What Made Minimalism In Postmodern Music Popular?

Hi David. I’m the first to argue for the need for composers and musical institutions to step outside of their bubble and learn how to interact with the public. I’ve repeated stated how urgent this is, and it’s what I am attempting to do, however tentatively and clumsily, through my website and other endeavors. I don’t think it’s healthy that so many composers are ensconsed in academia or the machinery of public grants. My hope for the coming years and decades is that there will be a profound evolution in how such music is disseminated, which seems inevitable given the dramatic rise of the internet coupled with the collapse of public arts funding in many Western countries. It’s either that, or an agonizing lurch into oblivion.

I have so many things I could write about on this subject but I will restrict myself to comenting on what I see to be the core of your article: from 3:46 to 4:43. I am composer living in one of the few places where financing for contemporary music isn’t doing that bad: Finland. However, whenever one is trying to get funding for a festival, a concert, or their own work, apply for a festival, or a call for scores, they keep facing the same challenge: “X society/festival wants new, bold initiatives”. That forces everyone to try to present the art they are trying to create or organize as something never before seen, special and courageous, when in fact… you could be just trying to get funding for that nice piano trio that someone commissioned you. Instead you present the piano trio as inspired by a certain Sanskrit text, whit 11 movements of 22 seconds played on 33 different extended techniques, throw in something to do with prime numbers, all to impress the reviewer, even though you haven’t even written the first bars yet. Or, you quit the piano trio idea altogether cause you’re worried you’re not gonna get funding, and instead apply for a clarinet piece with live electronics and installation that uses a new program that will create “a new world of sound”. So I think it is very much the institutions and the need for some kind of criteria that resonates with the expectation that art presents (MODERN music, not just any music) which forces composers to always think and act outside the box.

I had a defining moment when going to see the new music ensemble “Earplay” during my time as an SF State composition student. At the performance, about 50% of the audience consisted of myself and my 15ish classmates who were required to attend. The other 50% were the composers themselves and their friends/family. The hall seated about 400 and was mostly empty, and one could not escape that feeling the entire time. However, I never got an sense from the composers or performers that anything was amiss about performing to a mostly-empty hall. In fact, I could feel almost a sense of elitism in the idea that so few had the musical knowledge to “truly appreciate” the works performed. The performance that most sticks in my memory is that which featured a “newly invented instrument,” as the composer’s notes proclaimed. Said instrument was a collection of random metal pieces affixed to a turntable powered by an electric motor that spun and caused the metal pieces to strike chimes and such hanging above. I felt almost insulted at the triumphant proclamation of having invented a new instrument. Was I supposed to place this device alongside a pipe organ, a violin, a trumpet, or an electric guitar in its musical capability or ability of a performer to utilize it for making music? That was definitely my moment when I came to believe that music academia & this contemporary classical world care not for connecting with audiences, but rather for proclaiming whatever they create as high art and considering those who disagree to be somehow unable to grasp their supposed genius.

Once you said “conversation between the artist and society”, that’s when I knew I’d agree with you. It might be more obvious in the music world, but in the world of visual arts too, you sometimes feel you are exposed to works of art that are self-serving and made completely without any understanding on the part of the artist that art is first and foremost a means of communication. Contrived and deliberate attempts to be niche, obscure, and original seldom communicate anything particularly well as these tend to be purely intellectual exercises in avoiding what’s been done before, whereas a desire to communicate something from an emotional viewpoint – disregarding whether it is original – is what people tend to respond and relate to. When it comes to music, a lot of contemporary concert music sometimes seems an exercise in making something as cacophonous, non-melodic and atonal as possible, rather than having an emotional agenda expressed through music’s unique ability to play with our expectations, how it lets us believe we know what’s coming next only to surprise us followed by a moment when we again know what’s coming next, subliminally tapping into our human instincts for survival. That might still include cacophony, non-melody and atonality, of course. When it is done because you feel you have to – partly out of the fear of not being original – rather than because that is how you genuinely wish to express something, then that is what is communicated through the work. And listeners can tell the difference.

