John McWhorter Complains About Music No One Listens To
John McWhorter is a columnist for the New York Times. His day job is as a linguist at Columbia University, and he has become notorious for taking on “woke racism”. This makes him a favorite black writer among white conservatives.
But I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to discuss his stupid column that ran yesterday in the New York Times entitled “Classical Music Doesn’t Have to Be Ugly to Be Good.” Basically, his beef is with 12-tone music. He begins his editorial with the following:
In the early 1990s, I was in a chorus assigned to sing a contemporary classical piece that was, in a word, hideous. Almost willfully so, it seemed. It wasn’t in any home key — it was atonal — giving the listener no sense of base, instead just creeping all over the sonic spectrum. To my ear, the piece offered nothing of beauty, sequence or proportion. I remember thinking that I would rather have listened to a silverware drawer thrown down a staircase.
One might think that our concert halls were full of orchestras playing atonal music. To give his column a villain, he adds:
Yet some of the method’s practitioners have been given to an idea that this kind of music was an inevitable progress, dismissing a more intuitive yearning for nice-sounding music as a lack of sophistication: The composer Pierre Boulez once declared, “Any musician who has not experienced — I do not say understood, but, in all exactness, experienced — the necessity for the dodecaphonic language is useless” — “dodecaphonic” meaning 12-tone and “useless” meaning you, the rube.
Yeah, anyone who doesn’t listen to 12-tone music is a rube, according to Pierre Boulez. If someone wrote that today, you’d think he or she was a real asshole. But Boulez wrote that in 1952, 70 years ago when the then cutting-edge French composer was 27 years old. (It was published in Revue Musicale an essay called “Serialism”.) He died in 2016, after a career that included being music director for the New York Philharmonic; I can guarantee you that Boulez conducted thousands of tonal classical pieces. But McWhorter’s hard-hitting editorial sure put Boulez’s rotting corpse in its place!
It would have been nice if an editor at the New York Times had mentioned to McWhorter before publishing this embarrassing column that 12-tone music is pretty much a dead issue and that composers like Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams, Abby Fischer, Julia Wolfe, David Lang, Michael Gordon and many more are still composing music that many people like to listen to. Maybe he should have listened to some of it before writing this ignorant screed.
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