Levine and Wuorinen Not Gruntled With Music Critics

[Ralph]

SF Gate www.sfgate.com COMMENTARY

Modernist music masters flail their batons at evil music critics
- Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic
Wednesday, March 30, 2005

It's a safe bet that Barry Bonds doesn't have any music by the arch- modernist composer Charles Wuorinen lurking on his iPod. But the two men can agree about one thing, at least: When the going gets rough, it's always a good idea to blame the media.

Wuorinen and conductor James Levine -- who in spite of his smiley public demeanor seems to be equally embittered -- let loose with a bizarre joint display of pique in the pages of the New York Times on Sunday, as part of a round-table discussion on the subject of modern music and its discontents (composer John Harbison also took part, but largely declined to grouse).

Apparently, these guys aren't getting the respect that is their due, nor is Arnold Schoenberg, who according to Levine was perhaps the most important composer of the 20th century.

And whose fault is that? You guessed it: music critics.

"The problem with what happened after Schoenberg," Levine intoned, "was largely, or partly, coming from what turned out to be this desperate morass, futile attempt, to explain it."

Daniel J. Wakin, the Times' superb new classical music reporter, lost no time in picking up Levine's implication. "You seem to be laying all the blame on journalists, critics, writers on music," he said.

Darn right. "There was bad faith all around there for a while," said Levine, magnanimously spreading the responsibility around a little. "The problem is exacerbated by talk and print."

"A lot of writing about music involves copying what somebody already said, " Wuorinen added.

In a way, it's easy to understand why Wuorinen, once the San Francisco Symphony's composer-in-residence, should be so disgruntled. He has spent his career working assiduously to create music that conforms to the modernist ideals of historical progress and technical innovation. Impeccably crafted and intricately structured, it pursues the organizational ideas established by Schoenberg with impressive zeal. Along the way, he has garnered what rewards the world of contemporary music has to offer, including a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant and a Pulitzer Prize. And Levine, who this year began as music director of the Boston Symphony with a veritable orgy of knotty modernist scores, is now a high-profile champion.

Audiences couldn't care less. Wuorinen's music and that of other similarly oriented composers has yet to make a dent in the culture at large, or in the consciousness of music lovers. Hence the bitterness, the self-pity, the snarling at the listeners for whose benefit all this scribbling is ostensibly being undertaken. (Elsewhere, Levine paints music as an arcane mystery whose secrets are available only through the efforts of a priestly caste of initiates, when he bewails the notion that "in music, everyone's entitled to an opinion.")

Not that public whining is exclusively a modernist pastime; Ned Rorem, as staunchly anti-modernist as they come, has made it a cottage industry. But it's especially poignant in their case, because things weren't supposed to play out this way.

The founding myth of modernism, dating back to the "Music of the Future" propounded by Liszt and his followers and later codified by Schoenberg, was that this was music too "advanced" for any but a handful of contemporary listeners. In later generations, though, all would become clear: The prophetic artist, scorned and misunderstood in his own day, would be hailed once his time had come.

It didn't work out that way -- or rather, it did for some, but not for everyone. Mahler's time came; so did Stravinsky's, Bartók's, Ives', even Berg's. Schoenberg and his acolytes are still waiting, and they're getting really testy.

Some folks, like the late English novelist Kingsley Amis, think they'll be waiting indefinitely. "Twentieth-century music is like pedophilia," Amis wrote. "No matter how persuasively and persistently its champions urge their cause, it will never be accepted by the public at large, who will continue to regard it with incomprehension, outrage and repugnance."

Obviously, that statement is mostly a compound of curmudgeonly conservatism and plain old philistinism, leavened by a desire to shock. But any music lover has to concede that it contains a grain of truth as well, from a sociological if not an artistic point of view.

The musical modernism of Schoenberg and his followers has never been embraced, even by those who long ago accepted equally challenging strains in the other arts. And as long as we're being honest, we might as well admit that we don't know why.

It may have to do with inherent qualities in the way the brain processes auditory information. It may have to do with trends in music education. It may simply be a function of cyclical patterns of history. It may be because the music stinks.

It seems to me that it would be worth trying to solve this enigma, especially for those who love and devote themselves to this tradition. Sniping at the messenger is a tired and fruitless ploy.

E-mail Joshua Kosman at jkosman@sfchronicle.com.

Page E - 1
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f ... BVQ641.DTL

[operafan]

I generally don't agree with Mr. Kosman, especially when it comes to opera. However, IMO he comes off somewhat better in this earlier article about how audiences can be brought around to new music.

http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/f ... osman.html

[Guest]

Did any of us hear the performances in Boston?

All of them?

What was great and what wasn't, if anything?

Mark

[Corlyss_D]

Ralph, did you display the pique? I wanna see pique!

[MaestroDJS]

Audiences couldn't care less. Wuorinen's music and that of other similarly oriented composers has yet to make a dent in the culture at large, or in the consciousness of music lovers.

Samuel Goldwyn said it best: "If people don't want to go to the picture, nobody can stop them."

Most audiences and many musicians prefer good honest melodies, harmonies, forms etc. Nothing wrong with that at all.

Dave

David Stybr, Engineer and Composer: It's Left Brain vs. Right Brain: best 2 falls out of 3
http://members.SibeliusMusic.com/Stybr

Coordinator, Classical Music SIG (Special Interest Group) of American Mensa

Rosie: ein Walzer für Orchester -- http://www.SibeliusMusic.com/cgi-bin/sh ... reid=59153

[pizza]

Boston may not be the best place to assess audience reaction to modern music. It's still a fairly conservative musical venue and hasn't changed in that respect very much over the years. I've attended sell-out SRO houses in Chicago back in the '60s for Varese and other modernists and the disgruntled were those who couldn't get tickets.

The musings of music critics can sometimes be self-fulfilling prophecies.

[Ralph]

Ralph, did you display the pique? I wanna see pique!

*****

Remmeber that wonderful romantic song, "In the Pique?"

[karlhenning]

I read the entire transcript of the collective interview, and Kosman is selective and tendentious in his reading, and uses the interview only as an occasion for his own musical grudges.

Did any of us hear the performances in Boston?

All of them?

What was great and what wasn't, if anything?

Mark

I heard the Saturday performance, and I thought highly of it:

the double premiere of BSO commissions

Cheers,
~Karl

[karlhenning]

Some folks, like the late English novelist Kingsley Amis, think they'll be waiting indefinitely. "Twentieth-century music is like pedophilia," Amis wrote. "No matter how persuasively and persistently its champions urge their cause, it will never be accepted by the public at large, who will continue to regard it with incomprehension, outrage and repugnance."

That is not merely an unattractive remark, it is insulting.

To what point in the musical past does the composer of today need to revert, in order to avoid charges of "musical pedophilia"? Will 1865 do?

1827?

(Mind you, I write as a composer who loves the literature.)

[FrankAderholdt]

I have to admit--grudgingly--that there's a lot of truth in the article.

I am a fan of all styles and genres of "classical" music. I enjoy Schoenberg and his successors. The tougher the nut to crack, the better--but only for about 5% of my listening time.

(To lump Schoenberg and other modernists together in so facile a manner, as the article does, is a big mistake, though, IMO. Schoenberg was an arch-Romantic till the end of his days, his serial technique notwithstanding. A lot of composers who followed in his footsteps are dry-as-dust and intolerably boring. But that's for another thread.)

The unbending, "ultra-modern" composers need to own up to the fact that only a tiny minority of music lovers will ever take to their music. I agree that no amount or whining or conspiratorial paranoia will change the situation, either. Maybe most people just aren't willing to make the effort to learn a complex and challenging musical language. Maybe the music just sounds ugly to them. The return to tonality during the past two generations is probably proof that the pendulum is again swinging to the more natural order of things.

The ultra-modernists (terms fail us here) will always occupy a small niche. No one is to blame for this. They can consider themselves the gods on Mount Olympus looking down on the great unwashed if they want to. Ain't gonna change the musical landscape. They should be thankful for the exposure they get and fight for the best place in a very small room.

[karlhenning]

The unbending, "ultra-modern" composers ...

Who are these?

I must see if there is a live link (I think that the New York Times on-line articles are migrated to for-pay content after a set period) to the collective interview; in one of his remarks (to which my own review refers) Harbison speaks of Schoenberg's name being used as a "journalistic cudgel" blissfully unburdened by facts. And if many of Boulez's (e.g.) remarks have smacked of dogma, Kosman's screed is no less dogmatic.

What if we backed away from the war of words, and listened to some of the music?

Cheers,
~Karl

[karlhenning]

Also, wasn't Beethoven an unbending, "ultra-modern" composer in his time?

Our context is not Beethoven's of course, and I myself believe that "The Beethoven Card" came to be tiresomely overplayed in the last century ... but the fact remains, a great artist must be true to himself, must speak with his own voice.

So [insert name of "ultra-modern" composer to be supplied by our esteemed Frank] must have the artistic right to do as he sees fit, rather than what [some selective fraction of] the public would much prefer that he do, yes?

Just one more consideration, you know ....

Cheers,
~Karl

[FrankAderholdt]

Who are the "ultra-modern" composers?

As you know, there is no approved list. It's a broad term I'm using for those whom I believe the writer of the article is referring to. (Now, that makes a lot of sense, right?)

Certainly they would not compose in a "tonal" idiom. Neither would they be "minimalists." They would probably be hard-line serialists, freely atonal, or some unique character like John Cage. I would think first of Wuorinen, Stockhausen, Babbitt, Nono, Xenakis, etc.--you know, the really tough ones. I would not put (the later) Penderecki or Rochberg in the group.

To stick with those who are the subject of the article, I suppose we could say "the composers almost no one wants to listen to."

We could all come up with our own lists. I suspect that there would be many similarities in the choices of music lovers who are sympathetic to "modernist" music.

