418
PARTISAN REVIEW
Music, on the contrary, is commonly perceived to have taken the wrong road
the moment it ventured into modernism; those who continue along this road
are usually condemned, not (as they well might be) by comparison with
Schoenberg, but along with
him.
Even if we regard Schoenberg as an exceptional case, we would still
need to note the extreme difficulty with which any new and challenging mu–
sic is assimilated. The cases of Mahler and Ives suggest that it is not unusual
for a piece of music to begin to become acceptable to the musical public some
forty to fifty years after its date of composition. That this belated acceptance
of the new is much more typical of music than of the other arts was perhaps
best explained by Roger Sessions:
... in listening to a work which is familiar, we can let our minds wander
freely ...We do not necessarily have to pay close attention to avoid
being bored, as is the case with practically every other art, including
the theatre.
The problem with unfamiliar music is that this same casual and
intermittent listening soon results in boredom, disorientation, and frustration,
even when the unfamiliar work is inherently no more difficult to understand
than some of the music the listener has already come to terms with. When
the unfamiliar work is also new, it necessarily lacks the prestige of a music–
historical brand-name: its chances of getting the benefit of any doubt are
poor.
The minimalist music of composers like Glass and Reich appears to
have decisively broken the pattern of the belated acceptance of the new,
appealing even (or perhaps especially) to those who normally have no inter–
est in classical music. Minimalism may be no more than a fad, different from
others in the twentieth century only in its commercial success; but we cannot
rule out the possibility that it may represent an historic watershed
comparable to the change from Renaissance polyphony to early Baroque
monody, or from the polyphony of Bach to the simplistic homophony of the
pre-Classics.
In
either case, modernism will have to face (as Bach and
Schoenberg did) the double jeopardy of being too difficult when new and un–
fashionable when old.
Yet the absurdity oflabeling our time "postmodern" becomes clear as
soon as one recognizes that, at least in music, ours cannot be the first post–
modern period (it may not even be the last). Whether we compare Stravin–
sky's
Le
Sacre du Printemps
(1913) with Symphony in C (1940), Bartok's
Third Quartet
(1927) with his
Concerto for Orchestra
(1943), or Copland's
