The New Line Between Now and Then

I’ve had the pleasure to hear two pieces by Béla Bartók in the past two days—his Divertimento for Strings and his 4th string quartet—in concert. I haven’t spent a whole lot of time with Bartók’s music; it hasn’t ever really gripped me one way or the other. That quartet, however, was pretty remarkable, and even since last night it’s given me a lot to chew on as I work on a string quartet of my own. The performance also prodded me to revisit a question that nags me from time to time: For the rank-and-file classical music audience, such as it is, where does “old” music end and “new” music begin? Is Bartók part of the standard rep now? If so, how long has he been in there? How’d he get in the door? And, most pressingly, why Bartók and not Schoenberg (whose music, taken as a whole, I find much more meaningful than Bartók’s)?

I mention Schoenberg specifically because he seems to be the earliest composer whose music is “new” (i.e. taken up selectively or with trepidation by mainstream ensembles). Does it have to do with his Teutonic angst, his wonky academic side, his serial legacy? Search me. This lockout is doubly weird because for many years Schoenberg wrote music so large-R Romantic that it makes Schumann and Brahms seem like they’re holding back. Verklärte Nacht, one such piece, was written in 1899—the 19th century, for crying out loud! A composer friend of mine once said that he could listen to Schoenberg’s pre-dodecaphonic music all day, every day; I might get a little tapped out after a week or so, but I understand where he’s coming from. And not every composer after Schoenberg is similarly “new.” I’ve already mentioned Bartók, but what about Britten, Barber, and Respighi? Nobody has any qualms about programming their works, even though Respighi may have been a fascist.

I’m not the first commentator to observe that the year of “new” demarcation seems to move at a crawl. If we can tentatively periodize the last hundred years into two eras-1900-1945 and 1945-present-when will we see Cowell, Berg, Webern, and Messiaen on programs? When will musicians, as a broad body of professionals, take this music as seriously as they take the old chestnuts? I’m not even proposing that postwar music be folded into the corpus of classics, although I certainly wouldn’t complain. It just hardly seems unreasonable to ask that the repertoire be given a firmware update, so to speak.

In the next few days I’ll be headed to a concert of music by Ruth Crawford Seeger and Charles Ives. I’m excited to hear pieces by these composers, both of whom I value highly. However, I’m a bit miffed, honestly, that the group mounting this performance bills itself as a “new music ensemble,” because Charles and Ruth are not new. If we want our new music ensembles to live up to their names, mainstream classical music outlets have to take up the slack, and the best way for them to start is to give Schoenberg the same rights they afford Bartók.