And by the way: In no case could Beethoven be considered the "unbending modernist" of his day. The real break has to be between tonal and serial/atonal music, and not before the first decade of the 20th century.

[karlhenning]

And by the way: In no case could Beethoven be considered the "unbending modernist" of his day.

I disagree. Clearly he "bent" for no one, but his own musical fancy. And as for the other, you're defining "modernist" too narrowly, and tailoring it specifically to our day. Beethoven was alarmingly modernist to many of his contemporaries.

Cheers,
~Karl

[karlhenning]

Certainly they would not compose in a "tonal" idiom.

If we can scare up a live link to the collective interview, you will find interesting some discussion among Levine, Harbison and Wuorinen over what "tonal" might mean.

Cheers,
~Karl

[FrankAderholdt]

Clearly, there is no authoritative voice to determine the meaning of these terms. It's fun, but really pointless, to argue over them. I would use the term "revolutionary" for Beethoven. "Modernist" is generally not used in reference to music before the 20th century. No matter.

[karlhenning]

Clearly, there is no authoritative voice to determine the meaning of these terms. It's fun, but really pointless, to argue over them. I would use the term "revolutionary" for Beethoven. "Modernist" is generally not used in reference to music before the 20th century. No matter.

I call it discussion, not argument :-)

I suppose you are eager (for whatever reason) to emphasize differences between Beethoven and non-audience-catering-to composers of our day.

I don't deny that there are many and significant differences.

But there are similarities, as well. There are composers today whom we might call revolutionary, save for the wry truth of Wuorinen's remark:

How can there be an avant-garde in music, when the revolution-before-last said, 'Anything goes'?

Cheers,
~Karl

[FrankAderholdt]

Correct, Karl. Discussion, not argument.

I suppose the only major point that's set in concrete for me is the abandonment of Western traditional tonality of approx. 800 years and the subsequent exploration of alternate systems of organizing musical tones. This is, to me at least, The Great Divide, and can be dated 1900-1910. Everything before that represents incremental change, development from a fixed base. Serial or atonal music is qualitatively different. (That's not a value judgment but merely a descriptive statement.)

[karlhenning]

I suppose the only major point that's set in concrete for me is the abandonment of Western traditional tonality of approx. 800 years and the subsequent exploration of alternate systems of organizing musical tones.

Well, we are likely going to differ on the facts, as well as on their significance.

Schoenberg (who did not entirely abandon tonality) considered that he was in line with tradition, and not abandoning it. At any rate, before we can agree on a date at which tonaliity has been 'abandoned,' you will have to define 'tonality' (and if you can define it in a way which embraces all of Western music for 800 years, you are going to be in line for a Pulitzer). The terms are fluid enough that the discussion can go on and on without getting much real traction.

And where does Debussy sit in relation to this Great Divide of yours?

Oh! And:

Wuorinen, Stockhausen, Babbitt, Nono, Xenakis

... are really a heterogeneous group. Are they in any meaningful way, to be clumped together? Especially as — in Kosman's view, not necessarily yours — The Great Musical Satan?

And if there's a Great Divide, I need to know where it is, because sometimes I write in G major, and sometimes, well, very much not in G major.

Cheers,
~Karl

[FrankAderholdt]

Karl,

I'm in real danger of getting totally out of my league here. I come at this after 45 years of passionate interest in classical music and the same number of years as avid collector of recordings, plus a bookworm's insatiable thirst for knowledge. What I don't have is extensive technical musical training.

What I mean by traditional tonality is the "comfortable" sense of the "home key," the basic triad, and the recognition of tension/resolution which we all have in our bones. I also know a little bit about the vast complexity and great number of variations from this basic structure.

Debussy is a great pioneer. His ambiguous tonality often places him with a foot in both worlds.

I'm quickly running out of adequate vocabulary to express my ideas. I suppose I could go to a standard textbook like Donald Grout's and spit out some great quotes. My personal tote bag of musical expressions is just about empty, though. Or, to change the metaphor, the well is just about dry.

Ask me something about Protestant and Calvinistic theology and I can talk intelligently all day, using the proper terminology. I yield the floor to you on the subject of this thread!

[FrankAderholdt]

Oh, and back to those "ultra-moderns." I certainly don't have the knowledge or skill to classify them properly.

It's pretty clear among those who care about music, though, which composers are "hearer-friendly" and which are really tough going. That's all I meant by lumping some composers together. I can't imagine anyone claiming that anything by Stockhausen, for example, is easier to listen to than anything by John Adams.

I suppose that entire last paragraph can be fiercely disputed as well. Schoenberg's Violin and Piano Concertos are among the loveliest pieces I know, from any era.

Help! I need to come up for air!

[karlhenning]

I'm in real danger of getting totally out of my league here. I come at this after 45 years of passionate interest in classical music and the same number of years as avid collector of recordings, plus a bookworm's insatiable thirst for knowledge. What I don't have is extensive technical musical training.

Still, you come to the conversation with knowledge and experience; your part in the discussion is value added :-)

What I mean by traditional tonality is the "comfortable" sense of the "home key," the basic triad, and the recognition of tension/resolution which we all have in our bones ...

Debussy is a great pioneer. His ambiguous tonality often places him with a foot in both worlds.

"Home key" is something which was a while in the making, though (for instance) ... and Wagner started effectively to defeat that in the 1850s. So that yardstick won't quite embrace our 800 years.

I don't think there's really any such thing as "atonality," but greater or lesser degrees of success in managing the gravitational force of tonality. and I don't mean that Bach's management was necessarily any better or worse than Beethoven's or Wagner's management.

And ... Wuorinen's work from the 80s strikes me as very musical work.

It still isn't Debussy, but ... well, you might give it a try sometime.

Cheers,
~Karl

[karlhenning]

I can't imagine anyone claiming that anything by Stockhausen, for example, is easier to listen to than anything by John Adams.

Well, it's not my favorite music necessarily ... but I find Stockhausen's Mantra easier to listen to than some Adams.

Schoenberg's Violin and Piano Concertos are among the loveliest pieces I know, from any era.

They are indeed.

Cheers,
~Karl

[FrankAderholdt]

Thanks for all the food for thought, Karl. Please continue. I find most helpful your sentence, "I don't think there's really any such thing as 'atonality,' but greater or lesser degrees of success in managing the gravitational force of tonality." I never thought of it quite that way.

Dontcha just love the complexity of music history? I feel so sorry for those people who think "classical" music all sounds alike.

[karlhenning]

Separately ...

Here is a fascinating Pierrot Lunaire resource

(Well ... speaking of works which don't gruntle some folks ....)

Cheers,
~Karl

[karlhenning]

A Taxing Program Like This Is Worth a Varsity Letter

Of the Danielpour premiere:

It is easy on the ear and as pretty as can be, but after a while a listener wanted at least a hint of a challenge, or at least a few flecks of grit to suggest the music's contemporary provenance.

[karlhenning]

Assuming that a composer is at least entitled to like his themes (even though it may not be his duty to publish only what he himself likes, I dare say that I have shown here only melodies, themes, and sections from my works which I deemed to be good if not beautiful. Some of them were produced with ease; others required hard labor. Some are relatively simple; others are complicated. But one cannot pretend that the complicated ones required hard work or that the simple ones were always easily produced. Also, one cannot pretend that it makes any difference whether the examples derive from a spontaneous emotion or from a cerebral effort.

Unfortunately, there is no record that classic masters made much ado about the greater or lesser efforts needed for different tasks. Perhaps they wrote everything with the same ease, or, as one might suspect in the case of Beethoven, with the same great effort, as Beethoven’s sketch books prove.

But one thing seems clear: whether its final aspect is that of simplicity or of complexity, whether it was composed swiftly and easily or required hard work and much time, the finished work gives no indication of whether the emotional or cerebral constituents have been determinant.

It is necessary to remember that frequently the elaboration of unaccompanied themes and melodies in the examples I have shown required from three to seven sketches, while some of the contrapuntal sections were composed in a very short time.

It seems to me that I have anticipated the solution to this problem in the very beginning of this essay with the quotation from Balzac: “The heart must be within the domain of the head.”

It is not the heart alone which creates all that is beautiful, emotional, pathetic, affectionate, and charming; nor is it the brain alone which is able to produce the well-constructed, the soundly organized, the logical, and the complicated. First, everything of supreme value in art must show heart as well as brain. Second, the real creative genius has no difficulty in controlling his feelings mentally; nor must the brain produce only the dry and unappealing while concentrating on correctness and logic.

But one might become suspicious of the sincerity of works which incessantly exhibit their heart; which demand our pity; which invite us to dream with them of a vague and undefined beauty and of unfounded, baseless emotions; which exaggerate because of the absence of reliable yardsticks; whose simplicity is want, meagerness and dryness; whose sweetness is artificial and whose appeal attains only to the surface of the superficial. Such works only demonstrate the complete absence of a brain and show that this sentimentality has its origin in a very poor heart.

(from Heart and Brain in Music, 1946)

... When just drafted to a reserve company during the war, I, the conscript, who had had many a bad time, once found myself treated with striking mildness by a newly arrived sergeant. When he addressed me after we had drilled, I hoped I was going to be praised for my progress in all things military. There followed a blow to my soldierly keenness; surprisingly, the tribute was to my music. The sergeant, a tailor’s assistant in civil life, had recognized me, knew my career, many of my works, and so gave me still more pleasure than by praising my drill (even though I was not a little proud of that!). There were two other such meetings in Vienna: once when I had missed a train and had to spend the night in a hotel, and again when a taxi was taking me to a hotel. I was recognized the first time by the night porter, the other time by the taxi-driver, from the name on the label of the luggage. Both assured me enthusiastically that they had heard my Gurrelieder. Another time, in a hotel in Amsterdam, a hired man addressed me, saying that he was a long-standing admirer of my art; he had sung in the choir in the Gurrelieder when I conducted them in Leipzig. But the prettiest story last: a short while back, again in a hotel, the lift-man asked me whether it was I who had written Pierrot Lunaire. For he had heard it before the war (about 1912), at the first performance, and still had the sound of it in his ears, particularly of one piece where red jewels were mentioned (‘Rote fürstliche Rubine’). And he had heard at the time that musicians had no idea what to make of the piece — the sort of thing that was quite easy to understand nowadays.

