Concerto Guide: Prokofiev, Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, op. 16

One of the more surprising developments in 20th century music was the renewed attention paid to the concerto form. Earlier concerto composers, like Vivaldi with over 500, were very prolific. Both Bach and Mozart wrote a remarkable number of extremely fine concertos. So did Beethoven, but he also initiated some trends that echoed through the 19th century. By the end, major composers like Brahms were writing a single, very long, violin concerto, like Beethoven instead of several like Bach and Mozart. Brahms, a pianist, only wrote two for his own instrument while Beethoven wrote five and Mozart, not counting arrangements from J. C. Bach, wrote twenty-three! Even Franz Liszt, probably the greatest piano virtuoso of the 19th century only wrote three for his instrument.

So while some composers, like Sibelius whose Violin Concerto we discussed two weeks ago, continued to write just one violin concerto, most 20th century composers wrote at least two, even though it was not their instrument. And the piano concerto flourished with multiple ones by Bartók, Prokofiev, Shostakovich and even Stravinsky.

If I were to speculate, I would propose that the existential stresses of the 20th century found an appropriate vehicle in the concerto for solo instrument and orchestra. If you feel that you as an individual are surrounded by hostile and implacable forces (and frankly, for a lot of the 20th century, this was simply true), then the solo concerto might be the ideal medium to express this. In the 19th century, the solo concerto, like the symphony, expressed the aspirations and ideals of the mass audience of the bourgeoisie. Carl Dahlhaus mentions the strange restoration of the string quartet in the 20th century and I see something similar in the concerto which gained a new lease on life as the alienation of the individual vs the mass became a keen social and metaphysical theme in the 20th century. [Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, p. 28] Mind you, the 20th century concerto, like its 19th century predecessors, did not lack in virtuosity. In fact, the one we are going to look at today is famously one of the most challenging ever written.

The Piano Concerto No. 2 by Prokofiev, completed in 1913, was dedicated to a friend who had recently committed suicide. It has a very original and compelling opening, quiet, but with the feeling of the calm before the storm:

What a contrast with the typical 19th century piano concerto, whose opening usually features the piano, fortissimo, in a very virtuoso passage. The narrante indication in the piano part is interesting. It means "narratively" as if you are telling a story. This hearkens back a bit to the Ballades of Chopin that have a similar feel, though it is new in a concerto context. Here is how that theme continues, accompanied by pianissimo strings:

The allegretto arrives and the orchestra has still not had a strong tutti. The piano again has all the thematic material:

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The opening andantino returns, setting up the piano cadenza and still the orchestra has not come to the fore. What the orchestra has done is provided an often eerie context for the piano, accompanying with variant textures as a kind of landscape over which the piano moves.

Here is some of the piano cadenza, near the opening and notated on three staves:

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And as the cadenza continues, the texture gets even more complex and virtuosic:

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This cadenza, which starts at the six minute mark in the clip I am about to play, goes on for four minutes! This is a new thing in 20th century concertos and sometimes, as in the Violin Concerto No. 1 by Shostakovich and the Guitar Concerto by Villa-Lobos, the cadenza becomes a separate movement.

Finally, as the orchestra returns at the end of the cadenza, we get a full-blooded tutti:

And what a tutti! Unleashing the brass section, fortissimo, gives an enormous weight to this, the climax of the movement. All that is left is a brief coda in which the opening theme is recapitulated. The movement ends piano. Those three pages of fortissimo at the end of the cadenza constitute the only orchestral tutti in the whole movement.

The Scherzo, vivace is a whirlwind of never-stopping sixteenth notes in the piano with, again, the orchestra in a largely subsidiary role. The Intermezzo (this is a four movement concerto) is Prokofiev at his most Russian. The heavy and dolorous march is a perfect foil to the eerie first movement and the scintillating second. This is also the first chance that the percussion section get to do much.

