Moritz von Schwind, Ein Schubert-Abend bei Joseph von Spaun, 1868. Vienna, Wien Museum. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
February 1958. In the American magazine High Fidelity, read by people who bought stereo systems and classical records, an essay appears by Milton Babbitt, composer and professor at Princeton. The editors give it a title that will travel around the world: Who Cares if You Listen? Babbitt had proposed another, far more sober: The Composer as Specialist. The editors’ title stuck to him for the rest of his life.
The text, though, largely deserved the title. Babbitt compares avant-garde music to mathematics and theoretical physics, disciplines nobody expects to grasp at first hearing, and draws from the comparison a precise proposal: for the serious composer, a “total, resolute, and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media”. Not a complaint about an audience drifting away. An invitation to let it go.
From that moment a phrase gets repeated that sounds like an observation: contemporary music has lost its audience. History says otherwise. For nearly all of its life, European art music was the music of the living, played for people who wanted to hear the latest thing. You went to the opera for the new title of the season, to Mozart’s concerts for the concerto he had just finished writing, to Viennese drawing rooms for Schubert’s new Lieder, sung with the composer at the piano. Bringing a composer who had been dead for generations back into the hall was a rare gesture: when on 11 March 1829 the twenty-year-old Mendelssohn conducted the St Matthew Passion in Berlin, Bach had been dead for seventy-nine years, the score had not been performed since the Leipzig days, and the concert went down in history for exactly that reason. The historian William Weber, who has spent a career studying European concert programmes, has shown that the music of dead composers conquered the concert hall only over the course of the nineteenth century, and that by around 1870 it had become the rule.
The audience, then, did not vanish. What changed is the place where it was made to sit. Within three generations concert halls became well-guarded museums, where one listens mostly to the illustrious dead, and the new slips in sideways, a quarter of an hour between the overture and the symphony. Then some composers, instead of claiming the place, theorised that one could do without it. These are two choices, made by people with names and surnames, not a law of nature. The audience itself proves it every time new music reaches it without apologies: the opera of the living is not a dream, it is the normal condition music comes from.
The most striking case has a date. In 1992 the Nonesuch label released Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony, written in 1976, with the soprano Dawn Upshaw, the London Sinfonietta and David Zinman. The record sold more than a million copies, became the best-selling contemporary classical record of all time and reached number six on the UK album chart, in the middle of the pop acts.
Years later Babbitt went back to the essay that had chased him for decades. He said that the title contained almost nothing of the letter and none of the spirit of his article, and added: Of course, I do care if you listen.