Music

ByERICH LEINSDORF

THE controversy over contemporary music is not rest rioted to the field of music at all. It has a social implication of the largest order. It seems to me that living composers look to the symphony orchestra as a representative expression of our music life with a certain amount optimisim, phony orchestras, opera companies, and chamber groups are part of the musical past but not necessarily of the future. We often forget that music in the past has always been reserved for a small, exclusive group. Nowadays we are striving to reach a much larger audience.

We are today faced for the first time with the problem of making serious music a part of a democratic culture. In our efforts we are hampered by a lot of difficulties which are not easy to solve. Music has never paid for itself, and it does not pay for itself today. Our good will toward living composers is seriously hampered by economic considerations.

I am informed, for example, that the number of recordings of contemporary works is very small. The recording companies say, “How can we sell music which the people don’t know?" They may even say “which the people don’t want.”I don’t know how they know that.

The same applies to the radio. When any program of good music is sponsored commercially, some agency starts meddling and demands certain things which were on the repertoire of the beer-hall concerts in Europe fifty years ago.

Last there is the box office. I myself have noticed that some performers are ready to experiment with new music — are ready to give tribute to the new and to the living; but they abandon this endeavor very quickly when it decreases the sale of tickets.

Musicians in general don’t think about these problems because they don’t buy tickets. I have never in my life bought a ticket to a concert. We get in somehow, and therefore we don’t think of that part of the problem. But when you are connected with an organization which sells tickets, you know quite well that when the business manager says to you, “Well, the program is all right, but there is one piece I want you to throw out,”that is the piece which has been written in the twentieth century.

I believe that music education is approaching these problems from the wrong end. Music education tries to convince people of the greatness of the past masters.

It measures everything that is done today by the standards of the past.

What we have left of the past and what is today our so-called standard repertoire is a very small portion of cream off a huge bottle of milk. We have forgotten that there was a large portion of milk to produce that little cream.

You cannot argue with the public. You cannot even say to the public, “Listen and listen again.”

There was once a baritone in an opera company who had very original ideas about costume and interpretation. He was to sing the Scarpia role in Tosco.. He didn’t like the way Scarpia has always been done on the stage. He didn’t like the black dress. He didn’t like Scarpia to be an old man. So he decided to do it differently. He ordered himself a very elaborate costume, — purple, I think, and he had a red wig, and he was a young, very handsome man. And he did everything differently.

The night he went on stage, the director of the opera theater, standing in the wings, looked at him, looked at his very strange attire, but didn’t say anything. The next day there was a lot of comment on the unusual attire and the unusual interpretation. The director called the baritone into his office and said, “Why have you chosen this way of interpreting Scarpia?” and the baritone gave him a very long talk. He had it all figured out why Scarpia should be done that way. He had good reasons. He explained them with great conviction. He gave the director a long, long sales talk on the way Scarpia should be done, which was exactly the way he had done it the night before.

After he got through with the explanation, the director just looked at him and said, “Did you explain that to the public?”

You don’t argue with the public.

There is no doubt that the attitude of our audience is conservative, that what they have accepted of contemporary music is mostly derivative music — music which reminds them of the past. One could give a long explanation of this conservatism. I believe the reason for it lies not in our time, not in our country: it lies in the Europe of the nineteenth century. It lies in the time when the aristocracy, the inherited nobility, ceased to be the only patron of music and when the bourgeoisie took over. The bourgeois society acted not always out of pure love, but for social and economic prestige. They were conservative because they did not want to listen. They wanted to relive certain early impressions of their youth, of their childhood, of their early education. When a certain symphony by Brahms or a certain opera by Mozart had made a deep impression on them at the age of fifteen or at the age of eighteen, they wanted to relive that particular age of their youth by going through the motions of hearing the same old selections again and again.

This inherent conservatism of our audiences is the biggest stumbling block for a real development and real popularity of new music. When I say “new” I don’t mean derivative music of living composers. There are living composers who are really dead, and there are composers who are dead in body who are really living.

I don’t think that the evaluation of contemporary music is helping to make serious music a part of the democratic culture, and I don’t think that driving toward success within the existing musical organizations will be more than a passing satisfaction for the composer. I believe that our primary endeavor must be to enlarge our audience, to create for contemporary music a fertile soil where it can find the response it needs.

What we call a repertoire did not exist one hundred years ago. Every concert, every musical presentation, was new or practically new. One didn’t fall back on the old and squeeze in the new like a bitter pill between two pieced of cake. That is a recent practice. I personally think that it has nothing to do with the quality of the composers; it has only to do with the quality of our general culture, which is in a state of flux, and in which we have to find, first of all, the larger public.

This larger public cannot be found by simply opening the doors and saying, “Come in, you are welcome. The prices will be cheaper. Enjoy yourself.”

No, they won’t come in. Today’s public is limited. It cannot fill the presentations in New York City. For the most part those who attend concerts are the friends of the performer.

We have been fooling ourselves if we really think we can present any kind of serious art to a completely uneducated or uninstructed person. I think that our main problem is to raise the standard of musical education, to create a musical public infinitely larger than the one which we have today. Our potentialities are enormous. We have here very large halls, much larger than the halls were in Europe. The radio and the phonograph enable millions of people to hear the same thing. But must it be exactly the same thing, in all cases, which their grandparents heard?