Has New Music Made Itself Irrelevant?

Classical music devotees tend to be sharply split over the issue of contemporary music, to the extent that a conductor devoted to the work of, say, Elliott Carter may quickly find himself with a very small core audience. “The problem isn’t just a decline in musical literacy. You don’t have to be able to read a score to ‘get’ a piece by R. Murray Schafer or Einojuhani Rautavaara, just as you don’t need a thorough basis in colour theory and composition to respond to a painting by Frank Stella or Joanne Tod. Without really thinking about it, the broad arts public has decided that the truth of our times is not to be found in contemporary music, or at least not to a degree to make the search worth while.”