Driving home yesterday and a thought hit me: There's a good reason why people don't listen to "modern" classical music. Even I, as a full-fledged crazy classical music theorist, don't listen to Ligeti on my way home. I have to study his music. I have to write about his music. I have to give a presentation on his music at a conference in a couple of months. One would think that'd be incentive to listen to a Little' 'geti in the car. But you know what? I don't.

Though all of us supposedly "cultured" people lament the fact that people don't appreciate classical music, it's not their fault. Well, it's not all their fault. Classical music (I'm talkin' Western here) up to a point was written for consumption. Bach wrote his music to be played in a church, Chopin wrote for friends, and Rachmaninoff wrote because he's just a schmaltzy kinda guy. But ever since Beethoven, there has been a parallel strain in the aim of composers: to write absolute music, to write music for its own sake, rejoicing in formalism, innovation, and transcendance, even at the cost of public ignorance. Of course I'm making sweeping generalizations and it doesn't apply to half of the composers out there. But a lot of the famous ones in recent memory: Schoenberg, Babbit, Stockhausen, Boulez, Cage, write music not to be listened to in a casual sense. They write music for you to concentrate on. If it takes an average person quite a bit of work just to analyze tonal harmony, then it takes a supreme effort of will to sit through and absorb some of these modern compositions. And composers wonder why people don't listen to more of their music. In short: it takes too much effort and it doesn't even sound good!

It doesn't sound good. It really doesn't. Now, I'm sure there are people who appreciate that kind of music but I'd venture that a majority of the academics out there don't really LIKE listening to Schoenberg's Klavierstucke. It is a significant piece. It is a well constructed piece (in a theoretical sense). But do we like listening to it? Do we hum dodecaphonic tunes while chopping up carrots for tonights dinner, as Schoenberg suggested? NO!

In terms of dissemination, it comes down to a matter of concentration. Pop music doesn't take much concentration or effort to take in. Much of classical music, on the other hand, demands your concentration. It's all tautological, what I'm saying here (that pop music is popular because it has the qualities of popularity in it...duh) but I think people forget the point quite often. Especially us craaazy academics. Even within the field, we like listening to Bach and Chopin, not Boulez (some of us do of course).

So what classical music do you listen to and how do you listen to it? And if anybody says Schoenberg: is it something other than Verklarte Nacht?

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UPDATE: To temper my rant above, I don't think it's necessarily bad that these composers are writing REALLY-HARD-TO-UNDERSTAND music. I think there needs to be a broad spectrum of creativity, both popular and highly academic. The ones writing really complex music shouldn't bemoan the fact that more people aren't appreciating their work though (up to a certain point). It may be sad that the unappreciated composers are probably the ones coming out with the next big idea but that's just the way things work for now. Of course, there are those masters who write formal/academic AND nice to listen to/popular music: Beethoven comes to mind...but they're much much more rare...