CHAPTER 12
December 31, 1999. Born as I was in the middle of the twentieth century, and having spent much of the intervening time interacting with living composers and their new music, it was particularly telling to see how arts institutions decided to wrap things up as we exited the old century.1
New York City prides itself on being a cultural capital of the world. On that New Year’s Eve, the New York Philharmonic celebrated the end of the twentieth century by playing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, completed in 1824. The program included nothing American, nothing from a century of Philharmonic commissions and history, and, indeed, nothing from the twentieth century itself. Only a pre-recorded twelve-tone bell motif—selected from the music of Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Bernstein, and Stravinsky, and used by the Philharmonic to summon its audience into the hall—recalled the waning of the old modernist century, and not with a bang but a tinkle.
New York’s Metropolitan Opera put on a “Millennium Gala” based on Act II of Die Fledermaus (1874). The music from the twentieth century performed at the gala was not from operas, but from the Broadway musicals South Pacific, Carousel, On the Town, and Man of La Mancha. To be fair, there were two arias from Puccini operas: “Vissi d’arte” (1900) and “Nessun dorma” (1924). And there were operetta arias by Victor Herbert and Franz Lehár, and a Hollywood song, “Because You’re Mine,” from the 1952 Mario Lanza film of the same name, which includes the lyric by Sammy Cahn “That isn’t thunder, dear. It’s just my heart you hear.” No Berg, Henze, Stockhausen, or Berio. Not a note of the century’s great opera composers: Richard Strauss, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Kurt Weill, Benjamin Britten, John Adams, Philip Glass, Samuel Barber, or Gian Carlo Menotti. And no recognition of the thirty operas that the Metropolitan Opera itself had commissioned during the twentieth century.
Of course, institutional discussions went into choosing these programs, and one does not want to draw too much from these data. However, if we compare the two programs with, say, the opening of Philharmonic Hall in 1961 (Beethoven, Mahler, Vaughan Williams, a world premiere by Aaron Copland) and the 1966 opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House (the world premiere of Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra), the contrast is quite startling. What does it say about the very greatest American institutions and their attitudes toward the art they commissioned—not to mention the hundreds, no, thousands of works composed during a 100-year span? Were there no works those institutions felt should be heard again, proudly displaying their commitment to new music and opera during an entire century?
That New Year’s Eve in Berlin, Claudio Abbado conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in final movements of a number of symphonic works that just barely took its audience into the twentieth century—excerpts from the nineteenth century’s Beethoven and Dvořák mixed with short excerpts from Stravinsky’s Firebird (1910), the finale to Mahler’s Fifth Symphony (1902), Schoenberg’s super-Romantic sunrise from Gurrelieder (1900–1911), and some German operetta excerpts and dances. Every single piece of music ended with a simple major chord (A-major, G-major, B-flat-major), with the first half of the concert—the classical half—culminating in a thunderous, minute-long, triumphant C-major triad, the simplest chord every child learns to play on the white notes of a keyboard. No Webern, Boulez, Carter, or Morton Feldman. No living composer—German or otherwise—or a single note of classical music composed after 1911 was represented.
No world premiere commissions from any major institution were performed on that historic night. A search in various archives provides more sobering data on how classical institutions chose to end the century. Those facts directly confront what has been written about the twentieth century and what was deemed “important” from a philosophical and aesthetic point of view. It is as if we are living in two parallel universes: one that is what we actually experience, and one that seems more of a wish that keeps demanding to be true.
Thousands of books have been published on the two world wars, the run-up to each of them and their aftermaths, raising the uncomfortable possibility that wars never actually end. World War II’s “hostilities” may have ceased in 1945, but the world did not go back to a sense of peace by September 12, 1945, the day I was born. Indeed, “hostilities” may be a euphemism to represent armies standing down and peace treaties being signed, but hostilities in the actual meaning of the word clearly continued—and will continue as long as there is memory. It was, after all, a world war, and in some respects it is a war that never seems to have ended.