It strikes me that I need not alter what I believe about the semi-ignorant, the expert judges; I may continue to think that they lack all power of intuition.

But whether I am really so unacceptable to the public as the expert judges always assert, and whether it is really so scared of my music — that often seems to me highly doubtful.

(from My Public, 1930)

[karlhenning]

The BSO has never sounded like any other orchestra. These days, under Levine, it sounds more like the feisty bunch of symphonic virtuosos that then-music director Serge Koussevitzky propelled to glory during the '30s and '40s. How many other orchestras could have mastered the varied complexities of John Harbison, Charles Wuorinen and Igor Stravinsky -- on the same program? A lesser orchestra might have capitulated to the difficulties. The BSO appeared to thrive on them. You heard 106 musicians breathing and listening and reacting as one.

[karlhenning]

The Wuorinen and Harbison from the 'double premiere' are on at Tanglewood, 16/17 July

[karlhenning]

Modernist music masters flail their batons at evil music critics
- Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic
Wednesday, March 30, 2005

It's a safe bet that Barry Bonds doesn't have any music by the arch- modernist composer Charles Wuorinen lurking on his iPod ...

... and it's a safe bet that Kosman couldn't be bothered to read much of the following interview, apart from reading into it his own axes-to-grind:

James Levine, John Harbison and Charles Wuorinen

Published: March 27, 2005

Following is an edited transcript of a discussion with James Levine, John Harbison and Charles Wuorinen, moderated by Daniel J. Wakin.

QUESTION: How closely do you work with the conductor in preparing the piece, and how much do you like doing that?

LEVINE: I should go first with this one because my answer will be very different from their long experience. Usually, I have an initial conversation, or conversations in which I ask if the composer is interested to write something and describe just in the barest way whether I need a chamber ensemble piece or I was thinking of a large orchestra piece or I was thinking of a piece with a soloist. But something that’s totally external.

And then sometimes I can say it would be wonderful if it would be an unusual group of instruments or it would be wonderful if it had a part for one singer in singing a very old and large text, or something like that. But I swear once I’ve had that conversation or conversations, my instinct tells me that if the composer is a great composer — and these guys are — they are writing from an inside track, which I don’t want to interfere with. I want their piece ...

I’ve had occasionally a composer tell me he wished I had given more, I had said more things I had wanted, but I find my own tastes don’t work that way. I’m not terribly inclined to take a guy who writes great music at the rate these guys do and be any more specific. I would be if there was something I was desperate to have. And I never say, “How’s it going?” On the other hand, if one of them calls me and says, “Hey I’m in a snag with something, should I go this way or that way?” that is a conversation I’m happy to have. But I don’t want to call them and interfere with whatever process works for them.

WUORINEN: I always have worked in a very practical way. I like circumstances in which I know what is, in a general way, what’s wanted. What maestro’s just said is the kind of thing, the kind of general but yet framing limitations, that I find very useful. I like to know how long, I like to know approximately what forces, I like to know something about the general character or purpose of the piece. Then I go off and do it, and try to fulfill those requirements as best I can. In other words, it’s an old-fashioned kind of craftsman’s point of view.

LEVINE: What he articulated is what I didn’t articulate well. Those questions that he referred to are the ones we talk about. We talk about how long, and what forces, but when the content comes, I haven’t add…

HARBISON: Sometimes we get very specific, more specific ...

QUESTION: Do you like to take part in the rehearsing of the piece?

HARBISON: Sure, but conductors are all different. I’ve had everything from a lot of back and forth, which is actually the best, to absolute ground zero. I’ve showed up at rehearsal and was never introduced and never spoke a word with the conductor.

CHARLES WUORINEN: That’s the spectrum.

JAMES LEVINE: Wow.

WUORINEN: If someone who is going to conduct a piece of yours is uncomprehending, there’s not much you can do about it. And on the other hand, if you have, as we have in this case, someone who understands fully, then there may be an odd detail here or there, but there’s nothing basic that ever needs to be said.

JOHN HARBISON: It’s more the pleasure of actually being part of the process.

WUORINEN: Yeah, it’s the realization in sound of something that has been in one’s head, and that’s a great satisfaction, obviously.

LEVINE: See, what I do is, I solicit every bit of help I can get in the preparation of the piece. But I always am proffering it in the sense that I know what the circumstances are. For example, maybe we have a lot of rehearsals, and maybe John or Charles are free for most of them. That’s great. More often it happens we have a controlled rehearsal time, which is not too little but not too much, and the composer’s very aware of that and therefore doesn’t make criticisms at random.

What happens is, I do a reading rehearsal preferably without the composer, unless the piece has been transcribed in such a way that everybody’s afraid of things that were printed wrong, and the composer’s view is very important then. He might come to the reading. I just always want to make sure that he understands a reading is just a reading and that it could not be useful beyond that. But what usually happens is, once they’ve read it, in the working out, I sort of go for the things that are obvious to me and then at a certain point, like the break, I go say to the composer, “Am I on the right track? Is it just wrong altogether?”

The one thing that is always a sigh of relief, since I study a certain way — I have yet to be told by a composer that I was going the wrong way, which makes you think. I had a couple of experiences where I had to do a piece and the circumstances were important and I thought if I just misconceived it there wouldn’t be time. Since my whole musical life is trying to satisfy and serve the composer, I take the most fun out of being able to find that handful of live composers whose language speaks to me a certain way, where I know I can picture clearly what they’re looking for and in that way be a better middleman rather than a destructive one ...

The process is marvelous because every great composer knows perfectly well that the musicians have the instruments, and therefore you need the psychology of how to critique what they do in a way that makes it more exciting for them to get the critique.

And with these guys I tend to get a really telling detail here or a really telling detail there, and occasionally something fundamental shot through the piece, where if I would do this it would be better. Invariably I’ve yet to have to convert my own feeling to the feeling the composer’s telling me. I find I’m on the feeling of the composer fairly easily. But that doesn’t mean I can always get it, because it has to go to the players. The piece is also new for them, and I like reworking things. I think the second, third and fourth reworkings are often better than the premier series. But once in a while the premier series gets damn close.

QUESTION: There must be a point as composers where you have to let go, where suddenly this is no longer the piece in your head or under your fingers, but it’s in the hands of others.

WUORINEN: Always.

QUESTION: Is that a painful thing? Is that a relief? How would you describe that?

WUORINEN: It just happens. It’s just part of the normal practice. I’m always working. I’m always writing music. I finish one project and go to the next. And so the giving up is just casting the work out into the world. And sometimes it has a rough time, and sometimes it doesn’t, but in any case it’s there and I’m done with it. I even have the vice of forgetting. People will ask me questions about things which I’ve done even just a few years past and I’m really not very helpful because I’m thinking about now and not then.

HARBISON: I’ve always had to sometimes not … express ideas about tempo that would have been something I thought about initially because over time I think I’ve come to discover that the conductor does better with whatever concept is organic to them.

QUESTION: Even if it’s not your concept?

HARBISON: I think on occasion I’ve even messed a conductor up by saying I really feel this faster or slower. That may be how I feel it, but the conductor does better with what they feel.

[karlhenning]

WUORINEN: Generally there’s not just one way to do things. Even an allegedly precisely notated score with everything presumably specified is a very general document. There are an infinity of paths of realization through any notated score. And by the way, that’s something that I think people need to pay more attention to. The score as an independent entity, which can be realized over and over again, is something that’s really unique to Western music. And all this stuff about improvisation, and some recently posited notion that maybe notation will disappear and won’t that be marvelous and we’ll all be free, is a kind of threat to lose a unique and very precious characteristic of Western music that other musics don’t have.

QUESTION: What about the idea of innovation for contemporary composers? Should that be the primary goal, innovating?

HARBISON: Well in terms of the composer’s experience of it, yeah, but in terms of the historical definition of it, I don’t think anybody can be that accurate about it.

WUORINEN: No. I think both of us … I don’t know John if would agree with this, but I know it was certainly true of my own early life as a composer, the environment in which I grew up featured a kind of ideology of the reinvention of music. Specifically, each new music piece was supposed to somehow redefine. Now that’s a very exciting idea, especially if you’re young, and has been enormously productive, but it’s not a notion that can be indefinitely sustained.

Innovation in terms of what? I remember Nicolas Slonimsky came back from a trip to what was then the Soviet Union talking about how marvelous and advanced the new music there had become because they were using tone clusters. Well, that’s not an innovation, that’s just a sonic feature of some sort. First you have to define what you mean by innovation and then proceed. For me it’s not an issue. I just try to write the next piece, as John says, do new things for myself.

HARBISON: You’ve got to feel it internally, for sure. But it’s not the composer’s job to define what innovation is, in some historical sense, because people get sidetracked by that.

LEVINE: As a conductor there is no question that if I can find out what the composer really wants and do it, it’ll be better than any other result. The thing is, even when you have no confusion in your head about what you’re trying to do, it isn’t always easy.

What John said about the tempo is very interesting. Suppose I’m conducting part of a piece and it’s too fast or too slow. The composer says to me, it needs to be bleep-bleep. I can’t change it on a dime, because I have to get to where I feel it and know where it is, know what it does to the weight, to the pace and to the harmonic rhythm, and all those kinds of things. And people are dumbfounded when I say that. “You mean you can’t just do it two notches faster?” Well I could, but I wouldn’t stay with it. I wouldn’t digest it to the point where I could find that without being careful.

