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New classical music is absolute torture

By Joe Queenan (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-07-11 07:37

During a radio interview between acts at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, a famous singer recently said she could not understand why audiences were so reluctant to listen to new music, given that they were more than ready to attend sporting events whose outcome was uncertain.

It was a daft analogy. Having spent most of the last century writing music few people were expected to understand, much less enjoy, the high priests of music were now portrayed as innocent victims of the public's lack of imagination.

There is no denying that the people filling the great concert halls of the world are conservative, and in many cases reactionary: reluctant to take a flyer on music that wasn't recorded at least once by Toscanini.

They know what they like and what they like is Mozart. There is a childish, fairytale quality to their infatuation with the classics: Beethoven's deafness, Chopin's tuberculosis, Brahms' fixation on Clara Schumann. Modern composers, their stories largely unknown, cannot compete with all this romance and drama.

In New York, Philadelphia and Boston, concert-goers have learned to stay awake and applaud politely at compositions by Christopher Rouse and Tan Dun. But they do this only because these works tend to be short and not terribly atonal; because they know this is the last time in their lives they'll have to listen to them; and because the orchestra has signed a contract in blood guaranteeing that if everyone holds their nose and eats their vegetables, they'll be rewarded with a great dollop of Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn.

I started listening to classical music when I entered college, aged 17. Because of my working-class background, "serious" music was important to me, but because it confirmed that I had cut my ties with the proletariat and "arrived".

Over the years, this sense of membership of a cultural elite has evaporated: after attending roughly 1,500 concerts in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Paris, London, Berlin and Sydney, I no longer believe that fans of classical music are especially knowledgeable - certainly not in the way jazz fans are.

American audiences, even those that fancy themselves quite in the know, roll over and drool like trained seals in the presence of charismatic hacks phoning in yet another performance of the Emperor Concerto. The public likes its warhorses, but it doesn't seem to care how well these warhorses get played.

They are particularly susceptible to showboaters like Lang Lang and Izzy Perlman and Nigel Kennedy; they turn out in droves to hear Andrea Bocelli warble his way through the Shmaltzmeister's Songbook. These people may think they care more about music than the kids who listen to hip-hop, but I've been eavesdropping on their conversations for 40 years and the results are not impressive. They know that Clair de Lune is prettier than Fur Elise, that Mozart died penniless, and that Schumann went nuts. That's about it.

Because classical music fans are much older and more affluent than audiences for other types of music, the very notion of including contemporary music on a program is problematic.

Last winter, I attended a performance of Luciano Berio's seminal 1968 composition Sinfonia. Two days later, the New York Times reported that the New York Philharmonic gave an "electrifying and sumptuously colorful" reading of this "all-embracing and ingenious" masterpiece. Maybe they did.

But the day I heard it, I gazed down from the balcony at a sea of old men snoring, a bunch of irate, middle-aged women fanning themselves with their programs, and scores of high-school students poised to garrote their teachers in reprisal for 35 minutes of non-stop torture.

Sinfonia may be one of the cornerstones of 20th-century music, and the Times critic may have been right in describing the quality of the performance. But he might have noticed that the audience merely tolerated it - and that unlike him, very few dismissed Brahms' Fourth Symphony as an "afterthought". Not judging from the applause I heard.

When I was 18, I bought a record called The New Music. It featured Kontra-Punkte by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima by Krzysztof Penderecki. I was incredibly proud of myself for giving this music a try, even though the Stockhausen sounded like a cat running up and down the piano, and the Penderecki was that reliable old post-Schoenberg standby: belligerent bees buzzing in the basement.

I did not really like these pieces, but I would put them on the turntable every few months to see if the bizarre might one day morph into the familiar. I've been doing that for 40 years now, and both compositions continue to sound harsh, unpleasant, gloomy, post-nuclear.

It is not the composers' fault that they wrote uncompromising music that was a direct response to the violence and stupidity of the 20th century; but it is not my fault that I would rather listen to Bach. That's my way of responding to the violence and stupidity of the 20th century, and the 21st century as well.

The debate about what is wrong with the world of classical music has been going on for at least a half a century. Specious arguments dominate the conversation. Why has the public accepted abstract art but not abstract music? Why does the public accept atonal music in films, but not in the concert hall?

A certain market for demanding new music can always be found among brash young urbanites, but this audience is not large, nor well-heeled. Moreover, it is by no means certain that the affection for new work survives one's youth, when sonically grating music is mostly a way of antagonizing older people.

The central problem in writing music targeting hipsters is that even hipsters one day stop being hip, and get replaced by hipsters who want their own brand of annoying music.

The Guardian

(China Daily 07/11/2008 page9)