What/why don't people "get" modern classical music?

The main contributor to "taste" or "preference" is culture, namely, the culture of the individual. This is something that has not really been addressed by any of the posters here, though they have danced around it. To "get" something musical is akin to "getting" something culturally. It is rare that someone goes out of his way to adorn his home with trinkets, souvenirs, or decorations from a foreign culture unless he has travelled abroad or has some reason why that foreign culture resonates with him. The so-called "classical" form of music is foreign to most people simply by virtue of the fact that one has to acoustically travel out of his way to access it. It metaphorically lies an ocean and a half away from what one is wont to hear. This means that only people who have lived the "classical" experience or have some sort of reason for identifying with something so outside of the norm really seek it out.

It is rare to find someone who really is interested in all types of music, culture, food, et cetera. Though many people say that they would like to "travel the world", they want to do so on their own terms. They prefer the tourist traps, the cheesy cruises, the non-authentic "local" cuisine, and even go so far as to say they are having a cultural experience as they order a hamburger in a Japanese McDonald's. The reason they fear immersing themselves in a foreign culture is because they have not been introspective enough to decide what their core individual "culture" is. They are comfortable letting their respective societal mores determine what their global outlook should be. This is exactly the same thing with music. They are willing to listen to anything, but they want to listen on their own subjective terms. Music is subjective, so of all things, it is the hardest to erase misconceptions about it.

My solution to the dilemma is to accept that there really is "bad" classical out there. I love all styles of music, but I definitely have found certain genres to have a higher potential for examples of "good" versus "bad". I put these qualifiers in quotations because — again — this is all subjective. Even though I am a die-hard jazz fan, I will be the first to admit that there is a TON of jazz crap out there. What is off-putting and annoying to people outside of a musical culture is when a die-hard fan defends music simply because it falls into his preferred genre. As long as one can recognize good and bad in all music styles, it makes it easier to approach a foreign genre without bringing preconceived notions into the equation.

For me anyway, music is an art from, a way to express emotions and feelings. To get a piece of music is so that you can relate to it, in your life, and it would have a large influence on society.

Some people get rap because what the artists are rapping about are relevant to their world. Other people like rock because they feel the words and the way the song is being expressed.

Also taste comes into it; some people prefer violins to guitars, relaxing music as opposed to heavy music. Modern classical music probably lives in the shadow of the earlier music with Mozart, Bach etc.

When people who don't listen to allot of classical music such as myself hear modern classic, I automatically compare it to the famous composers, and make a quick judgment on what mood and expression is being presented in the music.

Allot of the the pop and mainstream music has an influence on that. because within the first few seconds of the song you get a pretty good idea of what the mood is, and the listener nowadays are sort of inclined to make a quick judgment of a song. This is a great reflection of today's hustle and bustle world with everyone having high stress lives and jobs, they need a quick way to release the stress, and it would be only rarely that someone would take the time out to sit down and listen to the music. To imagine the performer actually playing the piece, the technique and the skill involved.

Modern classical music requires more effort from the listener to fully enjoy and appreciate the piece of music.

By "get" a piece I would assume it is a general reference to a lack of understanding of the piece in general. For example most atonal music can come across as being pretty random, and takes a while to fully understand everything going on. It doesn't really help that a lot of atonal composers also liked counterpoint a lot, and, without conventional harmonies to fall back on, it makes the piece sound even stranger to an ear that is not used to it. Part of the reason for this with modern classical music is that an awful lot of ideas have been thrown around through the history of classical music (obviously) and so doing something no one has actually done before is inevitably going to lead to weird things happening.

Those are just my thoughts anyway.

Something in a book I recently read sheds some light on this topic.

It said that when we listen to a piece of music from our own culture, even if we haven't heard that piece of music before, unless we have some kind of issue with our musical perception, we can usually hum along to some degree, we can predict what's going to happen to some extent, and we have a sense what does and doesn't make sense musically. Most people in our society have been exposed to their culture's music from a very early age, so we've had a long time to get a grasp of its patterns and how it works.

