Challenges for modernist composers

The aesthetic consciousness of modernism has a complicated history. As Sol Bellow said: “strange feet wear strange shoes”. From a musical perspective, a diversity of styles have appeared during this time period, however, no single style represents the standard definition of modernism. Compared with the classical period, the music characterized by the intention to break the order of time and space, the wide usage of imagery, symbolism and awareness, as well as other methods in order to show life and the character of people.

Modern music has made an unprecedented breakthrough, which has formed the primary sound characteristics of modern music itself; Meanwhile, the performance of music has also been expanded to an unprecedented extent. Composers gained more abundant ways of creation, but due to the range of these techniques, which frequently exceeded people’s hearing habits and music thinking familiarity, the gaps between audiences and composers have grown wider than ever. One of the general explanations about the twentieth century music, which made about twenty years ago, was “synonymous with “avant-garde stuff nobody likes”. Apparently, the acceptance of twentieth century music was stagnant, even for today, in which the “Contemporary Classical Music” that we live in is undergoing the polarization of acceptance.

Composers, somehow expected to adopt some melodic melodies and consonant harmonies to please the audiences many years ago. Once, when some of the composers who tried to make a difference, the audiences would consider that music as pretentious work, only because it sounds unfamiliar to them. But the fact is a composer should not be limited by rules of classical or traditional. As Steven Stucky mentioned in his article, “… a composer’s duty is not to any particular listener or any particular imagined audience; a composer’s duty is to the work itself. A composer has to remember that a true work of art is rich, multifaceted, and challenging. Its aim is not popularity, its aim is truth.”

John Cage’s 4`33 as a beginning of the Fluxus movement, and the piece like feeding the piano to eat straw, or listening to the voice of butterfly’s wing by sitting in the concert hall was subsequently followed by a large number of similar works. Also, the movement continued to spread to other areas, for example, architecture, literature, and visual art. The Fluxus movement is an extreme example during the development of modern music, but it also demonstrates that when traditional bondage is broken, the music would present the most original emotion. In this case, many writers therefore have expressed their anger, ugliness, and evilness through their works, and they called it the expression of “honesty”, which is the basic spirit of the modern music.

Audiences were terrified by being isolated from “contemporary music”, these abstract, unfriendly, harsh, hard to follow, even boring pieces were confusing to them. Nowadays, the acceptance of contemporary music is rising rapidly, however, audiences straightforwardly express their hatred for contemporary music. Leon Botstein once said in his book: “These festival weeks have had nothing to do with music. Schoenberg’s followers have overdone it. What the consequence of the absolute domination by dodecaphony will be … is that in ten years, I am convinced, no one will talk about the twelve-tone system.” Despite some people reject the idea of twelve-tone music, it is still impossible to ignore its tremendous influences, which fueled a new generation of music history.

Let us say, modern music is bound to be a controversial music style, without taken into consideration that people have such diverse tastes for everything, including art; even popular music could not satisfy all types of personality. The connection to an engaged audience－“not necessarily a mass audience, but certainly one that goes far beyond the composer’s peers and immediate circle－looking for music of a challenging, expressive and moving character.” In this case, people try too hard to understand contemporary music, which seems unadvisable. Sometimes it is unnecessary to fully understand esoteric techniques or rigorous structural schemes, responding to music passionately and emotionally is equal to directly embrace the pure sounds from music itself.

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