72: The Conversation

Will and Joey talk New Music

Name That Tune

This week’s Name That Tune was submitted by Listener Marcello. Here’s your hint: another work by this composer was used as an NTT rather recently (within the past ten Tone Prose editions.) No looking back — that’s a hint for our regular readers! 😉

As always, your goal is to provide as much accurate analysis as possible. First try to get the nationality, year, and genre, then make educated guesses about the composer and — if possible— the piece. If you know the piece immediately, send us an email at toneprose@substack.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing. 

Last Week’s Results
Tone Prose 71
Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 19, op. 49 no. 1

We’ve begun a new streak! Listeners Marcello and Eric emailed in with the exact piece. Listener Laurie sniffed out Beethoven right away. Joey hedged his bets between Mozart and Beethoven, but he relied on the clue to go over the edge with old Ludwig van.

This work was an early sonata (a sonatina, really) that Beethoven didn’t publish until middle age, when his brother finally talked him into it. The same is true of sonata no. 20, op. 49 no. 2. I (Will) didn’t know about these pieces until I went hunting through the sonata repertoire in preparation for writing my own.

Think you can stump your fellow Listeners? Go ahead and try!

Head to our Google Form to upload a 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.

The State of the Art

Last week, Joey sent Will a text message asking his opinion about an album he’d been listening to and seeking his opinions about projects that fuse pop music and art music. They decided to take their discussion to the newsletter, leading to a wide-range discussion of musical aesthetics. 

Enjoy the dialogue and please weigh in with your own thoughts and opinions in the comments!

Joey: Alright, we’re doing this to talk about classical music, pop music, and everything in between, as you and I recently texted a little bit about. 

I’m of the opinion that mainstream Western Art Music (WAM) hit a wall in the 20th century when some composers decided to divorce their work completely and purposefully from tonality. As much as I love some of the music of Schoenberg and his circle of followers, the music doesn’t seem to resonate with audiences much, even a century later. Surely you agree with this to some extent?

Will: Indeed I do agree, and I would go further to say that the music created by Schoenberg’s and his cohort branched off into a new musical genre, such that “modern music” became a sibling to the music of the classical tonal tradition. It inherited certain qualities from classical music — the instruments, some musical forms, the setting in which it was heard — but it was something distinct.

Joey: Ok wow, that sounds like a whole other episode of this column — would love to hear more about that some day. 

But alright, since we can agree broadly about that, I'm going to go one step forward and say that I believe that Western art music has hit such a wall with listeners because of its unwillingness to engage with new “folk music,” aka, pop music. 

I was recently listening to an album called Again by American electronic producer and composer Daniel Lopatin, under his alias Oneohtrix Point Never. I like certain moments throughout the album, but overall it’s not my taste per se. However, I'm interested in your genuine reaction to this kind of music, which to me is art music that uses the language of pop/electronic music — its instruments, its melodic/harmonic sense, its treatment of motives, etc.

Will: I thought this album was hella mid and I didn’t care for it all that much, however, I definitely DO like music in this genre, most notably Björk and Sufjan Stevens. In fact, it’s about the only “popular” music I do like / regularly listen to. (To this short list, I’d add Lizzo and Janelle Monae’s The ArchAndroid.)

 However, I reject the premise of your framing: I don’t think Western art music has hit a wall because of its unwillingness to engage with pop.

Well... maybe I don’t reject the premise, but I would at the very least demand a definition of terms. When you say “audiences,” which audiences are you talking about? Modern classical music has an audience; it’s just not very big, and there’s not as much crossover from the audience for mainstream classical music as the New Music people seem to think they deserve.

But this is why I come back to my genre point. I think these people just need to embrace the fact that they are doing a different genre (and, I would say, many of them have done just that.) You could make a case that lo-fi chill-hop is losing its audience because of its unwillingness to engage with country music. It’s just a different audience.

Joseph: When I say “audience,” I mean any audience! Certainly contemporary, modernist classical music has listeners — I am one — but I totally agree that there’s not too much crossover from the listenership of mainstream classical music. I suppose your initial framing, that modern music represents a branching off from the mainstream tradition, explains that. It would be the end of my argument entirely if we simply say, “Contemporary classical music composers are uninterested in engaging with the classical music tradition,” and are therefore uninterested in the same audiences. 🤷‍♂️

I maintain that the way the music on the Again album operates is more similar to art music (a problematic term that I’m using for convenience) than popular music because I understand pop music to function around repetitive cycles, which probably traces back to most popular music’s generic roots, including African-American genres, musical theater, and other folk music. 

With the possible exception of some of Björk’s music, your other named faves (Sufjan, Lizzo, Janelle Monae) are pretty solidly repetitive in nature. And there’s nothing wrong with that — I probably like pop music more than you! But is this album’s “through-composed” music that draws on contemporary popular music’s language a “way forward” for mainstream classical musicians? Your music, for example, which I would say generally disavows the modernist movement of the 20th century, has clear influences from popular music, notably musical theater’s (Stephen Sondheim’s) harmony and rhythms.

