The young UK composer Martin Suckling recently had his work Play performed at a Berlin new-music festival organized by George Benjamin. It's a happy, wired, jumpily pulsing score, approachable in idiom but unpredictable in movement. Suckling reports on the premiere here, and it's instructive reading. Evidently the festival and related concerts occasioned some controversy: Benjamin's works Palimpsest I and II inspired boos alongside bravos at the Berlin Philharmonic, and Suckling was subject to a hostile review in the Berliner Zeitung. This being Germany, the problem wasn't that the imported British works were too ugly but that they weren't ugly enough. Such was the tenor of the Berliner Zeitung review: "All the traumas of the twentieth century were here obliterated. Forgetful of history, unencumbered, this music tries to pick up where the happy-go-lucky music from before the First World War left off. The idea of authentic expression seems to have taken care of itself completely, in parallel with Stravinsky and Ravel's turn from late-Romantic pathos, except that these young Brits obviously no longer recognize the need to say something new." And so on: the review is so overflowing with sub-Adornian literary kitsch that it hardly needs to be taken seriously. Suckling is right to say: "Music can be enjoyable to listen to, sweet to hear, but have something more to say beneath the surface." He might have added, if he were in a less diplomatic mood, that quite a few of those twentieth-century traumas were inflicted by Germans on the rest of the world, and it's a bit ironic that a German should accuse a Scot of forgetting them.
The Berliner Zeitung's takedown of younger British composers — Thomas Adès and Mark-Anthony Turnage are dissed by implication — is sadly symptomatic of the stagnant state of the German new-music scene, which I reviewed in my article "Ghost Sonata." Time and again, composers and critics have invoked the horrors of the twentieth century as justification for worn-out avant-garde devices. The composer Jeffery Cotton has written a passionate essay on this topic, quoting my effort briefly. Of a Darmstadt new-music concert, Cotton writes: "Like so many times before at concerts of new music in Germany, I was overwhelmed by the feeling, as each piece started and ended, that someone was simply opening and closing a door on the same, eternal improvisation of effects and gestures." When he asked one of the performers why this music seemed constitutionally incapable of repeating segments and building a structure therefrom, the musician answered: “Well, return of the kind you mention would give rise to a system, and that would mean form, and form is fascistic." No, purely ideological pronouncements along the lines of "form is fascistic" are fascistic. Read Mann's Doctor Faustus.
For another point of view, see Mike Silverton's line-by-line critique of my "Ghost Sonata" article in the on-line La Folia magazine. Silverton, an old comrade from Fanfare magazine, acknowledges that German new-music polemics often tilt toward absurdity, but feels that the music should be considered separately from the propaganda. He believes I've dismissed Helmut Lachenmann too high-handedly. Perhaps so. I wrote that Lachenmann's music — best heard on ECM's Schwankungen am Rand CD — was "intermittently gripping": that grudging admission was insufficient for a composer with a weird and wild ear. My main beef is not with individual composers like Lachenmann but with the overarching ideology that holds the new-music scene in thrall. Imagine the difficulties that Martin Suckling would face if he were a young German tonal composer, receiving that same sweeping dismissal every other day from critics, musicians, radio programmers, and festival administrators, with the "fascist" slur thrown in for good measure. Steve Hicken of Listen 101 says that we have to get beyond a politicized new-music scene and celebrate the best of all traditions, "conservative " and "radical." A fine idea, but how do you arrange a cease-fire? Who's going to tell the Germans?
Update: Marcus Maroney, too, pleads for an ecumenical approach in the new-music field.
Update II: Salzburg has announced a Second Modernism. I am announcing the End of the Second Modernism.
Update III: I've made some corrections to the above — the Berlin Phil played Benjamin, the Deutsche RSO played Suckling — and included a brief description of Play, which I heard on MP3.
