Why does serious 20th-century music attract so few listeners? This unpopularity is not due to a lack of interest in serious music itself, since classical music is a formidable industry that regularly draws vast numbers of listeners worldwide. These people flock to listen to the works of an earlier era, however—music of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Why should a public that obviously loves music be so consistently repelled by the music of its own time?

A popular explanation is that people are lazy or uninformed. If they would only take the time and trouble to understand contemporary music better, they would soon be able to enjoy it. A close examination of contemporary music does not support this excuse. The problems begin with our composers, not our audience, as will be clear from the examples below, which are taken from some of the most acclaimed composers of the 20th century.

One of the principal characteristics of 20th-century music is an increasing mechanicalism in both its creation and performance. The first step in this direction was the invention of the twelve-tone or “serial” technique of composition by Arnold Schoenberg in the 1920’s. In this system, the composer chooses a row or “series” of the twelve notes of the scale, and writes his entire piece made up of various permutations of this series.

This system has an inherent lack of freedom and promotes mathematical thinking on the part of the composer, since he must think in terms of permutations of a fixed series rather than of the natural flow of music. Because of the restrictions on melody and harmony, there is a strong tendency for the composer to be constricted in rhythm as well.

A further difference in contemporary music is that today’s composers characteristically write down every detail of the performance, leaving nothing to the discretion of the performer. Accents, time values, and tempi are specified with a completeness that leaves virtually no scope for interpretation. Even traditional notations of time, such as quarter notes and whole notes, may be replaced with the precise number of seconds a note is to be held.

This eagerness on the part of the composer to exercise total control over his music may seem to be justified on grounds on interpretative accuracy. There is, however, no way to assimilate a score in which every detail is notated or is indicated in words. If the composer’s attitude is one of absolute control, the music itself will always feel heartless. It will fail to move the players, and therefore the listeners, in any real way.

A typical example can be drawn from “Bicinium,” a work for two oboes by Charles Wuorinen. The second oboe part starts in 5/32 time, with a single note sustained throughout the measure. Suddenly, the next measure switches to 4/16 time—a difficult shift. Then, instead of having four actual sixteenth notes or multiples thereof in the measure, there are five sixteenths in as a quintuplet, divided as follows: two thirty-seconds, one sixteenth, two thirty-seconds, a triplet of three thirty-seconds (which fits into one-sixteenth), and two thirty-seconds. If this sounds difficult, that’s because it is. In the third measure, the meter switches to 1/32. The next measure switches to 2/4 time, a much slower tactus. Coming directly after the previous measures, it is very difficult to react to accurately, especially since the notes in this measure are also much slower: eighth note, quarter note, eighth note. The last measure in this line is in 3/16 time, again a difficult shift.

For that triplet in the second measure, the musician must feel that this measure is made up of four beats of one-sixteenth each. He must space the quintuplet of five notes evenly over these four beats. To play the triplet, the fourth beat of the quintuplet must be felt as divided into three equal parts.

The point is not that today’s musicians cannot play this accurately, but simply that there is no way a human being can do all this division and subdivision and still maintain a musical pulse. When a musician is required to concentrate so hard on rhythmic mechanics, there is virtually no chance of his playing with a natural sense of phrasing.

A more subtle form of overnotation is to replace the intuitive and somewhat flexible traditional time markings with time values calibrated in seconds or fractions of seconds. An example of this is “charisma,” a piece for clarinet and cello by Iannis Xenakis. Throughout this piece, the tempo is indicated exclusively in seconds rather than in the traditional beats-per-minute. The musician must respond to the number indicated next to the note, which tells him how many seconds the note must be held. The musician naturally responds to a note as if it were in the context of a particular tempo. But if he must simultaneously respond to a number, he is forced to flip to a completely different part of his brain, while still retaining some semblance of musicality. This is a form of mental torture, especially if the process continues throughout the piece, as in this case.

It is true that the composer has indicated “approximately 5 seconds” or “approximately 1/2 second,” etc. This apparent flexibility, however, is deceptive, for the musician still has to concentrate on counting seconds. In effect, the composer has written a piece with no actual tempo. If there is no tempo there is no rhythm, and where there is no rhythm there is no music.

Seemingly at the other extreme from overnotation—and often found within the same piece—is so-called “aleatoric” music. The word “aleatoric” derives from the Latin alea, a game of dice. In aleatoric music, particular passages, or even whole sections is to “Play A, B flat and E flat freely over and over again for twenty seconds.”

Oddly enough, aleatoric directions are often constricting, not liberating. The performer feels limited by the fact that he is still trying to play within the composer’s mindset. In addition, he is often required to improvise for a specified length of time—in the illustrated example, for 60 seconds. He must improvise and count both at once. When a musician is asked to play an aleatoric passage, he has neither the freedom to play according to his intuitions, nor enough guidance from the composer to improvise as musically as possible. In effect, aleatoric music gives the musician a double message, since it requires him to improvise in a context that by its nature is not improvisatory. This tends to drive musicians crazy.

The spirit of a piece is always visible in the appearance of the score, and the scores of many modern pieces resemble tangles of barbed wire. One looks for phrases without result. (In modern music even rests do not necessarily indicate true breathing points. Today, silence is often used not to balance sound, or for peacefulness, but rather for shock value—equivalent to the pause in an artillery barrage between the impact of one shell and the next.)

Some scores use “graphic” notation. Graphic notation consists of pictures intended to cause musical reactions when the musician looks at them. Composers who adopt such approximate graphic indications of what their music is to sound like have leaped ideologically into the fallacy that music can consist solely of a series of doodles, textures, outbursts, stops, and starts. Never mind how artfully arranged, this amounts to adopting the attitude that your score can be used by anyone, to express any idea, in any context. Although performances of graphic music are quite rare, it represents a major and perhaps growing part of contemporary composers’ output.

Modern music is suffering, then, from the extremes of tyranny and chaos, rationalism and irrationalism—two sides of the same coin. Rather than expanding musical possibilities, most new notation is actually inhibiting, and what is being inhibited is music. At the extreme of rationalism, composer Earle Brown has defended serial music on the grounds that it is the technique “most rationally compatible with and relevant to many methods of analysis and synthesis employed by mathematics and the physical sciences today.” (He does not explain why art should imitate science.)

At the same time, Brown admits that the early serialist slogan, “total organization,” is now embarrassing. To right the balance, he feels, serialist composers must add an element of “the uncontrollable.” This point of view is manifested very clearly in his compositions, where serial and aleatoric passages alternate. Nevertheless, the radical contradiction between these points of view persists; he seeks to “balance” rather than to integrate them, in the hope of producing “creative insecurity.” Thus, the contradiction between these two points of view, rather than providing a stimulus toward their reintegration and the consequent rehumanization of music, is prized for its own sake. To rationalize this contradiction without resolving it. Brown concludes, “We can serialize, generalize, mobilize, do anything now . . . without needing to be right.” For the sophisticated composer, then, anything is acceptable as long as it is not universal, absolute, or timeless.

Taking this still further, other composers espouse pure irrationalism. They view their primary mission as to depict disorder, confusion, fear, and above all, meaninglessness: a lawless universe, lacking fixed points of reference. Such a viewpoint can be described as “disintegrationism,” but it is part of the myth of progress that has all but gutted most of the arts in this century.