alexhills

I think the solution for the big orchestras is to not try and be so monolithic. Use the younger, more open-minded, performers to go play Steve Reich in a jazz club, and there is a chance some of the people who hear that will give the more standard stuff a go, and in the very very long term, substantial new connections will be made. Tacking on the odd new work here and there - the LSO have tried to that in the last couple of years and it is a disaster - just feels like telling people they have to take their medicine now, and will get back to the proper stuff in a minute....

The qualifier is, of course, that what I think sounds good is I can only imagine very different to what most other people here would think sounds good. Not to mention that of course the notion of 'sounding good' is a highly culturally conditioned one. However, the point that really worries me about the insane philosophy quoted above is that I really suspect this composer hates the way his own music sounds, but seems to think he has to write that way because of some dialectical obligation...

I've never been entirely anti-Adorno, it's just completely rammed down one's throat by a lot of the composers I've associated with and that makes me uncomfortable with it. The idea that one is somehow writing music in order to allow one's audience to better appreciate Frankfurt dialectic negation seems rather absurd to me.

This, for example, by a truly truly awful  and not very well known composer I will not identify, surely has to be the least enticing sounding aesthetic project of all time:



I believe music has a genuine philosophical dimension, but more important is that one has to love the way it sounds.

You are probably thinking of Canto Sospeso. One of the interesting things to me about a lot of post WW-II 12 tone music is actually how spectacularly little it has become more accepted. Boulez's Structures or Stockhausen's Kreuzspiel are still amongst the very toughest nuts to crack I think. If Die Soldaten is only a one off, but does the same, that's still an exciting thing. It is well worth going to by the way.

As for Wilfrid's point about the visual arts, this is something I've thought about a lot. i think one of the biggest causes of resistance to music is that one is giving up time in a very fixed way. Prometeo is going to last for 2 hours, like it or not, you can't walk away and move on to the next painting or ask your friend what they think that yellow splodge in the corner is doing there. So I do sometimes think the medium is fundamentally unsuited to the nature of modern life sometimes.

The good news is that the audience for new music is at least younger and fresher than that for the standard orchestral rep. I'd be more worried about the long-term viability of the conventional orchestral concert than composition itself to be honest.

We have done a remarkable job of resisting commodification, us lot.... I think only avant-garde poetry has remained as resolutely un-graspable.

I'm past having a view on whether this is a good or bad thing. I just want to write my notes and hope a few people here and there listen to them.

That said, we say the music is obscure, and it is, but Luigi Nono's Prometeo, one of the very most difficult pieces of the last 30 years, has just sold out 2 nights at the Royal Festival Hall next month. OK, this is the UK premiere 20 years after the piece was written, which is a disgrace, but that is still a real audience and in an aesthetically mainstream setting at that.