Recently a friend sent me a link to a Philip Hensher article in the Independent entitled "Will nobody mourn the death of classical music?" Google it if you're interested, but if time presses, Hensher concludes by writing, "...in a hundred years . . . it will be incomprehensible, dead, and gone, and very few people will care". You get the picture.
I was reminded of this when, driving up the M74 the other week to climb yet more grey Scottish mountains, I listened to Donald Macleod interviewing Pierre Boulez. The East West Divan Orchestra under Daniel Barenboim was playing a series of Boulez pieces in its week-long programme of Beethoven symphonies at the Proms.
Macleod began by saying something rather daring. A composer friend of his, on being told that Macleod was going to be interviewing Boulez, had remarked that the Frenchman’s music was “decadent”. Boulez dealt with this observation graciously enough by not dealing with it at all, gently heading the discussion off in the direction of other less tendentious terms like “baroque” and “rococo”. Macleod did not persist with the “decadent” line, leaving me to wonder exactly what his friend had meant, and whether there might be any sense in which the term was just.
That night’s Boulez piece had one of those titles beloved of late 20th century composers, something like “Diversions II”. It beebled and burbled, shrieked, twisted and turned. For the first ten minutes at least. Then I switched it off. Feeling that I was going to be sitting in the car anyway, and I might learn something, I switched it back on. The piece was doing pretty much the same thing as it had been when I switched it off. I turned over to Radio 5 instead, with its inane chatter about the forthcoming Olympics and whether Brad Wiggins would win the Tour. Eventually, tiring of that, I switched back to the Boulez. It was still burbling and shrieking, only this time with a bit more cello.
I am well into the second half of my life now, and I do not want to spend any more than I have to of the years that remain listening to music I don’t enjoy, so I switched it off for the last time.
I have for years been arguing that there are precious few objective standards in art, and so I am not going to fall into the trap of saying that this Boulez piece (or the others I heard in the following days) was bad music. I just don’t like it. It might however be interesting to set out something of why I don’t like it, or to be more accurate, why I don’t think it works.
Deprived of the gravitational pull tonality affords at both the micro and macro levels, Boulez’s music lacks a sense of harmonic direction. And writing in a language in which any combination of pitches (apart from the triad, of course) is permitted, it also - paradoxically - lacks harmonic variety. After all, one atonal six note cluster is quite like another. When regular rhythm is shunned, distinctions between fast and slow music disappear; the listener is left with a musical landscape which is, paradoxically, one-paced. Because melodic ideas aren’t audibly repeated it’s very hard for the listener to get a hold of any structural features. In short, I find it a language in which opportunities for variety and contrast seem to have been carefully excised, with tedious results.
But none of these things would matter if I liked the material from moment to moment, and I guess this is the key. There are plenty of composers who are not terribly interested in construction (or not very good at it), but whose material I find irresistible – Schubert, Rachmaninov, Mahler, Grieg, John Williams, amongst others – and it is a coincidence that the composer I most admired as a teenager – Sibelius – turns out not only to have written material I find deeply stirring but also to be one of the greatest constructors of any kind of music at any period.
We all know that most people who like classical music don’t like Boulez (read this sentence again carefully if you think you disagree with it). Of those, I suspect that the overwhelming majority don’t give a fig for (and aren’t even aware of) the technical points I mentioned. Like me, they just don’t like the material.
Back to Philip Hensher. I have written before about the decline in classical music in Britain, but I don’t quite share Hensher's apocalyptic view. I think classical music is rescuable given a sensible education policy and, just as crucial, a sensible programming policy. We aren’t likely to get either any time soon, of course.
In any other artistic discipline the idea that you might promote something audiences don’t like just for the sake of it would be laughed to oblivion. Not so in classical music. And this brings me to the question of Pierre Boulez’s decadence.
I don’t think Boulez is a decadent composer. Not remotely. One of the great things about being a composer (and I guess an artist of any kind), is that in contrast to the many constraints we all experience in our lives, in art we are, at present in the West, free to create whatever we want. If Boulez likes writing his sort of stuff, good luck to him.
But I suppose you might argue that, in a context where the audience for classical music is ageing and declining, it is decadent to insist on performing music that people, on the whole, don’t like.
And when opportunities for putting on new music before a mass audience are rare, you might argue that it was double-plus decadent to insist on performing Boulez, repeatedly, at a festival paid for, on the whole, by the general public, who like it even less.
It might be laudable to play it a few times, to see how it goes down. But when it becomes apparent that they don’t like it after, oh I don’t know, fifty years or so, you might also argue that it was decadent to keep on ramming it down the public’s throats, particularly when there exist reams of other new music that they might like and that could be put on instead.
You might further argue that, when it’s felt that a helpful moment-to-moment explanation on the Proms’ Twitter feed (and no, I am not making this up) is necessary while the beebling and burbling is going on, the plot – as well as an opportunity - has been well and truly lost.
For whatever else you can say about it, art whose advocates acknowledge the need for a written explanation while it's going on is palpably Not Working.
