Classical Music Tapped Out

Face it: Classical music is a dead language. In the latest skirmish of the Thirty Ears War, music-lover Claire Rydell writes that composers “Milk a Dead-End Aesthetic” (Counterpunch, May 2), composer Burt Goldstein retorts with ad hominem tut-tutting (“New Music Merits Respect, Not Attack,” May 16), Times Music and Dance Critic Martin Bernheimer scolds the troops for defecting (“Modern Progress Under Salonen’s Green Umbrella,” May 18), and UCLA Professor Paul Reale preaches that history will go on (“In Support of Well-Conceived Music--Old and New,” May 23).

But the war is already lost. Classical music is a dead language--not so dead that no one speaks it, but dead enough so that you can’t write classical music anymore without it sounding like an imitation of a dead composer.

Composers hate when that happens. Yet there are only so many beautiful things you can do with rhythm and tonality (or its derivatives), and they’ve already been done. So if today’s composers were to write attractive tunes and harmonies, you’d know who they sound like. But by writing ugly music, you can’t tell. Which means, of course, that none of them sounds like much of anything. And you don’t much care.

Think of classical music as the Latin of musical languages. Then you can see why intellectuals like Pierre Boulez write in dead Mesopotamian dialects--or deadly mathematical monolects--while minimalists like Philip Glass write Hare Krishna mantras. It’s so you won’t confuse one with the other. Or with Chopin.

We listen to Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky because we respond emotionally to great symbolic expressions of heroism, of anguish, of excitement, tenderness and joy; just as we respond viscerally to great displays of bravura technique and to beautiful sounds. No other music has such power to move us.

Music and the arts have the power to fulfill and inspire us. But they also have limits, beyond which they lose their power. And this very potential is a non-renewable resource that great artists and composers have used up. Yet, even if it’s no longer possible to carry the development of the arts much further, we can still enjoy the riches of our artistic heritage--without having to apologize for what we do not like.

PHILIP BLACKMARR

Pasadena