You either get it, or you don't. From an early age, I got it. I remember, as a child, being told I could stay awake to listen to John Cage's HPSCHD being performed at the BBC Proms so long as I was in bed with the light turned out. A treat, for my 14th birthday, was a ticket to a Stockhausen concert in London. I revelled in it all. Sometimes I was mystified, but I just knew that something was going on worth listening to and that if I kept listening, all would be revealed.
I was right. Many 20th century composers produced work which is up there with the best: Stockhausen's Gruppen, Gesang der Jünglinge, Nono's Il Canto Sospeso, Berg's Lulu, Boulez' Le Marteau sans Maître, Cage's Sonatas and Interludes to name but a few. If you're a 'classical' music lover (classical? serious? art? the lack of a definitive word for the genre we're talking about may be part of the problem) and these pieces are unfamiliar to you (or you dismiss them as unapproachable noise), then you're missing something. Of course, you're totally at liberty to miss it if you want. We live in a free society, don't we?
In a consumer society, there's very little incentive for anyone to promote anything that requires effort on the part of the consumer to consume it. The product, too, must at least appeal to at least a critical mass of people, to be worth producing. During the Cold War, the avant-garde – though hard to turn into a commodity – served a purpose. The Soviet Union rigorously controlled the output of composers – all new music had to appeal to a wide audience on first hearing. Governments in the West were keen to demonstrate – as much to their own people as anyone else – how different they were. You may not like the music your country's composers are producing, but at least they're allowed to produce it – encouraged, even. And hey, it's a free country, so you don't even have to listen to it! Preposterous though it sounds, the CIA even found ways of funding and encouraging the work of avant garde composers.*
The twentieth century avant-garde were, on one level, prophets who chose music as their means of communication. Their music often seems to speak to us from a different world whose musical expression might seem complex to us now, but which will become clearer to us with time. I don't think this is fanciful: indeed, the music was often explicit about it. One of Schoenberg's earliest more challenging pieces, the last movement of his Second String Quartet, is a setting of a poem by Stefan George which began with the famous line, 'I feel air from another planet'. As writers of film music discovered, the work of these composers was not so far removed from the world of science fiction.
Once the Cold War was over, though, the idea of the artist as prophet, who produced visionary work that one needed to make an effort to get to grips with, was never going to meet with government approval. The era of late capitalism, left to its own devices, has no need for it. Arts funding changed: at one time, it was a way to fund important work that would never be marketable. These days, if you want arts funding you're under pressure to demonstrate that your work will become commercially viable.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall there was no way back. Free market economics had already been raised to the level of a dogma – anything that didn't sell didn't matter – and there was no need for governments to try to demonstrate their social and cultural superiority to a rival system. Talk of individual freedom faded from the narrative. As a child growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, you were told how lucky you were to live in a country where you didn't need an identity card and wasn't not watched by TV cameras wherever you went. Now, CCTV is everywhere and governments since the 1990s have often talked of introducing ID cards. There has even been serious discussion in both main Westminster parties, at various times, as to whether we should move to a 'post-democratic' age and replace politicians with managers. The things people were prepared to fight a nuclear war over in 1965, miraculously, don't seem to matter anymore.
The composers of the twentieth century avant-garde, who'd found themselves promoted by governments who found them useful but who had no time for their visions, found themselves dropped the moment those governments had no further use for them. Not only that, but a new generation of composers was on the rise, learning their trade in a very different world to their forebears. Prophets only survive in places where people are open to change. They find themselves marginalised – and, at worst, persecuted – everywhere else.
The irony of all this is that if you turn on BBC Radio 3 today, there's a good chance you'll find yourself listening to Shostakovich. If you go to a classical concert, there's a good chance they'll be playing, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and... Shostakovich. In the pre-concert talks and the programme notes, you'll be treated to a restatement of the trials and tribulations of his relationship with the soviet state. If you take any interest in classical music (or whatever you want to call it), you'll have heard it a hundred times before. The chances of any serious, 'difficult' late twentieth century classical music being on the bill, though not impossible, are slim indeed.
Thankfully, mainly due to the internet, the avant-garde still survives – though on the margins. In fact, the fact that the Establishment's gaze is turned elsewhere might even be doing it good, in a way. Many of the great musical works dating from the days of relatively lavish state funding now languish in obscurity because they require huge or difficult to assemble forces to put on and a lot of rehearsal time to get right. These days, when anything marginal is destined to stay marginal and fund itself, there are – thanks to the internet – too many small outfits to count turning out electronic music, short films, experimental writing, multimedia projects, etc. Also, the availability of often free software to take the place of expensive machinery and equipment has made it easier for people to make what they want. Moreover, having your work showcased on your own website rather than under the avuncular gaze of a state broadcaster, for example, can mean the audience gets to appreciate the work in a more meaningful context.
*Coincidentally, a new book - Finks by Joel Whitney - has just come out about CIA interference not, this time, in music, but in literary culture during the same era.
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