I.

In John Adams's autobiography Hallelujah Junction, the composer discusses at great length the enormous influence that Sibelius had on him throughout his life. He later juxtaposes this with an article written by the composer, conductor and theoretician René Leibowitz, entitled ‘Sibelius: The Worst Composer in the World’. Adams takes issue with Leibowitz's assessment and pronounces that history has revealed Leibowitz and his ilk to be ‘little more than gnats swirling around the visage of a noble beast’.Footnote ¹

If one briefly ignores the affected folksy vocabulary characteristic of the New England transplant, what is presented here is a remarkably lucid depiction of the canon-hegemonic foundation myth of music history: the story of the edifice and the flies. According to this myth, the vast majority of music is bad and the vast majority of people producing it are talentless, with the apotheotic exception of a few great men (and now, after much struggle, a couple of women too) who have somehow harnessed the inexpressible power and nobility of this most abstract of arts to craft timeless masterpieces, the mere existence of which is a universal testament to the transcendental importance of music. This is the edifice, which endures. The rest are the flies, which die after a season. There is an uneasy truce between the two; most often both continue to eke out their aesthetic existence with little or no correspondence. However, this is not always the case: occasionally one of the flies, through either aspiration or open contempt, will peregrinate too close to the edifice. This greatly irritates those canonised or seeking canonisation, and the offending fly is swatted down.

This is a continual process: the edifice assimilates new members into its hegemony and new flies are born. Shortly after dispatching Leibowitz, Adams goes on to dismiss a new cadre of ‘young composers’ who

It is clear, especially within the context of autobiography, that Adams's criticism is self-defensive; by positioning himself as the benevolent but strict arbiter of musical quality, he separates his music and, more importantly, himself from younger musicians who, were they not so dull, frivolous and above all anonymous, would have every right to lay claim to the canonic legitimacy over which Adams presides. Certainly Adams himself is aware of his obligation to find worthy heirs to the canonic edifice, a task he takes disturbingly literally by praising his son Sam as the model musician of the younger generation.

Leibowitz makes no mention of any son.

II.

I am not writing this to suggest that Leibowitz is a better composer than Sibelius or Adams. What I am arguing is that Leibowitz may well be more important – and certainly more significant – than both of them, precisely because he neglected the hegemony of greatness. It is significant that Adams and his music make the same claims to greatness as Sibelius and – perhaps more tellingly – Boulez. Indeed, Boulez is treated elsewhere as a genuine existential threat to the passion and wholesomeness of Adams's aesthetic, precisely because this artistic greatness is a zero-sum game: Boulez and Adams can't both be right. Thus Adams, digging in his spurs and adjusting his tortoiseshell glasses, mutters through clenched teeth that modern music is not big enough for the two of them. Meanwhile Leibowitz is a nobody, a mediocrity, an irritant, a fly buzzing around the heads of great men while they grapple for immortal artistic supremacy.

Leibowitz is relegated to this position not simply because he has denigrated Sibelius, but because he has refused to put forward another great Name to take Sibelius's place. The argument is not that Sibelius is a poor composer whilst another, stylistically opposite composer is great, it is that greatness itself is ridiculous. Adams has singled Leibowitz out for excoriation not because he has taken on Sibelius, but because he has taken on greatness.

Indeed, the refusal to posit a positive alternative is what separates Leibowitz's article from other critical evaluations of Sibelius. Take Adorno's assessment, found in his review of the book Sibelius: A Close-Up (London: Faber & Faber, 1937): ‘If Sibelius is good, then all criteria of musical excellence valid from Bach to Schoenberg, such as complexity, articulation, unity in diversity, multiplicity in oneness, are frail’.Footnote ³ Adorno is unmistakably defending the edifice; it is a different part of the canon, but it is still the same canon. Leibowitz's rejection of the zero-sum canonical game is rendered explicit in a later interview:

Crucially, Leibowitz's position here not only separates him from Adorno as a critic, but from Adams and Boulez as a practitioner. As a conductor and concert organiser, Boulez's construction of a twentieth-century canon, his championing of a (relatively) small body of works – Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Debussy and himself most prominently – to the exception of nearly all else, is by now very well known. It is less well known that Adams the conductor has done the same, even backing out of a conducting engagement with a Stockhausen piece (the Los Angeles Philharmonic performance of Tierkreis scheduled on 10 April 2012). The ideological defence of the canon is the theoretical aspect of aesthetic hegemony, the cultivation and maintenance of repertoire is its practice.

