Blame-the-audience disease
Date:
04/09/2012 Contributor:
How long does a style of music have to be unpopular before we conclude that it's probably going to remain unpopular forever? Years? Decades? Apparently, for fans of at least one kind of music, not even a century is enough. And for some of these fans, the audience is mostly to blame for the music's lack of popularity, not the composers or performers. That was at least my reaction over the weekend of a re-reading of "Why do we hate modern classical music?," a 2010 article by Alex Ross, critic for The New Yorker and author of "The Rest is Noise," one of the best-received books on classical music of recent years. I like Ross's writings quite a bit, thus it was quite sad for me to see that he, too, had succumbed to the dreaded malady that's long plagued the critical establishment: blame-the-audience disease.
The style of music in question is atonality, the style (really a bunch of styles) of music pioneered a little over a hundred years ago by Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg. Thanks to Schoenberg, his disciples (especially Alban Berg and Anton Webern), their disciples and disciples' disciples (Pierre Boulez, Hans Werner Henze and many others), and so forth, atonal music and its offshoots (e.g., twelve-tone, serial) became one of the most prevalent composing styles of the 20th century. To put it very simply, atonal refers to music in which there is no tonal center, no "do" (as in "do, re, mi"), no "tonic" (as in the note the music returns to at the end), no "scale" (as in major, minor, modal, pentatonic, etc.). The notes of the music may still have some relationship to each other, and may still form melodies, harmonies and patterns. Yet without a tonal center to ground the music in, many listeners will find it difficult to follow the music's flow, and to discern its shape. Without the expectation that a dissonance (the simultaneous sounding of notes that clash with each other) will resolve into a consonance (the simultaneous sounding of notes that sound sweet together), the music will be robbed of its normal mileposts and resting places, and its expressive range will be narrowed down to disorientation, anxiety and other unpleasant sensations.
At least that has been the reaction of many listeners, probably most. I have no access to good audience data on this (does anyone?), but can still make an educated guess that this is so. How? Well, name for me an atonal work that has become a big audience favorite. I know, I know — lots of great works don't become favorites, lots of maybe not-so-great ones do, and besides, that's not the best way to judge a work's quality. But don't you think that a century of a style as prevalent as atonality would have produced at least one bona fide hit? And I'm not talking about works of historical importance, major artistic quality or a strong minority following. Or even those I like. But...one hit? One? Please? Go ahead; try me. I say it can't be done, at least to my satisfaction. And I think that says a lot, especially since other works and styles that were contentious in their time, from Stravinsky'sRite of Spring to minimalism, have caught on with a broader public..
You know, when the millennial odometer flipped over and we could finally be rid of the 20th century, I hoped that atonality, in all its myriad forms, could be consigned to the past, taking its place in the history book alongside such dead styles as Biedermeier, Rococo and Ars Nova. Sure, some atonal works would survive on their merits. But we would no longer have to treat it like living music, and allow ourselves to be guilted into putting up with it if we didn't really like it. Alas, it was not to be, or at least not yet. There are still those in the musical community, including composers, performers and critics, willing to use atonal music as the club to beat us over the head with for our doltish resistance to their obviously superior tastes. And oh, do they ever come up with logical-sounding reasons why the development of atonality was just the most natural thing in the world. And why our inability to like it is because of the conditioning of our narrow-minded culture. Never mind that they can't name a single other music from anywhere or any time in the world that doesn't have some kind of tonal center — atonality was part of the inevitable march of historical progress, and any composer who doesn't agree is an irrelevance. Yes, one of my UConn music professors in the mid-70s said just that. Reminds you of a couple of other discredited but tenacious 20th-century ideologies, doesn't it?
Look, I don't want to sink to this level and lash out at all of musical modernism just because of one style and its most extreme adherents. Nor am I calling for an outright ban on the programming of atonal works, though they might not be best served by placement on mainstream programs. There are reasons why this music came about, and its a crucial part of the history of its times. And there are authentic masterworks in the style, at least from its first generation. (In my opinion, just about all the masterpieces are by Alban Berg, but that's just me.) But it's way too late in the day to be "shocked, shocked" that another atonal work provoked some small portion of an audience to walk out. And neither will I sit idely by as another critic insults the audience as he comes up with another set of condescending excuses for why they don't like the same music he does.
I'll do a deeper refutation of Ross's article in a later post, but you don't have to wait until then to let me have it for this post. Comment away!
