“[A]ny musician who has not experienced — I do not say understood, but truly experienced — the necessity of dodecaphonic music is USELESS. For his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of his epoch.”
Pierre Boulez (“Eventuellement…”, 1952, translated as “Possibly…”)
(Wikipedia)
“No, it means the epoch rather than the musician is USELESS. Majority adoption justifies NOTHING.”
–My response.
There seems to be something about the training at the Paris Conservatory of Music since Messiaen that (a) encourages atonality and (b) discourages the free thought necessary to critically evaluate a musical paradigm, because every composer I’ve encountered or read about that spent a significant amount of time there has been absolutely intolerant of tonality for the simple reason that it isn’t the way “modern” classical music is composed. They see tonality as something archaic, to be discarded without even evaluating the idea.
And as anyone following my blog knows, I think discarding ideas without evaluating them is nearly always a very stupid thing to do.
They are also not content to simply hold their own views, but determined to impose them upon others despite resistance, with conviction born of either aesthetic absolutism or a lack of individual thought. In essence, like so many other people, they’ve subjugated themselves to the social demands on their eras rather than defining their own styles and writing music (or doing whatever) for the sake of its own existence (luckily, this nearly guarantees that they will fade when those eras are over, because social demand is nothing if not capricious and they have no other leg to stand upon).
It is also worth noting that classical music began to decline in popularity right around the time that Modernist atonality emerged. It isn’t a coincidence, and to say that atonal music is socially demanded is to ignore the very forces that marginalized classical music to begin with. The only music that’s truly in demand is popular music now, and it’s your own fault!