A year or two ago my wife received a sampler of contemporary music from her record club. Though diverse, the twelve excerpts on the disc share two things: a bias for consonance and a conciliating blandness. I can hardly blame the people at the record club for not being bolder in their selections - after all, no one has charged them with promoting the avant-garde. Their motive is a half-way honest one, to profit from culture, and to do so they have to appeal to the broadest possible audience. The point of releasing the disk was to convince an existing market of consumers who find sure value in Brahms that music of a similar aesthetic character is still being produced. That, at least, seems to be the subtext of the disc's title and redundant subtitle, Contemporary Classics: The New Tradition. Nyman, Torke, Bryars, and the rest of the composers represented on the disc might be fitter marks for blame, but still, they are only satisfying a need. As long as institutions like orchestral concerts remain forms of "bourgeois self-display," in Dahlhaus's words, and as long as these institutions remain the engine for classical music consumption, music that affirms what used to be called "bourgeois values" will be in demand. Contemporary Classics will fill the institutions' need for a semblance of relevance while relieving them of unwanted contact with the avant-garde. As long as this remains the case, the gap between the musical mainstream and the avant-garde will continue to widen, to the detriment of both. Orchestral concerts will lack the vigor that a continual infusion of significant new works would bring, while the avant-garde will be pressed further into the special status assigned it by a mostly unwelcoming public.

 

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