Philharmonic Reflects Audience, Culture

It was a nice coincidence that on the same day the Calendar section printed Brent Trafton’s excoriation of the Los Angeles Philharmonic for failing to use his personal tastes exclusively in making programming decisions (“Philharmonic Should Put Audience First,” Counterpunch, July 5), a letter from a physician in The Times’ Health section cited a statistic that “when something bad happens to a person, he or she shares it with 48 other people; when something positive happens, with only two.” Thus, I think it necessary to challenge Mr. Trafton’s categorical denunciation before anyone should get the idea that he represents a majority viewpoint.

It has been my experience in 20 years as a professional composer that audiences, in the main, do enjoy encountering the unfamiliar from time to time, and in fact do not require a steady, unrelenting diet of the tried and true “classics.” The problem is that satisfied audience members rarely write thank you notes, and why should they? But curmudgeons by their very nature tend to be inveterate letter-writers, and thus can give the impression of being far more numerous than they really are.

So much of what Mr. Trafton has to say is so old-hat, so over-the-edge (how can anyone say that Salonen is a “lousy” conductor of anything?), but I feel that I must reply if only to defend the much-maligned living composer. As one of the contemporary composers programmed by the Philharmonic this past season, it is quite possible that my work was one of those that struck Mr. Trafton as an “atonal experiment” that “appeals to music educators, their students and music critics.” While I don’t take issue with his liking or disliking a piece, that being his prerogative, I am disturbed by his blanket dismissal of a whole category and his impugning of composers’ motivations in creating new work. For one thing, none of the music programmed by the Philharmonic can be labeled as an “experiment.”

Like them or not, all these new pieces are the result of years of thought, study, training and profound reflection on the paths that music has taken and might yet take. Further, it is simply untrue that the composers represented by Philharmonic programming write only for specialists. It is so easy in rejecting a kind of music one hasn’t tried to understand to lump its creators into a category that would suggest that they are out of touch with the world.

But we, not Beethoven and Brahms, are Mr. Trafton’s contemporaries. We share much more with him and everyone else alive today, the same concerns, the same background noise from which the music must emerge, so why will he not recognize that we may have something to say that is even more relevant than what Tchaikovsky has to offer? We composers do not write the music we do in order to be mean. Rather we compose to share a personal musical vision with all our contemporaries. Sometimes the work might be provocative or even disturbing, but it is never the product of malice or disregard for the audience.

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When I am asked the familiar question: “Do you write for the audience?,” I have to say, “Yes,” because I myself am a member of the audience. My music represents my experience as a listener in this culture. Perhaps because I’ve been at it longer I am able to bring a greater breadth of musical knowledge to my listening than Mr. Trafton can to his, but there’s nothing stopping him from surpassing me. Should he choose to bring himself face to face with the 20th century, the culture that gave birth to him, after all, then he might come to understand, for example, that Debussy was not a very apt example for him to have cited of “atonal” music.

One of the reasons that we do need Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonic, its beautiful music-making to one side, is because it has forthrightly undertaken to keep us in regular contact with our own time, not merely providing us with the “standard repertoire,” those pleasant reminders of a vanished past. Most people seem to understand that new books, movies, plays and visual art are vital to contemporary life, offering unique insights into our complex shared culture. Today’s concert music is no less vital, and really no more forbidding if you just relax and give yourself a chance to listen to what it is saying. We write it for you, after all.