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The piano contributes some hurtling decorations:

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but in this movement, the orchestra gets an equal share of the material:

The finale, Allegro tempestoso is just as tempestuous as you might expect:

But please, place no credence in the very odd commentary on this movement in the Wikipedia article. Trust me, composers do not write passages in 4/4 that are to be played in 7/8:

Five octaves above the intermezzo's end note, a fortissimo tirade pounces out of the sky, written in four-four-time but played in seven-eight (one-two-three-four-one-two-three etc.).

Who writes this stuff? The syncopation in the strings is not matched in the winds or piano, which is why it is properly notated in 4/4.

And that's all I want to say about this concerto. It has been one of my favorite concertos since a composer friend of mine lent me a box of all the Prokofiev piano concertos, oh, decades ago. Here is Yuja Wang doing a terrific job of it. The Verbier Festival Orchestra is conducted by Charles Dutoit:

Which Debussy Prelude Are You?

This kind of title is, of course, unashamed clickbaitery. The Internet loves lists, narcissism and polls and this combines at least two of those. I was on my way to a party yesterday and just about when it was due to begin, it started raining and the Debussy title just popped into my head: "Jardins sous la pluie" (Gardens in the Rain), because where I was going had a big garden. As a matter of fact, that piece is not a prelude, but the last movement of the suite Estampes. But then the thought "which Debussy prelude are you?" just popped into my head. When I lived in Montreal it would have been "Des pas sur la neige" of course.

Here are the complete titles of the Debussy preludes, two books, so twenty-four in all. Due to some ambiguity in the titles, there are even more possibilities. Think of it as being like the astrological signs or the Jungian personality types except more whimsical and musical (and just about as meaningful). So, which Debussy prelude are you? You might choose a title and then listen to the music to see if the music suits you. In the original edition, Debussy prints the score to each piece and at the end, puts the title, which I kind of like. So, go ahead, make your choice and let me know in the comments below. We have to do it this way because I don't know how to set up an online poll. But leaving a comment will be more interesting anyway.

If you chose the antepenultimate one in Book 2 I am going to be worried, though. A canopic jar was what the ancient Egyptians used to store the viscera of a mummy. Has to be the weirdest title ever for a piano prelude...

Book 1:
Danseuses de Delphes: Lent et grave (Dancers of Delphi)
Voiles: Modéré (Veils / sails)
Le vent dans la plaine: Animé (The Wind in the Plain)
Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir»: Modéré
("The sounds and fragrances swirl through the evening air")
Les collines d'Anacapri: Très modéré (The Hills of Anacapri)
Des pas sur la neige: Triste et lent (Footsteps in the Snow)
Ce qu'a vu le vent d'ouest: Animé et tumultueux (What the West Wind has seen)
La fille aux cheveux de lin: Très calme et doucement expressif (The Girl with the Flaxen Hair)
La sérénade interrompue: Modérément animé (Interrupted Serenade)
La cathédrale engloutie: Profondément calme (The Submerged Cathedral)
La danse de Puck: Capricieux et léger (Puck's Dance)
Minstrels: Modéré

Book 2:
Brouillards: Modéré (Mists)
Feuilles mortes: Lent et mélancolique (Dead Leaves)
La puerta del Vino: Mouvement de Habanera
Les fées sont d'exquises danseuses»: Rapide et léger ("Fairies are exquisite dancers")
Bruyères: Calme (Heather / town in Eastern France)
Général Lavine - eccentric: Dans le style et le mouvement d'un Cakewalk
La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune: Lent (The Terrace of Moonlit Audiences)
Ondine: Scherzando
Hommage à S. Pickwick Esq. P.P.M.P.C.: Grave (Homage to S. Pickwick)
Canope: Très calme et doucement triste (Canopic jar)
Les tierces alternées: Modérément animé (Alternating Thirds)
Feux d'artifice: Modérément animé (Fireworks)

Here is a clip with all of the preludes played by Krystian Zimerman:

Now wasn't that a clever way to trick you into listening to the Debussy preludes?

