Who’s afraid of the avant-garde?
Philip BallLooking at Rothko: no harder to “see” than wallpaper
Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don’t Get Stockhausen
By David Stubbs (Zero Books, £9.99)
The writer Joe Queenan caused a minor rumpus in the austere world of contemporary classical music last year by complaining about how painful much of it is. He called Berio’s Sinfonia (1968) “35 minutes of non-stop torture,” Stockhausen’s Kontra-Punkte (1953) like “a cat running up and down the piano” and Birtwistle’s latest opera The Minotaur “funereal caterwauling.” “A hundred years after Schoenberg,” he wrote, “the public still doesn’t like anything after Transfigured Night, and even that is a stretch.”
Inevitably, Queenan was lambasted as a reactionary philistine. Performances of “modern” works like this were well attended, his critics said. And while Queenan took pains to distance himself from the conservative concertgoers who demand a steady diet of Mozart and Brahms, his comments were denounced as the same old clichés. Yet clichés become clichés for a reason. It’s true that these challenging works will find audiences in London’s highbrow venues, but the fact remains that Stockhausen and Penderecki, whose works are now as old as “Rock Around the Clock,” have not been assimilated into the classical canon in the way that Ravel and Stravinsky have. When someone like Queenan has earnestly tried and failed to appreciate this “new” music, it’s fair to ask what the problem is.
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