Once I had to do one of John’s pieces that I love, but he wasn’t in town, he couldn’t come to the rehearsals but he came to the last one and my heart was in my mouth, and I thought, “God, if we have to reconceive something, we haven’t got time.” He knew that, but he also knew the players were also very dedicated to the piece, and he said, “Really, I promise, I’m not kidding you, it’s a little detail here and here and here,” and we read them to the people and the instrumentalists love it because again, they’re in contact with a real composer and they can get a real concrete answer to a real concrete question.

HARBISON: The thing about innovation though — I was just thinking about one of the things that I recently began to feel about Bach, which was the composer I spent a lot of time with. Every piece I know of Bach has some unique detail, something that really doesn’t happen anywhere else. It may be something that those of us who spend a lot of time with music would notice and other people might not. But part of what would drive him into that piece is partly that he’s making some discoveries, even though he’s got a fantastic machine, a fabulous engine that drives it.

WUORINEN: That’s a composer who was always thought of as being rather old-fashioned in his time. But that has nothing to do with innovation in that sense. It has nothing to do with whatever the flavor of the month is, and especially has nothing to do with the attempt that is sometimes made to make big general statements about where music is going and how this is this, and we don’t do that anymore. A lot of people get into that and it’s not helpful.

LEVINE: It certainly isn’t.

QUESTION: You’ve denounced that in the past. You’ve also denounced trends in composition to please the crowd, to write entertaining music to the detriment of music as art, pretty strongly.

WUORINEN: Well look. It’s a very simple matter. As I’ve said a million times, there has been an attempt, largely successful, to confuse what you might call art and what you might call entertainment. I think there’s a very simple distinction, and it doesn’t diminish entertainment in any way because we all want it and we all enjoy it. Entertainment is that which you receive without effort. Art is something where you must make some kind of effort and you get more than you had before.

LEVINE: It couldn’t be clearer or more concise than that, and that’s absolutely right.

WUORINEN: It just seems to me that there in the world, whether people like it or not, whether it fits their perceptions, there are higher things and lower things. There are things that are worth more and things that are worth less. We all have our own individual ways of assessing that. But to say, as so many cultural observers and other people of that sort do, that really, these things are all the same, they are all of equivalent value — the person who sticks a microphone in his mouth and sings a rock song is the equivalent of a highly trained opera singer, for example — it’s just nonsense. And it should be resisted, as I have always tried to do. One is accused of being too sober or too severe. That’s just silly. People are missing the fun of high art if they think such things.

HARBISON: I like that, but I would want to say this about it too, that it’s possible for people who intend to always entertain to produce something that is very perceptible as art, and by contrary it’s also possible for people who are intending to make very high art to produce nothing more than entertainment. In other words, there’s an accidental blurring —

WUORINEN: Sure.

HARBISON: — that takes place quite often. But I would say that culturally, the blur of perception is global, is complete. I don’t think that our culture is very adept at feeling at least positive about the fact that there are different intents in the world. People intend different things, very critically so, and the risks are very different, and of course the commercial issues are very different. I think that’s one of the things we have great difficulty absorbing.

WUORINEN: Look, I think that’s absolutely true, and what you’re talking about is the sort of real world in which there can be any number of popular musicians from the past who really by this definition should be called, quote, “artists.” But I’m not speaking about that. I’m not speaking about what happens in the real world. I’m speaking about a cultural ideology which is promoted, which intersects with perfectly worthy feelings of democracy, which cannot understand that there’s a difference between, say, juridical and political equality and equality of gift, equality of perceptions, equality of interests. There’s a homogenizing impulse here which I think is very malign. And that’s what I think needs to be resisted.

HARBISON: And a corollary to what Charles is saying is that there are actually different kinds of music. And the distinctions are useful and pleasurable and important. The corollary to that is that somehow everything is the same. There are different musics in different parts of the world that have separate intents, separate strains. The whole idea that we are somehow merging all musical impulses seems to me amazing.

WUORINEN: And it’s not true.

HARBISON: It’s also very misleading.

QUESTION: Should a composer of serious Western art music attempt to entertain, to please the crowd?

WUORINEN: How do you do that? If you don’t please yourself, how can you please anyone else? That’s Point 1. Point 2, I don’t know what the mechanism is. The fact is, these attitudes are very patronizing toward the public. They assume that the public is going to be hostile to anything the least bit disturbing. The public is like any group of people. They can be led or they can be left alone. It just seems so obvious. I think, and pardon me for being paranoid, the question of entertaining the public or writing music that somehow does it is not a demand that rises up from the masses of people, even the relatively small number of people who live in serious music. It is something which is fostered from above, by our rulers, however you want to construe that notion, whether they are cultural or political or whatever, who are afraid to do other than ape the taste of the lowest level. That’s just a sociological fact.

LEVINE: I used to, when I came to New York as a kid to study at Juilliard, and I was still in high school in Cincinnati, I sometimes stayed with my dad, who was at a hotel working in New York a week here or there. I stayed with friends, my parents friends, [who] had a subscription to the Philharmonic. And one day, she said, “You want my Philharmonic tickets?” I said, “Why aren’t you going?” She said, “Tchaikovsky Fifth???” All that meant was, she’d heard the Tchaikovsky Fifth and she’d heard it again and she’d heard it again and that’s fine. She’d been a little girl once and heard the Tchaikovsky Fifth and now as a 60-year-old lady, she didn’t want to spend the time on her fanny in Carnegie Hall listening to another Tchaikovsky Fifth.

Now, this is different for everybody. I happen to be similar about that particular piece. But suppose it were the Brahms Fourth, or suppose it were the Schubert C major, or suppose it were the Mahler Fourth. These pieces have a lot of mileage in them for me, still. So periodically I want to restudy and do them and I don’t not look forward to hearing them. But there was something completely messed up in our culture at a time when people were not heavily into new music.

I can tell you this: I’ve conducted so much 19th-century opera in my life. I’m one of the few people walking the earth who will tell you that I love “Cavalleria Rusticana” and I love Beethoven Opus 131, whereas most of the people who love Beethoven Opus 131 look down their noses at “Cavalleria Rusticana.” For me I don’t have a problem with the two different things. But I do have a problem with quality being watered down to a degree where there’s nothing there, and then have people offer me their theories about 12-tone music being not natural. This is such patent nonsense, I barely know where to go with it.

It comes down to something I think we have to say. A critic who shall be nameless writes a review of an opera performance and he praises the clarinet for his beautiful solo before the tenor aria. The only problem is, the instrument was an English horn.

QUESTION: So it wasn’t “Tosca,” “E lucevan le stelle?”

LEVINE: No. And he referred to it twice, because he wanted to make a point that the tenor wasn’t very good, and it wasn’t good proportioned in the piece, that the clarinet solo was so gorgeous and the tenor wasn’t very good. So the clarinet solo got mentioned again. Now this man is well meaning. This man is not a nasty guy. But one thing terrified me about that article. If he doesn’t hear the difference between those two instruments, what else doesn’t he hear? But he has the right professionally, I guess, to say what music is good or bad, whatever, even if he can’t hear through it ...

Hearing actual notes is, if you’re not oriented toward music, similar I suppose to being colorblind or not, though I never was colorblind. What gets me down is the idea that for some reason in music, everyone’s entitled to an opinion and it doesn’t really matter whether the content of the opinion makes any sense or not.

WUORINEN: Well here’s a thing. One of the things that’s always struck me about music, as opposed to literature, painting, the theater, the other arts that we normally interact with, is how there seems to be an assumption that knowing less, having less experience qualifies you better to be a judge or an evaluator. I often ask myself, the problem is that music is an extraordinarily visceral phenomenon that comes at you. That makes people think that they understand it.

But on the other hand, music is incredibly abstract. Unlike the other arts, it can’t be grasped. You have exactly as long as the piece is to get it. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. It doesn’t matter that you can repeat the experience, perhaps. It is a very tough thing, very abstract, and on a very high level. So there is this dichotomy between its visceral quality and its abstraction, which means that people tend, and not just the layman sitting in the seats in the concert hall, people tend to develop opinions which are based on only the lowest level of reaction. And that I think often leads to very destructive — well, let’s put it, simply unhelpful opinions about things. And sometimes these opinions are given by those who have influence on others, and that is even less helpful.

HARBISON: I have a much mellower feeling about that. The idea that everybody has an opinion about music has come to feel to me like a great advantage that we have over some of the others because it engages people at some instinctive level. Everybody is entitled to an opinion about music.

LEVINE: Absolutely.

HARBISON: It’s one of the most peculiar things about it. They wouldn’t do that in other arts. They wouldn’t just say, “I know what I feel about this.” But at least it does mean that there is a level of engagement that we can in some way tap into. I’m sure Charles felt this recently with his opera [“Haroun and the Sea of Stories”]. You run into a public there that is so peculiarly engaged. It’s kind of very distressing and also very exciting to have people that intent.

WUORINEN: Well it was, yes, in my case. It was wonderful also because children were engaged by it.

LEVINE: Yes.

HARBISON: But the intentness, which used to, I must say, bother me a lot, and the idea that critics would write about our profession in ways that were really so basically uninformed, has come to feel like an advantage. Some guy on the bus last year comes up to me and he says to me, without even introducing himself, he says, “Really you should shorten the last scene of that opera, that Gatsby.” And I thought, “In no other line of the arts would somebody care that much.” I was very annoyed initially of course, but then I thought it over and thought, “God, that’s a nice thing.”

LEVINE: I find in that in Boston and New York I experience something very parallel to this, which is, I am stopped all the time by people to say something, when I’m waiting to cross the street or I’m in a restaurant or whatever, and these people are invariably committed, warm, very intelligent, having a point of view, even if all you can do is disagree and say, “You know, I’m sorry I disagree.” But I think what John said just now is very true about the possibility that the vitality of this art form is cued into that somehow.

