UPDATE, 11/18: Composer Institute participant Spencer Topel’s latest blog entry is up over at NewMusicBox. This time around, Spencer’s pondering just how far composers will travel to hear the music they’ve written, and how that ties into Americans’ sense of distance…

Over at ArtsJournal, composer/critic Greg Sandow is celebrating the Chicago Symphony’s announcement that Mason Bates and Anna Clyne (a Composer Institute alum!) will be the CSO’s composers in residence next season. And Greg’s excitement boils down to what he sees as a possible evolution of the flavor of living composer that major American orchestras choose to showcase. Notably, he sees Bates and Clyne as part of a new generation of young composers who mix genres, drop in pop references, and most importantly, write music that your average concertgoer will enjoy listening to…

“For years, the Big Five orchestras — New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Philly, Boston — featured modernist new music. Boulez, Matthias Pintscher, Birtwistle (a Cleveland favorite), Magnus Lindberg currently in New York, Carter and Babbitt currently in Boston. Along with a welcome dose of John Adams, but the emphasis was modernist. Or, in other words, on music that hardly anyone likes (whatever its virtues might be), music the normal audience can’t respond to, and which also has no base (for instance among artists in other fields, or younger people) outside the classical audience. It’s music like this, I think, which leads orchestras to conclude that new music doesn’t — no matter what many people might expect — attract a young audience.”

Now, this is a controversial paragraph, because fans of certain Modernist composers have never really been willing to acknowledge that Modernist music sounds like indecipherable noise to most listeners. (And to be fair, a lot of those who think Modernism was ill-conceived and hurt classical music badly also don’t do a very good job of separating that judgment from the clear reality that Carter, Birtwhistle, Boulez, et al are brilliant men who deserve respect.) But if you ask me, Milton Babbitt’s notorious screed, “Who Cares If You Listen?” (originally published in 1958,) tells us that Modernist music established itself as contemptuous of the audience at a very early stage, and I really don’t think that’s a debatable point.

So why is it that Modernist composers didn’t fall out of fashion with orchestras and the people who lead them the moment an alternative style of composition was available? Composers have been writing far more ear-friendly (and yet unquestionably serious) music for decades now, and yet music directors like James Levine in Boston (not picking on him in particular, he’s just the highest-profile example going at the moment) continue to insist on packing concert programs full of Carter and Wuorinen, despite audible dissatisfaction from the audience.

I’ve had any number of theories about Modernism’s death grip on orchestras over the years. I used to think it was a peculiarity of the Northeast’s overly academic personality. (That one dissolved when I started traveling more, and realized that geography didn’t seem as relevant as I’d suspected.)

Then I decided that it might have to do with a simple intellectual disconnect: if you’ve spent a lot of time studying Modernist music, as many musicians do in the course of learning to be musicians, it does start to make more sense to you, and it can be hard to remember that your average concertgoer did not spend four years listening to Babbitt and Stockhausen as preparation for attending your concert.

I still think that second theory has potential, as does the possibility that the musicians who continue to promote Modernism truly do believe that one day, we’ll all wake up and it’ll sound as normal to us as Stravinsky. (This is an absurd idea, and maybe someday I’ll go into the many, many reasons why.)

I’m all for challenging audiences, and I’m not for a moment suggesting that we should just give up on “serious” new music and start considering John Williams and Mark O’Connor to be the new Copland and Dvorak. But I’m with Sandow on the undeniably positive nature of an orchestra with Chicago’s pedigree embracing a generation of composers who, frankly, have been getting way too little respect from the orchestral establishment and the press that covers it.