In 1964 the Cold War was throbbing along, racial strife was tearing at the fabric of American society, and academic serialist composers held a dismaying number of trump cards in the career game. Young composers, particularly in America, were faced with an increasingly narrow future in which options beyond pursuing Ph.Ds were rapidly fading away. It seemed that modern composition was retreating ever more quickly into the cloister, composers becoming answerable only to tenure committees and certainly not responsible in any meaningful way to audiences and their pesky desires to be engaged, moved, or entertained.
In 1964 Benjamin Britten delivered an address in Aspen, Colorado. Britten was no academic nor had he any sympathy for the insular attitudes common to the professorial class. His talk was part speech, part rallying cry, and part manifesto, a much-needed and clear counter to the tendency of young composers to retreat into campuses where artistic freedom meant kowtowing to the ukases of current academic fashion. He said:
"There are many dangers which hedge round the unfortunate composer: pressure groups which demand true proletarian music, snobs who demand the latest avant-garde tricks; critics who are already trying to document today for tomorrow, to be first to find the correct pigeon-hole definition. These people are dangerous—not because they are necessarily of any importance in themselves, but because they may make the composer, above all the younger composer, self-conscious, and instead of writing his own music, music which springs naturally from his gift and personality, he may be frightened into writing pretentious nonsense or deliberate obscurity."
More than any other force in American music, the tenured professorship in composition in prestigious research universities has had the most destructive and dire influence. Creative work has no place in the university. In the academy, pursuit of the liberal arts is devoted to the about of things and not the things themselves. You do not go to the university to become a painter; that's what art school is for. Ditto music: if you're going to do music, go to a music school and/or conservatory. Universities have their own concerns, valuable and wonderful ones to be sure, but those concerns are of little importance to working creative artists. When a musician winds up in a university, academic penis envy is sure to follow with alarming consequences for that musician's creative output. Composers look around and see the scientists in their research labs, getting all the money, getting all the glory, getting all the attention. They see the cool stuff going on all around them, everywhere it seems except in the music building, which is largely devoted to the benign pursuit of musicology—a perfectly fine calling, to be sure, but by its very definition devoted to the collecting, study, and analysis of what other people have created.
One entire block of American composers got their collective foot caught in the lecture hall door in the period immediately following WWII. There they were at Princeton, at Yale, at Harvard, at MIT, at Cal, looking around and wondering how they could manage to be other than genteel laughingstocks. The real faculty were unlocking the secrets of the universe, while the music folk were thought of as the guys baking brownies for after hours.
So they overcompensated. They got all scientific and mathematical. Penis envy went rampant. They started beating their puny chests and squawking out near-desperate assurances of their intellectual equality. The ultimate such squawk emanted from the ultimate academic composer, Milton Babbitt:
"Such a private life is what the university provides the scholar and the scientist. It is only proper that the university, which—significantly—has provided so many contemporary composers with their professional training and general education, should provide a home for the "complex," "difficult," and "problematical" in music…Granting to music the position accorded other arts and sciences promises the sole substantial means of survival for the music I have been describing. Admittedly, if this music is not supported, the whistling repertory of the man in the street will be little affected, the concert-going activity of the conspicuous consumer of musical culture will be little disturbed. But music will cease to evolve, and, in that important sense, will cease to live."
As an apologia for academia's cyclic Brahmanism, as professors teach students who become professors who teach students, this is par for the course. Particular to Babbitt's mindset was a dreadful snobbery that derided ordinary concert-goers as conspicuous consumers. But even more typical was his blindness towards the sheer insignificance of the music he was espousing. Like many another naïve and deluded academic, he mistook his seminar rooms for the world, his student-staffed noontime concerts for mainstream music-making, and his articles in arcane academic journals for broad-based public literature. He never seemed to realize that to just about everybody, including the working musicians of the world, his concerns were immaterial piffle that belonged on the other side of the looking glass.
It wasn't just that Babbitt & Co. divorced themselves from Homer Simpson humming a silly tune while chomping down his fish sticks. Babbitt & Co. were divorcing themselves from human society. They were abrogating the single most important responsibility of any creative artist, which is to create art for their fellow human beings. It is a long-held bond, a cultural contract, if you will, in which artists are supported by their societies in return for their art.
