The Musical Times, Vol. 135, No. 1816, 150th Anniversary Issue. (Jun., 1994), pp.
330+332-334+336-337.

Even WV Quine, whose gentle observation that ‘the less a [field] is advanced, the more its terminology rests on an uncritical assumption of mutual understanding’ could not have forseen a terminological tolerance which would permit the term ‘classical’, as in ‘classical music’, to accommodate the proclamation of the President of the United States that ‘jazz is America’s classical music’. So, rather than expose myself to the suspicions of harbouring unpatriotic, even seditious thoughts, or to be obliged to conjecture as to the future of jazz (which has its own problems), I presume to substitute a term at least roughly coextensive with and in some respects more pertinently extensive than ‘classical’, and one innocent of inaugural augmentation.

That was not the first occasion on which ‘classical’ was subjected to official or semi-official scrutiny and revisionism. Some years ago the Smithsonian Institution sponsored a conference on ‘American Music’, with every conceivable and barely conceivable music and putative musics equally represented. Our little acre, labelled ‘classical’, was immediately challenged on the familiar historical grounds of correctly characterising only a chronological era, and on the unfamiliar ground of having generated such dubious ’stylistic’ categories as semi-classical (as in ’saxophone pieces the whole world plays’), and -perhaps in Great Britain -continuing on even to hemi-demi-semi classical music. Then a parade of rubrics was rejected as casting too wide a net, catching the operas of August Bungert with the songs from Leonardo; Wiley Hitchcock’s elegant ‘cultivated music’ (as distinguished by him from ‘vernacular music’) was hotly rejected - not by me - as too ‘elitist’, and - finally - the term that I had used in a talk: ‘The unlikely survival of serious music’ (and so do I tip my hand) was similarly rejected as too normative, which it was intended to be. So I shall persist in using it, since I feel no obligation to take a composer seriously merely because he takes himself seriously.

These initial remarks should not be viewed as anecdotal evasions; they each reflect that pervasive and invasive populism which merely reached its peak of executive authority with the presidential proclamation, as the floodgates of the fuzzy boundaries opened yet wider. The most influential source of support for ’serious’ (the quotation marks here are intended semi-seriously) music, the National Endowment for the Arts, has imposed, through its appointed panels, a censorship of egalitarianism, regionalism, sexism (some may wish to term this ‘reverse sexism’) and racism (some may wish to term this ‘reverse racism’) which has had far broader and harsher effect than the publicised attacks and threat of censorship by a yahoo legislator and his fellow protectors of the public morality. The NEA’s ideological correctness has trickled down to other public and private benefactors, who - in the mean spirit of these times - have abolished entirely or critically reduced support for those contemporary performance ensembles who, for three decades, have provided the vehicles for composers, particularly composers of demanding music, to hear their music and have it heard, to provide that ’success’ which Schoenberg termed ‘the only success which should matter to a composer, that of having his music understood’. The Group for Contemporary Music, which instituted - in 1962 - a revelatory series for which rehearsal time was never less than that sufficient unto the work, where works were selected not for the ‘kinds’ they instantiated, but for what they individually were, and where performances were as expert and informed as the music chosen for performance, has been obliged to abandon its concert-giving activity, and other distinguished ensembles, whose principles and - often - principals originated with the Group similarly have been compelled to reduce the number of their concerts and the number of performers engaged in their concerts. This removal of support has been ‘explained’ by the official donors as a response to the limited sizes of the audiences, and the limited number of ‘minority group’ members represented on the programmes and present on the stage; there is apparently little concern that the most threatened minority groups are the composers and performers who have been on the programmes and on the stage.

