496 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II
academic composers from experimentalists working outside educational insti-
tutions. Of the former group, the epitome was Milton Babbitt, who in the 1950s
had made the case for university-based composers to dedicate themselves to
research that might expand the language of music, in the manner of research
scientists and mathematicians. From Babbitt’s point of view, appealing to a gen-
eral audience ought to be no more necessary for a composer than for a physicist.
Of those outside academia, the minimalists in particular sought to explore
new musical ideas while communicating with a broader slice of the musical
audience. Minimalism, especially the music of Philip Glass, marks the start of a
larger historical trend toward the reuniting of popular and classical spheres that
continues to the present day. That movement within music can be seen as part of
the larger cultural phenomenon of postmodernism.POSTMODERNISM IN THE ACADEMY
Within the academy before 1980, writing music with popular appeal was often
regarded as retrogressive. Although the hegemony of Babbitt-style serialism was
less pervasive than the stories of some veterans of those years may suggest, aca-
demic composers in the 1960s and 1970s generally avoided traditional tonality,
writing music that either was atonal or used tonality in unconventional ways,
as in the music of George Crumb or Ben Johnston. University composers who
embraced the New Romanticism most fully, such as George Rochberg, often
found themselves ostracized by their professional colleagues.
Many of those colleagues subscribed to the idea that music was historically
“progressing” toward ever more complex means of expression. That modernist
notion fostered a diffi cult relationship with music of the past: composers could
admire and love the music of past masters but shied away from emulating it for fear
of being imitators. Moreover, some modernists tended toward a high-mindedness
that discouraged reference to popular styles for fear of eclecticism, a bugbear of
late modernist aesthetics. These attitudes could result in new music whose com-
plexity exceeded the listening capacities of all but the most specialized audience.
In fact, however, many academic composers in the century’s latter years
grew more tolerant and pluralistic in outlook. As already noted, since the 1960s
a handful of composers, notably Crumb and Rochberg, had developed highly
personal musical languages that combined tonality and atonality, mixing earlier
classical styles with non-Western elements and cutting-edge contemporary idi-
oms. Following their example, composers during the last third of the twentieth
century grew more open to stylistic admixtures.
One composer who has successfully bridged the gap between academia and
popular styles is William Bolcom, long on the faculty at the University of Michigan.
Trained in serialism, Bolcom began his career writing avant-garde concert
works. On the side, however, he participated in the revival of interest in Scott
Joplin, wrote a few Joplin-inspired rags of his own, most notably Graceful Ghost
(1970), and launched a separate career as accompanist for his wife, singer Joan
Morris, devoted especially to English-language popular songs of all eras. Begin-
ning in the 1980s, he combined the various strains of his compositional life in a
series of eclectic compositions drawing on a wide range of cultivated and ver-
nacular idioms. His Violin Concerto in D Major (1984) requires a soloist with aWilliam Bolcom172028_20_495-513_r3_sd.indd 496 23/01/13 11:14 AM