I Don’t Like Brahms . . .

If I have season tickets to the symphony, and one of the programs is mostly Brahms, I’ll often give my ticket away.  “That’s blasphemy!” I hear.  “He’s one of THE THREE B’s!!”

Mmm.  Yep.

Still don’t like his music, though.

I like Borodin.  And Saint-Saens.  Both contemporaries of Brahms.  And that’s what really irks me when I hear people say “I don’t like new music.”  How can anyone, in good conscience, decide that they won’t like this or that piece simply because it’s “new music?”  I just heard a harp concerto by Roel van Oosten, written in 1999, that I’m adding to my list of favorites.  Beautiful, lyrical, it has almost a Romantic sensibility.  As opposed to Society Sounds by Robert Morris.  Nope, I don’t like that one at all.

Now, does that mean van Oosten is a great composer, and Morris (a Pulitzer Prize winner, by the way) is not?  Not by a long shot.  Brahms was a great composer, whether I like him or not.  Everyone’s taste is different.  You may love something that I despise, and vice versa.  But I do wish people in general were more willing to listen to and experience new works before judging them.  For Pete’s sake, we hear new music in every movie we see!  New music is just crawling over the TV and movie screen, and it doesn’t make you cringe and walk out, does it?

So then, why is it so difficult to expand the audience at new music concerts?  Well, I think there are a lot of reasons.  One big issue is that music is ubiquitous.  You can carry your tunes with you all day, every day.  In Beethoven’s day, you were lucky to have any opportunity to hear a quality performance of any music, and audiences eagerly looked forward to the newest work.  Now you can hear three different versions of the Eroica symphony back to back, if you’d like.  A live musical performance is not the same “event” that it used to be.

I think, too, that many of us (and I – reluctantly – include myself in this statement) are willing to feed into the idea that new music not readily “understandable.”  “This isn’t like other new music,” we sometimes say.  “Give it a listen.  Please?”  Listening to new music doesn’t need to be a favor, and it doesn’t need to be excused.  Listen because you might hear something you like.  Or something you don’t.  Or something that you’ve heard before that you hear now in a different way.  But also, go and listen because it is an event, possibly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hear something that you may find you love.  Getting a CD made of new music is difficult and expensive, so that really neat Tim Sutton flute quartet that Dolce Flutes played today?  You might not have the chance to hear it again.

Besides, you may find yourself being on the leading edge of the next big thing.  Remember the line from Amadeus, when the emperor told Mozart there were “too many notes”?  That was a genuine criticism.  Here’s another good one:  “Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto gives us for the first time the hideous notion that there can be music that stinks to the ear.”  (Here’s a really neat article with more of these gems.)  Sometimes it takes a while to truly appreciate the joy and timelessness of what we are hearing.

So go to a new music concert.  Imagine that you don’t have 24 hour access to recordings, that this is your chance to hear something you’ve never heard before.  And enjoy the music!

Or don’t.  Because you’re entitled to your opinion.  After all, I don’t like Brahms.

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