With music from other cultures, that isn't there, or at least not to the same degree. I think the same thing happens with modern classical music- its language is unfamiliar, so people don't know how to make sense of its patterns.

The book drew a parallel with language- people utter a continuous stream of sound, but when we hear our own language, we are able to break that into words, meaningful utterances- we get it. That doesn't happen with unfamiliar languages- we don't know the patterns, so it just sounds like a stream of sound.

Ah... but is it art? =)

The great problem of classical music in the twentieth century has been how to push the boundaries without alienating the audience. All art needs an audience, there's still no point in writing music which no one will listen to, but no composer wants to be known for dumbed-down popular pieces. What many found during the twentieth century is that there's a point at which music is no longer "ordered sound", but degenerates into noise. Everyone has their own limit to what they can handle (some love Schoenberg, some abhor him), when someone doesn't "get" a piece of music, it's simply that it's gone beyond that limit.

Because it's all dissonant noise. there's no melody or creativity to it, it's just a bunch of ugly sounds. It's not fun to listen to in the slightest. That's not to say that all modern music is bad. There have been many film scores that I would rank with some of the finest classical compositions in history such as Star Wars, Harry Potter, How to Train Your Dragon, and way too many others to list. But it really sucks that film music is the only form of good classical music we have nowadays. People need to realize that no one wants to here crap like this. Sorry to be blunt about it but there you go.

The only "Modern" composer whose work has been wholly absorbed by the general public is Debussy.

I would bet that even from the base of musicians and training musicians who are contributors on Y/A, all but a few are a part of the problem as far as wanting "Recognizable Melody and or Harmony." This is often the same crowd who bewail the 'death' of classical music, not realizing that all they consume from prior 1900 used to be 'new music,' and not all of that was 'easy access' for the contemporary listeners of the day! (Chopin, radical? many don't hear how radical it remains - just hear 'the pretty.')

I believe there are a lot of folk out there who are "Musical Escapists," i.e. "Sentimental Tourists," who prefer to drop in on the past via its period arts, (ironically, a place they never experienced, ergo, a time and place they can have thousands of misconceptions about!). Those are unreachable, BTW - those who just don't want to go past, for example, Brahms. They are using music for very different reasons than the ways a 'true musician / music lover" approaches music.

I've also found that many a claimant to the title of 'music lover' hears, basically, only the top, and further perhaps recognizes some of the harmonic color or sea change, but not much else.

There is a huge disparity in our contemporary audiences; generally, tens of thousands have been known to flock to an exhibit of paintings by Kandinsky - the same crowd who consume and like contemporary design, read contemporary literature, etc, will eagerly look at visual works from the twentieth century through to today, but are resolutely stuck on music up to and about 1890 - 1900.

I find this 'audience' Very Much Part Of The Problem' when it comes to 'The Death of Classical Music' and the morphing of concert halls and the recording industry to a "Music Museum."

Since they are truly so far 'behind,' I recommend first exposing them to 20th Century classical works which still have familiar elements: an identifiable motif / theme, and still use older procedures, clear(er) bass line, etc. The likes of Copland, Hindemith, Milhaud, Stravinsky, etc. are already a stretch for this type of listener, but it gets them past the wading pool into the 'free swim' area.

Likewise, introduce them to the earlier Elliott Carter Sonata for Cello and Piano or his highly melodic Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello and Harpsichord before trying to bring a non-thirsting horse to the trough of the Berio Sequenzas, et alia.

And yes, I would agree with you that if one is a True Music Lover, that Music is Music. You forget that so many do not listen to get "Just Meaning from Musical Activity."

Choose your battles, in the instance of this issue, selectively.

Ps. Thanks for the Berio - its fantastic, and lyrical, and quite beautiful.... sigh, some do not know what they are missing (100 + years of profoundly good and great musical works!)

Best regards.

I will admit that it is an acquired taste.

