Students of composition have cause to be anxious. Despite their great commitment to their work, they are threatened with complete extinction. Every young composer is aware of the dangers of dedicating his or her future to a profession that may not have a future of its own.
There is only one demon to blame for this phenomenon. The ongoing debate over the “decline” of Classical music rages furiously in circles of musical purists, to the extent that it distracts almost completely from any actual compositional activity. As it leaks into the national media, the debate forces us to focus on the sea of grey hair that accompanies every performance of a Brahms symphony or Mozart concerto, and to wonder why young people are unable to appreciate Classical music as they once were. Have they been brainwashed by consumerism? Or has the advent of popular culture taken its toll on more traditional arts? One needs only to glance at the website www.musoc.org to get an idea of how far this argument can be taken.
Of course, none of this is really true. Hordes of young composers are composing all the time; it’s just that a large proportion of self-proclaimed lovers of Classical music are uninterested. Why risk attending a premiere of an unknown work by an unknown composer when you could go just as easily go listen to the London Symphony Orchestra play Mahler and guarantee yourself a great time? Thus a cycle of historical validation is born, in which only those great works of the great composers are cared about; and audiences are left disillusioned over why there are no twenty-first century equivalents of Beethoven or Mozart, all the while unwilling to try to find them. The culture of Classical music has entered a self-fulfilling crisis.
The BBC Proms – the world’s largest classical music festival – is always a good place to witness this phenomenon. The festival never fails to showcase great new works by living composers, but these pieces are generally received with a sense of tolerance, not anticipation. They end up feeling like gaps between performances of the favourites, and suffer from a palpable dip in enthusiasm.
There was no better example this year than the premiere of Mark Anthony-Turnage’s Hammered Out. The piece, so blatantly an orchestrated version of Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” that any youthful ears would instantly have spotted the link, was scheduled awkwardly between performances of Barber and Sibelius, and was thus ill-suited to the audience. As a result, Turnage’s conscious tip of the hat to youth culture went largely unnoticed by the audience and press alike. This was music written deliberately for young people, and yet the circumstances were unfortunate enough for it to go unappreciated.
We may well complain about young people’s disinterest in Classical music, but in order to engage young people we need to recognise it as an art form with its place in the present as well as the past. It is the responsibility of music lovers to give living composers the attention that they deserve, to provide a platform for the musical present separate from the museum of the concert hall, and to breathe some life into an art form that is so often mistaken to be dead.
