How charmingly ironic, then, to end the 20th century in a wave of nostalgia for that very music. Schoenberg's Moses und Aron , at last trotted out by the Met as though they'd just discovered the 20th century, is reviewed sentimentally by critics who tout Schoenberg the way the Republican House Managers touted the Rule of Law - aware that the public isn't really behind them, but determined to act proud of their lonely principles. Boulez is named composer's chair at Carnegie Hall, extending his influence in a city and time ultimately as foreign to him as he is irrelevant to it. David Schiff and Paul Griffiths in the Times lament that composers no longer write incomprehensibly complex music. I was drafted to a panel on modernism recently in Los Angeles, where the aficionados got caught up talking about 1950s Darmstadt and couldn't get off the subject even after audience members begged them to.
Serialist music is fun for experts to talk about, partly because it makes no sense.
There was no discernible point in writing a dry, unrewarding, unmemorable piece like Boulez's Le Marteau san maitre , and that's exactly what's fascinating about it. As a cause it never achieved the big public triumph it sought for decades, and so still seems unfulfilled. It never had the opportunity to become so ubiquitously popular that it overplayed its hand, fell into complacent excess, and made even its advocates finally glad to see it depart. Might as well expect the Irish to just drop their interest in independence from British rule without achieving it as expect musicians who spent their lives fighting for the cause of 20th century music to move on to something else. And so, just at the moment when one would expect all kinds of hype about the new music of the 21st century, we get - nothing.