It is difficult to imagine much improvement in the lot of the avant-garde, at least in the foreseeable future. Performing arts institutions, including music conservatories, are only becoming more indebted to commercial and corporate influences and less amenable to music that implicitly or explicitly rejects such influences, as avant-garde music almost necessarily must. The administrators of those institutions might argue that the avant-garde turned their backs first, and they might be right. However, the institutions cannot give up their responsibility for helping to keep musical language vigorous, least of all for their own sake. Every investment in ephemeral music, every rock drummer or unreconstructed minimalist commissioned to write an opera, represents an opportunity missed, not only for the future repertoire of the institutions, but also for the representation of the early 21st century to posterity. If the institutions continue to ignore the avant-garde they will remain mired in the same repertoire, and eventually will complete their transformation from focal points of middle-class culture to specialized cultural venues. For its part, the avant-garde has been left to create its own venues with a small fraction of the material support that traditional venues receive.

The audience for avant-garde music is now comprised of composers themselves and a handful of dedicated listeners, a raft on the sea sustaining the forward edge of music. Artistic isolation is a threat, but even as new-music culture becomes ever more decentralized, the isolation of individual composers can be overcome by technology. Already today recordings and radio broadcasts are at least as important as concerts for disseminating new music. The internet, a fair source for information on new music (mostly computer music) and getting better all the time, is just now becoming a viable medium for sharing compositions. If computer-generated composition becomes the standard, which seems likely (see below), audio discs and sound files will become the native format for most new music. Listeners will audition the music on their stereos at home, reproducing far better than a concert hall the space in which the music was heard during its creation, that is, the studio, the study, the living room. Halls designed for listening to electroacoustic music exist, but they are great rarities. Even if the proportion of new music created with computers increases steadily, it does not seem likely these halls will proliferate. New music culture is being sustained less by people gathering in one place, and more by people communicating electronically. The influence of the Darmstadt and Donaueschingen festivals has waned because the need for such congregations has decreased. For the time being, the changeover from gathering to communicating remotely is being inhibited by the magnitude of sound files and by the sluggishness the internet, but the day is coming when sounds and images will be delivered over the internet with the speed and fidelity of cable or satellite television.

The day is coming, too, when most new art music will be electronically generated. I suspect that those involved in electronic music back in the 1960s and 1970s are surprised that this is not already the case at the end of the 20th century. In art-music culture, however, traditional institutions are powerful, traditional ensembles are ubiquitous, and both continue to exert a strong gravitational pull on composers. As long as instrumental ensembles exist, music will be written for them. But as the forward wave of music becomes ever more concentrated in computer composition, instrumental composition will become ever more backward-looking, and eventually will wither from a lack of creative input. The frontiers for instrumental writing have been closing as Lachenmann and others have wrung the last sonic possibilities from acoustic instruments. "Contemporary" music ensembles, which commonly reach back to Schoenberg, Webern, and Varèse for repertoire, have mostly ceded the forward edge of programming to electroacoustic music events, and eventually may become repertory ensembles specializing in 20th-century music.

Because of the personal computing revolution, the present generation of children is growing up with considerable computer skills. For those inclined to compose, the computer will be a natural tool for experimentation. Once they reach maturity, the possibilities presented by computer composition will draw many of them away from instrumental writing. Already today the possibilities for creating and manipulating sounds on a computer are virtually inexhaustible, and they will only become easier to produce. Computer composition is becoming more accessible, too. Once confined to studios because of the need for specialized hardware, computer composition can now be undertaken on any personal computer containing a sound card. Synthesis and editing software is widely available, much of it over the internet, some of it without charge. As more composers turn to computer composition, a greater portion of the best and most forward-thinking - that is, the composers who will carry musical language forward - will be composing with computers. Besides practical, technological considerations, musical language is ready for the change that computer composition brings. Serial and organic paradigms have become strained, and are ripe for supplanting by algorithmic composition which draws on mathematics or physics.

At some point in the future, then, the musical avant-garde is likely to be predominantly technology-based. This presents at least three problems. First, the avant-garde will lose even its meager foothold in traditional instrumental ensembles, and will become completely alien to concert-goers for whom such music is an occasional, unwanted first piece on the program, and who will not attempt to experience it through other media. Second, composers will lose valuable allies in performers. If an appreciation of avant-garde music rests on a specialized knowledge of it, new-music performers are in a unique position. Losing these performers will mean losing a significant pool of sympathizers. Whatever creative freedom composers gain by self-reliance will always be offset by a shrinking audience. On the other hand, the future of computer-controlling and other electronic instruments may be brighter than it seems now, and composers will not lose their performers. Third, though the cost of computer composition is generally falling, some technologies remain expensive. This puts them out of the reach of some composers who might benefit from them, and may deprive the forward wave of music of contributors. The expense also invites corporate sponsorship. To support their Brain Opera, Tod Machover and his colleagues chose the Windows operating system because they thought Microsoft might come through with sponsorship money, which it did.(7) When composers consider corporate money, they open a path to self-censorship. So, in some ways technology seems merely to aggravate the decline of the audience for avant-garde music. Fortunately, perhaps, technologies and cultural trends that we cannot foresee will arise; some may benefit the avant-garde.

About ten years ago, Raymond Williams noted that in the middle of the 19th century the term "modern" shifted its reference "from 'now' to 'just now' or even 'then', and for some time has been a designation always going into the past with which 'contemporary' may be contrasted for its presentness".(8) Today, in music and in all the arts, the term "modern" has been fixed historically and assigned a specific set of aesthetic attributes. In music, after the Second World War, "contemporary" replaced "modern" as the term denoting recent events. But "contemporary" is now becoming a historical term associated with postwar music (the Harmonia Mundi label has titled two releases Contemporary [Zeitgenössische] music in West Germany, 1960-1970 and Contemporary music in West Germany, 1970-1980), leaving "new" to describe recent music. These layers of terminology, which music culture may continue to shed like snake skins, are symptomatic of the institutional classes into which 20th-century music has been forced by an unwelcoming mainstream. The need for a subclass of new music labeled "avant-garde" is also a symptom. The likelihood of these classes ever dissolving, eliminating the need for a term like "new music," seems about as remote as the likelihood of atrophy reversing its course, and for some of the same reasons. Society will continue to fragment, to grow more complex, and music will follow society. Individual composers will be heard by an ever smaller audience, but those in the vanguard will be spared isolation by their participation in the evolution of musical language.

 

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