Back in the Buddha's day it was common for monks to settle near a village. Those monks provided a multitude of services to the villagers, including philosophical teachings in their spiritual tradition, healing, officiating over marriages and feast days, and even baby-sitting children and pets alike. In return, the villagers supported the monks with daily food offerings. Since this unwritten contract would be broken should either side fail to carry out its obligations, a progressively complex set of rules arose that focused on minimizing friction. The Buddhist version is known as the Vinaya, or the monastic rules of conduct, the great-great-great-grandfather of the Rules of St. Benedict and all other such monastic how-to books. Among the strictures were precise instructions about those food offerings: monks would eat only one meal a day, hoarding was strictly forbidden, monks would accept anything offered, monks would never actually ask for the food, monks would avoid re-visiting the same house or location in the village on a regular basis, monks would not share food amongst themselves or trade or in any way barter foodstuffs. There's a ton of stuff in there, all of it established after the fact. Thus one can trace monastic mishaps in the Vinaya. It isn't at all surprising that sex and food are the major topics. Every time an enterprising monk sought a way around a restriction, a corresponding new precept was handed down. If it's in the Vinaya, you can bank on some monk's having done it…once. And yes, that includes receiving fellatio from a rotting, disembodied human head.
I digress. What I'm getting at here is that artists and society exist together in a yin-yan, tit-for-tat reciprocity. Artists do their thing to enhance daily life, whether that be through music or shows or artwork or architecture or literature or poetry or whatnot. In return, society grants artists training, a living, a forum, and hopefully some chances for posthumous recognition. Every concert hall, recital hall, salon, opera house, museum, library, and theater bears witness to that contract, as does every conservatory, art school, poetry journal, and how-to book.
That's where it all went wrong with the post-WWII academic composers: they proposed to welch on their end of the agreement. They forgot, or else conveniently ignored, that they are not scholars or scientists or researchers. They are creative artists, people who make things, things intended for the use, pleasure, and edification of others. That's what Britten had never forgotten, as he stated so succintly at Aspen:
"I do not write for posterity—in any case, the outlook for that is somewhat uncertain. I write music, now, in Aldeburgh, for people living there, and further afield, indeed for anyone who cares to play it or listen to it. But my music now has its roots in where I live and work."
The academics naturally would have sneered at such homey sentiments. They did sneer. When Britten's War Requiem made international headlines in 1963 and entered the choral repertory practically overnight, they scoffed. But they paid the price for their breach of contract: they were shunned. And their music, far from representing the evolutionary and developmental mainstream, was properly ignored for the nothingness it was.
There's a temperature gauge that I consult to get a reading on a particular composer's public visibility. It's the catalog on ArkivMusic.com. Even if Arkiv's listings don't tell me anything about the quality of a particular composer, they definitely tell me who is doing the best in the marketplace, because when individual composers sell particularly well, record companies rush to provide more recordings. Thus Arkiv's numbers of available recordings provide a rough but handy guide. Here are numbers of currently-available recordings from Babbitt and Britten:
Babbitt: 43
Britten: 998
But wait! There's more. Of Babbitt's 43 recordings, only 7 are devoted to his music alone; in all the rest he is but one composer among many. And of all 43 recordings, only 3 are from mainstream record labels (one each Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, and Naxos) while the lion's share come from specialists in modern music: 13 from CRI (Composers Recordings, Inc), 5 from New World Recordings, and even some from reissue labels such as Music & Arts. In short, his catalog presence is not only puny but is also restricted to the new-music ghetto. Posterity has assigned him a position roughly comparable to Domenico Zipoli, another composer with 43 recordings, mostly as one name amongst many, and mostly from specialty labels. In case you're not familiar with Domenico Zipoli, be advised that he was a Baroque church composer who spent most of his career in Argentina.
In Britten's case, the discography leans strongly towards EMI and Decca (including massive retrospective box sets from both) and includes numerous performances from the world's most celebrated performers, orchestras, and opera companies. Britten is recorded up the wazoo and back, including his own superlative performances both as pianist and conductor. Britten is in the catalog the way that Brahms is in the catalog, the way that Beethoven and Tchaikovsky and Berlioz and Schumann and Haydn and Schubert and Stravinsky are in the catalog. There's nothing ghetto or puny about Britten's discographic presence. His numbers are similar to those for Johann Strauss, Jr., Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sir Edward Elgar, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Maybe Britten claimed not to write for posterity, but it would appear that posterity likes him very much indeed.
Benjamin Britten never broke his word with his society. To be sure, he was a modern composer whose idiom can take some time and experience to absorb. I would never claim that Death in Venice, just to take one example, constitutes easy listening. But he held up his end of the bargain, and an admiring and grateful society reciprocated. Lord Britten of Aldeburgh earned his place on musical Olympus, just as surely as Babbitt earned his banishment into ever-darkening obscurity.