III.

It is probably unfortunate that I have settled on Leibowitz as my revolutionary standard-bearer. There are certainly composers denied from the canonical edifice who are more compelling, more discriminated against, more progressive. But I have chosen Leibowitz because this apparent (although certainly not actual; see, for example, pages 116–131 of Mark Carroll's Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe) mundanity makes him the ideal neutral template for the revolutionary composer, the composer who axiomatically denies the pursuit of a singular Greatness in favour of plural greatnesses.

To demonstrate more thoroughly what is at stake, and to draw connections to current debates in New Music, I will briefly use another example of a musician who was marginalised in the name of canonic greatness: Julius Eastman. The violence innate in aesthetic hegemony, the maintenance of the edifice at the expense of the flies, is brutally obvious with Eastman, who spent the final decade of his life homeless and almost totally ignored; an obituary was not published until eight months after his death (by Kyle Gann in the Village Voice).Footnote ⁵

Eastman's rejection of hegemony was visceral, confrontational and absolute. In musical terms, he accomplished this in performances that teased out the fundamentally subversive dimensions of otherwise boilerplate avant-garde opuses, most famously in a 1975 performance of Cage's Songbooks, and through a compositional and notational practice that eschewed artifice for an almost self-consciously crude presentation of extremely reduced and repetitive material (his scores can be found here: www.mjleach.com/EastmanScores.htm). Extra-musically, such rejection was bluntly conveyed in the titling of Eastman's pieces: while a curator may safely absolve themselves of the title XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!! with an ironic smile, a work called Crazy Nigger presents intractable difficulties.

It is precisely these difficulties, the facets of non-canonical music that push it beyond purported mediocrity into open contempt, that present a radical challenge to the cultural, economic and institutional hierarchies of art. The two criteria of mediocrity and contempt are the vectors of a double articulation deployed in maintenance of the canon. This double articulation, performed by composers, practitioners and theorists defensive of the edifice and wary of the flies, transforms the subversive content of noncanonical music – its contempt – into a bland exhibition of talentless exercises – mediocrity. Explosively controversial music is either assimilated into the aesthetic hegemony of the canon or dismissed as lazy mediocrity – it cannot be allowed to continuously subvert the fundamental and universal truth of enduring aesthetic greatness.

IV.

A well-publicised survey by the Italian classical music magazine Classic Voice recently arrived at the conclusion that New York City-based Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas is the greatest living composer.Footnote ⁶ By this point the attentive reader need not be told that such a pronouncement is simply the latest iteration of assimilating new figures to the edifice of great music. But what will such a distinction accomplish? The answer is depressing: it will motivate scholars to write more articles about an already well parsed oeuvre, it will serve as rough-and-ready PR material for major ensembles who have worked with Haas, and validation for lesser ensembles who have performed his music; in short, it will maintain the closed feedback circuit of new music.

This is an unacceptable state of affairs for an art form already fundamentally untethered from cultural life with delusions of autonomy – delusions only exacerbated now that a democratically elected leader whom both the popular and avant-garde artistic communities collectively and publicly despise is now the most powerful political entity on the planet (a telling headline from 7 February: ‘Why John Adams Won't Write an Opera About President Trump’Footnote ⁷ ). But despite such purported autonomy, which sanctions the luxury of protesting something by not writing an opera about it, it is immediately obvious that the aesthetic hierarchy being reinforced here is indelibly linked to a sociocultural one. Classic Voice looks beyond Haas towards lesser composers, those only recently added to the edifice (translation mine): ‘The old “contemporanea” fades slowly but surely. There emerges a new generation: playful, joyful, humorous, multimedia-savvy, “youthful”, populated by women (who says composing is a masculine profession?)’.