Actually, a lot of people hate contemporary art. I have studied in elite art schools and been in the art world more or less my entire life, and most people only attend such gallery openings with a kind of “emperor’s new clothing” awkward silence when in reality they all secretly feel alienated and not interested in all in the work. If the art world wasn’t a playground for money laundering of the world’s elite, it would also fall into obscurity, much like a lot of the ‘true’ artists today have, who create actual valuable works of originality and beauty. But yeah, I totally agree that “everything is NOT fine” – not at all. Art, real art in most forms, is not valued at all in society. I could go into a list of reasons for why that is, but it really comes down to a lack of aesthetic education and lack of art appreciation. Instead “history” of art is taught, and this is a mistake. Knowing the history of works of art does not teach people to understand the structure or meaning of works of art, and that’s really mostly the problem as to why most people feel art is irrelevant to them: art is taught as a historical object, trapped in a time and place, and not as a deep and important element of the human experience in the here and now, in our lives in this moment. Just my two cents.

I went through music conservatory studying composing. I learned a lot about music, and I still write (albeit not expecting to make any money from it), but one idea I ran through with everything I wrote was to pass it by an ordinary non-musician to see if they understood it. They didn’t have to enjoy it (although they sometimes did), but if their reaction was “I don’t get it”, then I considered the piece a bad piece and treated it accordingly. This of course made some of my stuff off-limits to most of the conservatory new music faculty, who were trying to push the boundaries of what was possible, constantly pushing me to make my music more extreme, less normal, and less focused on singable melodies or sometimes-consonant harmonies. I’m much happier writing where I don’t have to concern myself with what they think.

I’m a classical musician, but I’ve always been put off by the stuffy, supercilious atmosphere of classical concerts. Classical musicians — composers and performers alike — could start by losing the snooty attitude that, for example, forbids clapping between movements (unless it’s an opera aria, when they’re ~ expected ~ to clap, even if the singer wasn’t that good). For goodness’ sake: the audience wants to express their appreciation, and we turn them down? That’s so incredibly arrogant. It should come as no surprise that when we treat an audience with such disrespect, we don’t get a very large crowd. Classical composers have the same attitude: since a few great works (e.g. Rite of Spring) met with hostile receptions initially, they assume that their works are great (because they take it for granted that they are geniuses) and a hostile reception shows the audience’s lack perception not their music’s lack of quality (because they assume the audience are fools). For every work that met with jeers at first and turned out to be great later, there’s probably 100 that have met with jeers because they actually just sucked — but no one remembers those. (PS: I LOVE David Bruce’s music.❤️)

Man, I love the comments box in this website. I think contemporary music has given us a lot of things that we can use, by example: harmony to color a piece, new form structures, new ways of analysis, motivical approaches, microtonality, etc. And these are tools that can be used to create more interesting music that not only can be attractive to a general audience, but that can be rich in concepts and expression. Is about finding the middle ground, kinda like jazz (in the sense that it can have a complex harmony and still be attractive to listeners). And I think being mindful about your audience isn’t the same as trying to gain their favor. I think the most acclaimed painters and artists in general used themes, forms and motifs that were relatable to their audience, and they became great not by creating something unrecognisable, but by creating something original with something relatable. Music works with the ear and with time. Most men are primarily visual, and even today mankind can’t understand/perceive time as well as it wants to. So being a little bit mindful about it maybe would be a good approach.

I was trained as a jazz composer at Berklee College of Music and now mostly do pop/folk/country songwriting. I’m afraid that there are simply limits set by physics itself, as to how “far out” and dissonant music can go before most people will turn away from it. There’s a reason a perfect fifth sounds “nice,” and it’s not just because people were told it is supposed to sound nice. Good luck trying to get the populace to accept weird dissonant music with no repetitions or melody for people’s minds to latch onto!

The problem with contemporary music is that it has become much too insular and centered around universities. It also makes too many demands on the listener, something that has been there from the beginning, for instance, I had to take a music appreciation class in order to learn how to listen to “serious” music. And, though I found this to be a worth while endeavor I also understood the consternation of my fellow classmates who felt the entire concept of “learning” how to listen to music was ridiculous. I can think of analogues in the visual arts; the painter Mark Rothko painted pieces that were technically simple but Discursively complex and made extensive demands of the viewer. Rothko was challenging the viewer to make sense of his paintings through their (the observers) knowledge of the art form, and not showcasing his ability for the casual consumption of the observer. Contemporary classical music has become this type of art almost exclusively; the layman can like a contemporary piece, but only someone with an education in the art form can understand it. Its this latter expectation of getting the “point” of a contemporary piece that leads to the chasm between composers and their audiences now.

Lots of good comments here. My problem with contemporary classic music is that it is so abstract that the average listener and even musicians will never understand it. In my opinion art/music should be made to please people or to provoke and anger them rather than self expression. If art doesn’t affect the viewers/listerners emotions it doesn’t serve any purpose. Good examples of relevant contemporary music are the works of brass band and wind band composers like Philip Sparke.