WUORINEN: There’s another advantage, too, I suppose to all this, which is that the kind of super, or hyper-specialization, that you see in the visual arts really cannot exist in the world of concert music. That’s something that has spared us what I think of as excess. And also, of course, the fact that there aren’t quite the same financial rewards in general in composition as there are if one is a successful visual artist.

LEVINE: Interesting.

HARBISON: We can’t be collected in that way.

WUORINEN: No. And the silliness of some of the specializations — this one wraps things in fat, that one, etc., you see this all the time, and one wonders where they are going to end up. It’s an open question.

LEVINE: It may be worth noting, for some purpose we haven’t yet discussed, these two guys are on the same program with world premieres. They are two examples of great composers of our time who don’t write music the same way at all. I was asked [about] that once by a board member at a press conference, and I said, “When you hear this music, you will see this is two totally different things.” But I love these guys’ music. They are two of our very greatest composers. Unless someone is equipped to hear that, on some level, it’s just words.

HARBISON: There’s actually a track back from what Charles writes and I write to later Stravinsky, which is kind of interesting about this program. I think later Stravinsky is one of the best-kept secrets.

WUORINEN: One of the most important composers.

HARBISON: It’s tremendously important music that the public doesn’t know, out of which a lot of us who write music make what we make of it.

LEVINE: You can’t imagine what a pleasure it is for me when we work hard to do a good performance of one of Elliott Carter’s masterpieces, and when Elliott Carter came out onstage, the audience went absolutely berserk. We are clearly getting some progress. When you have the possibility to make enough programs to control the juxtaposition of new pieces and the way they get revived, I think our culture, the recordings, the concerts, what goes into people’s head, is changing for the better finally.

QUESTION: Let’s go back to talking about the differences between these two composers sitting here, great in their own way but very different. Very different traditions, certainly described differently. You may not agree with it, but the perception is that you [Harbison] are a tonal, neo-Romantic, although I know you hate that term. People say that you [Wuorinen] are a serialist, you write atonal, difficult, thorny music. Are those perceptions correct or not, or is there some truth to them?

WUORINEN: In a word, no. Most of these perceptions come not from hearing or knowing the music, but from reading what someone has written about it.

LEVINE: Hear, hear.

WUORINEN: An interesting question to ask someone about one or the other of us, “Oh, he’s this way or that way,” is, “Which particular piece are you referring to?” You won’t get an answer, I guarantee you. So an awful lot of this is just second-, third-hand. These categories have very little meaning. We don’t like them because of that reason. If they were accurate, perhaps one might cotton to them. I can only say for my own self, to call me a serial composer, I think is — first of all the term has to be defined and no one ever bothers to do it. Secondly, if it means a kind of churning of the total chromatic constantly through, it simply doesn’t apply to my work. My work is different and it is centered not in a tonal or diatonic way, but in a hierarchical way that it is not dissimilar from that of older music.

QUESTION: You wrote in your book, Simple Composition —

WUORINEN: Never write a book.

QUESTION: Never write a book — it’s in print! Of course it was a long time ago —

WUORINEN: It’s still in print. People use it.

QUESTION: It was written in 1979 and you wrote that the tonal system could only be found in backward-looking serious composers, is no longer used by serious mainstream composers, has been replaced and succeeded by the 12-tone system.

WUORINEN: Well, that’s a categorical statement which cannot be — of course it had more to it then, although to some extent it is obsolete now. But it depends on what you mean by the tonal system.

[karlhenning]

LEVINE: I’ve got to leap in and say, that is a tautological statement. That is spoken by a man who is tired of how difficult it is to make anything understood, in any of these distinctions. We all at one time or another say something in a tone of asperity because we have trouble getting it understood.

HARBISON: Tonal is a tough one to place too, as hard as serial or harder, because like at which point in the centuries of usage —

WUORINEN: Yes, exactly.

HARBISON: — what we might call tonal references are we going to try — it’s a moving target. It’s not going to stay still.

WUORINEN: As normally used, it’s a pseudo-technical term for familiar.

LEVINE: Yeah. Right.

HARBISON: And in fact, for us, who work with notes, it’s something extremely specific, but specific to a given instance, so it’s not going to be much help to describe things that way. I don’t think that most of us who are trying to make music, write music today, think from moment to moment, “Is this serial, is this tonal?” We can’t work with those reference points or we would be too encumbered to move on. I’m always amazed that so much of the observation of what we do is in turn so different than the way we do it. It’s much harder to be a critic than to write the music. To write the music is to do a thing, and to evaluate something is to have to come up with ways to describe something.

WUORINEN: The other problem with criticism, even assuming a very well-qualified writer, is that unlike the case of literary criticism, in which you are using the same medium to evaluate as the original artwork was produced in, you are making a translation of media and that I think is an almost hopeless problem —

LEVINE: Absolutely.

WUORINEN: — unless you’re going to deal in technical shoptalk.

QUESTION: Doesn’t art criticism have the same problem?

WUORINEN: Well I think so. But there it seems to me the object, the reference, are much simpler. Visual art generally speaking doesn’t have the time constraint problem that the perception of a composition does.

LEVINE: I’m always fascinated by something which is maybe not relevant now, but Schoenberg wrote Verklärte Nacht, and he wrote the Gurrelieder and he wrote the first string quartet, and he wrote some early songs, and eventually he wrote the violin concerto and he wrote Moses and Aron, way down there. Why, I always wondered, did so few people extrapolate what a great composer he was from the pieces they could get right away as a springboard for studying the pieces they couldn’t get right away. Instead, because they had trouble, they treated it like he was two different people.

HARBISON: I think if he’s difficult, he’s difficult in all the pieces.

LEVINE: Yeah.

HARBISON: If he is. He’s a bogeyman. He’s like a bad wolf, useful in a kind of stirring-up-the-waters way. Maybe his acceptance was slower than some composers, but that reviving of the Schoenberg thing, I just don’t understand it at this point. It completely eludes me.

WUORINEN: It’s insane. I mean he’s been dead for over 50 years. You would think it was a settled issue. His music continues to be played. It is loved by musicians.

HARBISON: He’s played more and more.

LEVINE: We’re finally getting there.

WUORINEN: People only make themselves look silly when they say, “Oh this was a terrible mistake.” Well if it’s so, it would be time for the mistake to have been recognized and rectified, but it hasn’t been, so perhaps it wasn’t a mistake after all. The reason why the Schoenberg of the violin concerto or Moses and Aron is treated differently from the Schoenberg of Verklärte Nacht again is a question of familiar sounds. And that’s all.

HARBISON: The issues of his personality are always going to be there.

LEVINE: I don’t think I got the point across. The point is that if you see the brilliance of Verklärte Nacht, of the Gurrelieder and of the chamber symphony or whatever, why doesn’t it become a passionate committed point for you to understand the music the man wrote later on, which is clearly coming from the same guy? That is, an inner imperative.

You know what it’s like? It’s like the stage director always invents something. But a stage director above all people ought to be able to see clearly that the drama is so-and-so. That’s his profession. So when he comes up with something that’s complete nonsense or ruins this aspect of it or that aspect of it just in order to have five minutes of analogy that somebody, who doesn’t know the piece either, can say, “Oh, that was interesting” — what if I were to go to an opera engagement and say: “I got an idea gang. Let’s have the wind players play the string parts and the string players play the wind parts? Won’t that be interesting?” I have seen productions which were just not possible. They have nothing to do with the piece at all. And let alone the degree to which the composer has composed it a certain way, which makes sense only if you do it onstage a certain way. Everybody’s deaf to this.

WUORINEN: But aren’t these directorial excesses the result of a largely frozen repertoire, where aside from the desire to make them sexy again is the simple fact that these familiar works are regarded as objects on which whatever may be perpetrated. Since the score exists and they have to be sung and played, the place to do it is on the stage. I remember there was one such thing where Don Giovanni becomes a drug dealer in Harlem — it seems to me to take that work out of its historical context is totally to miss the point of what he is, which is someone who —

LEVINE: Forty percent of the piece can’t be made sense of!

WUORINEN: He does what he does because he is a member of a social class that makes it possible to do it. And that’s where the piece is radical in its own day. Why do you suppose Da Ponte had to run away to New York and run a grocery store in Hackensack?

QUESTION: And teach at Columbia.

WUORINEN: Indeed. The first professor of Italian with no students and no pay. After a fight with the trustees whether Italian was a fit subject for a modern university —

QUESTION: It sounds familiar, to what happened to you.

WUORINEN: (laughs) Well, it’s a little bit different. That sort of thing comes from, so to say, objectifying the work in question, treating it as a thing to which you can do anything, rather than a living entity.

QUESTION: Can I go back to the discussion we had before, which you called tautology? I’d like to get your reaction to that, Mr. Harbison, to those statements.

HARBISON: About no music of relevance is being written that is still based on tonality?

QUESTION: Right, that tonality has been replaced by the 12-tone system and that no serious composer would write in the tonal idiom.

WUORINEN: Stirring up conflict, eh? That’s what you really want.

QUESTION: A journalist would never do that. I’m shocked!

HARBISON: Since most of us take these things personally, and most composers are not trying to sort out history as much as make their way into the next thing, in 1979 I would have felt very defensive about that. In the present, it seems like an interesting thing to have said at that point. Historically speaking, I think the biggest problem with the perception about the 12-tone system is absolutely akin to the perception of Schoenberg, that it’s become a journalistic cudgel. It has no bearing or relationship to the actual music that is written with these principles, just as Schoenberg doesn’t have any relationship as a composer to this creation of this scary-looking guy, with staring eyes.

