Shock of the New?

David Pay seeks the fear factor in contemporary classical music

"Rubbish!" The word repeatedly echoed through the Orpheum, along with eruptions of booing from two men in different parts of the hall. These expressions of outrage accompanied the last notes of Vancouver composer Peter Hannan’s Side with Entropy, a new work that had opened that particular Vancouver Symphony concert this past spring. It had been paired with what seemed to be one of the most popular pieces of the 2004–05 season across Canada, Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Given the influence of our southern neighbour’s puritanical responses to popular culture, you’d have expected the latter to be the evening’s controversial element, with its lusty depictions of prurient debauchery. Not so.

I could only assume that the men’s reactions were directed at the piece, not the performance. As a regular concertgoer hard-pressed to find contemporary work on mainstream concert programs, the incident did make me ask: What is it about serious new music that makes audiences so determined not to like it? In the 18th and 19th centuries, audiences expected concerts to feature the latest compositions, but that somehow changed. When it comes to classical performance in the early 21st century, audiences occasionally seem willing to grin and bear new music—perhaps believing that it’s good for them—but mostly they just avoid it.

Commissioned by the VSO, Side with Entropy mixes electronic sampling, amplification, and a traditional symphony orchestra with a rigorously composed score that includes sudden changes from hard-driving rhythms to a mysterious lyricism. Personally, I loved hearing the spoken-word and everyday sound samples simultaneously with the acoustic instruments. So what was the fuss about? The piece did incorporate an underlying political message about consumerism, deriving from text that reads in part, “Got much. Need more.” I wondered whether the booing had more to do with the amplification shattering more staid expectations of a Monday evening at the symphony.

I decided to ask the people at the source. “The piece has a subtly political message, so it might be that,” said Hannan, considering the incident during a recent interview. “And some people have a really strong reaction to modern electronic technology, and object to their world being invaded by sounds from the street.

“There’s a kind of knee-jerk reaction to technology and music,” he continued. “People forget that orchestras are a collection of technology from the last five centuries, and that composers have always used the latest musical technology, whether it was introducing modern violins or Wagner tubas. I’m not trying to rattle the cages. I love writing for orchestra, and orchestras are part of my history as a musician. But so is electronic music. It makes total sense to me to combine acoustic orchestral music with amplified electronic music.”

Bramwell Tovey, the VSO’s music director who had conducted the première, considered similar options. “I really am not sure what brought [the booing] on, except that I do know at least one person who comes on Mondays who loathes Canadian music—and this is a person who by any other definition would be called a patriot. I am inclined to think it had nothing to do with the electronic component in the score, as for most people I spoke to this was a plus rather than a detraction. Perhaps it was induced by a person who saw Peter Hannan’s recent opera 120 Songs of the Marquis de Sade, with all its attendant nudity and scenes of masturbation and orgiastic indulgence.“

If that was the case, it’s a very good thing Carmina Burana wasn’t staged. But no matter what the cause of the small minority’s vocal disgust, Hannan was happy about the feedback: “I would rather a live reaction like this than people lying there like corpses.”

While it might add some spice to concert-going if we heard regular booing, why do we only hear public derision when the art is new, and not when a performance of standard repertoire is mediocre, or worse, bad? And do those who are brave enough to boo at a performance have the critical capacity to differentiate between good work and bad work, rather than just sounds they like and sounds they don’t like?

* * *

In May of 1998, after a theatrically hilarious close to act one of Rossini’s Barber of Seville, I turned to the woman sitting next to me at the Vancouver Opera. We traded impressions and commented on the audience’s laugh-out-loud reaction, then moved on to discuss the recent staging of Richard Strauss’ Salome, which had been directed by filmmaker Atom Egoyan. I expressed disappointment about Egoyan’s production, but was effusive about the highly chromatic 1905 score. Dismissively, the woman responded, “I’m too old for that kind of music.” I looked at her aghast. She appeared to be in her early 70s, so I pointed out, “The music is older than you are!” Sure enough, she was taken aback by her realization that her excuse didn’t hold water.

Maybe it’s just innocent ignorance—the kind that considers Salome to be contemporary—that sets the course for the public’s unwillingness to engage with new music. Maybe it’s a lack of historical perspective, combined with an expectation that serious music is a diversion rather than a legitimate reflection of the society in which it’s created.

“In Canada,” Hannan commented, “composers are not regarded as real artists, [un]like filmmakers and authors. Composers are regarded as a joke and not taken seriously as artists who express the world we live in.”

He also finds it remarkable that highly educated, artistically engaged people discuss the songs of Bob Dylan as “serious music” while often being totally unfamiliar with modern masters like Pierre Boulez, Steve Reich, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Louis Andriessen. While acknowledging Dylan’s brilliance in his field, Hannan points out that if the same people lionized crime writer Ruth Rendell as a genius author of serious literature in the way that they hold up Dylan as a genius composer of serious music, they would be laughed out of the room.

