How The 20th-Century Avant-Garde Committed Musical Suicide 

Retired symphony violinist here. The number of pieces that we had to play that were written on graph paper and involved stop watches... so moving! Many years later, when I was orchestral librarian, I discovered a wall in a storage room where all those works had been stored. In ten years, only one piece was requested, by the composer.

I was a student of Stockhausen’s at the U of Penn in 1964. I was 22. I also got to know John Cage very well not as a follower but a good friend and as an engaging conversationalist. I also was one of the last students of Stefan Wolpe. Your theory is quite well defended. The basis for a useful essay which I encourage you to write. My own pathway took me to many places both within and outside of the framework of avant-garde “movements”. I was fortunate to have always disdained being “part of a movement”, a major aspect of my own liberations. It’s a long story (I am 81). But I wanted you to know that (as someone directly involved) your analysis is spot on.

Greetings from Germany! Thank you so much for all your terriffic videos! Your RU-vid channel is one of my favorites! In the 1980s I studied composition at the Munich music academy (Musikhochschule). We students were strictly forbidden to use any harmonic sounds but forced to write cacophonic music like the at this time hyped German composer Wolfgang Rihm. After one year I was so frustrated that I stopped my studies and changed to the conductor's class. To hell with the 20th-Century Avant-Garde!

When Penderecki was accused of betraying the avant-garde, he replied: I was not a traitor to the avant-garde, but the avant-garde was a traitor to music.

I remember John Cage was amused that the results he achieved by composing by random I Ching hexagrams were indistinguishable from the results Milton Babbitt achieved with careful mathematical calculation of every musical parameter. Charles Wuorinen ( a guy we disagree on ) grumbled "How can you make a revolution when the previous revolution said 'anything goes'?" And, of course, people like Glass and Reich made a revolution by saying the previous revolution was WRONG and very little goes. Thus tonality and regular rhythm re-entered the vocabulary. Many great composers -- Howard Hanson, Henry Cowell, Paul Creston, Gene Gutche -- got left behind in the avant-garde wave; they seem to slowly be coming to the fore again. As they should. Some of the avant-garde stands: Berio, Feldman, Xenakis, Penderecki, Crumb, etc. Because they were talented. But so much of that material was of no consequence; it's sad. Some of those composers may have had some skill and talent, if they hadn't bought into the avant-garde fallacy. I give Berio great credit for telling Reich "If you want to write tonal music, write tonal music."

My fondest memories when performing such music was being at ease since no one could tell if you’d made a mistake.

Even nowadays in academia (and note this is just anecdotal), there's an over-insistence on composition students to be 'original' and 'find their own style,' which feels like a hangover from decades ago. Thinking back to my undergraduate just a few years ago, this attitude unintentionally caused mine and my colleagues' music to sound stifled and hemmed in; any whiff of 'pastiche' was marked harshly. I went to another institution and my new supervisor had better advice: 'I don't care if it's original I only care if it's good.'

As a composer who lived through the indoctrination of serial and 12 tone education in the late 70's and early 80's, I completely concure. It took me a good 10 years to clear myself of my 'education' to begin to write anything that had any significance to the 'real' world. I think your analysis is spot on. Thank you for sharing your insight.

“They wrote themselves out of existence” is what I’ll tell my child when he will inevitably ask me what happened to the 20th century musical avant-garde.

The trick nowadays is to preface your uninspired music with a personal backstory so admirable that the listener feels like a cad for giving an honest critique.

Two quotes: "A composer isn't original because he tries to be, but because he can't help it." - Ralph Vaughan Williams "I am not interested in music, or any work of art, that fails to stimulate appreciation of life and, more importantly, pride in life.” -Bernard Herrmann

Ravel put his finger on the problem when he described Schoenberg's serial technique as "laboratory music". Method became an end in itself, and the audience was lost.

I don't disagree but I think this whole scene or experiment was on the whole fruitful. It burned itself out but in the end we got all the amazing compositions by Webern, Xenakis, Lutoslawski, Feldman, Nono, Ligeti, Cage, Scelsi, Dallapiccola etc. etc.

Quote by CS Lewis seems relevant, even to music I feel: «Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.»

Ultimately, expecting people to listen to music designed to be non-melodic, non-rhythmic, non-emotional, non-pretty, is absurd. These were spoiled brats. Their main accomplishment was to cure people of guilt for not appreciating new music; the middle-brow public simply walked away.

American composer, Stephen Albert said of the atonal/serial movement, "Once you brought the cultural bolshevism of the time, you were down the mindless trail of the avant-garde. Twenty-five years down the line I suspect that one will look back with mystification as to how people took the fifties to the seventies seriously except as some kind of sociological aberration." It seems that Albert had it right.

