The Rest is Noise

[John Boyer]

In another thread I mentioned listening to one of the quartets of Ernst Krenek. Indeed, I have been been on quite a Krenek kick the last few weeks, pouring through his symphonies, quartets, and sonatas. Nothing he wrote belongs here, but he put me into mind of Alex Ross's book on modern music, "The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century". In it, I found this interesting passage:

"In the late 18th century, 84% of the repertory of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra consisted of music by living composers. By 1855, the figure had declined to 38%, by 1870 to 24%. Meanwhile, the broader public was falling in love with the cakewalk and other popular novelties.  Schoenberg's reasoning [for abandoning the public] was this: if the bourgeois audience was losing interest in new music, and if the emerging mass audience had no appetite for classical music new or old, the serious artist should stop flailing his arms in a bid for attention and instead withdraw into a principled solitude".

This raises an interesting chicken or egg question. Did modernism in music drive away audience interest, especially in the new, or is modernism a reaction to an audience increasingly beholden either to the past or to the latest technologically enabled inanities of pop culture?  What is especially curious is the rapid decline in the programming of new music right at the very point where we of this website find so much interest, the age of mid to late 19th century Romanticism.  It long predates the advent of atonality and serialism. 

[eschiss1]

Such either-ors leave out the presence of several other factors (just as the decline in popularity of movie theaters over the course of the 20th century can't be wholly understood without taking into account the existence of televisions, try as some might to do so...) though yes, as you say, e.g. the symphonic poems by Liszt (not everything that's fairly standard now grabbed on immediately, after all) - was (one sees in Walker's Liszt biography) for awhile a victim of growing fissures in the later 19th century.

[John Boyer]

Quite. 

[eschiss1]

Walker, in a footnote, as I recall, finds the War of the Romantics ironic (my word) considering the amount of energy they expended arguing over musical differences that, well, pale compared to the wide range (range, not just extremes) of musics composed after - not even 1915; starting in the mid-1890s, arguably.

Edit: Austin in what I found a fine book on 20th-century music identified Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi (1894) as the audience-acceptable, critic-hated opening of the musical 20th century, in a manner of speaking- because it's not loud dissonance that announces that break, but the quiet near-disappearance of I-IV-V common-practice harmonic progression.

[John Boyer]

My point, though, is not the transition to dissonance in the 20th century but the rapid disappearance of new music in the second half of the 19th, which to us is the golden age of Raff and Brahms, Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky, Reinecke and Saint-Saens.

[eschiss1]

I wonder how one would go about quantifying this, though- even the first issue of the 1889 NZM I opened announces a performance of a relatively new string trio by Herzogenberg, so of course it's a relative thing which would need to be measured (Edit: incidentally, the -next- page of that issue lists a performance in Zwickau, also in 1889 I assume so almost a decade after the premiere, of Raff's Die Tageszeiten.)

[Ilja]

It seems to me that Schoenberg's response is a very specific and fairly extreme one, driven at least as much by his own social and political attitudes as by any objectively discernable phenomenon. Moreover, and this is a trap that I see Ross falling into as well to some degree, Schoenberg's de facto rewriting of musical history artificially inflates the role of modernist "art music" and almost wholly ignores other developments. For most of the 20th century, theatre, film and videogame music, operettas and zarzuelas continued to follow more iterative paths, sometimes adopting techniques from modernist trends and incorporating them into something new - not entirely unlike composers had done for centuries. As Eric said, Schoenberg (and others, Boulez being perhaps the most extreme case) reducing musical development post-romanticism to a binary proposition is a historical distortion. But then again, they were, and considered themselves to be, propagandists. The big problem was the adoption of these ideas through their growing personal influence.

[eschiss1]

... Schoenberg's compositional or aesthetic response? (What he did, vs. what he believed others should do?) As he changed his mind about both a few times, as people do during a long career, using the singular is confusing as well as ambiguous.

[Alan Howe]

The question, though, is 'which modernism'? There was the extreme kind which led to the abandonment of all tradition and then the various ones which maintained continuity of some sort  and to some degree with the past. The latter have, inevitably, won out. The school which culminated in Boulez has proved to be a dead end.

Let's take an everyday example of an audience. About twice a year I am asked to present a programme of unsung music to our church social group - which consists entirely of retired people. Some know a fair bit of music from the standard repertoire, but others 'just know what they like', i.e. something they can understand and enjoy. So, (mature) Stravinsky, Bartók and Schoenberg are definitely out; Although I venture into the 20th century for, say, Korngold, most of my choices are from the 19th.

As far as I can see, for most people almost all modernism's a no-no. For them, it's best left on the shelf next to Ulysses and Guernica.

[John Boyer]

I should have left Schoenberg out of this, since that wasn't the point. "NIAGARA FALLS!  Slowly I turned, step by step..."  Returning to said point and addressing Eric's question on quantification, Ross's source on changes in 19th century programming away from living composers is William Weber, "The Rise of the Classical Repertory in Nineteenth Century Orchestral Concerts", in The Orchestra: Origins and Transformations, ed. Joan Peyser (Billboard Books, 2000), p. 376.

Looking back on my original post, however, I see I opened the door too much on modernism and didn't focus my argument enough on the change of programming in the 19th century. My error.

[Alan Howe]

At a guess: as the 19thC progressed, the notion of a body of music (the repertoire) developed with a longer and longer historical hinterland, meaning that ever more music from the past was played as the century wore on. Inevitable consequence: less and less contemporary music could be fitted in - and was in any case constantly (unfavourably) compared with what had gone before.

Could it be that simple?

[John Boyer]

Yes, with a growing, proven repertory of deceased composers (Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, etc.), it could be as simple as that. 

[Ilja]

No, because that supposes that the assessment of music is an objective process. Whereas we all know that marketing, education, developing taste all play a role. Despite the ossification of the repertoire, things still change: Stravinsky is sort of out, Martinu is sort of in, for instance. Some pieces get played less whereas others clearly hit current aesthetics: I have the distinct impression that Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 is valued much higher now than it was twenty years ago; you can say the same about all of Rachmaninoff.

[Alan Howe]

I was talking about the subject at hand, i.e. the development of the repertoire in the 19th century. I think my 'guess' is provable from the evidence of the period. What happpened after that is far more complicated.

[John Boyer]

No, because that supposes that the assessment of music is an objective process.

I think you are taking "proven" too literally.  I did not mean it in an Aristotelian sense. Rather, by "proven", I meant a growing body of generally accepted repertory by composers who continued to fill the ranks of the deceased.  There was simply a larger and larger body of accumulating work by composers who in 1845 were among the performed and living and who, by 1875, were among the performed and deceased.  I also took for granted that from this growing body of deceased composers works would be added to or removed from the repertory.