IT AIN'T OVER 'TIL IT'S OVER

The ability of good music to captivate the masses has been sacrificed to ... strained formalism and pretensions to originality...  The composer apparently never made it his goal to pay attention to what the Soviet audience expects from music.

New music has to be music that people love.
______________________________________

The first of the above quotes comes from the infamous 1936 review (written on Stalin's orders or with his approval) of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of  the Mtsensk District.[1]

The second quote comes from a speech given by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.  Well... not really.  Goebbels probably said similar things about music (the Nazis were studious imitators of Soviet Communism), but he did not make the statement in question.  That statement was made in 2010 by one Deborah Borda who at the time was the President and CEO of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.[2]

As a concise summary of her philistine Stalinist criteria for desirable new music, Borda's statement is of little if any interest.  Totalitarian rhetoric and behavior are ubiquitous in today's America, where individuals and corporations grovel before Facebook lynching mobs and Twitter execution squads, where universities encourage students to think and behave like Brownshirts, and where art organizations have become eager servants of whatever ideology happened to be de jour.
     What caught my attention was that Borda's statement was meant in part as an explanation of why the music of American modernists - Ellliott Carter's in particular - is not played by the orchestra under her command.  In 2017, a few months before returning to New York as the President and CEO of the New York Philharmonic, Borda confidently declared that "the years of ... Elliott Carter ... are over."[3]

Like other totalitarian prophecies - The Bright Future of Communism, The Thousand Year Reich - Borda's prophecy of oblivion for Elliott Carter's music reeked of falsehood while the words were still bouncing off the roof of her mouth.  Since her one-sentence obituary for Carter's artistic legacy, there have been enough performances[4] of Carter's works (including a new production of Carter's opera in Stuttgart) to remind me of Yogi Berra's immortal wisdom: It ain't over 'til it's over.

And it certainly "ain't over" for Elliott Carter.  More telling perhaps than the number of performances is that some of them came from distinguished but musically conservative orchestras and conductors.  I was surprised to hear Carter's Clarinet Concerto performed last year by the arch-conservative Leipzig Gewanhausorchester under Andris Nelsons (with Jörg Widmann as soloist).  No less surprising was to hear Carter's Three Illusions for Orchestra as part of the 2019 season-opening program of the Minnesota Orchestra under Osmo Vänskä.

Something else made me think of Yogi Berra's aphoristic observation as deeper and far more instructive than anything heard from the ridiculously overrated Wittgenstein.  Carter's music - the kind of music that Borda's fictitious "people" do not "love" - continues to attract talented younger musicians.  Last year the rising podium star Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla (b.1986) conducted an all-Carter concert in Birmingham.  This year the superb JACK Quartet performed all of Carter's string quartets in New York and London.  At the 2019 ARD International Competition in Munich, two of the three finalists in the clarinet category chose to perform Carter's Clarinet Concerto.  And later this year Robin Ticciati (b.1983) will conduct the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin in a program featuring Carter's Adagio tenebroso.

I do not know what the future of Carter's music will be like, but I am quite sure this future will not be determined by philistine administrators like Deborah Borda.  The future of any composer's music depends on whether there will be enough musicians who feel passionate about it and want to perform it.  To repeat Charles Rosen's remarkable insight for the umpteenth time, the music that survives is the music that musicians want to play.

_______________________________
1.  "Сумбур вместо музыки" (Muddle instead of music), Pravda, 28 January 1936, my translation.

2.  "A Conversation with Deborah Borda, President of the Los Angeles Philharmonic", Santa Barbara Independent, 7 January 2010

3.  "The New Music Paradox, Part 2: Lessons From the Front Lines", San Francisco Classical Voice, 28 February 2017.

4.  One can get the complete list of performances of Carter's works during a specified period on the website of Carter's publisher Boosey & Hawks.