As I listened to your really thoughtful comments, two things came to mind. I heard a specialist in Chinese philosophy, a Canadian-American, observe that the discipline of modern philosophy had given up its roots as "love of wisdom" to become "love of knowledge", a shift from "philo-sophia" to "philo-episteme", or something like that. It seems to me that so much of the academic world has made this shift, under some quest for "deeper" meanings. I see it as a residue of the identification of sin with the body (flesh), or a perpetuation of an "ideal" over what's "real" and here-and-now. I think you can see it in the quest for "authentic" performance in the world of HIP in music. It's permeated the visual arts too, where we move from abstraction to "purely" conceptual art. Artist's like Donald Judd would choose industrial materials, and simple repetitive shapes. He would draw up plans and have manufacturers make the work, so that he hoped his art would be free of his physical touch, free of the taint of feeling - the traditional signs of artistic genius. Be rid of paint brush marks, be rid of the artist's hand, be rid of feeling so that all that remains is pure Idea. Artists where I taught spoke of being "post-media": it didn't matter whether you painted, built, filmed, or performed. What mattered was that your concept determined what media you used. Having lived in this world of contemporary art for decades, I'm not so cynical as to claim that it was always intended as a scam or to "pull the wool over people's eyes." I think it was and continues to be a matter of real belief, for the most part (I've also seen work that I really thought was a scam), but that it was about building its own protective, self-energizing and self-affirming bubble - a kind of shield against real feeling, vulnerability, and against the real hard work that is necessary to create something and share it with others. Thanks, as always, for your wisdom and desire to share.

A friend once described a concert he had just experienced in the 1980's as sounding like a hack saw murder,

I agree with you on this one. I live near a very large university with a music school, so I can have my fill of free but usually very good recitals from faculty and students, on almost any day of the week. Generally, the composition students are moving away from anything avant-garde or serialist or things that do the equivalent of repeatedly blasting F-sharp at 100 decibels, but every once in a rare while I sit through a very avant-garde recital, from someone still trying to beat the proverbial dead horse--and the "message" I get from their "compositions" is so clear that it could just as well be announced with trumpets: "Someone give me a grant! Anyone, PLEASE, give me a grant!"

Another element worth mentioning--although you did imply it--was the arrogance of the avant garde in their belief that art should only appeal to a select group, and therefore unpopularity counted in favor of its worth. (Easy enough for a tenured music professor to hold.) That notion was already gaining a foothold. Alban Berg, of all people, was somewhat distressed that his Wozzeck proved so popular, thinking it a sign that it wasn't serious enough.

I could be wrong, but I have long felt that not only did the mid-20th century avant-garde music burn out gloriously. But it also seemed to be so unpalatable, that it played a major role in the general public’s overall loss of interest in “classical” music altogether. The majority hardly like to hear “beautiful classical music”. Why would they go to the concert hall for more chaos?

This is a straightforward summery about what the post WW2 classical music avant-garde was about, and why it ultimately had to implode. While I have always enjoyed many (but by no means all) of the compositions by the (so called) post WW2 avant-garde composers (very certainly I enjoy Penderecki), my approach to them was always the same as to any other piece of music: I have to enjoy listening to it. I know a lot of the avant-garde pieces were basically "paper music", music with a "concept" that may have some internal logic and a set of rules on paper, but that sounds like totally random sounds when actually performed. Interestingly, I do enjoy some of these pieces very much. I love Pierre Boulez' "Sur Incises", but I enjoy it on a very visceral level, rather than an intellectual one. For me, the music is like an immersive, shimmering kaleidoscope of sounds, and I find it deeply soothing and relaxing even (yes, maybe I'm odd that way). But I agree with the assessment that the avant-garde painted themselves into a corner and just basically couldn't get out anymore. The coming up with new rules and do's and don't of composition became more important than the actual compositions, and, as could have been expected, public interest was almost non-existent. It became a bubble.

I remember another talk where Dave spoke about the "arrogance" of Boulez dropping his 3rd piano sonata on the world where it wasn't even complete. I suppose that piece also falls into the category of fanciful pseudo-scientfic names : "Constellation-Miroir " etc . Great talk

My parents took me to see Peter Maxwell Davies conduct his "Eight Songs for a Mad King" as a kid. I have had a soft spot for him since then. He fits your pattern. His later works like "Orkney Wedding" and "Mavis in Las Vegas" are far more approachable. An afternoon with his Naxos quartets is a good afternoon for me.

Terrific, one of the most interesting (to me) of all your posts, thank you.

There are more bad composers than good composers, in the 20th century and in the past. Since the 20th century happened shortly we know them all. A few will be remembered later on, like Schoenberg, Ives and Ligeti.

My problem with most of the avant-garde is that they ran out of ideas very quickly and had little sense of what their predecessors had already done. I remember attending a concert of contemporary music and realizing that all of the "new" techniques had been done in the Twenties.

