The late Leta Miller was a musicologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specialized in 20th Century music. Miller was a good and workmanlike writer, but her book belongs to a category of worshipful professional biographies of 20th Century avant-garde composers that turned their backs on audiences, leaving the musical traditions of five centuries behind. Examples of other avante-gardists with diverse styles but common attitudes include Babbitt, Stockhausen, Cage, Nono, Dallapiccolo, Ligeti, and Boulez. As an audience-oriented advocate of musical reform, I suggest that a quote by choreographer Mark Morris, cited in Miller's book, does a good job in describing Harrison's role in American music: "You either know Lou and have been to his house and are his best friend, or you've never heard of him".
For Harrison and other musical revolutionaries of the early-middle 20th Century, any earnest experimental approach to music making was acceptable and artistic, provided it thumbed its nose at ordinary music lovers. The tragedy for development of music and society as a whole, in my mind, is that this esthetic was embraced by the professional music establishment. It abandoned the previous conception of music as an expressive form of communication that linked composers, audiences, performers (professional and amateur), religious congregations, and children, etc. in a common love. The use of music to entertain, inspire, or console was replaced by music as a means of political protest or self actualization by composers and a tiny circle of cognoscenti. Rejection of compositions by audiences became something like proof of the artistic integrity and depth of the composer.
Earlier "in your face" styles have been largely abandoned by the establishment. But the tabu on music composed for ordinary music lovers has not changed. Composers can compose in neolassical styles that reviewers often refer to as "assimilable" (i.e. not openly offensive or disturbing) but must avoid music designed to really appeal to audiences or have it rejected as "derivative" or pandering to low public taste.
What this has done is confine contemporary composition to an academic ghetto. Larger classical music organizations dependent on ticket buying or other support by the public include occasional contemporary compositions in programs as a symbol that they have not totally abandoned active musical creation. But the vast majority of repertory dates back to pre-music revolution styles with emphasis on the 19th and 18th centuries.
Without meaningful music that speaks to today, classical music has had an ever declining role in the musical life of society. Young people who don't have family or other special background that introduces them to the marvelous world of classical music are almost completely rock based. We have more virtuosic performers than ever before, but ever grayer audiences for whom to play.
Unfortunately, faculty of conservatories or music departments who understand the problem are constrained in writing about it. I encourage all music lovers who long for new musical inspiration to take interest and refuse to be intimidated about speaking up.
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- Reviewed in the United States on September 17, 2013
