A Contemporary Conundrum
Despite its support for contemporary classical music, the Proms ignores some very important names
Philip Clark 12:02pm GMT 31st July 2012
In the last week there’s been chatter on the Gramophone forum (you can catch up with the unfolding machinations here) about where modern composition might have reached circa 2012. Who are the composers that matter? A composer’s ‘importance’ is based on what exactly in a world where Helmut Lachenmann and Karl Jenkins both write something called ‘contemporary music’?
I had to leave my own forum arguments hanging, journo deadlines being what they are. But pondering the debate since, I realise that there are answers to that ‘whither New Music 2012’ question there for the hearing at this year’s Proms. Lachenmann and Jenkins have never been programmed at the Proms. Jenkins is presumably considered too (on a good day) featherweight; Lachenmann too esoteric and politically problematic (although reviving Rattle and the Berlin Phil’s 2011 pairing of Lachenmann’s Tableau with Mahler 9 is surely a Prom waiting to happen). Fundamental questions are raised about the new music that is ‘allowed’ to be heard on a summer’s evening in South Kensington, and music that clearly is not.
Roger Wright’s inbox must overflow with ‘advice’, sometimes unsolicited and often unwanted, about what he ‘should’ be programming, and I’m pleased I’m not the guy contractually obliged to politely arbitrate between fans of Lachenmann and Havergal Brian. But mining the BBC’s own online archive to phish for evidence, and realising that the Proms has never – ever, not even once – programmed a gnat’s crotchet of Lachenmann, Kagel, Spahlinger, Hespos, Donatoni, Murail, Flammer, Globokar, Dumitrescu, Rădulescu, Klaus Huber, Beat Furrer, Nicolaus Huber, Niccoló Castiglioni, Pierre Henry, Aldo Clementi, Gerhard Stäbler, Walter Zimmermann, Clarence Barlow, Georg Friedrich Haas, Bernhard Lang, Peter Ablinger; that Nono hasn’t been programmed since 1986; Sciarrino since 1989; Maderna since 1992; Hans Zender since 1978, is that a whiff of conspiracy I smell?
Following a week in which work by Pierre Boulez dominated, threaded through Daniel Barenboim’s Beethoven symphony cycle, my implied complaint about the neglect of central European music might feel disingenuous, plain wrong-footed even. But Boulez, with his unique ‘grand old man’ presence, is a rule-proving exception. Steve Reich (deservedly) celebrated his 70th and 75th birthdays at the Proms. Elliott Carter is on the ‘yes’ list too, I suspect for similar reasons to Boulez. But you’ll look in vain for American composers like Charles Wuorinen, Milton Babbitt, James Tenney – no Roger Reynolds since 1997 – who chose to frame tricky questions about the nature of musical material.
My complaint is thus bigger than one of mere Euroscepticism; my charge is that the Proms has difficulty with difficulty. Any festival that makes the right mood music about taking modern composition seriously but has consistently overlooked Lachenmann, Kagel and Sciarrino – or neglected to programme a single work of Nono for just shy of 30 years – is getting the mood of new music wrong. I’m not saying that the Proms should evolve into a European new music festival. But it is fair comment, I feel, to question how a whole movement of European composition has somehow fallen behind the aesthetic sofa. I’ve interviewed three senior conductors recently – Harnoncourt, Chailly and Rattle – who all, without any prompting from me, mentioned Georg Friedrich Haas as the name to watch. And if you’re thinking, yes, but you can hardly blame Proms HQ for not picking up on this, er, rising young star, Haas is 60 next year. Nono, who died in 1990, is the looming, inescapable presence that central European composers have to engage with (even if ultimately to reject him); and Lachenmann, Kagel, Sciarrino aren’t far behind him. But it’s like they’re non-composers who write non-music, not for the likes of us…
One feature, surprisingly little discussed, of this year’s Proms does merit a pat on the back however. Embedded within the season is a mini-festival of ‘avant-garde’ classics – from Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder (August 12), Pierrot lunaire (August 27), Five Orchestral Pieces (September 4) and Ives’s The Unanswered Question (August 1) to Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître, Ligeti’s Atmosphères (August 30) and Poème symphonique (August 14), Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie (August 4), Cage’s 4’33” (August 14) and Berio’s Sequenza V (August 14) – pieces that are true markers in our understanding of how music has evolved over the last hundred years.
