The Twentieth Century
by Don Robertson

Part Three: The Ostracism of the Tonal Composers

© 2005 by Rising World Entertainment

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How narrowly we must fit into the fashions of the day, that our own shaky sense of self-worth may be reinforced by others.

Jean Sibelius

     Jean Sibelius was born in Finland in 1865. By the 1890s, he had made his mark as a composer of orchestral music, his En Saga being completed in 1892 and Karelia Suite the following year. His first symphony was finished in 1899 and his famous violin concerto (one of the greatest ever written) came five years later. 
     Sibelius composed in a thoroughly romantic style, with lush chords and melodies. His music was filled with passion, and therefore, as the concert world turned more and more to the "modernity" the current fashion, music infused with stress, discordant and disjointed rhythm, it became increasingly difficult for the music of Sibelius to be accepted. 
     University professors in the theory and composition classes of major universities began falling more and more into the footsteps provided by Schönberg, adopting his intellectual theories, and they began punishing with abuse, students who wrote in "outdated" musical styles. Music critics and other well-known personalities were also lured into the dark force of "modern" music, and Sibelius's music was severely criticized, first by a few critics, then finally by some of the most influential figures in European classical music.
     The famous conductor René Leibowitz (1913-1972) called Sibelius the world’s worst composer. Nadia Boulanger, one of the most influential figures in 20th Century music, and with whom most of the famous American twentieth century composers studied (Elliot Carter, Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Cecil Effinger, Donald Erb, Irving Fine, Philip Glass, Andrew Imbrie, Roy Harris, Norman Lockwood, Daniel Pinkham, Elie Siegmeister, Walter Piston, and Virgil Thompson for starters) called Sibelius "a tragic case."
     This kind of criticism effected Sibelius deeply. “I have had to suffer a good deal for having persevered in composing symphonies at a time when practically all composers turned to other forms of expression,” he said.
     Around mid-century, Sibelius stopped writing music altogether. By this time he had become a laughing stock among the musical elite. However, in America his music had developed a wide popular appeal, a situation largely due to the fact that not only did the American public love his music, but he was tirelessly championed by Olin Downes, the music critic for the New York Times. Sibelius was also loved by the public in England, where he was greeted favorably by the famous English critic and writer Ernest Newman, and in Germany, where he found public acceptance. Other central European countries, where Sibelius's music wasn't (and probably still isn't) performed, wanted little to do with him, though, and critics in these countries scoffed at stories about those silly American and English concert attendees.
     Downes had a difficult job in America promoting Sibelius' music, however, as he was continually challenged by the machine called "The American Composers," most of whom had studied with Boulanger. Among them was Aaron Copland, considered one of America’s elite composers by the musical establishment, who in his 1941 book called Our New Music, wrote: 

     "The nonsense about Sibelius was due to the exaggerated commentaries of a handful of English and American critics [referring to Newman and Downes, mostly] who obscured the true picture of a late-19^th-century composer who had nothing significant to say for 20^th-century ears....The attempt to set Sibelius up as a great modern composer is certain to fail.” 

     Well Copland, was well off the mark on that one, as Sibelius continues to move his way up the list of those who REALLY were the great composers of the 20th Century.
     Sibelius had not adopted Schönberg's atonality, nor had he mimicked Stravinsky's disconnected rhythmic monstrosities, and so he was washed up as far as the music elite was concerned. Meanwhile, Copland, continued to write the most trivial of trinkets, like Rodeo, for public consumption, side-by-side with his concession to "modern music," with more ‘serious’ works written in a discordant style: the Piano Concerto, Connotations, and Inscape... compositions that are practically unknown today, but guaranteed to keep his fellow "serious" composers happy, and ensuring that his “Great 20th-Century Composer” image remained alive. But can any work of Copland's even come close to Sibelius’ Violin Concerto, or to his symphonies, works that have a spiritual potency that touches the soul?
    Copland wasn't alone, however. Another American composer, Virgil Thomson, began tearing into Sibelius publicly during 1940, when Thomson became the music critic for the New York Herald Tribune. His first printed review was a scathing attack on Sibelius and his 2nd Symphony. He branded Sibelius a “provincial composer beyond description” and derided his music’s popular appeal. Another composer, Russian composer Nicholas Nabokov, called Sibelius’s symphonies “antediluvian monstrosities.” Musicologist Paul Henry Lang, professor at Columbia University, author of the 1,107-page Music in Western Civilization and successor to Thomson at the Tribune, was astounded by the popularity of Sibelius’s music in America and wrote that the good points in the composer’s favor were offset by the “obesity…turgidity, and redundancy” in his music, where the melodies were too long and drawn out. Famous American critic Harold C. Schonberg, in his book The Lives of the Great Composers, labeled Sibelius "simply a minor composer."
     Music that expressed beauty and love, such as Sibelius’s, was an anachronism during the period of 20^th-century “modernity,” and critics referred to it as being overly sentimental, boring, and bad. Meanwhile, the American and English public preferred the music of Sibelius over that of the modern intellectuals such as Webern, Schönberg, and Stravinsky, who are still to this day considered 20th century musical Gods. There was such a negative acceptance of Sibelius’ music by those in charge that the extremely sensitive composer found it more and more difficult to create new works, so much so that he was unable to give his last, 8^th, symphony to the world, and destroyed it instead. Following this, his last decades were musically silent.

