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The two excellent composers on our faculty, because of their ambiguous and often tortured relationship with the “down-and-dirty” world of the arts market, are very much aware of the situation of music in the twenty-first century, but their answers to the question of the market and their place in it are radically different. Virtually everyone else in the department is focused on music of the nineteenth century or earlier and on neoclassical or neo-Romantic works of the twentieth century, rather than music of living composers. There are, of course, some instruments—such as the clarinet, sax, and flute, among a few others—that have a significant repertoire of very recent works. It is also true that choral music for university ensembles has a very large catalogue of contemporary works. (It is interesting to note that community and semiprofessional choirs are much more likely to perform works from the traditional canon, save pieces like Rutter’s Requiem.) Otherwise, we occasionally hear, in our concerts, the performance of a “modernist” piece, or perhaps a work of one of our students or faculty, or more rarely, a living composer outside the confines of academia. Based on a statistical analysis of the concerts of a recent three-year period in our department, 90 percent of the music that our students and faculty performed was music of the common practice period.
It is obvious that this phenomenon is a reflection of a previously mentioned point: the classical music culture in the U.S. is essentially one of performance, not of composition. It is even more obvious that the stakes with regard to understanding one’s cultural present are far higher for a producer of art than a reproducer (most musicians are essentially reproducers, that is, performers). The problem is exacerbated in the musical world by the fact that the music of the Western classical tradition is far less malleable, far less amenable to experimental treatment (or has seemed so until recently) than theatre, dance, or visual arts.
So it is perhaps not so striking that the very concept of postmodernism (which, by the late 1990s had, for all intents and purposes, lost much of its vitality as an art movement, if not as a subject of philosophical interest) is, even today, virtually unknown and irrelevant in departments of music, even among composers. There is, in many conservatories and music departments (a few are beginning to make dramatic changes even as this is being written) an almost total disconnect with the present (and the relatively recent past), except as the locus of opportunities to perform the music of the past.