422
PARTISAN REVIEW
ally hears.
As
William Bolcom puts it:
... for most folks, especially professional people, classical music has
become a kind of pleasant background for the day. Yet agents and
orchestra programmers continue
to
offer fare that is essentially the
same as what an audience member might have heard in a tony bou–
tique or restaurant that day. Perhaps one reason people have
stopped going to concerts is that the novelty of hearing background
music played "live" simply wears off.
The debased use of classical music as muzak is ubiquitous. I've heard
Beethoven in a public urinal, snippets of Bach and Vivaldi at the ends of in–
nings of televised Yankees games, bowderlized Mozart to advertise perfume,
quotations from Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms as background to televi–
sion comics, and amazingly sophisticated
(if
computer-performed) neoromantic
background music for television crime shows. Gentrification and Baroque
music appear to have been made for one another. Minimalism may offer a
few the opportunity to concentrate on "acoustic by-products" which would
pass unnoticed in a musical discourse of any complexity; but for most listen–
ers, its lulling use of repetition guarantees its suitability as yet another chic
form of muzak. Finally, a magazine ad informs me that New Age music pro–
vides "beautiful environments for home, car or office, useful for meditation,
relaxation, massage and movement" - it's harmful only if you listen to the
stuff. Can anyone actually listen to anything any more? Is the utter
trivialization of great music the final consequence of making it easily available
to all? A Peter Ustinov sketch once suggested that only ugliness could resist
being reduced to muzak. If so, then modernist music, with its insistence that
the listener really listen, may be the only truly reactionary music (or even
the only music) we have.
I may seem to be leaving the subject of contemporary music and its
possible audience in a worse state than I found it, and to have begun to drag
classical music as a whole down with it to boot. Yet I have heard strong ne–
oromantic works; and minimalism seems to compensate for the glacial pacing
of the individual work by the rapidity with which it is recapitulating the his–
tory of music. No one can yet judge the possibilities for various hybrid mu–
sics. There will probably always be a few oddballs who take music seriously;
they will be the only audience that matters. In any case, like those seven–
teenth-century soldiers who continued to wear armor long after battle was
dominated by guns, I expect to continue writing romantic works in my own
dialect ofmodernism.