As a PhD student I feel I must offer an explanation for that "irrelevant minutiae" that have become the common theme of so many doctoral dissertations in musicology and humanities in general. 30 or 40 years ago, a dissertation could take 10 years to complete and end up being like 1,000 pages long. However, as the number of PhD students have increased, the means to finance their research have run thin. Nowadays, a typical doctorate lasts between 4 to 6 years. Some research grants in my country last for just 3 years. This includes at least 1 year to write it up and about 4 more months of revision. This means you may have as little as 2 years for conducting reseach before you're pushed to start writing. That's not much when you're trying to make an original contribution. And to make it even worse, you're are also burdened with other obligations: attenting conferences, doing reseach stays abroad, lecturing and tending to undegraduate students, helping to organize seminars, etc. In these conditions, it's no wonder we are pushed to limit our reseach to narrower and narrower topics. In my experience it's not really an "Academic Avant-Garde mentality" problem. We would love to expand the scope of what we're doing. It's more of a resources and a systemic problem.

Great video Dave! I always liked Duke Ellingtons take, if it sounds good, it is good. I know rather simple.

What happened in music after ca. 1950 closely parallels what happened to the visual arts during the same period.

Dear Mister Hurwitz, I've been enjoying your mini conferences ( sometimes not so mini, in fact ) for a while now. I find them entertaining AND enlightning. What grabs me most, however, is your immense, exuberant, humourous LOVE and deep, direct, sensual knowledge of music. It is contagious and exhilirating. À propos of this particular topic of the avant-garde and its demise, it seems to me your views intersect with those of Leonard Bernstein's during his famous NORTON LECTURES « The Unaswered question ». His attempt at demonstrating that tonality was embedded somehow in the human condition seems nowadays to be legitimized by this generalized return to a new kind of tonality in music all over the world. I myself spent years -- especially in my youth -- listening almost exclusively to serial, electronic, conceptual abstract compositions. And, with time, I became, as you so rightly put, more INCLUSIVE. Simply, more human. Unafraid of my own emotions. Thanks a million.

Thank you for your video. Until now I've figured I was just a musical philistine when it came to my disdain of most avant-garde works. I've echoed Rimsky-Korsakov's criticism of younger composers churning out "brain-spun" works with no heart. Now I know I'm not the only curmudgeon out there, and you've enlightened me on why many modern composers have jumped t tracks in the pursuit of soulless exercises. Keep up the good work!

A quick footnote re. "sclerotic" (a native Polish speaker here): in Polish that word is used exactly as the word "senile" or "Alzheimer" is in English. So I'm pretty sure Penderecki wanted especially to underline the "old age senility" aspect of the avant-garde here (before other aspects like "hardening of the arteries" which is also true but a distant second in terms of meaning in Polish).

I loved your presentation. I often wonder that my own symphonies will be hated, not because they are avant garde in any way, but because they are the complete opposite.

For me, a composer who I guess would be classified as "late Romantic" or so, I find so much modern music (including that which is referred to as Avant Garde, to be little more than an experiment in sound and not containing the emotions that make us human. Some are brilliantly orchestrated but where is the musical content? I hear so many "Look what I can do with the orchestra...look how strange I can sound...isn't that so original?" works that, unfortunately, conductors see worthy of performance. I realize that, in his day, Beethoven, or Mahler, etc. were considered "modern" and "new" but the expressiveness and tonalities that convey emotions were always there. So much of modern composition for classical instruments lacks that, in my view. I truly believe that these new works will never survive and be listened to for centuries like the great masterpieces we still love.

You know the 20th century Avant-Garde was over when the writing (bloviated philosophy) about the music/visual art/performing art(s) was more interesting than the actual performed music/painting/dance. Arvo Part is another great example of a composer who went from 12 tone composition to a more expressive style. Great topic Dave!

I have long felt that music that can be enjoyed needs to have elements that are in some sense familiar, with points at which the composer diverges from our expectations. Without the divergence, the music would be predictable and therefore boring; but without the familiar, with no recognizable form to grasp on to, the sounds become just a series of sounds, with no connection/progression that can transform them into music. Thus, if a piece strays too far from our musical understanding, rather than an intellectual basis, it is difficult to appreciate it, emotionally or otherwise, as music. In a similar way, it is because of Picasso's enormous emotional strength in his earlier works that imbue his less obviously representational later works with their communicative ability. (It is also easier to give a composer who has demonstrated his understanding of 'real' music the benefit of the doubt with his more esoteric works - Tippett and Nicholas Maw come to mind.)

I have thought about this: The Avant Garde were musical nihilists. But far from being dead, it's alive and well today, it evolved into 'Techno' and EDM. And now millions of so called 'musicians' make this awful 'grand child of minimalism' up on their computers with no idea really what they are doing apart from just looping and looping. Put a beat with it and your set to go. That is what some of these good intentions ended up being. On the other hand people like Glass and Reich became classicists and Glass in particular became a great symphonist in later life. I think your premise is correct, Dave, and thanks for your video. Very interesting.

