Musical Re-enchantment?

In the last chapter of his survey of twentieth century composition, The Rest is Noise, Ross (2007: 514) admits that it is tempting to ‘see the overall trajectory’ of this musical culture as ‘one of steep decline.’ He says that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘composers were cynosures on the world stage, their premieres mobbed by curiosity seekers’ (Ross, 2007: 514). In the year 2000, it was much more difficult to imagine a comparable musical event to, say, the premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and, in the main, ‘contemporary classical composers have largely vanished from the radar of mainstream culture’ (Ross, 2007: 514). It is telling that when Stockhausen died in 2007, at the age of 79, many international media outlets led their obituaries with one of the composer’s least musical claims to fame: his infamous statement, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, that the assault on the Twin Towers constituted one of the ‘greatest works of art’ of the modern period. As to the state of art music per se, Ross (2007: 514) admits that here too

‘it might appear that classical music itself is veering toward oblivion.’ Orchestras are stuck in a ‘museum culture’ of playing the works of dead composers and pieces largely composed before 1900. And these very same orchestras are ‘playing to a dwindling cohort of ageing subscribers and would-be elitists’ (Ross, 2007: 514). But the author cautions against adopting a dismal attitude towards the state of art music:

Young audiences crowd into small halls to hear Elliott Carter’s string quartets or Xenakis’s stochastic constructions. Living composers such as Adams, Glass, Reich, and Arvo Pärt have acquired a semblance of a mass following … As the behemoth of mass culture breaks up into a melee of subcultures and niche markets, as the Internet weakens the media’s stranglehold on cultural distribution, there is reason to think that classical music, and with it new music, can find fresh audiences in far-flung places.