1. Should the audience for contemporary music become broader? Should it become narrower, or perhaps deeper? Should the audience acquire the shape of a pear, or perhaps of a hearing funnel?
I'll leave such questions to the policy makers who first invented criteria to force contemporary music to meet standards that have little to do with music. Criteria come and go and I warmly sympathize with those whose daily job it is to ward off the belittling advances of those who believe contemporary music, or even classical music per se, is – to quote Hans Abbing - "simply too expensive."
As the ongoing international banking bail out makes abundantly clear, money is never the issue on our hemisphere, not even when those who can help themselves appeal for help. The reluctance on the part of politics and policy makers to spend more generously on matters that, by all means, make a difference to the way our culture looks, sounds, feels, smells, tastes, thinks and works, should not guide our thoughts here.
Hence, rather than internalizing policy criteria such as "broad" or "diverse" audiences, and asking how we can contribute to the realization of such targets, I'd suggest we take a little more distance.
2. The question of "contemporary music and the public" is almost as old as contemporary music itself. As Morag Grant, who is the author of the book Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics, once put it,
Picture a new music festival, any new music festival, and the picture will include the following: subvention from the state or, less frequently, from a commercial enterprise; a small public, including a fanatical majority who know each other at least by sight and are, in extreme cases (the UK), willing to travel the length and breadth of the country (Huddersfield, in November) to sip the nectar of the forbidden fruit. And, let us not forget that final, essential element: a podium discussion entitled 'New Music in Search of its Public'. Forget, for a moment, the more intellectual difficulties of sorting out rationality or irrationality, the proper way to approach Webern, or what really happened in Darmstadt in 1958: the most abiding and problematic cliché of all with regard to new music is that no one wants to listen to it. The critique thus implied by the public through their absence is not—pace Babbitt—'Who cares if you listen?', but the simpler and more devastating 'Who cares?'
So here we are, today, performing the ritual started by our forebears. Are we in the right position to perform the ritual faithfully? can we speak the proper phrases? can we balance, as participants are required to do, between self-assertion and self-conscious humility? can we make tentative suggestions that might relieve our plight? I am sure we can.
And even if we, sitting behind this table, are not in charge of the budgets, not presiding over concert venues, not in charge over culture politics and, hence, have no power whatsoever to change whatsoever, we can in fact transform this impossibility into a starting point for possibility. Let's therefore imagine, imagine all the people, imagine all the people listening for today's composed music. It’s easy if you try. After all, we're not performing this ritual at a new music festival - but in a theater.
Imagine.
3. The space is empty and dark. In the middle of the hall there is a chair. One chair only, illuminated from above by a single spot light. Opposite the chair, at about twenty meters, there is a stage where, in the dark, a black grand piano awaits patiently the unfolding of events. At the door, a listener appears, a single individual who is told to sit wherever he wants to. And every time the succeeding listeners, for there are many, enter the hall they invariably decide to take the chair. Once they sit down the spot light shifts toward the stage where, at the same time, a young pianist enters. She walks over to the grand piano, bows, and starts to play.
Let's go back one step.
Enters the first listener. It is Friedrich Nietzsche. He sits down leisurely and leans back in a fashion not very typical of him. His face shines with happiness and he blinks. "I am the last man," he says, in a quiet and confident tone. We know he is acting: this is the last man from Zarathoustra, the man for whom the earth has become small and who lives a life of small happiness. This is the man who has lost his power to desire, as well as his power to despise himself. "I just returned from Bayreuth," the man continues in a whisper. "Parsifal, transcription for piano. That was a good performance. Lovely people, lovely people. Our Wagner was ein guter Kerl. No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse. It's what happened to Nietzsche. He saw things - things beyond things. He heard, he heard profoundly - and he perished. No, that we should never allow us to happen. We love repetition. We, who have discovered happiness – the eternal happiness of musical miniatures." The man blinks and leaves the venue, in no hurry.
Enters the second listener. It is Theodor Adorno. He immediately seizes the situation and takes position. The loneliness and darkness of the situation appeal to him. It smells like autonomy. Perhaps this is the hardest, the most rare and radical thing to get, to experience. Will this concert performance produce anything that comes near it? He frowns, sitting down while he watches the spot light going up and down between him and the stage, like a pedulum, a dialectic of, say, enlightenment. His mind wanders in distraction: "will this venue," he thinks by himself, "this temple of the new consensus, ever be able to subtract itself from the powers of administration? Will anything that is performed within its ideological, acoustic, and regimental coordinates produce the experience of autonomy? In truth, the venue where he is sitting sells itself under the devious slogan of "Concert Hall of the 21st Century," where in fact it was built as a concert hall of the 20th century. Its little lies announce that anything of the kind that he, Adorno, had described as a possibility for hope – for music, for us – has already fallen pray to a Disneyland style remake. No, the game is over. Before the pianist arrives on stage he gets up, glances into the pitch dark and strides toward the door.
Enters the third and final listener. It's an art-minded customer. He sits down comfortably and bends over to grab from his Freitag bag a book. Yes: a book. He opens it to start reading but – alas – the light turns away and makes it difficult for him to continue reading. While the pianist starts playing he bends over again and takes out his cell phone. In his typical handy fashion he composes an sms to his friend Hans to tell him about this wonderful experience of New Art that he is having. It's music by a young Dutch composer, whose subsidized world premiere sounds well in the hands of such a skilled performer – a winner of the Gaudeamus Interpreters Award. The music itself seems to be doing other things as well, it appears as though it is listening to music.
When he's finished typing he cleverly uses the light of his phone to do anyway what circumstances prevent him to do: read his book while listening to the music. The customer is accustomed to optimizing his experience. And he expects there to be options to work with: his book, his phone, his music, he may even want to plug in his headset to modulate the entire experience. Whatever he decides to do, boredom is what he shall never have to go through. Yet, his infinite connectedness tends to produce ever growing shades of grey in his life. He hopes for, and even silently anticipates, the implosion of the web he lives in – and that's why he has come to this concert performance. Either to get more connections or to experience implosion. What, he asks himself, would such an implosion be like? How would such an event enter the horizon of his infinite connectedness? And what would the edge feel like, once this rupture has occurred?
But before he can give this more thought the concert is over. He walks over to the stage and exchanges his cell phone recording with the performer. They chat a little and wave goodbye.
Living for today.
4. The three scenes described here frame different epochs of listenership. What they have in common is a vision of what it means to be contemporary. Sitting in their chair each tries to find coordinates for an orientation in listening. This orientation is shot through with the realization that there can be no access to the present in any simple and immediate fashion. What we, contemporaries, face when we look into our own time is, in the words of Giorgio Agamben, a bundle of obscurity ("Contemporain est celui qui reçoit en plein visage le faisceau de ténèbres qui provient de son temps"). Hence, I would like to suspend any quick decisions as to where we stand, at present, in our "own" time.
In the course of modern history, listening to music has become intertwined with questions of selfhood. Listening interrogates its own limits, that is, the limits of using music in order to mould, or invent, a form of existence. Our own time, which tends to substitute solutions for answers, tends to be too quick to decide about the value, or meaning, of musical experience. Rather than proposing solutions on the basis of an analysis of the current state of musical culture (as we find, for instance, in Abbing), I would suggest to bracket this very gesture. Why do we think that musical culture should receive its marching orders from sociological, musicological, economical or any other account of the present?
Let's not pretend that we are less contemporary, less confronting Agamben's bundle of obscurity, than we do. And let's do so in the name of music.
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