"Classical" orchestral music is in a death spiral. And I'm not sure how it can be avoided except through government endowments. Most orchestral nonprofits live and die on donations. The donors are moneyed and old. And they want to hear Beethoven. The next generation of potential patrons are not so young and not moneyed. And have a different taste in music.
A counterpoint. You're describing the American situation. Most (central?) European orchestras are at least partially publicly funded and therefore relatively stable. As they do not rely solely on donation (by old farts as you imply), they are able to experiment far more and also provide a stage for new composers, new works. Same for opera houses. As they are modernizing the interpretations of symphonies and especially the screenplay in operas, they become politically and socially relevant again. There is little worse than enduring a ballet in the style of the 19th century, but watching a modern piece can be a really great experience.
So government endowments enable orchestras to experiment and hence stay relevant. Without those your analysis is spot on.
Each to their own. I find it depressing to watch yet another clueless director desperately trying to make his reputation as a 'fresh talent in opera' with a stage littered with the paraphernalia of modern life and a cast dressed in track and business suits. We can look forward to space suits I suppose or maybe no clothes at all. Are we too dumb to look beyond our own era?
If what you want is state-funded or charitably-funded institutions commissioning and performing new art music without reference to audience tastes, well, that's already been tried: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmst%C3%A4dter_Ferienkurse and so on. The results are generally considered to have been mostly not a success, both in terms of attracting an audience and of the quality of the music itself. The author of the Beethoven article happens to have written a book http://www.amazon.com/The-Rest-Noise-Listening-Twentieth/dp/... which covers this among other things.
For that reason, I find that the Romantic composers (Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, et. al.) are a great segway, since their compositions are highly dynamic, powerful, and emotional.
All that will happen is people will no longer be able to make a living being a musician in a big name orchestra. Classical music will go on, musicians who love playing will keep playing, and audiences will keep listening. The only thing missing will be the money.
They used to be a lot smaller and cheaper - they have become massive because they need to be able to fill enormous halls. If the money goes then we will lose the huge performances, but live classical music won’t die.
I've been attending orchestral concerts in the US for three decades now, and the entire time people have said that Beethoven et al were going to die out with the new generation.
Well, death spiral is harsh. Sure orchestras are closing up shop. But as described, they were being propped up unnaturally. They could play something else! If nobody goes to the classical music shows, then they're putting on the wrong kind of shows.
I'm glad to see musicians continue to be employed because it makes the world a better place. But the 'classical music' cult was weird. It's like the State Fair tap-dancing talent competition. Why is it there? Because they've always done it. Not really a spectator sport, but folks spend 10000 hour getting good at it anyway. I'm not going to cry over the 'death spiral' of tap-dancing either.
Oh don't be such a pedant. Its a metaphor or whatever - only the cult of classical music appreciates it, and they're not enough to keep expensive orchestras afloat. Like other obscure and nearly extinct art forms.
Let me repeat that again. Classical orchestral music is in a death spiral. The audience is getting older and their tastes haven't changed. Yes you can listen to the same 9 Beethoven symphonies on Spotify by the Hungarian symphony orchestra in 1989. No one disputes that
Now, name a modern, orchestra composer who's work you've listened to (excluding motion picture soundtracks)?
Now, imagine if rock music stopped at Pink Floyd's The Wall.
Ticket sales don't lie. Symphonies are shutting down all over the country.
I'll bite. Thomas Ades is making astounding music today. So is John Luther Adams, and Nico Muhly. I've enjoyed works by Mason Bates, Andrew Leshnoff, Yehudi Wyner, and others. Just because you haven't heard of them doesn't mean that they don't exist.
Some symphonies are shutting down, but the Chicago Symphony just announced increases in ticket sales and attendance. Excitement over my local orchestra, the Seattle Symphony, is increased in recent years since they hired a new music director and commissioned a Pulitzer-prize winning piece by John Luther Adams.
I heard Mason Bates for the first time this year with the Pittsburgh Symphony, where he is the Composer of the Year. He performed "Rusty Air in Carolina." When I read about the piece before the concert I was skeptical, as combining electronic instruments with an orchestra is not something I'm generally fond of (disclaimer: I used to make electronic music, albeit poorly). However, I ended up mesmerized and loved it!
