Modernism as an attitude problem

Mr. Carter never has made concessions to his listeners. ... It will take many hearings for the relationships in the score to assert themselves.
HAROLD C. SCHONBERG [1]
____________________________

So there you have it: An innovative composer's pursuit of his artistic vision is an attitude problem.  The composer is described as one who refuses to "make concessions to his listeners", who is "uncompromising", who expects his listeners do heavy mental work involved in keeping track of a bewilderingly rapid succession of seemingly unrelated sound events.  Put in a euphemism-free way, the composer is an arrogant motherfucker who pursues his aesthetic ideals at the expense of his listeners' desire for pleasantly comfortable aural experiences after a long and busy day at the office (or at the country club).

Blunt as it is, I find this description unobjectionable so long as its scope of application is taken to be wide enough to reflect the fact that the entire history of Western art music, in its broadest outline, is the history of arrogant motherfuckers who pushed music in directions that were uncomfortably strange, irritatingly complex, and largely unintelligible to all but a handful of so-called connoisseurs.[2]  
     Bach was frequently in trouble with his employers for writing church music that was difficult for musicians and singers to perform and for the congregation to understand.  As a young church organist in Arnstadt, Bach was already reproved for "having ... made many curious variations in the chorale, and mingled many strange notes in it, [so that] the congregation has been confused by it." [3]
     The complexity of Mozart's mature music was challenging even for professionals, as witnessed by Mozart's colleague, the successful composer Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf who complained that Mozart "gives his hearers no time to breathe; as soon as one ... idea is grasped, it is succeeded by another ... until at the end [nothing] remains in the memory".[4]
     Beethoven's music demanded even more from the listener, eliciting numerous, often bitter, complaints from critics and musicians.  Thus, Vaclav Tomasek, the important Czech pianist-composer who attended a 1798 Prague concert of Beethoven's music (with Beethoven as soloist), complained that the music's "frequent ... deviations from one [idea] to another ... destroyed the continuity and gradual development".  The editorial published in the Viennese periodical Thalia in connection with the 1812 Vienna premiere of Beethoven's 'Emperor' Concerto complained that Beethoven's music "can be understood and appreciated only by connoisseurs."  And the premiere of Beethoven's First Symphony caused one German critic to describe the music as "explosions of the outrageous effrontery".[5]
     In the 19th century similar complaints were made about the music of Chopin, Schumann, and Wagner.  Even the supposedly conservative Brahms was accused of writing music that was too complex and unintelligible![6] 
     With this in mind, the only surprising thing about Harold Schonberg's review of Carter's A Symphony of Three Orchestras - the review penned by a sworn enemy of avant-garde music - is its almost friendly tone of resignation.  Or so it feels when compared to what came through the clenched teeth of Bernard Holland, one of Schonberg's successors as chief music critic for the New York Times:

Elliott Carter ... gave the 20th and even 21st centuries compositions that were ... sometimes dense to the point of impenetrabiilty.  ...  [I]t is hard to imagine the average intelligent music lover, after a trying day in the world, turning to his or her record player at home and seeking solace in the [music of] Carter...  Carter did not need the public; one hears it in his pieces.  He ... liked to blame general ignorance and illiteracy for the lack of love directed toward [him]. ... [This is] self-serving arrogance...[7]

Here we finally arrive at the full meaning of that ubiquitous critical euphemism 'uncompromising', the meaning I intuited almost perfectly in my opening paragraph (written before I came across Holland's vitriol).  Musical modernism, broadly construed, has always been viewed by its opponents as an attitude problem, even if expressions of this view have rarely been as direct as in complaints about Beethoven's "outrageous effrontery" or Carter's "self-serving arrogance".
     But then a certain amount of arrogance is necessary (though never sufficient) for creating works of art which challenge and eventually overcome deeply entrenched assumptions and expectations.  To accept this unavoidable (and obvious) intersection of psychology and aesthetics is to see countless historical examples of aggrieved critics and enraged audiences as being nothing more than illustrations of Charles Rosen's remarkable observation that the long-term survival of musical works is determined neither by the critics nor by the public.  As Rosen put it, the music that survives is the music that musicians want to play; and the continuing enthusiasm for Elliott Carter's music among European musicians makes me optimistic about its future.  The past several months have seen a new production of Carter's opera What's Next? in Germany (Duisburg), an all-Carter concert in Paris (by the Ensemble InterContemporain) and another all-Carter concert in Birmingham (by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group), as well as Simon Rattle's performance of Instances at his first concert as music director of the London Symphony Orchestra.
     Even A Symphony of Three Orchestras - surely one of Carter's "absurdly overcomposed monstrosities" in the words the loudest philistine among American musicologists, Richard Taruskin - has received a committed performance by the SWR Sinfonie-Orchester under Alejo Pérez in October of 2016.
     Incidentally, this short orchestral work, prohibitively expensive to rehearse properly with American orchestras, was performed in Amsterdam by the Radio Filharmonisch Orkest under David Porcelijn as far back as 1982, two years before its first performance by the Chicago Symphony and four years before its first performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra.  I thought it will be well to end my paean to arrogant motherfuckers of art music by adding a recording of this performance to the blog's audio collection of Carter's music. 

_______________________

[1]  Review of the premiere performance of Elliott Carter's A Symphony of Three Orchestras by the New York Philharmonic under Pierre Boulez, New York Times, 18 February 1977. 

[2]  Here is a taster of the frightening regularity with which 20th century modernist composers have been branded as 'uncompromising' by critics, musicologists, and historians of music:
i) Schoenberg, the most ... uncompromising composer in history (The Guardian, 12 January 2007).
ii) The uncompromising character of [Webern's] music ... became an emblem of uncompromising ethics   (Music in the Twentieth Century: The Oxford History of Western Music, Oxford U. Press, 2006).
iii) Varese represented ... an uncompromising modernist stance (Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s, Oxford U. Press, 2000).
iv) Boulez was ... an uncompromising Modernist composer (New York Times, 6 January 2016)
v) Stockhausen's [music] is ... altogether uncompromising (A History of Western Musical Aesthetics, U. of Nebraska Press, 1992).
vi) Helmut Lachenmann ... uncompromising German modernist (New York Times, 9 September 2009).

[3]  Schoenberg, H.C., The Lives of the Great Composers, WW. Norton, 1997, p.44.

[4]  Solomon, M., Mozart: A Life, Harper Collins, 2009, p.463. 

[5]  All three Beethoven related quotes come from Downes, E., The New York Philharmonic Guide to the Symphony, Walker, 1976,

[6]  It is hard not to laugh at the description of Brahms' First Symphony as "mathematical music evolved with difficulty from an unimaginative brain" (Boston Gazette, 24 January 1878), but only because this description places Brahms in the company of the twentieth-century modernists whose non-tonal music has been repeatedly derided for being 'mathematical'.  Since all music (regardless of style or period) has abstract formal properties which are essentially mathematical in nature, such descriptions only prove that stupidity has never prevented anyone from making a living as a music writer.

[7]  Holland, B., Something I Heard: A New York Times Critic Remembers 1981-2008, Lisa Hagan Books, 2015, pp.144-145.