Class acts

Musical Times, Summer 2003 by Whittall, Arnold

One of the many ways in which the culture of the new millennium is dramatising its immaturity is in sweeping statements about classical music: less popular than ever, less accessible than ever, marginalised in schools, fossilised in concert halls and opera houses, dumbed down on Radio 3. Amid all the bluster, journalists can be relied on to tilt at that easiest of targets, the aging if not utterly antidileuvian remnants of the avant-garde, as if their continued faith in certain ways of doing things had always excluded alternatives for those who thought differently. It is difficult to square such a doomsday scenario with a pluralistic reality in which composers like Ligeti, Part, Tavener, Adams, and Turnage do a fairly convincing job of preserving various quite traditional ways of doing things. And while it would be complacent in the extreme to suggest that, despite such factors as the reduction in new recordings of classical music and the travails of 'serious' publishers, it cannot be argued that the race is wholly to the commercial and the instantly, painlessly digestible.

It now seems clear that, while the major composers born in the 1920s have proved imaginative and adaptable in responding to their original avant-garde principles (often as a result of new developments in technology), those born in the 1930s have been even more pragmatic and open-minded - and none more so than Louis Andriessen, whose essays, lectures and interviews, published under the teasing title of The art of stealing time (Gestolen tijd: alle verhalen in Dutch), give a vivid account of how a new kind of radicalism can evolve and even prosper. The key was to throw out the kind of idealism that persuades old-style avant-gardists from Boulez to Birtwistle and beyond that the symphony orchestra and traditional, pre-amplified means of voice production serve equally well for the new music. With reference to his Anachronie I (1967), Andriessen said (in 1972) that 'no one understood what he had played and why. And nobody gave a damn. I could hear (and see) that by the way they played. The audience heard nothing at all', and he went on to rail against the 'social function' of the Concertgebouw Orchestra - 'defending the interests of the ruling classes in the Netherlands', and to declare that 'I detest that class of ladies and gentlemen who consume the music which affirms their self-satisfied social status' (pp. 128-29). By 2000, speaking about his latest opera Writing to Vermeer, Andriessen was still proclaiming that

the performance of contemporary music by symphony orchestras is completely uninteresting. The musicians don't like playing it, the audiences don't like it, so I would say: stay out of the way of the symphony orchestra (p.323).

This attitude is closer to that of Steve Reich (or even the IRCAM-habituated Boulez), than to the likes of Lindberg, Adams, or Turnage. So is the explanation that their music is actually more 'romantic' than Andriessen's? One of the main leitmotive of The art of stealing time is the preference for baroque and classical models, and even when claiming that Trilogy of the last day was 'an attempt to gain access to the nineteenth century' (p.272) Andriessen - who affects to have 'not the slightest idea' what Bruckner and Mahler are about - talks of approaching Chopin, Mendelssohn and Schumann by way of 'the early irregular forms of CPE Bach. This period is more anarchistic than that of the strict Classicists'. If the anarchic is one attraction, the 'dramatic irony' of the German Romantic philosophers is another, and this leads Andriessen to one of his boldest assertions:

the Romantic philosophers say that everything already has its antithesis in itself and there is no hope of a development which leads to a better situation. At the same time, Hegel developed his dialectic theory, which roughly says that two opposing positions - thesis and antithesis - lead to a higher unity - synthesis. Within that, I believe, lies the beginning of the discussion between the modern and post-modern ways of thinking (p.276).

We can infer from this that Andriessen the composer has more time for a modern classicism which doesn't waste its creative energy in unrealistic attempts to achieve an old-style synthesis, whether between variety and unity or between 'serious' and 'popular'. His formative experiences with the groups Hoketus and De Volharding helped to fill out a creative persona convinced that 'early be-bop and cool jazz have influenced me very strongly, more than Mozart, Bach and Brahms' (1990, p.153), and despite the Stravinskian character of assertions like 'Parker is cold cold cold. Good art is cold; it has reservations' (p.155), the relish of 'bluntness' is offset by a no less strongly declared passion for Ravel, and for reservations about realism: 'what I like about art is art that is not real. Art which is trying to intensify reality passes me by' (p.172). Further, 'in the Classical conception of art it is not important that you, as an artist, express your own feelings but that you depict an object which is "outside" you': and, in a clinching definition, 'don't tell me that Chopin is a Romantic composer. He is a Classicist' (p.314).