Music in the 21st Century

By Ken Smith

"I don't know what the repertoire of the future will be, except that Chuck Berry will be in it," says Wall Street Journal critic Greg Sandow. He finds an unlikely ally in ICM Artists President David Foster, who adds, "The music that lasts into the future may well be a composer in some popular realm who becomes known as repertory only years later." In an era defined by a President splitting hairs over the definition of the word "is", it shouldn't be surprising that prominent figures in classical music at the end of the millennium are pondering exactly what "classical" means.

"Classical is not so much a style as an attitude," says Albert Imperato of Universal Classics. "It's not a one-night stand, it's a relationship. It's not just about today, and usually you have to wait a long time to find out if you're timeless."

At the other end of the spectrum comes George Steel, director of Columbia University's Miller Theater. "Classical music as a term is already pretty useless," he counters. "The idea that music has a constructivist historical agenda is dying. The future determining factors in music will be venue, ensemble, and the balance of notated structure to improvisation in each piece." Within those philosophical extremes fall most others, preferring to side with a middle ground articulated by David Shifrin, artistic director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, as "balancing timeless elements with what's happening today."

For most of us, the first question for the 21st century is what will survive from the 20th. Musically, the general consensus is "not much." Despite his prognosis in some American classrooms, Darwin is alive and well in the concert hall.

"What we think of as masterworks became that way because they're music people want to hear," says composer John Corigliano. "You can force things down people's throats only so long. Then you need to give them the right to reject things without feeling stupid."

"I love the Brahms piano pieces," the composer George Crumb says, "but Brahms really doesn't seem to have all that much to say to us today. Maybe the 19th century is a little too close. Who would've thought that we would've found more resonance in the composers of the 12th and 13th centuries?"

"Only a handful of 19th-century pieces are around today, and there are many more composers now than then," says Susan Feder, vice president of G. Schirmer. Most pieces don't survive, particularly when they drift away from the womb that nourished them-be it academic or professional-and have to find their own way in the world.

Once the music's out there, though, the question remains whether or not it will resonate with listeners. "We've had composer residency programs in the past two decades that have caused many composers to write in a programmable style that's more practical than inspired," Feder adds. "I'm not sure how much of that music will last."

"My general feeling about most contemporary classical music is that it just doesn't have the focus of the other arts," says Sandow. "There are a lot of composers I like, but if I put them up against other musical genres, I find they rarely connect in the same way."

Even those pieces that do connect, like Philip Glass's opera Einstein on the Beach and Górecki's Third Symphony, may not stand the test of time-at least right away. This century has seen Mahler's and Ives's stars rise while Franck's and Respighi's have fallen. Sibelius is getting more performances these days, Ginastera less. Shostakovich and Barber have ridden a veritable roller coaster.

"Perhaps by the 23rd century listeners will widely embrace the past hundred years," says Shifrin, echoed closely by conductor Robert Spano. "I don't think it's inconceivable that Elliott Carter will find a large popular audience in the future," the conductor adds. "Don't forget, even Bach had a slump for about a hundred years till Mendelssohn brought him back."

A lot of it has to do with the performers. "On one level it's obvious," says Foster, "but the implications are not. Moses and Aron has been one of the most fabulous things the Metropolitan Opera has ever done because James Levine loves the piece, not because he just thinks it 'needs to be done.' If you want to know what orchestral music will survive, ask the orchestra members. The music they love has a much better chance than the music they hate. If the soldiers won't move, the generals can't influence the outcome."

Finding the music of today that lasts, though, may well require looking beyond the concert hall. The road is paved with examples. Stephen Sondheim has already found his way into the opera house. Movie soundtracks now fill classical-record catalogs. Brian Eno's Music for Airports arguably became repertory once Bang on a Can performed the work live last season at Lincoln Center. Gidon Kremer pulled Piazzolla into the concert hall, while Duke Ellington became a common point of reference last season for the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic (and later for Boston and Chicago).

Gazing into the Crystal Ball

The most exciting-not to say foolhardy-predictions lie in describing the music of the future. Hardly a person fails to point out that predicting 20th-century music on the societal and technological basis of 1899 would have been laughable, but that doesn't keep people today from looking into their crystal balls.

"There's no limit to what composers can write today, either in terms of style or in using computers and acoustic instruments," says Jacqueline Taylor, executive director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. "Creative minds are grappling with problems in all kinds of interesting ways."