As a bonus, here is "Jardins sous la pluie" from Estampes. The performer is Sviatoslav Richter:

A Note is Just a Note

Composers are very concerned about notation because it is both the record of their creative ideas and the primary conduit of instructions to the performer. The long history of notation is largely a progression from less precise to more precise, but we may have reached a plateau in terms of useful notation. Here are some interesting remarks from composer Kyle Gann:

I complained to the singer I’m working with that some of my composer colleagues insist that virtually every note in a score should be marked with a dynamic and articulation marking – something I refuse to do. She replied: “Oh, I hate it when I feel hemmed in by the composer. I want to look at the notes and think, ‘What do I need to do to bring this line to life?'” That’s why I’m working with her. I would be irritated working with a performer who needed to be spoon-fed every phrase-shape, just as I would be bored writing a piece that sounded the same no matter who performed it.

I am in exactly the same situation these days with a singer I am about to start working with. We are going to record all of my song sequence Songs from the Poets and I have been going over the scores with a fine-toothed comb, proofing and editing. Like Kyle, I tend to not notate every interpretive detail. I notice that the comments to the post are fully in agreement. I talked about this once as the problem of Overdetermined vs Underdetermined several years ago.

The real background to this, what Kyle calls the "Eternal Argument" is actually an ideological one, but with an historical dimension to it. If we look back at the works of people like Bach, Haydn and Mozart, we do not find a forest of dynamics and articulations and phrase marks. For example, here is the opening of Haydn's Symphony No. 39:

There is a minimum of indications apart from the notes themselves: just a single dynamic for each part (piano), some slurs and a couple of staccato dots. To any person familiar with Haydn's style, this is enough. With Bach we get even less:

Yes, I know it's terribly fuzzy, but I think you can see that there are no dynamics or articulations or metronome marks, or even a tempo marking.

But, beginning with Beethoven, a lot of what we might call the "style" of a work, the basic ways in which it would be played or "interpreted", began to be manipulated by the composer. Beethoven began to make dynamics a structural aspect of the composition and so had to indicate them pretty precisely. This process continued well into the 20th century as composers more and more needed to construct, not only a particular piece in a particular style, but the style itself, essentially new with every piece. Eventually we ended up with scores that look like this, Structures by Pierre Boulez:

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I hope you can see that (click to enlarge) because every single note has a dynamic and an articulation, making for a very dense score. This is essential to the style of this piece, because all these aspects are part of the serialized compositional structure. But, just as this makes for an abstract kind of music, without traditional expressive content from the composer, it also prevents the performers from adding expressive content themselves.

But, for my songs at least, I just don't want to try and predetermine every expressive gesture by the singer. I want the singer to discover the interpretive nuances for herself. As one commentator said on Kyle's post:

To me it seems that if the composer covers the score with markings, they do not trust the performer. As a student conductor said to me years ago, if the performer is in tune with your music, they will play it properly; if they are not, no amount of dynamics or other markings will make them in tune with it.

This being "in tune" with the music is rather a subtle concept, but this is what performers do: they study and work with a piece of music until they understand it, feel it and are comfortable with it. Sometimes they have to learn a new style, but as no musical style is hermetically sealed off from all the others (mind you, there are exceptions!), this is something that performers do as a matter of course.

I'm really looking forward to working on the songs with the singer as I hope we will work out some of the style together.

For the envoi today, I pick the first of Britten's Songs from the Chinese, perhaps the finest set of songs for voice and guitar written in the 20th century:

Not Repeating

Ornette Coleman just passed away recently. I didn't talk about it because jazz is really not my beat and I don't have much empathy for the genre as a whole, though I certainly respect many jazz musicians. There was an interview with Ornette Coleman in NewMusicBox several years ago, after he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music and he said some interesting things about composition:

So for me, composing is a way of keeping up with not repeating. For me, that’s what it does. It makes me aware of how much I’m repeating and what I’m not repeating. What I’m not repeating is better.

