20 - Tonal traditions in art music since 1960

Summary

If the history of American music in the twentieth century can be said to have imparted at least one clear lesson, it is that tonality has proved to be a far more durable and resilient force than many, at least among the more progressively minded, would ever have predicted at the century’s beginning. Indeed, although there is still an identifiable musical avant garde, and although prominent figures in modernism’s second (post-World War II) wave, such as Milton Babbitt and Elliott Carter, are still making their voices heard, it is tonality in all its many varieties that seems poised to set the tone, as it were, for the concert music of ad 2000 and beyond. Among those performers and audiences with at least some interest in recently composed music, it is tonal music especially during the last two decades that has garnered the lion’s share of attention. Elderly composers who grew up neoclassical and never wavered; middle-aged composers who started off as atonalists or dodecaphonists only to repent later on; and younger composers for whom a nontonal idiom was never really a viable or seriously considered option – all are enjoying exposure in performances and recordings as never before.

Why has this happened? And why now? For all its history as a melting pot, open to new influences of every sort, America has, paradoxically, always had a deeply conservative streak. And this conservatism is nowhere more evident than in its attitude toward the arts. As has often been pointed out, the Þrst Caucasian arrivals in the territories that eventually became the United States, as well as the many succeeding waves of immigrants over the next several centuries, brought what “culture” they had from their former, European homelands.