I've been reading articles at the Future Symphony Institute over the last few years and I'm sympathetic to the proposal that what we generally think of as classical music is continued as a realm of creative activity. I do love the arts a good deal, even if I confess to being ambivalent at best about the nature of the arts as industry in the contemporary West. It's not that difficult to find articles in which someone insists that orchestras are too parochial and staid and should be open to new music and to be aware that that's not necessarily disinterested rhetoric.
It's possible to see advocacy for new music as advocacy for new music over against the symphonic warhorses that reflects a "we should have our turn". But the symphony was not always the most prestigious pinnacle of musical prestige. Let's take Scott Joplin, the American composer of ragtime who died before he could complete or publish a piano concerto he was sketching and who was known to have composed musical-dramatic works such as "A Guest of Honor" and Treemonisha. There's an effort under way to update the text of Treemonisha while attempting to keep the music.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/theater_dance/can-a-108-year-old-opera--by-scott-joplin--be-made-to-sing-for-today/2019/01/05/b3a4056c-0aaf-11e9-a3f0-71c95106d96a_story.html?utm_term=.013589cf9bf9
Though I admire Scott Joplin's music I am not sure that attempting to update his opera is necessarily the way I would go. As a guitarist I have other interests. But I cite this effort to show that in Joplin's lifetime the most prestigious musical form in the high art traditions he was working toward were the piano concerto and opera rather than the symphony. If you've read Douglas Shadle's Orchestrating the Nation it's not hard to speculate that Joplin knew enough about the concert music America of his time to realize that symphonies had pitiably short lives in the United States. My own take is that as a form of popular song ragtime evolved into jazz which evolved into R&B and rock and that American popular song even now has a residually ragtime feel once you've internalized ragtime to the point where you can hear how it's riffs and gestures evolved. I think there's still plenty that can be done to move Joplin's work and musical legacy into more explicitly contrapuntal directions and to assimilate it into more complex large-scale forms.
Yet for all my interest in chamber music and music for classical guitar, that gets to a theme that has run through the Future Symphony Institute writings and writers that I've been thinking about.
As a guitarist whose primary musical experience in educational and performance terms was in choirs, I admit that there's something about the Future Symphony Institute I don't quite connect to ... namely the symphony part. Why are we invited by way of the institute's name to consider the future of classical music to be a symphony in an orchestral sense? I'm not saying there won't be symphonic music in the future or that I don't like symphonic music. As a guitarist and composer I feel, if anything, that guitarists and guitarist composers can only benefit from immersion in symphonic music, chamber music, keyboard literature and so on.
But I was also choral singer in school (Tenor II and/or Baritone as needed) who had the pleasure of singing Byrd, Tallis, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Poulenic, Messiaen, and Alice Walker arrangements before I ever got around to writing (or playing) my first guitar sonata. If you think about Western music as a continuous line of musical activity across the Western world over the last 1,200 years maybe as much as a quarter to as little as a sixth of that time has gone by in which instrumental music was thought of as the apotheosis of musical art in the West.
Which is to say that if people think the future of classical music is the symphony that might be an ultimately reactionary stance. The foundations of what we think of as the Western art musical canon emerged in vocal and choral music and evolved to include instrumental traditions over the course of centuries before what we can properly think of as the symphonic literature evolved. And when I say symphonic literature you probably didn't reflexively think "Oh, right, we totally need a Vanhal revival right now!" You probably just asked "Who's Vanhal?" if you're not already steeped in musicology discussing 18th century composers. Now maybe we will, in fact, get a bit of revived interest in Vanhal symphonies but, who knows? My jocular point is that a great deal of symphonic music is as unknown or more unknown now than it ever was in the lives of the composers who made it. It may be axiomatic that the higher the pinnacle of a musical culture the more parochial it must inevitably be about what repertoire it presents and preserves.
But I have been thinking for a few years now that the future of what's colloquially known as classical music may be returning back to vocal idioms. On that note ... here's some of an essay at New Music Box about the state of American choral music.
https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/the-future-of-choral-music/
Here’s a common experience I have as a publisher of choral music: I’ll receive a piece with all the hallmarks of a composer who knows what they are doing. The piece is well engraved, follows the rules of voice leading, is idiomatically written for the voice—and is dull. But then I’ll do a little sleuthing and find samples of this same composer’s instrumental music, which will often by contrast be lively, engaging, and innovative. Nothing drives me battier than to see this separation between the two mediums, and I’ll often write an impassioned reply to the composer asking why they are so apparently willing to stifle their creative voice when it comes to choral music. Nine out of ten times, they respond with something akin to “thank you for giving me the permission to write the music I want to write.” These experiences have lead me to the belief that while there is plenty of newly composed music for choir, it is not part of the same contemporary conversation around new music as its instrumental and solo counterparts.
