Da música clássica contemporânea...

O (corajoso) artigo que cito, em seguida, é evidentemente provocatório, constituindo – queira-se ou não – uma verdadeira pedrada no charco: parte substancial da criação musical clássica, contemporânea, apresenta afinidades mil com o empalamento.

Posto que a criação é, no meu entender, destinada à fruição pelo outro – o objecto – e não um mero exercício narcísico, e dado que argumentos – cliché (como seja: ”O público é estúpido! Há que educá-lo”), por estas bandas, não vingam, em parte – não em tudo, sublinho – tiro o chapéu ao autor destas palavras:

«After 40 years and 1,500 concerts, Joe Queenan is finally ready to say the unsayable: new classical music is absolute torture - and its fans have no reason to be so smug

During a radio interview between acts at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, a famous singer recently said she could not understand why audiences were so reluctant to listen to new music, given that they were more than ready to attend sporting events whose outcome was uncertain. It was a daft analogy. Having spent most of the last century writing music few people were expected to understand, much less enjoy, the high priests of music were now portrayed as innocent victims of the public's lack of imagination. If they don't know in advance whether Nadal or Federer is going to win, but still love Wimbledon, why don't they enjoy it when an enraged percussionist plays a series of brutal, fragmented chords on his electric marimba? What's wrong with them?

(…)

There is no denying that the people filling the great concert halls of the world are conservative, and in many cases reactionary: reluctant to take a flyer on music that wasn't recorded at least once by Toscanini. They know what they like and what they like is Mozart. There is a childish, fairytale quality to their infatuation with the classics: Beethoven's deafness, Chopin's tuberculosis, Brahms' fixation on Clara Schumann. Modern composers, their stories largely unknown, cannot compete with all this romance and drama.

In New York, Philadelphia and Boston, concert-goers have learned to stay awake and applaud politely at compositions by Christopher Rouse and Tan Dun. But they do this only because these works tend to be short and not terribly atonal; because they know this is the last time in their lives they'll have to listen to them; and because the orchestra has signed a contract in blood guaranteeing that if everyone holds their nose and eats their vegetables, they'll be rewarded with a great dollop of Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn.

(…) I no longer believe that fans of classical music are especially knowledgeable - certainly not in the way jazz fans are. American audiences, even those that fancy themselves quite in the know, roll over and drool like trained seals in the presence of charismatic hacks phoning in yet another performance of the Emperor Concerto. The public likes its warhorses, but it doesn't seem to care how well these warhorses get played. They are particularly susceptible to showboaters like Lang Lang and Izzy Perlman and Nigel Kennedy; they turn out in droves to hear Andrea Bocelli warble his way through the Shmaltzmeister's Songbook. These people may think they care more about music than the kids who listen to hip-hop, but I've been eavesdropping on their conversations for 40 years and the results are not impressive. They know that Clair de Lune is prettier than Für Elise, that Mozart died penniless, and that Schumann went nuts. That's about it.

(…) Last winter, I attended a performance of Luciano Berio's seminal 1968 composition Sinfonia. Two days later, the New York Times reported that the New York Philharmonic gave an "electrifying and sumptuously colourful" reading of this "all-embracing and ingenious" masterpiece. Maybe they did. But the day I heard it, I gazed down from the balcony at a sea of old men snoring, a bunch of irate, middle-aged women fanning themselves with their programmes, and scores of high-school students poised to garrote their teachers in reprisal for 35 minutes of non-stop torture. Sinfonia may be one of the cornerstones of 20th-century music, and the Times critic may have been right in describing the quality of the performance. But he might have noticed that the audience merely tolerated it (…).

(…) It is not the composers' fault that they wrote uncompromising music that was a direct response to the violence and stupidity of the 20th century; but it is not my fault that I would rather listen to Bach. That's my way of responding to the violence and stupidity of the 20th century, and the 21st century as well.

(…)
The debate about what is wrong with the world of classical music has been going on for at least a half a century. (Meanwhile, jazz, lacking the immense state funding to which classical music has access, is literally dying.) Specious arguments dominate the conversation. Why has the public accepted abstract art but not abstract music? (Discordant visual art does not cause visceral pain, discordant music does.) Why does the public accept atonal music in films, but not in the concert hall? (Jaws wouldn't work if the shark's attacks were synchronised with Carmen. We expect sound effects in the movies, but we're not going to pay to hear them in the concert hall.)

(…) Even when the public embraces the new, what it is really looking for is the old. It is hardly surprising that so many composers simply throw in the towel and compose music that will be ignored in their own lifetimes, hoping it will find an audience with posterity.»