Why is it that I detest so much popular music? What is it about “classical” or “contemporary classical” that attracts me?

The way they write is thoroughly off-putting, but Marcuse, Attali and Adorno make, between them, an excellent point. Music is not supposed to remain static. Where once the main focus of composers was to develop new melodies and harmonies, this has shifted to developing new ideas or forms – the scale of musical change has become much wider. If revolutionary music does not exactly cause, or even foreshadow great societal revolutions, it does at least parallel them. From the beginning of the 20th Century, composers have been an important part of the quest for autonomy, stirring up autocratic societies when given half a chance, or struggling meekly to subvert them when not allowed that chance. Think of Shostakovich, living in constant fear of musical and physical incarceration, writing his detestation of Stalin into the very music that was used as Soviet propaganda.

Popular music deeply disturbs me. If society were to parallel THIS version of musical events, then we would still be living in wooden shacks, working twenty hour days to supply the local nobility with wheat. This is what the promoters of popular music want. They want to be the feudal landlords, living off the backs of the peasants. THIS is why they push their product at us. They want to destroy the movements of musical revolution, and the moment that they succeed will be the moment that Western society ceases to grow, and the moment that humans abandon the idea of independent thought.

Contemporary composers – good ones – always make their audiences think. What is the significance of a chord? How will a tone row be executed? Subtexts can be heavily disguised or non-existent, but they are never obvious. Often a piece cannot be understood without intense concentration and a knowledge of the subject or composer.

I don’t exclusively listen to contemporary classical, but I do do my best to listen to music that is REVOLUTIONARY, either today or at the time it was written. Music that has to be thought through. Sometimes music that might be obvious today, but was completely unexpected at the time of its writing.

Otto Berwald is today probably the best known Swedish composer of his era – not that this necessarily says a lot. He worked at the start of the Romantic, but was never a professional composer – the public in general detested what work he was able to have performed. At almost the same time that Beethoven was embedding the symphonic form into the popular consciousness, Berwald ripped it apart. Four-movement form was certainly not a priority, and where Berwald used it, he did not hesitate to disrupt its ‘proper’ construction. His harmonies foreshadow Nielsen. His colours, Debussy. Berwald was an innovator, an intellectual, a revolutionary. Because he did not have to rely on his music to make ends meet, he could write whatever he pleased, with no constraints bar the skills of his musicians. He was FREE. And that is what makes good music.