"My students will put an electric guitar and drum set with a violin and bassoon and just automatically assume that it's a viable ensemble," says composer Steve Mackey. The difference is a frame of reference shaped entirely by the information age, where hundreds of cable channels and millions of Web sites are immediately accessible.

"We hear more music in one day than somebody in the 1700s heard in a lifetime," says conductor Marin Alsop. "New music will continue to reflect the emotional state of this extreme living, as well as its calmer, more spiritual side."

Reflective or not, such eclectic inclusivity still remains a matter of debate. "I have the strange feeling that we're in a stylistic holding pattern," says Tim Page, former Washington Post music critic and now creative adviser to the Saint Louis Symphony. "Nothing recently has stood people on their heads like the early works of Philip Glass or Steve Reich. Maybe we should stop thinking of radicalism as terribly important."

"We've come away from the idea of originality," echoes composer Michael Torke. "The aesthetic today is anti-originality, with people trying to do everything in one piece. Novelty has taken the place of originality. We can find a lot of well-made pieces, but there's nothing singular about them."

Not by ordinary measures, perhaps, but that may change as well. "I think we're headed for a fundamental rethinking of music, including an analysis system based in timbre," says Steel. "Counting pitches is just not appropriate in music that deals with layers and colors like Ligeti and Xenakis-to say nothing of James Brown or Duke Ellington. A timbral analysis would show any hip-hop album as being far more interesting than any Mahler symphony."

The generation of composers now in their forties has long made a point of omnivorous listening. "We saw the battle going on between the academics and the minimalists," says Bang on a Can co-founder Michael Gordon. "But it wasn't our fight." Their own reconciliation of those styles, though, often seemed a bit forced.

"Composers now in their twenties are the first generation to have no preconceived ideas about musical style," says Jessica Lustig, whose 21st Century Music Management works primarily with composers. "They're free to borrow from anything they see-MTV here, Mahler there-and they really benefit from the fact that there's so little musical literacy out there." It is, rather, post-literate music for a post-literate society, where, as composer Christopher Rouse points out, "You can no longer grade a student's piece by whether it follows a tone row." Composers have the freedom to write in whatever style they choose, serial music included.

Which Way the Pendulum?

Whether your term is the "New Romanticism," as Feder calls it, or "a 1990s Rococo," to use Steel's term, most agree that the pendulum is poised to swing again within the decade. The question is, in which direction?

"Historically, the next big trend will come from what people in the other arts are doing," says Torke. Sandow says he sees structural paths already charted in contemporary art and fiction. "Most composers today are still creating a musical equivalent of a 19th-century novel," he observes. "Today's fiction is all over the place, each work creating its own context. A piece like Christopher Rouse's Der gerette Alberich, which draws from both Wagner and rock and roll, can be startling for listeners in a concert hall, but not for anyone who reads contemporary fiction or goes to galleries.

"Classical music is not going to be healthy until more new music is done than old, and old works are done in a way that makes them fresh," insists Sandow. "It's completely backward and non-artistic to be playing the same works year after year. Musicians become cynical, audiences are lulled, and it keeps classical music from being taken seriously as an art form."

"Nourishment of the present is what draws meaning to the past," adds Imperato, "and that relationship always needs to grow. If you keep looking back at your wedding day, your marriage is going to have a false sense of nostalgia."

That nourishment comes both through the performance itself-where developments like the early-music movement invigorated the sound-and from its context. "I love the traditional overture-concerto-symphony model and I think a lot can still be said with it," says Spano. "But that model is no longer the exclusive format."

For all the future programming possibilities, the least likely is that orchestras will continue to draw from the same list of 50 works. "There are many different audiences out there," says conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, "and just as a really great repertory theater company can present Shakespeare and Brecht and Euripides and Beckett, an orchestra needs to play to the diversity in its own audience."

"In 25 years there will be fewer orchestras," predicts Page, "but the ones remaining will become sources of artistic pilgrimage. People will drive for hours to Cleveland or Saint Louis specifically to see the orchestra."

Alsop points out that "The orchestra is becoming a community-owned institution. Music's niche varies from community to community, and wherever I am, I try to find out not just what they want to hear but what they need to hear, and how I can provide it."

