trumpetmike

I love this quote - the problem I see is how we can all agree on what comes under which title.

I found myself on the wrong side of many lecturers whilst at university for my views on much of the modern (and postmodern, if we are using these terms) music that we were forced to listen to as part of the course. They were being presented to us as "great" pieces of contemporary music, yet they may only have had one performance and that was basically to an audience of contemporary music buffs.
My contention was that these composers are only going to be remembered because everything is now recorded. If you are a budding composer, with "unusual" tendencies with regards to tonality, harmony, texture, orchestral forces or anything else you only need to have it performed once and it can be recorded forever. Whether it is a good piece, great piece or just a piece of **** it will always exist. This means that for those contemporary music lovers, they will be able to spend years analysing a piece and then be able to come up with some dubious reasoning as to why it should be termed "great."
Time is a great **** filter. It is only through painstaking research that many of the symphonies of Haydn are now known. The more popular ones have remained pretty much in the public eye since he wrote them, whilst others had their first performance, bombed and so were laid to rest. Listen to the complete Haydn Symphony cycle (if you have a spare month) and you can soon see why these pieces were forgotten. They are not played in concert halls now, unless people are trying to play obscure works (almost as if to prove the point that even the greatest composers had off days). If our illustrious musicologists had had scores and recordings of these pieces available to them for the past two hundred years I am sure that they would have come up with reasoning as to why they are great - they haven't, so they haven't.
One of my lecturers was a huge Haydn fan and was trying to convince us that one of the lesser known symphonies was actually one of Haydn's greatest works. His argument was lost on all of us - we couldn't see that what he was saying made anything great, it was just another symphony in a long list that didn't add anything to the genre. Then again, we haven't spent most of our life studying the obscure works in order to prove their greatness.

Many contemporary composers seem so keen on producing "music" that is "different," "startling," "challenging," or "postmodern, neo-classical, pretentiously titled" (or any other descriptions that they and the critics love to use) that they seem to forget that it is the music that counts, not what you call it.
Personal opinion time
Why does Birtwistle get loads of attention?
Because the critics have decided that he should. His "music" is lost on many people, inlcuding me. I would quite happily term it "noise," I would quite happily term it "unfortunate," but "music" is a word that I would leave well aside.
There are great pieces of modern music, but you really have to search hard to find them, in much the same way that audiences would have in the past. Ask many music students to name 20 composers from the classical period and many will struggle (no need to do so, please folks) yet ask them to name 20 contemporary ones and many will have no problems. Time has allowed the "not so great" composers to vanish into obscurity (with the occasional one being remembered by certain instrumentalists because they happened to write a concerto/sonata for that instrument), yet the contemporary ones are all here and now - we haven't yet had the chance to forget them.

Apologies for the lengthy (sometimes ranting) post, this is just a subject that gets under my skin all too easily.



Afterthought.
If someone is reading this in 100 years time (assuming that TM, or it's later incarnations, are still in existence somewhere in the ether) and Birtwistle is a name that can be used alongside the likes of Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven - I publicly admit that I was wrong. It might just go to prove the current opinion and future opinion are not always the same.