On New Music

The classical music canon needs little defending. Time has the effect of weeding out bad music, which is why nearly everything we hear from the seventeenth century is so good: the forgettable composers have been justly forgotten. We may tweak that Auden quotation about books to make it relevant here: some music is undeservedly forgotten, but none is undeservedly remembered. This also goes some way towards explaining why so much new music is tedious, pointless, or asinine: time hasn't distanced us from it yet. (As for whose music is tedious, pointless, or asinine? Well, the task of filling up the blanks I'd rather leave to you. / But it really doesn’t matter whom you put upon the list, / For they'd none of 'em be missed.)

So there is reason to mistrust one's senses when appraising new music. (Why do I doubt my senses, you ask? Because a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. John Rutter may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.) Current broad popularity is no indication of lasting value. Indeed, even things that I like may prove less than durable. We are, all of us, susceptible to novelty, which blinds us. Like every chorally-inclined high-schooler in the year 2004, I liked the works of Eric Whitacre, which I now loathe. (Add him to the list of cheap purveyors of artless unprepared dissonance, a club he shares most prominently with Morten Lauridsen and the late Stephen Paulus.) Seven years ago it was Nico Muhly, about whom the word Wunderkind was tossed about with wearying regularity.

My current new-music infatuation is with the music of Caleb Burhans, which — for now, at least — I enjoy quite a bit. He's of the same New York classically-trained Radiohead-listening crowd, which sets off several alarm bells. But I find his Jahrzeit striking: it is more than the tiresome timbral experiments that comprise most new composition, though of course it does employ extended techniques. Burhans' Magnificat and Nunc dimittis are charming, and practical enough that I would actually consider using them in a liturgy. (That's another bone I have to pick with so many composers: music does not need to be difficult to be worthwhile. Indeed, it takes a more skillful composer to write defensible music that can be performed by the average parish choir than to write music for a professional ensemble, where in theory there are few constraints imposed by the performers.) But what will I think in five years? I simply don't know. One always must assume one's own tastes are unimpeachable, I suppose.

Robert Herrick: "A Christmas Carol"

What sweeter music can we bring,
Than a carol, for to sing
The birth of this our heavenly King?
Awake the voice! Awake the string!
Heart, ear, and eye, and every thing
Awake! the while the active finger
Runs division with the singer.

Dark and dull night, fly hence away,
And give the honour to this day,
That sees December turned to May.
If we may ask the reason, say;
The why, and wherefore all things here
Seem like the springtime of the year?

Why does the chilling winter's morn
Smile, like a field beset with corn?
Or smell, like to a mead new-shorn,
Thus, on the sudden? Come and see
The cause, why things thus fragrant be:
'Tis He is borne, whose quick'ning birth
Gives life and luster, public mirth,
To Heaven, and the under-Earth.

We see Him come, and know him ours,
Who, with His sunshine, and His showers,
Turns all the patient ground to flowers.

The Darling of the world is come,
And fit it is, we find a room
To welcome Him. The nobler part
Of all the house here, is the heart,
Which we will give Him; and bequeath
This holly, and this ivy wreath,
To do Him honour, who's our King,
And Lord of all this revelling.