In their 1980s heyday, minimalist composers such as Philip Glass seemed to offer a radical new answer to a perennial question of 20th-century music: whither western art music? The European conservative tradition had had nothing new to say since at least the death of Strauss in 1949. The progressive tradition had generally died with Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Britten in the 1970s, though it lingered on in places, notably America. With the exception of the ageing Messiaen, himself not in any sense a mainstream avant-gardist, radical postwar modernism was struggling to maintain an audience at all.
To say that Glass was like a breath of fresh air into this dying culture would be an exaggeration, not least because so many parts of the musical world bolted their doors to what he offered. But Glass both stirred things up and appealed to a new, younger audience, which composers working within the other traditions had failed to do. In retrospect it was not surprising that art music should have been challenged by a group of composers who were enthused by the popular music of the rock 'n' roll years, since rock had become the music of the people and eclipsed classical even among the intellectual audience. Nor was it surprising that the challenge should come from America, with its more democratic cultural instincts.
There was much to debate in what the American writer Joseph Horowitz calls the glacial grandeur of Glass's music, with its conservative harmonic palette and its paradoxically modernist determination that the music should not develop. The avant-grade priesthood loathed a style that was so violently at odds with everything they admired. But the market for tickets and record sales said otherwise. Glass's hypnotic and ecstatically repetitive music was successful with the public, especially the trio of operas—Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha and Akhnaten—that he composed between 1975 and 1984. Together, these works opened a door through which other composers of Glass's era, or those who had been influenced by his style, or those who had matured along comparable lines, were themselves able to find larger audiences.
The new opera, Appomattox, incarnates Glass's achievements and his failings. Like the earlier operatic trilogy, it addresses a large, even epic theme—in this case the problem of how to make a just peace after a period of great bloodshed and suffering (the question remains as acute for Americans in Iraq in 2007 as it did on their own soil in 1865). Yet Appomattox, as Glass himself has acknowledged in interviews, lacks the artistic idealism of the earlier operas. The new score is obviously the work of the composer of Satyagraha. But there are more compromises—among them shorter musical paragraphs, a keener awareness of text (not least in the fact that this opera is in English), a more diverse and dramatically responsive orchestral palette and even a pastiched homage to military and religious musical traditions.
All of these ought, in theory, to make Appomattox a less austere work than its predecessors. And in many ways, it is. Yet even in this newest work, which deserves a staging on this side of the Atlantic (there are as yet no firm plans), there seems to be a gap between what we see on the stage and what we hear, a gap between the flexibility and nuance of the former and the structural constraints of the latter. There seems to be a point beyond which minimalism, even in the mellower and more plastic version into which Glass's music has now evolved, is unable to go. Whither western art music? The search for an answer goes on.
Gordon Brown's son saves the arts
The arts emerged from the October public spending review with a last-minute reprieve from the threatened 5 per cent real-terms cut and instead the promise of an inflation-linked settlement over the next three years. What caused this welcome softening of treasury resolve after months in which the performing arts looked doomed to face cuts? The Arts Council's rearguard campaign helped. So did Tony Blair's late conversion to the importance of the arts. The new culture secretary, James Purnell, did his bit too.
I am told, however, that the key factor was Gordon Brown's emergence as a supporter of the arts. Cynical readers may put this conversion down to electoral calculation—one estimate says there are 600,000 votes in the arts. But Brown's new interest may be more personal. His four-year-old son, John, is said to have shown musical promise and has quietly been attending music classes at the Wigmore Hall, no less. If this is true, it may make John Brown the most influential child musician in London since the visit of the young Mozart.
