Just chiming in (and right out)...
Again having scanned fast what's been said, I'd just like to say that Williams has in fact composed a symphony, and, well, it is not that great... I don't know why he hasn't tried his hand at it again - maybe he is not that interested / not getting commissioned for one, he has a big catalogue of concerti, people must have concluded that his strength is concertante music.
However the real reason for my posting, is that I see here parroted what we repeatedly were spoon-fed at university (at gunpoint), namely regarding the so-called "bravery" and "courage" of the avant-gardists against "ignorance" and "opposition" (actually they were happily disregarded). Don't make me laugh and cry:
Off hand I cannot think of one avant-gardist who "bravely" abandoned a highly profitable and musical career (ex. the Berlin Phil. and Furtwangler begging for their work, audiences wailing outside their front door for more works, etc.), in order to investigate and penetrate those misty, higher planes of atonality/microtonality/concretality/what have you.
Rather the contrary! When atonalists finally conquered academia (and therefore controlled higher music education) in the late 40s early 50s, they became totalitarian and for decades "nobody" could get a degree composing even chromatically. If they did, they were derided, and forced into propriety (modernism). It was actually courageous and brave to rebel against such blinkered, dead-ended boundaries, at a time when Sibelius, Strauss, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Britten, Copland, and even Stravinsky (before 1951), were considered irrelevant and/or passé! Whereas Messiaen (barely), Varèse, Boulez, Stockausen, and Nono were the torch-bearers of musical composition... Yeah, right... Experimentation, "breaking the barriers", whatever you wish to call it, is brave only when you have to gain from the alternative. Schoenberg was a bottom-third / fourth rate tonal composer for example, and he knew it! His enormous ego propelled him psychologically to heights unattainable to him in the traditional way, and I believe that all-powerful need for acknowledgment and compositional status was at least part of what led him to originality and dodecaphony. Yes, the same for his students; great musicians, not as great composers (not compared to Strauss, Mahler, Sibelius, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, etc.)
I also disagree that atonality was the natural extension/evolution of tonality even though Schoenberg tried to pass it as such. I am in the minority on this one too, as composition faculties around the globe will tell you otherwise. To me, there is a great difference between bending something (no matter how stretched or distorted) and breaking it - or in this case breaking away from it. I might discuss the ridiculousness of dodecaphony as equality (Schoenberg, etc.), or bolshevistic equality (Adorno, etc.) amongst music pitches another time.
Suffice to say that Schoenberg will in the near future be proven correct (if egomaniacally so, but justifiably), that his compositional method would have ensured German musical dominance for 100 years. He didn't foresee the globalizing influence of his style (or didn't say if he did).
Are there interesting, compelling atonalists? Yes (for me Ligeti, Xenakis, Crumb, among others). Are there wrist-slashingly tedious hacks in tonal music? Oh baby!
But that's in the past. Crumb is alive but he's past. For me music is going nowhere and fast in the 21st century, and it is not an argument against this that people today can compose any damn way they please... That doesn't mean that music is going anywhere. The difference, in my view, of today to the past (say 1970s and before), is that the "leading" names in 'serious' composition (not soundtracks), are minor figures, without the personality to generate titanic stylistic currents, or any landmark works (to my knowledge). And I'm referring to the last 30 years+ so enough time has elapsed for any such work to have shone.
In one of my radio productions in 2014, as part of the station's WWI referential broadcasts, I enumerated some of the musical works that were composed during that World War decade: Petrouchka, Rite of Spring, Jeux, Daphnis and Chloe, The Planets, Prometheus, Symphony no.5 (Sibelius), An Alpine Symphony, The Three-Cornered Hat, Piano Concerto no.2 and Violin Concerto n.1 (Prokofiev), The Wooden Prince, etc., and these are just examples of some of the orchestral music during that decade! Should I move to chamber and solo works? (Pierrot Lunaire, L'Histoire du Soldat, String Quartet no. 2 - Bartok, Debussy's sonatas and preludes, etc.), or opera? And then compare all that to this decade we are proudly (and relatively peacefully - should I say numbly?) traversing?..
Yeah, that's what I thought...
Hi Errikos,
Thank you for this excellent post. Your description of the tyranny of the atonalist, avant-garde in academia matches my personal experience. In fact I would agree with almost everything in your post. The list of compositions from the WWI decade is quite striking and brings into sharp focus just how baren our landscape of worthwhile new music has become. I place the blame squarely on the shoulds of the atonalist avant-garde.
In the past, audiences for concert music seem to have been built by new composers. The excitement of a new creation of great music kept concert music exciting and fresh. The lack of great yet accessible new concert music has taken a terrible toll. Orchestras all over the USA are struggling to bring in audiences and stay financially solvent. It seems the only real excitement is generated when a new concert centers around film music.
Paul