I went to grad school to further my composition craft and all I got was some lousy ideas. Perhaps it was just the particular school and department (it was in the UK), but when I was there they didn’t seem to know what to do with masters students who weren’t studying musicology. They were embroiled in the question of how composition could be a research subject. I’m not sure if the avant-grade actually died or morphed into a different matter. But I still read program notes which read like thesis statements and are more interesting than the music they explain, from composers my generation (millennial) and younger.

Interesting point of view, largely agree. About Penderecki: I studied with him for several years. The last time we were together he told me over lunch that even though he had spent his summers for years in Lucerne, Boulez--who ran a music festival there--had never programed one of his works. There was a personal animus between them. Plus, I don't think Penderecki's works, since he was a Pole, received the clandestine financial support the avant-garde received from the Committee for Cultural Freedom and its various successors--both of these things might have colored Penderecki's comments about the "avant-garde." There's an irony, that has yet to be addressed, that probably the most performed piece of post WWII music, and probably most loved, is Giazotto's "Adagio." It would be interesting to hear your comments on this.

Excellent talk, Dave. Thank you!

Really interesting talk - I agree 100%. I was fascinated by the avant garde as a teenager (40+ years ago) in the sense of marvelling at how quickly music was changing (in the 60s and 70s) and how experimental it had become BUT I was almost always left with the feeling of "This is interesting but doesn't do anything for me [emotionally]". There was also the feeling of this "music" doesn't require any skill to compose. As you say, this music essentially reached a dead end. The greatest composers are those that could/can actually compose and have something to say which they share with us. So I love Bach to Berg, Reich/Glass, some Maxwell Davies, Tippett, Messaien, even some Xenakis...while some pieces can be initially very difficult to "get" after some perserverance I discover a great emotional message in their works. Conversely I find composers such as Ferneyhough and his New Complexity pretentious drivel that leaves me cold.

I think the avant- guard underestimated how complicated it is to write music that’s actually good in that style. Berg’s violin concerto is a work that I think sounds great, but most other pieces are just music for musicians that, like free jazz, has no heart and soul.

Modern composers seem to think music should be seen but not heard. They have so intellectualized it that audiences have a hard time connecting with it, and in its place movie soundtracks have become the modern version of concert music. It conveys emotions, drama, story telling and is often memorable, hummable and even singable and audiences can associate the music with something specific.

I think that only now, with more sophisticated electronic avant garde music or noise in general becoming a ricurrent element (also in more mainstream Digital composed music) the younger generations are very sensible to atonality and noise. I mean, It all started with rock and roll and then Velvet underground, and now you can see that what people consider cool strong moments in a Song (in contrast with more melodic calm parts) seems to be what composers as Stravinskij or maybe Penderecki invented as atonal elements in their music. If i listen to some of the Penderecki avantgarde works i can recognize a lot of elements that are present in today electronic music and made their way to PoP music in the last Years. Its difficult tò explain in detail. But i think if you are a youngster and you know both avantgarde music and today's electronic music you can see of what im talking about.

I feel like many of the avant-gadists do not seem to be able to differentiate between "pushing the boundaries" and "crossing the boundaries". Pushing the boundaries is precisely what made the composers like Liszt, Bartok or Stravinsky the musical giants, they had their one foot set in the rich tradition of historical music and other foot firmly set in the future created by themselves; whilst also taking the inspiration from centuries old music outside of classical tradition. These composers "expanded" the scope of music; rather than restricting their expression to limited rules. Disowning the entire tradition by declaring it as irrelevant (which I define as "crossing the boundaries") might make you look ahead of your time in the short term, but it won't stand the test of time in many of the cases; especially if it's the experimentation just for the sake of it.

...and how dogmatic they were. Thinking about young Boulez booing neo-classicist concerts by Stravinsky...

I guess, the problem is that all countries, which collaborated with the nazi or the fascists had a problem with the tradition, because in nazism and (later) fascism, the tonal tradition was welcomed, and "modern music" was banned. Even in France, which partly collaborated, you had fiercely fighting traditionalists and fiercely fighting avantgardists, and Poulenc even attacked Messiaen, who was somewhere in between; after Landowski was disempowered, Boulez took over, until the postmodernism started. Maybe, Central-Europeans need a philosophical concept, which allows them to write their music. In the german speaking world, Adorno postulated that after WW II and the shoah tonality was no more possible. As a result, even tonal music by jewish composers was banned (like the works by Gal, Korngold, Toch and many others). This lasted, until the postmodernism took over and tonality became restored at first in quotation marks, but, at last, the quotation marks got omitted. The development in the english speaking world seems to me more continious, because of the need of finding financial support. What was the rule in central Europe, was the exception in USA and Great Britain. Composers like Britten, Bernstein, Menotti, Barber, Floyd, Walton and even Tippett wouldn't get any chance in post-war Germany. But the real suicide of the avantgarde was, in my opinion, the treason of their ideals: Boulez re-worked most of his earlier works to make them richer in sound - and "Rituel" has from start to end nothing to do with avantgarde. Stockhausen started to write melodies, as did Penderecki, and Ligeti (who never was really avantgarde) wrote something like "Mysteries of the Macabre" and championed the beautiful sounds of Vivier. Lutoslawski and Penderecki both became more and more conservative, as did Berio. Nevertheless, the thinking about the musical material and the re-thinking of it is, in my view, the benefit of the avantgarde, and also the development of some techniques. I'm not sure, if a masterpiece as Corigiliano's 1st symphony could have been written without the knowledge of aleatoric passages a la Lutoslawski, collage, multi-layered developments and soundscapes. This is one of the works, which needed the avantgarde, maybe just to go pass it.

