Contemporary Classical Music or "New Music"

If you go to a concert given by a professional symphony orchestra these days, it is highly likely that the programme will contain one or two mainstream classical works, bundled with one or two contemporary works. This is the deliberate policy of the concert promoters, who wish to give contemporary works a hearing. So they tempt audiences with a Beethoven symphony and a Rachmaninov Piano Concerto, and throw in a couple of new works, hoping that they can still fill the auditorium.

When I have attended such concerts, I have never been able to remember one single melody or tune from the contemporary works. I've yet to be pleasurably surprised by any other aspects of this music. In fact, lots of these modern "serious" compositions seem to be deliberately discordant, painfully pugnacious, and fiercely forgettable.

I once went to a concert by the ACO (Australian Chamber Orchestra) in which Richard Tognetti played Mendelssohn's violin concerto in the first half. This was exquisite music, played brilliantly by Richard and the orchestra. I enjoyed the afterglow during the interval, having experienced Mendelssohn's sublime music so superbly presented. Then came the crunch in the second half of the concert. The violins of the ACO were wired up for amplification, a drum kit was wheeled on stage, and the ACO performed jointly with "The Whitlams", which turned out to be some kind of rock group. The wailing singing, the discordant and highly amplified string sounds, and the sheer volume of noise left me with crushing headache. I walked out of that concert feeling like an invalid. The pleasure of the violin concerto had been entirely wiped out by the pain inflicted in the second half.

Since about 1908, composers of Contemporary Classical Music have deliberately moved away from the traditional major and minor scales used by previous generations of composers. In their place they have substituted the chromatic scale, which they usually call the "12-tone scale". They deliberately try to avoid sounding any one note more often than any other, so there is no feeling of a home keynote. Each of the 12 notes appears an equal number of times in the composition. This music is often referred to as atonal music, dodecaphony, or twelve-tone technique.

Schoenberg (born in Austria, 1874-1951) invented these compositional techniques. He went further, defining a systematic mathematical way of writing music, based on transformations of a primary row of the 12 tones, placed in a random order, rather than as an ascending chromatic scale. These transformations involved playing the series backwards, or transposing the row up or down a certain interval, or both. Many or all the possible combinations of these transformations are then joined together, sometimes serially, sometimes contrapuntally, to create the final composition. The term used to describe the result is serial music.

Since Schoenberg and his pupils started the trend, his ideas have been enthusiastically taken up by Music Conservatories around the world, and these atonal and serial methods of composition form one of the most important parts of their musical teaching. New composers emerge from these establishments fully trained in atonal and serial techniques, so naturally, their own compositions employ them. Professors of music promote these works, striving to have them played at symphony and chamber concerts and on the radio, and to have them recorded. It seems likely, these days, that if a student attempted to write new music in a traditional tonal style, and submitted it to the Conservatory professors for examination, it would be laughed out and totally rejected.

It is a good philosophy to try anything once. You might like it. So if you've never heard atonal or serial music, give it a go. I've provided some links to web sites where you can listen to music by Schoenberg.

Wikipedia on Serialism
Listen to Schoenberg
The trouble with contemporary classical music.. by David Hunt

Personally speaking, I don't like this sort of music at all. It sounds awful, even painful, to me. The piano works sound to me remarkably similar to the music played by an 10 month-old baby using his elbows and fists to hit the piano keyboard. I am certain that the concert halls would be almost empty if the programme featured this sort of contemporary work exclusively. If you like music that has good tunes in it, try out Musical Discovery Themes on a 14 day free trial. It has over 1100 tuneful themes from the classical and folk repertoires.