Music is a balance of tension and resolution. A mentor once told me that the greatest composers are those who demonstrate mastery of this basic tenet. Dissonance, one form of musical tension, empowers harmony and resolution when used well. However, with few exceptions, today’s composers reject the natural order of tension and resolution. They opt instead to create sonic nightmares, soundscapes smeared upon a postmodern canvas in which tonality is subjective. There is never a true resolution, only growing ugliness.
That is why the celebration of the work of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, who turned 90 on Sept. 11, offers more than a glimmer of hope. Pärt, whose style of composing is indelibly intertwined with his Orthodox Christian faith, is being celebrated at Carnegie Hall and around the world for creating music that is beautiful in a time when ugliness is preferred.
The urge to compose in an atonal vernacular is not spontaneous. First, a composer must assent to the relativity of beauty. Then, he is immersed in the world of serialism and 21st-century experimentation. Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone method, which is tonal serialism premised on equality between the 12 notes of the scale, provides a springboard into sonal nihilism.
Significant labor is required to appreciate and even enjoy dissonance. When at last the composer’s musical senses have been sufficiently disoriented, he is then capable of writing in the untethered language of contemporary art. Just like many modern painters and sculptors, the modern composer seeks out that which is ugly, grotesque, and unsettling, and magnifies it in his art — knowingly and unknowingly. His music embodies the essence of human suffering but never the glory of redemption.
This is why contemporary classical music largely leaves the audience feeling unsettled and disturbed. It’s no wonder the audience continues to shrink.
In 1913, Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s masterwork, “The Rite of Spring,” premiered in Paris. Within minutes of the curtain rising and the orchestra beginning the piece, the audience started to jeer. As the avant-garde ballet progressed, the theatre erupted in a full-blown riot. The conductor Pierre Monteux later recalled, “Neighbors began to hit each other over the head with fists, canes or whatever came to hand. Soon this anger was concentrated against the dancers, and then, more particularly, against the orchestra, the direct perpetrator of the musical crime. Everything available was tossed in our direction, but we continued to play on.”
“The Rite of Spring” was musically and artistically edgy for its time. It challenged the status quo so severely that the audience could not bear it.
In contrast, today’s most vulgar art music could never elicit such a contentious reaction. As the saying goes, the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. Today, there are no riots; there are hardly any audiences. There is simply no societal buy-in. If you’ve heard even one of the “Best Classical Music Works of the 21st Century” as declared by The Guardian, you’re in the minority — a minority so small, you don’t get a payout.
Once the boundaries from which to push against are lost, so is the audience. Sitting through a full-length concert of most any contemporary art composer sounds as appealing as watching a play with no plot, with a cast high on acid. This tonally chaotic and unsettling sound du jour is further exemplified by Brian Ferneyhough’s “Sonatas for String Quartet.”
Sustained only by the academic class and musicians themselves, symphonies abandoned the populace audience long ago. Save for an occasional “pops” concert or one of the great classics that orchestras rotate through ad nauseam, the audience has in turn abandoned the symphony.
Classical music’s steady death is not inevitable, and it’s not a mystery. The successors of Western civilization’s weighty musical legacy have squandered their inheritance; they lie knee-deep in swill but refuse to turn back. They’re tantalized by the stench.
Returning to Arvo Pärt, we find a stark contrast: a wealth of the very type of art that offers a glimpse of the transcendent, where suffering meets hope, where this world meets the next — music that speaks the language of beauty in suffering. Once a serialist composer himself, his style is now known for its purity and poignancy. Perhaps most impressively, Pärt writes in a manner that is distinctly of the 21st century; his work is far from a regurgitation of past classical styles, demonstrating that music can be both innovative and beautiful.
One of his lesser known pieces, “Trisagion” for strings, demonstrates his extreme mastery of tension and resolution. The score of the piece contains the text of the Orthodox Christian “Trisagion” prayer written below the notes; the instrumentalists are, nonverbally, expressing the text.
Pärt’s musical legacy is one that very few composers, of this century or others, will hold a candle to. Still, a handful of other current composers are breathing life into the landscape. In the choral world, it is no wonder that composer Eric Whitacre has attained cult-status. His music, while reputably redundant, is beautiful; choirs enjoy singing his work, and audiences love hearing it. His piece “Lux Aurumque” has been streamed more than 9 million times on Spotify alone. Yet Whitacre is largely dismissed by the same art composers and academic superiors whose own music suffers from terminal unlikability.
John Rutter is another living composer who writes in a tonal vernacular. His work aligns with past classical periods, yet his popularity signals that audiences would happily turn back the clocks if it meant beautiful new music. Caroline Shaw, a typically experimental composer, found great success in her piece “Plan & Elevation,” which transmits an unmistakable Pärt-esque minimalism.
The public’s reception of Pärt’s, Whitacre’s, and Rutter’s works demonstrates our culture’s craving for beauty; there is a path forward for classical music.
To be clear, the path should not be devoid of diverse tonalities and mediums. Modern compositional techniques can uniquely express the depth of human suffering, as exemplified in Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.” Indeed, serialism has its place, like the color black on an artist’s palette.
Suffering is universal, but the product of suffering is not: You will know a man not by what he has suffered, but by how he has suffered. Those persecuted in the communist gulags, for example, endured horrific suffering, which often resulted in death or a hellish remnant of life. Yet there were certain individuals whose suffering propelled them upward rather than downward; many saints were perfected in the prisons of Soviet Russia.
Great suffering can produce a person who resembles the devil, but it can also produce a person who resembles God. The difference is how one suffers; suffering can be sanctifying.
Contemporary art music embodies suffering without sanctification, and thus, it has fallen from beauty to ugliness. Art embodies ugliness only when suffering is glorified for its own sake, rather than as a means to an end: sanctification and ultimately, redemption.