December 25, 1949

A Modernist Defends Modern Music
There seems to be no doubt about it -- after almost fifty years of so-called modern music there are still thousands of well-intentioned music lovers who think it sounds peculiar. The only way I can get the full impact of what modern music sounds like to such people is to stand in front of Picasso's more controversial paintings -- the two-headed woman, for example. I suppose that the more radical new music hits the ear with something like the violence that hits the eye in modern painting. Keeping these paintings in mind, I can sympathize with the musical layman who fails to comprehend contemporary music, although, as a composer myself, most recent music sounds quite natural and normal to me.

It occurred to me to wonder whether it wasn't possible to help the listener of good-will to hear it my way. Perhaps I should start by clearing up one possible source of confusion as to terminology. There really isn't a modern music any more because the term "modern music" has been taken over by the bebop boys. When Bop City on Broadway began advertising concerts of "modern music," that just about finished off a name that had outlived its usefulness anyway. Contemporary music, or new music, is what the recent works of living composers are called nowadays. It's not a glamorous cognomen, perhaps, but at least it is exact.

Formerly -- up to about 1925 -- the kind of music I have in mind was called "ultra-modern." It was under continuous attack by the more conservative members of the press; but more significant, it was heard only by the comparatively small group of people who attended concerts. The rest of the world may have read about it, but rarely had any direct contact with it. Nowadays the situation has radically changed; the press is more open-minded, and anybody casually twisting a radio dial is in danger of getting an earful of it.

However one calls it, almost anyone can identify it as music that falls strangely on the ear; music that is different. Such a listener would probably tell you that, whereas the older music -- the classics -- seems designed to caress and invite the soul, the newer music is disconcerting in effect, the idea being apparently to upset and disturb one's equanimity of soul. Otherwise, how is one to explain the cacophonous harmonies, the tuneless melodies, the head-spitting sonorities, the confusing rhythms and cerebral forms?

It is natural enough for the uninitiated to imagine that all problematic music may be safely damned under a single heading. But actually, even in the old days of "ultra-modern" music, a great many different kinds of music were grouped indiscriminately together, and especially today the newer music may be said to include an unusually variegated experience. It might be helpful, therefore, to start by trying to bring some order into the apparent chaos of contemporary composition by dividing its leading exponents according to the relative degree of difficulty in the understanding of their respective idioms:

Very easy: Shostakovich and Khachaturian, Frances Poulenc, Eric Satie, early Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Vaughan Williams, Virgil Thomson.

Quite approachable: Prokofieff, Roy Harris, Villa-Lobos, Ernest Bloch, William Walton.

Fairly difficult: late Stravinsky, Bela Bartok; Chavez, Milhaud, William Schuman, Honegger, Britten, Hindemith, Walter Piston.

Very tough: middle and late Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Varese, Krenek, Charles Ives, Roger Sessions.

It would be miraculous if anyone agreed with the comparative estimates of this list, but that is not its purpose. It demonstrates merely that not all new music ought to be thought of as equally inaccessible: Schoenberg in his latest manner, and the members of his twelve-tone school, are the hardest nut to crack, even for musicians. One needs a contrapuntal ear for Hindemith and Piston, a feeling for the lushly colorful Villa-Lobos, a sharp wit for Poulenc and Thomson. For the later Stravinsky you need a love of style, precision, personality; for Milhaud a love of tartly seasoned sonorities. One of the toughest of all is Varese; and the easiest, certainly Shostakovich.

But whether the style of a contemporary composer is easy or hard to comprehend, it would be wise for the lay listener to keep the composer's objective well in mind. The objective is not necessarily to make beautiful sounds like Chopin or Mozart. Much as one should like to do just that, it isn't possible, because one doesn't write the music of one's choice but a necessity.

If forced to explain the creative musician's basic objective in elementary terms, I would say that a composer writes music to express and communicate and put down in permanent form certain thoughts, emotions and states of being. These thoughts and emotions are gradually formed by the contact of the composer's personality with the world in which he lives. He expresses these thoughts (musical thoughts, which are not to be confused with literary ones) in the musical language of his own time. The resultant work of art should speak to the men and women of the artist's own time with a directness and immediacy of communicative power that no previous art expression can give.

My love of the music of Chopin and Mozart is as strong as that of the next fellow, but it does me little good when I sit down to write my own, because their world is not mine and their language not mine. The underlying principles of their music are just as cogent today as they were in their own period, but the essential point is that with these same principles one may and one does produce a quite different result.

The uninitiated music lover will continue to find contemporary music peculiar only so long as he persists in trying to hear the same kinds of sounds or derive the same species of musical pleasure that he gets from the great works of the past. When approaching a present-day musical work of serious pretensions, one must first realize what the objective of the composer is and then expect to hear a different treatment of the elements of music -- harmony, melody, timbre, texture -- than what was customary in the past.

Perhaps the best way to elucidate some of the peculiarities of new music is to attempt to answer to a few of the most frequently asked questions:

Why must new music be so dissonant?