I largely disagree on this. I find most works of the new tonality deadly dull, repetitive and unconvincing. The Avant-Garde of the '50s-'70s hasn't died. Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono, Maderna etc. continue to be performed and recorded. They may have literally passed on, but they continue to influence many young composers. At least in their early works, they were genuinely expressive. (eg. Boulez: Le Soleil des Eaux, Stockhausen: Drei Lieder, Nono: 3 Epitaphs for Garcia Lorca, Maderna: Tre Liriche Greche). True, they placed strictures on themselves with twelve note and serial ideas, but often used these to great expressive purpose. Also defending the twelve note compositions of what is sometimes called the middle generation, the composers who studied with or were directly influenced by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. (Gerhard, Valen, Skalkottas, Searle, Lutyens etc., all of whom were able to work successfully in large musical forms. Off my soap box now!!! Otherwise, I greatly enjoy your postings!

Excellent and thoughtful comments. However, there are still many critics and some influential (younger, oddly enough) composers in academia who still persist in a single-minded agenda: either absolute novelty or a great deal of abstraction are still the only allowable angles in 21st century composition. (The embrace of technological novelty doesn't help). Or, especially for some middle-aged critics, normal human emotions are too 'sentimental' to be allowed in new music. Dave is so correct in pointing out the inhumanity in this kind of agenda. For us tonally- minded composers from the late 20th who got sidelined, and who also did not follow the minimalists' path, this is still an uncertain and strange time-we might have some musical and life experience to offer, but too many younger composers whose ears have been too often numbed by simplistic pop and electronics cannot relate. Not all, to be sure. However, one of the problems (as Dave points out in a subtle way) is that a lot of avant-garders young and older really don't have much harmonic facility. Nor are they able to create memorable melody. Nor have they the capability to even play a wedding gig. I know that's an extreme statement, but....listen.

It would seem to me that the musical history of the 20th century was such a liberation of formal styles, eclectic interests, raw emotionality and psychology, disturbing expressionism and political and social restrictions and upheaval, that growing pains would be inevitable. No wonder so many Serialists abandoned the form and re-embraced tonality. No wonder that radical changes prompted the post- and neo- influences (neo-Classical, post-Romantic, etc.); was it experimentation or fear or something else? It seems to me that some avant-garde music is just academic, experimental for its own sake. It’s music that I can walk away from without regret. I love both tonal and atonal (I wish there was another word!) and dissonant and lyrical music, but not everything. Not all aleatory music is as good as Lutoslawski, for example. What we call “Modern” is still developing.

In his history of twentieth century music, “The Rest is Noise,” Alex Ross describes members of the avant garde as detesting music that appealed to normal audiences.

I was jealous of a fellow student who said his college major was "composition" -- I desperately wished I could be him. Then, after a year or so, I asked him "How's the composition going?" "Oh, I quit." I felt terrible for him. He explained, "If you write anything beautiful, they make fun of you. Everything has to be ugly. I didn't choose to be a composer in order to write music that I don't like." What he said kept ME from becoming a composer for at least a decade. I think EVERY composer in the world needs to watch your video here -- it has been a long time in coming.

You got it right. Can't be said or discussed better 👍

I'm glad that stuff exists for its own sake. I have never had any use for it.

Thanks for this very thought-provoking presentation. It's a subject I've considered many times from my extremely unacademic viewpoint. It seems to me that the 20th and even 21st century composers we most enjoy are those who continued the traditions of instrumentation left to us by the 19th century. So through the 20th century we had Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Britten, etc. This continues now into Adams, Macmillan and so on. It seems to me that fast technological developments, especially in the field of electronics, lured some musicians into a route to composition which avoided the rigours of the centuries. The use of electronics in instrumentation and performance using recorded music/sound allowed the merely modern to parade as academic and ingeneous. Some excellent composers do use electronics but I struggle to think of any who have not previously and to a greater extent used 'traditional' instrumentation.

"Modern" composers opened doors to bring in dissonance, ambiguity, descriptive timbrality and timbral experimentation. I think these things are important TOOLS for further expressions in composition, But NOT the purpose of composition. That said, I do find previously unheard concepts executed exciting at times.

