George Edwards
THE PLEASURE OF ITS BEING OVER:
A VIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
Returning to New York late last spring from ten idyllic weeks in
rural France, I found I could hardly pick up a book, newspaper, or magazine
without running across some reference to the horrors of contemporary music.
It all began when, thumbing at random through Robert M. Adams's
Bad
Mouth,
I came upon the following sentence:
I
think this [the acceptance of the ugly] is most apparent in the striking
instance of modern music, where the patter of polite applause that
greets every new atonal horror may indeed conceal the presence of a
few musicians who understand and genuinely appreciate what they're
applauding - but which comes for the most part from people who find
what they have heard to be hideous and incomprehensible, but are
ashamed to say so.
The sting of this well-aimed thrust, delivered almost offhand and with–
out any special animus, was perhaps mitigated by the fact that Adams's tar–
get is all the arts in the twentieth-century; music is merely the most striking
example, not a special case. Surely, I thought, if abstract paintings can sell for
millions, there must be hope that enlightened listeners can accept new music,
too. This comforting thought did not prepare me to find, two days later, the
following sentence in a poetry review by William Logan in
The New York
Times Book Review :
Reading Mr. Palmer's poetry is like listening to serial music or
slamming your head against a streetlight stanchion - somewhere,
you 're sure, masochists are lining up to enjoy the very same thing, but
for most peop le the on ly pleasure it can bring is the pleasure of its
being over.
Again, "serial" music is not the real target of this attack. But I began to
find it ominous that modern music, usually simply ignored, should be assumed
to be so universally detestable as to provide a useful point of comparison
with anything else held to be loathsome. Moreover, when compared with the
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