Here’s an idea I had while I was learning some new pieces for my Bargemusic show last week. Perhaps performers, not composers, were at the root of all the complexity in new music, especially 20th-century music. A kind of “performance anxiety”, but not in the usual sense of the term.
When a performer learns a newly-composed piece of music, he asks himself at a certain point: is this piece any good? Is it worth the time and effort I’m putting into it? If the question persists, it makes it pretty tough to do your job.
But if the music is so dense and complex that even the performer can’t understand it, that pretty much solves the problem. Is the piece good or bad? Who cares, because it’s completely unassailable! The performer’s job is reduced from cultural gatekeeper to manual laborer. Investing so much in learning a piece of complex music is kind of like buying an expensive, unreliable European sports car: you have to justify it to yourself somehow, or you’ll go crazy.
The end result is decreased risk for the performer of contemporary music. That impenetrable wall of perceived quality is transferred to them. Maybe performers actually put themselves at greater risk by choosing to play music that’s more outwardly grasp-able or emotionally accessible. And what good are you if you don’t take risks?
One of the “good” qualities of the music department of Bennington College when I attended in the early ’70s was the fact that they loved contemporary music without question. Most of the faculty were composers and they tended to hire instrumental instructors who felt as they did, but the point is that each new piece, weather composed by faculty or student, was performed as if it were a classic.
This conviction was very much a part of Bennington’s founding and was still true for Art and Dance, as well as Music; it’s an institutionally pervasive attitude. It works well when it comes to a serious devotion to contemporary arts and the avant garde, but it also gave rise a kind of non-judgemental acceptance of art for art’s sake—all art is equally valid and good.
As it turns out, lack of judgement is really bad for art and pretty much everything else, as well; but back to the performer of contemporary works of music. Given the choice to perform a work, the role of the performer is to perform it with all the skill, polish, and virtuosic ability one can muster. Then it is up to the audience to decide the value of a piece, which is one of the things that gives art vitality and meaning.
In the immortal words of the wise judge in “The Five Chinese Brothers,” “It is only fair.”
Of course, that was apropos of somebody being smothered in an oven full of whipped cream. Or maybe I’m misremembering.