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The
Classical Music of the Twenty-First Century
by Don
Robertson
© 2000 by Don Robertson
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My Own Realizations
During the last half of the 1980s, after my intense study
of classical music styles from Gregorian chant through
romanticism, I realized that one of the problems facing the
art of classical music was that a false expectation of stylistic
improvement always was present, just as it was also
expected in the art of painting and the other arts. In any time continuum, as art evolved, it must
also evolve stylistically by incorporating newly discovered elements, and that older styles were archaic
and should be left behind. There was always an historical
precedence for this: new discoveries always brought about a
stylistic change in art, and this change created the next step
in the evolution of that art form. Monteverdi and the
composers of the early 17th Century introduced
radical changes into the music of his time and thus the music
evolved to the style of the baroque
era that reached its
zenith in the music of J.S.
Bach.
Bach’s sons contributed to the beginnings of the style of
the classical era and they greatly influenced both Haydn and
Mozart who brought classical-era music to its zenith.
Beethoven and Schubert altered the state of classical music
with their new discoveries and were the first great masters of
the romantic era that culminated in the late 19th
Century with the music of Wagner. Schönberg introduced
atonality and changed the course of classical music in the 20th
Century, then along came Cage and the music of chaos. From
chaos is born the cycle of music again, but this time we have
a full cycle of music behind us, plus the ability to learn of
the traditions of music in other parts of the world, including
the great countries of India and China with their highly
developed classical music traditions that we have not had the
ability or the desire to explore before.
After realizing that there was always an expectation for a
stylistic improvement to further art music along and that
older styles were considered archaic for no concrete reason, I
realized that during the 1980s, this ‘improvement’ had
become a style known as minimalism.*
I believe that it is time to abandon this concept of
stylistic improvement as the criteria for which a piece of
music is accepted or not. It is this false sense of
improvement that continually gives birth to avant guard
and other superficial and degenerate artistic movements that
imply a rejection of the past. It is fine to make new artistic
discoveries, as we have seen in the past, but what is
important to realize is that at this time in history, the
beginning of the 21st Century, we have taken art
through an entire cycle, and now instead of looking to style
for the answer to what is acceptable in music, we need to
judge art by different criteria. We had become slaves to
style! We had to dress according to the most current style,
our homes and our furniture, they had to be chic, and we
had become victims of trends in eating, in smoking, trends in art,
trends in music. We were a society of
sheep following blindly some preconceived notion of what has
value and what does not. Awakening to our own inner potential
and the realities of the universe that we live in is critical.
This realization completely freed me from the boundaries of
what I now considered a false evolution of art music. I had
brought an end to atonality in my music by discovering the
composition of music using duochords, the root of negative
music. This was the same end to which I felt the negative
classical music of the 20th century was
unconsciously evolving. With my new freedom, it was not
necessary to embrace yet another ‘improvement.’ The whole
concept of artistic evolution through creating a new style and
abandoning previous styles, I now realized was contrived and
not necessarily real. Evolution in music did not
represent a step-by-step ‘improvement’ in style, but
instead dealt more with the evolution of man and our
understanding of ourselves, our environment, each other, and
the true meaning of art itself.
Thus freed, I realized that as a classical musician, I was
able to write that which best represented the state of my soul
and my feelings using any of the techniques that I wished to
use: be they new, or of past ages in classical music,
techniques that I had learned in my studies of non-western
classical music, or even from what I had learned in jazz, rock
and roll, or in blues. In fact, this is what many classical
composers were already experimenting with during the first
half of the 20th century, before the total
embracing of atonality and serialism…composers such as
Stravinsky (neo-classicism), Bartok (folk music), Ives
(marching bands), Messian (bird song, Indian scales), and
Milhaud (Jazz).
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* Minimalism was a term coined
to describe a style of music that evolved out of a composition
made by Terry Riley in the late 1960s called "In C."
Terry’s music had significance at the time because he was a
classical composer that had rejected atonality. The stylistic
features of Terry’s work was imitated by others and a new
style of music, later termed minimalism, was born. Composers
who fit into the minimalist category are Phillip Glass, Steve
Reich, and John Adams.
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