If you follow classical music or new music, you’ve probably read Greg Sandow’s blog or criticisms. He’s the one who is normally sounding the alarm that live classical music as we know it is dying. Generally, he is probably right, and deserves credit for pushing old, slow moving arts organizations to think about how to ensure that they will have an audience in twenty years. Unfortunately, in the course of attempting to highlight positive developments, he’s seemed to have added another useless, divisive category to classical music; Alt-classical. Why am I also bringing it up? Well, I keep seeing it everywhere. Every day I read another classical music critic using this term, mostly as a way of telling their readership why they aren’t going to like it.
What the hell is alt-classical anyway? The best I can gather is that there is not really a unanimous definition, but it involves young talented (mostly New York) composers who are willing to admit that they are influenced by more than just classical music, writing for classically trained chamber musicians, who give their concerts in non-traditional spaces, and seem to go out of their way to connect with their audiences. Call me crazy, but this isn’t new 0r alt-anything. This has been happening specifically in New York and San Francisco since the sixties – around the time that modern jazz and pop music became influential. Philip Glass and Steve Reich’s groups did this years ago, and claim the same non-classical influences.
There is nothing new here folks. Something you call Alt-Classical, I call a portrait of today’s classical musician. The people participating in this so-called movement aren’t some new breed of musician. They generally went to a music conservatory, spent years mastering their craft, and are presenting music in ways that are informed by their lives. To refer to composers or musicians as Alt-classical is uselessly divisive. Do you mean not classical? What is classical? Moteverdi, Brahms and Berg are all classical, right? These titles seem only useful for historians or critics who want to act like historians without perspective.
Did you see Anthony Tommasini’s article in the NY Times this past Sunday? He laments that fact that today’s generation of musicians (and even uses the term Alt-Classical) seem to program works by the 20th century experimentalists such as Stockhausen, Babbitt, and Berio as well as today’s young composers, but tend to avoid composers in the middle such as, Joan Tower, John Harbison, or Steven Hartke. Also, he asserts that there is not enough respect for composers such as Samuel Barber, Vincent Persichetti, Peter Mennin, David Diamond, and others.
The answer is simple – Percussionists are driving the new music scene, and this list of composers he presents have largely ignored percussion in their chamber music. We love to program Cage and Cowell and Stockhausen and Babbitt because they wrote a lot of music for percussionists. And so do today’s composers. Allan Kozinn had it right – “If you think about it, drums are the new violins.”
And please, stop with the Alt- Classical crap!