Playing music, listening to music, background music, talking about music
Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science 2025-03-06
I came across this book, Music After Modernism, a collection of essays from 1979 by pianist and critic Samuel Lipman. The book revolves around the fact that the classical music repertoire pretty much ends around 1930, indeed with not much after 1900. That sounds about right, and indeed the point is made stronger when we realize that this has barely changed in the nearly fifty years since. Wagner, Brahms, and their contemporaries were pretty much the end of the line, and Lipman discusses how composers of later generations have mostly failed to break through, along with what that implies for performance and interpretation of classical music, now that the paucity of popular new classical music has led to a separation between composition and performance.
Why did this happen? Here are a few competing stories, none of which quite works for me:
1. Compelling new classical music was being written throughout the nineteenth century, and then came “modernism”: a valuing of difficulty for its own sake, a dissociation between composers and audiences, echoing similar modernist developments in literature, visual art, architecture, etc. There’s something to this–It’s T. S. Eliot in the canon, not Stephen Vincent Benét, and the Museum of Modern Art and similar museums are full of all-black paintings and the like–but there’s something missing too, in that modernist classics by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, etc. are still popular and readable, and the mainstream of what could be called “serious fiction” remains tied to audience approval. Similarly with visual art and architecture: abstraction and brutalism haven’t been the only game in town.
2. Just as Western church music and folk music were largely superseded in the eighteenth and nineteenth century by art music (what we now call “classical music”), this in turn was superseded in the twentieth century by jazz and then pop. There’s some truth in this–as a friend once said to me, “If Beethoven were alive now, he’d be rockin'”–and much has been written regarding the musical depth of the jazz jam and the pop song–but I respect Lipman’s unwillingness to go far along this path: as a performer and student of complex classical scores, he might well appreciate pop music for what it is, without wanting to put Duke Ellington or Paul McCartney or Suzanne Vega or Brian Eno on the same level as Mozart and the like. Also, the continuing existence and development of high-quality pop music doesn’t address the question of why there hasn’t also been a continuing stream of new and new-sounding classical music. Symphonies and concertos and the like continued to develop and remain listenable in new ways after the death of Mozart, so why not so much in the past hundred years? It’s not from want of trying.
3. Some say that classical music since 1930 has been just fine. This is the tack taken by music critic Alex Ross in his 2007 book, The Rest is Noise, which celebrates many different strands of difficult twentieth-century classical music and places its composers in their cultural contexts. The Rest is Noise tells an appealing story that I’d like to believe, but the fact remains that I, along with many other classical music listeners, don’t find this recent music listenable in the same way as the nineteenth-century classics–and this seems different from, say, the listeners back in the day who thought that Beethoven was fine but Chopin went too far, or who couldn’t appreciate Debussy, or whatever. The difference is that, back then, the repertoire moved on and incorporated the new, in a way that hasn’t been happening for the past century. Concert directors keep trying, mixing in the new with the familiar old stuff–for example, here’s an upcoming program at the Pittsburgh Symphony: Verdi: Overture to La forza del destino Grieg: Selections from Suite from Peer Gynt Huanzhi Li: Spring Festival Overture *PSO Premiere Grieg: Piano Concerto The piece by Li is from 1955. I was curious so I went on YouTube and listened to a performance. It was pleasant enough, actually sounded like it came from the nineteenth century. I guess that composers can write like that when they want to! I don’t know enough about music to evaluate the piece; I’m guessing that Lipman would characterize it as an uninspired pastiche and that it wouldn’t particularly interest Ross, whose critique of the modern concert repertoire is not just that it doesn’t feature much of the new but also that it turns its back on the avant-garde.
Some important part of the story has to be the different ways in which people encounter music. Many writers have discussed how the experience of music has shifted over the past century or so from playing music, to listening to music, to background music–and this all affects how we hear music and how we talk about it. The story is clear enough. Until very recently in music history, if you wanted music you had to sing it or play it yourself, or go somewhere where people were performing. Changes in performance spaces corresponded to different developments of musical style and content. Records and radio made it possible to just listen, and to listen to a much wider variety of music than you’d encounter in your daily life or even going to the occasional concert. And then, as the decades progressed, we gradually moved to the modern condition of music always being available in the background.
