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Thefivemythsaboutcontemporaryclassicalmusic|Music|TheGuardian

The five myths about contemporary

classical music
Contemporary classical music is devoid of melody and appeal, all noise and no fun. At least, that's
the cliche. But this is music that is very much atthe heart of our modern world
Tom Service
Thursday 26 April 2012 20.00BST

1. It all sounds like asqueakygate

There are two sides to this. First, there's the simple fact that much of the music being
written now by composers for choirs, opera houses and orchestras has as many, and
sometimes more, tunes than anything by Beethoven or Mozart. For sensuous,
harmonious reverie, listen to recent music by John Tavener or Arvo Prt; for sheer,
abundant tune-smithery, look no further than those masters of choral, regal and festive
vocality Paul Mealor, Eric Whitacre and John Rutter. But none of this is what the
"squeaky gate" critics mean. They are thinking ofthe sort of music that the conductor
Thomas Beecham once said he "trodin": the avant garde of Karlheinz Stockhausen,
Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono or Brian Ferneyhough. One of the best answers to this sort of
attack comes from "unherd" on my classical music blog: "'Nasty squeaky gate' can
actually be amazing to experience if you're not afraid of it." You're right, unherd. As
ever, fear, or preconceptions, lead to the dark side. First, one of the signal, culturechanging achievements of contemporary music is that it opens your mind and ears to rehear the world, to realise the beauty that's around us in sounds we would otherwise call
noises. That's part of the genius of John Cage or Helmut Lachenmann, one way in which
the world becomes a different place when you listen to their music. But there's
something else: the visceral impact of music such as Iannis Xenakis's Jonchaies,
Stockhausen's Gruppen for three orchestral groups or Luciano Berio's Coro is like
nothing else music has done before. This music opens up huge reservoirs of feeling and
physicality. Listen to any, and have your squeaky gates of perception opened up.
2. It's inaccessible
Balderdash. Rewind a few decades. Have a look again atthe menagerie of cultural icons
on the cover of the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Who's that cheeky
chappie on the back row, whose big brown eyes and side-parting peer out between
Lenny Bruce and WC Fields? Why, it's the furthest-out composer of any of the out-there
60s avant-garde, Stockhausen. A piece of coincidental Beatlemania? Not a bit of it.
Without Stockhausen's electronic dreams and experiments thedecade before, and his
trailblazing example of how you could use the studio itself as a musical instrument, the
Beatles would be mired in musical pre-history, and Lennon and McCartney's
imaginations and yours would be infinitely the poorer. Spooling on through pop
culture, in the 70s and 80s, bands "discovered" tape loops, phases and rhythmic
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complexity. But that's only because Steve Reich, Philip Glass and the minimalists had
got there at least a decade before. Sampling? Again, it's the avant garde you've got to
thank, everyone from the pioneers of tape-based musique concrte to Alvin Lucier and
beyond. Coming bang(ish) up to date: who is Bjrk's favourite composer? Stockhausen
again. Brian Eno would be nowhere without Erik Satie and Cornelius Cardew, Stephen
Sondheim owes it all well, some of it to lessons with Princeton-based serialist Milton
Babbitt, and don't get me started on Jonny Greenwood's love-affair with Krzysztof
Penderecki. Without the "classical" avant garde, pop music just could not and would not
be the same.
3. You need to have a beard and wear a black polo-neck jumper to appreciate it
This is one of the real things that puts many listeners off, the idea that to be able to
understand Harrison Birtwistle or Judith Weir, Pauline Oliveros or Howard Skempton,
you need to have a working knowledge, and preferably a PhD, in music history from
plainchant to Prokofiev, and/or you needto be part of a club of contemporary music
groupies. Neither, I promise you, is true. There's a story told by Gillian Moore, who runs
classical music at London's Southbank Centre and who set up the pioneering education
work of the London Sinfonietta in the early 80s. One of its first projects introduced a
programme of Ravel and early 20th-century visionary and noise-fiend Edgard Varse to
groups of schoolchildren. For many, Ravel's music is sensual, beguiling, "easy", whereas
Varse's sirens, percussion and atavistic modernism make his music beyond the pale,
dissonant, and "difficult". What happened was just the reverse: the kids loved Varse
and couldn't get on with Ravel. But that makes perfect sense. So much of the great,
radical music of the past 100 years bypasses the world of convention and intellect to go
straight to the guts of sonic power, and to shake up your solar plexus. There's a good
argument that the less you know about Mozart or Schubert, the more directly you can
understand the sounds composers create today.
4. It's irrelevant
A simple formulation that sums up an unfortunate commonplace: the sense that this
music has nothing to say to today's world. As already said, many of the sounds that we
think most define our world today in pop music have the avant garde in their DNA, but
there's more. There is sometimes an impression that composers who write music that
pushes musicians to their extremes are doing nothing more than fiddling around with
meaningless notes in a solipsistic, self-indulgent reverie. Well, there's nothing wrong
with beauty, and the extreme, hard-wonbeauty of hearing a group of great musicians or
an orchestra at the limits of what they can do. But contemporary music has things to say,
if we have ears to hear it. And thanks togenerations of recent composers, contemporary
music has tried to change the world. Haven't heard of Cornelius Cardew? Check him out.
All his music was composed with social and political consciousness at its heart. And in
different ways, that's still happening. John Adams can't resist today's big subjects
politics, terrorism and religious extremism. Younger composers are forming collectives
that dissolve the pernicious boundaries between genres and institutions, creating work
that speaks to new audiences directly, powerfully and relevantly.
5. It's written for classical musicians so it must be 'old'
Ah, yes: here's the rub. For some, the very sight of, say, an orchestra, a string quartet or
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the idea of an opera house automatically gives an illusion of "heritage" rather than
"contemporary culture". The implication is that those institutions or lineups can't have
anything to contribute to musical thinking, that the musical ideas that composers in the
past have dreamed of in their orchestral works, quartets and operas, have filled the
repertoire, and our imaginations, to thebrim. Try telling that to Jonathan Harvey, whose
expansion of the orchestra into the realms of electronics makes music that is definitively
contemporary and immeasurably timeless, or to Thomas Ads, whose writing creates
visions of musical possibility that are new for today, or for any time. A piece that Ads
composed in 1999, on the eve of the millennium, symbolises the new meanings that
large-scale music can have. America: A Prophecy is a vision and a warning about the
ends of empire. Ads's music could not speak more fervently or fearlessly about the
essential truth of the way historical patterns repeat themselves, and how we ignore the
warnings of ancient civilisations at our peril. Don'tlet the veneer of the opera house or
the concert hall put you off. This music is speaking to us now: all you need is an open
mind and open ears.
* What are the composers' favourites? Mark-Anthony Turnage, Anna Meredith and more
tell us the contemporary work they couldn't live without.
Our new online series on contemporary classical music starts on Monday 30 April at
guardian.co.uk/classical
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