1.14 Making music modern

Introduction

A tension exists between the enduring aspects of the human condition, rooted in our biological make-up, and those aspects of our experience that are impermanent, transitory and rapidly progressing. Physically, we have evolved very gradually. Our maturation process, our inner urges, our life cycle have endured for thousands of years, deeply connecting us to our ancestors from the distant past. Over time, we have“stretched”ourselves biologically—we are taller and live longer-- but our essential nature and basic physiognomy have remained the same. On the other hand, in almost every other respect—socially, scientifically, technologically, etc. --the transformations have been far-reaching and dramatic. A caveman from ten thousand years might recognize our bodies; but he would not recognize our world.

One of the purposes of art is to explore this tension between the enduring and the progressing.

Thus, each era of art makes a unique and irreplaceable contribution, illuminating for us a particular moment in humanity’s on-going development.

Whether in ballet, theater, fiction, poetry, architecture or film, the educated public acknowledges and celebrates the continuity of artistic creation and its perpetual innovations and discoveries. Mavericks such as William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot and e.e. cummings in literature, Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham in dance, Pablo Picasso and Mark Rothko in art, Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry in architecture, Harold Pinter and Edward Albee in theater—to name just a few—all have found an enduring and devoted public: We wait for Godot, we are dazzled by Gehry’s forms, are awed by Picasso’s fractured portraits.

In contrast, progressive modern music of the past one hundred years has struggled to find an audience. Many major musicians consider it possible to live a full professional life without performing the music of their own time. Orchestral programming routinely favors the traditional repertoire. A large community of prominent performers, theorists and historians avoid the creative work of the last century, treating it as an aberration. To many listeners, Western concert music as they know and love it ended, for all practical purposes, at the turn of the 20th-century.

As a result, something deeply meaningful is lost. No one speaks with greater passion and eloquence than Beethoven about the tension between the enduring and transient parts of our selves. But he does so for his own time. Our own era is more heterogeneous than Beethoven’s, more unstable, and more imbued with ambiguities. Beethoven’s world did not have a conception of the unconscious; now psychologists describe most of our mental activities as being beyond our direct awareness. In Beethoven’s world, science depicted the natural world as a giant, predictable machine; in our time, we understand that unpredictability is built into the fabric of the cosmos. In Beethoven’s world, news traveled slowly; in ours, the stock market is updated by the minute on home computers. The New York Times once ran a headline,”Did Music End With Mozart?”As long as our world is developing, as long as our vision of life is evolving, no composer will ever have the last word.