For me, I think my concern about modern composers is that I associate them with highly dissonant or atonal music... I realize those are problematic descriptions, but I don't know the right terminology. Now, I do like atonal music to some degree -- I play the shakuhachi; perhaps honkyoku could be lumped into "atonal" somehow -- but encountering it at a concert where it wasn't the main draw for me is not always the most exciting experience, especially if I'm bringing someone who isn't into classical music and now they have to hear something that sounds like violins dying for 20 minutes (disclaimer two: I love Takemitsu's November Steps, which has violins that sound like they're dying).
I'm not saying that older music is objectively better or something like that, but I think it's not hard to argue that for many people it's a bit more approachable. As such, I think that artists who can write works that span between the old and new, such as in the case of Mason Bates' piece, will be critical in bringing in new audience members.
Definitely. I was also going to add Steve Reich, although his music is mostly not what you'd call "orchestral". But you could add Jonny Greenwood, Krystof Penderecki, George Benjamin, and more, and more. It's such a tragedy to see classical music as being "Beethoven or film scores". There are great modern recordings of Beethoven by good orchestras, too, and I'm as excited to hear a fresh new recording of Beethoven as I was when I discovered that Augustin Hadelich had recorded the Ades violin concerto (there are now three recordings of this marvelous work).
While I can name several modern classical composers whom I interested in* I think your point still stands and most people wouldn't be able to name an active composer after Beethoven, maybe Brahms. I have brief memories of an interview with Milton Babbitt about how classical music was no doubt on the way out due to advent of popular music, and i think he was right, these days classical music is only relevant in most peoples lives when mentioning an anecdote about how making their newborn listen to Mozart might increase their IQ.
Whenever I would go to a chamber music event or an orchestral performance there will generally be two sets of people there - the old school bougie folk and a handful of conservatory students - the casual audience member is far and few between. Orchestras will have a better chance getting an audience by performing pops or some program full of video game music.
Still, going to the symphony hall, being part of that scene, this might retain it's importance for the upper class / professionals, and this alone could be enough to continue to support more than a handful of orchestras around the United States.
* And the only reason I can is because I studied composition and theory at University.
Completely wrong. Streaming music services have added a convenience factor to pop music enjoyment, but they've made exploring the complete repertoire orders of magnitude easier and more rewarding. I've listened to music in the last few years that would have cost me tens of thousands of dollars to listen to even a half decade ago (music pirating outlets were miles away from what Spotify/Rdio can do).
I believe that in a world where the 3 minute radio-friendly song is an artifact of a bygone era and the constraints of physical media are gone, there will be a major resurgence of interest in epic, complex works of music. Just as Netflix has made psychologically complex, extremely long TV series much more central to our culture, I think people will start to gravitate to headier music that was constrained by yesterday's media.
The title here is a canard. The article does not explore the question of Beethoven's impact on his successors, it is taken for granted. This piece reviews a bunch of recent books about Beethoven (mostly concerning his personal, political and artistic life, not his legacy).
Especially since the influence of Beethoven probably dominates classical music much less now, after the enthronement of Bach, the rediscovery of Vivaldi and the whole Baroque and early-music revival, than it did in the nineteenth century when classical music was still (and maybe increasingly?) a popular and commercial hit.
They are important even with limited public success.
There is a lot of interesting contemporary classical music, but much of it requires a formed ear to appreciate. More accessible classical music usually comes from composers dead 100+ years ago in the Classical and Romantic periods. All styles: Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern and Contemporary bring something to the table, but some of them are too elevated for the general public, just like not the finer points of functional programming not being every developer's cup of tea. I wouldn't want advanced programming paradigms or exotic new math stop being produced just because the general public doesn't have a taste for them.
David Bowie is great, but if you were to catalogue his output, abilities, and achievements I think they would pale severely in comparison to Mozart. I can believe that music is overall just as great as ever, with the millions of contributors globally, but where are the towering geniuses?
I think that's not true. Its nice to extoll Mozart but their catalog might be commensurate, you'd have to do the legwork. I say, geniuses are all around us but we're acculturated to say 'the old masters can't be beat' without actually adding it up.
And most of it is not remembered by even most of those who likes his music.
The reason his output is so huge is of course because he for several periods was employed as a composer and had to churn out large number of compositions.
That's not to say that there's not lots of good material there, but it's not like his entire output is of sufficient quality to keep most people interested.