These circumstances, however apparently mundane and even downright unaesthetic, are - in fact - defining conditions of our present actual musical world, and projection from this world to a future possible world must take these conditions as alarmingly determinative and prophetic. For, if the formal conditioning of potential and eventual musicians and their audience demands informed guidance, and the informal conditioning assumes the constant presence of informed performance, the former has long been and is increasingly threatened by the conditions of music education. Although the state of our literacy and general education has provided the grist for the mills of self-appointed culture specialists, and heavy industry for certified public professors, the state of musical literacy and education concerns almost no one. I need do no better than again cite the figures that in 1974 there were some 2,200 music teachers for the 920,000 public school students of New York City; ten years later there were just 793, and the attrition accelerates, not just in New York City but almost everywhere, in many places converging to zero. And where there is what is designated music education, there is little attempt or will to instruct in essential skills of execution and conceptualisation; rather, in an attempt to win - or, at least, keep - student customers, this education takes the form of formlessness of improvisational fun and games, where anything goes and nothing comes of it. At more ‘advanced’ levels, at what were once institutions of higher learning, this educational process is content to produce amateur critics rather than professional listeners, content - at most - to provide mere awareness of and passive acquaintance with the shaping works of the musical tradition, and to thus populate musical society with unbred abecedarian composers, flaunting their nescience.

As general music educations becomes more permissive and diluted, and vocation oriented, ‘professional’ education has become more compartmentalised and insulated, particularly from sophisticated thought about music, the consequences for the few composers who are not so insulated are particularly unfortunate, for, in this country, virtually all commissions of consequence must be initiated by performers, and - therefore to a frightening extent what new music can be composed to be heard, propagated, recorded, and even published, is primarily determined by performers, who - with the exception of those exceptional performers who themselves have become members of an endangered species - are far less concerned with the future of music than with the future of their careers in music, and to that end commission works for themselves which are not too demanding, and likely to secure for them the greatest number of engagements, the most flattering notices, and therefore - recordings, and - thereby - fame!

The fragmentation, the shredding of musical society unto factionalisation, has been widely noted, and - to be sure - some of it is in the notes, the musics, but more of it is in the vocational preparation and disposition of the virtually disjunct domains of thought and action. And while the performers are in another world, most of the conductors of our ‘major’ orchestras are from another continent. These imported baton twirlers appear to have not even awareness of, surely no concern with, contemporary thinking in and about music, while the few natives in such positions, having been trained primarily as performers, share this ignorance and unconcern. What puzzles and disturbs some of us is not only, or even primarily, that the works of our contemporaries are not performed, and there is a large body of orchestral music - native and foreign - that is not and apparently cannot be performed, but what possible construal of the music, the ‘classics’, of the past the performances superintended by these conductors exemplify, whereas one can infer that the ‘new’ music offered is chosen for its being easy for the conductor to learn (preferably at rehearsal), for its inducing little resistance from the players who wish never again to be obliged to play what they haven’t played before, for its giving no offence to the orchestra’s board of directors, whose only relation to music is strictly social, and for not disturbing the passivity of the shrinking audiences. Such realisations of the music of the past and unrealised performances of the music of the present can hardly provide the forceful informal conditions for the internalisation of the dynamics of the tradition to be reformed and - even - deformed, but not by the performance but by the composer’s personal processing.

The rare conductor who is willing and able to perform what others cannot or will not, who might restore to public conducting what it has not exhibited since the days of the courage and conviction of Mitropoulos and the young Stokowski, is consigned to the even rarer conducting of small ensembles or student groups, but even were he to be offered the occasion to conduct the celebrated orchestras, he would be hopelessly shackled by rehearsal constraints, performers’ resistance and inexperience. Professional segregation is not an unfamiliar condition even for the American composer who occupies a university position. The music historian, who was granted academic legitimation earlier and more securely than the composer, consorts with the composer only under official duress; he, or she, is seldom to be found at a performance of contemporary music (following the lead, perhaps, of their art historian flugelman, Professor Gombrich), and the music historian’s forever has been and remains the strongly implicit attitude that, due to the historian’s superior historical perspective, he and she know that important music cannot be composed in our time; indeed, if such music could be composed, they would be composing it, but rather than delude themselves as we composers are deluding ourselves, they will continue to devote themselves to the noble study of those composers who composed at a time when music could be composed.