“Serious music is wallpaper in Canada, not an activity people do,” Hannan added. “In Holland and the UK, people treat music differently because they’ve actually done music. It’s not just a joke class in Grade Seven. For a culture to be truly healthy in any art form, you need the full spectrum, from the most popular to the most experimental. If we hadn’t had Stockhausen’s influence, pop music, especially electronica, would be different today. And the same holds true for classical music. If we hadn’t had David Bowie, new music today would be a lot less interesting.”

* * *

The New York Times classical-music critic Allan Kozinn recently named New York’s Music at the Anthology Festival his number-one classical pick of the year. No less than Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson, two of America’s most influential and widely known contemporary composers, sit on its board. Knowing that Manhattanites are famously more culturally engaged than most urban citizens, I arranged my tickets in advance for a Thursday night concert in a small church in Chelsea at last year’s festival.

Turns out there was no need. Despite the great press, and the presence of Glass in the audience, I shared the concert with a mere 28 others. New Yorkers seem to be as poorly engaged by new music as the rest of North Americans, and it’s not just at the MATA Festival. I’ve been to sold-out performances of new theatre in New York, and I look to the heady escalation of prices for contemporary visual art that is driven by that city, but I know of hardly any examples of sold-out new-music performances.

In June, I reached Lisa Bielawa, a composer, vocalist, and MATA’s artistic director, by email. She was just finishing a run with the Philip Glass Ensemble at Lincoln Center, which, she hastened to point out, did sell out. Asked about new-music audiences in New York, she described an ecology that fits many new-music centres.

“One of the realities of New York, as opposed to anywhere else in the US,” she explained, “is that there is such a density of actual practitioners here, and not just of new concert music—almost everyone is a doer, few are merely audience. Larger draws (like the Philip Glass Ensemble) still bring audiences that have a much higher percentage of composers/professional musicians in the audience than in other places.

“This means that there is something going on here—a ferment, a cross-fertilization—that has value beyond sheer audience numbers,” she continued. “Our work is better for it. But the real value of this ferment is, I hope, when our works can find audiences, beyond this ferment—audiences outside of New York, where the audience constitution/make-up is different.”

So perhaps, for the sake of the art, new-music concerts are more important for new-music practitioners than they are for audiences. Perhaps, in a hothouse environment, new music can develop and thrive in and of itself. But if it’s created in such an environment, what happens when it gets exposed to the elements, to a larger audience with a different constitution?

* * *
Generally, music is considered one of the most ineffable of art forms. As a saxophonist with six years of post-secondary training, including many courses in theory and history, I’ve gained some skills to wrap my brain around how timbre, dynamics, structure, and timing affect me and my response to music. With my training and regular immersion in performances of serious music from all periods, I also contextualize new music vis-à-vis other experiences.

I wonder if serious new music is really like conceptual art and other serious contemporary art forms, which often don’t start to engage people in a transformational experience until they take the time to learn what’s going on, what the history is, what the references are. Or perhaps it is a phenomenon more like the weather, something about which we can develop a visceral understanding through exposure, whether or not we understand everything that goes into it.

As a fan of modern dance, I lack the critical capacity to explain why a turn of Vancouver dancer/choreographer Crystal Pite’s wrist can create a lump in my throat, but I never worry about this inability when describing why I find her work transformational. And there are many times at concerts when, despite my musical training, I’m overwhelmed by a performance, plain and simple. In these cases I have no desire to explain what many concert-goers describe as the primary reason they listen to music: a transcendent experience.

Of course not all serious new music actually can offer its listeners a transcendent experience. Truly great music from any period is produced only by a fraction of the composers creating at any given moment. But why do most audiences today shy away from new music so completely that they miss the opportunity to discover what may be truly great?

In The Wilson Quarterly’s Spring 2005 issue, writer and musician Miles Hoffman proposes that music “is a balm for loneliness and a powerful, renewable source of meaning,” as well as “a perfect template onto which we can project our personal complexes of emotions.” He posits that the “pleasing qualities of consonant chords and intervals,” combined with the contrast of dissonance that resolves into such pleasing chords, is the basis of all “good” music. He goes on to say that a composer who creates atonal music is the equivalent of a chef “who suggests swallowing a tablespoon of salt for an appetizer and following it with a bowl of Tabasco for an entrée before washing it all down with a cup of vinegar.”

Hoffman clearly blames atonality for the lack of audience engagement, and cites composers who use non-tonal musical languages as the cause of the demise of Western classical music. But what his article lacks is a description of what drove the creation of atonality. When Arnold Schönberg wrote about his “emancipation of dissonance” in the early 20th century, he set forward a modernist agenda whereby that which was previously understood as dissonant could become consonant. Reading his writings about the hierarchy of musical notes and chords is like reading about human hierarchies. The “emancipation of dissonance” was as much about a reaction to the very human qualities of a regimented, militarized Vienna—and, I believe, Schönberg’s desire for social change—as it was about an exploration of musical language.