Nearly every day brings some news about World War II. And yet there is no substantive discussion about how that war, still called “the war,” impacts what we hear in concert halls and what fuels the aesthetic discussions available to us by those who write and get published on the subject of classical music and lyric theater. We should never forget it was both a war that used music and a war that was waged against certain music. It was a war that punished some musicians while it officially made heroes of others, extolling their music as representing, or at least supporting, political ideas.
Mostly, when it comes to classical music, the twentieth century was a century of loss, and that loss matters. One thing is clear to me: We have eliminated vast numbers of composers whose music was once played and appreciated. Some might say that this is a normal process. After all, many nineteenth-century symphonies, chamber works, and operas have fallen by the wayside, and we accept that as a normal weeding out of the crop. The difference, however, is that the mid-century weeding was done in spite of the continued successes of the works and the composers. Seventy-five years after the end of World War II, it is time for a reset. The so-called lack of repertory is a myth.
History is written by the victors. Then the revisionists, the rational balance-makers, and the logicians weigh in to help give a more nuanced view of the losers and the winners. Sometimes a writer will correctly point out that the vanquished have an immense influence on their conquerors. However, this process was accelerated after World War II and proved to be a unique example of the vanquished exacting justification and revenge when it came to culture and especially to classical music. America has always seen Germany and Italy as principal sources of classical music (true) and affords them the respect of knowing more than we do (sometimes), and because, although they lost the war, we needed them as allies in our fight with the Soviet Union (definitely). It proved to be a major aesthetic victory rising from the ashes of their otherwise humiliating defeat. And anyway, America could not force Europe to listen to its own music, composed on American shores, if it was not wanted. It was not, and when it was played, the music was excoriated in the dailies. Just ask the Korngold family what it was like for Erich in the 1950s when he brought his new music to Vienna.
A humiliated society’s intellectual community living in the wreckage of its own failed dreams wrote books and reviews—and taught music to the young. One can replace the mayor and the chief of police, but you cannot replace everyone, and it has been well documented that many Nazi and Fascist professors returned to their jobs, as did the conductors, the writers and the performers. A few of the children of the disaster, brilliant and talented, joined their voices in rejecting the refugee composers of America, whose music confronted a European populace that was now without food and water, and where accountability was everywhere to be sought. Many displaced Jews in Europe, having barely survived, returned to what was left of their towns and villages only to be blamed for causing the war in the first place.
That is what I believe happened to the thousands of hours of musical works—some of which might be masterpieces—that disappeared. As the generations have passed, a source of these aesthetic judgments—the racial policies of the Nazis and the Fascists and the war against Soviet communism—has been forgotten, and post-war aesthetic conclusions have been accepted as objective. And after having removed so much music and so many composers from our lives, what have we gotten in return? Surely, we have erased the link to—and continuity with—the great masters of the past, which has forced our institutions to leap across the void toward newly composed works that continue an aesthetic position the public has not embraced for over a century.
Aesthetics and politics are connected, and in the twentieth century the former easily masked the intent of the latter. If our classical music institutions exist to perform a core repertory that stops in the interwar era and then skips to living composers who write in a certain style, then that is the business of these non-profit organizations. That the institutions also feel they must support the provocative and the fringe elements—making this natural part of the art world the very center of it—should be worth serious discussion. That isn’t to say that the fringe and the provocative are not of value—but they are not the whole story, and never have been. We should always remember that building a never-ending embrace of the provocative, the ironic, the disruptive, and the incoherent will keep new classical music separate from all the other arts, which, unlike classical music, continue to thrive.
The very concept of “progress” is a relatively new one and should not be taken as a given. The Romans, for example, “regarded novelty with distrust and aversion,” as Ronald Syme points out in The Roman Revolution, and the “myth of progress” has been part of intellectual discourse since the nineteenth century. The futurist fantasies of the 1900s are so old-fashioned—retro, if you will—as to be curiously touching. Even though a number of middle-aged multibillionaires are investing in brief tourist trips into space, we need to reconcile our science fiction dreams with the fact that the last man to walk on the moon, Eugene Cernan, died in 2017 at the age of eighty-two, and the 2019 restoration of Eero Saarinen’s futuristic TWA Flight Center from 1962 is now a nostalgic trip into a future that never arrived. In the last decade of the twentieth century, a headline in the Financial Times seemed to reinforce my boyhood belief in UFOs and alien invasions with “Mars Wins Right to Sell Ice Cream in Germany.” Imagine my relief to find out that Mars is the name of an American company that manufactures candy and pet food.