The professionally most valuable and stimulating colleagues, since they are also interested in music, who have emerged as educational forces within the past three or so decades are the analytical theorists. But as their number and prestige increase, they, also, have tended to distance themselves from the contemporary composer, almost as if they wished to substitute the expression ’superior analytical perspective’ in the paragraph above. But that they, whose primary professional pursuit is the analytically achieved understanding of, and - on occasion - the responsibly non-entailed evaluation of compositions, are never placed on commissioning panels, or recording juries, or in any position of critical influence is but another evidence of the triumph of unreason. Further, their authority and influence have been undermined by the ubiquity of the recent music aestheticians, whose anti-professionalism takes the form, among a number of other forms, of almost never invoking even as little as the names of the classical analytical theorist, and never those of the most recent and most important past. Hermeneutics’ new hermits seldom face the music, for they mainly bow to each other. For example, one name to be found cited throughout the literature is that of Michael Scruton, who, in an article published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism on, merely, ‘The meaning of music’, and then reprinted, without emendation or correction, in the collection Analytic Aesthetics, exposes ‘but one instance of the intellectualism that has bedevilled the music of the “avant-garde” -the attempt to justify the musically arbitrary by making it intellectually inevitable, and to impose conceptual form on what is tonally formless’. The ‘avant-garde’ remains unidentified, as do any evidences of anyone’s invocation of ‘inevitability’. But Professor Scruton derives his authority for such condemnations a page earlier in the same essay, where he invokes again the descriptive ‘bedevils’ with respect to the analysis of Heinrich Schenker, which he claims ‘endeavours to account for the perceived form of a piece of music by showing its derivation from a basic musical idea, or Ursatz. The Ursatz may be a harmonic progression, a melodic sequence, or simply an interval, such as the fifth which plays so important a part in the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or the third which governs melody and harmony in Wagner’s Ring.)’ Any reader who is unable to recognise immediately the outrageous preposterousness, the congeries of absurdities contained in this statement immediately should stop reading this and begin trying to read Schenker. And the scholarly probity can be inferred from the reference to a footnote, which is presumed to confer authenticity on the assertion by referring, simply and completely, to the three volumes (in four parts) of Schenker’s Neue musikalische Theorien und Phantasien, not to a particular passage or page, or even a specific volume, which is especially arresting in that the concept of the Ursatz arrives only in the last volume.

Name droppings often appear to spell disaster for these wide-ranging generalists. As when Professor Jerrold Levinson, in his modestly entitled Music, art, and metaphysics, states: ‘Schoenberg’s first twelve-tone works - e.g. the piano pieces op.23 - are certainly to be heard as twelve-tone works’. Such certainty is historically as well as personally challenging, even mind-boggling, since this is the first revelation that - for example - the classical instance of ‘composing with the tones of a motive’, op.23 no.3 can be construed as ‘twelve-tone’. I await Professor Levinson’s 12-tone explication as eagerly as I still await Professor Peter Gay’s 12-tone analysis of Wozzeck, for which I have been waiting for a quarter of a century.

So, as we continue to suffer at the hands and mouths of such intruders from other disciplines, or the lack of same, and in the light, or dark, of all these present circumstances, how and in what condition can serious musical activity thrive and deepen, and even survive? Even the ever-optimistic and genial Samuel Lipman has written: ‘classical music today is in deep trouble. It is not clear whether we can do more than bear witness.’ Even under oath, that would scarcely seem to suffice. And that classical, that serious music has been characterised by an unfortunately influential newspaper as a ‘modest sub-culture’; observe the sneaking normatives ‘modest’ and ’sub’; why not ’super’ and proudly ‘immodest’?

If that precept of folk psychology that he who succeeds in overcoming the greatest obstacles will produce the greatest achievement is to be trusted, then we can only pray that there will be an active survivor, for he would be perforce a remarkable creator, and a lonely one.