Where does new music belong?

When I was 16, a concert changed my life. I've written about it here before: it was the London Symphony, under Kent Nagano, playing Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise. Read my piece from 2002 if you want to know that story; my point here is to say that that one concert was sufficient to get me hooked on new music in general.

In the two or three years following that evening, I actively sought out all the new music I could find. Most of it was played at the Purcell Room in London, one of the most acoustically perfect concert halls in the world, small (and subsidised) enough that adventurous programming was welcomed with open arms. It was there that I learned about all the big names of the post-war classical music world: Boulez, Xenakis, Cage, Stockhausen, and more relatively unknown British composers than you could shake a stick at. I basically got my classical education by working backwards from these guys: occasionally a Webern piece, say would come up, I'd get into him, and then at the next Webern concert I'd find something even more mainstream, and so on.

Meanwhile, my mother, emboldened by my enthusiastic response to the Messiaen, started educating me on her favourites, especially Bartók. Wonderfully, Sir Georg Solti was still very much alive and active on the London scene, and I went to many concerts he conducted of his beloved fellow Hungarian. To this day, Solti remains the conductor I feel most fondly towards: I can still vividly remember his kindly face, and the blood-quickening sounds he could get out of the LSO once he really got his teeth into something like Mahler's First. There are many conductors I respect, but Solti had a knack of engendering something closer to love – I daresay Leonard Bernstein did something similar in New York.

Solti was one of those conductors who inspires enough devotion among his listeners that they will follow him to pastures new. Simon Rattle is another: when he turned people on to classical music, it wasn't a narrow swathe of Brahms and Beethoven, but a vast range of music from Handel and Monteverdi to Henze and Messiaen, and beyond.

Rattle is one of those conductors – Michael Tilson Thomas, in San Francisco, springs to mind as another – who makes successful attempts to place new music at the heart of any concert season. Such people are rare, however, and the example of Nicholas Kenyon, who always throws an enormous quantity of new music into any Proms season, only really goes to show what is possible when you're supported by Auntie Beeb rather than octogenarian subscribers who start getting nervous when they see Richard Strauss on the bill.

A couple of weeks ago, the Toronto Symphony caused a small stir in classical music circles when they announced, in the words of Greg Sandow, that "they're going to banish new music from their regular season, at least for this year, and stick it off by itself in a few concerts next spring". (I can't link to the original story, because it's behind a subscriber firewall, and there doesn't seem to be any kind of press release on the official Toronto Symphony website.) Sandow, along with Alex Ross, refused to condemn this action: if new music isn't working in what Ross calls a "ghastly ritual, generating reams of five- and twenty-minute pieces that serve no vital function", then why not try an alternative method of delivering it?

While I understand where Sandow and Ross are coming from, I fear the Toronto experiment is doomed to failure. Full-scale symphony orchestras are expensive animals, and new-music concerts aimed at under-30 members coaxed with $10 tickets are guaranteed to lose large amounts of money. The minute that the orchestra runs into budget difficulties (and there isn't an orchestra in the world which doesn't run into budget difficulties), the new-music concerts will be the first to go. New music simply doesn't work as a bolted-on afterthought: it has to be an integral part of what an orchestra does, or it is nothing.

One way of doing this, of course, is for an orchestra to specialise in new music. The experience of the Brooklyn Philharmonic is disheartening, but a look across the pond at the London Sinfonietta shows that it is possible to run a successful, high-profile orchestra with consistently interesting and daring programming.

In the US, the prime example, although of course it is not an orchestra and therefore doesn't have nearly the same kind of struggles with overhead costs, is the Kronos Quartet. I went to see them perform Terry Riley's Sun Rings at BAM last night, and it was quite a sight to behold, even before the performance started. The large opera house was completely sold out, even though there were three separate performances featuring nothing but this single piece by a composer who's mainly known for one work he wrote in 1964.

Clearly, there's a huge audience for new music if it's done right. And the main lesson of last night's concert, for me, was that the audience really has to be able to trust the performers. A couple of posts ago, I worried about going to see a new opera at Glyndebourne: evidently, I don't completely trust the house to put on a great show. And the Death of Klinghoffer fiasco last December was proof enough for anybody that the Brooklyn Philharmonic and BAM are not the kind of brand names which can be trusted with new music.

The Kronos Quartet, however, with more than 30 years of history, has managed to create a brand name which people know they can trust. The score for Sun Rings did not require particularly virtuoso playing: probably there are a dozen other quartets who could have sat in those chairs and done an equally good job. But the production here was immaculate: no costs were cut, the very best designers and singers were hired, and everybody worked with each other to create a whole which was greater than the sum of its parts – quite the opposite of the regrettable Klinghoffer situation.

I'm not going to say much about Sun Rings itself: while I greatly enjoyed the concert, and am extremely glad I went, I have serious misgivings about the final movement, with visuals straight out of the annual report of a major multinational polluter and an annoying woman's voice intoning something about One Earth One People One Love. Other than that, the piece is excellent, and the video footage of the surface of the sun, especially, was glorious.

My broader point is that the audience clearly had a great experience last night, and, if given the choice, most of them will come back for more. There are many wonderful works written for full orchestra rather than for string quartet which could get a similar reaction. What New York lacks – what, I daresay, America lacks – is an institution which has successfully invested itself in performing those pieces. The problem, as I see it, with the Toronto approach is that if it doesn't work, little if any harm is done to the orchestra as a whole. New music is hard work, and if the costs of failure are low or even negative, then no one's going to expend much effort in making sure it works. The Kronos Quartet managed to sell out BAM for three successive nights because their audience knows that they care about new music, and have a history of getting it right. There are precious few other US organisations about whom the same can be said.

Posted by Felix at 16:48 EST

Comments

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Posted by: Stefan at 8:20 EST, October 12, 2004

Another excellent group: Bang on a Can. Very enjoyable concerts and they are not afraid to teach a little. I've been to three concerts that were packed with interested music-lovers eager to learn.

Posted by: jen at 22:23 EST, October 15, 2004