I blame it on the formation of jazz. (not condescending jazz, i love it)

Jazz leads to a drum set and new rhythms, which leads to Elvis, which leads to electronic music, which leads to drums tracks, which leads to auto-tuning, which leads to the unimportance of actual singing, which leads to screaming, and also losing the desire to make further process in music theory. Unfortunately, this is the path of what is now pop music. While this was happening, composers such as Schoenberg, Webern, Crumb, Adams, Cage, Ferneyhough, and many others are making more and more avon-guard music that gets trampled underfoot.

Then, when we ACTUAL musicians re-discover this collection of music and sounds, people give the cold shoulder stare, and they don't understand the multi-hundred-year-process that it took for music to reach that point. Most are desensitized by the scremo and the basic 4-chord-and-a-bridge pop music. This is not something they don't "get" because it is lower than the norm, its too far above the norm for the average ear to comprehend.

Please understand, I am not belittling any type of music, (except for scremo, that is just horrible) I enjoy most kinds of music, but I pity those who can't expand their horizons to listen and accept this music.

To "get" this is to understand the reason behind and structure of the music. The melody, the theme, the topic, the idea. It is hard to find the idea or theme of this kind of music, which is why most people halt their analysis and their want to decode this music when the first minor 2nd sounds.

Hope this explains it.

The answers by Pasq and Johannes show the root of them problem - they think it all sounds 'discordant' and/or 'terrible'. All this proves is how little 'modern classical music' they have heard. Many even condemn it without actually KNOWING any at all (they might have heard ONE thing once which they found not to their taste).

This ignorance infuriates me. What these closed-eared people do not realise is that there is a greater variety of 'classical music' being written today than at any other time in musical history; to lump it all together and try to pretend it is all the same is simply ridiculous. If one heard pieces written in the same year by (just for example) Arvo Pärt, Wolfgang Rihm, Mark Anthony Turnage and Toru Takemitsu, one would be struck by how DIFFERENT they are, rather than how they 'all sound the same'.

People don't seem to like having to 'work' at anything - especially music. There is this attitude among some that music should be 'soothing' and 'relaxing'. Other art form are not restricted to one set of emotional responses, so why should music? Most people don't actually LISTEN to music - they merely 'hear' it, often in the background while doing something else - somewhat akin to having a tea party in a gallery full of the world's greatest paintings and to which one occasionally gives a cursory glance without appreciating them at all.

In fairness, your two examples don't help one little bit and will only serve to perpetuate the attitudes of those your are questioning. Ferneyhough is a tough nut to crack for anyone. I have been involved in contemporary music for more than 20 years. I once ran one of the UK's leading contemporary music ensembles who were one of the very few who would (could) tackle Ferneyhough's music. As 'seasoned' as I am in the field, Ferneyhough is still a real challenge. He is one of the greatest living composers on the planet, but he is also one of the most uncompromising and 'cerebral'. The Berio is similarly a tough listen for many (and not particularly representative of his music as a whole). It would have been much more helpful if you had posted a wide variety of music from a selection of contemporaneous, yet markedly different composers. I will post a few links after typing this in an attempt to redress the balance a little.

In short, many (or perhaps even MOST) people who say they don't 'get' (which means a combination of 'like', 'understand' and 'be bothered to give it a try') 'modern classical music' have actually heard almost none and are basing their 'opinion' (or prejudice, more like) on their blissful ignorance.

Takemitsu - Edge of Dream http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W9DCEaYtQk

Arvo Pärt - Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e348n660zrA

Wolfgang Rihm - In-Schrift http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tg_EDa2TkA

Wojciech Kilar - Orawa http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGS3wt8l7-g

Turnage - Hidden Love Song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMPRdN-FqqE

Silvestrov - Silent Songs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=se0GW7ONThQ

Messiaen - Turangalîla-Symphonie http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=se0GW7ONThQ

Edit for Malcolm:

Did you listen to any of my links? If not, surely the Pärt, Kilar and Messiaen strike a chord you might be able to relate to?

People nowadays seem to expect instant gratification in many things. They will mostly "get" classical music if they are prepared to sit and listen - but that takes time and apparently people want to live life at a breakneck pace.