Where was Cancrizans when we needed him?

In the 20th century, a very confused century, intellectually speaking - the narrative became more important than the event. Many composers would mostly base their careers on their ideas about music rather than the music itself. In fact, the music would simply be attached to the narrative just in order to justify the concert and the label of the composer. There are though many great avant-garde composers and compositions, and many important ideas, concepts and techniques worth studying and enjoying. Actually, I think they are indispensable for a composer.

As a composer myself, it took me half my life to get over the 'need' to find my 'place' in the historical 'progress' and find something interesting, emotional, and meaningful. I discounted my tastes for what I perhaps expected of myself to be.

This is why Tchaikovsky wrote the most moving, beautiful music ever written. Thank god he realized that music should be beautiful.

I survived the XXth century to tell the tale! How Intelligence and Intellect are not the same! My creative esthetic is along the lines of Stravinsky's, "Creo quia Absurdum est".That is pure Esthetic Genius, there.

Long ago I found that there was a parallel with visual art, namely painting, and music. In the early 1970s I took the art class at the Barnes Foundation outside Philadelphia. Violette DeMazia gave a lecture on abstract art as compared to art that had (figurative) subject matter. Without saying that abstract art was bad, she pointed out that all the elements of abstract art; drawing, composition, color etc. are also contained in figurative art. So the intellectual appreciation can be similar. But figurative art has the extra benefit in that anyone can more easily have a relationship with the work of art. Likewise, melody gives everyone an entry point into a work of music. Take that away and you are left with just intellectual appreciation.

At some point in “art”, I think the avant- garde & ultra-modernism just had to come about and then eventually run it’s course. We just happened to be alive to experience that epoch. Unfortunately for many of us “art” in the 20th century took on the most reprehensible aspect of politics-sheer arrogance. “We’re going to shove this stuff down your throat whether you like it t or not. You`re sitting in the middle of the row and were going to shove George Walker into your ears between two Beethovens. Deal with it! What are you gonna do, get up and leave?” [The NSO did just that.] I agree that there is a lot of modern music in the last century which is inventive & interesting and engagingly challenging to the ears, which can be satisfying in itself, but there is a limit to general audience patience and acceptance. Even Stokowski often dealt with that issue during his life.

Brilliant Video. WOW. George Rochberg turned his back on the Avant-Garde and thereby achieved considerable success. See his: Violin Caprices, String Quartets, Transcendental Variations, and Symphony 5.

I subscribe to the comments of the great musical humorist, Anna Russel. With modern music, you never know if the composer has reached great new heights, or if he is just trying to put one over on us.

*What a contribution.* Done in a leisurely, casual style, yet you touched some corner stones of the XXth century music phenomena. I sometimes don't agree with your reviews (mostly well), but even then you feel there is a great musical intellect and insight behind judgements you don't approve with. This video has confirmed to me that I haven't spent many hours on your channel in vain. One thing that might elude you in this survey: the art is born within / out of its age. The _zeitgeist..._ The artists, especially the composers, cannot transcend their day and age and break out of the world they live in... Well perhaps only some, like *_Arvo Pärt,_* or performers like *_Elisabeth Chojnacka,_* but they occupy a special and rather limited niche. Briefly, there cannot be a grand heroic or even cheerful juicy music in an age of fallen, limp humanity, shaped by consumerism and media lobotomized, reduced onto a lower stage of existence with the art surviving just in the form of left-over exotic islands far from the society's mainstream.

Your description of a inclusive composer fits the beatles perfectly!

I got into Shostakovich from an early age and his marvellous mid to late 20th c music was dark, beautiful, amazingly expressive and largely tonal.

To me the ultimate irony is how much of this music was eventually unoriginal. So much sounded like the same chaotic mess with little to grab onto as a listener. I'm glad most composers today do not go that route.

Hallo from Greece! Enjoyed your way to talk! Beside playing almost exclusively Bach I find much innocent pleasure in Turkish classical music.

Excellent. I'd like to hear you continue this premise and expand into the 20th c. rise and dominance of popular culture especially for the general listener. Concert music and new music movements of the day can never seem to compete with the commercial machine as a cultural phenomenon.

"At the end of the day, they were not good musicians." I disagree there Dave. Someone asked Boulez about what happened to the total-serialist movement. He said something like, "Perhaps we didn't take into consideration something about the way people hear music." I think the avant-garde of the 50s and 60s defined music as something different than most people can hear. So there was enormous energy put into an organizational system that couldn't be heard. You basically have it right. It was self-destructive. People generally couldn't see that because so much importance had been attached to "progress" in the art form.

This was a really interesting take, David. Loved it.

I like your analogy of the bridge with no visible means of support. The rush to the patent office approach to composing has led to a few decidedly wobbly structures. If I've written anything half-decent that remains standing it's by adhering to more solid principles - and this mainly means checking out what Haydn did - the best avant-gardist of all!

