Whither Classical Music?

Last weekend, I attended a performance of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra during one of my solo sojourns to the downtown of The City of Broad Shoulders, the Windy City as it's also called.  Charlie Kane said of it to his friend Jedediah that "the wind comes howling in off the lake and gosh only knows if they ever heard of lobster Newburg" but it wasn't for that wind that it earned the latter nickname.  According to what I've read, an East Coast journalist called it that because of the tendency of its residents to boast of it, rendering them and their city "windy" in the parlance of the times.

It's interesting that although I visit River North and the Loop with some frequency, and enjoy classical music, I haven't been to a performance previously.  I'm not even certain why I did so in this case.  I had been to Winter's Jazz Club the night before and enjoyed what I heard and was checking for other live performance of music or a show, and thought of the symphony and am glad I did.

An orchestra at work is an impressive and powerful thing to observe.  It would seem to me that composing for a full orchestra is onerous and creating a composition which can be played and enjoyed by musicians and audiences is a remarkable artistic achievement.  Hearing an orchestra play great music is a notable sensory experience, or is for me. 

Listening to the CSO that evening prompted me to wonder, though.  Is classical music still a living art form?  One can of course still listen to and enjoy the work of great composers of the past as played by capable professional musicians, and that in itself, I would think, will always keep some of us listening to and appreciating the music.  But what of new composers and compositions and how they compare to the those of the past?

I was about to write that I'm unfamiliar with modern classical music (it seems difficult to even write those words as what is classical would seem on its face or by definition as not being modern or new).  But if we include within it the classical music written by 20th century composers, that wouldn't be entirely correct.  I have some familiarity with Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Schoenberg, Ravel, Debussy, Elgar, Benjamin Britten, Respighi, Berg, Poulenc, Richard Strauss, and Rachmaninoff so perhaps it can be said that as to classical music of the first half of the 20th century, at least, I'm not altogether ignorant.  But I know virtually nothing of what's gone on in the last 60 years or so.

I can't say I've liked some of the modern classical music I've heard.  Atonal and twelve tone music annoy me, for the most part.  To my doubtless unschooled ear, some modern classical music is mere noise.  It is I'm sure highly complicated noise, and may even be organized noise, but I don't associate noise with classical music or music of any kind.  I'm aware of the fact that certain composers have invited musicians to more or less do what they please, or select certain chords of phrases randomly and play them haphazardly, or laugh and shout or honk while others in the orchestra do something more traditionally associated with their instruments. 

That sort of thing has led me and perhaps others to speculate that classical music has played itself out.  That's to say that what has been done has pretty much covered all the ground which can be covered by orchestras or quintets or quartets or trios of a melodic nature by past masters of the various styles popular prior to the 20th century or the more melodic styles of the last century, for example the tone poems of Richard Strauss and Respighi.  And so, classical music composers now in a kind of despair resort to musical chaos.

I don't see how that can be, though.  I'd think that the variety of instruments available traditionally in classical music, combined with what technology now allow for, means it's likely still for new classical music to be made.  And, I think that it could still be music and not be wholly derivative of what has been done by the great composers of the past.

It's not a question of whether there is classical music which can yet be composed and played, then.  It's more a question of whether there will be patrons of that music.  Will those who now grow up with modern popular music even be exposed to let alone appreciate classical music?  Will they be musicians willing to play classical music?

The experience of being at a live performance of an orchestra would, I think, convince some of them at least to be patrons of it, because it can impress and can even be profound.  And, it does so without the need for the light shows filled with dancers, musicians pretending to play guitars and stars who most likely lip-sync their way through songs which are so over-produced that they can't be duplicated in a live venue.

The Sad Optimism of 2001

I first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, shortly after it first came out.  I was much younger then, of course.  I recall there was some controversy at the time regarding just what it was intended to express.  In particular, there was speculation regarding the nature of the monolith, or at least what it represented.  Some thought it represented God.  Regardless, I was much impressed.

The picture above is from the very beginning of the film, depicted as Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra blared majestically.  I found the precision of the imagery, which I suppose is to say the cinematography, astounding.  I had seen nothing like it before.  For the time it seemed wholly new.

The movie had its critics.  Some felt it dull and incomprehensible.  I personally felt somewhat overwhelmed, wondered and wondering.  It was clear enough that the monolith, whatever it was, was involved in the "dawn of man"; this was apparent from the scene in which the proto-human or ape-like creature began to use a large bone as a weapon after the encounter with it.  I particularly liked the scene in which the bone was thrown into the sky, and "became" a spaceship.

I didn't read the Arthur C. Clarke novel until much later.  It made sense of what I had seen, though I had inferred some things, as I expect most did, in time.  I don't think, as I believe some did or do, that the book didn't do justice to the film.  I think it a great movie.

As an achievement, it's remarkable.  But I think it's most remarkable, given what's happened since it was made, in its overestimation of what we would achieve, in space at least.

Was its optimism justified?  We were then on the brink of landing on the moon, but a short time, really, after JFK had declared that as a national goal.  A relatively short time, really, since we began to blast things into orbit.  The year 2001 was more than thirty years away.  In thirty years we had split the atom, blown up cities, reached space.  Perhaps our potential seemed limitless.

Nearly fifty years later, and we haven't even returned to the moon for many years, let alone sent a manned mission to Jupiter space, built a huge space station and installations on the lunar surface.  True, we've managed to send probes around the solar system and landed ambulatory robots on Mars.  We put so many satellites into orbit that they're becoming a positive danger. 

Clearly, it turned out that we had different priorities.  We have no HALs, but our computer technology is impressive enough, probably more impressive as it seems there were only two HALs in any case. 

But it's galling in a way that despite the fact that we haven't taken the steps required to begin the colonization of space (and we surely would have had colonies on Mars and perhaps elsewhere among the planets if the universe of 2001 had come to be) we seem to be in much the same poor way we were in the late 1960s.  We have no war in Vietnam, but we have conflicts all over the globe, the rich are very rich indeed and becoming richer, and the poor grow more and more numerous.  We grow more divided, angrier and probably have less hope than we did back then.

But perhaps I'm being too negative.  There were other futures envisioned in movies of the time and shortly thereafter which make our present seem good enough, perhaps even  desirable.  Kubrick himself depicted one of them in A Clockwork Orange.  The future in Farenheit 451 wasn't exactly cheery.  We have a penchant for dystopian futures and indulge it in our movies often enough.

Still, 2001 contained the hope of transformation, transcendence, in the form of the Starchild, which one of us became courtesy of the monolith,  Perhaps that hope is still there, although it seems to me that the transformation some of us seek is at the moment less physical and more mental or emotional.