The segregation of the musical avant-garde and the meagerness of its audience are obviously troubling, but, for many historical reasons, have become inevitable. To begin with - and I have to ask the reader to excuse the historical gloss that follows by keeping in mind that I am engaged in music criticism, not musicology - the prevailing absence of a common practice condemns individual styles to a relatively narrow audience. Beauty, George Santayana wrote, "is a value; it cannot be conceived as an independent existence which affects our senses and which we consequently perceive."(1) As we say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It follows that a musical style formed commonly may have a common appeal, just as a myth or folk tale shaped more or less collectively can have a broad resonance, even beyond the culture in which it was formed. The general appeal of any popular music is a result of the great number of its contributors. On the other hand, a style formed in isolation is likely to have a limited appeal. While no composer is truly isolated, compositional practice has become so fragmented that relatively few hands shape any particular stylistic current. Tuned by the shared idiosyncrasies of its contributors, each style finds a limited number of sympathetic listeners. The audience for new music splinters into segregatable niches, and declines from a lack of commonality.

The principal reasons for the fragmentation of musical style go back to the political and economic revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, to the diminishing fortunes of the aristocracy and the rise of the bourgeoisie. In the wake of these events, composers became less dependent on patronage and began to make their living in a greater variety of ways. Besides holding posts like Kapellmeister, they performed at public and private concerts, conducted freelance, gave lessons, took academic positions, became journalists, received commissions, and earned publication fees. Having no longer to please patrons, composers could write to please themselves and a new middle-class audience willing to indulge their individuality as a sign of contemporary sensibilities. Even 19th-century patrons were less concerned with receiving a specified body of work in return for their money than they were with supporting the chosen endeavors of composers whose status had been elevated from craftsmen to priests in the new religion of Art. This creative freedom differentiated composers, and encouraged some of the characteristics that we readily associate with romantic music - nationalism, eclecticism, the ideal of individual expression, etc. - which in turn spurred differentiation. The repercussions in musical style were unmistakable. The diversity of style found among the generation of composers born early in the 19th century - Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Wagner, Verdi - would have been unimaginable at the beginning of the century, and the diversity has only increased in the time since.

In the 20th century composers have continued to make their living many different ways, though more and more have taken up academic posts. Ideally such positions afford creative freedom, which would encourage stylistic fragmentation. However short of ideal the reality has fallen, freedom has existed. We need only recall complaints about "academic composers" failing to reach a broad audience to appreciate the support of universities and conservatories, whose administrators have generally been more concerned with the quantity and prestige of a composer's professional accomplishments than with the type of music they produce. These complaints have been fading rapidly now that universities in the United States have become infused with the dulling spirit of corporate competition, and every faculty member is expected to justify their position by bringing something of value - usually money or notoriety - to their school. Fortunately, liberating institutional support for composers has come from other sources in the second half of the century, at least on the other side of the Atlantic. "The leading composers of the Boulez-Stockhausen generation in western Europe," Paul Griffiths writes, "were all supported by broadcasting organizations­either directly as employees (usually in electronic music studios) or indirectly through the provision of the means for performance and recording. Their sole responsibility, therefore, was to create."(2)

Yet another factor may have done more to fragment music in the 20th century. With the advent of systematic composition came a change in composers' relationship with the music of their immediate predecessors. Composition became less of a craft whose methods of production were passed from one generation to the next as composers adopted a new way of working, one analogous to machine production (no coincidence in an industrial age): an apparatus for generating pitches and other musical elements is created, then set in motion. Systematic composition was already well established before the second World War, and blossomed after, when members of the avant-garde seized upon it as a means of freeing themselves from acquired habits. Computers have been a boon to systematic composition, chiefly for two reasons. They have given rise to algorithmic composition, a special case of systematic composition, and they have allowed for the precisest control of every element of music, right down to the harmonic spectrum of every note. If, in Walter Pater's phrase, music aspired to the condition of poetry in the 19th century, in the 20th century it has aspired to the condition of technology. Many composers have labored under the belief that a better system will mean better music, just as technological progress has brought better material living. Rather than refining a common system, however, composers have mostly pursued their own more or less unique systems. This is not a bad thing; it simply becomes inevitable as compositional practice necessarily reflects an increasingly complex, diverse, and fragmented society.

For at least 200 years, moreover, composers have been courting their own isolation, inadvertently or defiantly. Anti-bourgeois sentiment among a portion of composers, which grew from casual disdain in the 19th century to code in the 20th, could not help but alienate less confident members of a middle class from which the greater part of the audience for art music has been drawn. More significantly, the romantic ideal of art for art's sake and the cult of the composer that seems to begin with the romantics' veneration of Beethoven were bound with a long shift in emphasis away from the audience and toward the composer, away from result and toward process. Conceptual composition is an obvious result; the ubiquity of pre-composition is a subtler one. Among the former are the Cagean sort of concepts which deal with the creative process or the listening process, and which therefore have no chance of appealing, in either sense of the word, to concert-goers for whom such issues are not open to question, and that is probably most of them. There are also Rube Goldberg concepts like the following, which provides an unsurprising answer to the question of how the first Austrian in space would be put to use:

The cosmonaut's message from [the spacestation Mir] alienates the Blue Danube Waltz on Earth, and vice versa. The message from space conducts the waltz, so to speak. The alienated waltz is used as a control signal for a mute piano, which is played by the imaginary hand of the cosmonaut. The cosmonaut reaches his hand out to us as he flies overhead. . .Twelve Austrian composers subsequently used the data from the waltz and from the message as the basis for their own composition.(3)

Such concepts are aesthetically neutral: they can result in good music or bad music. However, they can occupy a composer to the extent that the work of art becomes a wholly private utterance, lacking appeal for any audience. Kenneth Gaburo put it bluntly: "I never have any doubts, but sometimes I wonder if I'm doing anything of value to others or am I just jerking off?"(4) While most new music is not so highly wrought conceptually, there is undoubtedly an emphasis on the process of composing that did not exist two hundred years ago. This is in part a necessary reaction to the splintering of compositional practice and the decline of composition as a craft whose techniques are passed down from composer to composer. If the forms and methods of composing are not given, and neither are the reasons for doing so in the first place, then a composer must give considerable thought to these things. An audience may become the least of a composer's concerns.

 

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