It’s no shocker to say that the choral and instrumental worlds have evolved quite separately over the past century. Highly chromatic or atonal music is rarely written for choirs, and the deep exploration of timbre found in instrumental pieces from later in the 20th century has mostly been ignored in favor of the pervasive choral sound inherited from the English cathedral tradition. Not only have the two worlds evolved separately, but their cultural importance is weighed differently as well. Using the Pulitzer Prize as one limited metric, it’s worth noting that, until The Little Match Girl Passion in 2008, an a cappella choral piece had never won the prize. This fact is confounding if we consider that choral music is the single most popular activity among adults in America. [emphasis added] It is estimated that 32.5 million adults in America sing with a choir on a weekly basis and that ensemble singing is the most popular arts activity among adults in the United States. While the majority of choirs are religious or school ensembles, it is conservatively estimated that 12,000 of US choirs are community and professional groups. That’s 10 times the amount of community and professional orchestras in the United States. It’s entirely possible that the Pulitzer committee shares the same perspective as much of the new music world, that choral literature is not in the same “high art” category as its orchestral counter-part. And to be fair, the largely avocational nature of choirs contributes to the cultural sense that, as a whole, it need not be taken as seriously as instrumental music.
...
Kyle Gann once wrote a blog post called "make way for the guitar era", or something close to it. As a guitarist I'm happy to consider the possibility that the last century has, in fact, been the era of the guitar. It might not have been the era of the classical guitar in the way that Andres Segovia wanted us to think about the classical guitar and probably "just" the classical guitar, but it was arguably a guitar era, an era which is in some sense already past us here in the 21st century. But for the classical guitar it could be hoped that the instrument and the musicians who compose for it and play it are on the cusp of some interesting things.
We may have been back in the era of song at the level of popular song and also in terms of a proliferation of choral societies. Yet if the standards of the best music have been refined in the last few centuries from instrumental models then a great deal of choral and vocal music will not pass the muster of "deep" or "serious" because the music does not conform to the ideals extracted from the most established instrumental works in the long 19th century.
As I've written dozens of times by now, I think that what would most benefit the "high" and "low" musical arts is that they would actually interact again. The respective trenches of popular music and classical music, and even the subsidiary trenches dug within these respective trenches, seem at times to be too well set. Whatever the future of what we call classical music may be I am not suggesting there won't be symphonies or orchestras at all, but a world in which there was no practically existing thing as a symphonic art and practice certainly existed in the Western past and it's possible that the future of classical music may not actually be all that much in the symphony, it may be in choral and vocal music, at least in the United States.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/theater_dance/can-a-108-year-old-opera--by-scott-joplin--be-made-to-sing-for-today/2019/01/05/b3a4056c-0aaf-11e9-a3f0-71c95106d96a_story.html?utm_term=.013589cf9bf9
Though I admire Scott Joplin's music I am not sure that attempting to update his opera is necessarily the way I would go. As a guitarist I have other interests. But I cite this effort to show that in Joplin's lifetime the most prestigious musical form in the high art traditions he was working toward were the piano concerto and opera rather than the symphony. If you've read Douglas Shadle's Orchestrating the Nation it's not hard to speculate that Joplin knew enough about the concert music America of his time to realize that symphonies had pitiably short lives in the United States. My own take is that as a form of popular song ragtime evolved into jazz which evolved into R&B and rock and that American popular song even now has a residually ragtime feel once you've internalized ragtime to the point where you can hear how it's riffs and gestures evolved. I think there's still plenty that can be done to move Joplin's work and musical legacy into more explicitly contrapuntal directions and to assimilate it into more complex large-scale forms.
Yet for all my interest in chamber music and music for classical guitar, that gets to a theme that has run through the Future Symphony Institute writings and writers that I've been thinking about.
As a guitarist whose primary musical experience in educational and performance terms was in choirs, I admit that there's something about the Future Symphony Institute I don't quite connect to ... namely the symphony part. Why are we invited by way of the institute's name to consider the future of classical music to be a symphony in an orchestral sense? I'm not saying there won't be symphonic music in the future or that I don't like symphonic music. As a guitarist and composer I feel, if anything, that guitarists and guitarist composers can only benefit from immersion in symphonic music, chamber music, keyboard literature and so on.
