New Music Could Be So Much More Inviting Sometimes

As far as musicians go, I am about as closed-minded as they come. That is a hazardous thing to admit in a field where willingness to try new things can score gigs. There are just some experiences for which I see little hope of enjoyment or meaning, and I prefer to let them fall on more-expert ears and into more-expert hands. Curmudgeonly though I may be, I am amazed by the tone in conversation often taken by performers and listeners alike regarding music written since World War I, and particularly regarding works written in this century. It scarcely serves composers well – not that composers deserve or need our sympathies.

Generally speaking, I have observed two groups of people when I attend concerts of new music: those who categorically reject all new music, assume dissonance and unanticipated changes to demonstrate deficiency in compositional technique or knowledge, and assume that avant-garde composers are those who cannot write well traditionally; and those who categorically accept all new music from fear of being dismissive, vocally insisting upon their enjoyment of certain qualities of the music in the hopes that this will make them actually enjoy it. Conspicuously absent are those who simply enjoy what they like and avoid the rest, whether it was written two centuries ago or yesterday. In other words, new music makes people afraid to have taste, as though it is frowned upon to have a nonintellectual opinion about a new work.

This, to me, is a great shame, because the stigma is shaping the enjoyment for many people in a way that affects both the audience for new music ensembles, and the level of musical enrichment possible in listeners' daily lives. Like historically-informed early music, mainstage symphonic concerts, and major rock festivals, a well-executed new music concert attended by a receptive and interested audience can have a primal, breathtaking effect that does not need to be described to be felt. By clinging to either disdain for dissonant sounds or timid, generic enjoyment, people are limiting their ability to see what a piece of music can "make" them feel.

Just last week, I attended a concert at the Aesthetic Parlour in Pittsburgh, co-produced by Alia Musica Pittsburgh welcoming new resident artist Ken Ueno. The program featured four main selections that could not have been more different from one another, even though three of the major works were completely improvised. I was not necessarily enchanted by all four pieces of music – another risky admission, given the favor in which I hold Alia Musica as a performance organization, and my newfound fandom of Ken Ueno – but that is not the point. The point is that, for many reasons, this concert served as an excellent, positive example of what new music can be when all of the ingredients for proper appreciation and production come together.

• The Aesthetic Parlour is essentially an expanded living room and guest area in a beautiful old house in Lawrenceville, arguably a current hipster stronghold in Pittsburgh. There was seating for about forty, and by God, that house was packed.
• The audience came from all backgrounds – music students, fine art students, general music fans, rock music fans and musicians, local music scholars, and even other composers – and the close quarters invited, if not begged, conversation among everybody.
• As there was not a true “backstage” entrance, performers were not afraid to change the standard mode of taking the stage. As they walked around and through the seating area, they said hellos and introduced their work without a microphone, in a way that was brief, conversational, and gave just enough idea of their styles to establish a norm from which there were many surprises.
• Most importantly, the performers understood their music, and music in general, and were committed and engaged. “Engaged” here is not a generic term for putting on an intense-looking face, but instead a true sense that these men and women were in character, and understood that music can have more than one character.
  • The opening piece had elements of musique concrète, ambient and industrial techno, free jazz, and classical avant-garde. In practice, this meant periods where the dominant sound quality was audio feedback, and there were a few long tones from saxophone and trombone to rise above the din, with distorted guitar and drum punctuations. Generally speaking, the performers were aloof from one another, something that my classically-trained instincts shunned at first, but it served to add to a sense of communication into a chaotic void. Because each performer was so consistent in his posture and demeanor, it started to almost resemble the avant-garde equivalent of shoegaze.
  • The second piece, the U.S. premiere of Seven Visions of Alchemy by Federico Garcia-De Castro, was the only fully-notated work on the program, and fit much more neatly into the canon of “classical music” that most define for themselves. The performers, flutist Sarah Steranka and cellist Cody Green, carried themselves as the seasoned chamber musicians they are, with eye contact, matching movements that diverged when the music did, and wonderful selling of transitions and character changes.
  • Headline act Ken Ueno is a vocalist – a voice user. This does not mean that we were then presented to a few bel canto aria selections. Ueno specializes in overtone singing, and his improvisation featured this, as well as a sort of perpetuum mobile of whispered vocables that were nothing short of virtuosic, primal screams, and manipulation of a bullhorn to create synthesizer-like effects. His performance energy was inimitable, and essential for the music. With so many rapid changes in the type of sound he was producing, his face, posture, volume, direction, and general sense of emotion were like light switches.

