Highway to the Danger Zone

Highway to the Danger Zone

By Colin Holter
Our music isn’t just weird and incomprehensible, it’s dangerous.

Written By

Colin Holter

Typing the phrase “adventurous new music” into Google returns around 55,000 results. Although many of these hits seem to have to do with a Sega CD music compilation—probably the only such volume to include both Little Feat and Chubb Rock—a great many have to do with contemporary concert music. “Adventurous” is a popular word to describe new music, as ASCAP’s “Adventurous Programming” awards attest. Makes sense, right? New music is terra incognita, and when we listen to it, we’re embarking on a fantastical journey of self-discovery—an adventure.

It suggests that concert music exists along an axis of safety and risk. There’s a little frisson of transgression that runs down our spine when we talk about new music this way, a frisson I myself have enjoyed more than once: Our music isn’t just weird and incomprehensible, it’s dangerous. It’s like the James Dean of music, whereas the usual program fare is more like Jimmy Stewart. But I’ve been wondering if the price we pay for this ripple of excitement is that we give people a ready-made excuse not to like it.

Safe and risky have pros and cons: Most people behave safely most of the time and take risks every so often; as capitalists, we recognize that risk is essential to growth, but as ex-animals, we err on the side of the “sure thing.” By turning the decision to embrace contemporary art into a risk/reward calculation, “adventurous” has the power to make you feel like a coward if you turn it down. You can be the bigger person by simply walking away, and many do.

Moreover, any discourse about new music that reduces it to a contest of hardcore-ness reduces it to nonart. It may work—sometimes—but it’s fundamentally dishonest, and it allows people who decline to investigate it feel better about themselves for rejecting a smug and rather superficial proposition. What can we do about “adventurous” and its synonyms?