(Illustrations, left to right: Arnold Schoenberg's self-portrait, Schoenberg's painting of Alban Berg, Max Oppenheimer's painting of Anton Webern)
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Comments
Praise to the individual
I'm sorry, John, I've read and re-read Ross' piece (and yours), and I can't find where he blames the audience for not liking atonal (sic) music. I even find your definition of atonal slippery. I realize you're aiming for the broadest possible understanding of the term, but the fact is, The Rite of Spring is atonal. Not in the same way as Schoenberg, to be sure, but it's still nowhere close to tonality. It does, however, features many things that concert-going audiences relate to well: obvious virtuosity, drawn-out buildups, release of a kind, that overcomes its language. Many of the composers Ross cites aren't really atonal in the sense that you want it to mean. Ligeti? It defies the very binary of tonal/atonal, it's pure texture a lot of the time, and his later works, like the piano études, are replete with tonal sounding music. Scelsi is nothing but tonal center, in that his music relies on microtonal sliding around a single pitch for ages. You'd never be in doubt of whete the pitch center is, but would audiences like it? That's more doubtful, because it doesn't trade in the rhetoric mainstream audiences are familiar with. (For the record, I find Scelsi to be kind of one-note as a composer - pun intended - and not as great as his fans seem to want to make him.)
As for atonal hits, what do we mean by that? A work that caught on and became a part of the canon? Why should atonal works be held to a different standard from other twentieth century music? Szymanowski wrote tonal-sounding music and is only now beginning to find an audience, whereas Berg is played all the time - his Violin Concerto being the prime example of an atonal hit. Yes, it features tonal passages and Bach's quotes, but that doesn't make it tonal. Many atonal works have become widely perfomed, near-repertoire works: Crumb's "Black Angels" for instance. Others developed neat little followings for a while: Rochberg's Symphony no. 2, Xenakis' "Metastasis", Stockhausen's "Gruppen", Schwantner's Pulitzer-winning "A Sudden Rainbow", Rouse's "Phaedon", and Simon Bainbridge's Grawemeyer-winning Primo Levi song cycle, "Ad Ora Incerta" - a powerful, wrenching work whose failure to catch on has more to do with the unfortunate decline in his career, I think. Even fearsome Schoenberg's "Survivor from Warsaw", one of his most compelling pieces, gets regular outings and positive feedback. Not that any of these works became "Appalachian Spring", but how many new works of any aesthetic stripe do?
No, it seems to me that Ross is making two related points in his article (aside from the valid sub-point that people seem happy to subject themselves to tension-inducing experiences with other art forms, like film, but don't seem to want classical music to perform that function):
1) Audiences need to stop expecting all the music they hear to conform to the very narrow set of expectations formed about classical music, i.e. that it should offer the same emotional payoff as the great tonal masterworks. How those expectations came to be is irrelevant. If listeners are prepared to accept non-tonal music on its own terms, they might discover that it offers a different, but equally compelling emotional landscape, beauty of a different kind, and a number of experiences tonal music doesn't. If, that is, the listener is prepared to meet the piece halfway and check their expectations (demands?) at the door.
2) Audiences need to take more personal responsibility for the way in which they consume art. I think his first anecdote is telling. So the the gentleman in the story hated Britten's gorgeous Serenade. But why was he there in the first place? In the information age, there's no excuse for going to hear such a widely recorded and easily available piece without having looked it up, and then blaming the composer for you not liking it. In past decades this may have been legitimate for concert-goers, but not anymore. And this is where I don't understand your piece, in that it seems that you're fine with letting audiences off the hook completely for being passive consumers of art, when nobody would buy a car or a house with the same attitude. A few seconds on Spotify, Naxos or iTunes will yield a recording of most anything for you to sample and decide whether you'll like it. If it's a premiere, the internet will turn up some representative excerpts of the composer's work, I guarantee. If not, then DON'T GO. Stay safe, keep to the 3 B's or whatever you know you're going to like, but don't walk into a concert blind and expect that a new work will conform to your personal vision of what music should be. If there's something else on the concert you know you'll like and really want to hear, you may have to accept that you'll have to sit through something you won't like to hear it. I recently sat through both of Liszt's piano concertos, which I loathe, in order to hear Ligeti's stunning Atmosphères and Lontano, and it was totally worth the aggravation. If you want to hear new music that treads a conservative line, you'll have to do a bit of homework to find it, but it's out there, just waiting to please you. But the audience needs to own their tastes and take some degree of responsibility for them. If people stay away from a certain type of music, concert promoters will probably get the point eventually and stop programming it.
I'm not blaming the audience at all for their tastes or for wanting the music they pay to hear to fill a specific need. In fact, just for you, I dug out a blog of my own defending that idea. But the fact is, music has no inherent responsibility to fulfill any particular set of needs, and blaming the composer for not giving you what you wanted is just as bad as blaming the audience for not liking it. The next time you're at a concert hearing a piece you hate, as yourself how you came to be there. Did you know what you were going to hear? If you knew you generally dislike new music, or atonal music, why did you think this would be any different? In the end, are you as much at fault for being locked into this experience as the composer and performer(s)? And if so, can you maybe give a little ground and try to make the best of it, rather than casting a plague on everyone's house for a situation you share some degree of responsibility for?