Progress may be a myth, but transition is not. A constantly repetitive artistic revolution is numbingly boring and ultimately irrelevant to most people. It is time to recognize the unstoppable process known as evolution. This is not an issue of liberal versus conservative. It is not about popular versus serious. And it is not about progressive versus retrogressive. It is about compassionate inclusivity rather than rigid exclusivity.
Even though our current music critics get breathless with excitement, one has to wonder if the world is really impressed by the prospect of a concerto for ping pong players and symphony orchestra2 or a recording of “Philly cheesesteaks” on the grill as a compositional element in an orchestral tone poem played in Carnegie Hall by the Philadelphia Orchestra.3 Perhaps it’s just fun. If it is fun, it is the same kind of fun as hearing the mechanical orchestras of the 1800s, the noise orchestra from 1913, and Nora the cat playing the piano on YouTube.
If you care to reread the incendiary words that made Pierre Boulez so famous in the early 1950s, you may begin to understand the universal acceptance of his pronouncements by the musical establishment of the 1960s, a time of great political upheaval in the United States and Europe. That Boulez subsequently spent so many years conducting the great Romantic works of Wagner, Brahms, Mahler, and Ravel, making them sound rational, cool, and controlled, was, perhaps, his way of returning to the center of the wheel of the art form he loved—great, descriptive, tonal music—without having to compose a note of it, unlike Schoenberg, Korngold, Shostakovich, Hindemith, and Britten, who were brave enough to do just that. Boulez just tried to make those Romantic works sound as if he had written them. This, too, is perfectly understandable. Boulez’s performances also gave cover to those like-minded people who wanted to love the music that dared not speak its name in the modern twentieth century—the passionate music that could only be admitted into a modern world when cloaked in rational dispassion. This, too, might be seen as an expression of the era’s counterculture that attracted many young people.
When Karlheinz Stockhausen expressed admiration for the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a brilliant work of art, I knew what he was saying, because it encapsulated the original, pre–World War I philosophical position of the avant-garde regarding the necessity of art to make a radical statement—one that ideally changes everything. He soon said that wasn’t what he meant, knowing that no one would ever play his music again if he held to the truth of his response. This is what he originally said:
Minds achieving something in an act that we couldn’t even dream of in music, people rehearsing like mad for ten years, preparing fanatically for a concert, and then dying; just imagine what happened there. You have people who are that focused on a performance and then 5,000 people are dispatched to the afterlife, in a single moment. I couldn’t do that. By comparison, we composers are nothing.4
We should not kid ourselves. Stockhausen was admiring the destruction of something that exists in order to create something new. That two airplanes taken over by a small group of religious fundamentalists could create an image of collapsing towers on a sunny morning when no one expected anything was indeed (for him) great performance art—“The greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos.”
In order to understand (if that is even possible) a mind like that of Stockhausen, here are a few facts. He was born in 1928 near Cologne. His mother had a mental breakdown when he was three years old. His father married the housekeeper and had two children by her. His biological mother was gassed by the Nazis along with other “useless eaters” while she was institutionalized. When he was a teenager, all of Cologne was carpet-bombed by the Allies. Look carefully at a photo of Cologne in 1945 and imagine a motherless seventeen-year-old.
This is where Stockhausen received his musical education. Ten years later, while much of Cologne was still ruins, Stockhausen took a position at WDR (West German Radio), which had opened an electronic music studio.
Perhaps we can understand a great deal with that brief outline—an outline that leaves out a thousand Thursdays and numbingly grey Februaries. What Stockhausen achieved is a miracle of human resilience and transformation, whether or not you like his music. Perhaps now that you know this story, you will open your ears to what he left us.