Want to know what makes new music ‘important’? Any of these pieces – all by composers prepared to wrestle with language to refresh the poetics of music – can tell you that. Lachenmann and Sciarrino, too, understand that the duty of poets is to grapple with the stuff of language. And that’s why their music has sting, but anyone gullible enough to buy a Jenkins CD has merely been stung.
This is perilous terrain though. Within the context of a mainstream classical music festival, how are we supposed to respond to the deeply strange psychology of Pierrot lunaire and Le marteau sans maître? Or the concept-driven Poème symphonique (a bunch of metronomes unwind at their own rate, creating a randomised rhythmic counterpoint) and 4’33” (Cage’s blaring loud ‘silent’ piece?) Why did Ives in The Unanswered Question want to make tonality and atonality collide? Why did Ligeti de-emphasise harmony in Atmosphères? How come Messiaen grabbed tonality back in Turangalîla, then repurposed all the rules? Re-connecting with what makes any ‘great’ and ‘revolutionary’ music great and revolutionary is never easy, but pieces like these demand to be stripped back to their material essence and heard within their historical context.
And yet without models for how today’s composers are grappling with language and form, that process is academic. It’s safe to programme these pieces now because they’ve been buffeted by history; they can be sold as ‘classics’. But just imagine the incredulity that would rightly flow from a season of 20th-century film that, via some institutional quirk, weirdly filtered out Fellini, Pasolini, Fassbinder, Godard, Herzog et al. That would be to impose a false narrative through exclusion, pretending that the film directors who matter don’t, softening the bite of modern cinema with cosy, easier-to-digest alternatives. And therein the cul-de-sac into which New Music at the Proms has been driven. I know that criticising the Proms is like whinging that your free Christmas presents, bought with love and attention to detail, aren’t up to scratch. But all I’m asking is that a clear wrong is righted. To paraphrase John Lennon, I say – give pieces a chance.
For further information on this season's Proms concerts click here
UPDATE: A few readers have tweeted/emailed asking me to recommend some listening for the composers I mentioned. This I'm happy to do. Try these for starters:
Mauricio Kagel - Die Stucke der Windrose (Winter & Winter 9101092)
Helmut Lachenmann - String Quartets (Kairos CD 0012662KAI)
Georg Friedrich Hass - In Vain (Kairos 0012332KAI)
Franco Donatoni - Chamber Works (Stradivarius STR 3315)
Luigi Nono – Risonanze erranti/Post-prae-ludium Donau (NEOS 11119)
Comments
I agree very strongly with the general claim that these composers need to be heard, but at a more specific level I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Your list of composers not (or rarely) performed at the Proms - age range at Euro-end from Nono, Donatoni, Aldo Clementi, Pierre Henry and Klaus Huber (born in the 1920s) to Lang and Ablinger (in late 50s) - is rather scattershot. In what sense are we talking about "a whole movement of European composition," which surely implies some unifying thread? "Difficulty" alone says little as a descriptive term. Are you suggesting there's some connecting thread in a fascination with the raw material of sound (e.g. in "spectral" music and electroacoustics) and its philosophical and political place? I'm just trying here.
I am also a bit thrown by the last two paras. Are you saying that Boulez, Ligeti and Berio (all born in the 20s) are *not* "models" for today's composers, while the other composers you list from that generation are? And do you mean "buffeted" or "buffered"?
On re-reading your blog Philip one or two other points leap out at me. As the title suggests (conundrum) perhaps a difficult problem and one to which there is no easy answer.
If I am reading you rightly, you are saying that both the 20th C milestone pieces and unjustly neglected modern/contemporary pieces need to be more deeply embedded in the culture of the proms and thus the proms programming (as Boulez was embedded in the Beethoven cycle - as you say the exception which proves the rule).
Thus continuity would be better served in showing how the language has recently developed/is developing (the 'models for how today's composers are grappling with language and form').
Hopefully I am correct in my interpretation that to hear the major works in their historical context means alongside other contemporaneous pieces from the same period...
"A composer’s ‘importance’ is based on what exactly in a world where
Helmut Lachenmann and Karl Jenkins both write something called
‘contemporary music’?"
