Audiences hate modern classical music because their brains cannot cope

[North Star]

I never imagined before that "our culture" was like a building, with foundations stopping it all from crumbling.

I didn't quite mean it like that myself either...

[71 dB]

What needs effort depends on what your expectations are, ...

Expectations are the enemy of enjoying art. It's difficult to get rid of expectations, but it always pays off.

[Karl Henning]

Jeffrey's is a good underlying point, though, from the individual listener's viewpoint:  when one has made the effort, does the payoff justify the expenditure (so to speak)?

The counter-argument that I cannot generalize from my own experience is well taken — but is no consolation to the listener who personally finds no reward in the music.

Also, I find myself perhaps agreeing with Jeffrey that the filter is largely a success with the period 1950-1990 — most of the names I should have supplied are also well known. Still I personally might consider that composers such as Mennin, Schuman, & Piston have fared poorly by the filtration.

[Mandryka]

I didn't quite mean it like that myself either...

That's a shame because it would have been an interesting position to try to explore, like Descartes view of human understanding.

[Mirror Image]

Here's my viewpoint and I'm going to make it rather brief: I cannot speak for an audience, I can only speak for myself when I say that, whenever I hear a new piece of music, I want to come away feeling glad I listened to the work. If something is just dissonant and discordant for its own sake, then that's not going to be something I'm interested in hearing. I suppose, for me, it comes back to the old tonal vs. atonal battle. I believe a work, especially nowadays can contain both, but at some point there's still a part of me that wants to be satisfied with the music. There has to be some kind of access point I think, but sometimes I like music just for the sound of it like Scelsi or even some of Xenakis' works, but, ultimately, these composers are dead-ends for me as I don't get anything emotionally gratifying from their music. It's just an onslaught of sound that really has no kind of journey or musical narrative. At the end of the day, if I don't feel something for music, then there's no possible way for me to 'cope' with it at all.

[Scion7]

Perhaps I'm being pedantic, but, for the record, Bartok was not an "atonal" composer.  All of his music, no matter how dissonant, actually has a tonal center.

There are many pieces of his that are, in fact, atonal.  But that isn't really the point, as the topic is on modern classical music, not just "serial" music.

[Karl Henning]

There are many pieces of his that are, in fact, atonal.  But that isn't really the point [...]

But it's a good ancillary discussion:  what exactly is "atonality"?

[Mr. Three Putt]

Here's my viewpoint and I'm going to make it rather brief: I cannot speak for an audience, I can only speak for myself when I say that, whenever I hear a new piece of music, I want to come away feeling glad I listened to the work. If something is just dissonant and discordant for its own sake, then that's not going to be something I'm interested in hearing. I suppose, for me, it comes back to the old tonal vs. atonal battle. I believe a work, especially nowadays can contain both, but at some point there's still a part of me that wants to be satisfied with the music. There has to be some kind of access point I think, but sometimes I like music just for the sound of it like Scelsi or even some of Xenakis' works, but, ultimately, these composers are dead-ends for me as I don't get anything emotionally gratifying from their music. It's just an onslaught of sound that really has no kind of journey or musical narrative. At the end of the day, if I don't feel something for music, then there's no possible way for me to 'cope' with it at all.

This is both well stated and completely reasonable. I was vague as to my actual preferences for a reason. Truth be told, I agree with you on both Stockhausen and Xenakis. I don't like mushrooms and I won't ever order food containing mushrooms, yet I won't pick them off a pizza. Eating them won't ruin my day but there are so, so many other foods I do enjoy, why would I ever work, or put effort into liking mushrooms? That's basically how I view "atonal" or even extremely dissonant music as well. I believe it's a sound and reasonable perspective and much less abrasive than saying , "That music just sucks." This is completely different from claiming to only want to hear beautiful things. The time and effort I put into Mahler and Bruckner have paid huge dividends for me. I found neither to be instantly gratifying.