In 2001, Stockhausen was expressing an aesthetic philosophy that directly echoed ideas that had been promoted almost a century earlier, and that resonated within his mind and soul. It was in 1909 that the movement known as futurism was born. Its intentions were to “exalt movement and aggression, feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the slap and the punch. . . . We intend to glorify war—the only hygiene of the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and contempt for woman. We intend to destroy museums, libraries, academies of every sort. . . . We shall sing the multicolored and polyphonic tidal waves of revolution in the modern metropolis.”
These ideas, born in the pre–World War I cauldron and recycled in the post–World War II era, fueled Stockhausen’s response to the attacks on New York’s World Trade Center in 2001. He was not a bad man by any stretch of the imagination. Although he recanted, his words nonetheless express the continuing aesthetic of an avant-garde that is protected, curated, commissioned—bought and sold—by the very establishment that was its original intended target. In addition, as Joseph Epstein points out in his History Meets Philosophy, “At the birth of societies, the leaders of republics create the institutions; thereafter it is the institutions that create the leaders of the republic.”
It is both dangerous and simplistic to look back at the 1960s and 1970s, smile, and say something like, “Well, that was a naïve time and we don’t do that anymore.” If you went to a concert of contemporary music that you did not like and, on cue, stood up and stopped the concert by blowing whistles and banging a hammer, as Boulez did with his fellow students in 1946, would you be a hero? I think not. Boulez was at war for the rest of his life. The philosopher Sir Roger Scruton called him “a byproduct of a disastrous war.”
Surely, it is time for peace.5
CHILDREN OF PEACE
Restaurants, sports, knitting, politics, pet handling, sanitation, laundry detergents, movies, alternate-side-of-the-street parking, the weather—all are fair game, and everyone feels empowered to have a valid opinion about them. Ask most people about art, especially classical music, and you will get something like, “I really don’t know anything about it.” Here’s the secret—you know everything you need to know about it. Art is not something you need to learn at school in order to understand, and of all the arts, music is the most personal and the most universal. You have been taught it every day of your life. You live in it and it lives in you.
If there is incipient optimism in all this, it is the beginning of a shift in the acceptance of a portion of the “missing repertory” on the part of the younger musicians who make up more and more of the personnel in symphony orchestras. With players born in the post–Star Wars age filling the ranks of orchestras, there is an emerging sense of profound joy in playing the music of their childhood—the music that, for many, inspired them to become musicians in the first place. If the Vienna Philharmonic can play the music of John Williams and honor its eighty-eight-year-old composer in 2020, that should count for something. This is music many musicians heard before they heard Beethoven. Whereas there was tremendous resistance to Hollywood “movie music” in the 1990s by orchestra players who had been told in their various conservatories that this music was not good, we may have reached a tipping point. Adults born after 1975 have already bonded with this music and made it part of their adolescent playlist before anyone could shake that relationship, even if the music is, as one highly regarded critic wrote, a “guilty pleasure.”
What might have started as an expression of barely concealed contempt for nouveau riche immigrant Jews who composed the founding music of Hollywood films, soon morphed into a generalized disdain for music composed decades later by American-born (but still primarily Jewish) composers. One “reason” to dismiss the younger generation of film composers was that they had not been properly trained in real conservatories (as opposed to film schools). Of course, if they attempted academic training—rather than apprenticeship with working composers—they would have experienced an ongoing battle with their professors and the pressures to reject the vast and ever-expanding lexicon of music necessary for success in the field.