I went to a concert, I think it was about 15 years ago, of Dawn Upshaw. She came out to announce her encore and she said, “Now I’m going to do a song by Schoenberg,” and the whole audience went, “Aaaahhhhh!” like they were about to be literally flayed or punished or something. Then she sang Opus 2 or something, in D major. Everybody was even terrified by those sounds because they were told that they were going to be by Schoenberg. But it was so illustrative of the degree to which this personality has been turned into just a kind of symbolic scare tactic.

This is obviously so much not part of the reality of the concert world. This music is exactly as he said it would be. It’s finally been absorbed. People who work in the music world, their ears have dealt with it in one way or another. But it’s always amazing to me how persistent sometimes that kind of stuff can be. Just actually to keep, I suppose, a kind of burn going on.

LEVINE: But finally it’s happening. Now there’s a young generation who knows Schoenberg … and it gives me a sigh of relief because this music took people a lot of time and care to get a complete immersion. But to say it was worth it, goes without saying. Perhaps the most important musician of that whole century! There are things in Beethoven that don’t happen again — whose consequence are in Schoenberg. There are a lot of interesting contrasts and parallels between these two composers, and putting some of their music together in concerts has turned out to be a very exciting context for both composers.

HARBISON: Something about Schoenberg I always liked a lot is that of all the émigré composers, he was the most willing to be interested in the United States, to teach American students, to feel a lot of value in American music, enthusiastic about Ives and Gershwin and about many of the students that he taught, Leon Kirschner and Earl Kim, and really got into the American situation. His ears were wide open to it. Many other Europeans came in and put a kind of moat between them and where they were. Schoenberg was not at all afraid to do that. It’s something that was really valuable to him but to our culture as well. We’re not just admiring Schoenberg. We’re admiring his contribution to American music, which was tremendous.

LEVINE: The situation where I can contribute [is] the idea that just as the Boston Symphony somehow developed a Stravinsky repertoire and a Bartók repertoire and a Berg repertoire, now they will develop a repertoire from our best living composers. This will satisfy me deeply because it will balance something that I think for quite a number of years hasn’t been well balanced.

QUESTION: Do you feel you’re fighting an uphill battle in this?

LEVINE: No.

QUESTION: Is the B.S.O. alone in this?

LEVINE: That I couldn’t say. I do my programming a certain way with them. That’s a long story. If I go somewhere, I program the same way. In Boston, I think they’re more likely to understand it because the community, the audience supports the orchestra — and the universities and the sports teams — and understands what the whole culture is. No, I don’t find it an uphill battle.

QUESTION: I don’t mean in Boston, I mean nationally. Are you fighting a quixotic battle, in this accepting town?

LEVINE: In recent years, there’s a trend that seems to me that it seems to be getting better.

QUESTION: I don’t see what you are saying.

[karlhenning]

LEVINE: Well, first of all, there are those young musicians I know who come to Schoenberg on their own. For instance, the last two or three conducting tapes I saw from young musicians I know who want to learn to conduct, they were all Verklärte Nacht, the Chamber Symphony, things like that, as opposed to what they were 20 years ago, 30 years ago.

The joke always is the slow movement of the Tchaikovsky Fifth is the height of Romanticism. Until what? Until we pass the Berlioz love scene from before that, or till Mahler’s something or other or Wagner’s something or other. What is the most Romantic music? I haven’t any idea. That’s subjective. I just think I look at these great pieces by Elliott, or these great pieces by you guys, and I think we’re at the point now where we’re through with the phase, do this piece and then we don’t hear it again. Now the whole idea is to put it in front of the listener often enough that there’s a chance for the audience to understand what we understand.

WUORINEN: And that solves the problem. The only issue with any of this music is one of familiarity, repeated exposure to it. It’ll make its own case. Doesn’t need to be explained, it only needs to be played again.

HARBISON: It’s also true for the players.

LEVINE: I encountered the Opus 16, five orchestral pieces by Schoenberg when I was a kid. I was fascinated, but I didn’t understand. I did them every chance I got. I played Webern’s two-piano version. I listened to other people play them. I rehearsed them myself. I did them even in a situation once where I could only do three of them. Time was short. But I thought, I need to work on this. I swear to God, there is not a moment in that piece that I don’t hear in the same way that I hear Mozart symphonies. This piece is not as dense a Schoenberg piece as later ones, but dense enough that there are still people who hear it who haven’t heard it and say, “What’s that?”

HARBISON: Our ears do move. That’s the piece that Richard Strauss got, and he said, “At this point that’s a score I can’t read.” And he was a hell of a good musician. So I think our ears do adapt to what’s around us. We take it in and we have to absorb it.

LEVINE: The problem with what happened after Schoenberg was largely, or partly, coming from what turned out to be this desperate morass, futile attempt, to explain it. The people who could understand didn’t need the explanation, and the explanation made people suspect.

QUESTION: You seem to be laying all the blame on journalists, critics, writers on music.

LEVINE: There was bad faith all around there for a while. The problem is exacerbated by talk and print, because some people try to be “with it” secondhand.

WUORINEN: It’s a simple fact that … a lot of writing about music involves copying what somebody already said. In my own case, for example, I have confidently been pronounced a student of Milton Babbitt and Stefan Wolpe, both composers whom I knew very well, or know very well, and whose music I love but with whom I never studied. Simply because it was an affinity, an association, someone wrote somewhere that I was a student. Well that gets repeated. Nobody bothers to check anything. Another problem is that I don’t see a great many people who are going to review concerts at the rehearsals there before. That’s a big problem too.

HARBISON: Also in the very unique case of Schoenberg, I guess all paranoids have a basis in fact. But he was a very suspicious personality and a difficult personality. Some of us who knew Leonard Stein, for instance, who was his assistant — no one could be more for Schoenberg — even Leonard would say that Schoenberg made some of his own difficulties.

LEVINE: Yes, absolutely. I don’t find that I’m fighting at all really. I find something really quite different. Only you could evaluate what the journalism has to do with it. But here I am programming the way I should. The press is very good. The audience is very good. The reaction is very good. I get a letter once in a while which says I don’t like this or that, but that’s less than par for the course. It’s not a popularity contest, after all. The best I can do for an audience is give them what I’m sincerely passionate about. If I try to give them something I think they want that I don’t want, we just have a sterile result.

The overwhelming response to this programming is positive, even though once in a while I get a program where I can feel it’s slightly too long and I don’t want the audience or the orchestra concentrating on that in the last 10 minutes of the concert. So I’m finding ways to modify that, although what led me to it was the relationships between the pieces, and the context grows bigger and more exciting if you’re not limited to just that period of time where you can’t expand it, you can’t have the flexibility of it. No, on the contrary I don’t feel any general hostility on this subject at all, but there are some, occasionally, attempts to make it appear as if there were.

HARBISON: Charles, when you were a resident composer, did they ask you to deal with the upset letters at all?

WUORINEN: In San Francisco? Yes I did. I simply answered them in my usual meek and mild fashion, attempting to answer the questions. There weren’t very many of them, I must say.

HARBISON: In Pittsburgh there were some. Sometimes in the management of the orchestra there was a lot of trembling. I remember the celebrated moment was the Sessions Second Symphony and we got about three letters on each side of that piece. There was a lot of consternation, and I was given all of them to write back to, and to me it was just an indication of good engagement. The negative letters had to me almost as much life and interest as the positive.

LEVINE: We do Moses and Aron at the Met and I get questions from subscribers, “How do I prepare for this?” and I swear, if people would do what I suggest, I think the conversion rate would be quite strong.

I always say, before you go, don’t do anything. Just go to the hall in time to read the program notes so that you have some way of knowing the dimensions of what it is, just in the most general way. And then comes the important part. Listen to the piece and don’t fight with the piece while it’s playing. Just listen. If at the end of this piece, you hated it, you hated it, you hated it, and it was without anything for you, O.K.

But what if there was one single place that made you fascinated or that you said, “What’s that?” or that caught you, then you have to do the next thing: buy a ticket for another performance. And then it’s done. Because the second go, whether it’s a movie, a play, a book or making love, is not the same as the first, on any level. Your whole perception changes beyond what you expect, and you see and hear the piece completely differently, and that will help people a lot. But instead, they try to prepare, they read and read and read, they can’t separate because they haven’t even heard the piece yet. And then they sit at the piece like this, waiting for it to be over. This doesn’t work.

But I did have an experience once worth telling you, since you said, is it journalists’ fault or writers’ fault. I’d performed the second Lutosławski symphony — he was still alive — as a guest conductor in a town with a good orchestra. I don’t know what possessed me. The program was a Bach F-minor piano concerto, which I played, then Lutosławski’s Second Symphony, and after the interim the second Brahms symphony. And before the Lutosławski, I spoke to the public, spontaneously. I said: “You know, it bothers me. You took care of your kids, you did your work, you whatever, and now you go to a concert and I was working on music with the orchestra all day, and I know about the piece and you don’t. So let me tell you something about it.”

And I explained two simple things. The way the two movements were put together in content, in feeling, and a couple of things about Lutoslawski’s techniques, which are obvious, but it helped them. And just as I was about to turn around, I said, “Oh, and it takes about 35 minutes.” And there was a little giggle. And then I did the piece and they were silent through the piece. And they clapped and clapped at the end. The next morning, the music critic of that town said, “If this were really a good piece it would speak for itself and Mr. Levine ...

QUESTION: You can’t win.

LEVINE: So we all have these experiences.

WUORINEN: Well, that’s it.

LEVINE: We have the experience that I give an interview to a New York Times guy. Good guy. Takes notes. When the article comes out, my quote says I want to achieve the “maximum impression.” I what? What I said was I want to achieve the “maximum expression.” It’s only two little letters. The fact checker couldn’t get it unless he saw the quote. Maybe it was written wrong. Maybe it’s just a mistake, but it comes out of my mouth and there it is. For interviews for the next six months, someone was, “What did that mean?” It’s redundant as hell. And one is so tempted to say, What do I do this for? Why? Because even at this age, after all these years, anything I can do to make more people get it, I’ll do.

