Don Baton on "Music after DEI" at The New Criterion

https://newcriterion.com/dispatch/music-after-dei/

 
The adage that “the death of classical music is its oldest living tradition” is a cliché for a reason. In 1600, the theorist Giovanni Maria Artusi publicly condemned the madrigals of Claudio Monteverdi, one of music history’s great innovators. The composer’s crime? His outlandish belief that the strict rules of harmony and part-writing might sometimes be set aside in order to express the psycho-emotional content of the text being set to music. Artusi worried that Monteverdi’s heresies were setting the compositional craft on a slippery slope from which it might never recover. As it turned out, those heresies proved foundational to the Classical and Romantic styles. The vast majority of what we today call “classical music” might never have happened without them.
 
…  the things we must stop doing:

1.       Entirely end the selection of concert repertoire based on the race or sex of the composer.. … Minority and female composers that have something fresh and interesting to say will rise to the top naturally on their own merits. We do not need to go searching for them on any basis other than their music.
2.       End the selection of musicians based on race and sex. On this matter in particular, all ensembles must do is turn back the clock about fifteen years. Blind auditions should be used whenever possible, and all avenues for allowing applicants with preferred identities to circumvent the blind-audition process should be closed. …
3.       End the tacit assumption that the canon of traditional classical music is something only white audiences (or perhaps white and Asian audiences) can appreciate. …
4.       Stop relying upon ideologically captured organizations like the League of American Orchestras and OPERA America for ideas and guidance.  …
 
And second, the things we must start doing:
·         In programming, prioritize the “forgotten middle.” By and large, the steady diet of DEI-selected repertoire did not crowd out the masterpieces of Beethoven, Brahms, or Tchaikovsky—the godlike composers who keep classical music’s more conservative audiences coming to the concert hall. Instead, it choked out any sort of creative programming that lacked a racial or gender angle. This often meant the exclusion of high-quality music that introduced audiences to unfamiliar sounds, whether by forgotten old masters or new ones. It is a common pitfall for musical groups moving on from DEI to program only the warhorses. For its first post-DEI season, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra announced last month that it would be programming one of its most boring concert seasons in memory—hardly an unfamiliar work in sight. …

 
Post-DEI programming as dreadfully dull?  Who could have guessed?  Well, actually, it suggests that my instinct to not bother with symphonic and orchestral concerts at all in favor of guitar recitals is apparently not a bad one.  I know for sure I’m going to hear new music at most of the guitar recitals I attend.  I’ll hear warhorses, sure, but guitarists have been better and better in the last thirty years about bringing out obscure or forgotten 19^th century composers, 20^th century composers, and particularly actually living guitarist composers.

·         Encourage the composition and performance of new music, particularly the composition of approachable new music that audiences are interested in listening to. …
 

Here, too, I feel pretty good about being a guitarist who keeps tabs on guitarist composers.  Angelo Gilardino, Leo Brouwer, Nikita Koshkin, Atanas Ourkouzounov, Dusan Bogdanovic, and many other guitarists have composed plenty of fun, accessible new music and Gilardino only died a few years ago.  He’s written some really weird music but he’s written accessible music, too.
 
I could quote more but, on the whole, I think most 21^st century readers on the internet who even know what The New Criterion is probably won’t need much more samples. After all, elsewhere in said-same issue is an ode to Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas.  I used to read the magazine a lot more ten years ago, circa 2000 to 2016-ish. 
 

Maybe just as the shifting status and prestige of the novel as the apotheosis of "literary fiction" has faded, something similar has been happening with the novel and the prestige is just not coming back for the genre.  Beethoven's 9th isn't going away anymore than Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is going away.  Any Russian novel that was a catalyst in the creation of one of Peter Falk's most iconic roles is still going to get read in the 21st century (my parents liked Columbo, I became a Dostoevsky fan and eventually figured out that "Hey, Columbo is based on the examining magistrate in Crime and Punishment").

Baton's concern that post-DEI programming is even more deadly in its uninspired tedium that pre-DEI programming ... I am relieved to report that for those of us in the classical guitar scene that's generally not the same kind of issue.  Matanya Ophee would warn that plenty of uninspired and uninspiring guitarists are presenting lollipop after lollipop of the guitarist-pleasing finger exercises.  Yes, duly noted, but I am not willing to tell fans of Andrew York I can't hear what they hear in his music at this stage in my life.  I hope to hear the second half of Koshkin's 24 Preludes and Fugues finally get recorded!