Matt Whittall
Wow! There's a lot of stuff
Wow! There's a lot of stuff here, and I'd like to keep some stuff for a later blog. So let me get to it briefly, keeping in mind the Voltaire thing about not having enough time to make it shorter.
I appreciate your perspecitve on my definition of atonality, which I used carefully and, I think, accessibly for a general readership. I too have heard people misuse the term atonal, often using it to mean "the dissonant part," and to apply it injudiciously to music as decidedly tonal as Bartók's — not that he doesn't have his moments. As to Rite of Spring, the literature seems to support a combination of tonality and atonality, which indeed gives the work a lot of its juice. Yes, Berg has proved more accessible (and I think, greater) than his peers, though I would stop short of calling his music genuinely popular. And yes, I hear the same thing in Ligeti; that's probably why his music is (relatively) more enjoyable than that of, say, Boulez or Carter. But I think it's fair, if one wanted to look at things this way, to place works on a tonal/atonal spectrum, and to conclude that all other things being equal, the farther the piece gets to the atonal side, the less its likely appeal to a broad audience. Not all pieces, not all audiences, not a judgment of good vs. bad music. But in the aggregrate — the "Freakonomics" sense, if you will — I think I'm right.
As to your points 1. and 2., I note that both begin with "audiences need to..." Thus, while making your points strongly, you're also helping me make mine. Audiences don't need to do anything they don't want to; besides, they're far too disparate and unruly a bunch to take such instruction. In fact, unless done in the most diplomatic way possible, such instruction is destined to backfire. Don't ask me how I know this (ahem). Yes, it would be nice if more of them would do more preparation before attending a concert. But I've been around enough audiences to know and to respect the level of musical knowledge they bring as a whole to concert-going (or radio-listening, for that matter). The audiences I program for contain some of the smartest, most aware people around. Let's just say, however, that 99% of them are unlikely to bring their pocket score of Britten to a concert (and I'll have more to say later about Ross's faulty assessment of overall audience reaction based on one complaint). Of course, even if I thought so, I can't very well go around calling my audiences lazy or close-minded, lest I want to hear from the boss. Once upon a time, I might have thought such a thing, or at least thought I thought so. I know better now, and am unapologetically audience-focused in my programming and musical advocacy. What critic, what composer, what performer — what "insider," if you will, is advocating in this way for those who, after all, pay the way for others to make music? This doesn't invalidate the insiders' perspective. But it's important and, I think, highly instructive to try to understand things from the audience's perspective.
In no way would I support asking composers to compose in any other way than how they want. But composers, like all other artists, make their art with no guarantee of popular success. I bet that can be incredibly frustrating. In the long run, it may be the musical "insiders" who decide which composer and which works earn the respect of their peers and make it into the history books. But only the audience will decide what the audience wants. And if you look at the music that has come out of the U.S. (just to keep it at home) over the past century, classical and non-classical, I think the audience has done a damned fine job supporting some pretty great stuff. No one had to lecture them about how to do it, either.
But all is not lost, or should not be, for complex, challenging music, if programmed and presented smartly. Dropping a Carter into a mainstream, 2,000-seat subscription concert, or into my Tuesday morning program, isn't probably going to win him many new fans. Highlighting his work in a setting that will draw a smaller but more intensely devoted audience will do much more for the cause.
OK, enough for now. There'll no doubt be more later. I can't wait!
Good points
As always, you make very good points. I just feel that the creators of new music are rarely heard from speaking reasonably about what they do, so I should pipe up in defense of my profession. I work very, very hard on the problem of how to speak to my audience, how to contextualize dissonance in my music, how far is too far in a given piece, etc. (Based on the sounding surface of my music, I'm frequently mistaken for a populist, but that's no more accurate a characterization than calling me an elitist. If anything, my entire creative outlook is based on rejecting such binaries.) However diplomatically we choose to phrase it, I don't find it unreasonable to suggest that audiences have some responsibility in the compact of art-making to at least recognize that I'm a living, breathing composer, I won't sound much like their great classical masters no matter how populist a line I'm toeing at a particular moment, and make a few allowances in return of that respect. All art makes demands of its consumers. It's just that some demands are more familiar, and thus easier to meet.
I appreciate that. I can
I appreciate that. I can perhaps talk the talk, but I'm in awe of the composers and performers who can walk the walk. I think the audiences are too, and the more I and others can help each side of this equation to understand the viewpoint of the other, this blog will have served its purpose. Keep the comments coming!
From Jim Snedeker When I
From Jim Snedeker
When I studied 20th century music in grad school, I remember making the statement in class that "these composers come up with this god-awful noise they call music and justify it by saying it is something new, or it follows a new language, or it is based on a new type of system, but the only thing they succeed in is driving their audiences away."