Consider this video, taken from the encore by Garcia De-Castro. The ambient noise from the room unfortunately deprives us of some of those amazing, rapid-fire whispers, but nonetheless, please observe that it is possible to conceive and execute a Tuvan, emocore, slam poetry quasi-scat jazz tune:

Whatever your personal taste regarding this style of music, notice how closely the audience is situated in this venue. The performance was loud at times – in particular, during the first piece, I felt like I was at a seedy rock 'n' roll club – but it always felt intimate, like the swells in sound were encompassing the performers and the audience in the same sphere as the walls rumbled and the chairs rattled. Note the bipolarity in Ueno's part, and the bipolarity with which Ueno performs it, holding the tension in the room until he suddenly releases it by breaking the fourth wall to say, “Thank you very much.” With incredible conviction and talent from all three performers, this improvisation accomplished what so many pieces of music fail to do: it kept an audience silent for four minutes and transported listeners into another world.

It is possible to list the opposites of my bulleted list, and thus spell out some of the negative stereotypes plaguing the typical new music environment. Some concerts take place in the same venues, and exact same mode, as “mainstream” classical concerts, but without changing the means of promotion, draw about a tenth of the audience. Whether your audience is ten or ten thousand, the venue should feel full. Ten listeners can create a wonderful listening environment, but in an empty hall, the atmosphere is stifling for performers.

Then, not to shield performers from too much blame, there are some unwilling to break their conservatory comfort zones, and play with a disengaged, neutral face, eyes locked on their music stands, from downbeat to Fine. This is not encouraged in Romantic orchestral music either, but in Romantic orchestral music, the elements involved are ingrained in our cultural understanding of what “music” is. The entire point of many newer works is that a musical experience can happen without such narrow constraints as rhythm, pitch, and even melody. Listening for other elements that are initially more abstract, such as texture and tone color, we can broaden our definition of music to mean “organized sound” and listen intently to music that may challenge us, or even lead us to feel physically uncomfortable. After all, our culture accepts and expects most other art forms to occasionally be abrasive – why not music?

For this to work, though, the performers have to be paying attention to the elements that they need the audience to notice, and the concerns that lead to Vacant Performer Face Syndrome need to be so well-prepared as to be automatic. If a performer cannot maintain consistent body language through the end of a phrase because the last bar of the phrase is on the top of the next page, or if a performer is not able to conceive of a "phrase," instead seeing a series of disjunct rhythms and scattered notes, that moment was insufficiently prepared.

An empty concert hall, filled with music that the performers do not always fully understand, is sure to leave that mostly-empty audience striving to convince themselves that what they heard was good, instead of saying with conviction that they liked or did not like the experience. For better or for worse, that decisiveness is a much truer measure of the success of a new music concert, and it makes sure that the concert is talked about and is a part of our musical culture. This requires some investment of attention from both performers and audiences.

People understand not to write off Indian food as bad food because it tastes different from Italian food, and yet they shun new music because it is made of different ingredients than it was in past centuries. Like any genre, there is both good and bad new music. Like any genre, different people will define those categories differently. Like any genre, it can be well-understood, even if not instantly. Accepting those three thoughts can accomplish three things: open a new world of sound and feeling to the closed-minded, put the fearfully open-minded at ease, and make the standard audience much less stuffy, welcoming more people to become enthusiastic new music listeners. None of these are bad things. -SB

Written Reflections

1. Do you seek out, or have you ever attended, live concerts of new music? How does your experience relate to your experience with other concerts?
2. Do you notice the body language and level of engagement of the performers when listening to any style of music? Does the visual communication shape your overall enjoyment of the performance?
3. What are some of the things that negatively impact your musical experience at a concert of any style - rock, hip-hop, classical, avant-garde, or even open mic nights at coffee stores?