Composition is largely about finding new ideas and new ways of expressing ideas. That has been pretty much a given for about the last 200 years. Prior to around 1800, repeating yourself, if you could get away with it, hoping your patron didn't notice, was not an artistic sin as such. Bach, Haydn, Mozart all recycled music in different ways and forms according to their needs. Sometimes Mozart even recycled music by someone else! But around 1800 there was a profound ideological shift in aesthetics and the need for the authenticity of personal expression became an inherent feature of art music. This lasted up until modernism started moving to the view that music should not be the personal expression of the composer, but rather an abstract, objective exploration or experimentation with sounds. But the older view still persists in pop music and a lot of classical music as well. While jazz has some aspects that are modernist, it is, I believe, an inherently expressive medium in which the authenticity and originality of the expression is crucial. Since you are a slightly different person every day, your music will be a bit different every day. I think that is what Coleman is saying when he says "What I’m not repeating is better." When I am not just repeating myself, it is a unique personal expression.

I ran across this quote via a posting by Alex Ross at The Rest is Noise where he achieves his usual level of fatuity by saying:

Ben Ratliff has an obituary for the jazz master, who once said to Frank Oteri, "For me, composing is a way of keeping up with not repeating." No better definition has been devised.

"No better definition"...? I kind of enjoy these little nuggets of meaninglessness that I stumble across every time I visit The Rest is Noise. Actually, the name of the blog itself, taken from Ross' book title The Rest is Noise, is another one, isn't it? A little lapidary phrase with no, or highly ambiguous, meaning that tweaks us in a fatuous way. Didn't the New Yorker used to be better than this? I know that music criticism was.

I have a book on my shelf by Peter Kivy titled The Fine Art of Repetition that gets its title from one of the essays. Here, let me offer a couple of quotes. First of all, Kivy quotes a passage from the great music theorist Heinrich Schenker as a frontispiece:

Our understanding of musical technique would have advanced much further if only someone had asked: Where, when and how did music first develop its most striking and distinctive characteristic--repetition?

The essay itself contains this elaboration:

...music alone, from Bach to Brahms, and before and beyond, consists to a large, although of course varying degree, in quite literal repetition of what has been heard before.

To flesh out a bit that "before and beyond" you should recall that a great deal of Medieval and Renaissance music contains repetition of various kinds and, of course, since the high tide of modernism began to recede in the 70s, a great deal of contemporary music also involves various kinds of repetition. While you would get an argument from certain quarters, I think it is reasonable to say, along with Schenker, that the most striking and distinctive characteristic of music is repetition.

But this, in good music, is always balanced out by the principle of variation. Music that is too repetitive, such as some pieces by Philip Glass, suffers aesthetically, and music that contains too little or no repetition, as in some pieces by Pierre Boulez, also suffers aesthetically. At least, I would argue thus.

I want to stop here because I am going to prepare a post about one of the most interesting examples of modernism, the Symphonies of Wind Instruments written by Stravinsky in 1920. What I am going to do is look at two aspects of it: the amount and kind of repetition and the use of montage.

But as an envoi to this post, let's listen to some Ornette Coleman. This is Lonely Woman, the first cut in his 1959 album, The Shape of Jazz to Come:

UPDATE: Well, so much for that plan! The Symphonies of Wind Instruments is not available on IMSLP or anywhere else I can find online. So, in order to get the score I will have to cough up $30 or so and purchase a copy. Which is completely fine! I believe very much in paying for creative work. But this means that I can't do anything soon with that piece. I do intend to as soon as I can get a copy of the score. I very much think it is worth a close look and I need the score for that. It is not just that it can help us hear what is going on, it is also so I can put up musical examples so you can see it too. I can hear what is going on in the piece, but without the score, it is difficult to show you what I am hearing.

