How Have We Become So Backward Looking?

When Haydn took an interest in the Academy of Ancient Musicke on his late visit to London, they played the music of Handel. By the late decade of the 1700's, the music of the first half of that century had already become "ancient" in their eyes.

Yet compare that with today, and we confront the bizarre spectre of the music of the Second Viennese School being considered "modern"—indeed reputedly too modern for the majority of contemporary audiences to be able to tolerate.

Let's take a look at the dates of the three composers of the Second Viennese School:

Arnold Schoenberg: 1874-1951
Alban Berg: 1885-1935
Anton Webern: 1883-1945

For someone born in the 1990s, these composers represent people from their great great grandparent's generation. For someone born in the 1960s, they represent their great grandparent's generation. Even for someone born in the 1930s, they still represent their grandparent's generation. Even if a man born in 1885 (the year Berg was born) fathered you when he was 50 years old (the age Berg was when he died), you would have been born in 1935, making you 80 years old today. Yet we are told that these "ancient" composers are reputedly the very paragons of radical modernity, too frightful to play lest they clear the entire concert hall.

What has become of us today? How is it that our concert halls are filled exclusively with music by composers long dead, to the point that concert programmes devoted to radical modernists also include the music of our grandparent's or even great great grandparent's generation. We may be told that it is no different to the past, that, for example, Furtwängler and Toscanini played much music by Beethoven and Wagner. Yet we must not forget that Furtwängler was born in 1886, and Toscanini in 1867. They were both born in the same century that Beethoven and Wagner were musically active in.

It is hardly possible for a musician born in 1986 and 1967, exactly a century after Furtwängler and Toscanini respectively, to view the music of Beethoven and Wagner in the same light as someone born a century before them did. Beethoven died in 1827, some 40-60s years before either Furtwängler or Toscanini were born. For a musician born in the 1960-80s today, a composer who died very roughly around a 40-60 years before their birth would be someone like Berg or Debussy. As for Wagner, he died in 1883, three years before Furtwängler's birth and sixteen years after Toscanini was born.

Perhaps you might like to make a similar list for yourself of composers who died around half a century before your birth, as well as those who died when you were around sixteen years of age. You should also try compiling a list for a hypothetical person who is twenty year olds today, of composers who died between a half century up before them and up till the age of 16. It makes for thought provoking reading.

If you are twenty in 2015, then you were born in 1995. A half century before 1995 is 1945. When you were 16 years old, it would have been 2001. A composer who died in 1945 was Bartók. A composer who died in 2001 was Xenakis.

Time moves on relentlessly. With every year the music of a Bach or a Xenakis becomes that of someone from a time further removed from us, and we have to continually ask ourselves what relevance they have to us today. More importantly, we need to ask ourselves why we have become so backward looking that music from our grandparents to great great grandparent's generation is somehow considered "modern". Unfortunately, it says more ourselves than anything else. It speaks volumes about the frightful conservatism of our neoliberal and reactionary age.

The concert hall reactionaries today complain that Webern and Xenakis scare young concert goers away for being "too difficult". They want to attract young audiences by playing more Mozart and Tchaikovsky lollypops. To cure you of this delusion, I suggest you ask a twenty year to give you a list of the type of music they are listening to. I did that recently, and found myself confronted with a list including Slipknot and Marilyn Manson. So I went and studied the material on Spotify.

For someone who listens regularly to Xenakis and Boulez, what young people consider "rad" all seems rather conservative and old fashioned tonal material, so it hardly presented even the slightest of problems in comprehension. Even when it comes to something allegedly modern like so-called, "rap" music (supposedly a unique "genre"), there existed Sprechstimme long before that. I never ceased to be amused when looking at scores music played by supposedly "radical" bands that one soons finds oneself confronted with the astonishing sight of an ancient key signature. Even if old fashioned melodic type of thematic material does still play more of a role—alarmingly more than it does in Xenakis or even Webern, for example—simplistic melodic material is more systematically shirked, unlike in mainstream pop music, or at least underplayed. The result is that it is hardly plausible to argue that it is necessary to have grossly reactionary Tchaikovsky type of material in concert halls with syrupy romantic tunes to attract young audiences. Perfectly untuneful and anti-tuneful material can be perfectly interesting and challenging to a younger audience—or "rad" as my young friend would probably say.

What truly drives the young away from the concert hall is the image of opera, chamber and orchestral music as being the music for a peruked and aging petite bourgeoisie, akin to the aristocracy of Versailles enjoying the music commissioned for their delectations—a frightfully peruked bourgeoisie that actually considers the music their great great grandparent's generation to be "modern". Our modern concert halls must not be allowed to degenerate into latter day equivalents of the halls of Versailles.