Here the machinery of the culture industry – albeit in the hobbled incarnation of new music journalism – is assimilating a series of would-be threats into a familiar yet quirky (it's got ladies!!!!) hegemony. These are the novel flavours that make the classics even more reassuring and refreshing, the New Coke of the avant-garde. Accordingly, the criteria for canonisation have been slightly amended for the younger generation: now great music can be playful, quirky, fun, even female. But make no mistake: such music still must be Great, it existence must be predicated on a fundamentally exclusionary ethos. The zany and cute aesthetic present in recent concert music making emancipatory claims towards musical practice can easily be, and frequently is, co-opted into the same hegemonic canon of great works: a threadbare romantic conception of art reclothed in emojis, neon wigs and Windows 95 screensavers. Quirk is not openness, fun is not inclusion, eccentricity is not diversity: these trends simply reinforce the self-imposed autonomy-in-exile of new music. This communal absence of self-awareness is why new music newsletters can simultaneously bemoan the whiteness of the scene and publish a monthly geomancy column.

Of course the young composers and/or women momentarily lauded by Classic Voice will fall from the hit parade, back into the swarm of flies, if they do not adopt the title and style of the old guard. Through no fault of their own, Helmut Lachenmann now writes song cycles, George Lewis string quartets, and Nicolaus A. Huber dutifully fulfils orchestral commissions – they must distinguish themselves as the edifice and not the flies. Unlike Haas, these three successful composers were once demonstrably subversive and marginal (and are still very good at what they do), but, like him, their current output primarily exists to maintain their prestige and the hegemony of the canon, a hegemony all the more inviolable for having assimilated such potential threats.

V.

As I mentioned in the introduction, these arguments are not fundamentally new: they are the result of decades of musicological inquiries and criticism. But while this criticism has destroyed the legitimacy of the canon, the canon itself has been left intact. The result is aphasia: virtually no one born after 1980 really believes in the absolute of Great music, yet the only way to sustain a viable career (read: survive) is to immerse oneself in this debunked tradition as practitioner or arbiter-guardian. The identity crisis felt in the younger generations of New Music (which, to be fair, might not the most pressing crisis of art at the moment) arises from this perpetual falsification, as does the desperate backslide into nominalism (an unusually forthright attempt to grapple with this exact aphasia can be heard in Patrick Frank's 2010 piece Das Meisterwerk).

A broad structural rejection of the homogenising process of new music seems unlikely only because the dominant narrative of creative work is one of perpetually greater claim-staking over perpetually smaller resources. But if Haas may indeed fully enjoy his prestige, surely the reality for other established composers is far less compelling. The maintenance of a traditionally conceived greatness, besides being exhausting, reveals a striking discrepancy between the declared wish for a more inclusive and diverse community and the actual forces that maintain the existence of that community.

If the calls for openness and inclusiveness currently being launched within the international New Music community are to have any lasting effect beyond a momentary rebranding effort, the entire protracted professional machinery devoted to maintaining the hegemony of canonic greatness must be neglected – not dismantled, simply neglected. Although Ashley Fure's initial research had some factual issues (it identifies René Wohlhauser as a woman; he's not), her continuing initiative to expose historically marginalised composers to broader academic notice and inquiry is one positive manifestation of this objective. If continued, such efforts will reveal the canon to be a beginning, not an end point, of musical trajectories, and future generations of composers will no longer be forced to decide between absolute mediocrity and absolute greatness. But if the result is that a couple of marginalised composers are reincorporated into the edifice while the rest are thrust again into obscurity, the exercise will have been pointless: the potential in this research is not an addition to the canon, but a deliberate and critical neglect of it.

This is why Leibowitz called Sibelius the worst composer in the world, and why I now do the same with Haas, even though it is obvious that neither composer, nor anyone else, qualifies for such a title. By making such a judgment, such a negativist proclamation of absolute quality, the entire canonic-regulatory process is undermined (Lydia Goehr refers to this as ‘neutralization’). If it is ridiculous to call Haas the worst composer in the world, it is equally ridiculous to praise him as the greatest. This is not a parody; it is simply a reversal. Classic Voice has assembled an international team of experts to deliver a verdict no less absurd than Leibowitz's and mine. If these are the fragile assumptions of quality that underlie the entire production and reproduction processes of Western art music, the tradition is in far greater danger than even its greatest devotees are aware of.

This call for contempt and neglect is more than a victimised faux-punk-rock cry of ‘sell-out!’ at beleaguered professional musicians. This is a rejection of the concept that there is anything to sell at all. For as it stands, any composer aspiring to greatness must spend the entirety of their professional lives clutching at straws and swatting at flies.