Letter to the Editor
Dear Editor,
I've been reading with interest the ongoing debate on the death of classical music. It seems that classical music has been dying in operatic fashion, i.e. forever. But it is dying. In your pages all the usual suspects have been trotted out: hidebound audiences, greedy, scared and unimaginative orchestras, recording technology, school arts funding, and, of course, Milton Babbitt (as a composer, even a conservative one, I have a few angry words to say in defense of avant garde composers, but will save them until the end, because they are peripheral to what I really have to say). There is some blame to be placed everywhere, but I would like to point out two other trends which lie behind the decline of classical music.
1) Over time, music has changed from being a participatory activity to being a consumer product. The composers of Elizabethan England wrote madrigals not for professional singers to sing in front of a large audience, but rather for people to enjoy singing in their own homes. Madrigals were a parlor game, a form of entertainment, a lot more fun, for instance, than Trivial Pursuit. I would doubt that Vienna in 1785 had more professional musicians per capita than New York does now; in fact I suspect the opposite is true. Let's not forget that when Beethoven's 9th was premiered in the 1820's the orchestra included both the leading professionals of the day and many amateurs. If you missed the premiere, then the only way to experience the new sensation was to buy a piano arrangement of it and play it yourself. Classical music thrived in Vienna at the time, because people loved making the music themselves. I would venture to guess that life was just as hard for professional musicians then as it is now (c.f. Dickens' Little Dorrit); it was music itself that was thriving, thanks to the proliferation of amateur music makers.
Amateur music making was already on the decline by Beethoven's time. People like Brahms' friend Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, an amateur to whom he could send symphonic scores and expect her to read them at the keyboard, were
becoming more and more rare. Recording and broadcast technology, and the rise of our consumerist society, have severely curtailed it. So the pyramid is reversed. There are probably more professional musicians in the New York Philharmonic than there are active orchestral amateurs in all of Union County, New Jersey. Concert goers today view classical music not as a hobby and an intellectual excercise, but as a form of painless brain massage. Is it any wonder that Bach, most profound of all composers, is too heavy for them, and is outsold by Pachalbel. The fact is that we live in a musical society made entirely of those who ought to be the top of the pyramid.I was amused by Muriel Bossert's recipe for attracting an audience to a concert, but I can't help but wonder if - from the standpoint of classical music's welfare - all that time and effort would be better spent getting kids to make music. Just as with a famous old brand of stove-top popcorn, music is as much fun to make as it is to eat.
2] The nature of music making has been changing for a century now. We are living through a paradigm shift every bit as profound as the one which happened around 1600 with the inventions of opera, *thorough-bass, and modern string isntruments, and the decline of *polyphonic vocal writing. Just as the Baroque revolution rendered much great music strange and unperformable to contemporaneous tastes, so have recording technology, digital processing, and the characterstic instruments and textures of the last century of popular music driven a wedge between classical music and the every day popular reality of most of today's music consumers. When Mozart wrote [The Marriage of Figaro,] it was just an elevated version of the same musical language being heard in taverns, on the street, and in the Ländlers and waltzes he wrote for the emperor's dance parties. One could hardly say the same uniformity of language exists in the music, say, of Stockhausen and Sublime.
I am not advocating that you put down your violins and start writing concerti for dijeridu (much as I love that particular instrument), chapman stick and midi interface. A man's got to be what a man's got to be, after all, and self-consciously third stream music frequently sounds patronizing and false. Furthermore, we are living in a musical tower of Babel, where literally everything, certainly including violins, is grist for the mill (if I may mix metaphors). But I would like to see the effete and snobby dismissal of vernacular and vernacular-based music - and the adamant denial of even its potential for worth - toned down a little bit. It's true that you could take 99 percent of rock music and tie it up in a bundle, and I would without the slightest remorse trade it all for the Allemande from the Bach D major keyboard partita. But, on the other hand, I would trade every note ever written by Camille Saint-Saens (minus about 16 measures of the Organ Symphony) for Scarlet Begonias, to say nothing of the Beatles. The classics of the future, if they are to exist, are going to have to derive
spiritual and intellectual depth from a different set of musical conventions than did Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. The ground is changing beneath our feet. We can either adapt or die.Now, as to *Milton Babbitt. I'm a little tired of seeing "modern music" made the scapegoat for classical music's ills, and poor old "Uncle Miltie" being used as a straw man by every classical music eulogist. One would think Milton Babbitt was living inside a Volcano, stroking a white Persian cat and pressing buttons which sent Serialist apostates plunging through the floor into a tank of piranhas (twelve of them of course, and, come to think of it, he does look a little like Dr. Evil). He is not a charlatan bent on destroying classical music; he is writing the music that he wants to write because he thinks it is meaningful and important. I would believe Babbitt's accusers more if I ever heard audiences clamoring for Barber, but the fact is that they complain of excessive modernism when Prokofiev is programmed (This is absolutely true! It happened with a local orchestra not five years ago, when the orchestra had the nerve to program the 3rd Piano Concerto). The one-time primacy of academic serialism, blamed for so many of music's ills (I'm waiting for it to be tied to global warming) would never have happened if audiences had shown interest in some other kind of new music. Orchestra's like money, after all. But, with no guidance from their audiences, orchestras turned to academia as their arbiter of musical taste.
I blame composers (myself included) for only one facet of music's decline, and even then, only partly. We all ought to write more music that amateurs can play, and we ought to put the care into it that we put into the commissions we get from the big boys. Of course, that takes money....
John Sichel
Mountainside
Dr. Sichel is composer in residence with the New Philharmonic of New Jersey.