Will: Before I respond to the interesting points above, let me first pose a question: why are you concerned about this “wall” that seems to separate the broader listenership from “modern art music”? Do you feel that there is a group of listeners who are missing out on something they might enjoy? And/or are you concerned that “modern art music” isn’t getting the listenership it deserves somehow?

Joseph: I suppose (to get therapeutic about it) that I’m always worried about that old idea that “classical music is dead!” I want WAM to keep on living, moving, changing.

Will: OK, I’ll come back to this in a second, but first let me respond to your points above.

Since you brought me and my music into this, I’ll use myself as a theoretical case, and maybe I’ll calm some of your nerves at the same time. As you’ll know from having listened to and performed a great deal of my music, Stephen Sondheim is far from my only contemporary / popular influence. I’ve drawn from film music, pop music, and various folk musics. I’ve also drawn from the very modern music you claim I reject, but most of all from the centuries-deep well of classical art music.

That’s not to toot my own horn — it may well be that my music sucks! Certainly my audience is very small. But at the very least, you’d have to admit that my music is a music of abundance. As a composer, I’m not afraid to include bits that I like from many different sources.

Where I’ll concede to your original point is that I think much modern art music has been a music of rejection, defined by what it isn’t rather than what it is: it isn’t tonal, it isn’t traditional, it isn’t popular.

And yes, this means that it’s been ignored or dismissed by many listeners. Personally, it’s not something that keeps me up at night. I keep making my own music, and I try to make it better with every piece, in spite of the fact that I have but a handful of listeners (you, Listener Jeremy, an old guy in Massachusetts, occasionally Listener Marcello, and my mother every once in a while.)

Of course, the situation on the ground is that High Modernism has decidedly gone by the wayside and most of the “indie classical” crowd these days are embracing the very things you hope they would.

 I’ll risk saying that you may be coming at this from a tautological point of view. Contemporary art music composers are people who are interested in contemporary art music. Your wishing that they would be interested in something else would make them musicians of a different genre. I think you should just like what you like and collaborate with the musicians who interest you, irrespective of genre.

Now I want to go back to the very first point you made in this thread. Presumably you think there is a reason that the “wall” separating popular music from New Music is what’s keeping New Music from having a larger listenership. But I would say that the reason people don’t want to listen to New Music is that most of it isn’t very good, and that’s for a variety of reasons that a pop infusion wouldn’t necessarily solve.

It seems to me that this music isn’t good because its practitioners don’t follow their ears and don’t follow their hearts. They have been inculcated into a society (the university music establishment) that prioritizes creating music of coolness and sonic “interest” over music that uses the powerful, vast vocabulary at its disposal to move human emotion.

It all depends on what these people’s goals are. If they want to make the best music they possibly can, they’d probably do better to stitch together a new connection with actual classical music; it’s a much closer relative than pop. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Ravel — and yes, even Anton Webern — all looked back in order to go forward.

Joseph: Mason Bates, the great calmer of nerves. 

You’re probably right, and I am too anxious over nothing — after all, composers like Caroline Shaw, Eric Whitacre, and Jessie Montgomery are naturally appealing to existing and new audiences without the puppet-mastery of this piano graduate student. History will run its course whether I like it or not! 

As for calming your nerves, perhaps I can offer this: the Babbitt-esque “coolness” and intellectualism that you cite in the university music establishment is changing. It’s still present, without a doubt, especially among senior faculty and some of the more musically conservative students, but I believe there’s a tangible turn toward accessibility, even enjoyability.

Will: I so wanted to give you the last word, but I can’t after this response. 

We’ve played a little fast and loose in this dialogue with the terms “Modern Music,” “Contemporary Music,” and “New Music.” To me, New Music is the same as Contemporary Music. Modern Music is basically the atonal music of the 20th century, but I think lower-case modern music could encompass all three terms.

When I talk about the coolness of “modern music” I’m not talking just about mid-20th century high modern atonal stuff, I’m talking about the stuff coming out of academia and the extended New Music Industrial Complex today. The postminimalism of Nico Muhly and Bryce Dessner and Paula Prestini and yes, Mason Bates. I think it’s maximally cool music, way cooler than Schonberg or Nono or Babbitt. (Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism dude — at least it’s an ethos!”)

And a lot of that coolness comes from pop music. Pop music is cool music. Compare it to Beethoven or Tchaikovsky — those guys wanted to get the blood flowing! Pop music can get you dancing, but I don’t feel like many pop artists are trying to move your very soul with harmony and melody and texture and rhythm.

In the end, music is a way for us to entertain ourselves as we await our inevitable deaths. It can be good or bad or many gradations of mediocre. But it can also be transcendent, and I wish more composers were interested in unlocking the sonic secrets that allow humanity to pierce the veil that separates the realm of the material to the realm of the spirit.

Tone Praise

Purcell, “The Cold Song”

I (Will) am a person who finds it basically impossible to function when the mercury dips below freezing, so the recent cold spell had me wishing the yeti back in his wicker basket (watch the video.)

Tone Prose is a co-production of William White, Joseph Vaz, and the Listeners (i.e. you.)