Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African American Music

12 On the Decline of a Music

Chapter 12 ON THE DECLINE OF A MUSIC We have now reached the point where we need to confront directly what has so far been looked at only obliquely and indirectly: the condition of the classical-music tradition in Europe and America today. Classical music in the present century has exhibited a decline in creative energy, in openness to fertilizing outside influences, and, above all, in usefulness for the social and individualconcerns of those who in the past formed the constituency for creative musicians, which is in striking contrast to the riotous expansion and proliferation of Afro-American music. The decline has occurred in its most precipitous form in the years since the first world war (which seems to have been a watershed for the self-confidence of the western middle classes), but it is only the culmination of processes which have been going on for the last two hundred years or so.That it should have thus accelerated at a time when the skills of individual musicians, the virtuosityof orchestras, the splendour of great concert halls, and the production standards of opera houses, are considered to have reached new peaks is a paradox which I shall attempt to explain. No hint of this decline is given in the many books claiming to be histories of twentieth-century music that have appeared over the last thirtyyears or so. They tell their storyas ifitwere a mere continuation of those older histories of which I spoke earlier, mostly confining their attention without comment to the European classical tradition and dealing with compositions and their composers, arranged in as neat an order of influencer and influenced, cause and effect, as can be managed with limited hindsight. The story relates how 342 Music of the Common Tongue traditional tonal harmony came to the end of its resources, to be replaced by other, notably serial, means of pitch organization , how new tonal material and new means of sound production came into play, how a new emancipation of sounds and rhythms took place, how composers began looking for inspiration to other cultures and how some composers succeeded in obtaining further mileage from the resources of tonal harmony by sheer force of will and with the aid of the folk musics of their respective homelands. They tell also of the survival, often in new guises, of traditional forms such as the symphony, the concerto and opera, of the politicization of some composers (politicizationseems always to mean left-wing, a right-wing orientation or one that simply acquiesces in the status quo being apparently invisible); it tells, too, of composers' tireless experimentation to find new sources of sound and new ways of organizing and notating these sounds, of their making use of the most sophisticated resources of modern technology where they have been available, and, finally, of their questioning the very basis of western music itself in order to purify and renew it. The writersof these historiesare at pains, whilestressingthe novelty of what has happened, to assure their readers at the same time of the legitimacy of the classical music of this century, by stressing its continuitywith that of the European past. Here, for instance, is a paragraph from a widely-read Introduction to Contemporary Music, aimed explicitly at leading uncommitted non-professional listeners into the world of twentieth-century music: 'At three points in the history of music — as it happens, they were equally distant from one another —the forces of change were so much in the ascendant that the word newbecame a battle cry. Around the year 1300 progressive composers were referred to asmoderni and their art designated as ars nova, 'New Art'. The breakthrough of this modernism produced newrhythmicand harmonic principles as well as basic reforms in notation. The year 1600 is another such landmark. The contemporaries of Monteverdiraised the banner of le nuove musiche, 'The New Music'; expressive melody and the dramatic concept of opera challenged the tradition of religious choral music. Similarly, around 1900 there emerged the New Music, with an explosivenessthat gave On the Decline of a Music 343 rise to many a bitter battle . . . Contemporary music, so rich in its diversity, so excitingly tuned to the spirit of the twentieth century, is the latest — and consequently the most vivid — chapter in man's age-old attempt to impose his artistic intuition on the elusive stuff of sound: that majestic fivethousand -year-old attempt to shape the sonorous material into...