To follow on my recent post Why Do We Hate Modern Classical Music? I am writing a follow up to clarify some of the points that came up in the comments section. The first is to clarify that I mean “modern classical” in a stylistic sense, not necessarily limited to when the music was composed. I could have, and will in this post use the word modernist to refer to this style.
The modernist style is characterized by a lack of the elements that gave the prior three centuries of classical music its enduring value. As several of the commenters on my previous post pointed out, not all music of the modern period (roughly, the 20th and 21st centuries) is modernist music. In my view the classical music jumped the shark somewhere around Alban Berg and the Second Viennese School. But a small resistance movement has survived and continued to write audience-friendly music providing enough of the elements of the older musical tradition to gain a place in the repertory.
The careers of a few late romantic-style composers such as R. Strauss, Puccini and Mahler overlapped the 20th century. Other more recent composers have continued to incorporate elements which gave the prior three centuries of music its enduring popularity. My own list would include at least some (but in most cases not all) of the works of Prokofiev, Gershwin, Copland, Rautavaara, Pärt, Hovhaness and Vaughan Williams and Korngold. There are probably others that I do not know about.
A few of the commenters on my previous post cited particular modernist works that they like. I have tried to listen to a lot of stuff since I became interest in classical music; I can’t quantify how much but I have probably owned and given away or sold three or four times as much recorded music as I now own. From that stockpile I have found two modernist works that I like (Carl Ruggles Sun-Treader and Andrezj Panufnik‘s Sinfonia) and one that I sort of like: Messiaen‘s Vingt Regards sur l’enfant Jésus . I can’t quite explain why I like them nor would I suggest that anyone else might like them. I only mention them to make a point: I have found that (as Abe Lincoln might have said) there are many people who like a few modernist works and few people who like many of them. This explains the overall lack of audience acceptance of the modernist style.
I may not have been totally clear about the standards for rejecting modernism. Failure. Innovation. Conspiracy? What are their standards? On what basis do they judge audiences to be wrong rather than the composers? How much more time should we give modernism to win audiences over? Are they modernists suggesting that music should continue permanently down this path never gains audience acceptance? What would the world look like in which modernism had failed, if not the world of today? Should music be composer-driven rather than audience-driven?