Atonality was therefore, at its beginning, a political response and an aesthetic response, and Schönberg and his disciples thought that people’s process of listening would evolve through exposure to understand this music as they do tonal music.

This attitude doesn’t seem to have even remotely taken root in the population at large. My sister-in-law, for example, refers to atonal music as “nightmare music,” and tries to avoid it. Of course music should sometimes be able to reflect a nightmarish world, and understanding that world should, ideally, be a goal for most of us. But if art, and the transformation it can bring us, is about giving voice to our dreams—or, as Hoffman puts it, “we hear in music our own emotions”—then it seems that most concert audiences today dream of an idealised 18th- or 19th-century world.

I look to the American “Painter of Light” Thomas Kinkaid for a visual analogy of this idealized world—all picket fences and gaslights—and I envision a personal nightmare: living in a Kinkaid-filled home in the middle of Celebration, Florida. You can believe there wouldn’t be any atonal music within earshot. And probably nothing as political as Beethoven’s Ninth.

* * *

For today’s audiences to embrace new music, does the musical language matter? Do audiences engage more with tonal minimalism than avant-garde atonality, for example? Based on the following experiences, Bramwell Tovey thinks the response is individual. “Jocelyn Morlock’s new VSO work, commissioned by the CBC, was a work easily accessed [by the audience]—as opposed to Thomas Adès’ Asyla, which the VSO premiered four years ago. The audience seemed baffled by the Adès and charmed by the Morlock. There is no hard and fast rule here.”

Is there a hard and fast rule about how much new work can be programmed by mainstream music presenters and producers? Take a look at the brochures or websites of the largest music organizations in Vancouver and across the country and try to find the living composers. (Of course there are small organizations dedicated to presenting work by living composers, such as Vancouver New Music and The Western Front.) Now compare that to the exhibitions of work by living artists at our largest museums, the staging of plays by living playwrights at our major theatres, and even the presentation of new choreography by major dance companies across the land.

While we expect museums to include collections of contemporary art, and theatre companies to present new work by living playwrights, we tend to demand a lovely wash of pretty—and old—sounds from our music institutions. After all, if “music soothes the savage breast,” it can hardly be expected to challenge us as well. Why do most audiences equate intellectual challenge and new ideas in music as contrary to the ability to lift us onto a higher plane?

Perhaps it is, as Hannan observed, a lack of hands-on training and education that leads to a general desire for passive musical experiences. In her email, Bielawa also sent me a relevant quote from Bertrand Russell’s “In Praise of Idleness”:

The amusements of modern urban populations tend more and more to be passive and collective, and to consist of inactive observation of the skilled activities of others. Undoubtedly such amusements are much better than none, but they are not as good as would be those of a population which had, through education, a wider range of intelligent interests not connected with work. Better economic organization, allowing mankind to benefit by the productivity of machines, should lead to a very great increase of leisure, and much leisure is apt to be tedious except to those who have considerable intelligent activities and interests. If a leisured population is to be happy, it must be an educated population, and must be educated with a view to mental enjoyment as well as to the direct usefulness of technical knowledge.

Do different countries with different levels of music education, then, really have a different reaction to new music, as Hannan suggested? Conversely, Tovey felt that “perhaps audiences are younger here than in Europe and consequently more receptive. In North America we live in the post-modern age—even the post-post-modern age. Europe is still fretting about the past.”

I asked Bielawa if she notices a difference in responses to new music between American and European audiences. “Certainly the most noticeable differences are between the US and places like Serbia or Bulgaria,” she answered, “where a tender, grateful audience will come to any artistic offering—a play, a concert, an exhibit—with an open mind and heart, and not let their individual opinions about the specifics of the performance or the material cloud their appreciation for the meaningfulness of artistic endeavour in their community. There is too much of a glut of expensive, easy-access entertainments [in New York] for any audience to feel this way. It is one of those silver linings that comes with genuine hardship at the society-wide level.

“Every audience is different,” she continued. “When we took [Glass’s] Einstein on the Beach around the world, we found that Japanese and German audiences were silent and respectful, French and American audiences were excited and spent a lot of the time in the lobby enjoying the ‘scene’, Australian audiences were confused but eager to give it a chance, and Spanish audiences were largely stoned. But even different nights in the same hall brought different audiences.”

Every audience is different, and, to state the obvious, every performer is different. I believe that good music played extremely well always wins fans. And great music, of any period, genre or culture, performed magnificently, is transformational. Perhaps if we could all embrace the Serbian and Bulgarian approach of listening with open mind and heart, that transformation is something we would all attain.