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When I shared a recording of György Kurtág’s music with a friend, he wrote “after listening to this, it sounds to me like more of a soundscape. To my ears it doesn't meet the traditional definition of music as pleasing sound, rhythm, harmony, melody, etc. and an expression of human emotion.”

‍Them’s fighting words.

To state the obvious, one person’s definition of “pleasing sounds” can be another’s fingernails against a blackboard.

- The tritone, banned in the Middle Ages by the Catholic church as “the devil’s interval,” is not considered dissonant in Hungary.  

- Gangsta Rap, with its staccato rhythms and violent lyrics, was “a reflection and product of the often violent lifestyle of American inner cities afflicted with poverty and the dangers of drug use and drug dealing.” (Encyclopedia Britannica)

- When the composer Louis Spohr, Beethoven’s friend, heard Beethoven’s late quartet, Opus 127 (which we are playing this summer) he described it as “an indecipherable, uncorrected horror.”

- Famously, Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” caused riots at its premiere in Paris in 1913. It is now standard repertoire on orchestra programs.

Additionally, “expression of human emotion” sounds like it makes sense but actually says nothing. Shostakovich loves passages where he wants you to play mechanically and without emotion - which, of course, is a kind of emotion. Emotion runs the gamut from happy to sad to angry to anxious and disturbing. Does anyone go to a concert to listen to elevator music? Heck, even Disney movies have truly disturbing parts.

This summer, we’ll be performing John Cage’s controversial work, “4’33” which, even for me, pushes the envelope. It asks the question “what is music?” Is birdsong music, the sound of a passing train? If not, does Messiaen employing birdsong in a piece or Steve Reich using the sounds of a train, does that then make it music?  

In a terrific article in the New Yorker (“Searching for Silence, John Cage’s Art of Noise” by Alex Ross, he wrote:

‍““4'33"…has been called the “silent piece,” but its purpose is to make people listen. “There’s no such thing as silence,” Cage said, recalling the première. “You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”

‍Nearly six decades after the work came into the world, “4'33" is still dismissed as “absolutely ridiculous,” “stupid,” “a gimmick…” Such judgments are especially common within classical music, where Cage, who died in 1992, remains an object of widespread scorn. In the visual arts, though, he long ago achieved monumental stature…He is considered a co-inventor of “happenings” and performance art. Cage emulated visual artists in turn, his chief idol being the master conceptualist Marcel Duchamp. The difference is that scorn for avant-garde art has almost entirely vanished. A Times editorial writer made an “emperor’s new clothes” jab at Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” when it showed at the Armory, in 1913. Jackson Pollock, too, was once widely mocked. Now the art market bows before them…

‍The simplest explanation for the resistance to avant-garde music is that human ears have a catlike vulnerability to unfamiliar sounds, and that when people feel trapped, as in a concert hall, they panic. In museums and galleries, we are free to move around, and turn away from what bewilders us.

‍Morton Feldman, another avant-garde musician with an eye for the wider artistic landscape, once said, “John Cage was the first composer in the history of music who raised the question by implication that maybe music could be an art form rather than a music form.” Feldman meant that, since the Middle Ages, even the most adventurous composers had labored within a craftsmanlike tradition. Cage held that an artist can work as freely with sound as with paint: he changed what it meant to be a composer, and every kid manipulating music on a laptop is in his debt.”

See you in August,

‍David Yang, Artistic Director