Taken Seriously?

July 26, 2000

It seems that everything we encounter will eventually be classified somehow. Atonal music, liberal or conservative democrats, high-end or low-end are just some classifications I hear every day. I think some are more a matter of personal opinion than others, but that's just the way things are when one has choices. Having said that, let me get to the core of this posting.

Does it seem possible that one class of music is taken more seriously than another? (For purposes of this posting I am limiting my meaning of the word music to only include what is generally considered classical or art music) Being a composer myself I have been subject to harsh criticisms of my music. What has always troubled me is the basis for the criticisms. I don't recall when someone said I wrote out of range for the oboe or wrote passages too difficult for the trombone. Almost 100% of all negatives heaved at my music were because it sounded like Bach or like Beethoven (not like their quality but like their harmonic/melodic/rhythmic language) or something along those lines. People (esp. other composers) were quick to judge my music immediately because of the style rather than what I had to say.

I don't want this posting to be about me specifically but I would like to hear some opinions on the matter. I feel certain that someone would be taken more seriously from the start if the person listening heard something more atonal or 21st century or maybe something along the lines of a chainsaw hooked up to a digital delay. My question, again: Are some kinds or classes of music taken more seriously than others?

Wes Crone

OK, well, first off, if any socially influential group decides to take some music more seriously than others, then the answer is YES. Certain music has indeed historically been taken more seriously than other kinds of music, most of it falling into the rubric of "classical", which word itself describes, to some people's ears, the notion of a musical elitism, which they would like to banish from the earth, as if doing so would solve anything or help anyone. Their strong desire has nothing to do with the plain historical fact that some music was and has continued to be considered "better music" than the rest of it.

Elsewhere in these essays, I have indicated that my preferred view of the world is to give the whole business of life and the way the world runs a lot more respect than the average radical revolutionary gives it. There is no great social crusade that enthralls me. When truly understood, the role of a composer becomes all at once less socially significant and more culturally powerful.

In the work of the present, people take serious someone else succeeding where they have tried and failed. In the work of the near past, people take seriously that which gives them identity, often what they have been told is emblematic of their identity.

Nothing succeeds like success. That which succeeds in getting attention, approval, rewards is "taken seriously" and each individual lives his destiny and fashions his own identity from his experience.

The best road is not to worry about what "they" take seriously, but to find people who take what you want to accomplish seriously, and work with them. If you have something to say then eventually others will over hear the conversation and what to join in.

Stirling S Newberry

Well said! Once one gains a far less lofty perspective of one's mission, one can get down to the brass tacks of getting one's own music out there. Very often this involves a composer as a promoter of his music as well as its author, in one way or another, trying to find a way to make his music popular, but popular with whom?

If one wants to "make a scene" or a 'hit" for one's music, the best vehicle for long term financial success is to "go country" as this pop music idiom is very popular already in the big market. Of course I'm saying this tongue in cheek. But this is why composers of all eras tend to write in similar styles, because they were popular, people wanted to hear them. These days we have this strange notion that composers should be writing music in styles people would not want to hear. Music as medicine, bad tasting medicine at that, has been equated with progress. Can this be progress?

I'm a composer too, but my music is avant-garde and I received criticisms because is avant-garde. My opinion is: my work is to compose, the critic's job is to analyse. If the criticism is seriously right or wrong, I read the critic, I respect it, I profit some ideas, I ignore anothers, but I continue with my style.

Edson Ortolan

Well and good. Whatever one does, one must be true to oneself, etc. One thing I'm detecting, that I have thought for a long time, is that the music that specifically purports to be called or to call itself "classical" has far too many of its share of critics, from all sides. It is one thing for a critic to be informative, and more than for most other music, "classical" music really does benefit its audience when that audience is better informed about it. But, it is another matter for a critic to try to exhibit a style or set of styles as more fit for being taken seriously, which of course adds to the controversy concerning what music is to be taken more seriously. Way too many of us are putting the cart before the horse; we want to receive the laurels of immortality for ourselves and our works long before our works have succeeded. This is what I said,

Being Taken Seriously....

When I first went to Conservatory, where or even when is not important, it seemed to me that the composition department was bent on trying to produce nothing but people who could write like Hindemith, Bartok, Copland, Prokofiev or Shostakovich. In those years I didn't like these composers' style all that much. I preferred the styles of the Impressionists but rooted in the late romantics, particularly Brahms. I still have a preference for these styles, though not exclusively so. I found at that time a tendency among the faculty there, and elsewhere, to decry the limitations of the Brahmsian aesthetic. I am certain that it continues to this day, there and elsewhere. Except nowadays they want you to write like Crumb, Pendereki, Reich, Gorecki, Ligiti or even John Cage.

In my opinion, having tried the craft of composition only to the extent of producing a mere 18 opus numbers containing mostly piano and chamber music, there are other elements which must be there to produce a successful composition.