Hello David. Great article. From my perspective (I am someone who graduated with an MA in music theory and composition 35 years ago who used to do contemporary classical composition) what happened is that the fun and interesting people in the modern classical scene, who were young and creative and forward thinking, were absorbed into the world of indie rock, or electronic dance music genres. You could do anything you wanted, basically, and be as avant-garde as you wanted to be, while still having a scene and an audience and a place to form coalitions and collaborations. If you wanted to have a cello and a trumpet in the band doing dissonant music…go for it. Friends would play in their friend’s groups, for free, and the music only had to be simplified a little bit, if at all, depending on what your artistic goals were. After a while working this way, faster, simpler, with more frequent public performances in which to gain some feedback, you just keep going this way and never look back. Plus, the scene was young, socially exciting, and intellectually and politically stimulating. All the audience really asks for is a good song, a meaningful melody, a good groove, perhaps even a provocative mood or something to hold on to their interest. But that’s part of what being a good composer is anyway. After a while being exposed to so much of the indie rock underground, you see that all of the modern compositional ideas are, in perhaps an altered form from the concert hall, thriving somewhere in that underground scene.

It’s not entirely true that music from the past 100-120 years lacks relevance–even despite the inward lurch of art music into academia. Let’s bear in mind the influence 20th Century composers had on movie and TV scores. Schoenberg, who wound up moving to Hollywood and teaching at USC and UCLA, never got to the contract stage of composing for movies and TV, but students of his applied his atonal/12-tone style to convey suspense, horror, violence and dark moods in film and TV scores–it’s why I think of Schoenberg as the forefather of “don’t-go-in-the-basement” music. Even in the classic kungfu movies of Run Run Shaw, one can hear hints of Berg, Bartok and Stravinsky in the scores. And John Williams has never shied from utilizing ideas of 20th Century composers. Even some of the great art composers did get contracted to compose film scores, like Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Sergei Prokofieff, William Walton and Dmitri Shostakovich. There’s also the influence modern composers had on jazz artists, like Miles Davis and Charlie Parker, among others. (And one of Bird’s sidemen, Willie Ruff, studied with Paul Hindemith at Yale.) However, as art composers withdrew further into academia, their influence on more popular media diminished, leading to hackneyed and unmemorable scores in more recent movies. (The work of Hans Zimmer and Junkie XL come to mind. The use of temp tracks in the editing room hasn’t helped, either.) If contemporary composers can find ways to show the value of their work in more popular media, that may be a way of regaining relevance.

In all areas of the modern arts “difficulty” and a supposed shock factor connected to originality purely for its own sake has become a deeply entrenched dogma, while basic aesthetics has been largely ignored. Classical music went wrong when it largely threw out melody, harmony and many of the time-honoured traditional elements that make music both comprehensible and meaningful to the listener. The same way modern poetry went wrong when it largely eschewed rhyme, meter and the other structurally constraining elements that once made it quite a popular and well-regarded element within society. It would be interesting to see modern architects try to get away with the same kind of thing i.e. ignore the basic structural elements of their art. The only reason they don’t is that people would die because of it, and said architects would end up in prison. If composers and poets do the same thing no-one dies (only the culture dies off somewhat, due to the consequent waning of public interest). It’s possible to write good free verse (e.g. R.S. Thomas) but the vast majority of it is crap, because anyone can do it, and no learning of the craft has been necessary. Likewise I suppose it’s possible to write good (plinkety-plonkety) modern classical music but, again, the vast majority of it is awful, tedious, instantly forgettable, self-indulgent crap. So there 🙂

Who created the ‘Bubble’ that the Contemporary composer lives in? Why do we think about music-composition the way we do? The ‘Bubble’ is a collection of ideas and practices about “Art” that has evolved from both Kant and Hegel: strange, destructive and alienating ideas about “Art” – that have become ‘common sense’ (or better: “Fine-Art” brainwashing). Consider Hegel’s (horrible) Aesthetics for instance – it is not difficult to understand why “Art-Music” slowly and gradually became irrelevant – after the two German philosophers were naively adopted by the broader educated population: See what Hegel says – and judge for yourself! * A work which does not adhere to the ideas of its time has no value * The spirit in the work is more important than its craft * No matter how ugly art is – it has more value than nature If this is combined with the later idea of ‘Avant Garde’ the composer run directly into narcissism or total alienation: Either the mere goal of the composer to express something “authentic”, “novel”, “show something of his/her unique personality”, “new”, “talking about our time” (strangely since nobody really care about these pieces of music). Or the goal is to show how human touch can be completely erased (serialism, 12 tone, mechanic, electronic music, pure sounds, …. the list is endless – each composer has almost his/her -ism). For a sane human being this is absolutely crazy! The ideas behind aesthetic modernism (generally speaking) are very ugly and anti-humane. No wonder that people shy away from you – modern composers!

