Briefly Answering a Bad Take

John McWhorter, who is a guest columnist at the NY Times, decided last week that it was his turn to decry that awful modern music, meaning serialism, so he wrote a really pretty bad column. It starts with his personal experience with one piece of music that he sang in a chorus, but he doesn't say who wrote it or what it was. He then goes on to condemn serialism, state that melody isn't unsophisticated, and cite a limited number of sources, including Joseph Horowitz's recent book on Dvorak and John Mauceri's book on 20th c. classical music.

Where to start. Well, there is so much that could be said that I'm going to just give you an incomplete bullet list.

• McWhorter is entitled to like or dislike any music he wants to like or dislike.
• Some people like serial music, and they also get to like what they like. 
• He's fighting the style wars of 50 years ago.
• He's not a musicologist. He is dabbling by reading music writing that fulfills his preconceived notions. It's possible to be better read than he is in current music writing.
• You'll hear a lot more music in U.S. concert halls by (for example) Adams, Reich, Glass, Harbison, Corigliano, Picker, Adamo, the other John Adams, Riley, Rouse, Holloway, Chin, Adès, Gubaidulina, Golijov, Saariaho, Lindberg, Ligeti, Dessner, Lutoslawski, Montgomery, Sallinen, Rautavara, Paart, Dutilleux, Messiaen, Bates, Stucky, Mackey, Clyne, Yi, Bernstein, Harrison, Feldman, Muhly, Diamond, Copland, Stravinsky, Salonen, and others than you'll hear by serialists or by composers using different compositional techniques whose music is dissonant.
• It's a bad idea to write about serialism as though all composers who use the technique write similar music. Remember, that means that you're lumping together composers as distinctive as Berg and Webern, to go back to early serialists.
• Whatever Boulez said....you need to look at the totality of his career. The guy who talked about blowing up opera houses ultimately conducted at a few opera houses.
• If you're going to read it at all, Horowitz's book must be read in tandem with Douglas Shadle's Antonín Dvořák's New World Symphony. Doug is a musicologist specializing in American music.

There's lots more that could be said, but I don't have all day to write a NY Times-ready column, so that's it for today.

Style Warriors

It's a source of both frustration and amusement that there are still lots of people around determined to fight the musical style wars of forty or fifty years ago. It's not much of a surprise that you run into such people on Twitter, but it's surprising when I find music-world pros still trying to fight this fight. We saw a prominent example a couple of years ago in San Francisco, when, for reasons that are beyond me, both David Gockley and Nicola Luisotti complained very publicly about that awful dissonant music. I dunno, maybe it was cover for the attempt to persuade us that Marco Tutino's La Ciociara was a really good opera that deserved a place in the repertory. Then there was a program note at SFS; why didn't I ever mail that letter I wrote?

But when I see someone posting the following on Twitter, well, I need a more complete response than "No. Full explanation too long to tweet":

Here's a more complete explanation, which I plan to haul out at every opportunity.

First of all, the tweet assumes that there is no audience for the music of Schoenberg, his students Berg and Webern, and subsequent composers who wrote using atonal or serial techniques. This is simply false. The audience for such music is smaller than the audience for Beethoven, Tchaikowsky, and Puccini, but so? So's the audience for the music of Guillaume de Machaut.

Second, no, it wasn't a dead end. No particular compositional technique can lead to a musical dead end. There's a large repertory of extremely varied music that's atonal or uses serial techniques. There are composers, not all of them old, who are working in such styles and their descendants today.

Third, there are implicit assumptions in this tweet that all Western art music post-Schoenberg was written in an atonal style or using serial technique, and that this state continued until the present day. No, no, no, no, no. NO. Let me name a bunch of composers who were contemporaries of Schoenberg's or younger than he was who (mostly) did not write in the alleged dead-end styles. Why, I'm going to take the list down to the present, even.

Vaughan Williams, Holst, Britten, Bax, Bridge, R. Strauss, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Copland, Martinu, Kaprálová, I. Fine, Shapero, Bartok, Kodaly, Orff, Schmidt, Zemlinsky, Schreker, Messiaen, Barber, Villa-Lobos, Korngold, Ives, Puccini, Ravel, de Falla, Ruggles, Nancarrow, Cage, Sibelius, Nielsen, Bloch, Leifs, Sallinen, Grainger, Varese, Ibert, Ravel, Honegger, Milhaud, Sorabji, Moore, Ornstein, Piston, Hanson, Hindemith, Thomson, Thompson, Gershwin, Haas, Poulenc, Durufle, Walton, Hartmann, Rautavaara, Pärt, Talma, Saariaho, Salonen, Lindberg, Holmboe, Aaho, Menotti, Hovhaness, Takemitsu, Hermann, Lutoslawski, A. Panufnik, Gal, Diamond, Glass, Reich, Dutilleux, Ginastera, JL Adams, JC Adams, Harrison, Cowell, Partch, Bernstein, Weinberg, Arnold, Simpson, J. Anderson, Higdon, Adamo, Corigliano, Harbison, Feldman, Hyla, Hoiby, Kurtag, Ligeti, Thorvaldsdottir, Davies, Kancheli, Gubaidulina, Susa, Young, Riley, Silver, Lieberson, Del Tredici, Wilson, Bolcom, Rzewski, Crumb, Benjamin, Zwillich, A.R. Thomas, M.T. Thomas, Chin, Adès, Shaw, Wolf...and on and on and on. Yeah, I snuck a few older 20th c. composers in there.

And while you're at it, take a look at who gets played. I've heard almost no Schoenberg and Webern in the concert hall, rather more Berg, at least at orchestra concerts and, of course, at the opera.

So, tell me again about the dead end Schoenberg led Western art music into, because it's amazing how many good and great composers found and continue to find ways through or around this alleged dead end.