Keynote Speech: Professor Jonathan Cross
New Music: Is anybody listening?
Keynote speech by Jonathan Cross,
Professor of Musicology at University of Oxford
Complex. Enigmatic. Indecipherable horror. Beethoven’s late quartets did not please their first audiences. Such is the unhappy lot of the modernist. And things don’t seem to have improved much for the makers of new music today. Though some performances of avant-garde works have at least provoked violent reactions (most famously the première of The Rite of Spring in 1913), most seem to have been met with the damning silence of indifference.
So why do composers, improvisers, performers and producers still bother? Wouldn’t the world be a happier place if we just got rid of all this nasty modern music and spent our time listening to some comforting Mozart instead?
In this lecture, Jonathan Cross asks some provocative questions about the state of new music today, and even begins to attempt to sketch some answers.
Part of the New Music Scotland Showcase & Conference.
