Night of the Living Composers

Everybody’s afraid of something. The dark, earthquakes, alien abduction, snakes. But modern music?

Imagine this. Frankenstein’s monster is conducting. The members of the orchestra all sport his bride’s electrified hair. And throughout the theater, every seat is filled with patrons exhibiting the horrified look of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”

According to a current alarmist orthodoxy, that approximate scene has been playing in concert halls since the 1950s and ‘60s, when composers, in their quest for the new, so subverted music’s innate, emotional ability to communicate that they scared away an audience that hasn’t come back.

Julian Lloyd Webber, a fine cellist and the brother of the composer of “Cats,” summed up this attitude in a talk given to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in February. He accused a cadre of “new fuhrers of the classical music establishment, for whom tonality and harmony had become dirty words” of “creating a pernicious politburo, which proved every bit as effective as its counterpart in the East.” The result, he concluded, is that classical music in general “broke its trust with young people” and “lost its relevance to the media, who decided we were living in a pop culture.”

Lloyd Webber may sound unduly paranoid, with his talk of fuhrers and politburos, but he voices concerns that echo everywhere. This coming February, the Los Angeles Philharmonic will premiere a major new piece by John Adams, the United States’ most popular living classical orchestral composer. Not only does “Naive and Sentimental Music,” which is said to last close to an hour, promise to be his most ambitious symphonic work, its title indicates sure accessibility.

However, when the Philharmonic suggested including it on programs for a March 1999 U.S. tour, only the Lincoln Center was interested. Every other venue wants its naive and sentimental music tried and true.

Even at home, the Philharmonic, which is a leader in adventurous programming, can seem to be running scared. This season and next, the orchestra is focusing on what it calls “the surprising century,” a reflection of the great variety of 20th century composition. But fearful that subscribers associate the whole century with too much complexity, chaos and noise, the orchestra has backed off from using so specific a title for the season, as if the very mention of the past 98 years spells box-office poison.

The orchestra programming will go forward as planned, but worry is evident in the promotion of a series of Sunday “encounters” about the music. “Find out how tapping your toe might only be the first step” toward the music of Stravinsky, Elliott Carter and Olivier Messiaen.

And it’s not just the audiences that distrust the modern. Last season a rave New York Times review of a Chicago Symphony premiere of Harrison Birtwistle’s “Exody” generated a reply from one of the Chicago players who complained the musicians themselves couldn’t make heads or tails of this award-winning British composer’s convoluted music.

Where does all this discomfort with the new come from and how rational is it? The same sort of modernity that scares away music lovers can draw audiences into visual arts. Picasso, whose Cubism in the second decade of the century cut up perspective as radically as Stravinsky fractured folk melodies, is very big art world business. Works by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, two artists profoundly influenced by the most extreme experimental music of John Cage in the ‘50s, are now part of the art collection meant to lure high rollers to the new Bellagio hotel and casino in Las Vegas.

Audiences began turning more to classics than contemporary music in the 19th century, but the crisis began with the dawn of the 20th. In the first decade, when Puccini was writing his beloved opera “Madama Butterfly” and Sergei Rachmaninoff his blockbuster Third Piano Concerto, Arnold Schoenberg initiated the process of unhinging tonal harmony, preferring ever thicker chords and counterpoint to heighten expressivity. Schoenberg’s added complexity was what had happened all through history. Music from the time of Gregorian chant had done just what he did in advancing the notions of harmony, melody, rhythm and form. Even Puccini and Rachmaninoff were not immune to that progress, using advanced harmonies to heighten their own Romantic sensitivities.

The watershed in music, though, came after World War II, with a generation of young composers who had grown up during the war: Lloyd Webber’s putative “new fuhrers.” They had witnessed the real Fuhrer’s attachment to music from the great Romantic tradition of Beethoven and Wagner and they wanted to make a different art, a reflection of the positive nature of a progressive modern society. They looked to the future and technology for solutions.

At a time when space was being explored for the first time, composers turned to electronic media to expand the sonic universe. At a time when the human brain was being asked to absorb far more stimuli than ever before, they made scores so thick with notes the mind reeled. It was not uncommon for every string player in a orchestral work to have a different part.

They clearly moved too fast for many music lovers--not an unusual situation. In a New York Review of Books’ rebuttal to Lloyd Webber’s Davos speech, Charles Rosen, an outstanding pianist and sophisticated musical analyst, pointed out that just about any new kind of music over the past 400 years has been greeted with the exaggerated claim of the death of music.

And the experimenters are hardly the musical oppressors they are made out to be. These sonic adventurers are just one part of modernity. In the century’s second half, we can find a recent string quartet by Karlheinz Stockhausen in which each player performs his part in one of four helicopters circling the concert hall (the music and the rotor noise are all beamed back to the audience) or Cage’s silent piece “4’33” ,” from 1952. But we can also find Aaron Copland’s elegiac work, and Samuel Barber’s sentimental Adagio for Strings, as equally valid expressions of a world that couldn’t be pinned down.

