The beauty of postmodern classical music

Music liberated from relevance

Classical music is a dead art. It’s been dead, or at least dying for a long time. Not that great art isn’t being made, people have been making it for as long as it’s been dead. But of all the great Western classical artforms, it is the one that really didn’t make it through the 20th century. Newer classical music has zero stake in the cultural zeitgeist. And it’s my favorite stuff to listen to.

In the late eighteenth century, 84 percent of the repertory of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra consisted of music by living composers. By 1855, the figure had declined to 38 percent, by 1870 to 24 percent.

Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise

Orchestras were once profitable ventures which competed on new (and sometimes hot) composers. Orchestras are now charities funded by the wealthy elderly, and mostly play the canon of things written by people who were dead by 1900. The only place it really lives on with any relevance is in film scores and musicals. I’d hardly say it counts if you’re in the background. Yet due to rising population levels, there is more money and more people engaging with classical music than ever. It just has no relevance. It seems like the modern market economy, despite all odds, has so far not been able to destroy the will of people to spend their life, or at least their undergraduate careers, becoming extremely proficient classical musicians. Somehow, we still have oboe players, which is excellent. There are way more musicians than there are jobs, so the talent is insanely good.

Classical music written in the 20th century is my favorite thing to listen to. It starts with crazy Nationalist directions, then maximally avant-garde and unlistenable as a moral position against anything that people would like too much and be used by regimes for violence, then highly individuated reactions against the whole thing. The entire field, knowing that no one would really consume their stuff, could say fuck it and go wild. Like any artform, it has continued on an evolving conversation with itself, the surrounding politics, and technology. But the music is written for themselves, for the players, and for the niche groups of nerds that formed around it.

In 1976, Henryk Gorecki, a fairly unknown Polish guy who was big in avant-garde circles wrote The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. The second movement was inspired by a visit he had to a Gestapo prison where prisoners’ obscenities were scrawled all over the walls, except for a poem a girl wrote to her mother. 16 years later, a recording of the piece exploded, getting to #6 on the British pop charts. Gorecki got extremely scared off and went reclusive for the rest of his career.

Last year I joined an amateur string orchestra in San Francisco. While we butchered everything we touched, we specifically butchered a piece called Orawa, written by Wojciech Kilar. Somehow I’d missed hearing about him for years, even though 1980s postmodern Polish music is clearly my jam. It is so much fun.

Orawa is the only piece in which I wouldn’t change a single note, though I have looked at it many times. […] What is achieved in it is what I strive for - to be the best possible Kilar.

Looking at recordings on YouTube, it’s mostly performed by youth orchestras where all the players crack smiles, but this recording is serious and gets to the heart of my absolute joy of the postmodern classical music project. I highly recommend that you watch the whole thing.

Look at the professionalism, the robes of the conductor, the grey hair of the players, the intensity of their faces, the mechanical precision. It is a perfect performance of a perfect and obsessive piece of clockwork. Many decades of experience have been poured into this flawless rendition of this extremely silly piece of music.

The last coherent new thing to come out of classical music was probably when the Europeans shoved minimalism together with Jesus and produced Holy Minimalism in the 80s and 90s. Most of the rest has blended with other popular forms, film music, or vibesmusic for the Spotify. But the century is young and I hope they come out with more.

Listen to my playlist Chronological Bangers of the 20th Century to get the greatest selection inside of your ears.