From the Wilson Quarterly, Arts & Letters Daily linked Miles Hoffman's "Music Without Magic." While acknowledging the quality and beauty of some 20th century atonal music, Hoffman argues that atonal dominance in serious music, because of its deliberate assault on the ways in which music gives us pleasure by organizing time in the creation and resolution of harmonic tension, is at least partly responsible for the decline in audiences for concert-hall music:
One of the more obvious reasons we appreciate music's giving meaning to time is that our supply of time is so limited. But this is also why we so strongly resent having our time wasted! If you see a painting hanging on the wall and don't like it, you simply turn your gaze elsewhere, and hardly any time has been squandered. But if you go to a concert and the program includes music you find ugly or unpleasant, precious minutes of your life tick away, lost. You could have done something else with that little part of your life, anything else, but you're stuck four seats from the aisle, and time is passing. From resentment to hatred is but a small step.
And, of course, not many people enjoy being insulted, either, or falsely accused. In a 1964 speech at the Colorado campus of the Aspen Institute, the English composer Benjamin Britten said, "It is insulting to address anyone in a language which they do not understand." And if what's said—or played—seems so often to be couched intentionally in a language that virtually nobody could understand, and yet one finds oneself blamed over and over again for not understanding. …
Hoffman notes that defenses of avant-garde music of the "relentlessly dissonant and persistently unpopular variety" often center on the notion that exposure and familiarity will lead us to appreciate what we did not at first, and it does happen. But in music, as in poetry and in the other arts, the truly great works—at least those to which contemporary audiences had access—have always been acknowledged as such from the beginning, even when critical reaction was occasionally hostile. If, after a century, the initial promise of "liberation" from tonality has largely and spectacularly failed, isn't it time to admit that, while great musicians will and poor musicians won't find a way to make good music whatever the prevailing theory, this particular theory is a very bad one that has produced, mostly, very bad music?
Not hard to see where I'm going, is it?
I'd only add that good theory won't make great art any more than terrible theory will prevent it. The difference is most important in the work of those talented artists who aren't ever going to produce great work—that is, almost all of us—who are supported by good theory and practice and damaged by bad. So neither am I being snide, Ron, when I say her poems are better than yours.
7:40:11 PM 
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