A Garden for Music

On occasion I propose a mind-experiment to my music appreciation students: what if Beethoven had been born, not in Bonn in 1770, but in Philadelphia in 1830? What would he have done? Would he even have gone into music at all?

It’s pure speculation so we’re free to answer any old way we want. But I have a lot of difficulty making a plausible case for Beethoven’s pursuing music as his life’s work. Nineteenth-century America was no place for a musician. The country was young and growing, still requiring copious amounts of enterprise, finance, exploration, and derring-do. The Industrial Revolution was just about to transform the process of settling a continent-sized country, as the telegraph, the railroad, and the steamship made distances shrink and put west coast in easy contact with east. There were fortunes to be made in America, and the people were around who were ready to make those fortunes. Their names still drip with connotations of wealth and power: Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Morgan. Even if a smart, ambitious young man like Ludwig van Beethoven wasn’t drawn to railroads or steamships, perhaps he might have found his way into banking or investment, or perhaps might have pioneered a potent but less-celebrated industry, say along the lines of Adolphus Busch and his beer empire.

But music? That was strictly for the housewifes. In those days music was made in the home; it was women’s work, while the men were out building a country. Those few men who did go into music as a profession were uniformly second- and third-raters; who remembers them now? While Europe was producing several generations of composers whose achievements continue to dominate musical life to this day (Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, Rossini, Wagner, Verdi, Brahms, and Berlioz just to name a few) America just puddled along with its genial copycat nobodies. It’s highly unlikely that the cause was a lack of talent. The problem was a lack of opportunity.

Great composers tend to come in waves, often emanating from more or less the same center and emerging at more or less the same time. Think 1685: Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel and Domenico Scarlatti born in the same year. And Sebastian Bach was one of many Bachs who plied their trade industriously throughout central and eastern Germany. Most of all, think Europe around 1810: what an astonishing explosion that was! Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt, Berlioz, Wagner all born within a single decade, and in some cases within just a very few years of each other. Think back a few years: the 1790s saw the births of Rossini and Schubert, the 1770s Beethoven, the 1750s Mozart, and the 1730s Haydn. Every twenty years or so another extraordinary generation.

How could this be? More to the point, why didn’t it keep on happening? Brahms came through in the 1830s and thus the twenty-year rule remained intact. But then it went off: the next batch waited an extra decade until the 1860s, when along came Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Debussy. But the great wave was over, and only eddies and ripples remained. There would be no more generational effusions, at least not among concert-hall composers.

There was an effusion of American songwriters and Broadway guys—that all happened around the turn of the 20th century. George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, Frederick Loewe, and Vincent Youmans flourished under the benevolent gaze of two slightly older éminence gris figures—Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. That generation kept going for a good long while—Richard Rodgers was still writing in the 1970s, remember—but again there wasn’t another powerhouse generation in American musical theater to replace them.

However, there is no real mystery here. The case of Philadelphia-Beethoven-in-1830 applies to all the rest: musicians, particularly composers, arise in abundance and force only in a culture that values and sustains them. If the life of a musician is a guarantee of only poverty, hardship, and lack of recognition, then it stands to reason that promising talents will wither in the drought of indifference.

Consider the situation in Europe around 1810. If you were born the son of an estate stableman (Franz Liszt) and you had a fine musical talent, you could put that talent to very good use to propel yourself out of that stable and into the castles, salons, and drawing rooms of the highest levels of European society. It took brains and talent and tons of practice and some luck, but it could most definitely be done. Music was a viable profession, a way out of a lower-class life. Joseph Haydn, born to the village wheelwright in tiny Rohrau, near the Austrian border, wound up a chorister in Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral by age eight, spent most of his life as a high-ranking court official to one of Austria’s wealthiest families, and died rich and famous. All for writing music that people liked.

If the garden is planted and watered and maintained, flowers will grow. Generations like the bouquet of 1810 don’t happen by accident. The talent must be there, of course—and it is there, all the time and everywhere—but the conditions must allow for that talent to flourish. Early nineteenth-century Europe offered substantial career advancement opportunities for gifted young musicians, especially composers. So they got them. Ditto Broadway in the 1920s and 1930s; people wanted lots of shows with snappy songs, so all those wonderful songwriters arose to fill the demand.

This reminds me a bit of the 1970s when a new art form/skill arose—commercial computer programming. The world needed people with a discernible talent for writing computer software, offering downright flabbergasting riches to those who had what it took. And those talents were there: Andy Herzfield, Bill Atkinson, Jef Raksin, Alan Kay, et al. They got very, very rich and transformed their world. And the people who provided inspiration and focus—Steve Jobs and others—got even richer. Only a short time before there hadn’t been even a conception of talent for writing software, but here were people with undeniable talent, geniuses really, and they flourished like crazy. Early 19th century Europe got Schumann, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Liszt, Berlioz, Rossini, Schubert, Brahms. We got the personal computer and the Macintosh and the iPod and the iPad and e-mail and the World Wide Web and the Internet. We also got Windows Vista, but the 19th century got tambourine-rattling Daniel Stiebelt, so I guess it all balances out.

Which leads to the state of musical affairs in force for much of the 20th century. If the computer industry had treated visionaries like Alan Kay with the disdain that the current musical community shows towards composers, we’d still be lugging shoeboxes full of punched cards over to Control Data Corporation. Nobody much wants composers. Many in the audiences of the major-league venues such as the big-city municipal orchestras would be just fine and dandy if modern music were banished altogether. That’s terribly short-sighted of them, but that’s the way it is. Composition isn’t really a career path at all—in fact, composers almost always need to have multiple aces up their sleeve in order to make a living. There’s nothing all that new about that; Mozart and Beethoven made their livings primarily as performers, after all. But in my experience modern composers are rarely the same insanely gifted, well-rounded, versatile musicians as their forebears. Most play the piano well enough but not at a professional level. Most conduct well enough but not at a professional level. For every Esa-Pekka Salonen who has managed to combine a flourishing career as both conductor and composer, there are hundreds of nameless academics who support their composition habit by teaching theory, eartraining, and the like at colleges and conservatories. Rarely do they actually compose for profit, nor do they have to worry unduly about pleasing an audience in any other than a philosophical sense. Their music can be as obscure as they want, or as unattractive, or as adolescent. Since their income derives from their teaching positions, they are under no pressure to succeed in anything even remotely approaching a commercial sense.

Even if the occasional composer has managed to achieve a degree of public acclaim (John Adams) the garden remains still mostly inhospitable to those who would make their living exclusively from writing music. You can’t really get there from here.

For an opposite example, consider Finland. That’s a culture that values composers and other musicians. And look what has happened—all those incredible Finnish musicians, including composers, spreading worldwide and showing the rest of us what’s possible if we’re willing to make it happen.

But for the rest of the world, the very best and brightest in music probably aren’t going into composition at all. I have found that, while those of my students who are composition majors tend to be earnest, bright, and hardworking individuals who are a pleasure to teach, their actual ‘raw’ musical talent is typically modest compared to some of the instrumentalists—and those piano/violin/cello/guitar/etc majors who compose occasional pieces for themselves to play tend to write the composition majors under the rug. Truly high-voltage musical talent à la Mendelssohn doesn’t seem particularly drawn to composition any more. That’s a pity—but it’s the harvest of a garden that we ourselves have planted. If we want to have thrillingly gifted new writers in our concert halls, we need to ensure that high-caliber talents don’t take their energies elsewhere. Until then, we’re stuck with what we’re willing to pay for.

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