In the meantime, let's have a listen. The Symphonies of Wind Instruments a fairly short piece, about 9 minutes long, composed in 1920 by Stravinsky:

Uh-Oh, We're On the Radar

There is an old saying that you may not like politics, but politics likes you. This seems more and more true these days. For a long time, due mostly to a link from the king of blogs, Instapundit, my post on Guitar Wars was the top post here at the Music Salon. That was about a really absurd raid by federal agents on the Gibson guitar factory, in which they hauled away a whole bunch of ebony and rosewood.

Now the Wall Street Journal has a new article up titled "The Federal Marching Band of Music Regulators" that collects together a whole bunch of ways in which the feds (in the US, at least) are trampling all over the music business (and, indirectly, music itself). If that article is behind the paywall for you, you can likely read it by typing the title into Google search. Here is a sample:

In 2007 the Federal Trade Commission launched a broad and far-fetched price-fixing investigation against instrument and equipment manufacturers. Far-fetched because it is difficult to imagine how makers of such disparate products—microphones, guitars, drums and keyboards—could fix prices. It took two years for the FTC to realize that it had no case, but only after threatening fines, conducting depositions and commandeering terabytes of corporate records.

 Read the whole thing for the cost and damage to the industry. Here is another example:

In March 2013 the FTC then turned its sights on the Music Teachers National Association, a 139-year old organization comprised primarily of women who give piano lessons in their homes. The group’s code of ethics, which discouraged members from poaching one another’s students, was deemed a restraint of trade. The association got off without a fine but had to abandon its code of ethics, train members about “anticompetitive practices,” draft a 20-year compliance plan, and file annual updates with the FTC.

Ugh. Here is yet another example:

Last year Gold Tone Banjo was fined $110,000 by the Fish and Wildlife Service over a few bits of oyster shell. Gold Tone failed to properly fill out “e-Doc” customs declarations for the material, which was to be used for fingerboard inlays. These aren’t endangered species, but farmed oysters like on menus everywhere. Federal officials initially asked for a $370,000 fine and a six month jail term for the owners, backing off only after weeks of negotiation.

I imagine that by this point, if you are a music-lover like myself, you are reaching peak rage. It is the arrogance, ignorance and psychopathic impertinence of this that is simply insufferable. By what right do these people feel they can interfere with our peaceful pursuit of the art and business of music? By no right, of course. But the overweening regulatory state acts according to its pursuit of power, not the rule of law. And it more and more escapes even the most basic of restraints. The article comments, following a dispiriting list of fines assessed for little or no cause:

The fines are a matter of public record, though, on advice of counsel, manufacturers decline to publicly discuss details. They know public criticism of the FCC could result in retribution when future products are submitted for approval.

Only totalitarian societies rule by this kind of fear of retribution.

Many years ago I stumbled across public choice theory, which attempts to offer theories as to the behaviour of governments. I found it quite persuasive. You see, despite what every single politician says, about how they are acting for our benefit, the truth is that governments everywhere act so as to further their interests. Unfortunately, it is the nature of governments to be constantly trying to increase their power and reach. Most industries have long known the heavy hand of administrative regulation, now it is our turn: we are on their radar. No aspect of the music business is too innocuous or insignificant to be free from the interference and intervention of the state. It is particularly incongruous for music because it is so obviously inappropriate and unnecessary.

Now for a musical envoi that will, I hope, drain off enough apoplectic anger so that we can all get on with our day. In honour of Gold Tone Banjo, this is Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs with Foggy Mountain Breakdown recorded in 1949:

Friday Miscellanea

Kicking things off with the most aggressive Social Justice initiative of the day: let's make 2018 the year of publishing only women! Really, you can't make this stuff up. I hate to inconvenience anyone, but I'm going to keep composing that year, and publishing when possible. Here is what Kamila Shamsie thinks about the bias:

...at this point, I’m going to assume that the only people who really doubt that there is a gender bias going on are those who stick with the idea that men are better writers and better critics, and that when men recommend books by men it is fair literary judgment, while when women recommend books by women it is either a political position or woolly feminine judgment. To these people I have nothing to say except, go away and read some Toni Morrison.

