My grievances with academic music are ultimately philosophical. It would seem that we, as a generation, have come to a point where art is no longer definable. Though this allows the truly gifted a vital opportunity for creative expression, it also indulges the fancies of those who do not possess the capacity to create, but are nonetheless attracted to the artistic media.
I, too, am a possible target for this criticism of indulgence. There are, for example, those who would criticize my music as overly conservative or excessively tonal. My response is simply this: I am an artist whose music has a place outside of the academies of the world.
My music is not a hothouse plant. If the position of the artistic world has become one in which the academies, in their arrogance, must be placated or at least vulgarly amused with obscurity and complexity, then the historical capacity of art to better the world through an expression that goes beyond the common human experience has been lost.
Though academia enjoys the privilege of prolonging the existence of nonfunctional studies, languages, histories and other pursuits for the purposes of research and acquisition of knowledge, this endeavor is only done for the benefit of the few. Posterity, truth be told, is not the end everything, if everything is considered of the Western world. We are a people that are defined by our cultural (and, consequently, artistic) offerings, not the posterity gifted us by circumstance. However, the artistic output defining the populace at large is no longer that preferred by the studied musician, but rather that of the novice who follows his ear and his heart.
Despite the simplicity of the popular genre of music, it has a dignity that most serious music withers in front of. That basic dignity, the human drama that illuminates the greatest of Western art, seems painfully missing from the works coming out of the modern musical academies.
Rather, those works delight in complexity and obscurity for the sake of those seeking to pacify their intellects. The academic swill rush to the defensive upon hearing these statements, but after a hundred years, atonality has garnered no greater appreciation in the minds of the listener than it has ever had.
People like Milton Babbitt, a composer of this sort, will only comment on technical points like pitch relations -- mostly because talking about the way music feels is something that cannot be quantified or scientifically pinned down. Mozart is a genius, but appreciation of that genius is not limited to academics.
All people, common and vulgar, sophisticated and educated, kind and cruel, can appreciate the beauty of the work of Mozart. The academic can love his handiwork, but the amateur can still love what he says with each piece.
Art that serves purely as an exercise of the mind is not art at all. That endeavor, etymologically speaking, is defined as a game or puzzle. Haydn and his contemporaries could definitively say, "This is art." When asked the same question, we, in our contemporary society, cannot.Beethoven's music was both practical to the audience and academically rigorous. It seems that we have gotten to a point where rigor has overshadowed practicality.
Reasonably speaking, practicality means beauty and enjoyment to the listener. Some in the modern musical world such as Babbitt wish to view music as a form of scientific exploration: This may be all well and good, but it serves no purpose to art. Babbitt, for example, has long since considered himself above the ordinary listener.
The anti-climatic answer to the big question "What is music today?" is simply "We're not sure" or "We don't know." Correction, we do know, but we can't really say. Correction: We can say, but we aren't really at liberty to pass judgment on anything. Ever. Criticism has become transparent.
I would argue that it is time to step up to the plate and face this down. The reason that the old masters' standards are the only works regularly scheduled and recorded in the "classical music" world is that theirs is the only educated music that attempts to reach out to the audience.
Next time, I'll discuss the rise of the Second Viennese School, the nature of music in the post Romantic era, the problem with the superiority complex adopted by musicians such as Babbitt and the social and political aspects from which much of the "tortured artist" syndrome has real roots in our culture. Don't touch that dial, there's more to come.
-- Matthew J. Viator is a senior composition major at the Peabody Conservatory.