Still, I'd wager that if you pick a random Mozart piece it's got just as high a likelihood of quality as a random Bowie track.
Secondly, I suspect that the situation whereby musicians these days aren't expected to pen a large quantity of compositions is one of the prime reasons for the mysterious shortage of Mozartesque prodigies.
"Thick as a Brick" by Jethro Tull is the first thing that comes to mind. It has the length and variety of style that you'd expect from any classical symphony.
Nobody writes in that style of music anymore. It's "already been done". Even if someone wrote something as good as Beethoven's 5th, nobody would care. The classical music world has been there, done that. Mozart, Beethoven and Mahler aren't remembered just for their music on its own, but the fact that their music pushed the envelope, invented new forms of expression. They didn't just do it, they came up with it.
Classical composition moved in a kind of academic, atonal direction in the 20th century which was completely inaccessible to most of the public, and essentially died, in terms of a popular artistic movement. After Stravinsky, there just wasn't really much left to do. (Composers still write movie scores, but these basically just rehash what was already done in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.)
Instead, the world moved towards rock, pop, hip-hop... and there's a lot of exciting stuff there. Unfortunately, it's mostly based around 5-min songs, which limits its complexity. No matter how genius something like Brian Burton's "The Gray Album" might be, or certain Led Zeppelin songs, the format doesn't allow for even 5% of the kind of complexity that a symphony can embody.
So the Bach's, Mozart's and Beethoven's are surely out there -- but they're not doing the same kind of music, and they're harder to recognize as equivalents because we've abandoned musical structural complexity for sonic complexity instead (it's more about the sound or flavor or texture of a track, its hooks, and so on).
I think it's the other way around. There's lots of great stuff, and lots of dominant creative figures, such that it's impossible to pick through all the geniuses to find just "one" to be the "best".
Part of why the Classical composers loom so large in our minds is that they were the only "genre" of music available (by the rich modern standards of the term "genre"). We look backwards, and they are all there is to see. Now there's a bajillion genres, and many of them are full of very smart, experienced people plugging away.
I do not mourn this turn of events. I celebrate it.
(And yes, I am well aware that "Western" music is not the only kind and there's rich traditions of music in all ethnicities, etc etc. Still, Western music of the Classical era was something special and I don't think it's amiss to observe that. In the end, what they created was for all humanity, as evidenced by how quickly it has spread to all, and it is not surprising that when we look back, what we see is Bach and his progeny, which includes Beethoven.)
But that's a terrible, awful reason to not write music in that old style! If Mozart were alive today, wouldn't he still be writing music in his style? So what's wrong with somebody else writing it for him, now that he's dead. Maybe it's difficult to sell, but still.
It's weird and false to imply that classical composition no longer exists. Classical was one of the first fields of art to retreat from mid-century modernist experimentation and get back to basics. Minimalism reintroduced such essential elements as rhythm and melody as early as the 1960s. While there's still a large avant-garde contingent, most successful living composers walk a very interesting line between the new, complex and accessible.
It's not a popular music story at all - pop/folk music has always been doing it's own thing.
Oh it definitely exists -- heck, I sang in a New York premiere of a Jennifer Higdon piece this spring. But it's not popular. It's incredibly niche. There's isn't nearly enough general interest in it for there to be another Beethoven equivalent today, as a figure in society in general.
It's certainly niche, and painfully so. I think there is some potential for growth, given the absurdity of my aging friends forcing themselves to continue to engage with music written predominantly for teenagers and college students.
But there are. That is to say, if you mean exceptionally talented composers of classical music.
See Gyorgy Ligeti, Arvo Part, John Adams, George Crumb. Phillip Glass, and Nico Muhly. Everyone except Ligeti (RIP homie) is still living last time I checked.
It's too soon to tell. You would need 200-300 years to go by to know. And among the countless contemporary artists today, a tiny handful will be recognized for their enduring contribution to music.
I don't know about that. I think every major composer up to the mid 20th century gets a fair shake - and are undoubtedly not in the same league as the aforementioned 3. Composers from the last 70 years are harder to evaluate owing to the 'post-melodic' trend.
Yet the idolatry has had a stifling effect on subsequent generations of composers, who must compete on a playing field that was designed to prolong Beethoven’s glory.
Odd that the article doesn't leverage much evidence to support this point. However, we do have some excellent examples, notably Brahms, who wrote to a friend:
"I shall never compose a Symphony! You have no conception of how the likes of us feel when we hear the tramp of a giant like him behind us."
