While today’s iconoclastic visual artists like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin are hotly de-bated among art aficionados, in the world of music, contemporary classical composers inhabit a dissonant ghetto all their own. Few people listen to them, few critics review them and few people understand them. Western classical music as a whole makes up only 3.5 percent of the world’s total music market (contemporary works aren’t broken out separately). In 2002, classical-album sales were down 17 percent. Orchestras rarely feature contemporary works. “If you go to a museum or dance company, the balance between old and new is completely different,” says Nicholas Kenyon, the BBC’s controller of the Proms, live events and television classical music. But is that because new music is uninspired, or just not as familiar to us as Mozart? Are the composers to blame–or are we?
Classical music was once at the heart of Western culture, inspiring writers and attracting a huge popular following. When Beethoven died in 1827, schools were closed for his funeral and more than 10,000 people gathered outside his Vienna home. Oscar Wilde sent to Germany for piano scores of Wagner’s new operas in the 19th century, and T. S. Eliot quoted directly from the libretto of “Tristan and Isolde” in his poem “The Waste Land.”
Today, modern classical music is completely marginal to mainstream culture. In part, that’s because there are so many more entertainment options. But it also reflects a fundamental change in the composer’s role in society. Whereas Bach was employed by dukes and churches to churn out masterpieces on a weekly deadline, during Mozart’s lifetime there was a shift to the notion of the composer as a romantic genius, sitting alone–and preferably starving–in a garret. Gradually, originality became prized above all else, with dire consequences–a distinct absence of melody that made many new compositions inaccessible and unmemorable. “There was a long period [immediately after World War II] when music went out of sync with public taste,” Kenyon explains. “As composers tried to develop a new musical language, it became very esoteric.”
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment during the 20th century when classical music lost its way. Maybe it was in 1923, when the Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg overthrew traditional notions of harmony with his “Method of Composing With Twelve Tones Which Are Related Only With One Another.” Or maybe it came with John Cage’s notorious 1952 piece “4.33.,” scored for any number of musicians, all of whom sit without playing a note. Some composers experimented with adding recorded sounds. A performance of Cage’s “Roaratorio” requires noises to be recorded from every place in Ireland mentioned in James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake.” “With the Mozart and Beethoven our Western ears are trained to like, you hear the first half of a phrase and you have a sense of what might come next,” says French-horn player Alexia Cammish, who participated in the Proms’ Adams premiere. “Modern music intentionally lacks that, so you don’t know what to expect. The aural logic that you’re used to goes straight out of the window.”
To be fair, not all modern music is as impenetrable as the atonal works of the 1950s and ’60s. “There is still a sort of resistance [to modern pieces] built on music people were hearing 20 or 30 years ago,” says cellist Julian Lloyd –Webber, brother of composer Andrew. “I think the message needs to be brought home that not all new music sounds like that now.” Harsh minimalism has been transformed by composers like Adams and Philip Glass into melodious, appealing new works. Drawing on different spiritual traditions, avant-garde music such as Samuel Barber’s lavish “Adagio for Strings” even hit the U.K. classical-album charts last year, as part of a “Classical Chillout” compilation. “It’s a much more diverse scene now,” Kenyon says, “but that also means it’s not easy for the public unless they’re being exposed to [new music] regularly.”
Indeed, there is no inherent reason that music of our own era should not thrill and challenge audiences as much as the classics of 200 years ago. “There are definitely 20th-century classical composers that you can put on a level with Beethoven,” Lloyd Webber says, naming Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Stravinsky. As Kenyon puts it, “The best music has always confronted the problems of the time.” Hans Werner Henze’s Ninth Symphony, for instance, completed in 1997, explores the feelings of persecution, terror and grief that the composer endured as a young man in Nazi Germany, but transcends these to offer a vision of life’s startling beauty. Some wonderful midcentury gems, dismissed as old-fashioned in the 1950s and ’60s when atonality was all the rage, are also taking their place in the sun–including Malcolm Arnold’s symphonies and William Walton’s rich concertos for cello and viola.
It may simply be too early to say which 20th-century compositions will endure. As the programmer of the Proms concerts, Kenyon has noticed shifts in people’s musical preferences. “The canon changes,” he says. “Right now, for instance, we’re seeing the emergence of Shostakovich, who is more communicative with people today than Tchaikovsky.” Renowned American composer Elliott Carter, 94, who was a music critic in his youth, recalls attending the U.S. premiere of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” in 1922. “It was very much disliked at the time,” he says. “Half the audience walked out.” And that was nothing new, he says: “There was a good deal of complaint about Bach’s music in Leipzig because it was considered too complicated and too difficult.”
Today’s audiences are slowly coming around. Concert halls are learning how to lure music lovers to modern classical concerts. After the Royal Opera House slashed its top ticket price to $80, it sold out recent productions of Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck” and Nicholas Maw’s “Sophie’s Choice.” Britain’s classical-music station Classic FM has 6.6 million listeners–more than the BBC’s pop station, Radio 1 (though Mozart is still Classic FM’s most requested composer). To help audiences overcome their aversion to modern works, the station has been arranging for young composers to spend time with youth orchestras. “Extraordinary emotions exist between young people and their idols–footballers, pop stars,” says managing director Roger Lewis. “If they see that composers are living, breathing people who dress like they do, it helps take [classical music] out of the museum culture.”
Others argue that even more drastic measures are called for. Dynamic solo percussionist Evelyn Glennie believes that classical performers should take cues from pop artists. “By that I don’t mean we need a different dress code or flashing lights,” she says, “but classy productions that are unpredictable and suitable for the type of repertoire that’s being played.” And big concerts–like the Proms–should be treated as the grand events they are. “Every single time [our grandparents] went to a concert it was a real occasion,” Glennie recalls. “We don’t have that feeling anymore.”
On Sept. 12, the crowds of music lovers camping out on the street to get much-coveted Last Night of the Proms tickets will no doubt have that feeling. Broadcast on big screens in parks around the United Kingdom–as well as to millions of BBC viewers worldwide–the legendary Last Night has been, for more than a century, a champagne-fueled party, in which the audience lustily sings along with favorite anthems like “Land of Hope and Glory” and hums to Edward Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance.” This year it will also hear a new work by 29-year-old composer Joseph Phibbs, the youngest ever commissioned to create a work for the event. “I’m terrified!” he says.
Audiences, on the other hand, shouldn’t be. Today’s difficult new work may well become part of tomorrow’s familiar repertoire. “It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful,” lamented British composer Benjamin Britten in 1937. “It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain; of strength and freedom.” Keep that in mind if all you hear is a complex, clashing cacophony. Modern music is a mirror onto our 21st-century world: un-predictable and terrifying, but electric, too, with a raw, spellbinding edge.
