The (Classical Music) World Is Flat
The Music of Japan Today 2007 festival, a two-and-a-half day series of concerts and discussions on new Japanese music, took place last weekend at my alma mater, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. After the last concert on Saturday night, the guests of honor—three very talented mid-career Japanese composers and a grand master of the shakuhachi—took the stage for a Q & A with the audience. I had a question, but I didn’t ask it.
Forget serialism, forget postmodernism, forget historically informed performance and electronics and extended techniques: The absorption of Asians into the formerly European- and American-dominated field of classical music (both old and new) is the classical music story of the latter half of the 20th century. It’s the single most important thing to happen to the profession since the Second World War, and I expect it’s only the first step in what may be a centuries-long process of flattening classical music’s demography, escaping, at last, the hegemony of the dead white dudes. Exciting stuff.
But this is also a time when the continued value and relevance of concert music as a category of artistic endeavor is beginning to be questioned, sometimes even by its own standard-bearers. Although positive indicators abound, it’s hard to argue that classical music isn’t less and less respected by the general public every year. This may or may not be a uniquely American phenomenon; I don’t know the scenes abroad well enough to comment.
This is all an elaborate setup for the question I dared not ask on Saturday night: Do those Japanese composers feel that the carpet is being pulled out from under them? Are they optimistic that the pioneering strides of their teachers and predecessors haven’t led them into a dead end? They must be, and this is why I didn’t pose such a question in that public forum. If they didn’t believe that they were contributing to an area of creative activity whose continuation is essential to our species’ cultural survival, they probably wouldn’t be making those contributions to begin with. Further, I’d posit that the propagation of that belief is a necessary condition for the aforementioned global folding-in, itself an undeniably promising (not to say messianic) light on the horizon of art music.
The distastefulness of the old “East meets West” trope was, unsurprisingly, a recurrent theme of last weekend’s presentations; nobody, Eastern or Western, is comfortable with such a simplistic, uncritical paradigm. The lectures and performances of this past weekend have suggested to me that we might instead be headed for a Post-Western Era (of which the Asian musical diaspora was the first inkling) fueled by recent and ongoing advances in transportation and communication and characterized by a plurality of worldwide contemporary music projects.