Audiences hate modern classical music because their brains cannot cope

[Wieland]

As a lay person it is always difficult to enter such a discussion. But as someone who has listened to Bartok quite a lot I have to say that his middle quartets definitely sound very different to me when compared with the last two of Schönberg which for me are typical 12-tone compositions or those of Boulez, Carter or Kurtag which are considered serial works. Bartok 3 and 4 are pretty dissonant but I don't think they are atonal or serial. But whatever they are, THEY ARE VERY EXCITING.

[(poco) Sforzando]

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.

You may shrug all you like. Bartok never wrote serially.

[(poco) Sforzando]

As a lay person it is always difficult to enter such a discussion. But as someone who has listened to Bartok quite a lot I have to say that his middle quartets definitely sound very different to me when compared with the last two of Schönberg which for me are typical 12-tone compositions or those of Boulez, Carter or Kurtag which are considered serial works. Bartok 3 and 4 are pretty dissonant but I don't think they are atonal or serial. But whatever they are, THEY ARE VERY EXCITING.

Thank you, your comment is on point.

[mc ukrneal]

As a lay person it is always difficult to enter such a discussion. But as someone who has listened to Bartok quite a lot I have to say that his middle quartets definitely sound very different to me when compared with the last two of Schönberg which for me are typical 12-tone compositions or those of Boulez, Carter or Kurtag which are considered serial works. Bartok 3 and 4 are pretty dissonant but I don't think they are atonal or serial. But whatever they are, THEY ARE VERY EXCITING.

Finally, a sensible post!

[(poco) Sforzando]

Finally, a sensible post!

Agreed. Let me just add that Elliott Carter did not adopt serialism either.

[Mirror Image]

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

I didn't say it was a bad thing, you did.

[Jo498]

In German "Serialismus" is usually reserved for the post-Webern extension of "series" for parameters beyond pitch (duration, dynamics, whatever). 12-Tone-composition is called "Zwölftonmethode" or "-Technik", sometimes "Reihentechnik" (because "Reihe" = series in the narrower sense usually refers to the 12 tone series). So I am always slightly confused if "serialism" is applied to 1930 Schoenberg rather than 1950 Boulez (or wherever it fits). The pre-dodecaphonic atonality (like "Erwartung") is often referred to as "free atonality"/"freie Atonalität".

For me as a layman it is usually impossible to tell. Berg wrote several movements in the Lyric suite with dodecaphonic method but not all of them and I could probably never tell from listening (AFAIR the first and the last are dodecaphonic, and at least another one as well. I think the part with the Zemlinsky quote is not.) There are fairly "tonal" sounding pieces using dodecaphonic techniques by Liebermann (Concerto for Band and Orchestra), Martin (Petite Symphonie Concertante) and the Co-inventor Hauer. It depends on the series used, sometimes they will lead to some kind of tonal centers.

In any case this very different music composed with that (and other "atonal") methods shows that it was, at least for several decades not a strait jacket but "just" a technique that could be employed for rather different results.

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

In any case this very different music composed with that (and other "atonal") methods shows that it was, at least for several decades not a strait jacket but "just" a technique that could be employed for rather different results.

One of the ironies here is that Schoenbergian serialism, far from sounding radical, often sounds like late Romanticism pushed one step further. Mid-century serial symphonies, like Rochberg 2, Rautavaara 3, and the ones by Frankel, really don't sound anywhere near as avant-garde as the stuff being produced at Darmstadt around the same time.

[Mirror Image]

One of the ironies here is that Schoenbergian serialism, far from sounding radical, often sounds like late Romanticism pushed one step further. Mid-century serial symphonies, like Rochberg 2, Rautavaara 3, and the ones by Frankel, really don't sound anywhere near as avant-garde as the stuff being produced at Darmstadt around the same time.

That's certainly true, which reminds me I still have all of my Rochberg Naxos recordings still sealed and I bought these years ago!

[Cato]

For me as a layman it is usually impossible to tell.

... it was, at least for several decades not a strait jacket but "just" a technique that could be employed for rather different results.

And so the question will always be the same: do you like what you hear?  The technique can be irrelevant to the listener.

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.

An addendum: there have been rather conservative attempts to reinvigorate technique, so that it might sound "new" and yet avoid the criticism of "it sounds like the orchestra is tuning up or something."  I refer among others to Alexander Tcherepnin's interpoint alternative to counterpoint, to Tibor Serly's puckishly named Modus Lascivus, and Avenir de Monfred's New Diatonic Modal Principle of Relative Music.