The problem with Contemporary Music is the same problem that happens in any mature field, whether art, science, engineering or whatever. It is now a specialist subject and it takes a lot of study to just to understand and appreciate the current state. This means the general public can no more understand good Contemporary Music than they can understand the top chess players or great computer coding. The difference is that in certain fields there are proxies that let the public know someone is actually any good – Magnus Carlson beats everyone at chess, Elon Musk gave us the synchronised automated landing of two rockets, the iphone exists. But for Contemporary Music there is no proxy and it sounds awful to anyone who hasn’t had a liking for the naive aspects of music beaten out of them.

I personally love contemporary classical music. I seek it out, and love hearing new things. A lot of it is terrible, but only through listening to as much of it as I can, do I find those hidden gems. I wish orchestras had the balls to perform more of it. I would likely attend more concerts if they did.

I diagnose the problem like this: too many composers are offering up “pale imitations” of superficial gimmickry a la Cage, meaningless collections of seemingly random notes a la Boulez, and form-less, pulse-less undulations of sound a la … almost every academic composer in the 1960s. When composers learn their craft like David Bruce has, and stop relying on bad imitations of already failed ideas from the previous century, contemporary classical music will be appreciated again.

How can contemporary compositions be relevant when in most of them, a regular listener cannot remember or formulate in is head 3 consecutive notes of the main melody. How can you emotionally relate to that? For most people, at best, it’s nothing more than nice noise. Maybe I’m just being ignorant or limited, but I feel that this is the view most people have. And if taste is democratic, I may be right 🙂 .

I like music, so much in fact that I became a musician. Sometimes I wonder if the general public does not like music, and instead like the emotional attachments that the music brings back. I will leave it at that, as I am more interested in what others would say about this, than to read my own thoughts. Excellent article / content.

I believe that classical music in the 20th century was, for the most part, a huge and tragic waste of talent. The underlying idea seemed to be something like this: “Beethoven wrote difficult and challenging music that audiences at first rejected, but eventually he was acknowledged as a genius. I want to be like Beethoven, so I’ll write difficult and challenging music too!” Leaving aside the question of whether Beethoven’s audiences really ever rejected his music (I’ve read that this is a myth), I think this line of thinking has causality reversed. Beethoven wasn’t deliberately trying to write difficult music; like other composers he was just trying to write the best music he could, and because he was in fact a genius much of it ended up highly original and “difficult.” But if you aren’t Beethoven to begin with, going out of your way to write complicated and difficult music isn’t going to turn you into Beethoven! You just end up with complicated and difficult music that no one outside of a small cadre of dedicated enthusiasts will ever care about. I’ve read that Milton Babbitt was deeply bitter that the public never appreciated his music to the extent he thought it deserved. Well I once attended a premiere of one of Babbitt’s works where he stood up and took a bow afterwards and got booed by a good chunk of the audience. It wasn’t polite, but my opinion Babbitt got what he deserved.

People have more choices than ever before. Attention spans are shorter. It’s becoming less important to have people focus on one particular artist, genre, or even medium. We’ll never have another Beatles again because of this. I’m interested in how younger people, teens and twenties, view music. I own a music school in Tokyo and we often have discussions about today’s youth and music. There is an interest for contemporary music here – in article game soundtracks. Many which feature full orchestras. It’s not rare to find an average high school student obsessed with both the popular music of the time (in Japan: AKB, Arashi, Smap, ect.) and article game music. One of my students did a study of walking around Tokyo and stopping students wearing headphones to ask them what they were listening to. VGM won by a landslide! When I asked if any of these students attend concerts that feature VGM most said no. Blaming their busy study schedule. To answer your final question: personally, I’m interested in a mix of composition, improvisation, music games, and music education. With a focus on “unconventional” music. So, I started a school that teaches this stuff. And I keep up various performances, festivals, and workshops involving as many people as I can. Which is something I believe anyone with enough ambition could, and should, do.