Nobody listens to classical modern avant garde classical music, like most modern art it becomes completely shallow.

When I’m not able to tell the difference between when the musicians tuning their instruments or when they play the music, then I know it is Avant-Garde.

I like your thesis about this. One point of mine: I think many of the post WW II avant garde started writing for other composers and gave the finger to general audiences. Didn't Milton Babbit write an article for a music magazine saying composers didn't need audiences anymore? Maybe it's personal with me. I learned, over a year, some insanely difficult pieces by a local composer, played some of them in recital, and recorded them and his other pieces for organ. After that was out of the way, he broke our acquaintance, considering me too stupid to tolerate now that I had recorded his music. I don't think he's the only composer to think that way. After all, Wagner thanked Hans von Bülow for his devotion by stealing his wife!

Hi Dave, I hope you do a video on your favourite classic pieces of the 21st century.

The modernist tendency was to believe how you communicated was more important - or, indeed, of more interest, than what you were trying to communicate. Same with the Avant-Gard, perhaps.... 17:37

Wonderful food for thought here on a subject I've been contemplating for most of my 75 years. I remember rejoicing when I was still in music school in the early 70s when Harold Schonberg wrote an editorial in the NY Times declaring that serialism was officially dead, having failed to win a significant audience in half a century. I think that was one of the problems; I think at least up to Beethoven, if a composer wrote a work and the audience hated it, the piece was considered a failure and often the composer would revise it. But increasingly after Beethoven, if audiences didn't like something, it was the audience, not the composer, who supposedly failed, and presumably future audiences would one day see the error of their ways. I'm not advocating pandering to the lowest common denominator of listeners, but it's like the tree falling in the forest: If no one will listen to what you've written, is it really music? It's quite revealing how often the nicest thing that can be said about an avant-garde work is that it is "interesting"; you almost never hear it described as "beautiful" or "moving" or anything involving emotion rather than pure intellect.

Great composers are pretty rare, no matter their style. Why would we expect anything different from the avant-gardists? Also, what do we mean by "avant-garde?" It seems that it depends on the current musical consensus. Boulez reacted against neoclassicism and Romanticism, moving toward greater architectural complexity. The minimalists reacted against the complexity. As you point out, the better minimalists moved toward greater inclusivity of traditional methods and viewpoints and greater expressivity. Reich went from phase tape pieces to Different Trains, Adams from Shaker Loops to the Violin Concerto.

very good lecture which I shared on facebook. Coming from a different art form, the art school I attended reminded me of what Churchill said about German culture: "In Germany, everything is prohibited except what is allowed." The full quote is in four parts: "In England, everything is allowed except what is prohibited. In Germany, everything is prohibited except what is allowed. In Russia, everything is prohibited including what is allowed. In France, everything is allowed including what is prohibited." Perhaps, the music schools are like German culture. Spengler said that western music blasted apart with Wagner and that western art faded away with the Impressionists.

Cage's In a Landscape and Maxwell Davies' Farewell to Stromness seemed to come from nowhere given their composers. And what did Leonard Bernstein mean when he said music is "about nothing"? BTW Mr. Hurwitz, your recommendation of the DORAT'S box set of Beethoven's nine symphonies was spot on. I am very happy with the purchase and realized there was more to composer's symphonies than 5, 7, and nine. Thank you again. Your channel has become a daily indispensable treat. I am subscribed.

To attempt an analogy, rather like spelunking (or 'pot holing' if you are English), there is some value in mapping subterranean tunnels even if most of them are dead-ends. It can be a dangerous pastime especially when the dead ends become literal. Very very occasionally a new passage is discovered and options are widened. Devoting years of one's life to such exploits is risking wasting precious creativity time (not that composition is a competition). The classical tradition is just that - a tradition, and traditions tend to preserve the best aspects of the past and evolve cautiously if new accretions prove sufficiently robust when tested. In the music technology sphere there was a period in the late 1980s when computing and MIDI was offering enticing potential for compositional exploration with crude artificial intelligence - random notes which obeyed programmable rules of probability and so forth. It produced interesting and fascinating results for the spelunking operator, with memorable happy accidents etc. but for an audience it would eventually become tiresome - like an unwanted wind chime.

Do you have any thoughts on Stockhausen opera cycle "Licht"? One segment of it is hugely popular here on youtube "Michaels Reise um die Erde". I listened to it and I was postiively surprised. I usually reject 20th century music for the reasons you mentioned, but I liked this one for its expressivness. Also "Klavierstück 9" by Stockhausen is expressive, the end is haunting.

