You can disagree as much as you want but it will not mean much unless you've been an active member in accademies on those years. I've been speaking recently with a composition teacher and now composer who was a student in that era and comfirmed every word of what other thousands of students and teachers have been experienced.
It can't be even called a conspirancy because a conspirancy is something subtle while what happened wasn't subtle at all it was direct: "you do that and you can perform, study and record" "you do this and you get the *** out" ... not a conspirancy at all.
Interesting enough this has been confirmed by even people who was part of this orthodoxy and I still see first hand hints of it (and yes, that direct) in my experience as a student in an accademy that not only followed that ideology but had made a lot of economical connections with several recording labels based on the advent of this ideology.
You certainly pre-empted my disagreement in true Bushian fashion (Bushist?). First you tell me it won't mean anything if I am not in academia, which you don't know, then you tell me you get your information from talking to other people! Very naughty. Anyways, I hope to provide you with interesting fodder from Charles Rosen, who is very much a part of not only academia, but performance life as well.
I want to point out that all of this is not a critique or an attack to the music itself.
Everyone can create a militant and yes limiting and fascist ideology out of anything.
You may not be totally aware of it, but to me your posts are nothing but an attack on that music. Beethoven's powerful style dominated composition for decades, but nobody ever deemed to call him "militant" and "fascist." Your loaded terminology comes from a strong tradition: Charles Rosen writes, "Julian Lloyd Webber [the cellist]... gave a speech in Feb 1998 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, attacking what he called 'the new fuehrers of the classical music establishment.' It received surprisingly generous media coverage, including... a long interview in The Independent with the headline "STOP THE DICTATORS OF MODERN MUSIC."
Webber also wrote, much like danny elfenboy: "I am not necessarily criticizing [the avant-garde] style, but it cannot be good for music to straitjacket its composers. In the years after the war, Western classical music created a pernicious
politburo which proved as effective as its counterpart in the East. In America, composers like Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber found themselves dismissed as dated. In Germany, Bertold Goldschmidt couldn't even get a hearing."
These are of course composers of mostly tonal, perhaps more traditional, music. Charles Rosen responds, and I quote at length, because it is really the individual case that matters here:
"The vocabulary -
fuehrers, politburo - is considerably more interesting than the absurd propositions: Goldschmidt had difficulty in getting a hearing in his native Germany after the war pricnipally because he emigrated to England in 1935... both Copland and Barber, however, were performed from 1945 to 1975 with much greater frequency in the US than any of the more 'radical' composers like Elliott Carter or Roger Sessions. Lloyd Webber makes it seem as if it had been easy to hear the works of mdoernist composers during this period, as if the public could not have escpaed their dread dissonances. Of course, just the opposite is true."
I will never criticize the freedom to express yourself in whatever way you want and therefore I will never even criticize the artistic appreciation of the sound of an electric drill.
And why not? You are just a step away from doing it. Actually, you needn't bother, your feelings are apparent enough reading your unfortunate words.
Now if you say that it never happened it is you (many of which never set a foot in a musical accademy or conservatory) against thousands of teachers, students, composers, performers, musicians and criticis. But I do know what they say is real because many of them (thanks to various groups that promoted the freedom from the avant-garde ideology [and again check the masterprize and why it was so important]) can now perform and record their creations and there's no reasons why it was impossible for them before if not, as they say, that they were not allowed too and that anything that was opposed to the avant-garde artistic ideology was just ignored.
Have you been reading the Charles Rosen essay? MY goodness, you practically quote straight out of there. Rosen quotes Peter Gelb, the new director of the Metropolitan Opera, and at that time who headed Sony Records:
"Attempts to commission or schedule accessible and emotionally stimulating new music were blocked by a cabal of atonal composers, academics, and classical-music critics, who seemed to share ony goal: to confine all new classical music to an elite intellectual exercise with limited audience appeal. By their rules, any new classical composition that enjoys commercial success is no good."
