Best,
C

It’s great that we have music that’s solely “about” sonic exploration, and there’s a lot of music I really care about that has absolutely no agenda beyond that. But by labeling only those composers as “innocent adventurers,” and every other creator of music in every culture throughout world history as something not-innocent, you’re coming very close to throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Also, again–there are (and have been) composers out there who don’t speak German! This whole thread has had an undercurrent that strikes me as vaguely provincial, if not explicitly ethnocentric. What about Debussy, who was definitely not an “innocent adventurer” by your criteria, as his music definitely evokes emotions, and nature, and stories, but who definitely *was* one of the greatest purely sonic innovators in all of western musical history?

There’s a part of me that feels this willingness to address musical gestalt content (be they sonic, gestural, textual, conceptual) *as they occur*, in experience, is linked to Cage’s contribution to musical aesthetics. Up until that point, it seems to me that music was largely about two linked things: the expression of abstract pattern, and the expression of abstract emotional content, mixed in varying degrees among composers. It was taken as read that music had something “beneath the surface”, which it needed to *express*. Moreover, this expression had a large dogmatic content, be it technical or transcendental. From this perspective, Mahler is definitely not the innocent adventurer that Lachenmann suggests he might be.

It does not seem to me possible that Lachenmann could have said what he said in the video 50 years ago (not quite). As far as I can see, today, in European new classical music (I can’t speak as reliably for American music), the tendency toward expression and the tendency toward sonoristic adventure (which is close to, but not necessarily synonymous with, Experimentalism) exist in tandem, often supporting or contradicting each other. But I suspect that, before Cage, the ‘adventure’ of music was not as manifest as it is today. Whether Lachenmann really is the innocent adventurer that he purports to be remains to be seen. Maybe he is now; but he wasn’t always.

Try this for fun. Play this one with the volume off: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUHmf7Y-9ww using this one for the soundtrack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5r-jDxh7DI or any combination of Tom, Jerry, and Helmut.

Personally, I wouldn’t say I hate the music we’re discussing here as Jeremy did, just that it’s not very relevant to my sense of place in the world of music.

I hold the tradition to which Lachenmann belongs in much lower reverence than some other posters. People have a right to make such personal decisions, much like their right to choose a religion.

As I approach my sixties, I’m convinced that I am much happier using the time during which I might have attended a probably mediocre concert sitting at home engaged in the act of creating something of my own.
A concert would need to be unbelievably, extraordinarily, unspeakably good to make me change that opinion.

This would make a really great panel discussion somewhere…

I think what both you and Aaron point out–that we haven’t had very many opportunities to see this music live–is a valid observation, and it’s objectively and verifiably true. However, from what I’ve heard of Lachenmann’s recordings, I have none, zero, no inclination whatsoever to check out any of these performances. That could be because of the piled baggage of my cultural assumptions, or it could just be that I didn’t like what I heard on CD, and I don’t have a lot of time/money, and I’m not gonna go spending the time/money I do have to hear a live concert of a piece I hated on CD.

I mean, I don’t get to hear the Bulgarian State Women’s Television and Radio Choir live very often, and they’ve had a very distinguished international career. But if you told me you hated their music, I wouldn’t expect you to attend one of their (expensive, rare) live performances in an attempt to correct your previous reaction to their stuff. Because if you hated it on CD, then there is a very good (read: nearly certain) chance you will hate it live. I have never, ever, not once hated a piece on CD and then fallen in love with it live and suddenly realized what I had been missing.

I suspect most people’s experiences are more like mine than not in that regard. At the very least, people tend to not spend their time/money on experiences that they already have a fairly good idea they won’t like.–just look at demographics breakdowns of weekly box office returns for big movies. I don’t think people avoid “difficult” art or experiences–just check out MoMA any day of the week, or the Anjelika Film Center, or the Holocaust Museum in D.C. (Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s Holocaust museum, is a major tourist attraction and one of the most upsetting art/museum experiences I’ve ever had.) But I do think that people avoid experiences that have nothing to do with how they live their lives, or are unintelligible/seemingly arbitrary.

Am I saying that Lachenmann’s music is unintelligible or arbitrary? Of course not. It’s obviously not unintelligible to everyone because a lot of people seem to like it. And it’s obviously not arbitrary, because he’s spoken enough about his artistic philosophy and compositional process that we know he’s not just letting his cat walk on the orchestra. But it is unintelligible to me, and it still sounds arbitrary to me when I hear it, and even if I had an ear transplant and could suddenly hear what you do in his music, I would still hate the SOUND of it. It is, as us kids say these days, Not My Thing.

I just can’t believe that comparing people who have my reaction to the people who brought guns to presidential speeches last summer and spat (!) on and hurled epithets at Black and gay members of Congress just last week is (a) productive (b) fair (c) good for the art form (d) good for the civility of this blog. A little “positive jingoism” on behalf of the composers you love is healthy and great, and I sure do the same for the composers I love. But there is a line we often cross that puts other people on the defensive, and this post crossed that line.

When that line is crossed, people who aren’t willing to spend an hour honing their comment as I did simply check out. They stop reading, they don’t go to your shows anymore, they don’t buy your recordings, they unsubscribe from your mailing list. This line-crossing, writ-large by orchestras and opera companies and chamber music organizations the world over, is what’s killing classical music faster than anything else I can think of.