on contemporary orchestral music and expectations...

Making A Lasting Case For New Music (Part 2 of 3): The “Comfort Food” Problem | Inside the Classics:  my comment from that post follows:

I’m not sure if you’re going in this direction, but here’s my take on it: the problem is the model itself. The problem is that a premiered (or even new) work is lost and forgotten if it isn’t something they can later take home with them. Rather than arguing about tonality or accessibility in the music, what is important and helps people to remember new works is the sound itself, and if they don’t have that, its a forgotten work.

There is a LOT of contemporary composition that is being listened to, stuff that has the very same “dissonances” as contemporary “classical”, and is still loved in spite of it: film scores. Why? Because they are something the audience can TAKE HOME WITH THEM. They can listen to them again, and by listening over and over, they can get used to the sounds that otherwise would be biting their ears off. Yes, it does help a bit that they can revisualize the moments in the movie for the particular music and use that as a guide to give meaning to the dissonance, which strictly orchestral music doesn’t have, but it is there.

So for me, the problem is not the new music, it is the fact that i might go to a concert, hear new music, probably like it a lot, but if I can’t buy it the next day in the record store or even as a freakin’ download in crappy mp3 form, its forgotten. It has lost ALL possible meaning because it is remembered for a moment but not as one, if you get my drift.

Yes, music for the moment has its place (jazz lives for it, as do the better blues players and certain improvisational rock music like King Crimson), but in the orchestral world the end product is black dots on paper in the hopes of some orchestra somewhere wanting to play it, and THAT is where the orchestral music world needs to take the hint from the rest of the music world and realize that the product should be the recording, not the black dots on paper, and by increasing familiarity through the recording they can increase familiarity to the ears and from there get more people interested in it.

There IS an audience for this music, as Simon Rattle’s exceptional acceptance for the Schoenberg/Webern/Berg Orchestral Pieces (from the atonal, pre-serialism period) at the Proms shows (don’t ask how I know this, but it is one of the most popular torrent downloads right now, probably the only one of the whole season still being seeded). People WANT to listen to this music again, to take the time it requires to delve into it, just as they all had to do to learn Berlioz, Wagner, Brahms, Debussy, even Stravinsky and Shostakovich.

It takes time, it takes multiple listenings, it takes building a mental context to give it meaning, all things that just can’t happen when you only hear it once with the *expectation* of never ever hearing it again. The only way to get past that is to defeat that expectation and actually give people an expectation that they can and will hear it again, and THEN they’ll actually start to look forward to it.

But so long as “we play a new work, and that’s it, you’ll never hear it again” is the norm, then there’s just no reason to even invest in learning to enjoy new music.