“You’ll Get Used to [20th Century Music]”
My first intellectual conversations about 20th Century Music came from the last place I would have expected. Over my Summer breaks, I worked for an Italian American restaurant chain local to the Boston area. Having worked for the company for a few years in high school, as I got older, more opportunities within the company came my way. I was told the company had signed a deal with the Boston Red Sox to supply pizza for all of the home games, and they needed someone who was willing to deliver ~700 pizzas every morning to Fenway Park, so I applied and was accepted. The first morning came and I jumped into the truck next to a middle-aged man who I had never met before. It being so early (5 AM), I was not in a talkative mood, but he started playing some very interesting music through the truck’s speakers. I asked, what is that, to which he replied, Berg’s Three Pieces. Shocked (from the music itself, and from my coworker’s choice of music), I asked what led him to that piece of music. It was then he mentioned he was the Wind Ensemble director at a local conservatory, delivering pizzas to help his brother in-law out, who happened to be my manager. A long conversation ensued, lasting seemingly the entire summer. He mentioned his conservatory training, how he studied and was a longtime assistant to Gunther Schuller, and that his research involved Post-Tonal music. When he asked what 20th Century Music I liked, I shyly replied that I did not know much at all. He then told me something that is true to this day, “With 20th Century Music, and all New Music, the more you listen to it, the more you will understand about it. You’ll get used to it.”
While at the University of Florida, I was fortunate to participate in a variety of ensembles that held a lot of 20th Century music in high regard. Not only did the university have an active New Music Ensemble, but the large ensemble directors frequently programmed lesser-known 20th Century composers and pieces. The orchestra director at one point mentioned to me a potentially unique aspect of his thirty-year tenure: he had never played the same piece twice. Despite my initial criticization of this idea, I soon realized the huge array of orchestral music I was ignoring. We performed works such as Kodály’s Háry János Suite, Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky, Debussy’s La Mer, Bloch’s Schelomo, Khachaturian’s Symphony №3, and an entire concert devoted to Leonard Bernstein’s centennial. Every concert cycle I performed with the University of Florida’s Symphony Orchestra was a new set of compositions I had not yet experienced. I attribute most of my newfound love for 20th Century music to performing with this ensemble.
What initially struck me was the high degree of contrast one can observe within 20th Century scores. Despite all of the pieces I listed above being written within 45 years of each other, there is little else connecting them besides the label ‘20th Century Music’. Nowadays, I would argue their unifying factor is that they all could be analyzed through a variety of different theoretical lenses. For those who know me personally, I am a big fan of puzzles, whether it be Jigsaw puzzles, Sudoku, Chess, or any other strategic game. Similarities exist between puzzles and music, whether by speculation or actuality. From an observer’s perspective, one can use their experience and past study of the material to make an educated guess as to the performer’s (or composer’s) next move, but that is all it is, a guess. By enrolling in a Post-Tonal Analysis course at the University of Arizona, I hoped to gain new insight as to how these pieces are crafted. The way this class was structured was that each student picked two pieces to analyze. With only a handful of generic analytical systems described in the introductory weeks of the class, creating a plan to derive a piece’s structure was largely dependent on the student. This led me to some interesting findings within Igor Stravinsky’s Histoire du Soldat and Elliott Carter’s String Quartet №1. Like most analytical projects however, there were just as many questions raised as answers given. How can we create performance variety when this music is so descriptively written? As performers, should we be more focused on accurately representing exactly what is on the page, or is there room for individual or group expression within a new piece? Is this question reflective of the 20th Century, or music performance regardless of era?
To assume any of these questions have a single definitive answer would be naïve, however the debates surrounding current concert programming are encountered every day from the public-school level to the professional stage. Many professional orchestra programs consist of a few pieces including: an overture, a new work, a concerto, and a larger-scale piece. This of course is a gross overgeneralization, but the point still stands: one new work for 2–3 older pieces. It comes to mind that ‘the classics’ are the pieces that sell. We heard many such anecdotes in our previous class meeting. The non-musician public will attend a concert to hear “Da-Da-Da-Dum” (Beethoven 5), but not necessarily to hear a commission receiving its premiere that night. (For the purposes of this post, I write the term non-musicians as people who did not undertake a professional career in music.) Though I certainly do not have an answer for this unfortunate situation, I feel like this programming disparity exists primarily so orchestras remain in business — certainly a concept musicians know all too well. The question remains however, will the nonmusician public ever get used to New Music, that is, not the classics? Only time will tell.
