Generally, I'm in favor of anything that stands a chance of getting more people listening to contemporary music, but I'm also an educator, and so this project is kind of on my turf; I wrestle with mythologies of the modern and the classical everyday, and some of the toughest students to deal with are the ones who already feel that they have busted all their myths. Emerson's suggestion that 'when you strike at a king you must kill him' is perhaps a somewhat over strong evocation for a little response to a little blogpost, but it does seem that to claim to unpack something as subtle and embedded as a myth, one should be careful to bring the necessary tools for the project.
1. It all sounds like a squeaky gate
In outlining the return of some composers to the sounding aesthetics of yesteryear (what we might call 'neo-consonances'), and the optimistic hope in a progressive expansion of accepted norms of 'the beautiful' (what we might call 'the new consonances') Mr. Service captures two real and significant elements of current practice, but minimizes the continuing role of a 'strenge stil' or severe style in contemporary music. There are times when the unfamiliarity of the sounding music and the discomfiture of the audience and their expectations and desires is a compelling, core element of a work. I'm thinking, for one example, of a recent performance c)i's performance of Nono's 'fragmente...'; a gentleman left the concert, leaving a note that this was 'not music of any kind' on the back of his program; we discussed this as a band, and in addition to thinking that this was greatest angry departure from a concert ever, the form ofhis negative critique was actually a tremendously insightful take on that piece and its challenges.. This music may very well become 'beautiful,' but that process would follow and overwrite a rather more complex project of positional aesthetics.2. It's inaccessible.
The form of this myth confuses me - does he mean that it is inscrutable, or that it is difficult to find? He 'debunks' this inaccessibility by illustrating connections between artists in more popular/populist practices, which is interesting, and true, but doesn't, it seems to me, deal with the question of accessibility to the 'general listener' (now that's a myth to unpack...the general listener). A likely reading of this narrative would be that artists like Bjork and Mr. Greenwood serve as mediators between the listener and the (still) inaccessible contemporary music; they are tastemakers, and perhaps kingmakers in some sense. I think this sidesteps the fact of the social construction of all musical practices and the extent to which the accessibility of music is contingent the listeners situation in the industrial network of musical consumption. Perhaps this is a prelude to the more essentialist/naturalist arguments that follow.3. You need to have a beard and wear a black polo-neck jumper to appreciate it.
Again the disconnect between the myth and the critique is somewhat confusing. The myth assigns a character or style to the appreciators of contemporary music, but the critique argues that the more 'atavistic' (his term) composer is more easily appreciated by neophyte schoolchildren, using 'straight sonic power.' So the myth (and fear) of a cliquish elitism is negated by the universality of this contemporary music. Logically, compelling, but the idea of universality in musical signification is a pretty difficult position to sustain. (I don't have the time to even begin to list the literature to read on this...will add more later, perhaps.)4. It's irrelevant.
Relevance here is framed as essentially poesic;– this is a discussion of the ways that the 'real world' influences contemporary concert music. In my teaching, I have found that students critiquing the relevance of this music are far more interested in the potential impact rather than the 'origin story' of any particular work. The ontogeny of a musical work says little about its future impact. One might say that the argument from myth #2 would be more relevant here, but place here that argument would encounter a different problem than outlined above; that argument only catalogues the impact of contemporary music through its impact on other vernaculars, which seems to down play the significance of contemporary-qua-genre, rendering it subordinate to other practices.5. It's written for classical musicians so it must be 'old.'
Again, as in #3, we the positioning of contemporary music as transcendant or universal in the assertion that this music achieves a timeless character by being, in short, old and new at the same moment. This is for me, personally, the most interesting of these statements, resonating as it does with most ever piece I write and everything I write and teach. Having said that, to open up this line of argumentation would probably require a more careful articulation of the relationship between notions of 'classical,' 'heritage,' and 'timeless.' The differences in valences of these terms in historical, commercials, artistic, and philosophical discourses are wide and deep, and thus one runs the risk of supplanting one mythology with another. Get some Gadamer; 'nuff said.So these myths touch on many things that I find to be relevant, but don't seem to help clarify the foundations of any mythologies. Perhaps to really unpack myths around our practices, we should try to be a bit more careful not to set up straw-men for our analyses, but dig a bit deeper into the actual practice of our art, and its historical and philosophical underpinnings.