"New Music"

Had I been alive and listening to music over two or three centuries ago, I would have been demanding: “New music! Not re-plays of the old stuff that I know already.” So Messrs. Monteverdi, Purcell, Handel, Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert et al scribbled away writing new music every week, or month, or quarter. Just to satisfy the listening public's demand for “new music”. Fast-forward to the twenty-first century: Listeners and players regard “new music” on a programme as a child regards a spoonful of honey after a horrid medicine. Graduates of music academies (including many well-known music critics) extol the virtues of “new music”. Just as, to prove their modern credentials, they extol the virtues of great women composers (on shaky evidence). And, at the extreme critical wing; black women composers of new music.

Being not a composer, nor black, nor a woman, I can speak without prejudice. I like good music be it played or composed by French, German, Jewish, Russian, British, Scandinavian, Chinese, Japanese, Czech, Polish, Romanian, Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox .. the list goes on. Great music does not know sex, race, or nationality. Or time period. In the archives, there are kilos of music composed over the past three or four centuries, most of it rarely if ever played, and rarely if ever listened to. Do we really need “new music”? In my local supermarket, there is a complete aisle devoted to breakfast cereals. And almost another aisle devoted to different yoghurts. Do we really need yet another new yogurt, or breakfast cereal? Surely: enough is enough. Show me a piece of new music that is still being played and enjoyed after many decades, and I'll be mildly interested. Shostakovitch, Prokofiev, Khachaturian and Benjamin Britten — plus maybe just a few others — make the cut, but not many do. And after a lifetime of listening to music, there are still reams and reams that I have never heard. Josef Haydn wrote 68 string quartets; I've only heard a dozen or so, and know only a few well. Not to mention Domenico Scarlatti's 555 keyboard sonatas. Or Donizetti's alleged 70+ operas. I sense we “need” new music like we “need” a new breakfast cereal.