MODERN MUSIC: 'A DEAD ART'

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00001R000400010017-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: November 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: April 26, 2000
• Sequence Number: 17
• Content Type: NSPR

JAZZ CONCERT-"Jau is modern music-and nothing else is! Deep down in his heart the serious composer, dated to go on writing sonatas, symphonies and
Modern Music: 'A? Dead . Art'
Serious music, which for 300 years has pi oduced works` of beauty, has. run onto
sterile ground, says a critic. Today, obly jazz qualifies as vital ' and creative.
SERIOUS music is a dead art. The
vein which for three hundred
years offered a seemingly inex-
haustible yield of beautiful music has
run out. What we know as modern
music is the noise made by deluded
speculators picking through the slag-
pile.
This is not to say that there will
not continue to be orchestra concerts,.
recitals and opera.. Nor is it to say
that music is dead as a creative phe-
nomenon. New music plays a greater
part in daily life than ever before. But
it has nothing to do with what is
known as modern music-so-called in
order to emphasize a modernity other-
wise neither existent nor apparent.
The last really modern serious com-
poser, modern in the sense that he
spoke with the full authority of the
cultural forces of his time, was Wag-
ner. With him ended the long evolu-
tion of the art of music in the har-
monic or European sense. All that has
followed has been reaction, refinement
-and desperate experimentation.
Those of his successors who have
achieved genuine celebrity-Bruckner,
Mahler, Strauss, Debussy, Ravel, Sibe-
lius, Schoenberg, Bartbk, Berg, Rach-
mamhoff, Prokofieff and Shostakovich
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NEW YORK TIMS MaUazirlE
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-may be described as Strauss once de-
scribed himself, as triflers "who had
something to say in the last chapter."
They have had at least a public. For
the younger men there has been none.
Nothing they have written has been
keyed to any considerable segment of
contemporary taste or mkt "any -con-
temporary musical requirement other
than their own ambition to be' com-
posers.
It is his failure to meet contem-
porary requirements that distinguishes
the contemporary composer from com
posers of any earlier epoch. Previously,
it pould always be said that composers
represented the taste and the emotional
and intellectual characteristics of their
own time. Haydn, Handel, Mozart,
Beethoven, Chopin, Verdi, Wagner,
Brahms, Strauss and even the early
Stravinsky were all popular composers.
There was a demand for composers.
There was a demand for their music,
and they could make a living from
accommodating the demand. This is
not the case today.
THE amount of modern music per-
formed and recorded represents no
valid challenge to the truth of this
observation. Modern music is per-
formed, recorded and listened to not
because there is any popular demand
for it but because performers, record-
ing companies and, to a considerable
extent, serious music audiences believe
that they owe the composer a hearing.
Nor should the numerous festivals of
contemporary music, the grants, fellow-
ships and commissions to contemporary
composers be Interpreted as evidence
of vitality. If modern music had any
real vitality it would make its own
way.
IN former times contemporary music
survived, despite opposition from crit-
ics and professional musicians, because
the public liked it. Today, it languishes
despite critical and professional sup-
port because the public will have none
of it. That it survives, at all, at least
continues to be played, ds due simply
to the fact that the public no longer
has anything to say about it.
All the conventions of our musical
thinking are calculated to convince the
layman that tolerance is the finest of
all virtues. For him who finds toler-
ance difficult, there is the specter of a
future generation's rapture, the im-
plied suggestion that to voice his de-
rogatory opinions is to risk going down
in history as an ass.
The contemporary composer, pre-
occupied, not with himself nor with
society, but with the problem of how
to continue in a tradition esthetically
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Ever since Stravinsky and
his "Rite of Spring," mod-
ern music has had its pas-
sionate attackers and pas-
sionate defenders. A fresh
attack comes now in a new
book, "The Agony of Mod-
ern Music," by Henry Pleas-
and technically exhausted, and con-
temptuous of the music that exhausted
it, produces a music of technical ex-
cogitation in which the listener finds
neither pleasure nor the reflection of
anything of the least concern to him.
It is not that the contemporary com-
poser does not know his audience. As
Copland has said, "There is no dis-
agreement as to what audiences want;
they want what they already know, or
something that sounds like it." But
now, unlike the situation in Haydn's
time, there is a difference of taste be-
tween composer and public. What
pleases the public does not please the
composer. Finding little sympathy
from his audience, the composer turns
to his colleagues for comfort, forming
a society of (Continued on Page 57)
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MODERN MUSIC: O k DEAD ART' - MODERN MUSICs 'FRESH AND DIFFERENT,
br Hiy Phs:ts:
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