WUORINEN: That’s the thing ...

QUESTION: Let me throw out a final, real big general softball question, which is, the future of contemporary music now. Do you have some special insight? Optimistic, pessimistic, where things are going?

HARBISON: I’m very optimistic. I don’t know what happened to me along the way, because I used to talk about this rather conventionally, that is to say, worried. But somewhere along the way I became the opposite of worried. And I think it’s because I began to understand the difference between, or the carrying power of, the intensity, as against the rule of numbers. And intensity wins every time. People around this music are so fired up. And I’m not just talking about new music, I’m talking about concert music in general. People that really care. The future is not an issue. It’s just not interesting even to discuss, it’s so much more interesting to talk about what’s actually going on. If you need confirmation of that, you just sort of see that the profession is refreshed with fantastic talent all the time. If the music wasn’t good, why would all these people want to do it?

LEVINE: I agree with him 100 percent. I finally see the music world is coming out of this frozen, negative thing that was going on. The orchestras are playing the pieces, the soloists and chamber groups of course are. There are people like me, and there are many of us who want to see these composers’ works played in a way which reflects and interacts with the way the music is for us... The terrain is completely different. There are all kinds of recordings of pieces now. With the B.S.O., the orchestra itself and the audience, they really want the challenge and they want the pleasure of being able to get involved in the pieces. Ask me in five years whether it worked, but I don’t see why it won’t.

WUORINEN: For myself, I have to agree with all this. There was a time, I think somewhat similar to John in this respect, [when] I didn’t think things were going all that well, because I saw a certain amount of turmoil and misdirection it seemed to me on the part of a lot of people, and a lot of attacks, of the sort we’ve been talking about — Schoenberg. But I think that is changing now, and certainly in the circles in which I move, there’s really no problem. It’s going. And we are concerned, as I said, as John said, with what we’re doing in the present, without any worry about what the future holds.

LEVINE: I think the Schoenberg thing is prototypical. I always said sooner or later they’re going to get this. They have to get it, because the music is miraculous. And that took a little longer because the language was dense and because of the general dumbing down of things that didn’t help anybody. But now there is without doubt a big leap, proportionally, a big leap in the consciousness in the musicians and music lovers who know the music.

QUESTION: You were pretty pessimistic in some of the things I read 10 years ago about the emptiness of a lot of the things being written.

WUORINEN: Yes, and 10 years before that I did an interview with someone and I said we are Athens and we don’t know it, and I wish to revive that. We’re Athens and we don’t know it, or though some of us are beginning to suspect. I didn’t mean Athens, Georgia, although they have a fine university.

HARBISON: But I certainly don’t feel the negative vibration anymore among musicians, who are so excited about the work they do. I just think that malaise passed over.

WUORINEN: It was a phase.

HARBISON: It really is a very different world now. You can feel it in the room with musicians who are rehearsing.

QUESTION: You’re not just saying that for the sake of your own pieces?

HARBISON: Charles and I experienced — we both went through times where we might have come into a big orchestra and there’d be quite a chill blowing through the room.

LEVINE: I went through it too because I couldn’t schedule the pieces, because the schedule wouldn’t permit it. As a guest conductor, I would have been in the position of showing a new piece to the orchestra Tuesday morning with a premiere Thursday night. With a complicated piece you can’t do this and do service to the composer. So I waited a long time to have this wonderful “kid in a candy store” sensation that I have now.

HARBISON: Going to any orchestra now you’re not going to be greeted by that kind of thing. Just the attitude has shifted. Who knows what it’s about. It’s a good thing that we have.

LEVINE: You guys are commissioned for pieces, which only means, it hasn’t been, “Oh yeah, we know what that’ll be.” It’s, “We want more of it.” We want their developments.

HARBISON: And a lot of good stuff is happening, people writing very challenging stuff, and they’re getting work.

[karlhenning]

Corlyss: This chunk of the collective interview practically might be of interest to you ....

QUESTION: What about the idea of innovation for contemporary composers? Should that be the primary goal, innovating?

HARBISON: Well in terms of the composer’s experience of it, yeah, but in terms of the historical definition of it, I don’t think anybody can be that accurate about it.

WUORINEN: No. I think both of us … I don’t know John if would agree with this, but I know it was certainly true of my own early life as a composer, the environment in which I grew up featured a kind of ideology of the reinvention of music. Specifically, each new music piece was supposed to somehow redefine. Now that’s a very exciting idea, especially if you’re young, and has been enormously productive, but it’s not a notion that can be indefinitely sustained.

Innovation in terms of what? I remember Nicolas Slonimsky came back from a trip to what was then the Soviet Union talking about how marvelous and advanced the new music there had become because they were using tone clusters. Well, that’s not an innovation, that’s just a sonic feature of some sort. First you have to define what you mean by innovation and then proceed. For me it’s not an issue. I just try to write the next piece, as John says, do new things for myself.

HARBISON: You’ve got to feel it internally, for sure. But it’s not the composer’s job to define what innovation is, in some historical sense, because people get sidetracked by that.

LEVINE: As a conductor there is no question that if I can find out what the composer really wants and do it, it’ll be better than any other result. The thing is, even when you have no confusion in your head about what you’re trying to do, it isn’t always easy.

What John said about the tempo is very interesting. Suppose I’m conducting part of a piece and it’s too fast or too slow. The composer says to me, it needs to be bleep-bleep. I can’t change it on a dime, because I have to get to where I feel it and know where it is, know what it does to the weight, to the pace and to the harmonic rhythm, and all those kinds of things. And people are dumbfounded when I say that. “You mean you can’t just do it two notches faster?” Well I could, but I wouldn’t stay with it. I wouldn’t digest it to the point where I could find that without being careful.

Once I had to do one of John’s pieces that I love, but he wasn’t in town, he couldn’t come to the rehearsals but he came to the last one and my heart was in my mouth, and I thought, “God, if we have to reconceive something, we haven’t got time.” He knew that, but he also knew the players were also very dedicated to the piece, and he said, “Really, I promise, I’m not kidding you, it’s a little detail here and here and here,” and we read them to the people and the instrumentalists love it because again, they’re in contact with a real composer and they can get a real concrete answer to a real concrete question.

HARBISON: The thing about innovation though — I was just thinking about one of the things that I recently began to feel about Bach, which was the composer I spent a lot of time with. Every piece I know of Bach has some unique detail, something that really doesn’t happen anywhere else. It may be something that those of us who spend a lot of time with music would notice and other people might not. But part of what would drive him into that piece is partly that he’s making some discoveries, even though he’s got a fantastic machine, a fabulous engine that drives it.

WUORINEN: That’s a composer who was always thought of as being rather old-fashioned in his time. But that has nothing to do with innovation in that sense. It has nothing to do with whatever the flavor of the month is, and especially has nothing to do with the attempt that is sometimes made to make big general statements about where music is going and how this is this, and we don’t do that anymore. A lot of people get into that and it’s not helpful.

LEVINE: It certainly isn’t.

QUESTION: You’ve denounced that in the past. You’ve also denounced trends in composition to please the crowd, to write entertaining music to the detriment of music as art, pretty strongly.

WUORINEN: Well look. It’s a very simple matter. As I’ve said a million times, there has been an attempt, largely successful, to confuse what you might call art and what you might call entertainment. I think there’s a very simple distinction, and it doesn’t diminish entertainment in any way because we all want it and we all enjoy it. Entertainment is that which you receive without effort. Art is something where you must make some kind of effort and you get more than you had before.

LEVINE: It couldn’t be clearer or more concise than that, and that’s absolutely right.

WUORINEN: It just seems to me that there in the world, whether people like it or not, whether it fits their perceptions, there are higher things and lower things. There are things that are worth more and things that are worth less. We all have our own individual ways of assessing that. But to say, as so many cultural observers and other people of that sort do, that really, these things are all the same, they are all of equivalent value — the person who sticks a microphone in his mouth and sings a rock song is the equivalent of a highly trained opera singer, for example — it’s just nonsense. And it should be resisted, as I have always tried to do. One is accused of being too sober or too severe. That’s just silly. People are missing the fun of high art if they think such things.

HARBISON: I like that, but I would want to say this about it too, that it’s possible for people who intend to always entertain to produce something that is very perceptible as art, and by contrary it’s also possible for people who are intending to make very high art to produce nothing more than entertainment. In other words, there’s an accidental blurring —

WUORINEN: Sure.

HARBISON: — that takes place quite often. But I would say that culturally, the blur of perception is global, is complete. I don’t think that our culture is very adept at feeling at least positive about the fact that there are different intents in the world. People intend different things, very critically so, and the risks are very different, and of course the commercial issues are very different. I think that’s one of the things we have great difficulty absorbing.

WUORINEN: Look, I think that’s absolutely true, and what you’re talking about is the sort of real world in which there can be any number of popular musicians from the past who really by this definition should be called, quote, “artists.” But I’m not speaking about that. I’m not speaking about what happens in the real world. I’m speaking about a cultural ideology which is promoted, which intersects with perfectly worthy feelings of democracy, which cannot understand that there’s a difference between, say, juridical and political equality and equality of gift, equality of perceptions, equality of interests. There’s a homogenizing impulse here which I think is very malign. And that’s what I think needs to be resisted.

HARBISON: And a corollary to what Charles is saying is that there are actually different kinds of music. And the distinctions are useful and pleasurable and important. The corollary to that is that somehow everything is the same. There are different musics in different parts of the world that have separate intents, separate strains. The whole idea that we are somehow merging all musical impulses seems to me amazing.

WUORINEN: And it’s not true.

HARBISON: It’s also very misleading.

QUESTION: Should a composer of serious Western art music attempt to entertain, to please the crowd?

