Composers Milk a Dead-End Aesthetic

The collapse of a refined and subtle classical music culture from past ages is a calamity. It’s time to admit that the musical explorations of our century have been by and large a total waste of everyone’s time. One case in point: the recent Independent Composers Assn. concert (“3 World Premieres From Composers Assn.,” Calendar, April 8). Works that don’t measure up to any standard of excellence don’t deserve to be congratulated or held up with any esteem.

I think critics have a lot to do with associating this so-called art music with quality or worthiness. I wish just once I would see a review of new music in this newspaper that expressed even slightly what I felt. The bad concerts get great reviews and good concerts are either ignored or receive bad press.

There seems to be an unholy alliance between the people responsible for presenting such empty musical programs and the critics who nod and approve. Why is it the case that people with such vested interest, the composers, have almost complete say over what the audience is going to hear? We were assured by the program notes that Steven Stucky, the new music adviser to the L.A. Philharmonic, is one of the leading lights of his generation. But he had arguably the worst piece on the program.

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Maybe it is time to bring back the patronage system in which works were created for people who expected to like the work they’d pay for, not to be assaulted by it.

There were fantastic players on the stage--the Debussy Trio, Roger Lebow and Gloria Cheng to name a few--but they were given absolutely nothing musical to do. When composers disregard the laws of nature and write against the way instruments sound, it is difficult to listen.

All we are left with is sound effects and gimmicky, overused gestures (the sharp violent sound, the music that makes you itch). I feel, as T. S. Eliot once put it, “like the patient etherised upon a table,” attending another exercise in futility in which time is endless.

At the ICA concert at the L.A. County Museum of Art, I watched the parade of cliches as if I’d entered a time warp and sat at a student concert 20 years ago. Five composers cranked out their work with little regard to any formal values traditionally associated with the art of music. Musical structure, melody, sonority, counterpoint, or--dare I say it--beauty, don’t count.

It is puzzling how composers can be so dead to the things that make music exciting and transcendental. I wish they’d try to see themselves as part of a great musical legacy that includes Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart or the Beatles.

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The biggest mystery to me is how composers, in the prime of life, can still be locked into a musical rhetoric that is more than 50 years old. Here we are, on the brink of the 21st Century, and the dehumanized music from before World War II is still considered the appropriate method of high-class-ical-art-music communication. It is just unreal. We deserve better.

I tend to blame Schoenberg and other sacred cows who developed this dead-end aesthetic, dependent on philosophy or mathematical analysis more than anything else, for destroying everything I love about classical music.

Perhaps I should blame the universities for allowing the factory-style development of composers, awarding meaningless degrees to individuals with little technique and less artistic skill. I understand that there are 40,000 registered professional composers in this country. Surely a cursory glance at the gene pool over the last 1,000 years should teach us that there are rarely more than a small handful of creative geniuses at any one time in the arts.

Perhaps it would be better to blame the notion of democracy itself, that somehow we are all equal in everything and anybody who can play the piano can sign up and receive a crown conferring the title “composer.”

But, as the youngster in the children’s story who can see through the nonsense exclaims: The emperor really isn’t wearing any clothes.