When I was 15, Yo-Yo Ma played a piece of mine called “Soliloquy.” Second movement of a cello sonata I’d written at Juilliard pre-college. It was loved by the hall and it catapulted me into a spotlight I could not keep up: my education, which was an ivy league, hypothetically best-you-can-get, told me that everything I had ever known about why I composed – which really came from my training as a classical pianist, starting at age 4 – and my identity was shattered. @David Bruce Composer I suppose that alll I heard was: this music is not your voice. And essentially I was coached to add wrong notes into my music. There went my natural intensely personal world of music – my shattered identity has not yet recovered. No one, including any therapist I’ve been to, can account for my trauma, nor validate it. I’m on my own here. I went to schools arguably the best in the States (and spent a year at King’s College London). The irrelevance of classical music to the general student population there was evident. I joined a rugby team and all I wanted, all I desperately wanted, was to belong, was to be able to write without second guessing and invalidating myself. Yes, I’ve gone though serious traumas, ones no humans can forgive, but I have had to release them in order to survive. My parents are aging. They are not musicians. Because of the abilities I exhibited at the age of 2, whilst listening to Swan Lake, I was already labeled a child prodigy. I did excellently at the subjects to which I applied myself.

I would think the vast majority of people get exposed to classical music through the visual arts. Looney Tunes, Star Wars, Ghibli films and the like. This works very well for the few composers who can get attached to a successful movie or TV show. But undoubtedly the vast majority will never get there. But maybe these composers could use a medium like Youtube to present their works. Of course, there’s a lot of hurdles to overcome like the cost of recording your music and the question of if you are going to have a visual accompaniment. The idea of having classical music tied to animation, kind of like Fantasia and music articles of the past, is a dream I’d love to see. But I know that it is far more time consuming and costly to produce than your typical music article for a pop song. Still, there are tons of aspiring animators out there, just like composers. Maybe these two groups should get together and collaborate for their own mutual benefit.

It’s because it’s just not entertaining. There’s nothing for the audience to feel attached to. Even Stravinsky’s avant Garde music had rhythmic patterns and melodies to identify. And yet he still created new original art. Music evolves. You can’t just chuck out the basis of previous music and expect people to enjoy it.

This is very nice to have conversation on this subject. I think that today especially we have so many genres and artists that it’s impossible to keep up. Never was there a time of internet where people have access to most of these artist, and so I think that nowadays classical music is just not that popular among people. I believe that has to do a lot with how modern and contemporary music is made, the goal is to be original and to “surpass” the composers of the past. I don’t think music should be that shallow. The only thing we can do to ”bring back” the relevance is to show people that they can indeed enjoy unconventional music and that there is something meaningful and profound in it.

I think the problem here is two fold: One is that contemporary classical music has failed to adapt to music primarily becoming a fixed medium, obviously concerts are still performed and attended but ever since (roughly) the invention of vinyl records musical composition has evolved to exercise new musical ideas in the limits of recording and playback technology. A good example against this would be musique concrete and acousmatic music of the mid 1900’s, however, after the initial inception of these techniques most classical composers either continued with performative ensembles and/or haven’t caught up with some of the ideas that popular music has arrived from using the same technology (or in some case driving the development of new technology, i.e. drum machines, instrument amplification, multi-track recording, DAWs, e.t.c.). Since musique concrete was first conceived everyone from the Beatles (like you mentioned) to Brian Eno to King Tubby to Miles Davis have taken the idea of editing and transforming sound recordings and expanded upon it in their own way. And this is just one example. Music has changed a lot in the past 100 years and I think classical composers are begrudging of musical techniques that have originated in the popular music world. The other issue here is a presentation one, classical concert etiquette is extremely rigid and hasn’t changed much throughout the years. It’s vastly different from the average concert experience of today. It’s usually amplified (though full sized orchestras can get to rock concert volumes it’s much more dynamic than most modern music), crowds (usually) stand up and applause during the performance is allowed (amongst other things).

As a jazz musician who casually listens to classical music- it often seems like many contemporary classical composers try too hard to be “hip”. It almost seems like certain composers prioritize being unique or avant-garde over making music that sounds good. I know sounding good is subjective, but there’s a reason Bach performances can still sell out concert halls almost 300 years after his music was written.