It does depend I suppose on your message, but it is essential to get and hold the attention of both players and audience and once seized, never to let it go until the last note fades away. When the music stops, there is a brief but discernable pause of dead quiet, followed by deafening applause. When this occurs, you know you have them! Your music has carried the day or more as is more usual, the night.

A composer owes this much to his audience. After all the craft of composition is mostly to provide entertainment to others. This has always been and still is the case, despite all appearances to the contrary. One of the people who understood this well was Mozart, despite the fact that he ended as a victim of his own financial failure. He had said, "music must delight" and had been successful earlier, much due to the delight people took to his catchy, clever, well conceived, incredibly economical style.

But he was writing popular music for an aristocratic class of musicians, which is one reason that the music, whatever was produced, succeeded so well. But all the great composers knew it as well. Haydn certainly knew it, as had Handel learned a few years earlier. For both it happened to be England. Go where the money is. Delight people with your music and you shall earn a living thereby. Some have been trying ever since to attain these heights, but not with much success.

The times and society have changed the role of a composer such that he is relegated to the same status as a poet, perhaps respected but not absolutely needed. If one has an idea of becoming a composer, being a character out of late 18th or 19th century European society, well then, better do it as a hobby in your spare time. Don't quit your day job. If one is to write music, might as well go commercial and just write what sells ice cream or automobiles, write for the movies, etc. This is one reason why movie music in most instances cannot be considered serious music. There are exceptions but few. In the cases that matter, the music has to be the equal of the movie itself.

Serious music is music that stands by itself. It shares the stage with nothing else, except in rare instances, vocal choruses and soloists, or with dancers. Serious music is written for no other purpose than to write it, that in some sense, it must be written. The goal of its creation is in the mind and heart of the composer, though quite a few composers have attributed what amounts to divine inspiration for their work, as though through their music, one would be hearing the voice of God.

Throughout the really brief history of music, a few composers have attempted to make social or political statements. Then as now, this strategy for a successful run of one's compositions over time is a calculated failure. Social or political matters are fleeting and always dated. Music lasts forever. It can cast a spell that is timeless. I know of at least half a dozen masterpieces from the last three centuries that are capable of doing this to an audience when played well; the enigmatic second movement of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto #1, Beethoven's Grosse Fuga, the third movement of Brahms' piano concerto #2, the last movement of Mahler's 2nd symphony, Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn, the Rite of Spring by Stravinsky which I choose as the most important work written in the 20th century! That's quite a reach in style, but they all have the ability to grab and hold the attention of all concerned, both musicians and audience.

It is possible that someone could reinvent, revive, utilize or out and out steal all kinds of thematic and harmonic bric a brac from this period and tack it back together in some new way. This was called neo-classicism about eighty years ago. They even banded together in France to try and resurrect the older style. But most of what they wrote sounds French, but in a modern way, with here and there a sideways jeer or the sound of auto horns in the crowded streets of Paris. It doesn't carry the same emotional message as the former classical style did, for after all, Vienna was then as it still remains, quite a distinct city from Paris.

Of course since the time of Beethoven, the composer has also become far more of an individual or has usually been expected to be so, though occasionally a few band together with the idea of forming a "school". But the cult of individualism has put a terrific strain on many composers owing to that they think they must come up with an original style of their own in order to establish themselves as serious composers.

Critics, FAR MORE THAN AUDIENCES, have made or broken the careers of composers for being too "derivative". I've often thought that most of the late eighteenth century composers sound derivative even if they hadn't that intention. Also, imitation was far less frowned on among composers in that era than it has become today. If the critic's intention was to have the conservatories churn out plenty of second rate Hindemiths and Coplands, I guess they succeeded.

Meanwhile the audiences, so much more annoyed because no one has succeeded in getting and keeping their attention long enough for them to get any enjoyment on any level, have often faded away whenever anything from the last 100 years is programmed. The critics annoy them too. People generally don't want to hear any more of what bores them. And let's face it, some of the compositions of the last fifty years have been exceedingly boring!

The solution is clear, the motivations are obvious, the challenges are daunting, the calling is unique. To be a composer, one must be able to get one's message across using nothing but music. In order to succeed, one must have some true idea of what music is and how it works on the hearts and minds, nay of the very beings of their listeners.

David Burton

I will tell something. My wife wrote a poem in the newspaper. Some attacked the poem that it was stolen from other work. My wife and I succeeded to prove that the poem is hers and not stolen. Of course, that thing still have effects on her.

Mohammed Iqbal

Yeah, well, other people can seem to rattle you for no apparent reason, destroying much joy in the process. Sort of takes all the fun out of creating anything. The solution might be for more of the critics to refrain from anything more than informative criticism. Think that will ever catch on? NOT! It's alive and well on the Internet. Read any of the classical music message boards out there and the infighting that often crops up? Partisans of this or that. Will any of this ever change? NOT!

Of course, but the hierarchy changes over time. Two examples: Opera used to be considered the highest form. Now it's probably the symphony or the string quartet, which in turn rose out of purely social music-making, at a time when a cappella mass settings were probably considered the highest genre.

