The Contemporary Problem

Extract

David Simmons, introducing a recent concert of advanced works at the Purcell Room, has tried a frontal attack on the problem of contemporary music; but the trouble is that the attack, meant as a piece of propaganda, is a shade more problematic than the problem. There's hardly a sentence in the piece that I can swallow whole—and as for the virginal listener, he may have found the difficult music easier than the words that were intended to ease the way. Are we not, in fact, talking too much, all of us? You may ask, what's too much? Well, everything that is not submitted as demonstrable truth. I don't mean the whole truth, of course; what I do mean is nothing but the truth. At this problematic stage in musical history, it's cumbersome enough to have to take a lot of musical gas on the off-chance that it mightn't be gas; but to have to take gas about gas in the hope that you will be able to read sense into one or both of them is a bit of a task—and a task is something which culture, natural culture, shouldn't be.