The Composer Strikes Back

I wrote this screed some years ago. Both Milton Babbitt and the critical
antagonist I reference in the article have passed away; ave atque vale (at least to
Babbitt). Stockhausen, similarly, has gone the way of all flesh. Things have changed a
little bit in the concert world, thanks in no small part to the fact that, though the classical
music audience continues to shrink, the demographics are changing for the betterthe
most reactionary segment of the concert audience, lamentably, is shrinking faster than
the rest, through attrition. But I still know enough living, breathing peopleof all ages
to whose faces I ought to say what I have written below.
Imagine: you go to a concert, all excited. One of the worlds finest orchestras is
playing; a charismatic soloist will be breathing creative fire into an evergreen concerto-or at least wearing a revealing dress; some flaming egomaniac or other is will be dancing
on the podium as if possessed by the very spirit of creation. The seats are plush, the
lights are dazzling, you are in a retro-futuristic palace of the arts suggestive of the Space
Station Hilton from Kubricks Space Odyssey, or perhaps that burnished and romantic
landmark, built with a robber barons blood money, that hallowed hall where
Tchaikovsky, Dvorak and Mahler once wielded their batons. Its like living in a Danielle
Steele bookor a PBS pledge break. The men around you all have sculpted white hair;
the women (and, I suppose the men too) are surgically reconstructed; their perfumes and
colognes create a stultifying, tropical lushness: this room teems with culture as a rain
forest crawls with life. A few unreconstructed nerds in jeans and corduroy blazers are
blended in, along with their black-clad consorts, validating the intellectual significance of
what you are about to hear. A luxurious dinner of squid-brie-and-summer-squash torte,
with habanero-encrusted walnuts, a raspberry coulis and caramelized onions, served over
a bed of withered greensa pile of food the size of a thimble served on a plate the size of
a tam-tam, personally glazed by Basquiatall washed down with some noble and
suitably snotty vino, a terse and yet perspicuous Beaujolais nouveau, with hints of pear
and phragmitesa luxurious dinner, I was saying, has awakened your appetite for Great
Music. You have even silenced your cell phone. Agog with anticipation, you open your
program andthere it is, a hideous, big, black blot on your otherwise perfect New York
evening, something so hideous it couldnt be more hideous if it studied hideous at the
Sorbonne. You swallow your insufficiently-sucked menthol eucalyptus drop. You gag
and point: never mind me, look at this program! Something by somebody alive!!!
Now the young woman youre with will never ask you back to her apartment.
When I make appearances as a guest composer, or, as I often do, as a pre-concert
lecturer, I am frequently asked about new music (albeit not usually by persons hoping to
get lucky on a first date). The question is usually couched in words such as: I would like
to like modern music, but I just dont understand it. How do I listen to modern music?
What do I listen for? There are two contradictory sentiments being expressed here. To
some degree such questions can be taken at face valuethe earnest enquiry of a
sophisticated consumer of culture wishing to understand what is newbut there is an
equally obvious subtext, usually suppressed out of politeness and a fear of giving
personal offense: Why does your music and that of all other modern composers suck so
bad?

Part of the problem lies in the whole idea of new classical music: theres an
oxymoron for you. The classical tradition contains, in the music of Bach, Mozart,
Beethoven and dozens of other great composers, some of the most powerful and
expressive works of art ever produced in any medium. But, as the repertoire grows,
audiences want more and more to hear only what they already know, and there is also a
predilection for the classical equivalent of ear candy, classical music, in other words,
appropriate for wine-and-cheese receptions and German luxury auto commercials.
Beethoven is frequently likened to Prometheus, at war with the gods, and Mozart is justly
praised for his deep psychological penetration and his ability to project extreme
emotional statesbut audiences, dulled by unenlightened familiarity with their work,
experience their work only as brain massage, musical comfort food, a stiff belt of snobby
single-malt Scotch after a hard day at the office. Contemporary composers of new music
aspire to Beethovenian or Mozartean heightsotherwise, why would we go into the
business?but, when we try to express ourselves, we face an audience resistant to both
the challenging and the unfamiliar.
This gap between what the audience wants from classical music and what the
composer intended is exemplified in a scene from Woody Allens Hannah and her Sisters
(1986). I remember being deeply annoyed when, in this otherwise fine movie, Allen
pointedly suggested that cultured, intelligent and responsible people liked Verdi and
Bobby Short while only troglodyte lowlifes liked Punk Rock. Wait a minute, I thought to
myself (or maybe I said something out loud in a crowded theater and convinced yet
another date that I was a wild-eyed crazy person). Wait a minute. I like Verdi and punk
rock. I dont particularly like Bobby Short (though I certainly respected his
musicianship, God rest his soul). The point is that what connects Verdi to Bobby Short is
that its easy on twentieth century ears, but what connects Verdi to punk rock is that in
both cases the composer is trying to hit you over the head with an emotional sledge
hammer. Who you group with whom depends on why you listen to their music.
So Im not talking about uncouth philistines here. Those audience members who
challenge me at concerts are just as likely as not to be people who are fully comfortable
with Modern Art of the all-white-canvas or toilet-seat-nailed-to-the-wall variety and
can quote Don DeLillo chapter and verse. But they dont get new music (maybe because
you have to sit through it. Even a book you can put down for a while). And I find this
depressing. My questioners seem to think one goes to grad school to be taught to like
Bartok, Webern, Lutoslawski, Stockhausen, Ligeti and Cagenot to mention newer
(though sometimes less modern) composers, that I learned to understand their music
and thus came to like it. But its not that way. I loved Bartok from the moment I heard
him (live: it was the Miraculous Mandarin. Yow!). I liked Ligeti and Lutoslawski a lot,
liked Webern in small doses (of course, it only comes in small doses) and have come to
like them all much more, was ambivalent about Cage and will always have issues with
the narcissistic naughtiness of Stockhausen, no matter how much I come understand it
(even though Stockhausen is the only classical composer among the crowd on the cover
of Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, right there next to the great W.C. Fields).
I did not go to grad school to learn what I liked, just to learn why I like it. This type of
knowledge is of value to composers, who are essentially engineers of emotional
expression and need to know how, metaphorically speaking, to connect ear-wire A to
heart-wire B. It is of value to musical theorists (about whose needs the less said, the

