An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 22 | CLOSING THE GAP: CLASSICAL MUSIC IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 551

operas in full stagings. He has also brought on to the orchestra’s

staff as artist-in-residence the baritone Thomas Hampson, whose

Hampsong Foundation promotes art song in America.

Also in 2007, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra took

the remarkable step of appointing as its music director the

twenty-six-year-old conductor of a Venezuelan youth orchestra,

Gustavo Dudamel. The Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra is the fl ag-

ship ensemble of El Sistema, the government-fi nanced program

that has brought music education to some 250,000 impoverished

Venezuelan children, in the process adding a surprisingly high

number of gifted musicians to the world of classical music.

Dudamel, a product of El Sistema, is a champion of music as

an agent for social change, and his presence in Los Angeles

bodes well for the success of efforts to establish in the United

States a music education program inspired by El Sistema.

CLASSICAL COMPOSITION SINCE 1990

Seven conditions divide the musical world of contemporary American compos-

ers from that of older composers:

1. European music of the 1700s and 1800s (Bach to Debussy) has lost much
   of its privileged position.


2. If Americans have a common musical culture, it comes from radio and
   television, mass media that play a smaller role in the lives of younger
   generations than of older generations.


3. Because so much music is now created digitally, musical notation is fad-
   ing in importance.


4. Few scores are published today, but recorded music is easy to distribute;
   therefore, new music is more likely than ever before to be judged by how
   it sounds.


5. Thanks to digital samples, the most elemental musical unit, which used
   to be the individual note, may now be a complex of sounds or a quotation.


6. Because exposure to popular music is almost universal, composers who
   hope to reach a live audience rarely write without referring to pop’s
   musical conventions.


7. Today’s audience for classical music, as for all kinds of music, has splin-
   tered into many different groups, each increasingly cut off from the
   others.

In general, younger classical composers are inclined to accept the world as

they fi nd it and to ground their work in conditions they encounter in everyday

life. Infl uence seems to be passing away from composers who see themselves

as champions of quality in an age of quantity. Traditional barriers of national-

ity, culture, and economics are disappearing, and the supply of music grows

increasingly out of proportion to the demand. An almost limitless capacity

exists to gather, record, reshape, and circulate musical sound. In a culture of

such abundance, the idea of composing as a private activity, walled off within

K Venezuelan conductor

Gustavo Dudamel brings

his high-energy style to the

podium of the Los Angeles

Philharmonic Orchestra.

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