"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations." - Sir Winston Churchill

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Who’s afraid of the avant-garde?

"The writer Joe Queenan caused a minor rumpus in the austere world of contemporary classical music last year by complaining about how painful much of it is. He called Berio’s Sinfonia (1968) “35 minutes of non-stop torture,” Stockhausen’s Kontra-Punkte (1953) like “a cat running up and down the piano” and Birtwistle’s latest opera The Minotaur “funereal caterwauling.” “A hundred years after Schoenberg,” he wrote, “the public still doesn’t like anything after Transfigured Night, and even that is a stretch.”

Inevitably, Queenan was lambasted as a reactionary philistine...

His comments were denounced as the same old clichés. Yet clichés become clichés for a reason... Stockhausen and Penderecki, whose works are now as old as “Rock Around the Clock,” have not been assimilated into the classical canon in the way that Ravel and Stravinsky have...

Theodor Adorno, perhaps the 20th century’s most renowned social theorist, was a passionate advocate of Schoenberg’s atonal modernism for political reasons: tonality, he declared, was the bastion of bourgeois complacency. Following Adorno’s lead, the hardline musical modernists of the 1950s and 1960s treated any hint of tonality as a form of recidivism to be denounced with Maoist vigour; Pierre Boulez refused for a time even to speak to tonal composers. The American composer Milton Babbitt’s 1958 essay “Who Cares if You Listen?” responded to the wider world’s hostility towards this new music by arguing that serious composers should simply withdraw from the concert hall, while offering no explanation for the public’s antipathy to “difficult” music beyond a belief that they were too ill-informed to understand it...

It takes no more cognitive effort to “see” a painting by Mark Rothko than it does to look at wallpaper. The fact we can see the painting at all as a coherent object gives our interpretive mind something to work on, even if we come up with nothing more than a vague sense of beauty, serenity or absurdity. Music can defy even this basic sort of cognitive parsing: it can refute our efforts to find coherence, rather as if a video artist were to present us with unstructured static. Even Jackson Pollock’s chaos is contained—but sound is at once everywhere and constantly shifting.

Many musicologists accept a definition of music as “organised sound.” Yet sound is structured into music not on paper, nor even in the mind of the composer, but in the mind of the listener... There are some universal principles that come into play in differentiating music from mere noise. For example, melodies that move in small steps tend to sound unified and “good,” while ones with large and frequent jumps between high and low notes are liable to seem fragmented and harder to make out. Regular rhythms also contribute to coherence, while erratic ones often confuse us. Tonality creates a hierarchy of pitch and a sense of “place” in the musical scale. But it’s not just tonal music that uses these cognitive aids: they are found in other musical traditions the world over...

In Boulez’s Structures I or Stockhausen’s Klavierstück VII, say, there is no discernible rhythm, and the melody line, if one can call it that, is as jagged as the Dolomites. In this situation, it is hard to develop any expectations about the music...

This is not to say that atonality in general, and serialism in particular, is doomed to sound aimless and incomprehensible. There are plenty of other parameters that a composer can deploy to create coherent structures, and many have done so to great effect. But, increasingly, serial techniques were applied not just to pitch but to these other musical parameters, such as rhythm and dynamics. Such compositional methods progressively and systematically subverted any means of providing audible organisation. So it was unsurprising that audiences found the music harder to understand. For the serialist’s rules are not ones that can be heard. Boulez’s serial piece Le Marteau Sans Maître was acclaimed when premièred in 1955, but it took over two decades for anyone else to figure out how it was serial: no one could deduce analytically, let alone hear, the organisational structure.

Music, like any art, must be constantly rejuvenated by experiment. But “experimental” music surely only qualifies as such if it includes the possibility of failure. And if musical composition takes no account of cognition—denies that cognition has a role to play, or actively frustrates it—then composers cannot complain when their music is unloved...

If music is not acknowledged as a mental process, sound is all that remains."