This way there be dragons...

Bernard Holland had a column in Sunday's New York Times that really grabbed my attention. It was about the role of composers in the concert experience, and it expressed, in words far more organized and eloquent than I could come up with, much of what I believe to be true about late 20th-century music and those who wrote it.

The column starts out by repeating a question every critic has either been asked or asked himself: namely, how one should prepare for a world premiere, when there's no score to study and no recording to consult for perspective. With so much new music layered in complexity, how can even an educated listener hope to be ready to offer an assessment of a completely new work after one hearing?

Holland doesn't like the implications of the question: "Haven’t we got things backward? Shouldn’t composers be preparing for me rather than me for them?" That may seem flip, but it expresses the beginnings of the frustration that those of us in this business hear year after year from members of our audience. I can't count the number of times that some intelligent friend of mine has looked pleadingly at me after a concert featuring a work by a contemporary composer and whimpered, "Did you like that piece?" It's as if they can't allow themselves to believe their own distaste without having it confirmed by a professional.

This just shouldn't be the way things work. Composers (especially those in the business of writing dense, academic scores that sound more like aural representations of calculus equations than music) have spent a lot of time over the past several decades blasting away at symphony orchestras for not playing more new music, while conveniently ignoring the undeniable fact that the programming of new music didn't decline precipitously until virtually the entire music world fell under the spell of a generation of composers seemingly dedicated to the deliberate alienation of the listener. (see also rows, tone) Not only did these composers and their advocates in the press delight in the discomfort and hostility of the average concertgoer, they viciously attacked or studiously ignored any composer impudent enough to continue making use of such supposedly passé concepts as tonality or emotion.

This era is mercifully over, and has been for at least 15 years (although certain modernist bigwigs with friends in high places are still inexplicably held up as shining examples of what composers should be in certain academic and musical circles.) Most of today's best composers are writing music that, while certainly challenging in comparison to much of what you can hear on the radio, is accessible enough to the average listener that it won't trigger an immediate fight-or-flight reflex. More importantly, young composers seem to be granted greater freedom than in decades past to experiment with different styles and find their own voice rather than being pressured to adhere to a rigid ideology that equates impenetrable complexity with intelligent artistry.

To me, the great tragedy of the era in which new music was used as an intellectual cudgel with which audiences could be beaten is that even in 2007, when my orchestra is preparing to premiere a new work that I know for a fact they'll be able to absorb and enjoy on first hearing, I look out into the crowd before the first downbeat, and see hundreds of tense and worried faces attached to intelligent, open-minded people who are steeling themselves for the worst. Listeners have become so used to being confused and taken advantage of by the composers of the past that they can't help but assume that they're going to hate what's coming from a composer of today. And that's a damn shame.

The good news is that it doesn't seem to take much to break down those fears. Bear with me for a story: A few years back, the Minnesota Orchestra was premiering a brand new work by a composer of some international renown, as we do on a somewhat regular basis. We'd been rehearsing it all week with varying degrees of success, and as the concert loomed, we found out that the composer would not be able to attend, due to ill health. This was a shame, because we had been hoping that he would speak to the audience about the work, which was very complex and dark, before we played it, thus perhaps preparing them for what to expect.

Instead, Osmo took the microphone to speak about the piece, and everyone in the room was amazed by what he said. Right off the bat, he confessed that when he first saw the score, he had thought, "Oh, no." The piece was so esoteric and academic that he feared that neither the orchestra nor the listeners would be able to get their minds around it enough to make the experience of listening worth anything. Osmo further confessed that, even after days of rehearsal, he still wasn't sure whether he liked the piece. But, he added with a laugh, "what does Vänskä know? You will have your own opinions, and if we are playing the piece well, you will be able to hear with your own ears." It was an unexpectedly profound moment, even as the audience laughed at the joke. A conductor had just given a roomful of listeners full permission to hate a piece of music that they had paid to hear. All he asked was that they listen with an open mind.

After that concert, I cornered every audience member I could find, and asked what they'd thought of the piece. (I hated it, myself, but didn't let on.) Lots of them thought it was lousy - a few liked it. But the difference between these listeners and the ones I usually hear from after a tough premiere was that all of them were smiling, even the ones who had no use for the piece. Osmo had given them credit for being intelligent adults, capable of drawing their own conclusions about music, and that made them far more willing to engage with the piece than they would have been otherwise. I've often thought that if Osmo's speech could be replayed before every new or unfamiliar work we play, our listeners would wind up liking a far higher percentage of what we play for them.

Holland sums it all up better than I can: "Composers ought to write anything they want. And how nice it is that lovers of Duparc or Ned Rorum can gather in small recital halls and listen to the songs they wrote. Let explorers of microtonal imagery or computer-generated randomness revel in their exclusivity. The Internet seems made for niches of specialized interests; and if Milton Babbitt disciples want to crawl into one and exchange examples of combinatoriality, let us leave them to it. [But] for thinking big, you need to need the people... Giving composers the luxury of being important and disliked debilitates music."