Composers Discuss Music Audiences at Law Forum

Three leading American composers discussed aspects of "The Contemporary Composer and His Public" at last night's Law School Forum in New Lecture Hall.

Aaron Copland deplored the existence of so much "ancestor worship" among modern music-lovers. He said that the public's desire for "certified" masterpieces in music is a sign of cultural immaturity and a phenomenon not found in other arts, like the legitimate theatre. "Those who want only masterworks," he stated, "wouldn't know the best music if they heard it."

Copland said that the public ought to be interested in living composers, "because each one contributes something unique and vital, which not even such exalted figures as Beethoven or Sibelius could duplicate."

Irving G. Fine '37, Frederick Mann Professor of Music at Brandeis University, described how serious music has become "more private, more individualized" in the face of a concentration on performances by "exrovert public virtuosi." He said that the burgeoning of LP recordings has aggravated the problem, for although it has dipped into new music, it has dug deep into music of the far past, which now competes for attention with the new. He praised "fruitful and inspired teaching in the colleges," but regretted its prevailing conservative approach.

Otto Luening, professor of Music at Columbia, prefaced a summary of experimental and electronic music with remarks about the unfortunate fads for "background music," which pours forth while you do something else, for "narcotic music," which is turned down low as a soporific, and for "fixed music," which results from exclusive listening to a specific recorded performance of one work, "in which even the surface noises become part of the aesthetic experience."