A continental divide

Did someone say music is the universal language?

Certainly music cuts across political prejudices with ease. Millions of Americans, no matter what they may think about Old Europe politically, gladly commune with Old Europe on a daily basis with the help of Mozart, Beethoven and a number of white male composers buried overseas. In the Old European cultural capitals of London, Amsterdam, Berlin and Vienna, liberals quick to bash Bush and boycott American pop culture are equally quick to produce extensive John Cage festivals -- just as there are festivals of Charles Ives, Leonard Bernstein, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley and other all-American composers.

Yet when it comes to ways in which new music is made and disseminated, America and Europe have moved far apart. Worse, those annoying cultural stereotypes that make the world so trying these days find their way into our respective musical attitudes as well.

American composers pander; Europeans ponder. They think we’re simpletons; we think they’re pretentious. On both sides of the Atlantic, when not belittling, we do our best to ignore each other.

There is plenty of evidence to support the European position that, unlike us, they put substance over style -- especially if you contrast the works that regularly get programmed by orchestras, opera companies and festivals overseas with what you find in this country. The names are often different, as is the level of difficulty of the music.

Of course, almost everywhere you go you can find composers who write in difficult or less difficult styles and composers who do so well or not so well. America has an honorable tradition of producing challengingly complex work, as even the Europeans point out in their advocacy of Ives and Cage and Carter.

Americans don’t have a monopoly on trivial mollycoddle, what with the likes of the Eurotrashy Italian sentimentalist Ludovico Einaudi. Then again, there is the first-rate neo-Romantic Scot, James MacMillan, who obtains a certain grit by his militant message that combines themes of Catholicism and Scottish independence.

And there is always the profound but friendly middle path that one finds on the West Coast from John Adams and Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Still, a good argument for the European point of view might be the contrast between the mediocre, conventional American composer Jennifer Higdon and the exciting, edgy Austrian Olga Neuwirth, two women with emerging careers in their respective continents. Higdon writes in the manner of Bartok, Barber and Bernstein (Elmer as well as Leonard). Her orchestral scores are splashy and fall just short of the cineplex.

Championed by the conductors Robert Spano (who has just released a disc of her orchestral music with the Atlanta Symphony) and Marin Alsop, Higdon has been commissioned to write a new piece for the Chicago Symphony in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Ravinia Festival that will be premiered next weekend. The first weekend in August, she joins Alsop at the Cabrillo Festival in Santa Cruz as its composer in residence.

Neuwirth, whose experimental opera based on David Lynch’s film “Lost Highway” was a sensation in Graz last year, is the quintessential brainy and uncompromising European. Her music is full of striking and strange sound effects, is more likely to be found in the prestigious European venues and gets powerful championship from no less than Pierre Boulez.

The most prominent composer in Britain right now is Harrison Birtwistle. His music carries a heavy weight of sound and substance, the baggage required from a composer who looks at the world from multiple points of view. His latest opera, “IO Passion,” given this month in London, has been described as a dark, confusing, disturbing tale of unsettled relations, violence and sex. A typical Birtwistle piece is “Pulse Shadows,” an hourlong set of meditations on the angst-ridden aphoristic poetry of Paul Celan, written for soprano, string quartet and instrumental ensemble.

While Birtwistle may be off-putting to many a conservative concertgoer, he nevertheless satisfies European expectations that new music contain significant intellectual content. His impressively hefty operas, whether immediately comprehensible or not, are commonly produced at Covent Garden. This summer he is composer in residence at the Zurich Festival where dozens of his robust instrumental pieces will be played by major orchestras and ensembles.

In France, the cerebrally acceptable national style of composition is spectral music. Developed at IRCAM, the electronic music institute founded by Boulez in the ‘70s, it relies on advanced computing techniques to help work out harmonies based upon the overtone series of the natural sound spectrum.

The French have always been keen on instrumental color, and this is a big next step in opening the ears to arresting new sounds. When applied with the skill of Tristan Murail, a 56-year-old composer from Le Havre, spectral techniques can make an orchestra resonate so spectacularly that your whole sense of space and perception changes.

A big name in Germany right now is Helmut Lachenmann, and what odd music he writes. It is as though he finds music where music doesn’t exist. He fashions shards of sounds into sonic sculptures that glisten invitingly but are so razor sharp that if you could touch them they would cut you. Sometimes it feels as though the music itself draws blood as it enters the ear.

Though based on a Hans Christian Andersen tale, Lachenmann’s recent opera “Das Madchen mit den Schwefelholzern” (The Little Match Girl) is the kind of work that gets produced often in Europe and has been presented at prestigious festivals like that at Salzburg.

Instead of the pathetic little girl with only the matches she can’t sell to warm herself on Christmas Eve, the opera represents her shadows sung by two shadowy sopranos. As if Andersen were on the verge of nervous breakdown, Lachenmann evokes the ghosts of Gudrun Ensslin, the Baader-Meinhof gang terrorist who was a childhood friend of the composer’s, and Leonardo da Vinci, who leaps across time “quasi via satellite.”

This is an opera in which we only vaguely know where we are dramatically or musically, but in which we sense movement instinctively. Strange sounds congeal and break apart, break apart and congeal. Heaven is approached by rising sonic glitter but when reached becomes the breathy noise of the traditional Japanese sho.

So supportive of such bizarre, if fascinating, work are Europeans that a second recording will be released Tuesday by ECM. Yet nothing could be further from the radar of American opera companies.

