Modern music: it means different things to different people. You could say it’s pop, rock, Indy, dance, film scores, contemporary classical music, and so on. I recently went to a concert by the Halle orchestra, conducted by the composer Oliver Knussen. The program included two of his works, for large orchestra. We often associate contemporary classical music with noisy, dissonant and incomprehensible experimental compositions. But I was very pleasantly surprised about how much sense and relevance Knussen’s music performed that evening (3rd February at Bridgwater hall) had to the way we hear and absorb music these days, and the expression of the musical ideas felt harmonious even if not strictly on any particular key or tonality.
Knussen’s music in parts reminded me of Debussy at his most expressionistic. Debussy is accepted to be the first to go into uncharted musical territory at the turn of the 19/20th Century, with his work “Preludes a l’apres-midi d’un faun” or prelude to a faun’s afternoon. From the first sultry notes on the flute in that work, the listener is taken to a warm mysteriously enchanting afternoon in which the music creates an atmosphere and nature’s colours without ever really breaking into a long melody. The music is an expression, a tool, to paint the composers vision though our ears and into the mind’s eye. It was the launch (perhaps unintended) of the modern movement because up until then, music was always more or less grounded in harmonic keys and had some sort of architecture which had endured from the time of Mozart and Haydn through Beethoven, Brahms, stretched by Wagner and Mahler, and many other composers from late 18th to late 19th century. With his foray, Debussy encouraged many other even more radical departures, sometimes incomprehensible to the casual listener. The shocking yet exhilarating Rite of Spring by Stravinsky, the totally new composition rules of Schoenberg, or the protest of John Cage like his 4’33” of silence. If that is not modern expressionism, I don’t know what is!
So .. Where does the eternal young genius Mozart fit into my little essay. Apart from the fact that together with Stravinsky and Prokofiev, he is one of my top 3 favourite classical music composers, Mozart truly was the father of music that even today, over 200 years after his death, has full relevance despite it’s emergence in a time of Enlightenment gone by, surviving and enduring even through ideals of the romantic movement, the prejudices of victorian age, modernism, expressionism, to contemporary relevance. An easy example of Mozart’s relevance is the regularity with which his music is used in films throughout 20th and 21st century to date. Do you remember Trading Places with Dan Akroyd and Eddie Murphy? It blasts onto the screen with the entirety of the overture from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro opera. Then the film Amadeus of course. Or how about X-Men2 when the blue changeling mutant attacks the president’s office, to the dramatic chorus from a section of Mozart’s Requiem, or more recently, sections of his sublime Clarinet concerto being used in the King’s Speech. How about the ringtones on mobiles, and more seriously the undying enthusiasm for his music and the fact that he was and still is the composers’ composer as well as the people’s composer.
The test is, you listen to Handel or Bach, from a few decades before Mozart, on a film or advert, they give sense of grandeur within the ancient or the remote historic setting. Don’t get me wrong Bach was a genius too, but relevance to our everyday contemporary ears is more remote, when compared to Mozart. The familiarity with which we take in Mozart as if music by an old friend, means that truly he was at the gates of modern western musical development, the pivot, and he is the timeless master in tune with humanity.