Film music composers were emerging in the twenty-first century from their experiences playing rock and roll, like Howard Shore (The Fly, The Lord of the Rings, Doubt), Hans Zimmer (The Lion King, Gladiator, The Dark Knight), and Danny Elfman (Batman, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas). Snobbery against them for their lack of bona fide credentials led to a conversation with André Previn in 2017 about my preparing for the world premiere of Elfman’s Violin Concerto. “Who’s that?” Previn asked. As I was explaining who Elfman was, he interrupted with, “Oh, the whistler.” “The whistler?” I asked. “Yeah. You know. He comes up with a tune and whistles it and his arrangers write the music.” Although I defended Elfman as a man who composes every note and has the most astonishingly perceptive ears of any musician with whom I have worked, Previn remained unconvinced. (When Gershwin’s American in Paris had its world premiere in 1928, there was a persistent rumor that his assistant knew more about the work than the composer did.) The public, it should be said, does not care about these “insider baseball” stories. They love the music.
Italy has recently begun to produce some of its pre–World War II operas—by Italo Montemezzi, Riccardo Zandonai, Alfredo Casella, Pietro Mascagni, and Franco Alfano—and at least one composer, Marco Tutino, is writing operas that admit to the traditions of Puccini. A 2018 production of Korngold’s Das Wunder der Heliane in Berlin was so successful that it was immediately scheduled for a return in future seasons, and other productions have been scheduled throughout Germany. The German reviews were the very opposite of the drubbing it received from London’s press in 2007. Suddenly, Korngold’s opera is a masterpiece and, to quote one critic, “absolutely worth being rediscovered.” This might indicate that Europe is taking the lead in restoring the music it removed from performance after the war. Meanwhile, in America the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in music was awarded to rap artist Kendrick Lamar, rather than to another composer of serial or minimalist music. These are first steps in reclamation and redefinition. This is just the beginning, however.
Consider the following as examples of the effect of fifty years of obliterating the music of so many great composers. On August 31, 2014, Zubin Mehta, who served as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1962 until 1968, was quoted in the New York Times as saying he had recently attended a concert that “introduced, or reintroduced, a lot of the old movie scores in bits and pieces. Scores by Miklos Rozsa, Bronislaw Kaper, Erich Korngold, Max Steiner, etc. They were all fine musicians. Many were émigrés from Europe escaping Hitler who made their livelihoods in Hollywood. It was the most enjoyable and educational evening for me.”6 Mehta found it “educational” that these composers were fine musicians and had escaped Hitler.
In 2019, musicologist/conductor and college president Leon Botstein was quoted in the New York Times regarding the American premiere of Korngold’s Das Wunder der Heliane—which I recorded in Berlin for Decca in 19927—as saying it was “a complete discovery for all of us.” This was followed by his astonished “Where does [his] film music come from, and how did he put it together?” Put it together? Surely, he meant “compose it.” Later in the article, Botstein said that Korngold’s 1944 music to Between Two Worlds “[is] a very unusual score. . . . There’s something postmodern in it.” Post-modern? Does that rather bizarre assertion make Korngold’s music suddenly acceptable?
You, however, have already created a personal lifetime playlist and started it sometime before the age of fifteen. There is always more to learn from music and its extraordinary history. Luckily, you went to the movies and watched television. Maybe you had an aunt who took you to concerts and operas, too. Your music is bound into the fabric of your life and is connected to the lives of a thousand generations who have lived and listened before you.
It is too late to refer to my generation—of which I am proud to call myself a member of its vanguard—as anything but the Baby Boomers. That phrase means that there are a lot of us and that we are merely a bulge in the population statistics, moving inexorably toward our finale ultimo. One might consider, though, the reality of why this gigantic generation exists. We are the Children of Peace.8 We were conceived during a time when it was clear to our parents that the war would be over and would be won by those who rejected totalitarianism of any kind. Many of us born in America were blessed with happy childhoods. When we were hungry, we cried, and we were fed.
That does not mean we have not been wounded. That does not mean that we, who never saw that war, are shallow and unfeeling. Many of us profoundly care about the music of our lifetime (perhaps too much) and aspire to find an objectivity that can bring clarity of judgment along with a demand for fairness. And before we all die, we are, as a society, obliged to make amends.