("Him" being Beethoven.) And indeed, he didn't complete his first symphony until age 40.
In south Indian classical (Carnatic) music the greatest modern composer is Tyagaraja (1767-1847), who interestingly was a contemporary of Beethoven. Tyagaraja was prolific in a form of composition called a kriti, at once both structured as well as intense.
The kriti eventually led to the modern Carnatic concert format, in the early twentieth century. Where concerts once used to be night-long expositions of virtuosity in rural temple festivals, the modern concert became a brisk 2 hour affair that catered to urban schedules. A couple of 'heavy' abstract pieces, then a few kritis serving as anchor, rounded off with several light blitz pieces (usually scorned by the cognoscenti).
56 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadSo government endowments enable orchestras to experiment and hence stay relevant. Without those your analysis is spot on.
Rachmaninov, Schubert, Schonberg, Brahms, Beethoven (x6!), Mahler, Herrman, Barber, Mozart, Rota, Dvorak, Lekeu, Chausson, DeBussy
I'm not familiar with some of the names. I think Rota is a modern composer. But most of those names are composers who have been buried.
[1] http://www.operadeparis.fr/en
The Beethoven situation is a bit of an exception as they're doing a series with all 9 symphonies in a row. And I see a few more composers in http://www.operadeparis.fr/en/saison-2014-2015/concert--reci...
* Barber (1910-1981)
* Beethoven (1770-1827)
* Brahms (1833-1897)
* Chausson (1855-1899)
* Copland (1900-1990)
* Dvořák (1841-1904)
* Herrman (1911-1975)
* Lekeu (1870-1894)
* Mahler (1860-1911)
* Mozart (1756-1791)
* Praetorius (1571-1621)
* Prokofiev (1891-1953)
* Rachmaninov (1873-1943)
* Ravel (1875-1937)
* Rota (1911-1979)
* Schubert (1797-1828)
* Schönberg (1875-1951)
* Spohr (1784-1859)
* Strauss (1864-1949)
* Suk (1874-1935)
* Susato (1500-1561)
* Tarrega (1852-1909)
* Verdi (1813-1901)
Powerful stuff. Maybe Beethoven would've been a movie composer if he was alive in the modern era.
I'm glad to see musicians continue to be employed because it makes the world a better place. But the 'classical music' cult was weird. It's like the State Fair tap-dancing talent competition. Why is it there? Because they've always done it. Not really a spectator sport, but folks spend 10000 hour getting good at it anyway. I'm not going to cry over the 'death spiral' of tap-dancing either.
See, for example, http://properdiscord.com/2014/07/22/scott-timberg-ive-got-a-...
There are many other similar posts, all full of facts, on this blog. Alex Ross himself has written on the subject.
Now, name a modern, orchestra composer who's work you've listened to (excluding motion picture soundtracks)?
Now, imagine if rock music stopped at Pink Floyd's The Wall.
Ticket sales don't lie. Symphonies are shutting down all over the country.
Some symphonies are shutting down, but the Chicago Symphony just announced increases in ticket sales and attendance. Excitement over my local orchestra, the Seattle Symphony, is increased in recent years since they hired a new music director and commissioned a Pulitzer-prize winning piece by John Luther Adams.
For me, I think my concern about modern composers is that I associate them with highly dissonant or atonal music... I realize those are problematic descriptions, but I don't know the right terminology. Now, I do like atonal music to some degree -- I play the shakuhachi; perhaps honkyoku could be lumped into "atonal" somehow -- but encountering it at a concert where it wasn't the main draw for me is not always the most exciting experience, especially if I'm bringing someone who isn't into classical music and now they have to hear something that sounds like violins dying for 20 minutes (disclaimer two: I love Takemitsu's November Steps, which has violins that sound like they're dying).
I'm not saying that older music is objectively better or something like that, but I think it's not hard to argue that for many people it's a bit more approachable. As such, I think that artists who can write works that span between the old and new, such as in the case of Mason Bates' piece, will be critical in bringing in new audience members.
Alan Hovhaness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG_gAMwGG-Q
Why are we excluding motion picture soundtracks?
Whenever I would go to a chamber music event or an orchestral performance there will generally be two sets of people there - the old school bougie folk and a handful of conservatory students - the casual audience member is far and few between. Orchestras will have a better chance getting an audience by performing pops or some program full of video game music.
