The Failures of Contemporary Composition-Again

Schonberg 1981, 199-202

This article was written in response to the outpouring of mail that the Jan. 14, 1962 piece (see above) evoked. Looking back, after twenty years, I don't think that any composer active in 1962 was "a really strong American composer." Who were the ones featured so prominently in Perspectives of New Music, the house organ of the American avant-garde during the 1960's?

Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter (the Big Two at the time), Seymour Shifrin, Lukas Foss, Charles Wuorinen, Donald Martino, Billy lim Layton, George Perle, Arthur Berger, John M. Perkins, George Rochberg, Ralph Shapey, J.K. Randall, Leiaren Hiller, Andrew Imbrie, Mel Powell, Harvey Sollberger and George Crumb, to take a quick glance through its pages. Many professionals would rate Carter as a major composer. I do not. I have suspicion about a composer who at the age of 71 (at the point of writing) has not been able to attract a public. I would apply the same argument to Roger Sessions and his music. The much-talked-about Babbitt seems to have been more an influence as pedagogue and guru than as a potent creative figure. Crumb seems to be the only one whose music has any kind of circula-tion. Most of the others are names known only to specialists.

And so, despite the contumely, I do not think I was wrong.

A FEW WEEKS ago this column went out looking for a really strong young American composer and could not find one. Then the mail started coming in, the gist being that this writer was (as Ella Logan once sang in Finian's Rainbow) "a rotter/and a lotta/dirty names." Most of the mail was written by composers. It seemed to be the product of a conditioned reflex, like the angry buzzing of a warrior bee when an enemy approaches the hive. 

The general idea of all the mail was that a composer puts notes to paper, and hence is the sacred guardian of a mystique deserving of respect and support; and the more complicated the manner in which he puts notes to paper, the more he should be supported. But that, really, was not what I was writing about. It was the philosophy and esthetic of so much contemporary composition that bothered me. Dissonance, or twelve-tone music, or advanced serial technique has nothing to do with it. Nor does Romanticism, for that matter. A strong Romantic renaissance is in the making, but I find the derivations of Moore and Ward as unpalatable (and more so) as the experiments of Cage and Stockhausen. 

Dissonance is a term that does not mean much any more. Bartók's middle period contains as much dissonance as anything to be heard today. So does a piece like Ives' Housatonic at Stock-bridge. The point is, to what expressive value is dissonance put? Dissonance for the sake of dissonance is as esthetically empty as consonance for the sake of consonance. And it is a fact that nearly all the great composers in history have been called dissonant in their own day. That goes as much for Mozart and Beethoven as it does for Chopin and Schumann, Mahler and Stravinsky and Bartók. 

But never before in history have we had such a concentration on paper music. Paper music (or "eye music") is the kind that looks beautiful on paper and can be subject to the most fascinating analyses. The trouble is that in actual performance the mind will not take in the carefully plotted relationships that the composer has written down. Intellectually we may know that the last movement of a specific work is a retrograde of the first: that is, it is the same, only played backwards. But the ear will not take it in, even if the eye and the mind will. Twelve-tone music is great for compositional tricks like this. Only too often the trick is passed off as a substitute for the real thing. 

This is the grammar of music, not music. We all know that yesterday's revolutions are today's platitudes, and every avant-garde phenomenon ends up bound in its own type of academism. In any case, every age has a dual esthetic-the esthetic that is, and the esthetic that is to be. Here is where the cultural lag comes into operation. Most of the public-and this has always been true-adheres to the esthetic that is. In our day, it is the mainstream of music extending, roughly, to the beginning of World War I. The esthetic that is to be will be the language of the dodecaphonists, the electronic music composers and even Dada, but all assimilated into a common and comprehensible (to the general public) language. 

And it is only wishful thinking to maintain that because a work is new it must, ipso facto, be supported. In any age the overwhelming mass of creative effort is second-rate. Our age is no different. Up to now, what with musical figures like Bartók, Vaughan Williams, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Poulenc, Hindemith and Schoenberg, to mention a few names that come instantly to mind, we have not done badly at all. But below the big figures is the struggling mass of composers with the technique to express themselves, but without the genius to make their message memorable. 

Most of the correspondents who were angry about the conclusions I drew seem to think that it is the duty of a critic to pat everybody on the back. This is known as "encouraging talent," and is supposed to be "constructive." I call it coddling. Indiscriminate praise has been the bane of the generation. So many critics are afraid of being called reactionary, and are so lacking in confidence of their own abilities, that they have indulged in a positive orgy of back-slapping, making obeisances in the direction of anything that happens to be à la mode. That goes as much for critics in the other arts as it does for music critics. The one comfort is that no critic can alter the course of a positive forward movement. A good review never put an artist or composer permanently on the map, and a bad review never broke him. It is by a body of work, not by an individual performance, that the composer will live or die. All a mistake in critical judgment does, in the long run, is make a fool of the critic —a contingency the good ones are gladly prepared to accept. If not—if he thinks that his words are supported by scripture and Blackstone—he should be held to the ground while small pins are inserted in him to let the hot air out. 

Thus good music will flourish with or without the help of a critic, and the big men—the geniuses—will go their own way. There is no such thing as a misunderstood genius; it is a contradiction in terms. Van Gogh is perhaps the only great creative figure who did not attract a devoted following in his own day. Even Schubert, whose importance was not fully realized at the time, was recognized at his death as the greatest song composer in Germany, as his obituary notices will demonstrate; and his impact was such that the young Robert Schumann, on learning of Schubert's death, wept all night. 

History also points out that the big figures of a period are not necessarily the lasting ones. Spohr, Moscheles, Heller, Boieldieu, Kalkbrenner, Hummel: so fantastically successful a hundred or so years ago! And forgotten so soon afterward! But they were followers, not leaders. The great men almost immediately put their mark on the age, and if they live long enough (Schubert, after all, died at 31) their impact is shattering. They literally alter the course of music. Stravinsky and Schoenberg, in our century, certainly did. 

But, as I wrote, there seems nobody among the young composers in America strong enough to make that kind of impact. (It is hard to believe that if there were a composer of such power his work would be unknown.) Technicians we have all over the place. The owner of a bright, inner flame of the kind that produced a Charles Ives- that is missing. Avant-garde conformity spreads over most of our creative ambience, and that is the close-order drill to which so many of our young composers seem to be marching, led by a couple of very vociferous sergeants. FEB. 11, 1962