In the world of opera, Americans really do play it safe. Certainly, no recent American opera has had two recordings. The successful operas of late, the ones that have had single recordings and multiple productions -- Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking,” Mark Adamo’s “Little Women,” Andre Previn’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” -- all have one thing in common: Music serves not to obscure narrative but to underscore it. American opera composers are expected to tell familiar stories unambiguously.When placed next to advanced European scores, American music begins to feel inadequate. You really can’t talk about Lachenmann, a composer with a searching mind and the nerve and vision to push the envelope of music, in the same breath as Heggie, who sets word to note in obvious ways and thinks first about making singers happy. Lachenmann deals with abstract algebra; Heggie adds 1 plus 1 and proudly gets a 2.

But that does not mean that every emotionally accessible American score is shallow. John Corigliano’s Second Symphony, which was celebrated with a Pulitzer Prize three years ago and has just been given its first recording, may seem overly obvious in comparison with Birtwistle’s more abstruse orchestral style but reveals a gripping sonic imagination.

Meanwhile, in much German and Austrian new music you start to hear the same complexities over and over again, complexities that are as formulaic as Heggie’s dutiful harmonies and that add up to nothing more once you figure out what’s going on in the piece. At least with Heggie, you know right away what you get. There is nothing worse than spending a lot of time wading through something by Georg Friedrich Haas or Georges Aperghis for naught.

The Minimalists don’t quite fit into this scheme, but even so, interesting differences do exist between Americans and Europeans. Louis Andriessen, the great Dutch composer, writes far more grating and politically out-there music than do his American contemporaries, Philip Glass or Steve Reich.

And then there are the American mavericks who follow in the individualist footsteps of Ives or are experimentalists cutting their own paths. These are the Americans most readily honored in Europe. If you want to encounter a large retrospective of the works by Cage, Vienna is the place to be this fall. Morton Feldman’s orchestral pieces are practically repertory in Germany and Holland and all but unknown in America (the Los Angeles Philharmonic has never played one).

Even the more ambitious works by the dean of American composers, the 95-year-old, still-active Elliott Carter, whose rarefied intricacies have gone out of fashion in America, are best represented in Europe. When James Levine announced earlier this year that he will give the American premiere of Carter’s Symphonia this fall as part of his first season as music director of the Boston Symphony, the news was not greeted warmly by some populist composers and critics who felt this represents a musical dead end. Thus far it is the British who have championed this symphony, and they tend to look at us as, well, children, not able to appreciate the huge impact of composers such as Cage, Carter and Feldman.

All this animosity, insecurity, defensiveness, condescension that we trade back and forth across the Atlantic is hardly healthy. The fact is that we don’t live in a world of main streams any longer but tributaries. And the tributaries have a habit of flowing in unpredictable fashions. Adams, an adamant anti-Modernist, began his career a Cagian, but his experimenting softened as he added more traditional aspects to his style and developed a personal and powerful voice that now has international appeal. Salonen began at the other extreme, an intellectual Modernist, who has retained a hint of his inherent European complexity but given the style new impact using some of the same rhythmic techniques that Adams likes.

The future, though, probably lies with those of the next generation who take this middle-road approach a step further and bring in other parts of the world -- Asia, Africa and South America. Composers such as the Chinese American composer Tan Dun and the Argentine American Osvaldo Golijov combine so many different traditions in their music that they have become multi-stylistic, and the bridges they build across the tributaries may well be here to stay. But first we need to tear down a few walls.

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Europeans

Lachenmann: “Das Madchen mit den Schwefelholzern” (The Little Match Girl). ECM.

This new recording of Lachenmann’s opera, in the revised, slightly cut version that the composer prefers, demonstrates the power of confusing music and storytelling that operates on the disturbing edges of consciousness.

Birtwistle: “Pulse Shadows.” Teldec.

“Cut to the brain,” begins the last of these meditations on the poetry of Paul Celan, and boy, does Birtwistle ever. It begins with the fury of a string quartet (the outstanding Arditti) and an hour later, after the intense introspection from soprano Claron McFadden and the Nash Ensemble, finishes its mental, existential struggle with a listener feeling a whole lot closer to parts of the brain you hardly knew were there.

Tristan Murail: “Gondwana,” “Desintegrations,” “Time and Again.” Naive.

Here are three spectral orchestral pieces from the ‘80s that reveal just how sexy overtones can get.

-- M.S.

Americans

Corigliano: Symphony No. 2, “Mannheim Rocket.” Ondine.

Even though it took the Helsinki Philharmonic to record Corigliano’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Second Symphony, it is an excellent example of the more emotionally direct American style (the symphony is about loss, and pretty clear about how the composer feels on the subject) but still is smart in its use of interesting instrumental devices.

Higdon: “City Scape.” Concerto for Orchestra.Telarc.

Very conventional orchestral music dressed in snazzy colors.

Heggie. “Dead Man Walking.” Warner.

The brain-dead opera that won the operatic heart of a nation.

Carter: “Symphonia.” Clarinet Concerto. Deutsche Grammophon.

Elliott Carter’s 45-minute symphony in all its considerably complex and considerable glory -- and which will get its first American performance in Boston next season, eight years after it was finished -- in a dazzling performance by the BBC Symphony conducted by Oliver Knussen.

-- M.S.

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Mark Swed can be reached at mark.swed@latimes.com.