Features

In 1930, after receiving dozens of letters complaining about their “ultra-modern” radio broadcasts, the British Broadcasting Company published a set of listening instructions in Radio Times:

Listen as carefully at home as you do in a theatre or concert hall. You can’t get the best out of a programme if your mind is wandering, or if you are playing bridge or reading, give it your full attention. Try turning out the lights so that your eye is not caught by familiar objects in the room. Your imagination will be twice as vivid.

If you only listen with half an ear you haven’t got a quarter of a right to criticize.

Operating under the direction of Edward Clark, the BBC had been doing its best to bring the musical avant garde to the masses, programming brutal dodecaphonic operas alongside stand-up comedians and patriotic marches. Lord Reith, who had founded the BBC after replying to an ad in The Morning Post, believed that audiences would accept new musical works with “comparatively little effort.” He was wrong. Complaints continued to pour in, and before long the BBC was lashing out. “Many of you have not even begun to master the art of listening,” a programming director wrote in Radio Times. “You have not even begun to try.” In 1936, the BBC gave up the fight. Tonality returned to the airwaves.

The situation is not much different today. As David Stubbs notes in his new book Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko but Don’t Get Stockhausen, avant-garde and experimental music remain cultural punch-lines. Starting somewhere around 1907, when Arnold Schoenberg began to overhaul Western tonality in 1907, compositional music completely abandoned the theoretical anchors that had grounded it for centuries. It is impossible to overstate just how radical a break this was. The composer Anton Webern was not exaggerating when he gloated over tonality’s corpse: “We broke its neck.”

Twentieth-century modernism had other casualties, though, including the visible world in visual art. In the space of about fifty years, representation completely broke down. By the 1950s, Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists had made New York—not Paris—the cultural capital of the West, and today their paintings bring in tens of millions of dollars. They are dorm room posters. Stubbs’ question is a really good one: “Why has avant-garde music failed to attain the audience, the cachet, the legitimacy of its visual equivalent?”