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Modern classical music is primarily a
project of the classical music industry’s managerial elites which has
no basis in consumer demand. Despite decades of evidence that audiences do
not like this music, the managerial elites continue to push this agenda. When
challenged, their response is to blame
the classical music audience for not liking the music.
Much of my thinking about the arts has
been informed by Mises faculty Paul Cantor’s ten-part lecture series on Commerce and Culture.
The main theme of his lectures is that high culture has its roots in popular
culture and that popular culture has always been a commercial product. While
there are some instances of great art that have not been commercially
successful, there is no systemic conflict between great art and commercial
success. By this standard, the modernist classical agenda is a failure
because it has failed the market test.
Two articles illustrating the
“the consumer is wrong” crossed my web browsing path this week
– Why do we hate modern classical music? by
Alex Ross writing in the Guardian, and a response, Why does contemporary music spurn melody?
by Michael Fedo in the Christian Science Monitor.
Fedo provides evidence of the lack of
popular acceptance of the modernist agenda. New commissions hardly ever
“get legs” and receive a second performance
because…well…no one wants to hear them again. Actually, no one
wanted to hear them the first time either.
[his father, a French horn player in
the Duluth symphony] said that during his tenure Duluth conductors scheduled
at least one modern unconventional score each season. “During all those
years, the orchestra repeated Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky – most of
the classical canon – many times,” he said. “But we never
again replayed a modern composition.”
While I say that “no one”
likes this stuff, that is clearly wrong. As evidenced from Ross’s
piece, hardly anyone likes
this stuff. A typical concert program provides the following clues to the
real demand for modernist music: 1) a gnarly modernist work is always
programmed with Beethoven or some other popular work (disparagingly know as a
“warhorse” or a “chestnut”) and 2) the popular work
is always programmed after the intermission because, well, it would be very
embarrassing if everyone left after the intermission and most people will not
deliberately arrive late. (I am the exception to this, timing my arrival for
the second half of these programs if it is something that I want to see.)
Fedo relates the following story
illustrating the “blame the listener” reflex that is so common
among the managerial class:
In 1986, when he became music director
of the Minnesota Orchestra, Edo de Waart was an advocate of contemporary
composers. On a radio talk show, a caller asked him, “Why do we have to
listen to music that sounds like bus crashes?” To which the maestro
replied, “Sir, you’re living in the wrong century.” In
other words, get used to the dissonance.
Ross — a tireless advocate of the
audience-blaming agenda — admits that “modern classical music
remains an unattractive proposition for many concertgoers” and in the
next paragraph refers to it as a “problem” (Ross later uses the
word “unappreciative” to describe concert-goers who do not like
the new music). Mr. Ross, why is it a “problem” if people
don’t like something? This happens all the time in markets –
consumers do not like something; a product is not commercially successful. This
is, from the point of view of the producer of the product a problem if he
takes a loss, but it is not a systemic problem for the industry as such. It
is a market signal indicating that the classical music industry is producing
poor quality music.
Ross — taking the agenda of the
managerial elites as a given and the preferences of listeners as changeable
— argues that classical music is an acquired taste and that it is the
audiences who should, well, just go about acquiring it, as distasteful as
that might be.
Ross analyzes number of theories, such
as the rejection of novelty, the idolization of the past, and poor marketing
that seek to explain why listeners do not like modernist classical music.
This effort only serves to illustrate his view of the fixity of modernism, to
which audience tastes must eventually yield. The only question that remains
is whether it is the classical elites who should try harder to foist this
music on us, or whether we as listeners must try harder to digest this
distasteful menu.
But why should it be so? Why not some
public apologies on the part of the classical music elites for their poor
judgment in funding composers? Why does the classical-managerial class after
a century of its failed agenda not admit that they were wrong and start
trying to fund music that people might like? In what other industry would
entrepreneurs continue to pour funding into a failed business model?
That compositional talent still exists
is proven by the film industry, which produces several great classical-sounding
scores every decade. Yet Ross, predictably, draws exactly the wrong
conclusion from this data:
Indeed, it’s striking that
film-makers have made lavish use of the same dissonances that concertgoers
have found so alienating. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with
its hallucinatory György Ligeti soundtrack, mesmerised millions in the
late 1960s. Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, which deploys music by
Cage, Morton Feldman, Giacinto Scelsi, and Ligeti again, was a recent box-office
hit. Michael Giacchino’s score for the TV series Lost is an
encyclopedia of avant garde techniques. If the human ear were instinctively
hostile to dissonance, these and 1,000 other Hollywood productions would have
failed.
When I think of the score of 2001, I think of the music of the younger
and the older Strauss, not of dissonances. Setting that aside, I would point
out that movie-goers also like action movies with car crashes that sound like
car crashes. Would Ross take that as evidence that the human ear is not
hostile to dissonance? Maybe people like these films in spite of the score,
or maybe we have different tastes for musical scores that act as a sort of
enhanced sound effect track but are not perceived as music.
The classical-sounding film scores that
have taken off commercially in their own right, such as John Williams’
brilliant Star Wars
efforts and Howard Shore’s Lord
of the Rings all have recognizable melodies that any movie-goer
could hum after a single hearing.
The human race has not lost the ability
to write good — and popular — music. It is only that the
managerial elite who run symphonies and granting agencies controlling the
funding of composition have placed themselves in opposition to the tastes of
classical music, and justify this by blaming the audience for their tastes.
Ross and the classical-managerial
elites should question their assumption that modernism is a permanent feature
of musical composition that may or may not be accepted by audiences one day.
But there is nothing so permanent about modernism. The classical-managerial
elites have put the modernist program on welfare to shield it from a market
test. A big part of the welfare program has been the constant drum-beat of
propaganda suggesting that audience should like this music, and that the
problem — if they do not — is with the listener, not the music.
Even after a century, the public does
not accept the a-melodic, dissonant, car-crash, sound-effect-driven
compositional output of the modernist school as music. It is ultimately
audience acceptance that drives composition, not the other way around. While
we have been on a bit of a detour for the last 100 years, that should be long
enough to declare the modernist agenda a failure and move on to something
that people do like.
The classical music audience wants
melody. What needs to change is not public tastes, but musical composition.
It’s time to give the nascent John Williams and Howard Shores of the
world the the new commissions instead of pouring more money and symphony
programming space a dark hole in the ground. C’mon Alex Ross, give
melody a chance.
Robert Blumen
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