As a non-musician who loves music but almost always listens to it while doing something else (as right now!), I think it’s clear that the experience of hearing music is so different in these different settings that it completely changes what makes music work, or sound good. For example, Music for Airports is great in the background–that’s its whole point–but it could be kinda boring to hear in concert. Beethoven or Dvořák symphonies have a lot more going on.
And then there’s modern music of the sort that Alex Ross likes and Samuel Lipman didn’t. To say this more carefully: Lipman does like a lot of modern classical music–he mentions a bunch of American and other composers who wrote classical music in the decades from the 1930s through the 1970s, not the super-avant-garde stuff or the minimalists or the straight-up throwbacks but what he sees as natural developments, music that he as a performer and listener appreciates. But he recognizes that classical music audiences are not interested in the modern classical music that he likes–and that audiences are also pretty much not interested in the modern classical music he doesn’t like, either. Ross, on the other hand, has something good to say about all sorts of new classical music from the past century, and he takes a much more positive take, always pointing to some performance or another where the audiences seem to be lapping it up.
So what’s going on?
It’s my impression that, in general, music is more interesting to play than to listen to. Combinations of notes that don’t sound like much can be interesting to explore, and playing music is a form of exploration or experimentation: even if you’re playing a piece note by note, at each step you’re implicitly experimenting in that you always have a choice to play it differently. Beyond this, I can well imagine that some music can be more interesting than to compose than to listen to or even to play–indeed, it’s not hard to compose patterns of notes that are unplayable by a human. So some of the development of modern music has to be a move from interesting-to-listen-to to interesting-to-play to interesting-to-compose.
To return to the move toward ambient music: for me, all sorts of things, ranging from pop to jazz to classical, work in the background. It depends on my mood. When I’m working, it’s helpful to have music happening so that, when there is a lapse in my concentration, I can hop onto the moving train of music and then hop off a few seconds later and go back to work. In the absence of any music, I’m more likely to get stuck.
If the only way I encountered music was to sit and listen to it and do nothing else, then I think I’d listen to a lot less pop and a lot more classical music, because pop music is typically more repetitive–there can be great riffs but less going on overall. Conversely, if I want to focus on the words, some repetition in musical structure is helpful; more to the point here, I can appreciate a pop song without having to focus on it.
None of this really answers the question of why classical music since 1930 did not develop in the way that it had in the previous two hundred years in the manner of other serious and popular art forms, with mini-upheavals within a larger tradition. I can’t quite bring myself to go with Ross on this one: sure, concert programmers are conservative and keep going with audience favorites, but they’ve had a hundred years to promote new work, and that new work doesn’t have that staying power: it’s sometimes interesting, sometimes sounds ok, but it’s not stuff I’d like to hear again.
Also I think there’s one more thing going on, which is we (music audiences, as well as musicians and critics such as Lipman and Ross) aren’t just looking for good music, and new music; we’re also looking for good stories. The brash young upstart, the smooth crowd-pleaser, the sense of progress and development within the culture. Lipman isn’t looking for someone who will write music that’s just like Wagner, and he’s not just looking for music that’s the logical successor to Wagner’s; he’s also hoping to encounter the story of an exciting new composer breaking through. And when Ross champions various modern classical music of the twentieth century, a big part of the appeal are the stories. I’m not saying that Ross doesn’t sincerely like the music; I just think it’s like with sports, that the narrative is important–the narrative within each composer’s career and how that fits in with the larger development of music.
Even if we have lots of old music to listen to, it’s hard to give that up, in a similar way as that it wouldn’t be the same to just watch classic football games on tape delay.
Here are some of my related posts on the general topic of what we we like in music:
Why do we prefer familiarity in music and surprise in stories?
How Music Works by David Byrne, and Sweet Anticipation by David Huron
This guy is to music as I am to statistical graphics
Genre fiction: Some genres are cumulative and some are not.
The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars
Who are the culture heroes of today?
Cohort effects in literature (David Foster Wallace and other local heroes)
P.S. Just to emphasize: I’m pretty much the opposite of an expert on this topic, so feel free to point me to relevant arguments in this area. Thanks.