The isolation of the avant-garde, then, did not arise suddenly as a negative response to radical postwar composition, but developed gradually over the course of at least two centuries. While this isolation has everything to do with the nature of the music, it has nothing to do with its quality or ultimate intelligibility. Those who believe otherwise can find substantiation in the work of respected music scholars, who often invoke nature with greater or lesser sophistication. These scholars seem to make the mistake of treating music as a purely formal matter and disregarding its status as a product of culture. Being a product of culture, music has evolved as culture has evolved. To call on nature, even in the guise of psychoacoustics or linguistics, against the course of music history (that is, against culture) is to suggest a host of philosophical implications, some disturbing and others merely outdated. At this point in history it is far more appropriate philosophically to allow composers the freedom to ignore nature, or to draw on it in an unprescribed way.

No doubt postwar avant-garde music seems less intelligible to most concert-goers than the usual fare. In the present age, however, when scientific and cultural disciplines have become so highly developed that only specialists can grasp them, no one should be surprised if music is being produced that is intelligible only to a limited audience. Milton Babbitt made that point in an infamous 1958 article "Who Cares if You Listen?" which, in fact, he later titled "The Composer as Specialist."(5) By no means is the music beyond the grasp of a broader classical-music audience; however, relatively few people have acquired the specialized knowledge needed to appreciate it. In the case of music, specific technical knowledge is not even essential as long as a listener has enough experience with the music to be able to make sense of it. Either way, a knowledge of avant-garde music is a tough sell in a culture oversaturated with information and entertainment, and if concert-goers are indulged by post-minimalists, neo-romantics, and pop-hybridists, they have even less incentive to explore more challenging music.

How much nobler it would be to try to bring a broader audience to the level of the music, as Kodaly sought to do by education and Wagner by revolution (well, that's a hornet's nest), than to bring the music to the level of a broader audience. The National Endowment for the Arts in the United States, under pressure from lawmakers who might be just one homoerotic image away from reducing its budget to zero, has called upon artists to do just that, to be more responsive to the general population. This is bad news for the avant-garde in the United States, just as bad as the Endowment's ending grants to individual artists. It signals a surrender to uncomprehending anti-elitist sentiment and a willingness to dictate artistic choices to its applicants. Still, an Endowment that shrinks from controversy is better than none at all, even where the avant-garde is concerned. Ending federal funding for the arts would only increase dependence on corporate funding, and hasten the shift from corporate patronage to more conspicuous corporate sponsorship. Once the Cleveland Orchestra is playing in, say, Rustoleum Hall, there will be less chance that the music heard there will challenge an audience, let alone alienate it.

Some composers, needing no prompting from the NEA, have embraced aspects of popular music and commercial culture in order to make their music more accessible. Two aesthetic problems arise. First, art music is distinguished from popular music, among other ways, because it creates a complex representation of its author and its society. When art music trucks with the surface representations of popular music, it becomes hollow - the better to commoditize it, perhaps. Second, when art music exploits popular culture, it suffers the culture's continual, rapid obsolescence. It becomes not only hollow, but also ephemeral. Other composers have breached a classical music market dominated by common-practice music by adopting parts of its style and language. This has meant a resurgence of tonality. Leaving aside questions about whether tonality was ever exhausted in art music, we have to ask if a musical language cultivated in another era still has the power to represent our own. The answer lies clearly in the music, in the threadbare gestures and inert forms which, like verbal clichés, are scarcely capable of articulating anything outside of their own banality. Tonal composers today deny their music a compulsion and a richness of meaning by not availing themselves of a language that is able to reflect the complexities and singularities of contemporary culture. Moreover, whatever local meanings they assign to individual works, their language refers not to the whole of their environment and their experience, but to classical music culture, a considerable narrowing of scope. This is not the sort of historicism that architects have used to assign meaning to their work. Tonal composers today are not trying to recall the ideas of an earlier era, but are simply responding to the ubiquity of tonal music in concert halls, conservatories, and popular culture).

There are inevitably political implications in a composer's choice of language, too, whether or not the composer acknowledges them. I would stop just short of agreeing with Herbert Brün that a composer who writes tonal music supports fascism (though anyone who was in Berlin in the 1930s is more than entitled to that opinion), however, the use of tonality in art music today suggests an agreement with outmoded principles. In the first two-thirds of the 19th century, the stabilities and hierarchies of tonal music, which had come to represent the aspirations of its aristocratic patrons, were rapidly undermined by composers with various revolutionary sympathies (though, to be sure, they were still cozy with the aristocracy, whose money and cultural education could not help but attract them), from Beethoven, who welcomed Napoleon as a remedy for an authoritarian Habsburg monarchy, to Wagner, who was active in the Dresden uprising of 1849. In the 20th century, serialism arose from the dissolution of tonality and the development of line and motive as compensatory structural elements; it also arose from the same impulse that produced socialism, that is, a desire to disperse central authority and to weaken sociopolitical hierarchies. Tonal music of different sorts still flourished in the first part of the 20th century, but the upheaval brought by events of the 1930s and 1940s in Europe led the postwar avant-garde to reject absolutely any musical idea with so much historical baggage as tonality. A significant number of postwar composers have still clung to or rediscovered tonality, but at this point tonality can only represent a long regression. With nothing to contribute to the larger evolution of musical language, these composers have in effect removed themselves from the stream of cultural progress. This is a sin of omission, an unwitting vote for the most conservative elements of society.

It might not be seemly to rail so hard against new tonal music if it were harmless, but it is not. The resurgence of tonal music and the rise of art/vernacular hybrids, both validated by post-modern pluralism, have had the effect of choking the avant-garde out of conventional venues. When less adventurous (that is, most) music directors are moved by an inner or outer obligation to program new works, they can select or commission compositions that agree aesthetically with their usual programming. This has driven avant-garde music further into specialized venues, making it even stranger to most concert-goers. No doubt it has also reinforced the conviction of some of these concert-goers that new music cannot be as good as old music. Because it bears a surface resemblance to common-practice music, new tonal music invites comparison with common-practice works that have passed into the canon. The new works can scarcely rise above mediocrity, let alone measure up. Adorno may have put the reason best: ". . . true musicality, the spontaneous relation to the matter, rests on the ability to have experiences. Its concretion is a readiness to deal with things that have not yet been classified, approved, subsumed under fixed categories."(6) Creativity is not self-expression so much as it is problem solving. A tonal composer today deals mostly with problems that have already been solved, and so loses a valuable spur for creativity. Still, these composers are rewarded by musical institutions and by audiences, more for their acquiescence than for the quality of their work.

 

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