Last night I was going through my 20 disc, Romantic Piano Concertos box and being blown away by music I'd never heard before. THAT'S why I listen and explore new music. I must admit when I see a disc from a composer I'm unfamiliar with, and I see they were born in the 1700s and died in the 1800s, I get a bit excited because that's my sweet spot. When I see they were born in 1952, I'm slightly less interested and they don't get top priority. That's not to say I won't get to them. It's just I'm not even 100% familiar with my very favorite composers and that's where my priority lies. The point I was making was I'm not going to dismiss an entire era/genre because of a few bad experiences. I'd still rather meet Schubert than Philip Glass but only one is possible and it would be an extreme honor. I adore most of Glass' (Glasses? ) music and think his 3rd String Quartet is a timeless masterpiece. I guess, in summary, I'm a big fan of open-mindedness.

[Scion7]

Well, speaking for myself, I define "atonality" as the serial / 12-tone row theory as developed by Schoenberg and his two closest students-associates-coleagues, Berg and Webern.  Not all stretching-the-envelope modern classical music is atonal, of course.

I define "charlatan" as per the OED. 

:-)

[Karl Henning]

[...] I guess, in summary, I'm a big fan of open-mindedness.

I salute you, sir!

(And I find my ears "grow larger" over time.)

[Karl Henning]

Well, speaking for myself, I define "atonality" as the serial / 12-tone row theory as developed by Schoenberg and his two closest students-associates-coleagues, Berg and Webern.

Then you agree with jochanaan that Bartók did not write atonal music, is how I read you.  Do I mistake?

[Mandryka]

It's just an onslaught of sound that really has no kind of journey or musical narrative.

I think one of the most far reaching effects of "mainstream" music has been to set people's expectations where yours are stuck, with the result that non narrative musics are hard to listen to.  I remember feeling exactly as you do now with Xenakis when I first started to pay attention to Schubert (D840/i for example.) It was when I started to listen to chant, and to Feldman, that I finally saw how limiting the narrative/journey conception of music is. That there's more things you can do in a listening experience than look for movement forward, for tension and release, for consequence. You can enjoy the ramble, the flânerie. Aimless walking -- that's another model of music than a story with beginning middle and end.

By the way, one of the problems with some Xenakis is that it's spacialised -- if you're not in Cluny it's not really possible to enjoy the polytope.

[Karl Henning]

And you say "an onslaught of sound that really has no kind of journey or musical narrative" as if it's a bad thing . . . .

http://www.youtube.com/v/4fWTc6_-90I

[Scion7]

Sorry, but I have lots of literature besides my own eardrums that state Bartok wrote some serial pieces.  I find the 3rd and 4th string quartets definitely in that area.  Shrugs.

[Karl Henning]

Sorry, but I have lots of literature besides my own eardrums that state Bartok wrote some serial pieces.

I crave your patience. If there is so much literature on your shelf, there should be no difficulty bringing us a citation, yes?  I am highly interested.

I have studied the scores of the third and fourth quartets;  pace your eardrums, these quartets are not serial works.

Perhaps we need to expand our ancillary discussion:  What exactly is serialism?

[Karl Henning]

A quick and dirty Google with the keywords serialism and Bartók yielded the following abstract of an article in Music Theory Spectrum:

The paper explores a class of compound interval cycles, full statements of which run though the tones of the aggregate two, three, four, and so on, times, and in which like pcs are distributed as evenly as possible throughout the cyclic ordering. Such cycles, called maximally-distributed, multi-aggregate cycles, maximize chromatic diversity over their spans while constraining harmonic variety. The paper examines the role of maximally-distributed, multi-aggregate cycles (or segments thereof) as compositional determinants in a variety of Bartók's works. In particular, the paper considers how cyclic unfoldings are used in conjunction with the technique of near-aggregate completion, how cycle adjacencies are often treated as salient harmonic entities in passages that feature cyclic unfoldings, and how the periodic intervals of such cycles are often manifest as salient transformational intervals in works that unfold those cycles.

The title of the article (which drew my search) is "Multi-Aggregate Cycles and Multi-Aggregate Serial Techniques in the Music of Béla Bartok."

