I think there is a ton of modern classical music (MCM) that listeners would enjoy if they had a way to more cheaply discover it.

Why can’t people cheaply discover MCM they like, and what can be done about it? Below are some guesses.

 

Obstacle 1: There are almost no full-time critics of classical/MCM music.

According to this post, there may be about a dozen full-time critics of classical/MCM music in the USA. ¹ This is probably more a symptom of the difficulty of exploring MCM than a cause, but it helps perpetuate the problem. The best solution to this is probably to increase demand for MCM critics by fixing the problems below (and perhaps others I’ve missed).

Obstacle 2: MCM critics do not rate works/albums or give them genre labels.

This one really bugs me. Honestly, how is someone with limited time supposed to navigate the world of MCM if nobody will tell them which works and albums are the best ones, and roughly what they sound like? Sure, this information is sometimes (but not always!) buried somewhere in reviews of new works or albums, but it needs to be at the top of the review, right under the artist and work/album title. Yeah, yeah, musical quality can’t be reduced to a single number and a list of genre tags, blah blah blah GET OVER IT and BE MORE HELPFUL.

Obstacle 3: Because of obstacle #2, there’s no way to aggregate expert opinion on MCM works.

Rock/pop fans have Metacritic, AOTY, etc. This is impossible for MCM because MCM critics do not rate albums.

Obstacle 4: MCM critics don’t even make lists.

Even if critics didn’t rate every album they reviewed, they could at least make year-end “best of” lists and genre-specific “best of” lists. But MCM critics almost never do this. Seriously, how is anyone with limited time supposed to navigate MCM without listicles?

Obstacle 5: Many MCM works aren’t recorded for years after their debut.

Suppose you read a review of a new rock/pop album, and you want to hear it. What do you do? You stream it on Spotify or buy it on iTunes.

But suppose you read a review of a new MCM work, and you want to hear it. What do you do? The answer is probably “buy a plane ticket to another city on a specific date and pay $80 to hear it once in a concert hall, otherwise wait 1-15 years for the work to be recorded and released and hope you remember to listen to it then.” To someone used to the rock/pop world, this is utter madness.

To become more consumable by a mass-ish market, MCM works need to be recorded and released first, and performed for the public later, after people have had a chance to stream/buy it and decide whether they want to endure the cost and inconvenience of seeing it live.

Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about the MCM business to know how to fix this.

 

Not on this list

Conspicuously missing from my list of obstacles is “most MCM composers write unlistenable random noise.” They do, of course, but I don’t see that as a problem.

“Unlistenable random noise” is hyperbole, I know, except for some pieces like John Cage’s HPSCHD. What I mean is that most MCM composers tend to write music that sounds to most people like “unlistenable random noise.” As Joe Queenan put it,

During a radio interview between acts at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, a famous singer recently said she could not understand why audiences were so reluctant to listen to new music, given that they were more than ready to attend sporting events whose outcome was uncertain. It was a daft analogy… when Spain plays Germany, everyone knows that the game will be played with one ball, not eight; and that the final score will be 1-0 or 3-2 or even 8-1 – but definitely not 1,600,758 to Arf-Arf the Chalet Ate My Banana. The public may not know in advance what the score will be, but it at least understands the rules of the game.

… It is not the composers’ fault that they wrote uncompromising music… but it is not my fault that I would rather listen to Bach.

If the obstacles listed above were fixed (plus some I probably missed), then MCM would be in the same place rock/pop music is: composers can write whatever they want, including unlistenable random noise, and some of it will find a big audience, most of it won’t, and that’s fine. ²

Footnotes:

1. If you click the red markers on the map, you’ll see that many of them point to people who are not remotely full-time critics of classical/MCM. Probably there are more full-time critics in Europe, but still not that many.[↩]
2. Though I’m not sure governments should be subsidizing the work, any more than they should be subsidizing avant-garde death metal or free jazz, some of which is also really great and also “unlistenable random noise.”[↩]