better) and, to some extent, performers, who need to communicate the composers
message to the audience. Grad school understanding is of little use to audiences. What
they really need to do is just hear the piece a few more times. If the will to listen isnt
there, then they will never come to love Bartoks Fourth String Quartet, even if it was
written before talking pictures. They will never enjoy Ligetis Melodien or Weberns
opus 10 (written before World War Onefor crying out loud, its old). I consider my
music to be pretty conservative, but what hope is there for me if Bartok is still waiting at
the door?
Its not just the audience that is frequently hostile. Consider the following quote
from the estimable music critic Bernard Holland, which comes from an article in the New
York Times of June 29, 2003, entitled How to Kill Orchestras. Mr. Holland wrote As
for disappearing audiences, no amount of managing will solve that one. Classical music
has only itself to blame. It has indulged in the creation of a narcissistic avant-garde
speaking in languages that repel the average committed listener in even our most
sophisticated American cities. Intelligent, music-loving and eager to learn, such listeners
largely understand that true talent and originality must find their own voice. What they
do not understand is why the commitment to reach and touch listeners in seats does not
stand at the beginning of the creative process, as it did with Haydn and Mozart. This kind
of art-for-arts-sake has much to answer forFleeing audiences are one more symptom,
the cause being public art that has been abandoned by its avant-garde and uses its given
natural resources with profligacy. Audiences are not to blame. They are smarter than
Elliot Carter and Milton Babbitt want to think they are. In other words, classical music
is dying andyou rotten composers are to blame for everything.
This really tees me off. Milton Babbitt and Elliot Carter, the favorite straw men
of neophobes everywhere, are among the thorniest and most cerebral of composers,
perhaps overly so, true. But their detractors write about them as if they were seated in
retro-futuristic plush chairs not in Fisher hall, but in the heart of a dormant volcano,
stroking white Persian cats and pushing buttons that send serialist apostates to their
deaths in a pool of twelve-tone piranhas (come to think of it, Babbitt bears a certain
resemblance to Donald Pleasance). As if, in other words, they were vicious people out to
destroy classical music.
They are not. They write the music they write because they think it is meaningful and
worthwhile. They are less cynical, more creative and smarter than music critics. Even
bad composers give the world more than good music critics. As Beethoven once wrote
(in big angry letters) on a negative review: O you miserable bastard. What I shit is
better than what you thought? Does it matter that the work in question was Wellingtons
Victory, and that the negativity of the review may have been merited? It does not:
Wellingtons Victory, which by Beethovens standards may very well be shit, is still better
and more important than what the critic thought.
And heres another point: Not all composers are Milton Babbitt and Elliot Carter.
I would venture to guess that not even half of composers are Milton Babbitt and Elliot
Carter. And we all care deeply about our audiences. What, otherwise, is the point of
writing classical music? To impress girls? To make money? (As a student of mine said,
Forget platinum. Classical musicians are stars if their album goes wood.) We all aim
for the emotional g-spot and many of us write music, for better or worse, that is more
accessible than that of Elliot Carter and Milton Babbitt. Nevertheless, when orchestras