I think in the post-Avant Garde period that we’re in right now, we should be using the sounds and ideas resulting from this extensive experimentation to fulfill a goal. In a way I find that lots of Avant Garde music lacks a “goal” aside from an abstract collage of textures. I think the real geniuses of the time knew how to do that (Stockhausen, Ligeti, Penderecki, Xenakis, Crumb), but many others did not. What I find interesting is that this does not appear to be how the classical tradition is moving. My observation is that since the Avant Garde there has been a split where American composers inspired by Reich explore this pan-diatonic postminimal thing (something Kyle Gann writes about) and European composers inspired by Lachenmann and Ferneyhough try to continue the avant garde values of abstraction and texture. Neither of these fulfill my ‘argument’ of taking the sounds created by the avant garde to fulfill a purpose. However, I notice that popular music is fulfilling this goal. Specifically in bands/groups like black midi, King Gizzard, Squid, Death Grips, Kendrick Lamar, and JPEGMAFIA. They all use elements of noise, fragmentation, and abstract texture to support whatever goal they have in their song. I don’t know what you think of that or if this ramble is relevant to the video, but this is just what I was thinking watching this

I really think that there were two kind of avant-garde composers: those who cared about his music actually being listened and enjoyed by someone (Penderecki, Zimmermann, Ligeti...), and those who didn't (Stockhausen, Kagel...). It seems a fact that the first ones evolved and survived the avant-garde dictatorship, and the others didn't. But I agree with you: the first ones where great musicians, and the others just weren't.

The avant-garde still rules... it has shaped 21st century music . Take a look and listen to the Pulitzer Prize winners of this century. or at the works selected for ACO readings and the like, no one dares to play anything with a melody, and the truth is many composers who attempt melody are simply inept at it. Great composers are very rare

I like the phrase that Rorem used, "any notes will do."

I remember seeing a documentary about Simon Rattle, he was rehearsing some Hans Werner Henze stuff with The CBSO and all at once he stopped and said "Hang on, I think I've found a tune here somewhere!" My old music teacher went to a concert featuring something or other by Peter Maxwell Davies. He said where he was sitting he could see the score on the conductor's music stand and he said it just looked as if someone had loaded some ink onto the tip of a 12 inch ruler then flicked it onto the page "Flick flick flick orchestrate that!" he said.🤣

Fear, inhibition and negation.....so true. Very wise, Dave. In the music dept. of my uni in the early seventies, it was clear that the pervading style was all about not doing whatever had been done before. It was a kind of arrogence, thinking that rhythm, harmony and melody were old hat, passè, no use. Without them, though, you cannot entice audiences (only those few who suscribe to the emperor's new clothes). They would loath your frequently stated view that music is entertainment. It was a puritanical, life denying attitude which, thankfully, no longer exists to any great deal, as far as I am aware. I once asked Wilfrid Mellers, who was the Professor when i was an undergraduate, if he'd ever seen minimalism coming. Could he have predicted it? And he said no....but he didnt know what else could have come after Berio, Cage etc. Athough i have to say that I did enjoy a few of the concerts at the time. If it's going to survive at all, such music needs to be heard live, watching the musicians at work. Then, sometimes, the sonorities of certain passages can be fascinating.

Classical music is a niche in the world of music, and Avantgarde is one in classical music. 99.99% of the results might be failures, but I'm always sympathizing with the SF approach to explore new worlds. I think successful examples for this approach are Liszt's b minor sonata and Schönberg's 2nd string quartet.

Great insights as always! It would be of great help, for us trying 20th century repertoire, to include Penderecki and other alike composers, in your "10 works for begginers" series

Your comment re: excursions into philosophy by composers reminds me of the reverse, Adorno's philosophy of Mahler. I so wish I could have back the time I wasted reading that thing.

Medtner and Busoni wrote already early in the 1900's pamflets against the type of modernism they saw as perilous to Music. Not yet even having heard anything that would be the later Avant Garde. Maybe Pierot Lunaire was already too much for them...

I've always thought it was a shame that Schoenberg didn't stick with tonality longer because some of his early works like The Gurre-Lieder and Verklarte Nacht are just beautiful. Verklarte Nacht was even considered "danceable" and Anthony Tudor used it as the score for his ballet Pillar of Fire. Even though the themes of this ballet are very dated, it's still worth seeing because of how well it fits with Schoenberg's music.

For me, Part & Gorecki (among a few others) publicly blew the whistle on the whole thing from the early 1990s onwards. Clearly, uncompromisingly modern- but immediately & hugely popular as well. The common put-down that audiences were like sheep- only wanting to hear unchallenging classical era stuff- just didn't hold water any more.

First time on this channel. What a magnificent work of thought and sensibility this video is. If you have it transcribed, i'd LOVE to translate it to Spanish, so I can share it with non English speaking people around here. (The RU-vid automatic translation of automatic subtitles works awfully, sadly). Cheers, and thanks!

The title of Milton Babbit's 1958 essay sums up the post-WW2 zeitgeist: "Who Cares if You Listen?" The antithesis was stated well by Randall Thompson (1899-1984) when he said, "A composer's first responsibility is, and always will be, to write music that will reach and move the hearts of his listeners in his own day," but Thompson was a stubborn holdout against that zeitgeist.