At a performance of Opera North's wonderful Siegfried a few days ago, a friend of mine, not a Wagnerite but willing to be converted, asked when the music was written. Oh, mid 1800s, I said, guessing. This turns out to have been broadly true, though Wagner abandoned Siegfried for a decade after writing Act II to attend to the small matter of writing Tristan and Meistersinger.
This morning I googled the term "cultural foreshortening", and was pleased to find no reference to it on the net. I might therefore claim to have coined it. This is my name for the phenomenon, analagous to the visual foreshortening effect where something far away seems closer than it actually is, where a piece of culture created a long time ago is ubiquitous now and therefore seems contemporary. If I were to pick a piece of music pretty much at random, Albinioni's Adagio is familiar to us in a dozen contexts as backdrop to modern life, in lifts, in supermarkets, films, adverts so that it might have been written twenty years ago. In fact, given that it was expanded from an Albinioni fragment by an Italian academic in the 1950s but is widely accepted as a piece from antiquity, the Adagio might in fact be quite a good example of how this works.
But it isn't just music which has become familiar through its public repetition. Even novelties can seem contemporary. From the invention of the printing press onwards, accelerated by the public library, the gramophone record, the photocopier, the internet and now Spotify, a process has been set in train by which today virtually all the music ever written or recorded is available at the touch of a button. We live in an age where all music is contemporary.
As a composer I'm interested in the consequences of this. Much though I dislike post-modernism, which at its worst tends towards a kind of nothing-much-matters aesthetic, it seems to formalise the idea that there is no such thing as an absolute style. Recently I conducted a symphony by a pupil of Haydn, Paul Wranitzky, which probably hadn't been played in the last 200 years. It wasn't as good as Haydn, and I would be surprised if it gets an outing in the next couple of centuries, but one of the striking things about it was how like Haydn it was. You really could have been listening to one of the middle period extrovert C major symphonies, the Maria Theresa perhaps. And this is similarity of style is also true of Mozart and Haydn: most of us who scrape a living round the fringes of classical music can tell the difference between the two composers, but most of us can also remember occasions when, confronted with a work we didn't know, we got it humiliatingly wrong.
I guess my point is that awareness of the possibility of other styles undermines one's faith in the idea that there is just one way of writing. Classical music has quite often been prepared to look back (and I'm not just thinking of obvious examples like the Holberg Suite or Dumbarton Oaks, but also of pieces like Brahms 1st Piano Concerto, in which Bach's music is woven into the fabric of what was offered as a piece of new music). Periods of stylistic hegemony have become increasingly rare, and the Great Serialist Terror, which dominated new music in the middle years of the 20th century, was in the end undermined by the gramophone record, which prevented great composers like Sibelius from oblivion, no matter how unfashionable they were with critics and academics. We now live in an era where music is surprisingly plural, where minimalists rub shoulders in concert programmes with ageing post-Webernists and thrusting young Spectralists. I think this is partly because of the old music which is all around us, which seems nevertheless new, and which teaches us above all else that there is more than one way of doing things.
If Beethoven had been born in a cave at the end of the last ice age would he have written the Moonlight Sonata? Of course not. Music is a product of the composer's personality, sure, but also of the prevailing cultural, social and political atmosphere, the technological resources available and factors harder to quantify like the quality of light and landscape. There was nothing inevitable about the Moonlight Sonata.
What this seems to me to signify is that we should feel free to write what we like, in whatever style we like, responding to the music of the past in whatever way we like, co-opting some parts of it and discarding others. In two hundred years no-one will care whether what we did was fashionable or not.
Knowing when Wagner wrote Siegfried is only a very small part of the pleasure to be had from listening to it, and my friend's astonishment at its modernity, considering it came only about twenty years after Beethoven's death, must be an even smaller part still. These things matter mostly for musicologists.