Interesting, never really thought about it. But it is weird how contemporary is so extremely on the outskirts. Here’s some reasons I can think of: 1. Pieces are too long. People can look at modern art for 5 seconds, know whether they are going to get something from it or not and walk on if need be. You can’t really do that with a piece of music. You have to sit for say 20 minutes to know whether there was anything in it for you. 2. There’s no memorable/identifiable bits in it (a melody you can sing).There’s no words/text to hold on to either (it’s just sorta noise made with orchestral instruments). 3. It’s highly abstract. Movies aren’t that abstract they are still basically photography. You might not care about or get a lot about a movie’s plot or meaning but still enjoy the visuals which are still basically normal photography. If movies were just 2 hours of abstract visuals (like a Motherwell painting) without dialog then I’de say there would be a lot less people interested. 4. It often sounds scary, depressing or overly dramatic (unless you already have acquired the taste and know how to listen to it or have an academic understanding of the techniques and developments). Although you can say the same about a lot of modern art I don’t think visuals have the same impact as noise does. Noise links in much directer with a persons mood/emotions and people are simply turned off by it (e.g. is this some kind of horror film music? Yeh, I’m going to sit for 20 minutes feeling agitated, depressed and unsettled).

In another of your articles you say how you have composed a piece, which would be an interesting example for the article but you cannot share it on YouTube. I understand the licensing issues but this is an example of how composers are limited by success. YouTube is where I discover almost all of the music I listen to and I think it is best to have a body of work freely available.

Personally, when I go to a concert I’m always going for the older pieces of dead composers, never for new ones. I actually am weary of going to concerts that start with contemporary compositions because they end up being so unbearably hard to listen to. I think that says a lot about the state of classical music at the time and I’m a diehard classical fan who likes almost any new (non-contemporary) piece I hear. The music doesn’t sound like music, it sounds like some strange experiment, and doesn’t feel like anything.

1-What is in the present, still the most performed concerto in music halls all over the world, that was composed in the last 100 years? El Concierto de Aranjuez. Do we need to ask why? If anyone does, just listen to its Adagio, which by the way, IT IS THE MOST PERFORMED CLASSICAL MUSIC CONCERTO OF ALL CONCERTOS FROM ANY PERIOD, and it was written in the 20th Century,, in1939 if I am not mistaken, the very same year Hitler UNleashed his own version of hell on the world. 2-And in the beauty of that Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra, written by the blind Spanish master composer Rodrigo, called by many ”The Last of The Romantic Composers”, which makes the hearts of its listeners so happy, is a sure sign pointing the way to go to modern and future composers . 3-And although for sure, the recent and current elitists purveyors of culture, believers in their OWN hype do have an agenda against the beauty and deep SOLace found ONLY in The Light of The Truth, and thus they’ve been tearing at it for decades (in reality willfully taking part in their selves initiated spiritual battle against Jesus, God incarnate, and the inherent beauty of His love and commitment to mankind, for it reveals what evil many have burrowed deep within their hearts. Enough to look around to today’s western societies to clearly SEE)modern composers who love the beauty in music (like Rachmaninoff did for example) shouldn’t be discouraged by the mediocrity and coarseness of today’s music scene. And even though Michael Tilson Thomas said once that in the 20th Century noise won over melody in classical music, Mahler, who made it to the early years of the 1900s, did say that composing wasn’t about the notes ”but about the heart”.

Academics have a bias against tonality. I was an undergrad music major, and my 20th century music history prof. excluded Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Britten from his syllabus, but included a department colleague and himself. Boulez and his coterie of snobbish assholes who deemed every non-revolutionary composer as 2nd rate held far too much sway. Today, they are dying out, while Shostakovich et. al are being increasingly rediscovered. So the answer is simple. Stop being afraid of tonality and functional harmony. There is now more than ever room for the next Richard Strauss or, for that matter, the next Shostakovich.

This is a article I hope you will make sometime. I’ve always wanted you to analyze the works of the English brass band writer, Paul Lovatt Cooper. To me, he is an inspiration to my brass playing and Cooper is a phenomenal dynamic writer. I would like to see a article where you look at the way he writes and why he is so effective at capturing and conveying emotions in his scores. Any words back would be a huge plus! Keep up the good work!

I’m a composer who’s not a part of these circles or discussions (shameless plug for my small website: RichieNicksMusic)… I was unable to finish my upper education due to finances, and I feel like that really made it impossible for me to be remotely successful. I’ve never been able to pay rent with my music, for example. I am only ever offered the ever agonizing “exposure” BS when approached by or approaching people about projects. And yet the like and even love for classical music is still obviously there… otherwise movies would be scored differently and people who would never listen to Mozart, Vivaldi, Bach, etc wouldn’t happily recognize and repeat any such music regardless of the source. I think it’s mostly a respect and value problem… people enjoy it, but they no longer respect and value it. My music is wanted, but not in exchange for money. I’m expected to use my brain, skills, personal creativity, and specific knowledge purely for the sake and use of others, not for my own gain or support. Edit: And I think it’s on the nose to note that people really do enjoy classical music right up until you actually call it classical.

