Perhaps the reviewer is confusing “engaging the audience” with “validating their ignorance”. No art form has an obligation to serve ignorant consumers. Education is the obligation of the listener, not the composer or ensemble. Why on earth is the reviewer complaining about sitting in silence for 2.5 hours listening to music? That’s what a new music concert is, and it shouldn’t surprise you. I’m sorry a musician didn’t come find you at intermission and personally explain why it should be relevant to you. Should he or she bring you a cup of tea, too?

This music is abstract (despite the overt musical referentiality of Professor Bad Trip to psychedelic rock, which the reviewer ignores). If you don’t like it, or don’t want to make any effort to delve into its reason for being, that’s fine (though not very good for music criticism). But to say that one should be able to approach it with no frame of reference, while demanding fulfillment and enjoyment, is ridiculous and lazy. Would you demand the same for any other “difficult” art form? We could rewrite all literature at a first grade reading level, that might make it a little more approachable. And I’m so tired of all those jagged lines in modern art…

Same thing for labeling anything unpredictable as “ivory tower”: “Oh no, the movement didn’t end with a big cymbal crash so I know when to clap! It is therefore cold and inhuman and I refuse to engage it!” Pretty ironic for a reviewer with a “deep dislike of pretension” to only invalidate anything that doesn’t conform to his subjective tastes.

If you want the immediate gratification of something predictable and understandable, then go watch a Michael Bay movie instead (assuming, of course, that one has the this previously mentioned “frame of reference” to interpret and enjoy it. Not everyone does.)

Phil Fried, no sonic prejudice

You might want to take a listen to the computer music coming out of Stanford, or to the Gamelan Pacifica up in Seattle, or the various gamelan ensembles at Mills college, or the CNMAT work that combines people like Pauline Oliveros and David Wessel. The League of Automatic Music Composers people are still around (except for Jim Horton): Jim Bischoff, Tim Perkis, David Behrman, and they’re still doing remarkable work. The microtonal concerts put on annually by William Alves are great. Tom Nunn’s edgewalker ensemble using homebuilt xenharmonic instruments is still doing great work.

None of this music sound complex, though some of it is: it’s just gorgeous. If you confine youself to no-talents like Ferneyhough, you’re gonna be disappointed. If instead you listen to the really good West coast music by people like Loren Rush and William Schottstaedt, you’re going to hear some amazingly great music, none of it especially complex.

MEC is famously hard-edge, they hire the best musicians possible to play the most difficult music of the past forty years and it’s fantastic. We are talking about a sixty year heritage of presenting the latest and greatest in esoteric music beginning with Schoenberg and Stravinsky (when they were deemed too difficult to listen to).

But, if this is not your bag then head on over to the west-side and check out Jacaranda, their eclectic programming is fantastic and much less argumentative. I remember a fantastic concert of Rothko Chapel (feldman) followed by Ben Johnston’s fourth string quartet followed by the knee plays from einstein on the beach.

Or, you could cross the street and see the ultra-experimentalists coming out of cal-arts playing in the Red Cat (hour long indian-style improvisation on a piece from the John Cage Songbooks?). You could go down to USC and see the Contemporary Music Ensemble there or the student composition recitals. You could hear my group (what’s next? ensemble), People Inside Electronics, the LA Percussion Quartet, the California Ear Unit, the Ojai festival or another John Adams love-fest at the LA Phil.

Complexity doesn’t define new music in LA, diversity does. There are hundreds of new music concerts a year and each group/presenter has built their own individual niche. If you don’t like difficult music then just hop in your car, get stuck in the traffic and drive across town to see something else.

(Incidentally, that’s an argument that contemporary music – contrary to the myth – is actually *more* embedded in the concerns of wider society than traditional concert music because its aesthetic reference extends beyond the narrow canon of historical music.)

I don’t disagree with your assessment of the High Fidelity article. But I’d urge you to put it in historical context. Babbitt had endured a great deal of indifference, criticism, and hostility already by that time. His foray into musical theatre, with the attendant debacles that often occur in “show business,” had left him disenchanted with the commercialism then on the rise in popular music and media in the late 40s/early 50s.

While the current trend on the part of many composers is outreach and wide engagement, Babbitt was hardly the only modernist at that time who felt that a specialist audience was the best environment in which to cultivate creative work. I’m not suggesting his approach is the one we should adopt today, but I hardly think it was as polarizing and vehement as his worst critics have indicated.

“[Dear Ed. - if your new reviewer, who 'tells it like he sees it', sees the form of La chute d'Icare as 'impenetrable', you might consider getting a new reviewer.]”

Hold on, surely contributors should be allowed to express difficulties in coming to terms with works, or, more simply, to express why they don’t like them? It’s a dull conversation where only people who like and “understand” an art work are present.

And anyway, I think Cassidy’s “imbalance between [...] the structure, and the intricacy and instability of local level materials” and Bailey’s “disjointed organisation” are only different ways of expressing a shared difficulty with the work. I don’t like it much for the same (very broad) reasons – it’s not confused enough for me. I like Ferneyhough when you can completely switch off and not think about structure.

If there’s a reasonable objection to make about the work, it’s the the form is really quite simple, direct, and obvious in its accumulations, juxtapositions, and instrumental roles (with, for my ears, an imbalance between the almost blunt, boxy nature of the structure and the intricacy and instability of local level materials). Both the global structure and the middle-ground form seem to be designed, if anything, to be _immediately_ perceptible, graspable, and understandable, so that attention is shifted further down to local-level interactions (most notably the (again rather obvious) canonic layerings that appear throughout).

As for the comment that there is minimal interaction provided by the MEC concerts at Zipper Hall (interaction w/ musicians, insufficient introductions, etc.), I’m quite surprised — the concert series has a dedicated parallel series of lecture events for every concert, complete w/ film screenings, composer discussions, Q&A sessions, etc. Additionally, the program notes for the concerts are written (quite eloquently) by Paul Griffiths, providing extra layers of context and connection and explanation.

I’m rather biased (ehem … http://mondayeveningconcerts.com/events/021411.html), but I’ve been incredibly impressed with the audience interaction efforts from the MEC. Along those lines … for those interested, there will be a ‘bloggingheads’-style discussion b/t me and the composer Michael Pisaro which will be posted on the MEC website sometime in the near future, giving further info to setup the Feb 14 concert. And the Sunday Morning Films talk at the Goethe-Institut on the 13th will look at the idea of ‘destabilized, deterritorialized form’ in recent music, poetry, painting, and film.

So … bring your friends to the Sunday a.m. chat, get them to read the very informative program notes (distributed well in advance … see, they’re already available! http://mondayeveningconcerts.org/notes/021411.html), get them to watch the bloggingheads discussion, and then if they still find the music on Monday night impenetrable, we’ll try again w/ a post-concert beer or three.