I'll say this:  whether or not my brain can cope with that abstract, is a question I happily leave untried.  I certainly agree that the late quartets of Bartók are rich, and we can broadly agree that they display maximized chromatic diversity and constrained harmonic variety (though I should feel very funny using such terms when speaking to anyone, however subtle his musical understanding, of my own music, for instance).

I can speculatively assent to the thesis Did Bartók manage his pitch-world in ways which may have parallels in serial music?  But there are no tone-rows in the third and fourth quartets.  There is not a single governing twelve-tone row in either piece, such that all the pitch material in the piece is derived from some version of that pitch set.

[Cato]

Wow!  I was wondering how this zombie-topic was still walking around!   

Looking at the title again after 5 years, I still wonder whether modern audiences have brains unable to "cope" with e.g. Stockhausen or Carter or Ferneyhough.

Listen to the latter's La Terre and once you get past the primordial chaos of the opening you - perhaps - will sense (c. 3 minutes) some sort of structure.  Some people may hear "mud" I am sure: but there are some exciting things here.

https://www.youtube.com/v/qxbpF_aW4vU

One must, however, realize that in its chromosomes percolate the genes of Charles Ives, Penderecki, Vermeulen, Ligeti, Stockhausen, Messiaen just to name a few.  Ferneyhough's style is not something produced ex nihilo: the style's ancestry is clear.

Now, has the Charles Ives of the Fourth Symphony or the Vermeulen of the Second Symphony become as popular as Mozart and company?  No.

As Thomas Mann's devil notes to (fictitious) composer Adrian Leverkuehn in the novel Doctor Faust: "Composing today is difficult, devilishly difficult."  The quest NOT to sound like Mahler, or Rimsky-Korsakov or any of the other composers considered "classic" is indeed "devilishly difficult" in the obvious sense that e.g. Beethoven was not competing against himself, nor against the archived and recorded achievements of the last 1000 + years, if one starts with the anonymous piece of two-voiced organum from c. 900 A.D.

Harry Partch and Alois Haba and Ivan Wyschnegradsky and microtonalists of all divisions have tried to solve this "devilish" problem by using the sounds outside of the 12 found in our scale.  Have their works invaded the popular or even semi-popular consciousness?  No.

New instruments using electronics have opened up new possibilities: in which direction, however, after over 60 years of possibilities in that field, will the audience migrate among the choices of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony or Vladimir Ussachevsky's Wireless Fantasy or Stockhausen's Hymnen?

And so: is "coping" really the problem?  Have audiences given the "new music" a proper shot, 100 + years after Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra and simply rejected it?  Or have they not given it a proper and fair hearing and rejected it out of hand?

Both would seem to be true, but I have always had a sense that the latter group is larger.  And so the problem remains: how do 21st-century composers avoid the bizarre to distinguish themselves and break out of the herd?  Or can they embrace the bizarre in such a way that they can sell it to the audience?   Certainly you have Arvo Paert saying "get back to basics," although a work like When Sara Was 90 Years Old may easily strike audiences as bizarre, and not worth their time.

[Karl Henning]

I find the title of an article from The Music Review in 1957: "Tonality, Symmetry, and Latent Serialism in Bartok's Fourth Quartet" by Colin Mason.  I bet that is an article I should enjoy reading.  It is worth noting that Mason modifies Serialism with the adjective latent, and that the first word in the title is Tonality.

[Karl Henning]

Sorry, but I have lots of literature besides my own eardrums that state Bartok wrote some serial pieces.  I find the 3rd and 4th string quartets definitely in that area.  Shrugs.

Actually, you see, where I was hoping to go with that is the fact that [ "atonal" music ] (allowing yet for an interesting, I think, discussion of just what atonal can mean) is a broader set than [ twelve-tone music ].  For instance, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern all wrote "atonal" music which pre-dates Schoenberg's discovery of the twelve-tone "method."

[Sergeant Rock]

Well, speaking for myself, I define "atonality" as the serial / 12-tone row theory as developed by Schoenberg and his two closest students-associates-coleagues, Berg and Webern. 

Ah, you're a disciple of Humpty Dumpty, I see 

When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."