The 20th century produced quite a few composers whose music is well worth listening to - Martinu, Barber, John La Montaine (who is till with us), Lou Harrison. Bartok's string quartets can be difficult at first, but are worth becoming familiar with. The same is true of Ives's "Concord" Sonata. There is an analogy with non-representational painting, actually - which is easy to do, but very hard to do well. Most non-representational painting is crap. So is most free verse. And for sure lots of modern and contemporary music is. Schoenberg has never done it for me. Webern I find to be an interesting oddity. Boulez was never as far out as he pretended to be - and actually isn't very good (he's not that great a conductor, either). On the other hand, I was listening to Wallingford Riegger's third symphony this morning and I think it's pretty good. The real problem with contemporary classical music is that too many composers can't some up with a theme and on the rare occasion when do haven;t a clue as to what to do with it. So you end up with orchestration and nothing more - sound effects, in other words. It's Rimsky-Korsakov without the talent (Rimsky was a distinctly second-rate composer who sometimes manages to disguise that with brilliant orchestral color; his student Stravinsky had the same problem - and solution. Of course, when Thomas Beecham conducts Rimsky this doesn't always seem the case.) Queenan, by the way, might want to listen to Ned Rorem's three symphonies. So might you.
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