Let me point out something interesting: you know who is supporting this so-called bias? Women themselves! The great majority of purchases of books are made by women and so it is their tastes that are creating the demand for more books by men.

* * *

Yes, this piece about a new music festival held just for the drugs is from The Onion, but it still strongly reminds me of the one outdoor rock music festival that I attended. How long ago was it? Well, Rod Stewart was there and he was still cool.

* * *

You may have noticed how I love to bash the pseudo-scientific "discoveries" that keep being reported because of their shallow miscomprehension of the basic facts about music. Well here is one that is rather more sensible and reasonable: "Why we love sad music."

"Basically, the brain can be thought of as a problem-solving engine, or a prediction-engine.  In other words, we derive pleasure from solving puzzles, from understanding relationships, from seeing patterns in our environment, and from predicting what's going to happen next. Music can be thought of as a microcosm of that; to the extent that there are all different kinds of patterns, rhythms, harmonies, melodies, and different kinds of relationships. If you are able to perceive those relationships, you can also make predictions about what's coming up."

Yes, and composers work by setting up certain expectations and patterns and then going in a different direction. But I think they miss out a bit on explaining sad music by not mentioning catharsis: so-called "sad" music actually makes us happier because it purges us of strong negative emotions.

* * *

The sad truth is that there are some music schools that have become the private preserve of people who should not be in charge of young people's education. The reasons why may be various and complex, but the results are evident: in these schools the musical education and achievement of the students is not the primary goal, rather it is the careers and security of those in charge of the institution. An institution run in this way may appear to be just what it should be, but if you examine it closely you will see that all the important decisions are made by and for people who are most interested in their own progress and not that of the students. Most unfortunately, sometimes a clique of these people manage to gain control of an entire community, with predictable results. I can think of two Canadian cities, for example, where both the university schools of music and the local conservatory have fallen under these sorts of regimes. I make these remarks after reading about problems with some British schools as reported at Slipped Disc: "The losers who hold power in music schools." How does this happen? I think it starts when one unfortunate choice is made and a person is put in charge of a school who is not a genuine musician, but rather an opportunist. This person, unless resisted by those who are genuine musicians, will start to gather around him or her others of the same mindset and after a while, they will gather all the reins of power in their hands. Policies, procedures, awards and so on will all be created and given out to benefit the careers of the self-important administrators and not the students and quality of music. But to outsiders this Potemkin village of a music school will look almost like the real thing. It is an insidious problem. I suggest following the link at Slipped Disc and reading the whole of the essay by Alison Moncrieff-Kelly.

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I have argued against this a number of times, but new research hints that I may be wrong! Gerry Veenstra of the University of British Columbia has done a survey of nearly 1600 people in Toronto and Vancouver and found that "Musical Tastes Mirror Class Divides" --well, sort of. He doesn't actually say anything about class, but he does mention educational levels:

"In regard to highbrow tastes, appreciation for classical, choral, jazz, opera, and world/international music was especially common among people possessing higher educational credentials," Veenstra notes. "For example, the odds of postgraduates claiming to like classical music in my sample was more than three times as high as the odds of people with less than a high school diploma claiming the same."

In a mirror image of those results, "the odds of disliking classical music was more than eight times as high for the least educated respondents as for the best-educated ones," he adds.

I think I have argued against this kind of generalization because of my personal history: I became a lover of classical music before I went to university. Perhaps it is correlation rather than causation, two things that statistics and surveys tend not to distinguish. People who have higher levels of education also happen to like classical music. Now why would that be?

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Classical music hero of the week award goes to David Patrick Stearns, classical music critic for the Philadelphia Enquirer who, embedded with the Philadelphia Orchestra for a concert in the Musikverien in Vienna performed the following feat:

...just because the public is among the most cultured on the planet doesn't mean the cellphones are under control. Despite a preconcert warning announcement, one woman pulled out her phone just as Lisa Batiashvili had begun the quiet, slow-burning opening movement of Shostakovich's Violin Concerto No. 1. Only eight rows from the stage, the phone kept beeping and burbling, its owner entranced by it and oblivious to those nearby shooting her daggers.