You can base a composer's "importance" on whatever you want. How many CDs does he sells, how much money he makes, how beautiful you perceive his music to be, etc. But ultimately and historically, Beethoven is important because Brahms, Wagner, Bruckner, etc. could not have been written without him. And Wagner is important (whether you "reject" him or not) because Mahler and Strauss and Schoenberg etc. could not have been written without him.
A hundred years from now we'll know but I think we can probably project whether Lachenmann or Jenkins is more likely to have invented techniques that will evolve and remain in use. The "rejected" Nono has already demonstrated some importance- note the techniques invented in Prometeo in use in operas by Ferneyhough and Furrer for one example.
Sorry for being slow on the uptake here; I've only just noticed these comments.
Redrick, I disagree with your point that a composer's importance can be based on 'whatever you want', which strikes me as a rather dangerous relativist position. Should we base a composer on how they look for instance? And 'beauty' is a problematic word, too. Do you mean 'beauty' as in decorative, cultivated beauty? Or as in the sense of expressing authentic self? But I think we're essentially singing from the same hymnsheet!
Mark and Schreker opera person, thanks for your comments which I'll try to deal with together. My point is perhaps not as complicated as you both assume. I'm just raising an objection that music from central Europe written post-1945 is largely, not exclusively, but largely ignored at The Proms, which creates a distorted picture of 'modern composition'. Yes, Mark, I am saying that the Proms seemingly thinks it's OK to programme 'radical' music if its sting has been contained by history, but won't cut the same slack to composers like Lachenmann, Kagel, Nono, Zender et al, largely preferring a more domesticated kind of new music, a situation which creates an historical disjoint IMHO.
I fully intended my selection of composers to be 'scattershot'. The only common denominator between them is that are central European. It's not like the Proms has regularly champoined, say, Kagel, Donatoni and Clementi, but not Nono, Lachenmann, Spahlinger and Hespos, from which one could draw certain conclusions. It's like there's a blanket denial that any of this central European music exists, and if it does then it all sounds like one thing (a rather bizarre assertion of James MacMillan's facile article about new music for Standpoint magazine a few years back). That strikes me as lazy and unfortunate, sad too because so much great new music is lost to the Proms and for seemingly arbitrary reasons. (And DST, I've been trying to unpack your last para, but can't. Sorry.)
Philip-Clark - thanks a lot for the clarification, and I should have said that this is a great and much-needed piece. I was being literal-minded - what hit me first were the generational differences among the composers on your big list, but as you say these are figures who, broadly, get visible from 1945 on.
Sorry about my muddy last para. Until yours I'd read you as follows: the Proms have neglected a huge bloc of post-1945 composers, but this year there's a discernible mini-festival of classics that were "avant-garde" in their own time and place (Gurrelieder to Sequenza IX); however, their ground-breaking qualities aren't apparent against the background of a "mainstream classical music festival", so they need historical contextualizing (perhaps through programme planning that would set e.g. Schoenberg alongside his contemporaries, so that we immediately hear what's different?). When the last para began by saying that such efforts would be "academic" without "models for how today's composers" are composing, I wondered who was meant, since several composers in your "mini-festival" surely still do furnish such models. But presumably you meant those on the sadly long list of forced absentees from the Proms.
Anyway, there's hope. Seriously, I can think of some Bernhard Lang that would go down a treat there.
Thanks for your response and clarification Philip (not that much clarification was needed! Or at least not on what you wrote but on our responses. I'm sure its an occupational hazard of being a writer that it sparks discussion and questions of interpretation).
To both yourself and DST - the opportunities to hear works in their historical context could be exploited more at the proms. The BBC does sometimes do this to be fair, for example just looking back at the 2009 season brochure, the year 1934 was celebrated as a theme, what with the deaths of Elgar, Holst and Delius, and the births of Birtwistle and Max.
Generally, thematic approaches tend to be by composer or genre each year, but there's plenty more that could feasibly be done there - by school, movement, specific year etc...
Example - the year 1913. Now that would be a cracker for next year's proms! (They've probably already got that one pencilled in for its centenary).That year saw the premieres of Schoenberg's Gurrelieder, Webern's Six Pieces opus 6, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and Rachmaninov's The Bells. Can we have a concert with at least three of those on please? Don't think they'd all fit on one programme. Use the Webern as the overture! I'm going off the opening of Rae's book on Lutosalwski there - it was a great year for a composer like Witold Lutoslawski to be born in.
Mark
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