Milton Babbitt was right. He was just right for all the wrong reasons.
Just a few weeks ago I found myself involved in a Facebook spat with a friend of mine who shall remain nameless. I was in the midst of fulminating about how bad the orchestral world was these days, and she kept insisting that the outlook was much brighter than I was picturing. Since then the Dutch government has taken a hatchet to their cultural institutions, another couple American orchestras have disappeared into oblivion, and one of the great orchestras in the world, the Philadelphia Orchestra, has been reduced to functioning like a 3rd rate community ensemble. And that’s the good news. Meanwhile, Norman Lebrecht has weighed in with this article, and no matter what one thinks about him he has pretty much summed up the situation.
Which brings the whole situation back to Milton Babbitt, he of the famous “Who Cares If You Listen?” article. Forget for a moment that the title wasn’t Babbitt’s choice, and that the entire article has frequently been so taken out of context that it has taken on a life of its own. Babbitt was right about one thing:
“The time has passed when the normally well-educated man without special preparation could understand the most advanced work in, for example, mathematics, philosophy, and physics. Advanced music, to the extent that it reflects the knowledge and originality of the informed composer, scarecely can be expected to appear more intelligible than these arts and sciences to the person whose musical education usually has been even less extensive than his background in other fields.”
Babbitt goes on to decry the idea that “music is music,” which in his philosophy means the heresy that “music is just music,” and here lies the issue that is at the root of our current situation. First, the greatest composers always understood that at the root of their greatness was a simple connection to their audience. Even such an iconoclast as Beethoven knew that there was a basic consanguinity that his best music engendered. This is a very simple concept, though one extremely difficult to put into concrete terms. Therein is the beauty of music – the more concrete one tries to make it the less successful it becomes. Exhibit A – Mozart, some of the simplest and most profound music ever produced. It’s also the hardest, because the simpler it is the harder it is to just let it be profound.
Second is that we as a profession spent most of the last 5 decades worrying about the wrong thing. In Lebrecht’s article he correctly states:
“Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as “management”, the natural enemy.”
For all this time there has been the obsession with what the other orchestra is paid. In the interim the whole concept of the Liberal Arts Education has been eviscerated. But no worries, as long as we keep up with Cleveland’s wages. Throughout the country Music Education has been completely removed from the secondary schools, but our orchestra makes almost as much as Chicago. Essentially what said “hard-hat unionism” forgot is that we do not build cars. We make music. Nothing against those who worked in the Detroit car industry (that includes several of my relatives) but you could walk into that kind of job without even a high school degree, learn the job in a few weeks, and have a job for life. In music we start as young as four, spend decades mastering instruments, go to conservatories, and yet no amount of hard work will get you anywhere if you don’t have at least a little talent. You don’t need talent to run a metal press. And then if you’re lucky enough to land a job in a decent orchestra you are essentially living off the largess of a fickle public. You have entered the twilight zone of the non-profit world.
So you need talent, dedication, and then worse of all – an educated public. Instead of worrying about how much Philadelphia was being paid we should have been worrying much more about keeping our public educated. Babbitt was right – most people have absolutely no idea what to make of the most advanced classical music today. But the solution is not for the composer to withdraw into their personal kingdom, rather it is to reinvest in extensive music education. The problem, though, is that education of this kind takes at least two generations to take firm hold in a society, and with the situation that we’re in right now there might not be more than a handful of orchestras left by the time it takes root.
Hi Bill,
Greetings and two cents from Duluth.
Babbitt (with whom I studied privately for two of my four years as a composition major at Juilliard) was wrong. Dead wrong.
The function of music is not to provide us with an intellectual experience; it is to move us. An intellectually educated listener seeking Milton’s intellectual experience spurred by sound might have a good experience (aha – isn’t that cool – there’s the row in inversion!) but it pales in comparison to the quality of an experience in which we absorb sound, lose ourselves in it, and are profoundly moved.
And perhaps this is the principal reason that for all intents and purposes Milton’s music is irrelevant to the listening public.
What’s tragic for us in the decline of musical education is not so much that it taught us facts to enrich an intellectual experience of music, but that it introduced young people to the glories of an aesthetic experience of it.
Let me know when you find a solution!
Markand
Bill, I am shocked! You know full well that it does take talent to run a drill press. There are talentless, well trained hacks everywhere, including on the few remaining production lines in this country and in the orchestra pit. “Talent” emerges when someone is fully engaged and enriched by what they do, from waving a baton to delivering pizza. It’s just another form of love, and some drill press operators love their work.