Rosen replies: "That imples that difficult avant-garde music was played more often in recent decades than more conseravtive modern works 'easy' to listen to and more successful commercially. That, of course, is quite simply false."
And how many programs have we been forced to sit through with works of Xenakis? Kurtag? Boulez? Carter? Babbitt? Wuorinen? I am willing to wager you could count it on the fingers of one hand, if it wasn't even zero. Where are these avant-garde fascists? If they are dominating the prizes, the academies, why is their music simply not played? Boulez, you may be shocked to learn, gets performed mostly
by Boulez. Carter gets his accolades from James Levine; I remember Kurtag was a favorite of Dohnanyi. In other words, they had personal supporters, people who played their music because they loved it, not to enforce an ideology.
Another reason why I know that it is real is because I'm still living it, things are changing and it's easier now but I can still sense old vibes of that mentality and orthodoxy.
Rosen writes: "I should have thought that the modernist style in music was no longer a threat, but if it is still frightening, then this attack is an encouyraging sign that modernism is alive and in good health. The earliest figures, of course, are now long dead and have entered the pantheon: Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Berg, Webern, Bartok are an unquestioned part of our musical heritage. The most radical revolutionary masters of the generations that followed - Messiaen , Boulez, Carter, Berio, Ligety, Stockhausen, Birtwistle, Maxwell Davies, Babbitt - are all aging and respectable members of society... It is, I suspect, this respectability that terrifies [danny elfenboy]."
At masterprize hundreds of students and composers from the whole world confirmed it publically before having the first chance in their life to perform their works some of them written many years before.
For every traditionalist student you know that never had their works performed publicly, I am sure i know one "avant-garde" or modernist who has the same problem. And for those modernists who do achieve performances, there are rarely a second. But Rosen writes: "The music of conservative composers, like Barber or Thomson, may not provoke outrage, but it has no more popular mass appeal than that of the most extravagant modernists."
Not only. I know people in this forum who can confirm this having lived that in first hand on accademies and concert halls.
As long as you rely on these nameless thousands of people with whom you have apparently spoken personally on this very topic, these assertions are easily refutable: because I know just as many people who refuse all contact with modern and avant-garde ideologies, and these people I know are composers, performers, and theorists alike. In fact when I was young I desperately wanted to play the Webern Variations - my teacher wouldn't allow it. I was the one oppressed, banned from playing the music I wanted. (I did play it, and my teacher ended up loving it.) I had a composition teacher in university who refused to allow atonal music, because he said that writing diatonic music had to be mastered first. There you have it, I have successfully rebutted your argument.
To believe that I'm talking about an "avant-garde conspirancy" and that something like that never happened is like believing in an opposite and even bigger "conspirancy" ... that of the thousands of composers, students, critics, musicians who have over the years confirmed all of this.
Then you are not talking about an avant-garde conspiracy? Or you have not personally interviewed thousands of people on this subject?
Doubting this sounds to me like doubting the black slaves testimonies of sufference, oppression and abuse just because it would sound like an attack to the white people and the white culture (hence ... I'm white, my family is white ... we're nice .. so they must have made this up)
I see that by doubting you I have become an intolerable racist. Well, one should certainly be careful when one doubts danny elfenboy. Fortunately I am not intimidated by these insecure attacks on my morality, and I feel safe in accusing you of holding irrational resentment!
I can provide you the phone number of a composer and teacher I know in a very famous school. You can ask about all of this and her experience yourself.
Perhaps we can trade phone numbers of our foot soldiers.
I don't know what Charles Rosen is talking about and whether he has just interested (ideological, economical .. whatever) to deny the truth; but no one is talking about a a subtle conspirancy ... but about direct facts.
At least you confess you don't know what he is writing about. I will kindly rewrite your sentence to give history a warmer view of your ideas: "I don't know what Charles Rosen about and whether he is just interested in finding the truth..."
Walter Ramsey
Topic: Xenakis Piano Concerto "Synaphai"