program music by any of us, it is inevitably treated as if it were by Elliot Carter or Milton
Babbitt. Consider the following incidents, all of which really happened.
1. A small orchestra in northern New Jersey programs the Prokofiev 3rd Piano
Concerto (written in 1913), a work which even Stalins reactionary and repressive
musical bureaucracy hailed as tuneful and melodic, unsullied by the decadent modernism
of the West. Nevertheless, many in the audience complained about having to listen to too
much modern music. This happened in the 21st Century.
2. So you smug New Yorkers are blaming the above on the provinciality of us
New Jerseyans? I witnessed a performance of John Adams Harmonielehrer by the New
York Philharmonic in the late 1980s. It made up the 2nd half of a program, which had
begun with trad music. Hardly had the first note of this very accessible piece sounded
when 20 to 30 percent of the audience got up and walked out. That first note, by the way,
is an E minor chord. Let me repeat that: an E minor chord. (The 2nd and 3rd notes of
Adams work are also E minor chords, as are about the next 40. But its not the repetitive
nature of the music that chased away the audience: the exodus began right on the
downbeat.) What could be so offensiveor, to use Mr. Hollands term, repellentabout
an E minor chord? It was a good enough way for Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Dvorak to
begin their pieces. And, by the way, if the audience had it in mind simply to boycott all
modern music, why didnt they just leave at the intermission? I can only conclude that
they didnt consult the program to see what they were about to hear until the conductor
raised his baton and, when they did, they saw that dreadful parenthetical datum (1934-- )
after the composers name. Once they saw that, their prejudice told their ears what to
hear.
Around the same time, the Philharmonic played Messiaens Turangalila
Symphony, with Zubin Mehta conducting. It was an event, with the great composer in
attendance and his wife featured as the soloist (on a primitive synthesizer called the
Ondes Martenot, which swoops from note to note like the score from a vintage science
fiction movie). Turangalila is a mammoth work which has a little bit of everything. Its
rhapsodic, erotic, loud, exuberant, brassyand essentially tonal. Many of its melodies
use the folk-like pentatonic scale, but are presented in an over-the-top way, creating the
effect (in the fourth movement, with its appropriately loony title: Joy of the Blood of the
Stars) of a clan of bagpipers trying to play The Campbells are Coming amidst an African
drum group, with both ensembles watching Forbidden Planet while indulging freely in
hallucinogenic drugs. On this occasion the Ondes Martenot was badly over-miked, but
the performance was otherwise top-notch, with the scores many difficulties waking up
the sometimes somnolent Mehta and bringing out his considerable best. I was sitting in
the back, and I witnessed an older couple walking up the aisle after the concert was over.
The man was protesting to his wife, but I liked it. His wife replied, in an acidulous
hiss, No you didnt!
3. Sometimes musicians get in on the act. I cant complain if a musician dislikes
a piece I like, or even if he or she dislikes all modern music. What bothers me is when a
musician makes denigrating comments about modern composers and their works in front
of an audience because he or she thinks thats what his audience wants to hear, and
wishes to ingratiate him(her)self. Conductors are particularly guilty of this brand of
sleaziness. I was once present at a Meet the Artist program sponsored by the Visitor
Services department of Lincoln Center (in which, at the time, I servedand I dont want

to talk about it any more), wherein visiting tour groups could buy a personal meet-andgreet with an available artist. It was Mostly Mozart season, and this program featured the
conductor, who we will call the Maestro. When someone asked him a question about
modern music, he sensed blood in the water and an opportunity to throw in a little more
chum. He took a pot-shot at one of my heroes, Charles Ives (who, by the way, was long
dead and whose last compositions had been written sixty years before this incident),
saying words to the effect, why program Charles Ives. Nobody wants to hear him. I
doubt theres anyone here who could sing a melody from Charles Ives music. I was
mortified and indignant and shot up my hand immediately: I can. The Maestro looked at
me and shrugged. Oh, but youre probably a musician. As if being a musician
devalued my musical judgment.
Heres what got me so mad. Ives music can certainly be cacophonous and wild,
but his modernism was an expression of a kind of loony Walt Whitman-esque
inclusiveness. It is built almost entirely out of singable melodiesthe melodies of the
gilded-age America Ives loved. Melodies everyone knows, or once knew. Nearer my
God to Thee, for instance, Columbia the Gem of the Ocean, In the Sweet By and
By, Long, long ago, and The Battle Cry of Freedom, appear constantly in his work.
No one can hear everything going on at any given momentbut if you listen youll hear
something you can sing back, whether you have a doctorate or not. The Maestro must
have known this (at least I hope), but, obeying the inner coward that lies under the skin of
all conductors, he was pandering to his audience.
I believe in this scorned repertoire, and enjoy listening to itlistening to it as
powerful art, not just as some kind of elegant equation. Furthermore, hearing something
new should be exciting and fun, even when the new work doesnt make the grade. There
is a thrill to exploration, to hearing what none have heard before, and a degree of
satisfaction to formulating ones own opinion based on concrete evaluation, rather than
relying on the patronizingly delivered verdict of the philistine or the callow sophisticate
in the next seat.
But there are times when I despair. I encounter mindboggling narrowness in
listeners, and not just classical listeners. One learns to love what one listens to as a child
and a teenager, and then the sclerosis sets inunless you do something to keep your
music muscles from atrophying. Thats the real problem, when you get down to it:
people have a better understanding of music when they actually spend some time making
it. Remember the old slogan for Jiffy-Pop popcorn? Or am I, by invoking something so
ancient, allying myself to powdered wigs and trilobites? Anyway: its as much fun to
make as it is to eat. So it goes with music. Our concert audiences dont make much
music anymore, they mainly just eat it. And new music is vegetables.
When it comes to dealing with audience hostility, perhaps Charles Ives, that
glorious old mess, had it right. Once, at a concert he is said to have rolled up his
program, hit the head of a complaining audience member in front of him, and growled,
Shut up, and take your dissonance like a man!