Music, of course 4.2: Contemporary music…

I am tired.

As a composer, I am tired of the constant complaints about the “weirdness” of modern music. I am well aware that Stockhausen does not sound like Brahms. I know for a fact that Crumb chamber works cannot be mistaken for Mozart serenades. I understand that the octatonic scale only faintly resembles a major scale. I sympathize with the reality that polyrythmns are much more difficult to discern than homogeneous ostinato patterns.

And I don’t care in the slightest.

I am not so naive as to pretend that I don’t know who funds the majority of symphonies, opera companies, ballet troupes, and chamber associations. I am, however, concerned with human mortality. The inescapable fact remains that the little blue-haired ladies will soon pass away. I wonder who will be left to fill the void. Whom have the elderly patrons trained to take their place on the boards of civic orchestras? Have they passed on their tired, outdated prejudiced opinions to the vapid and listless generation that followed them? Will I hear more inane comments such as “Ooh, I don’t know about that Schoenberg fellow…his music just isn’t very pretty…”

Pretty?

Schoenberg’s groundbreaking period began in 1911. For the mathematically challenged, that was over 98 years ago. Does this honestly still qualify as “modern music?” He is dead. Mozart is dead. Beethoven is dead. Their music lives on of its own accord. Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutti doesn’t need your help anymore. It lives and breathes simply because it is transcendent.

I used to think that modern composers needed your help as well. We asked for your support, but you found our language to be too challenging…so you gave up trying. When the harmonies became too lush, when the melodies became secondary to tone-color, and when the rhythms became too dense, you decided to stick your heads in the sand and stop trying to understand art for what it is rather than what you wish it to be. You turned us into beggars. Not anymore.

I quit.

I will write, you will listen. Or not. I need not depend on it for my livelihood, so the choice has now become relatively arbitrary to me. I will no longer try to please your aesthetic dustbin of a collective mind. Listen to the same insipid Brahms symphony over and over. Music will continue to grow without your assistance. Who killed the symphonic tradition?

You did- by never allowing it to evolve.