So the problem was addressed American-style: Yours truly reached over, took the phone out of her hand, and pocketed it until intermission. Another phone (unfortunately out of my reach) went off during Batiashvili's cadenza. Was it my imagination or did her playing grow increasingly angry? The music takes well to that emotion, and Shostakovich got the most uproarious applause of the night.

Can we send him flowers, or get him a bonus or something?

* * *

 And that gives us the musical envoi for the day, the Violin Concerto No. 1 by Dmitri Shostakovich:

The only violin concerto that begins with a Nocturne.

Avant-Fascism

I am always conscious of two dangers in talking about music and aesthetics in the early 21st century. You might call them the Scylla and Charybdis of music blogging. On the one hand we have the rocky shoal of the politicizing of music and on the other the whirlpool dragging us down into the isolation of music in a hermetically-sealed chamber away from messy politics. I try to steer a middle course by noticing politics from time to time when it seems relevant and looking at music as it is in itself the rest of the time.

One issue that I have brought up from time to time is the ideology of modernism in music which condemned all those composers, like Shostakovich and others, who continued to write tonal and melodic music despite the proclamations of the avant-garde that this was now "music of the past" and therefore bad. I have described this as kind of a Deuteronomy of music history: Schoenberg begat Berg and Webern and they begat Boulez and Stockhausen and also of their tribe were Cage and Bartók. To my mind, aesthetic quality is not determined by ideological purity.

I just ran across an item at Slipped Disc titled in Norman Lebrecht's usual over-heated style as "French rage: Michel Legrand accuses Pierre Boulez of ‘acting like a Fascist’." The comment section is a kind of MRI scan of the various opinions on this question. I was rather surprised, though I shouldn't have been, that there are so many commentators with whom I would, roughly, agree.

Legrand's claim is that:

‘For 40 years Boulez and his ‘family’ have closed all possibilities for all other composers to be performed. He decided that the musical past would be wiped out and we would start from scratch. He shut the door to all other composers. Composers like me could not have made a living because we had no access to the concert hall.’

Here is a sample comment:

What you say is true and perceptive; however, in the USA there are still large pockets of powerful and intolerant ‘orthodoxy’ who control much of the funding for new music. Some of these pockets are accidental, caused by locals coincidentally banding together. But too many are of course in the hands of various influential academics, musicologists, or commentators who still subscribe to a totalitarianism, perhaps mildly modified by a grudging acknowledgement of John Adams and others, but a totalitarianism still ‘armed’ by a general rejection of anything with a relationship to traditional melody, a pulse, and general tonality.

This is the general political problem of our time in a nutshell: there is a class in our society that takes on a leadership role based largely on career opportunism and credentials and seeks to control discussion and funding of those things they consider important. They don't want to have a free and open discussion, because they don't want their basic assumptions revealed, let alone questioned.

In music, I believe I have summarized these basic assumptions in a number of places, but they include the view that the music of the past is dead and irrelevant and the music of today and the future must be structured in entirely new ways. It is not to be either the personal expression of the composer or an appeal to the tastes of the audience. It is instead to be an exploration of novelty in various ways.

As a matter of fact, I think that this ideological movement, which I usually call "modernism" or "high modernism" has failed. Performances of this kind of music are dwindling as other competing models come to the fore such as the new consonance, minimalism, process music and a lot of other similar music that does not benefit from a handy catchphrase.

I notice that one sign of the failure of the modernists is that they no longer seem to control the purse strings of the major competitions. Philip Glass was just given the Glenn Gould prize and John Luther Adams was given the Pulitzer Prize in Music last year. These are both composers who customarily use consonance and a regular pulse.

So, since all too many people are agreeing with me, I need to reconsider and refine my position! Is it not the case that, while the modernists were over-complex and contemptuous of their audience, the new consonance composers are perhaps too bland and pander to the audience?