GEORGE EDWARDS
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Adams, this more recent broadside seemed to suggest that haters of modern
music, previously ashamed of their inability to respond to it, were now com–
ing out of the closet.
Sensitized by these snippets, and by a short but exemplary quotation
from Kingsley Amis's attacks on the music of the sixties in "Girl, 20" (in
The
New Yorker,
June 12, 1989), I was unable to muster my usual display of in–
difference to the latest eruption of Donal Henahan's spleen in
The New York
Times
Arts and Leisure section
U
une 11, 1989). In a column entitled,
"Whatever Happened to Music?," he links the (presumed) paucity of
"exciting and durable compositions" since World War II to the "dead-end
dogmas" of the "academic avant-garde." Whatever the merit of this claim,
Henahan presents it less as a coherent argument than as Agnewesque
invective. In fact, he seems less interested in convincing the ordinary reader
of his case than in intimidating modernist composers. His contemptuous tone
and certainty of the verdict of history reminded me of the invective of re–
pression in China, and caused me to wonder whether an atmosphere could be
created in which the composition or performance of "ugly" music could actu–
ally be suppressed. I dismissed this paranoid notion on the grounds that - as
long as it finds no way to desecrate the Flag or depict homosexual acts -
music is too unimportant in our society to be worth quashing.
A roundup review of new compact discs by Andrew Pincus
(The New
York Times,
June 18, 1989) presented a change of tone which was at first
welcome. Here the "Midas touch" of the Great Performer "transforms 'new
music' - that dreadful crabbed thing - into simply music, though of this cen–
tury."
"Angular skips, broken rhythms, atonality, pounding dissonances - all
the tricks of the contemporary composer are turned into art that breathes as
naturally as Chopin." Wow! All this time, it turns out, the fault was with bad
performances, not with "dead-end dogmas," "post-Webernean serialism," or
"gray academic music"; as Schoenberg said, "My music isn't dissonant, it's just
badly played." All this seemed too good to be true. Sure enough, Pincus con–
tinues: "A cynic might even argue that this is a case of a spectacular perfor–
mance making a work sound better than it really is." Got it? If it's ugly,
blame the composer; if not, credit the performer's magical transformation of
dross into gold.
As
a composer, I'm accustomed to being regarded as at best marginal.
There are many social occasions when I would love to be able to say, ''I'm
in stocks and bonds" (which perhaps I would have been in seventeenth-cen–
tury Salem) rather than exposing myself to the almost inevitable "and what
kind of music do you write?" I'm as prepared as most for the typically nasty,
brutish, and short review; my normal response to being pilloried is to im–
merse myself in new work, as if eternally optimistic that its reception will be