Certainly Tcherepnin was the most successful of these.  The others' ideas have perhaps  not been fully explored, although the latter is a variation on the theme of polymodality.

[Ken B]

Karl discussing "a meaningless onslaught of sound"? This Mennin 8 week in Boston?

[amw]

You may shrug all you like. Bartok never wrote serially.

Actually there is one single tone row that appears in the Violin Concerto as a melodic idea. In total (exposition & recap) it adds up to about forty seconds of dodecaphony, although accompanied by a pedal note that acts as a modal centre and prevents it from being truly Schoenbergian. Some people have (presumably with tongue firmly in cheek) referred to this as Bartók's serial phase.

@Jo498 As far as I can recall from high school, all of Berg's Lyrische Suite is dodecaphonic, although it took analysts some time to figure out exactly how he wrote it; he uses three different tone rows, and manipulates them pretty extensively. Berg was an extreme constructivist, and even in the "free" non-serialised pieces he's generally doing something mathematical-like with bar numbers and beats or whatever. Mind like a sink as they say

[Mandryka]

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.

It's interesting how the situation is so very different in plastic arts - here in London Tate Modern has more visitors than Tate Britain for example - people love arguing about New British Artists, Gilbert and George make the news etc.

Same in architecture. And drama.  Music seems to be stuck, like novels.

Anyway your post inspired me to listen to Arvo Part's When Sara was 90 years old. I need to think about it.

[some guy]

What a strange thread to have been resurrected. And what a stench of the grave still hangs about its cerements.

But that's as may be.

What struck me most reading through the entire thread, gasoline-soaked handkerchief to my nose, of course, was what a cloth-eared dunderhead this "audience" entity is, to be sure. What some scientists, and some posters, seem to think they're doing is talking about the putative difficulties of certain types of music. What they end up doing in actual fact is describing a group of people with practically no skills who are terminally stupid as a group and who should never go to concerts or buy CDs because listening to music is such a foreign thing for them. It's a continual struggle, for sure.

And speakiing of "people," that category, which includes way more people (!) than the "audience" category, doesn't seem to include very much intelligence or perceptivity, either.

Some posters have pointed out that there are audience members who do not struggle with music, some individual members of "people," even who are perfectly ept.

Defining a group by its most inept members seems a trifle off to me.

Passing judgment on certain types of music by considering only the inept members of a group is just daft.

[Florestan]

There´s nothing so sweet as fighting the stench of the grave with the odor of smugness and the scent of superciliousness, ain´t it?

[Jo498]

I tend to agree. It is a little like confronting barely literate persons with a tiny vocabulary with Shakespeare. Or complaining that differential calculus was too hard for people who were never taught math beyond elementary school. It's just that after a century of overwhelmingly dominant popular music we apparently think that music is fundamentally "different" and that

Wouldn't one get analoguous results if one presented high school kids who grew up on nothing but rap and hip hop with, e.g. Bach's b minor mass or Mozart's Figaro? A minority might like it but most will probably be bored, puzzled and heartily dislike the cooing and fiddling.

I never really understood why it should be a problem that only a small minority listens to e.g. Webern or Rihm when it's only a (larger but still fairly small) minority that listens to Monteverdi or even Mozart? Why is a minority of 10% (guesstimate for classical music listeners) unproblematic (or shows superior taste) whereas a minority of 0.1% 20/21st cent. avantgarde fanciers is supposed to show that "brains cannot cope"?

[Sean]

You know what I'm going to say, it's certainly true that most audiences haven't a clue about the internalization of music to access its aesthetic content and it just washes over them, but only tonal music in the broadest sense is internalizable.

[Mandryka]

I never really understood why it should be a problem that only a small minority listens to e.g. Webern or Rihm when it's only a (larger but still fairly small) minority that listens to Monteverdi or even Mozart? Why is a minority of 10% (guesstimate for classical music listeners) unproblematic (or shows superior taste) whereas a minority of 0.1% 20/21st cent. avantgarde fanciers is supposed to show that "brains cannot cope"?

The problem is this: how are modern composers going to earn a living from their music?

[Karl Henning]

The problem is this: how are modern composers going to earn a living from their music?

Solution: modern composers earn their living some other way.

Benefit #1: The composer is at complete liberty to write what he pleases, and for whatever reason.

[Karl Henning]

Objection #1: Modern composers earning a living by some other means, therefore have limited time to devote to their art.

Benefit #2: The modern composer is therefore driven to efficiency.  Having limited time for his creative work, he has a greater motivation to do his best work.