There is music being composed right now that will be seen as representing this time and this place—wherever and whenever this book finds you. There are fifteen-year-olds who are discovering music that they will make their own and that will travel with them to the ends of their lives, giving them a thread from which to weave a lifetime of experiences. They will hear music through an aural prism greater than mine and far greater than any music heard by Debussy or Duke Ellington. Whatever that music is will be their music and that makes it great, because it will be part of a great relationship. This will be their inner resonator. It will bypass the future the deceased futurists were trying to anticipate. You or I could tell them that this isn’t good music and give them a thousand reasons for your opinion, but you might as well be talking in outer space.
The only question that remains is whether we can connect the world of those fifteen-year-olds to the source—connected, as it is, through the last century and leading directly into their life stories. The journey from Brahms and Wagner to John Williams, Danny Elfman, and the video game music of Austin Wintory is actually quite easy to demonstrate. All you have to do is listen.
SOMETHING REALLY NEW THIS WAY COMES
Unlike the rituals of the eternal adolescence of the avant-garde, something truly new was emerging in the first decades of the twenty-first century, though it is not to be found where you think. It is not robots—artificial intelligence—composing the next wave. It is not another concert in which guitars sound like trash compactors or the chemical processes of plants are transformed into notes. Nor is it the music generated by translating into tones the genetic code of the novel coronavirus by MIT professors.9 It is the interactive music composed for video games.
In its infancy and due to its limited technology, game music was a series of bleeps and blurps, as simple as the sounds we were composing at the Yale Computer Center in 1970. But, like the grand orchestral scores employed in successful science fiction epic films, big orchestral music gives contemporary video games a gravitas and “reality” that has become the new normal.
But here is where things change. A composer of a video game must write music that can morph to accompany the individual journey of the player of that game. In other words, the compositional challenge is to write dramatically appropriate thematic materials that can transform seamlessly with the progress of the game. The music can change at any time and in a split second. No two games will play out the same way, and no two renderings of the music will either. As with all dramatic music, there is a musical goal, but it may never be reached, or if it is reached, it will never be reached the same way twice. The score is therefore co-performed by the player and the author of the music. It carries within it the indeterminacy of chance music while expanding Wagner’s leitmotif theories into the twenty-first century, with implications for interactive classical music that is absolutely new.
This, perhaps, is the biggest and most exciting challenge for a composer since the invention of sound films in the 1930s, and it has a huge future (and present) for some very talented musicians. If there is such a thing as an avant-garde in this century, it will be found in composing music for an interactive delivery system, something that never happened before in the history of music. Forget the music made by a woman tethered to the inside of a piano—or like it, if you want. New music has a new and magnificent challenge. As composer Austin Wintory recently said, “At its best, game music turns the player into a co-storyteller.”
In addition, the passion shown by millions of gamers for live orchestral concerts of game music, like those presenting music from the fifteen scores to Final Fantasy (mostly composed by Nobuo Uematsu), is rooted in an unprecedented application of the musical materials: the themes themselves become personal in role-playing games. Once you have chosen who you are in a game—which can last between twenty and forty hours each time you play it—your character’s theme is you. It belongs to you in your quest. For operagoers, it would be as if you chose whether to be Siegfried or Hagen, Gutrune or Wotan, before attending a four-day Ring cycle. The music and the story would be told from your point of view, and the importance of your motifs would shift accordingly.
Something new and something old is always happening. In every era there seems to have been a great thinker writing about how this is the end of life as we know it. At the same time, there inevitably is another great thinker who is writing about all the new and great things that are happening or are about to happen. Both are correct.
The story of the music from the last century is complicated by the plethora of music that was accessible to a worldwide public—and every composer writing for it—all in an environment of turmoil. Human nature—why we make and listen to music, and how we perceive sound—does not change. Wars and propaganda machines played music throughout the last century as if it were a shuttlecock in a badminton game. If, as one theory goes, music is not about anything but the notes, it certainly was used as a representation of a lot of things and ideas—and power. Perhaps the simple answer to this complicated story is: play the music.
