Musical Accountability

Most musicians are held accountable for their work. Audiences have a way of rewarding the players they like with repeat ticket and record purchases, and an equal way of ignoring those who bore them or offend their sensibilities. Critics lurk in the shadows, sometimes skulking into concert and recital halls and then making their opinions known in writing. Everybody has an off day, just as everybody has a close encounter of the third kind with incompetent or unfairly biased critics. It isn’t consistent. But it’s there, and it’s pervasive. You play, you get judged; it’s that simple.

The same held true for composers throughout history; most were employees of a church, court, or opera house. The kapellmeisters were held firmly accountable by either patron or bishop; they were expected to write certain kinds of music for certain purposes, and said music was not to leave aristocratic guests or parishioners scratching their heads and muttering so when are they gonna start playing, they all sound like they’re still tuning up. Any composer who pissed off his patron would be job-hunting in the very near future, just as would befall any church composer who failed to deliver goods that measured up either musically or theologically.

The situation with opera composers closely resembled the modern world of cash-and-carry, supply-and-demand. Signor X wrote Opera Y; either the audiences (or king) liked the opera and it was staged elsewhere, or else the thing flopped and Signor X got busy cranking out Opera Z. Too many flops in a row and people started whispering that Signor X’s day had come and gone and it’s probably time for us to be getting in touch with Monsieur W.

Thus no matter whether stage-, church-, or court-bound, no composer could write pretentious gobbledegook and get away with it. Composers were accountable; they had employers and audiences who paid the bills and who most resolutely would not pay for crap they hated or that made them feel stupid. An intrepid composer could incite his listener’s thoughtfulness with just the right amount of challenge tossed into the mix; consider Haydn’s phenomenal success with his English audiences in the 1790s, thanks to his uncanny ability to write structurally sophisticated works that remain on the surface ingratiating to even the most bumptious listener. There was nothing about patronage or pleasing a paying audience that negated progress or rewarded only dull conformity. Maybe unimaginative dullards weren’t necessarily tossed out on their fannies, but stolidity was not ipso facto a virtue.

Nineteenth century composers had their audiences to contend with, not only in the concert halls, but in the music stores. People bought copies of a composer’s work; sheet music was a big business back then when everybody played an instrument. After all, that’s how everybody got to know music. Civic symphony orchestras weren’t the norm even in big European cities until the 1870s or so; before then you played it yourself or you didn’t hear it. So composers had to sell their music—not just to professionals who had the wherewithal to deal with massive musical and technical challenges, but to ordinary Joes and their wives who didn’t want to be put through the seventh circle of Hell just to be able to hear this latest sonata or set of variations.

More to the point, composers were accountable. They had to please people: audiences, musicians, buyers. If folks didn’t like a composer’s work, or pay any attention to it, then it behooved said composer either to marry well or to seek alternative employment. Nobody could get by with writing impossibly obscure music that nobody wanted to buy, nobody wanted to hear, and nobody wanted to play.

Then came the aftermath of the Second World War and a sudden shift in cultural demographics, brought about by the massive surge of young folks flowing into colleges and universities, thanks to the beneficence of the GI Bill. All over America—and Europe wasn’t far behind—colleges expanded their programs, adding new majors and fields in a wild scramble to keep up with the nearly overwhelming numbers of new students. College, once the provenance of either the very rich or the very smart, was now becoming viewed as an inalienable right.

Thus came newfangled majors in the music arena, including musicology, music theory, music history, and the like. Before the 1940s most musicians were educated in conservatories, where they obtained certificates instead of degrees. But with the great GI Bill college surge, everybody needed a Bachelor’s degree at the very least. Obviously they couldn’t all be Physics or English Lit majors. Some wanted to do music, and they wanted to get a proper college degree for doing said music. That included writing the stuff.

Universities had employed composers before the War, but only in the post-1945 era did composition departments sprout in earnest throughout the land. Composers, once as subject to the slings and arrows of market approval as everybody else, could now retreat into the safety of a tenured academic position, where accountability morphed into an entirely different thing: publishing enough to earn, or keep, your tenure, and receiving reasonably positive teaching reviews from your peers and students.

That was the rub: publishing a composition, or at least having it performed within the confines of the college, was enough. Whether the piece was any good, or whether it was understood by anybody, or whether anybody liked it, didn’t enter into the picture. By the mid 1950s, writing accessible music had become downright unfashionable; if the general public could understand it, you just weren’t being academic enough. A mindset arose that defined composers as scholars and researchers instead of the craftsmen and entertainers that they really are. That’s the mindset behind Milton Babbitt’s infamous article “Who Cares If You Listen?”—the title bestowed by a magazine editor who was obviously blessed with a good ear. Babbitt’s thesis was that composers were now researchers, and thus whether the public liked or understood their work was no more important to them than it was to somebody who was, say, exploring the heady reaches of string theory. From a certain point of view, Babbitt was right, but he erred badly by considering himself, and his colleagues, to be standing at the forefront of Western music and representing the mainstream of musical development. In fact, they were a sideshow of a sideshow, fringe elements way out of the grand scheme of things. By retreating deep into the academy they had voluntarily resigned from the profession; they were no longer musicians or composers or even artists, but academics. They were no longer creating art or music, but research. If Milton Babbitt was a viable composer, then Judith Butler is a viable writer.

But those composition-department gigs are tempting, incredibly so. They afford real, actual security to a composer and thus are similar to solid kapellmeister posts of yesteryear. One needn’t worry about the next rent check or whether or not one can afford to raise a family. That’s a very good thing. But all comforts come at a price, and it’s quite possible that the price tag attached to collegiate teaching positions is, in the final analysis, artistically ruinous.

But it’s all going to change, if for no other reason than the scarcity of said university positions. People who get them don’t give them up; they die in the saddle. Increasingly they are replaced by adjuncts who have no chance of ever achieving a full-time tenured position and are therefore still subject to the whims and winds of public opinion. So it’s possible that the collegiate cocoon that allowed several generations of composers to abstain from carrying out their true calling is unravelling, and once again composers will have to start writing music that people actually like. In fact, that mindset has re-established itself amongst today’s younger composers, who know perfectly well that they’ll probably never achieve that cushy university gig that their cushy university professor had.

Their lives will be tougher; they’ll have to make it by their wits, by their talent, and by selling their products. That isn’t easy, but then again, it never was. And maybe, just maybe, that yawning gap between composer and audience that opened about fifty years ago will close, once and for all. But a lot of composers are going to have to get good and hungry before that’s likely to happen.

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