This is completely stupid. Just because you’re not extremely successful doesn’t mean there aren’t others who are. If you’re comparing yourself or your peers to the master composers of history, that’s completely ridiculous. Not only are we hundreds of years removed from them, but there are also many more composers nowadays. The fact that popular music is popular because it exists due to technology and is more easily accessible is simply a part of the normal evolution of music. Classical music is still important and has a role, but the explosion of popular music has overshadowed the classical sphere. Comparing modern classical composers (who are successful) to huge pop stars is like comparing Wagner to one of the thousands of completely irrelevant composers who were his contemporaries. And you completely contradicted your whole point, because there ARE some superstar contemporary composers. Uh, you think you can count on one hand the piece that are renown/loved since the Rite of Spring? BS! That’s absolutely incredible and crazy that you could pass off a claim like that, totally saying that all contemporary classical music from the last entire century is culturally irrelevant. I live in LA and the LA Phil usually has one new composition per orchestra concert. They also have the Green Umbrella series, which is all contemporary, and mostly premieres. I have a masters in percussion performance and throughout all my performing in orchestras and other groups there is a large amount of new composers’ works being played, and a massive amount of frequently performed works from the 20th century.

I think the problem is it being called classical music. It’s not classical music it’s art music. Just because you use a classical setup it doesnt make a film score classical music. We don’t call pop music with catch hooks folk music even if it serves exactly the same purpose as folk music did in the 1700’s. And by the way isnt repeating the same thing over and over because you know the audience likes it exactly what composers like Vivaldi and Strauss did? Smetana copied swedish folk music for his slavic national epic etc. I think we just need to get out of our own asses a little bit to make stuff that is relevant to larger audiences which i don’t think classical music ever really was it was always for a select few aristocrats that could afford to comission such works and the best works have stayed in the public concience byt being taught at conservatories until recorded music could make performers worldwide celebrities. Nowadayys nowbody can leave their phone alone for the duration of a rachmaninow piano concerto.

This is euro-centrically biased! …. Or I might say that your argument lacks a crucial point: cultural relevance comes from cultural coherence; this is something I as an Iranian composer with persian musical background have dealt with on daily basis and it took me 15 years to reach a somewhat balanced innovative language that is derived from my cultural roots. I do not care about the number of receptions, because as you justly mentioned, it depends on a lot of elements. But I dare say that my music is trying to stay coherent to my musical identity, in this case straightforward persian music, plus a lot of fascination with western history of art and culture. I have tried to remain true to my origins, and deduce a system of fundamentals of persian music to reach a means of expression that is contemporary to the state of the “art” technique and research as far as the musical world is concerened. I am sure there are so many other brilliant minds from non western cultures who are struggling to achieve the same result and this is what your “contemporary “classical”” world is lacking! A true musical identity crisis, in which every note, every cent of intonation, every instance of timbre, gosh even the very definition of musical expression has to be rethought, radicalised, compared and made sense of in its original roots in different civilisations so far away as that of euro-centric and perso-islamic. There are roots in common, and I claim to have found traces of them. Don’t beat around the bush, dig in for the inconvenient roots from the backyard of your inconvenient neighbours!

Music is like food. It has to be delicious for people to want to eat it. Only a few can talk themselves into tree barks for the sake of fiber. With a good piece of fruit, while you are enjoying the flavors, you are also getting nutrients. The vibrant flavors are in fact a result of good nutrients. You can make food that reminds you of something good for you, but in fact is just some artificial flavorings. Such as a donut, designed to remind you of something really good, loaded with sugar and may even have some red goo in it to remind you of some berries and sure enough most people are satisfied with those (pop music). Or you can eat a really good fruit and enjoy the much more nuanced flavors and the vitamins and the fiber and everything that makes a fruit a product of necessity in the natural world (good music). On the other hand you can eat pills that contain what scientists think has the nutrients that your body requires as far as they know. Most people hate those but some are willing to take those pills and pretend that they are looking forward to taking them because they are supposed to be good for you body (you know what I am talking about). The question is where does the bitter melon end and the pill start?

