I've been listening to a lot of contemporary classical/art music lately. Last night I went to the 40th anniversary concert for the Contemporary Chamber Players, who used the occasion to change their name to Contempo (the name was appartently suggested by the wonderful composer Marta Ptaszynska, who advised David Sasso and me on our children's opera last year) and also to prominently (and seemingly without irony) juxtapose George Crumb's Black Angels with some solo jazz piano music by Brad Mehldau. There were also works by Chen Yi and Jonathan Harvey.
I think the inclusion of Mehldau was bizarre. It's true he's the jazz pianist working today who's most successful at creating a fusion with classical elements, but it's all late romantic stuff: difficult meters, polyrhythms, and late tonal harmonies. This kind of experimentation may stretch the limits of jazz, but it's barely even interesting coming after the textural explorations of Black Angels. These are completely different musical languages, and typical jazz listeners just don't have the musical vocabulary to deal with textural rather than melodic or rhythmic lines. This isn't meant as a criticism of jazz, or of Mehldau, whose music is plenty complex. But simply putting these two kinds of music on the same stage won't be sufficient to create a common audience.
Other ideas for building an audience for art music? I think a great deal of progress could be made with some simple, direct explication of what the hell is going on in the music. Contemporary static arts have their own layers of obfuscating pomposity, but I've always felt that the huge success of conceptual art is thanks in large part to the playful writing about it -- both by the artists themselves and critics. Where is that playfulness in writing about new music? Reading the program notes for some of these concerts, it's as though there's no consciousness about just how obscure the medium is. Instead, there's this almost high church liturgical attitude. Yuck.
Post a comment