One of the signs of the sickness besetting modern culture is the apparent loss of the grand tradition of great Western music composition. Where today can we find composers of the caliber of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, or Wagner? Where today can we find operatic composers comparable to Verdi or Puccini?
Much of the responsibility for this break with tradition is an academic culture that has systematically and ideologically abandoned our great compositional heritage in favor of atonal modernism and is most often opposed to harmonious beauty. Few like or appreciate post-tonal music except the academics themselves. And yet all is not lost. There are still contemporary composers who embrace the grand tradition, one of whom is the American composer Michael Kurek.
Michael Kurek’s music is receiving increasing acclaim for its lush, neotraditional, melodic, narrative style, which many have likened to the works of the greatest early 20th-century symphonists. It has been performed by orchestras and chamber groups throughout the United States and in many other countries, across five continents. He has received the prestigious Academy Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which is the Academy’s top lifetime achievement award. His 2017 album, “The Sea Knows,” reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Traditional Classical Music chart, and he has served on the Classical Nominations Committee for the Grammy Awards. His book, “The Sound of Beauty,” was published in September 2019. He is a professor of composition emeritus at Vanderbilt University, where he chaired the department of composition for 14 years.
In this exclusive interview with The Epoch Times, Dr. Kurek discusses with Joseph Pearce the challenges facing tradition-oriented music in an age of modernist iconoclasm.
Several years ago, this curriculum was changed. Now the students begin with a first course called “Music as Global Culture,” teaching them all sorts of non-Western musical traditions designed to disabuse them of any Eurocentric biases they may have, or perhaps to inoculate them against any they might be tempted to acquire when they hear Western masterworks the next term.
Then they have just one semester, not five, to cover all of Western music history! Naturally, many things must be left out or given perhaps only a few minutes of class time. The students get to choose the next two music history courses, each with a heavy dose of sociology, such as “God, Sex, and Politics in Early Music” or “Music and the Construction of National Identity.” Finally, they take a whole course on modernism and postmodernism (as opposed to just the one course covering the previous six centuries). Other agenda-driven electives are available: “Music, Identity, and Diversity,” “Music, Gender, and Sexuality,” “Women in Music,” “Women and Rock Music,” “Artist, Community, and Democracy” (described as “minority viewpoints and cultural pluralism in a democratic society”), and “Hip-Hop, Punk, and the Democratization of America’s Pop.”
Many of the performance faculty had voted against these curricular changes because they are trying to train students to actually play the canon of Western music in a symphony orchestra, as a profession. As for the students, many have privately told me that they feel shortchanged on content and feel as though they are the subjects of some kind of ideological indoctrination.
I was fortunate to gain tenure before my compositional style was yet as traditional as it later became, but I still had to have twice as many accomplishments as normally needed to gain it. With those accomplishments, tenure could not easily be denied without a clear violation of my academic freedom to compose in any style I want. So, they were stuck with me.
A member of the board of directors of a major opera company wrote me last year of his frustration with this system in regard to modern operas: “three hours of ugliness and atonal singing without a single tune,” and he mentioned that ticket sales for those operas are often as much as 70 percent lower than ticket sales for the traditional operas in their season. Although this is costly to the brink of ruin, they keep performing them to avoid being called a “museum.” Opera companies are caught in a vicious cycle—or, as he put it, “they seem to have a death wish.”
If the vast majority of truly classical music sales are of mainstream classical music, for example, Beethoven, Brahms, Bach, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner, then for modernist classical music of the 20th century to the present, we are probably talking about a veritable hairline on the pie chart of all music sales. I do know that the average sales for modernist music CDs, not counting copies bought by the composer, performers, and their friends and family, is under 50 copies.
Composers whose music demonstrates traditional craft need to be commissioned with artist grants to fund and promote recordings of their work. How else can the public realize that the train is back on its track? For example, I am about to make a recording of my new symphony with a university student orchestra because I cannot afford to hire a professional orchestra to record it. Both the London Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra had agreed with my recording company to record the symphony, but no funding could be found to pay their musicians’ recording fee! This is not meant as a crass fundraising appeal, but it is the most concise, real-world illustration I can think of. How much more influence and impact could the album have using the London Symphony Orchestra?