But I was also choral singer in school (Tenor II and/or Baritone as needed) who had the pleasure of singing Byrd, Tallis, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Poulenic, Messiaen, and Alice Walker arrangements before I ever got around to writing (or playing) my first guitar sonata. If you think about Western music as a continuous line of musical activity across the Western world over the last 1,200 years maybe as much as a quarter to as little as a sixth of that time has gone by in which instrumental music was thought of as the apotheosis of musical art in the West.
Which is to say that if people think the future of classical music is the symphony that might be an ultimately reactionary stance. The foundations of what we think of as the Western art musical canon emerged in vocal and choral music and evolved to include instrumental traditions over the course of centuries before what we can properly think of as the symphonic literature evolved. And when I say symphonic literature you probably didn't reflexively think "Oh, right, we totally need a Vanhal revival right now!" You probably just asked "Who's Vanhal?" if you're not already steeped in musicology discussing 18th century composers. Now maybe we will, in fact, get a bit of revived interest in Vanhal symphonies but, who knows? My jocular point is that a great deal of symphonic music is as unknown or more unknown now than it ever was in the lives of the composers who made it. It may be axiomatic that the higher the pinnacle of a musical culture the more parochial it must inevitably be about what repertoire it presents and preserves.
But I have been thinking for a few years now that the future of what's colloquially known as classical music may be returning back to vocal idioms. On that note ... here's some of an essay at New Music Box about the state of American choral music.
https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/the-future-of-choral-music/
Here’s a common experience I have as a publisher of choral music: I’ll receive a piece with all the hallmarks of a composer who knows what they are doing. The piece is well engraved, follows the rules of voice leading, is idiomatically written for the voice—and is dull. But then I’ll do a little sleuthing and find samples of this same composer’s instrumental music, which will often by contrast be lively, engaging, and innovative. Nothing drives me battier than to see this separation between the two mediums, and I’ll often write an impassioned reply to the composer asking why they are so apparently willing to stifle their creative voice when it comes to choral music. Nine out of ten times, they respond with something akin to “thank you for giving me the permission to write the music I want to write.” These experiences have lead me to the belief that while there is plenty of newly composed music for choir, it is not part of the same contemporary conversation around new music as its instrumental and solo counterparts.
It’s no shocker to say that the choral and instrumental worlds have evolved quite separately over the past century. Highly chromatic or atonal music is rarely written for choirs, and the deep exploration of timbre found in instrumental pieces from later in the 20th century has mostly been ignored in favor of the pervasive choral sound inherited from the English cathedral tradition. Not only have the two worlds evolved separately, but their cultural importance is weighed differently as well. Using the Pulitzer Prize as one limited metric, it’s worth noting that, until The Little Match Girl Passion in 2008, an a cappella choral piece had never won the prize. This fact is confounding if we consider that choral music is the single most popular activity among adults in America. [emphasis added] It is estimated that 32.5 million adults in America sing with a choir on a weekly basis and that ensemble singing is the most popular arts activity among adults in the United States. While the majority of choirs are religious or school ensembles, it is conservatively estimated that 12,000 of US choirs are community and professional groups. That’s 10 times the amount of community and professional orchestras in the United States. It’s entirely possible that the Pulitzer committee shares the same perspective as much of the new music world, that choral literature is not in the same “high art” category as its orchestral counter-part. And to be fair, the largely avocational nature of choirs contributes to the cultural sense that, as a whole, it need not be taken as seriously as instrumental music.
...
Kyle Gann once wrote a blog post called "make way for the guitar era", or something close to it. As a guitarist I'm happy to consider the possibility that the last century has, in fact, been the era of the guitar. It might not have been the era of the classical guitar in the way that Andres Segovia wanted us to think about the classical guitar and probably "just" the classical guitar, but it was arguably a guitar era, an era which is in some sense already past us here in the 21st century. But for the classical guitar it could be hoped that the instrument and the musicians who compose for it and play it are on the cusp of some interesting things.
We may have been back in the era of song at the level of popular song and also in terms of a proliferation of choral societies. Yet if the standards of the best music have been refined in the last few centuries from instrumental models then a great deal of choral and vocal music will not pass the muster of "deep" or "serious" because the music does not conform to the ideals extracted from the most established instrumental works in the long 19th century.
As I've written dozens of times by now, I think that what would most benefit the "high" and "low" musical arts is that they would actually interact again. The respective trenches of popular music and classical music, and even the subsidiary trenches dug within these respective trenches, seem at times to be too well set. Whatever the future of what we call classical music may be I am not suggesting there won't be symphonies or orchestras at all, but a world in which there was no practically existing thing as a symphonic art and practice certainly existed in the Western past and it's possible that the future of classical music may not actually be all that much in the symphony, it may be in choral and vocal music, at least in the United States.
