that many undergraduate composers could write a cue that would fit right into The Hours.
The Hours isn’t really so different from AI music to me; it’s sort of got a recognizable syntax but no real expressive purpose, no through line. None of the choices strike me as remarkable or inspired. Which is fine: as film music it is supposed to be in the background, supporting the drama.
One way of putting the larger dilemma is that many twentieth-century listeners are totally fine with “The Hours” (particularly as background music while working or eating or running or whatever). But many composers (including myself) wouldn’t really be that interesting in writing it because there’s no challenge involved; it just wouldn’t be an interesting way to spend your time.
Maybe Glass is like using STATA to calculate a single correlation on an uncorrected dataset and calling it a day; Schumann is like building a complicated hierarchical Bayesian model? Yet the difference between these two is lost on lots of listeners, particularly now that we all listen to recordings rather than learn how to play the piano.
I wanted to add Glass to the conversation as well! Steve Reich, too, no?
The original posts mentions ignoring the minimalists but I am unsure why.
…and re continuity of classical tradition into the 20th century we shouldn’t forget Jean Sibelius (wonderful violin concerto tho that was written well before the 2030 cutoff in top post) and Maurice Ravel (e.g. piano concertos).
I like about Sibelius that he effectively downed tools and retired from composing 30 years before his death in 1957. Perhaps he realized in 1927 that (as in the top post) “the classical music repertoire (was) pretty much end(ing) around 1930”! Ravel’s Piano concerto for the Left Hand written between 1929 and 1930 just made it…whew!
There are some classical composers alive today writing great music: Arvo Pärt, Morten Lauridsen, Eric Whitacre, Philip Stopford. I do agree that the 20th century has a dearth of great music. Copland wrote some good stuff, as did Vaughan Williams, Barber, and Rachmaninoff. Composers in the 20th century abandoned the old ideas of aesthetics (such as the idea that beauty = form + harmony + complexity), as well as any worldview embracing redemption. So you get either vapid music like Johann Strauss, Jr, who is the Thomas Kinkade of music: there’s nothing wrong in his world, hence his world is highly unrealistic. Or you have Alban Berg and Stockhausen, with their truly ugly music in which there is no redemption. As my music history professor once said, “In the 60’s, composers called each other up on the phone and said, ‘Hey, I bet I can write an uglier piece than you!'” Art comes from worldview. Worldview informs your aesthetic which informs your art.
I’m atypical in that I tend to be naturally (meaning, without making an effort) more attracted to “classical” music from the 20th century and later rather than to older music, which I can appreciate and respect, but it takes more of an effort (I’m the same with paintings and visual art). By the way, I tend to find the term “classical” a misnomer; applying it to the Mozart to Beethoven period has some musical precision whereas I find it very hard with the “standard” use of the term to know where it starts and where it ends, also regionally.
It annoys me to some extent to see music I love called “unlistenable”, well, if you can’t listen to it, fair enough, you don’t have to, but I can. Just to name something I love, take Ligeti’s Etudes for piano. Pretty much everything by Ligeti I have heard had more immediate appeal to me than basically everything from the classical period. I also love a lot of Stockhausen, Eliane Radigue (not sure whether anybody here knows her) and many more.
As I wrote in another thread on AI poetry, I think when discussing the music experience (and art in general), we should always have in mind the interaction between the work (composer, performer) and the listener, and acknowledge the listener’s contribution. If I can’t see the merit in the work of composer XYZ, it may very well be my problem and not the problem of XYZ’s work. Also, music develops in environment in which both the music creation and the listening habits and attitudes develop, and influence each other.
I accept that the “classical” music after 1930 has to some extent lost its connection to the “public”, although I suspect this to be somewhat more complicated as I’d think that it was elitist already in the 19th century and before, except that most of us know more of the musical taste of the contemporary non-elites than of those before 1900. Remember music couldn’t be transmitted in different ways than having it played in your presence (OK, there was sheet music)! These were totally different conditions for the distribution of musical knowledge and taste.
A major thing of the 20th century in my view is the commercialisation of music media. Connected with this is the rise of commercial music. It also gave instrumentalists that played exciting things live but couldn’t be reproduced from sheets (jazz improvisation!) a prominence that they couldn’t have before. This also holds for music the qualities of which are harder to grasp intellectually (sheet music helps rational analysis a lot). Another tendency is that the concept of originality became much more important in art in general, not only in music, from the end of the 19th century. This prompted composers like Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Debussy, Ives, Bartok to move further away from the tradition. I believe that particularly after the second world war, but to some extent already before, there was a rise of academic (i.e., where music was taught at a high level) contempt for (a) following the old traditions (after the mess they got the world into), and (b) the upcoming dominance of the mass market by commercial music. As in other art forms, also music was strongly influenced by the experience of the world wars, widespread information about all kinds of human atrocities etc., resulting in a certain trend “against beauty” (probably also supported by tendencies in psychology and politics regarding freedom of expression and less obedience for communicating what is “expected” or what “the people/ the relevant social system wants”).
I don’t actually think that there is a difference between modern music, modern art, or modern poetry in terms of “objective quality” (in fact I don’t think there is such a thing; if anything it could only be defined relative to a specific social system/culture). Rather there is something about music and/or the human ear, sense of hearing, that seems to make music deviating from the old harmonic traditions harder to stomach than art for the eyes or “in language”. Note that this doesn’t only concern “modern classical music”, it also concerns much music from different cultures (for most Westerners, traditional Chinese painting works much more smoothly than traditional Chinese music, I’d think). There seems to be more intuitive openness for painting and sculpture that challenges the habits of seeing than for music that challenges the habits of hearing. Chances are there is some psychology of perception behind this, but I’m not sure.
A reason for modern classical music being indeed less “listenable” than older music (or commercial music) is probably a certain amount of self-confirmation and in-group behaviour of the academic music community regarding the rejection of commercial music and traditions in the 20th century, so that composers in academia would be pushed to do things that provoke and are hard to get into for the uninitiated. I believe this has been criticised also from the inside (some minimalists consciously turned their back on this). In this respect I can at least to some extent connect to the general tone in this discussion, although personally I have no issue listening to much of the “contemporary classics”.
FWIW, back in 1993 I published an article on Stages of Evolution in Music. It might help sort some of this out. Here’s the abstract:
What I’m calling Rank 4 music is the stuff that’s difficult for many to make sense of.