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Music, for them, is made on instruments of the traditional nineteenth-century orchestra. The students’ entire effort, their very raison d’être, is the mastery of traditional instruments—instruments that, by virtue of their structural characteristics and the aggregate weight of their collective historical tradition, serve to encourage the continued performance and composition of music relevant to them.
The weight of that tradition—the capabilities of the instruments, not to mention their acoustical properties—are formidable obstacles to the efforts of composers who wish to move out from under that tradition. If your only tool is a hammer, it is said, every problem looks like a nail. Further, composers are well aware that to compose music that is in some sense inimical to standard uses of these instruments, or that includes non-traditional or electronic elements, is the kiss of death. Unless one’s reputation is big enough to guarantee the willingness of an orchestra to practice one’s music, and the willingness of an audience to pay to hear it, such efforts will die on the vine.
A Conference “Conference”
In a paper on some connections between the situation of music in the late twentieth century and that of philosophy of science in the same period, I made the statement that tonality is “dead.” A philosopher in the audience took umbrage. He argued that thousands of living composers are writing tonal music in popular, jazz, musical theatre, opera, and even in the area of “serious” concert music. Because of this, one could not possibly argue that tonality was dead.
My point to him was not that tonality is not being used by living composers—nor that representational painting is not being done by some living painters. The point is that those ways of doing music and art have lost their potency as the universal aesthetic paradigms in the West for the ongoing development of musical or artistic ideas. They are no longer the principal forces behind the activity of Western composers and artists. Because of the peculiar characteristics of postmodernity, the situation of tonality is precisely the same as any other means of composition or organization—or decomposition or disorganization—of music.