Rachmaninoff

     Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff had similar problems. He continued to write in the romantic-era style from his first to his last composition, carrying into nearly the middle of the 20th century a tradition that he had begun in the 19^th. In 1927, Viktor Belyayev wrote in the Musical Quarterly: 

“It was Rachmaninoff’s fate to live in the midst of this multitude of jostling and divergent currents in contemporary Russian music. In this concourse of circumstances we see the reason for the profoundest tragedy of his work – the tragedy of a great soul expressing itself in language and by methods which were antiquated, whereas under other conditions they would have harmonized with the times.” 

         There was always a continual torrent of abuse heaped on Rachmaninoff. Works such as his Second Piano Concerto, one of the most beautiful piano concertos ever written, because it was not written with discords, was neglected and criticized and dismissed as “twaddle.” One critic wrote that it was “the sort of thing that any pianist and orchestra could extemporize by the yard.” Yet no other composer during the entire century, with the exception of Sibelius, came close to composing a work that compares to this beautiful work, one of the widest excepted works by any 20th-century composer.
     In the 5^th Edition of the sacred Grove’s Dictionary, published in 1954, Eric Bloom had this to say about Rachmaninoff: “As a composer, [Rachmaninoff] can hardly be said to have belonged to his time at all. . . His music is well constructed and effective, but monotonous in texture, which consists in essence mainly of artificial and gushing tunes accompanied by a variety of figures derived from arpeggios. The enormous popular success some few of Rachmaninoff’s works had in his lifetime is not likely to last, and musicians never regarded it with much favour.”
     Unwilling to embrace the discordant, nervous music that had taken over their musical world, and defeated by continual criticism, Sibelius and Rachmaninoff, along with English composer Edward Elgar, had by the 1920s curtailed composing music. Sibelius stopped abruptly after his 1926 composition Tapiola and the 1928 Incidental Music to the Tempest; After revising his first piano concerto in 1917, Rachmaninoff wrote only six more works in the remaining 25 years of his life, and Elgar stopped writing after the Cello Concerto of 1919. Thus, three great composers, two who had composed two of the greatest concertos ever written, gave into defeat, to watch silently as concert halls rang with the discords and the nervous energy of 20th-century music, music that came not from the heart, but was a reflection of the stress of life during the twentieth century. 
    In a plebiscite conducted in America, where people were asked which living composers were most likely to be performed a hundred years from then, Sibelius came in first, Richard Strauss (another ‘holdover’ romantic composer) second, and Rachmaninoff third.

