Last month, Tacoma Symphony Orchestra audiences surprised themselves by really enjoying a brand new composition.
The occasion was the premiere of Gregory Youtz’s new Double Percussion Concerto, commissioned by the TSO and funded by a grant from Boeing Corporation. It’s well known that audiences are cautious about modern music, and sometimes find it strange, unlovely and alien. To some people’s apparent surprise, this piece was interesting, varied, humorous, and visually and sonically exciting. Even more importantly, to my mind, it occasioned a “growth moment” for our TSO musical community’s receptivity to the exotic and unfamiliar.
I would like to suggest that listening to music is a lot like being a gourmand: what one likes and appreciates evolves over time. Like acquiring a taste for different foods, you can learn to appreciate composers and styles that did nothing for you formerly. Let me share a few examples from my own evolving musical diet, and what it has taught me about appreciating different styles.
Like most people, I’ve always enjoyed Debussy. I heard La Mer as a young boy and fell in love with it. Debussy’s music is regarded as the jumping-off point of modernism. This is where composers began to shed the straitjacket of traditional tonality, harmony, and rhythm that had reigned supreme for 200 years. From Vivaldi to Wagner, Western Music was based on the diatonic or major-minor tonal system (the familiar do, re, mi, fa, sol…). It served us well in providing a common language and framework for all kinds of fantastic art. Late in the 19th century, however, the enfante terrible Debussy came along and deliciously bent, but did not break, this system. He opened the door to a freer, more experimental approach to composing.
If Debussy opened the door, Igor Stravinsky pretty much kicked it in -- with his groundbreaking 1913 ballet score, Rite of Spring. Pierre Monteux, who conducted its premiere, recounted that when Stravinsky first played the score for him on the piano, "I was convinced he was raving mad." It was so unlike anything heard before that it literally caused a riot at its premiere.
The first time I heard Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, I didn’t riot, but I didn't get it any more than those members of its first audience. It sounded like an orchestra noodling before a concert. This was music? Why would anyone want to listen to such seemingly wanton cacophony?
My ears opened up to it a few years later in a music history class in school, when the professor (my father, as it happened) explained what was going on – how it was about rhythmic rather than melodic development, how the actual melodic content was incidental, how the treatment of the melodies changed with every repetition. This gave me a new context for listening to it, and suddenly – aha! A whole new world of listening opened up for me. You mean music doesn’t have to be pretty? It can be gritty and edgy instead? How cool is that??
Not only could I then appreciate Stravinsky, but also Bartok. One of my Emerson, Lake & Palmer albums had an adaptation of Bartok’s Allegro Barbaro. Curious to hear the original I bought Gyorgy Sandor’s recordings of the complete Bartok piano music. Allegro Barbaro treats the piano as a percussion instrument (which it actually is, by the way, but no one had previously had the guts to treat it as such). The other interesting thing about it is that the left hand plays predominantly on black keys while the right hand plays on white. This technique is known as bitonality -- music that's (more or less) in two keys at once. Now there’s something you don’t encounter with Mozart!
Beyond Barbaro, I came to appreciate the strange mixture of Central European rural ethnic folk melodies crossed with Bartok’s cerebral, musicological compositional style. All sorts of odd chords, modes and rhythms, yet somehow still recognizably tonal. Even today, Bartok does for my ears what a strong cup of black coffee does for my palate.
Then I got curious about Arnold Schoenberg. I knew that he had pioneered an odd-sounding compositional technique known as “Twelve-tone.” The idea was an extension of Wagner’s music, which stretched the diatonic system to the breaking point with its chromaticism (use of all 12 notes instead of just the 8 notes of the diatonic scale). With Wagner, it is often difficult to tell just what key the piece is in. Schoenberg, however, took things a step further.
He came up with a system that did away, not only with diatonicism, but with tonality altogether. As its name suggests, instead of just an eight-note scale, Twelve-tone features all twelve notes of the chromatic scale (every white and every black key). The composer organizes them into a “row” that functions as the basic motif or theme around which the piece is built. Unlike the diatonic system, in which one note is “home plate” (i.e. whatever key the piece is in, such as C major), all notes are created equal in Twelve-tone – there is no “home plate.” The result is some of the world’s most unsettling music. You may find that a little goes a long way. I have a Maurizio Pollini CD of Schoenberg piano music, and it’s great when I’m in the mood for something bitter.
Schoenberg’s two pupils, Berg and Webern, took the Twelve-tone system in different directions. Berg actually made it fairly listenable. I bought a copy of the Lulu Suite and found it intriguing. It sounds like someone took a Wagner score, cut it up with scissors, and rearranged the segments in random order. This is the musical equivalent of Munch’s The Scream. Webern’s approach was even odder – he loved to strip every ounce of flesh and muscle off his scores, down to the bare bones, so you have these long stretches where just a single instrument is playing, or maybe several. Webern’s music is like a really dry martini – it tastes so bad it’s good.
My point is this: anyone who has seriously stretched their food palate knows that some tastes come easily; others are acquired. But you have to experiment. I didn’t like mussels the first or even the second time I tried them, but eventually my taste buds had an aha moment. The same thing is true with music. I used to detest Stravinsky; now I love Stravinsky. I may never acquire a taste for certain things. I can’t make myself like oysters, at least not so far, and Philip Glass’s music does nothing for me. Maybe that will change some day – and it’s actually fun to keep trying.
Here’s the other great thing I’ve discovered along the way. The more I listen to Stravinsky, Berg, Varese and the other pioneers who stretched Western Music beyond the diatonic system, the more my appreciation of the old masters grows when I return to it. I can hear things in Beethoven and Bach I never noticed before. For their time, they were both as radical as Schoenberg!