A satisfactory reply to this troublesome question is exceedingly difficult because of the fact that a dissonance in music is a purely relative thing. What sounds dissonant to you may sound quite mellifluous to me. The whole history of Western music proves that our ear tends to increase its capacity for considering pleasurable chords which in former times were considered painfully discordant. Harmonies thought to be unusual or bizarre in the time of Monteverdi or Wagner are accepted as current usage by later generations of ordinary music lovers. Our period has hastened this historical process, since nowadays any chord, no matter what its degree of dissonance, is considered usable if it sounds "right" to the composer (that is, right for its expressive purpose) and is handled well within its context. If you find yourself rejecting music because it is too dissonant, it probably indicates that your ear is insufficiently accustomed to contemporary musical vocabulary and needs more training -- that is, listening. Reading about a dissonant chord doesn't make it sound any sweeter, but repeated hearing certainly does. It is interesting to note in this connection that bebop, the latest jazz manifestation, has been introducing more and more dissonant harmonic textures into popular music, thereby arousing some of the same resistance from the mass public as was encountered by the serious composers in their field.

Is it true that the new composers care little about melody?

No, it definitely is not true. The greater proportion of today's music is melodically conceived, but it must be remembered that conceptions of melodic writing have changed. Here again it is not easy to agree upon a common ground for discussion since the average person's idea of melody is so limited in scope. A melody is not merely something you can hum. It may be too complex for that, too torturous or jagged or fragmentary, and in instrumental writing, it may go far beyond the limitations of the human voice. You must broaden our conception of what a melody may be if you want to follow what goes on in the composer's mind.

Part of the difficulty, as it concerns modern melody, may be traced to the harmonic problem. Many listeners become so lost in the web of unfamiliar harmonies that they never manage to hear the tunes that are being played. Since most music of serious pretensions deals in simultaneous sounded independent melodies, forming a contrapuntal texture that requires wide-awake listening even when the melodies are conventionally cast, if follows that a similar structure made of more recondite melodic writing will imply even more attentive listening. (Composers -- and not only contemporary ones -- have sometimes exaggerated in that direction, forgetting that the human ear is limited in absorbent capacity.) In general I would say that the melodies are there, but they may not always be of the immediately recognizable variety.

Is contemporary music supposed to be without sentiment or feeling, cerebral and clever rather than romantic?

A brief paragraph can hardly suffice to deal adequately with so persistent a misconception. If a contemporary composer's work strikes you as cold and intellectual, if may be that you are using standards of comparison that really do not apply. Most music lovers do not appreciate to what an extent they are under the spell of the romantic approach to music. Our audiences have come to identify nineteenth-century musical romanticism as analogous to the art itself. Because it was, and still remains, so powerful an expression they tend to forget that great music was written for hundreds of years before the romantics flourished.

It so happens that a considerable proportion of present-day music has closer ties with that earlier music than it has with the romantics. The way of the uninhibited and personalized warmth and surge of the best of the romanticists is not our way. That may be regrettable from your angle, but it remains a fact nevertheless -- unavoidable fact very probably, for the romantic movement had reached its apogee by the end of last century, in any case, and nothing fresh was to be extracted from it.

Even composers found it difficult to break the spell, so it is hardly to be wondered at that the public should have been slow to grasp the full implication of what was happening. The literary world does not expect Gide or Mann or T.S. Eliot to emote with the accents of Victor Hugo or Walter Scott. Why, then, should Bartok or Milhaud be expected to sing with the voice of Schumann or Tchaikovsky? When a contemporary piece seems dry and cerebral to you, when it seems to be giving off little feeling or sentiment, there is a good chance that you are not willing to live in your own epoch, musically speaking.

Before concluding, I should like to ask a question of my own. Why is it that the musical public is seemingly so reluctant to consider a musical composition as, possibly, a challenging experience? When I hear a new piece of music that I do not understand I am intrigued -- I want to make contact with it again at the first opportunity. It's a challenge -- it keeps my interest in the art of music thoroughly alive.

But sadly I've observed that my own reaction is not typical. Most people use music as a couch; they want top be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be used as a soporific. Contemporary music, especially, is created to wake you up, not put you to sleep. It is meant to stir and excite you -- it may even exhaust you. But isn't that the kind of stimulation you go to the theatre for or read a book for? Why make an exception of music?

It may be that new music sounds peculiar for the sole reason that, in the course of ordinary listening, one hears so little of it by comparison with the amount of conventional music that is performed year in and year out. Radio and concert programs, the advertisements of the record manufacturers, or school curricula -- all emphasize the idea, unwittingly, perhaps, that "normal" music is music of the past, familiar music that has proved its worth. A generous estimate indicates that only one-eighth of the music we hear can be called contemporary -- and that estimate applies mostly to music heard in the larger musical centers. Under such circumstances, contemporary music is likely to remain peculiar, unless audiences demand that the music producers let them hear more of it. From where I sit that sounds like the millennium.

Aaron Copland, Pulitzer prize-winning composer of "Appalachian Spring," has lectured on, conducted, and created contemporary music in many forms. He wrote "Our New Music."

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