Video in Concert

To hear some people, it's not just the music but the whole 19th-century concert format that's due for some dramatic changes. One possibility is the presence of video screens, which have already been used for pre-concert documentaries by the New World Symphony in Miami and for supertitles setting the scene for ballets and tone poems by the Cleveland Orchestra in Severance Hall.

"Concerts may add more of a visual element," Chicago Symphony Orchestra Executive Director Henry Fogel concedes. "But that technology is hardly new. As for speaking to the audiences, Leonard Bernstein did that." Rather, he says, the most substantial changes will come in the institutions' attitude about themselves, and their role in the community.

"There may even be a time when you can click on a screen on the back of the seat in front of you and zoom in on the horn section," says publicist Mary Lou Falcone. "We're a society used to doing more than one thing at time, and we have to find some way to keep audiences engaged without pandering." Pandering, though, is in the eyes and ears of the beholders. Audiences come to different venues with different expectations, which means that what's playing in "classical" venues largely frames the definition.

"Society is so consumer oriented that we're always shopping for brand names," says Elizabeth Sobel, vice president of IMG Artists. Even Carnegie Hall struggles these days just to keep up with developments in audiences and performers, points out Linda Golding, president of Boosey & Hawkes. Witness the Hall's new performing space: The strongest brand name in American concert music is adding a venue for art forms currently beyond its reach.

"I see the need for concerts to be events," says Falcone. "First in the programming itself, with an imaginative variety of thematic and festival handles, marketing them as such in a way that presents it in an offbeat and interesting manner with integrity."

Fogel, though, sees it differently. "You can't make everything special," he argues, "because then 'special' becomes normal. I really don't see much of a change in the future."

Fear of Flying

Classical-music figures still discuss media and technology with a combination of fear and fascination, but few consider it a threat. "If the sports world can demonstrate anything, it's shown that media exposure can increase live attendance," says Fogel. "You can easily get a better sense of a basketball game by watching it at home, but the hottest ticket in town last year was the Chicago Bulls."

Nor, with all due respect to Glenn Gould, is live performance threatened by recording, though it has undeniably changed the way we listen. "It's the philosophical difference between repeating a pleasurable experience and opening yourself up to something new," says Foster. Spano puts it more directly: "The fact that anything can go wrong makes a live performance like watching a tightrope act."

Recordings remain a frequent bone of contention, as both orchestras and composers feel ill served. "With very few exceptions, repertory recordings will come from smaller companies who want to document a certain interpretation in a certain time and place," says Page, whose orchestra has launched its own local label in Saint Louis.

Those musicians and composers not under the wing of an institution still have the benefit of the home studio and distribution over the internet, although most admit that the technology's much-touted "democracy" is a mixed blessing.

"The technology is there for composers to make their works readily available," says Lustig. "The question is whether to license recordings through publishers, organizations like the American Music Center, or the composers. Who is best able to reach the audience?"

"For all the talk of democratization, everything still comes down to marketing and promotion," says Torke.

More and more, those skills lie with the students themselves. Sandow, who teaches a class entitled Classical Music in the Age of Rock at the Juilliard School, says students come to conservatory today with unprecedented levels of business savvy. "The conservatives learn about marketing," he says. "The radicals try to upset the system."

True revolutionaries, like Steve Reich and Philip Glass, who kept tight control over their own compositions, or the composers of Bang on a Can, who made names for themselves as presenters as well, chart their own course as if the system didn't exist.

"In the course of training musicians, you have to get them to think about the things that truly matter to them," says Tilson Thomas. "Musicians will be making more of these decisions on their own."

At present, the system has yet to deal with many of today's musicians and composers who work in musical and artistic hybrids. Like others before them, they need to start by finding a new vocabulary or having one thrust upon them. Preferably an alternative to the word "crossover" will be found to distinguish between, as Sobel puts it, "music that evolves from an authentic voice as opposed to projects generated because some record company told a singer to record Gershwin."

They may come to the table without terminology, but if they stick around long enough-just like the impressionists and the serialists and the minimalists-the system will make room for them. Says Mackey, "I think when we look back at the 21st century we'll see that the first shift has already begun."

Ken Smith writes about music for Time Out New York, Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, and the Newark Star-Ledger. His work has appeared in The Strad, Billboard, Piano & Keyboard, the American Record Guide, Symphony, and Chamber Music, among other publications.