Still, going to the symphony hall, being part of that scene, this might retain it's importance for the upper class / professionals, and this alone could be enough to continue to support more than a handful of orchestras around the United States.
* And the only reason I can is because I studied composition and theory at University.
I believe that in a world where the 3 minute radio-friendly song is an artifact of a bygone era and the constraints of physical media are gone, there will be a major resurgence of interest in epic, complex works of music. Just as Netflix has made psychologically complex, extremely long TV series much more central to our culture, I think people will start to gravitate to headier music that was constrained by yesterday's media.
There is a lot of interesting contemporary classical music, but much of it requires a formed ear to appreciate. More accessible classical music usually comes from composers dead 100+ years ago in the Classical and Romantic periods. All styles: Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern and Contemporary bring something to the table, but some of them are too elevated for the general public, just like not the finer points of functional programming not being every developer's cup of tea. I wouldn't want advanced programming paradigms or exotic new math stop being produced just because the general public doesn't have a taste for them.
The reason his output is so huge is of course because he for several periods was employed as a composer and had to churn out large number of compositions.
That's not to say that there's not lots of good material there, but it's not like his entire output is of sufficient quality to keep most people interested.
Secondly, I suspect that the situation whereby musicians these days aren't expected to pen a large quantity of compositions is one of the prime reasons for the mysterious shortage of Mozartesque prodigies.
Classical composition moved in a kind of academic, atonal direction in the 20th century which was completely inaccessible to most of the public, and essentially died, in terms of a popular artistic movement. After Stravinsky, there just wasn't really much left to do. (Composers still write movie scores, but these basically just rehash what was already done in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.)
Instead, the world moved towards rock, pop, hip-hop... and there's a lot of exciting stuff there. Unfortunately, it's mostly based around 5-min songs, which limits its complexity. No matter how genius something like Brian Burton's "The Gray Album" might be, or certain Led Zeppelin songs, the format doesn't allow for even 5% of the kind of complexity that a symphony can embody.
So the Bach's, Mozart's and Beethoven's are surely out there -- but they're not doing the same kind of music, and they're harder to recognize as equivalents because we've abandoned musical structural complexity for sonic complexity instead (it's more about the sound or flavor or texture of a track, its hooks, and so on).
Part of why the Classical composers loom so large in our minds is that they were the only "genre" of music available (by the rich modern standards of the term "genre"). We look backwards, and they are all there is to see. Now there's a bajillion genres, and many of them are full of very smart, experienced people plugging away.
I do not mourn this turn of events. I celebrate it.
(And yes, I am well aware that "Western" music is not the only kind and there's rich traditions of music in all ethnicities, etc etc. Still, Western music of the Classical era was something special and I don't think it's amiss to observe that. In the end, what they created was for all humanity, as evidenced by how quickly it has spread to all, and it is not surprising that when we look back, what we see is Bach and his progeny, which includes Beethoven.)
But that's a terrible, awful reason to not write music in that old style! If Mozart were alive today, wouldn't he still be writing music in his style? So what's wrong with somebody else writing it for him, now that he's dead. Maybe it's difficult to sell, but still.
It's not a popular music story at all - pop/folk music has always been doing it's own thing.
It's certainly niche, and painfully so. I think there is some potential for growth, given the absurdity of my aging friends forcing themselves to continue to engage with music written predominantly for teenagers and college students.
See Gyorgy Ligeti, Arvo Part, John Adams, George Crumb. Phillip Glass, and Nico Muhly. Everyone except Ligeti (RIP homie) is still living last time I checked.
Odd that the article doesn't leverage much evidence to support this point. However, we do have some excellent examples, notably Brahms, who wrote to a friend:
"I shall never compose a Symphony! You have no conception of how the likes of us feel when we hear the tramp of a giant like him behind us."
("Him" being Beethoven.) And indeed, he didn't complete his first symphony until age 40.
The kriti eventually led to the modern Carnatic concert format, in the early twentieth century. Where concerts once used to be night-long expositions of virtuosity in rural temple festivals, the modern concert became a brisk 2 hour affair that catered to urban schedules. A couple of 'heavy' abstract pieces, then a few kritis serving as anchor, rounded off with several light blitz pieces (usually scorned by the cognoscenti).