I really don't believe that this supposed hierarchy has ever existed as Steve describes it. Opera has always had its pretensions, but even though opera was supported by the state or by wealthy private or political persons, opera productions were always bolstered by a large bourgeois (middle class) audience even as early as the 17th century. Opera was an event to attend in order to be seen as much as entertained. Opera was after all what people had before television; both sight and sound. So what if it was all in a foreign language, usually Italian? It tended to do best in the Latin or predominantly Catholic countries anyway, including southern Germany and Austria, which have always been predominantly Catholic countries. Some 17th century Portuguese operas are six hours long! Nowadays of course opera is more of a museum piece than ever. Most people attend operas with the same mixture of vanity and ignorance that they always had.

Other forms of music, particularly the symphony, and later chamber music, had two patterns of development, distinct from each other and from opera. The symphony first developed in certain courts of central European, mostly German, petty nobility, who generated interest in their localities by subsidizing larger musical establishments; orchestras of thirty-five or more professional players. Where there was opportunity, there were opportunists in the form of composers, who all that were interested to do so, wrote symphonies for these large groups; string bands with assorted woodwinds, horns and tympani, that became known as "symphonic societies", "Philharmonia" and eventually "symphony orchestras". Later on, especially in London and America, the large piano manufacturers sponsored many of these events, especially the tours of the great virtuosi accompanied by the ever increasing numbers of local, municipal or private orchestras that sprang up in cities everywhere as the 19th century drew to a close. In the 20th century these groups coalesced into the symphony orchestra societies of today. All the music these groups play is either already "in the museum" or intended to join its "permanent collection". I tend to look upon "artists in residence" at many modern symphony orchestras as "curators in training" positions.

Chamber music in its center of development, Vienna, became the private entertainment of princes, politicians, ambassadors and their courts. We live in quite a different day and age when people in these positions would never know how to play a violin. Whether these people who played string quartets by Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert or others of an evening after a meal, regarded these exercises as "the greatest" or "most profound" musical experiences or not, these kinds of concerts, including piano recitals, are accorded a certain musical significance. The whole realm of virtuosi instrumentalists stems from the chamber music societies and looser gatherings from the late 18th century onward. Virtually all of Chopin's recitals were held in private salons attended by at most a few dozen guests and servants. But, nothing like this "salon society" really exists anymore. Whatever is the current "art scene" in half a dozen big cities around the world is the closest we have to it.

Wes Crone said, "Being a composer myself I have been subject to harsh criticisms of my music. What has always troubled me is the basis for the criticisms. I don't recall when someone said I wrote out of range for the oboe or wrote passages too difficult for the trombone. Almost 100% of all negatives heaved at my music were because it sounded like Bach or like Beethoven (not like their quality but like their harmonic/melodic/rhythmic language) or something along those lines. People (esp. other composers) were quick to judge my music immediately because of the style rather than what I had to say."

I haven't heard your music, so I can't say anything really meaningful. Ideally, one shouldn't criticize on the basis of idiom alone. In other words, we should be grateful to have a good piece in whatever idiom. On the other hand, if you write in the style of Bach or Beethoven, you are competing with Bach and Beethoven - two masters of those styles. People might be comparing you to those two and, not surprising, preferring them.

Indeed, this is quite literally how a lot of people reason when they hear music that sounds too much like someone else's. The key of course would be to write music that might use similar forms, stretching them of course, but using quite different harmonic, melodic or rhythmic material as has been done by a few early 20th century composers.

Again, not having heard your work, I can't say that there's anything relevant or remotely helpful in any of the above. However, that's the music which has elicited the kind of response in me that you have gotten.

I think Wes was just trying to say that in his experience it didn't really matter what style his critics might have preferred, they'd criticize him for being too much like them, and hence inferior to them. Meanwhile Steve is describing a composer close by who to him is guilty of doing the same thing. It may be that these composers are just trying to get as close as they can to those composers whose styles they admire in order that something should "rub off". But if so, there would be something wrong with this. It is one thing to intentionally cover another's style. Satie did it wonderfully on a well known Sonatina of Clementi's. But it is quite another to approach to the coloristics of a style and yet have nothing of consequence to say. Real inspiration, which could be the subject of another piece, now that's something else.

Wes Crone also said, "I don't want this posting to be about me specifically but I would like to hear some opinions on the matter. I feel certain that someone would be taken more seriously from the start if the person listening heard something more atonal or 21st century or maybe something along the lines of a chainsaw hooked up to a digital delay."

Steve Schwartz

And sooner or later it is always recognized, for example, most of Mahler's music.

I had said, "To be a composer, one must be able to get one's message across using nothing but music. In order to succeed, one must have some true idea of what music is and how it works on the hearts and minds, nay of the very beings of their listeners."

I received a response to my post from another composer.

Dear David,

I thoroughly enjoyed reading your posting and find it, as a composer myself, to be quite inspirational!

Sincerely,

Amy Scurria

Composer