Posted 6:51 PM by Gene

Terry Teachout has written a response to Joe Queenan's irritable foot-stomping about modern "serious" music. Mr. Teachout is right: "[S]uch accessible and appealing works as Benjamin Britten's 'Ceremony of Carols,' Aaron Copland's 'Billy the Kid,' Maurice Ravel's G Major Piano Concerto, Dmitri Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, Igor Stravinsky's 'Symphony of Psalms' and Ralph Vaughan Williams's 'Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis' must not be swept into the ashcan like so much music fiddle-dee-dee. True enough, and "modern" enough; but Mr. Queenan was fuming at what he called "contemporary" music -- at today's "opera", at "9/11" Stockhausen and John "Trapped" Cage, at conservatory faculties full of exquisitely trained technicians who wear it on their sleeves that they "write for themselves" while not giving a damn whether anyone likes it -- or even if their WUHK makes any sense. Perhaps they were just tripped up by the nomenclature: "modern" and "contemporary" may mean the same thing, when they don't. What gives Mr. Queenan's screed its timeliness is that, as Mr. Teachout notes, there were once great, MODERN works of music. Now it's just foundation grants, musical "chairs", backscratching reviewers, and emptying concert halls.