Someone once told me they saw a sign in a bookstore that proclaimed: “Read the good books first. You won’t have time to read them all.” It’s true. Resources are limited. Time is limited. And as much as I may hate to admit it, to spend time with one thing is to take time that could be invested in attention to another. We all have these choices to make, to the degree we have choices to make, and to the degree we realize the choices we have.
I am the harshest critic of contemporary music. I am suspicious of marketing and the avant-garde being so easily conflated and confused as it is, and beyond this I think "art" composers are too often allowed to get away with far too much sloppiness, inconsideration, and generally laziness, all in the name of modern artistic license (what Philistine can challenge them/us, after all?). To be fair, it’s somewhat hard to blame them when the system in place, in the US at least, strongly incentivizes this general behavior - quantity over quality, clever but baseless marketing tactics, and an obsession with recreating pretty formulas long since discovered safe enough to continue wringing out ovations. (E.g., not a whole lot different then some of your typical market economy behavior.) But still, it’s not why I got involved in all this, it turns my stomach, and even more to the point, I don’t completely understand how a new music “artist” could live with so much compromise. But then, I have heard it takes all kinds.
I’ve listened to a fair bit of new music by now. I know a bunch of people who’ve heard a lot more than me, indeed, but nonetheless I’m not a spring chicken. We all listen for different things and we all need different things. However, when I listen to a new work of contemporary art music now, I know what I’m after and I’m unapologetic in my brutality. Life is just too short and there is just too much great stuff out there and I have a lot of looking left to do.
To begin with, a work needs to reach in some way viscerally during the first hearing. This way can be small or atypical, but during this first listening there must be something that I feel physically or emotionally or somehow experientially beyond simply the math in my head. If I don’t experience anything during this first time, it’s likely I will never listen to the piece again. I am alive and I need life in my music. No, very little is impossible – a friend may push me to give it another listen, it may be by a composer I already admire, and so forth, yes, yes. However, I know that I have had amazing experiences with music, I know what these are like, and I really don’t have a lot of time for much other than the extraordinary. People say “it was nice.” Ugh, what a bore. This music that I love pushes edges, challenges, creates new sound experiences. Give me love or give me hate: “Nice” feels like an anathema.
But that’s only part of it. There is, obviously, a great deal of music that accomplishes the aforementioned in spades, but that we still just don’t care that much about, that won’t make a significant impact, and that we wouldn't be able to develop a developing relationship with over time. What I want is to become curious through listening, to feel something, and then to investigate and discover beyond this the work’s depth, the artist’s meticulous consideration. This is the great balance: seeing the "Pietà" and then reading "The Agony and the Ecstasy." There is something so satisfying, so holistically fulfilling artistically to experience a work like this, a work that is for me complete. And this rare thing is what I begin to look for when I first listen to a new work of contemporary art music, and all I feel I really have time for within the space that this precious, pregnant music occupies in my life.
