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About That New Music...
by Dr. Ollie Powers
Ventura College Music Department
When you attend an orchestra concert, the chances are that you’ll hear well-understood and time-tested music from the great composers of the past. From time to time, however, the music director may program new, unfamiliar works. Sometimes these newer works may be a challenge to listen to and to understand, and you may very well wonder what was going through the minds of their composers.
Since I am a composer who has written a number of new works in a variety of styles, I can perhaps shed some light on what makes composers so interested in the new and unfamiliar. In the time of Mozart and Haydn, music tended to follow accepted procedures. It had a certain sound that was logical and fairly predictable. Then a younger composer came along and took that style in new directions, occasionally shocking audiences of the day with his daring sounds; his name was Beethoven. In the nineteenth century, many composers started where Beethoven left off, pushing music into even newer territory. More and more, the idea came into people’s minds that music, rather than holding to an unchanging ideal, was something that could evolve. And it became clear that composers in each new generation wanted to find their own voice rather than simply repeat the styles of the past. This tendency for change reached its peak in the twentieth century, where all of the old traditions were challenged. By the 1960s it was apparent that the musical revolution was so complete that anything was possible. As a composer now living in the twenty-first century, I have the feeling that my music can quite literally be anything I want. And this means that I have to choose, from a great many possibilities, what it is I am really interested in. This brings me to a consideration of my relationship to you, the listener. In the Classical Era, musicians and audiences were "speaking the same language" in the sense that the music had an established tradition to which the audience could relate. It was a time of a comfortable relationship between composers and listeners, because, it seemed, everyone knew what to expect. For many composers of the twentieth century, however, the need to develop and explore new sounds and new structures outweighed any desire that their music be made enjoyable to the average listener. A number of composers (Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis, and Babbitt, for example), considered what they were doing to be the pursuit of the most advanced new concepts, and they felt strongly that to simplify their music for the general public would be an unbearable compromise. Such composers either accepted that the audience for their music would of necessity be smaller than that for Mozart, or they complained that audiences weren¹t willing to make the effort to understand them. Thus, for much of the music written in the 1950s and 1960s, the relationship between composer and audience tended to be an uneasy one. But new music does not always have to be so forbidding. Aaron Copland, for instance, famously set about in the late 1930s to develop a simpler style for his concert music for the exact purpose of establishing communication with the concert-going public. His success with scores such as "Billy the Kid" and "Appalachian Spring" was enormous. And what is minimalism, developed in the mid-1960s and 1970s, if not a turn away from the extreme intellectualism and abstraction that prevailed up to that moment? Composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich brought a new simplicity, along with a return to tonality and regular rhythm, that probably caused more than a few listeners to breathe a sigh of relief. Toward the end of the twentieth century came talk of the "new romanticism" in which composers wrote again in an even more conservative idiom. Arriving as a composer at the present moment in time with all these possibilities before me, I must choose my direction. I don’t feel that I must choose one direction for all my music; instead, each piece I write has its own particular ideas to explore. No matter what possibilities I choose, however, I feel there must always be something new in my music. After all, there is no use writing something that sounds like Beethoven. For one thing, it has already been done. For another, it was done superbly, and I am not likely to be able to improve on the original! The third and probably most important thing, though, is that merely copying the past would provide no personal satisfaction. I think I can bring my own experiences and tastes to bear to create something original. I hope that when I do, I will bring something new into the world, and this means that my piece will naturally
have something unfamiliar in it. (But I do have the choice of how much unfamiliarity I embrace at any one time.) As a composer, I feel my responsibility is to explore these new sounds and structures and bring what I feel are the best of them to the audience. What is the audience¹s responsibility to new music? In my opinion, they ought to at least try new music from time to time, just to see if they might find something that excites them. It is certainly an experiment for the listener, since every composer will be doing something unique. Sometimes new works require many hearings. From my own experience, I can tell you that there exist pieces of music that I did not particularly understand until I really studied them me when I did, pieces that I now cherish. Another thing to consider is that we may be far more accepting of unusual music when we hear it in a movie soundtrack. Why shouldn’t we be able appreciate such dramatic and unusual music in the concert hall as well? I¹m reminded of how Stanley Kubrick used the awe-inspiring Requiem of György Ligeti for the most important scenes of "2001: A Space Odyssey." This powerful work can send shivers down the back of one’s neck. Although it is true that new music does not have the same guarantee as a tested classic, the experiment of listening to it may just pay off for you as it did for me when I encountered Ligeti. The music of the acknowledged masters (like Beethoven) will never disappear from the concert hall, and will no doubt continue to be dominant in the majority of concert programs. But when a new work comes along, do give it a try! There is probably someone like me behind it, who has brought together some new sensations and wants to share them with you. |