WUORINEN: How do you do that? If you don’t please yourself, how can you please anyone else? That’s Point 1. Point 2, I don’t know what the mechanism is. The fact is, these attitudes are very patronizing toward the public. They assume that the public is going to be hostile to anything the least bit disturbing. The public is like any group of people. They can be led or they can be left alone. It just seems so obvious. I think, and pardon me for being paranoid, the question of entertaining the public or writing music that somehow does it is not a demand that rises up from the masses of people, even the relatively small number of people who live in serious music. It is something which is fostered from above, by our rulers, however you want to construe that notion, whether they are cultural or political or whatever, who are afraid to do other than ape the taste of the lowest level. That’s just a sociological fact.

LEVINE: I used to, when I came to New York as a kid to study at Juilliard, and I was still in high school in Cincinnati, I sometimes stayed with my dad, who was at a hotel working in New York a week here or there. I stayed with friends, my parents friends, [who] had a subscription to the Philharmonic. And one day, she said, “You want my Philharmonic tickets?” I said, “Why aren’t you going?” She said, “Tchaikovsky Fifth???” All that meant was, she’d heard the Tchaikovsky Fifth and she’d heard it again and she’d heard it again and that’s fine. She’d been a little girl once and heard the Tchaikovsky Fifth and now as a 60-year-old lady, she didn’t want to spend the time on her fanny in Carnegie Hall listening to another Tchaikovsky Fifth.

Now, this is different for everybody. I happen to be similar about that particular piece. But suppose it were the Brahms Fourth, or suppose it were the Schubert C major, or suppose it were the Mahler Fourth. These pieces have a lot of mileage in them for me, still. So periodically I want to restudy and do them and I don’t not look forward to hearing them. But there was something completely messed up in our culture at a time when people were not heavily into new music.

I can tell you this: I’ve conducted so much 19th-century opera in my life. I’m one of the few people walking the earth who will tell you that I love “Cavalleria Rusticana” and I love Beethoven Opus 131, whereas most of the people who love Beethoven Opus 131 look down their noses at “Cavalleria Rusticana.” For me I don’t have a problem with the two different things. But I do have a problem with quality being watered down to a degree where there’s nothing there, and then have people offer me their theories about 12-tone music being not natural. This is such patent nonsense, I barely know where to go with it.

It comes down to something I think we have to say. A critic who shall be nameless writes a review of an opera performance and he praises the clarinet for his beautiful solo before the tenor aria. The only problem is, the instrument was an English horn.

QUESTION: So it wasn’t “Tosca,” “E lucevan le stelle?”

LEVINE: No. And he referred to it twice, because he wanted to make a point that the tenor wasn’t very good, and it wasn’t good proportioned in the piece, that the clarinet solo was so gorgeous and the tenor wasn’t very good. So the clarinet solo got mentioned again. Now this man is well meaning. This man is not a nasty guy. But one thing terrified me about that article. If he doesn’t hear the difference between those two instruments, what else doesn’t he hear? But he has the right professionally, I guess, to say what music is good or bad, whatever, even if he can’t hear through it ...

Hearing actual notes is, if you’re not oriented toward music, similar I suppose to being colorblind or not, though I never was colorblind. What gets me down is the idea that for some reason in music, everyone’s entitled to an opinion and it doesn’t really matter whether the content of the opinion makes any sense or not.

WUORINEN: Well here’s a thing. One of the things that’s always struck me about music, as opposed to literature, painting, the theater, the other arts that we normally interact with, is how there seems to be an assumption that knowing less, having less experience qualifies you better to be a judge or an evaluator. I often ask myself, the problem is that music is an extraordinarily visceral phenomenon that comes at you. That makes people think that they understand it.

But on the other hand, music is incredibly abstract. Unlike the other arts, it can’t be grasped. You have exactly as long as the piece is to get it. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. It doesn’t matter that you can repeat the experience, perhaps. It is a very tough thing, very abstract, and on a very high level. So there is this dichotomy between its visceral quality and its abstraction, which means that people tend, and not just the layman sitting in the seats in the concert hall, people tend to develop opinions which are based on only the lowest level of reaction. And that I think often leads to very destructive — well, let’s put it, simply unhelpful opinions about things. And sometimes these opinions are given by those who have influence on others, and that is even less helpful.

HARBISON: I have a much mellower feeling about that. The idea that everybody has an opinion about music has come to feel to me like a great advantage that we have over some of the others because it engages people at some instinctive level. Everybody is entitled to an opinion about music.

LEVINE: Absolutely.

HARBISON: It’s one of the most peculiar things about it. They wouldn’t do that in other arts. They wouldn’t just say, “I know what I feel about this.” But at least it does mean that there is a level of engagement that we can in some way tap into. I’m sure Charles felt this recently with his opera [“Haroun and the Sea of Stories”]. You run into a public there that is so peculiarly engaged. It’s kind of very distressing and also very exciting to have people that intent.

WUORINEN: Well it was, yes, in my case. It was wonderful also because children were engaged by it.

LEVINE: Yes.

HARBISON: But the intentness, which used to, I must say, bother me a lot, and the idea that critics would write about our profession in ways that were really so basically uninformed, has come to feel like an advantage. Some guy on the bus last year comes up to me and he says to me, without even introducing himself, he says, “Really you should shorten the last scene of that opera, that Gatsby.” And I thought, “In no other line of the arts would somebody care that much.” I was very annoyed initially of course, but then I thought it over and thought, “God, that’s a nice thing.”

LEVINE: I find in that in Boston and New York I experience something very parallel to this, which is, I am stopped all the time by people to say something, when I’m waiting to cross the street or I’m in a restaurant or whatever, and these people are invariably committed, warm, very intelligent, having a point of view, even if all you can do is disagree and say, “You know, I’m sorry I disagree.” But I think what John said just now is very true about the possibility that the vitality of this art form is cued into that somehow.

WUORINEN: There’s another advantage, too, I suppose to all this, which is that the kind of super, or hyper-specialization, that you see in the visual arts really cannot exist in the world of concert music. That’s something that has spared us what I think of as excess. And also, of course, the fact that there aren’t quite the same financial rewards in general in composition as there are if one is a successful visual artist.

LEVINE: Interesting.

HARBISON: We can’t be collected in that way.

WUORINEN: No. And the silliness of some of the specializations — this one wraps things in fat, that one, etc., you see this all the time, and one wonders where they are going to end up. It’s an open question.

LEVINE: It may be worth noting, for some purpose we haven’t yet discussed, these two guys are on the same program with world premieres. They are two examples of great composers of our time who don’t write music the same way at all. I was asked [about] that once by a board member at a press conference, and I said, “When you hear this music, you will see this is two totally different things.” But I love these guys’ music. They are two of our very greatest composers. Unless someone is equipped to hear that, on some level, it’s just words.

HARBISON: There’s actually a track back from what Charles writes and I write to later Stravinsky, which is kind of interesting about this program. I think later Stravinsky is one of the best-kept secrets.

WUORINEN: One of the most important composers.

HARBISON: It’s tremendously important music that the public doesn’t know, out of which a lot of us who write music make what we make of it.

LEVINE: You can’t imagine what a pleasure it is for me when we work hard to do a good performance of one of Elliott Carter’s masterpieces, and when Elliott Carter came out onstage, the audience went absolutely berserk. We are clearly getting some progress. When you have the possibility to make enough programs to control the juxtaposition of new pieces and the way they get revived, I think our culture, the recordings, the concerts, what goes into people’s head, is changing for the better finally.

QUESTION: Let’s go back to talking about the differences between these two composers sitting here, great in their own way but very different. Very different traditions, certainly described differently. You may not agree with it, but the perception is that you [Harbison] are a tonal, neo-Romantic, although I know you hate that term. People say that you [Wuorinen] are a serialist, you write atonal, difficult, thorny music. Are those perceptions correct or not, or is there some truth to them?

WUORINEN: In a word, no. Most of these perceptions come not from hearing or knowing the music, but from reading what someone has written about it.

LEVINE: Hear, hear.

WUORINEN: An interesting question to ask someone about one or the other of us, “Oh, he’s this way or that way,” is, “Which particular piece are you referring to?” You won’t get an answer, I guarantee you. So an awful lot of this is just second-, third-hand. These categories have very little meaning. We don’t like them because of that reason. If they were accurate, perhaps one might cotton to them. I can only say for my own self, to call me a serial composer, I think is — first of all the term has to be defined and no one ever bothers to do it. Secondly, if it means a kind of churning of the total chromatic constantly through, it simply doesn’t apply to my work. My work is different and it is centered not in a tonal or diatonic way, but in a hierarchical way that it is not dissimilar from that of older music.

QUESTION: You wrote in your book, Simple Composition —

WUORINEN: Never write a book.

QUESTION: Never write a book — it’s in print! Of course it was a long time ago —

WUORINEN: It’s still in print. People use it.

QUESTION: It was written in 1979 and you wrote that the tonal system could only be found in backward-looking serious composers, is no longer used by serious mainstream composers, has been replaced and succeeded by the 12-tone system.

WUORINEN: Well, that’s a categorical statement which cannot be — of course it had more to it then, although to some extent it is obsolete now. But it depends on what you mean by the tonal system.

[karlhenning]

Levine, Wuorinen, Harbison ... at Tanglewood

... The next afternoon, Levine returns to the BSO with an American program featuring two BSO commissions that he premiered in Boston, John Harbison's "Darkbloom" overture and Charles Wuorinen's Piano Concerto No. 4, plus two hands-across-the-Atlantic pieces, EdgardVarese's "Ameriques" and George Gershwin's "An American in Paris" ...

... He emphasized that he was not talking about ''throw any old thing at 'em and say, 'Gee, isn't that cute?' " He just wants to work out "a kind of priority for the new music that has some congruence with the way the old music sifts itself" over the course of time.