The most radical of the modern composers were indeed vocal in their calls for progress, whether insisting on mathematical systematization of 12-tone music, or opening composition to the influence of chance. And they did, as Lloyd Webber claims, accuse conventional composers of irrelevance.

Those were the times. Remember, everyone who could bought a new car each year in the ‘50s. Still, new music hardly expelled the old from the concert halls: Performances of this music were actually quite rare.

It may be true, as Lloyd Webber claims, that modernism did break his father’s will to compose in the ‘50s. The director of the London College of Music (not to be confused with the more prominent Royal College of Music), William Lloyd Webber wrote in the style of a lightweight Parisian from decades earlier, as evidenced by a just-released CD of his short chamber pieces on Hyperion. But such music simply didn’t attract a lot of attention in a postwar Britain more interested in building a new society than fondly recalling an expired one.

We tend to forget how much fun idealistic young composers had as they sought to make the world more interesting through their music. We forget the excitement that was in the air.

David Schiff, a composer at Reed College in Oregon and a familiar commentator on music, wrote recently about the thrill he had as a kid in the ‘50s of discovering new albums of unfamiliar modernist music. Frank Zappa regularly said the same thing about his youthful stumbling upon the modernist Edgar Varese around the same time.

My own Bay Area college days in the ‘60s were full of missed assignments thanks to local performances by Italian composer Luciano Berio, Cage and Stockhausen. These concerts were mobbed by the same audiences that went to hear Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin the next night.

Ironically, a great deal of what seemed experimental then--aspects of modern music the fear-mongers are likely to tell you are still too hard to listen to--have become almost commonplace now. Many of the experiments have found their way into popular music or the tastes of mass audiences: dissolved narrative, intricate complexity, dissonance and even turned-up volume.

Composers like Stockhausen and Boulez broke apart notions of the beginning, middle and end of a composition when they wrote music in small blocks of notes scattered about the page. Performers were asked to jump from block to block at will, as if they were reading a newspaper. Today that sounds like surfing the Net or watching an MTV video.

Complexity--the simultaneity of phenomena--is exactly what seems to excite science and society now. It’s the buzzword of visionary physicists seeking to explain the universe. Listening to intricate music is not only naturally intriguing but also an excellent mental exercise for grappling with independent stimuli. If Mozart can make kids smart, then a composer like Milton Babbitt, whose music comes at you like an electric storm, dazzlingly fast, from all directions, should make you even smarter.

As for modern music’s noisiness and dissonance, that too is all about current events. To my ears, a concert of modern music is practically a refuge from the sonic pummeling you can get from going to the movies these days.

Yet the perception that this music is an extremely unpleasant medicine continues to dominate--until it is actually tasted. Take, again, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and its music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen. He is one of those alarming modernist composers himself, and he is also, at age 40, one of the hottest young conductors on the international scene (the Cleveland Orchestra, America’s finest, is reportedly after him). These phenomena may not be unrelated.

It was from a desire to hear the difficult modern music he and his friends were writing that he became a conductor. Lloyd Webber to the contrary, Salonen figured no one else was likely to play it. It was through having to master such difficult music that he developed his extraordinary technical skills. It was undoubtedly his need to find a way to make his own rigorous music attention-getting that he learned how to be an exciting presence on the podium.

And Salonen has proved that music once thought inaccessible can rivet just about any audience. Last season with a festival devoted to Hungarian modernist Gyorgy Ligeti, he managed to get the Philharmonic subscribers, who can turn restive even during Tchaikovsky, to hang on every startling note. When they applauded, they seem to exhale in amazed relief, perhaps a result of embracing their own fear of the new.

Fear and fun, of course, are not such opposite experiences, as every fan of horror films or roller coasters will tell you. Indeed, Frankenstein’s monster up there on the podium may not be such a bad idea after all.

HK Gruber has created just such a work. A Viennese blueblood bass player and composer whose 19th century ancestor Franz Xaver Gruber penned “Silent Night,” Gruber is also a rebel who both embraces and parodies many of the compositional trends of the century.

His “Frankenstein!!,” which the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s New Music Group will perform Monday at the Japan America Theatre in a nod toward its “scary” modernist mission and the Halloween season, is a monster romp, tuneful and surprising, nutty and black in its cockeyed humor. Gruber, himself, sings (and he sings like no one else) of merry monsters and monsterlets, of rats and terrified children, of John Wayne and Lois Lane, of baby vampires that bite baby.

Gruber mocks many things in “Frankenstein!!,” and one of those things is the irrational fear of modern music. The result is an irresistibly hilarious piece, always a huge hit with audiences that show up (it has had some 1,000 performances over the past two decades). By all means bring the kids. They know, after all, the attraction of fear. And they couldn’t care less about Julian Lloyd Webber’s paranoia.*