Has classical music ever been relevant to the masses? I don’t think so. classical concerts in 1900 century only had access to wealthy European audiences and it was only relevant to the elite society. now that classical music is accessible to everyone, just like jazz, people have the opportunity to say openly they don’t care for contemporary music or classical music. People now have a voice and they prefer simpler musical structure that you can dance too. Why did bluegrass music arise in North America. its not like European immigrants listened to polka music in Poland. cultures change and everyone has an equal opportunity to adapt.

Listening to contemporary music for me is usually like perusal a movie in another language, where all the characters use gestures that make no sense, and are set in a place that seems somewhat but not quite familiar. I don’t understand it and It’s not relatable. These two things make listening irritating and almost a chore!

Hi David–I’ve viewed a huge number of your vids and am a huge fan. But I’ve noticed a sort of elephant in the room–you seem to be a part of the group that embraces Euro -oriented, or “classical” music I suppose. Around 1900, it was the jazz players who radically changed European artifacts such as piano, sax and brass instruments into vocal instruments. A frequent You Tube poster like yourself might avoid that subject fro 3 or 4 vids, but after seeing the broad scope of your interests, I’m astounded that you haven’t addressed the way jazz/blues has transformed the 20th music world. The artificial perfect intonation became flexible, the overly stylistic opera vibrato attenuated and these mechanical instruments became “human” for a change. Keith Jarrett, in particular, has overcome the piano’s percussive character and he can bend a note as well as any guitar player. RE: the dearth of beloved classical composers?…well, all of these journeyman, ham ‘n’ egg talents were replaced by a sudden flood of authentic jazz geniuses: Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, Keith Jarrett, Oscar Peterson, Stan Getz…the list is endless. And they solved the problem of “saying something” by being in the public eye…it could not have been physically easy, but unlike the countless solitary academics who were apparently born with nothing to say, jazz players did what Bach, Mozart and Chopin did…they interacted with the public and created the zeitgeist music of the 20th Century.

Is this asking the right question? It seems to me we have pre-20th C music divided into popular, which we no longer listen to, and Classical which we revere. (More educated folk like yourself know about classical music that we no longer listen to, but bear with me.) Along with this we have this idea that Classical music was written by the Genius Parade: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven … which sort of peters out with Schoenberg, Stravinsky … and we are asking what has happened to Classical Music? Firstly can anybody write Classical music or is it more often an appelation that is added well after the fact? I know it has been done, but perusal Bach fall out of fashion then coming back – what does that tell us? One can write in the tradition of previous composers, but at what point do we elevate it to the canon? I guess this is your question. What do we do about genres which are neither Classical nor popular, as they don’t fit into those classes? Where we once had just two, now we have dozens. Jazz, for example, which as a class has complexity comparable to Classical music. And one only has to listen to (say) the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s version of Rhapsody in Blue, besides Gordon Goodwin’s version to see that Jazz has something to say. And you, David did that brilliant analysis of the Cory Henry solo (which I have recommended to dozens of friends). Some musicians in Sydney did a performance of ‘Birth of the Cool’ from the original charts, but with improvised solos. It was amazing, like tasting fresh fruit after eating canned.

Controversial opinion: is it just a bit crap? Or rather, have a few hundred years filtered out all the crap composed in the past so we’re mostly just left with all the good stuff, while contemporary music hasn’t been given the time to get rid of the dregs? Alternatively, I can pay a little bit of money (or nothing at all) to visit a museum of modern art and see many pieces of art and go through it at my own pace. If it’s crap, I’ve wasted little time and money. If it’s good, great, and I’ve discovered a new artist or two to follow. Attending classical concerts is extraordinarily expensive and there’s no way in hell I’m going on a whim just to check out a composer I’ve not heard of until I have a decent sense of whether I’m going to enjoy it or not. How do I know if I’m going to enjoy it or not before I’ve heard the composer’s music? It is hard to discover new contemporary classical music, and honestly I’m still discovering new pieces by composers from 500 years ago to listen to! My sister is an opera singer at Glyndebourne and I can’t afford to see her in concert – I genuinely can’t. It’s just too much money (£70 plus for a ticket, and a bad seat at that), and they aren’t giving any discounts out. I get why it’s expensive, but you should also understand that this is a pursuit that really is only pursuable by relatively wealthy people. I have, however, attended concerts of modern film music, including Interstellar, Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. I like the music and the concerts are pretty cheap, mostly because they have mass appeal and can operate on economies of scale.