I still stand by that. Twelve-tone system? What a bunch of hogwash. It's an interesting concept, but it doesn't mean that the music produced by it is going to be anything special or even listenable. If you want to call it music, it has to have at least a recognizable melody, harmony, or beat. Failing those three, it needs to have at least tension and release. So much of the atonal stuff is only tension, no release. Failing that, it's nothing but noise that I could get for free by going out onto the freeway.
The composer/audience contract is like the author/reader contract in writing: they must meet each other halfway. If the modern composers can't give the audience's ear something that can be readily identifiable as music, then they have failed and have only themselves to blame if no one comes to their concerts.
There's nothing to be gained
There's nothing to be gained by blaming the audience, but I think "atonality" gets too much of the credit/blame for the failure of mid-20th-century music to win a popular following. A large part of the problem with such music has little to do with its harmonic language. It's hard to follow because there's no meter (you can't tap your foot to it) and there are, frequently, no memorable tunes (you can't sing along). None of this came about by accident; post-war composers were deliberately eschewing themes and meters.
There's no reason you can't write infectious dance music free of a tonal center. And there's no reason you can't write atonal music based on memorable (and recurring) themes.
GH
Hmmm...let me think about
Hmmm...let me think about this. Again, I return to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, hardly a toe-tapper (unless you want to sprain an ankle) but a quite popular work. Copland's Appalachian Spring also qualifies, with its frequently-shifting meters. But two counterexamples hardly invalidate your claim, which no doubt has something to it.
The emancipation of dissonance: you gotta want to be free!
Lots of tonally stretched-to-the-limit music has won massive, adoring, financial empire-building audiences: Jimi Hendrix feedback-charged guitar solos, is but one example.
I can understand why a brilliant, artistic young musician in Vienna in the beginning of the 20th century would want to "emancipate dissonance." It was a time when painters were looking for new ways to make paintings without shape, or visual compositions utterly invisible to the eyes of most art-lovers. But as the inheritors of the monstrously imposing German tradition of classical music, maybe the "12-tone Sudoku" school misread one part of the miracles performed by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, on to Mahler and Wagner: that the greatest music has a great system to it. But Bach's fugues, Beethoven and Mahler's hours-long masterpieces aren't the masterpices they are, eternally thrilling listeners generation after generation, becasue of the systems of organization they employ - They are masterpieces because they are as viscerally musical, in the human ear, as a tune like Greensleeves, or an evergreen sung by a great Jazz stylist, in addition to having perfect architecture. I have witnessed that tone-row music when based on a less rigid system can be very appealing to general audiences. And let's not forget- atonal music is stock in trade of film score composers; deny that the next time you watch a protagonist in a psycholgical thriller enter "the darkened room." Bernard Hermann's scoring for the shower scene in Psycho? That ain't Brucker.
As much as I disagree with the audience-bashing, or hissy-fit on the part of Mr. Ross (whose articles I try never to miss, to be honest), for me, as a music-maker, I'd say if a critic really does love and see beauty in something the audince rejects, he or she should bravely advocate it, and has to do a damn good job of opening people's ears up to it, rather than just scolding them out. That's the last resort. Maybe Vienna wasn't "where it's at," at least not then. Don't forget, some music comes ahead of its time seemingly. At the very same time Shcoenberg was composing this music, W.C. Handy was travelling around the deep South, studying and incorporating "new" musical systems that would in 10 year's time take over the world:
"The primitive southern Negro, as he sang, was sure to bear down on the third and seventh tone of the scale, slurring between major and minor. Whether in the cotton field of the Delta or on the Levee up St. Louis way, it was always the same. Till then, however, I had never heard this slur used by a more sophisticated Negro, or by any white man. I tried to convey this effect... by introducing flat thirds and sevenths (now called blue notes) into my song, although its prevailing key was major..., and I carried this device into my melody as well... This was a distinct departure, but as it turned out, it touched the spot." - W.C. Handy
Hey, sounds like the "emancipation of dissonance" to me!
PB
Thanks for a very consonant
Thanks for a very consonant response to my perhaps dissonant post. I have no problem with Alex Ross or anyone touting atonal music, or any kind of music, unto the end of time. What I'm squawking about is his insulting the audience for not getting with the program and liking the same music he and the other smart people like. Look at the condescending (and unsupportable) way he describes the classical audience in the last paragraph. How dare the people who pay today's big-city symphony concert prices express their preference for one kind of music over another! OK, I get it that that a small, vocal (and ambulatory, apparently) minority doesn't want anything more recent than Sibelius. And that composers and performers don't want to be confined to the styles of the past, and want to move the art form forward. I do too, in my programming. But continuing in the attempt to "mainstream" consistent audience-killers, then expressing continued disppointment with the audience for not following your enlightened lead, isn't going to help anything.