Musicians and music-lovers who are looking for signs of Modernism's end and Romanticism's return (I suspect there are more of us than even we imagine) have lately been thrown a bone in the form of a curiosity called, deviously enough, "New Romanticism." Neither really new nor at all Romantic, "New Romanticism" is a twist on Modernism, a continuation of the familiar death march for Western music that certain mainstream composers and critics have been beating out for half a dozen decades.
Like most handy aesthetic or moral labels, this one was born in the press, its purpose being the lumping together of certain composers who didn't fit anywhere else. The movement is supposed to have incubated in the 1960s and is now said to be everywhere. (Or perhaps it has even peaked.) The "New Romantics" are said to include avid Del Tredici, George Rochberg, Frederic Rzewski, George Crumb, Joseph Schwantner, John Harbison, Christopher Rouse, and Tison Street, among the virtually countless others who have been so labeled. By extension, one could also include composers such as Joan Tower and Oliver Knussen, who have come to prominence since the "New Romanticism" emerged, and older composer like Hans Werner Henze and Ned Roared, who have always had flashes of Romanticism in their work. All of these composers are highly skilled, often deeply gifted, people. Some of them may even actually be romantics. But together, they do not constitute "New Romanticism
If they did, then surely the seasons in New York, Washington, San Francisco, and so forth would be resounding with populous, happy symphony audiences pouring forth praise for young Schumanns, new Liszts. After all, audiences show up in spades for the "old Romantics" - Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, Schubert and Wagner, Franck and Elgar, and Mahler and Verdi. But this is not the case for the New Romantics. Instead, the very words "new music" - Romantic being beside the point - continue to signal to most people a morass of dense, non-tonal harmonic sputtering, and tuneless hours of rhythmic grind. At symphonic and chamber concerts around the nation, audiences attend performances of new music in underwhelming numbers, knowing that what they get from a new piece of music is "New Music," New works are a vital business only where the audiences expect and encourage the "New Music" aesthetic and eschew Romanticism, that is, in Soho lofts.
Are there Romantic elements to the composers of the "New Romanticism?” Undoubtedly. That is why the bone can seem so satisfying. Del Tredici's endless sonic climaxes are as parodistically Romantic as Mahler's though lighter hued. Rochberg's string quarters are the real item in terms of their structural strength and archlyricism. But as a movement, it's a flop, and worse: it's an excuse to ignore the real needs of people to hear new music with melody at the core - music coming from a vital cultural center, rather than from the edges of a rapidly failing world of symphonic orchestras and opera companies.
What's missing isn't composers but a context. The "New Romanticism" has appeared without anybody having the slightest notion what Romanticism is. The closest thing to a definition of New Romanticism may have been composer Jacob Druckman's, as cited in a recent article in the New York music magazine, Keynote: it is music of a "strong and potent reaction to the academicism [of] the 1950s." This is fine, so far as it goes, but it is a definition by negation; it tells us that the New Romanticism is against academicism, but it doesn't tell us what it's
...
Read Full Article
|