The officers of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives program of the United States Army—the so-called “Monuments Men”—did not search for the lost music, just the art works looted by the Nazis. How do you find something that is invisible? We must all be the Monuments Men and Women of Music. Restitution will return the music to its public—or rather, the heirs of the public from whom it was stolen. Us.
We can read the names of many composers and their works and have absolutely no idea who they were and what their music sounds like. What symphonic works were composed in Europe, Russia, South America, and the United States—indeed, the entire world—that is excluded from the books we read and the music that is played in our concert halls?
In America, our opera houses and orchestras were commissioning works throughout the century, and practically none of those works has survived. Were all those dedicated commissioners, those who sat on juries, and those who ran the most important cultural institutions of our country 100 percent wrong? If that is not true, is there anyone willing to do the work and let us hear the most likely candidates for rescue?
Will there ever be major grants to restore our own collective cultural legacy? If the artistic institutions in each city of the world looked at their own history; if musicologists, open-minded critics, and music directors—with their orchestras and opera companies—committed to uncover and explore at least one forgotten composer each year, we could actually begin to refill the emptiness in our repertory, a repertory that lost its continuity due to a series of alliances and coalitions created in a century of European warfare, beginning with the run-up to World War I and ending (perhaps) on December 31, 1991, when the flag of the Soviet Union was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time.
I long to hear the music of Heitor Villa-Lobos, Egon Wellesz, and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco in concert. I hope to experience a fully staged production of Hindemith’s Die Harmonie der Welt (The Harmony of the Universe), which, as of this writing, has never even received a concert performance in the United States.
Howard Hanson’s symphonies, a restored Antony and Cleopatra by Samuel Barber, the works of Ernst Toch and Franz Schmidt, the operas of Nino Rota, the works of unknown masters from Brazil (Walter Burle Marx), Ukraine, and Argentina—all fill the imaginary aural landscape I have created from the readings I have undertaken in the past half-century. And what about all the women composers? During World War II, for example, both Hindemith’s and Schoenberg’s classes were full of young women, and yet we know so little about them and how they passed on their knowledge and talent to future generations.
After so many decades of repertorial choices that have erased certain composers and brought others forward, audiences have been taught to shy away from composers whose names they do not recognize. Others, such as Hindemith and Schoenberg, have such a bad reputation that programming them will mean major challenges at the box office. The American period of both men includes some of the greatest music of the last century.
This means our institutions and cultural leaders must re-establish a trust with the public. Surely we need to encourage the new generation to play and champion this music, especially in our most prestigious venues and with our greatest ensembles. It will take time, leadership, and a real commitment, but classical music should not be a niche industry.
Maybe we can get away from our yes/no world of classical music, stop thinking in terms of pops versus serious, and refuse to ghettoize movie music. We can create organic concert programs that demonstrate continuity based on ideas and styles, instead of sandwiching a new complex piece between two well-known warhorses, which only confounds the brain and its ability to absorb musical information. Music has always been and will always be an ever-developing connector, not a disrupter. Perhaps we can open our arms to a greater definition of what the music of our lost time actually is. Maybe, as we encourage our living composers to sing to us in their personal voices, we can also bring back the music that was taken from us a half-century ago and give it a chance.
We might all benefit from accepting without guilt the music we already love and let our natural curiosity lead us to music we do not yet know. If we cannot find it, demand that it be played and support the small recording companies that explore the forgotten and the unknown. If you are very fortunate, that music will take you to all those places and states of being that the physicists are trying to explain and prove—parallel universes, non-linear time, and the vast majority of things that exist but we cannot see or hear and that connect us from today into the very reason we love music, the heart of the matter.
Charles Ives made a distinction between the Unknown and the In-known, the latter being what we profoundly sense but cannot prove or even explain. Just widen your embrace and listen without prejudice. What is the sound of it? No metaphors. No similes. No false criteria. No imposed walls: a gateway to the thing that is infinite, curved, expanding, and imploding—that always existed and will always exist as long as humans walk the earth. It is right there invisible to the eye, yet palpable to your ear, your mind, and your heart.
It is called music. It is yours, and because it is yours, it is great.