Has modernism failed? That's a big question, and one which I'm vaguely qualified in only one field - classical music - to answer.
I suppose it depends on what you think the modernists set out to do. You could argue, in a charitable frame of mind, that they wanted to reflect the increasing mechanisation and alienation of modern life, to develop a musical language which enabled music to mirror the death of the romantic ideal and to explore the increasing awareness of the dark side of the human soul, revealed as clearly in Freud's Viennese consulting rooms as in the trenches of the Somme.
And to some extent they succeeded. The difficulty is that music, like all other art, is meant to be enjoyable (construing that word very broadly). Reflect horrible things too faithfully, and art stops being enjoyable and becomes something of a chore. Mozart's Idomeneo is written in a lean, accessible melodic style, but it is still the most horrifying opera I've ever seen. It succeeds because the experience is mediated by the music, which offers a stylised analogue of suffering rather than attempting to mimic the suffering itself. On the other hand I once had the misfortune to sit through Aribert Reimann's modernist opera Lear, a very tough three hours, and frankly I'd rather cut my own leg off than repeat the experience. Moreover, audiences know very well that whilst quite a lot of life is unpleasant (and quite a lot of people around the world lead lives that must be very unpleasant indeed), much of it is actually rather enjoyable. The raw, bleeding sensibilities that modernism urges on us seem no more realistic than, for example, P G Wodehouse's arcadian country house froth. And at least Wodehouse is funny.
Certainly classical music's decline must partly be attributed to the truly toxic effect aggressive new work has had on audiences. With your cynic's hat on however, you might argue that the modernists have succeeded only too well - Schoenberg's serialism was explicitly intended as a rebuke to comfortable bourgeois certainties. All of which is fine - we bourgeois can now consider ourselves thoroughly rebuked. But then what? Encouraging the middle class to turn to other pursuits has worked well enough on this view of modernist ideals, but has implications for the infrastructure of classical music which I'll come to in a moment.
My contention is not just that modernism has done a good deal to strike at the viability of the classical music industry. It is that modernism is inherently alien to classical music. Let me explain. Our idea of the modern and new is intimately associated with technology. You can see this must be so just by looking back at what it was that got modernism going in the first place - industrialisation, the telephone, the aeroplane, the atom bomb, space travel. Now look at the symphony orchestra. A medium which hasn't changed in more than a century. No one is every going to look at a symphony orchestra again and think, "That's new". That doesn't mean the orchestra isn't one of the most wonderful collective institutions ever developed by humanity. It just means that it's never going to be cutting edge again.
You might think that the amazing development of digital signal processing could be harnessed to acoustic instruments to give classical music the gloss of novelty. And it can, up to a point. But the core classical repertoire doesn't demand it, and in fact I can't think of a single electro-acoustic piece which has entered the orchestral repertoire, even though composers have been trying on increasingly sophisticated equipment for fifty years.
The desire to be modern and new, to be original, is hard wired into the DNA of every composition student leaving a conservatoire. But it is a chimera. How to go forward is a subject for another day, but modernism in classical music has failed to grip the public, which saw it as a misreading of its own life-experiences and which stayed away from the concert hall in droves. It has been moreover rendered impossible by the march of acoustic technology. Modernism no longer has the option of sounding new. For a time a hundred years ago it sounded new and ugly. Now it can only sound ugly.
Views like these are as unpopular with the classical music establishment as they are commonplace outside it. And yet I was prompted to write this piece by an article in the Guardian today written by Mark Simpson (no relation - for the uninitiate Simpson is a fabulous clarinettist who won BBC Young Musician and is now a well-thought of young composer supported by the BBC in a way that can only make some of us sigh a little wistfully). He writes, "perhaps these changes signal . . . a diminishing belief in the value of contemporary classical music. Stravinsky famously said that classical music is not for the masses. His Rite of Spring was a piece that blew me away in my teenage years and aided my commitment to classical music. But Stravinsky died during the time when the modernist movement of the 1960s and 70s was favouring intellectual procedures over purely emotional ones. The effects of this can still be seen in the reluctance of many audiences to encounter contemporary music that they fear will be jagged and atonal. There's no denying that the great pieces of the past stirred our emotions in a way that modernism has failed to do, and audiences have been alienated as a result".
So it's not just me then. "Audiences have been alienated as a result". And what will happen is that as audiences shrink, so will the political justification for public subsidy. I went to the Royal Opera House last week, and looking around at the sleek faces of the rich and powerful in the bars and restaurants I wondered what would happen if poor people saw this, or if they knew that the ROH consumes the largest tranche of (taxpayer-funded) Arts Council spending. Modernism has helped to push (helped - there are other causes) classical music towards a place where the infrastructure of orchestras and ensembles, players and audiences, is no longer economically or politically viable. If it ever gets there that will be an awful shame.