Intellectualization

    Misdirection in the 20th Century was spearheaded by intellectuals such as writer and philosopher Theodor W. Adorno who hated Sibelius' music. He felt that Sibelius should be lumped in with "the other amateurs who were too frightened to study composition theory." Adorno wrote that music, because of the way in which it was composed, affected consciousness, and was a way of “social management and control.” Adorno, who in addition to his writing, composed atonal music, felt that Schönberg stripped music of its “crutches”: those conventions that had been inherited from past music, but were still being applied in popular music. Boulez later called this "the stripping away of the accumulated dirt." 
    Adorno’s argument was that the listener could attain “consciousness” by listening to Schönberg’s music. Why? Because, Adorno felt, the listener had to use his or her intellect to understand the music! Schönberg’s music instigated critical reasoning in the listener, and by listening to this music that contained “all the darkness and guilt of the world,” the listener attained “true consciousness.”
    Thus, the intellectuals came forth in the 20th Century to define the “true consciousness” one attained through an intellectual comprehension of music! This is exactly opposite to attainment of consciousness through transcending the mental process, especially through the vehicle of the attunement with higher emotions as expressed in music by the masters, such as Beethoven and Wagner.
    Adorno also felt that the sense of critical hearing in listeners who liked predictable music would regress in the same manner that one’s sense of taste would regress by eating fast food and diet colas, an argument that completely eliminates the emotional and spiritual effects of music. This argument became fodder for music intellectuals during the 20th Century, however, who wanted to sell people on atonal and serial music. Intellectually, the argument was appealing: "listening to predictable pop music all the time and one will never develop a taste for classical music," it says. But emotionally, this does not make sense, as powerful feelings can be aroused by those “musical clichés” that Adorno and his intellectual comrades abhorred. 
     Realistically? I would say that either in the case of food or music, it is not the awareness of the common foods or common music that dulls and makes unreachable the deeper tastes; it is the absence of awareness, training, understanding, and acquaintance with the deeper tastes of any art, be it food, architecture, poetry, music or painting, that has causes this. One CAN appreciate both. Adorno considered emotional listening as an abdication of reason. “Popular music is objectively untrue and helps to maim the consciousness of those exposed to it,” Adorno wrote in 1976. 
     Welcome to the 21st Century everybody! it is time to unleash ourselves of such ideas: ideas that have imprisoned composers of classical music for years, and caused concert goers to flee the concert halls. 
     Adorno wrote that music “sets up a system of conditioned reflexes in its victim.” He is referring to, of course, what he calls the “wrong” kind of music, such as popular music and music by such romantic composers as Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov. He felt this music was used to control society by causing conformism. What this intellectual failed to understand was that when listening to romantic music, the feelings may be invoked, and it is the positive feelings of love, joy, and peace that are paths on the road to true consciousness! 
     Conformism has nothing to do with the outer world of man, and all to do with the inner. No matter what is going on without, it is the inner acquiescence to anything exterior (from casual comments by others to full out-and-out brainwashing) that is the essence of conformism. Man is already a conformist, having been raised and bred, schooled, and set on the "acceptable" path in his particular society. Listening to popular and romantic music does not breed conformism. If anything, it can help liberate the listener by allowing him or her to better understand his or her own feelings, thus supporting the work of the true being within. 
    For example, Maria Cary’s song Hero appeals to the emotions and the mind with its message of inner strength. The song was the result of her own guidance as she struggled to become who she really was. Certainly the record labels sold her as "just so much sex," but that is not what we are talking about here. Many of the great artists had to become nonconformists in order to realize their goal. She was able to encapsulate in an emotional way how she discovered the hero within herself, the hero that brought her triumphantly through her trials. I wonder how many thousands, if not millions, of people this song has helped. 
     The thing about philosophy of any kind, including religious philosophy, is that it can become a set of patterns in the intellect that become the ruling force in one’s life. But the true mission of philosophy must be the liberation of the individual spirit to think and feel for itself, as all necessary answers are then within grasp. After one has reached a true state of self-awareness, philosophy and religious dogma are no longer as useful as a personal motivator; guidance and understanding are gained from intuition and true cognition.

 20th Century Composers and Discord

    Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, Richard Strauss and Elgar were not the only composers who wrote music that continued to be based on tonality. There were a number of other composers, and some composers who wrote both tonal and non-tonal works.
    The music of Hungarian composer Bela Bartok ranged from very accessible to stridently discordant. His six tormented string quartets, for example, are angst-filled testimonies to pain and despair, while a number of his early works, such as the Second Suite, Opus 4, and later works, like the Third Piano Concerto, are beautiful and enjoyable musical compositions. American composer Aaron Copland wrote extremely popular works, such as his Appalachian Spring (which contains sections of music with beautiful harmonies and melody, and others based on distorted melodies and ugly harmonies, while maintaining an air of folksiness throughout), as well as others that are extremely discordant. There were a number of composers who wrote music that still maintained roots in tonality, but used ugly and dark harmonies and distorted discords. So many composers were intimidated by the pervading opinion that all contemporary music must be written in a "modern style," else the composer would be banished from the concert hall or from teaching positions at universities. Fortunately, this attitude will disappear in this century as 20th Century classical music begins to be viewed in hindsight and the understanding of the effects of consonance and dissonance are more clearly understood. 
    Maurice Ravel was mainly a tonal composer who wrote pleasing music. However, a few of his works were influenced by the discords of Igor Stravinsky. Works such as his two piano concertos and the early string quartet, for example , are beautiful works of art.
    Until the actual break with 20th Century negative musical tradition by the so-called minimalists beginning in 1960, the power of discord and the persuasion of the serial composers and their proponents was so strong that even those who continued to write music based on tonality incorporated discords in their music. While much of the music of Russian composer Aram Katchaturian remained pure (he wrote a beautiful violin concerto, piano concerto and the Masquerade and Gayne suites for Orchestra), the music of his contemporaries Prokofiev and Schostokovich was infused with discord, jagged and nervous harmonies and generally unpleasant emotions.
    Composers who did not stray much from the path of tonality include Howard Hanson (whose masterpiece of Romantic music is his 2nd symphony), Alan Hovhaness, Ralph Vaughan-Williams, Benjamin Britten, Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, Hindemith, Neilson, Carl Orff (Carmina Burana and the Shulwerk), and let us not forget Leroy Anderson and George Gershwin. Samuel Barber's music is tonal, yet not always concordant. He wrote two beautiful masterpieces, however: the Adagio for Strings, Opus 11, and the Violin Concerto, Opus 14.
     Spanish composers include Manuel de Falla, Rodrigo and Granados. French composers: Vincent d'Indy and Charles-Marie Widor and Charles Tournemire.
   
- > For further observations about the topic of the ostracism of the romantic composers, read what contemporary composer Nancy Bloomer Deussen has to say about it here.

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