Five classical music controversies

Clemency Burton-Hill
Music Classical music
Classical music has a genteel reputation
but controversies and scandals abound.
Clemency Burton-Hill selects some of the fiercest rows.
Related
When Christmas carols were banned
It feels almost like murder is how the 21-year-old composer Jonas Tarm described t
he recent cancellation of a performance by the New York Youth Symphony at Carneg
ie Hall of his award-winning piece March to Oblivion. Describing his piece as dev
oted to the victims who have suffered from cruelty and hatred of war, totalitari
anism, polarising nationalism in the past and today, the winner of the prestigiou
s First Music competition had quoted musically from both Ukraine s Soviet-era anth
em and the Horst Wessel Lied, the official song of the Nazi party. Tarm did not
make it clear that he was doing so or why
in his programme notes.
In a lengthy public statement, the Youth Symphony s executive director declared th
at given the lack of transparency and lack of parental consent to engage with thi
s music we could not continue to feature his work on the program . Tarm vigorously
defended the right of music to speak for itself and described the move by NYYS as
an act of censorship. (It is, by the way, still illegal to play the Horst Wesse
l Song in Germany.)
The question of whether music, a collection of sonic vibrations, can mean anything
and if so, how we should respond to that meaning
is an old and vexed one, which
we are still no closer to answering. Classical music may have the reputation of
being a refined and rather genteel genre, but controversies and scandals abound
in its history consider the ongoing provocations of Wagner, or Stravinsky, whos
e Rite of Spring sparked the most legendary riot in musical history. Here are so
me other classical works that have caused a hullabaloo whether for political, te
xtual or aesthetic reasons over the past few centuries.
St John Passion by JS Bach (1724)
We don t exactly think of the father of classical music as a scandalmonger althoug
h, as John Eliot Gardiner s outstanding 2014 biography proves, nor should we think
of him as a saint simply because he wrote such sublime music. But Bach s ravishin
g setting of the Gospel of St John, a cornerstone of the classical canon, leaves
a bitter taste in the mouth for some. In 1995, a student protest broke out at S
warthmore College in Philadelphia, after members of the choir refused to sing wh
at they considered anti-Semitic words. (The gospel in question refers to the ene
mies of Jesus as the Jews, the Jews, the Jews ; the word is repeated 70 times throu
ghout the 110-minute work. In 2000, the 250th anniversary of the composer s death,
there were public demonstrations against a performance of the Passion at the Or
egon Bach Festival, with one rabbi picketing the event and another resigning fro
m a festival planning committee. Critics have weighed into the debate: Michael M
arissen s study Lutheranism, Anti-Judaism, and Bach's St John Passion expertly pro
bes Bach s handling of the challenging gospel text. Most commentators, however, refl
ect the esteemed Bach scholar Robert L Marshall s view that the St John Passion giv
es voice to some of the loftiest sentiments of the human spirit [and] neither th
at supreme masterpiece nor its incomparable maker needs any apology.
Symphony No 3:

Eroica , formerly known as Bonaparte

by Ludvig van Beethoven (1804)

The story behind the dedication of Beethoven s third symphony is the stuff of musi
cal legend. As BBC broadcaster Tom Service writes: Imagine if events hadn t interve
ned, and Beethoven had stuck to his original plan, and his third symphony had be
en called the Bonaparte . Imagine the reams of interpretation and analysis that wou
ld have gone into aligning the piece with the Napoleonic project, its humanist i
deals and its all-too-human historical realisation.
Napoleonic certainly describes the scale on which Beethoven conceived the work
he
even sketched out a programme of Bonaparte s life within the symphony s movements
un
til the moment in 1804 when he was informed that Napoleon had styled himself Emp
eror. The original dedication to Bonaparte was defaced: Beethoven announced that
Napoleon was a tyrant , who will think himself superior to all men , and re-named the
symphony the Eroica .
The symphony was also controversial musically, causing Beethoven s great admirer H
ector Berlioz to exclaim at one point if that was really what Beethoven wanted it
must be admitted that this whim is an absurdity!
Absurd or otherwise, the Eroica stands as one of the most important cultural mon
uments of all time.
Parade by Erik Satie (1917)
Sir and dear friend
you are not only an arse, but an arse without music. Such was
the verdict of Erik Satie on the critic Jean Poueigh, who had slated his music t
o Parade, a 15-minute ballet commissioned for Diaghilev s Ballet Russes, which als
o brought together the iconoclastic modernist imaginations of Jean Cocteau and P
ablo Picasso. Poueigh subsequently sued Satie in a bitter court case
and won. Ev
er the offbeat and eccentric composer, Satie s score utilised then-radical sound e
ffects such as a typewriter clacking, milk bottles clanging, gunshots, foghorns
and sirens. Avant garde? Certainly, but the audience at the Paris premiere on 18
May 1917 sided with Poueigh: they booed, hissed, and even threw oranges at the
orchestra.
4 33

by John Cage (1952)

Cage, who studied with Arnold Schoenberg, declared 4 33 was his most important
his critics declared it a very bad joke. The score of the three-movement piece i
nstructs performers not to play for the entire duration, in order to encourage t
he audience to engage with the ambient sounds of the concert hall. Cage, who was
hugely influenced by Zen Buddhism, had first broached the idea of composing an
entirely silent piece during a lecture at Vassar University in the late 1940s. H
e predicted, however, that such a piece would be "incomprehensible in the Wester
n context," and was apparently reluctant to write it down: "I didn't wish it to
appear, even to me, as something easy to do or as a joke, he said at the time.
anted to mean it utterly and be able to live with it. In 1951, he spent time an
nechoic chamber at Harvard University, and the resultant experience gave him the
intellectual confidence he needed to proceed with the idea. "I heard two sounds
, one high and one low, he explained. When I described them to the engineer in
rge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the lo
w one my blood in circulation."Triumphantly, he added: "Until I die there will b
e sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the
future of music.
Some audiences, however, would say the future of music has never been under
threat. Ever since the first performance, in Woodstock, New York, in 1952,
actors have been baffled, angered, and irritated by 4 33 . They missed the
Cage, of that first audience. There's no such thing as silence. What they

work;

I w
a
cha

such
detr
point,
though

said

t was silence, because they didn t know how to listen, was full of accidental soun
ds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During t
he second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people t
hemselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out. But
as Julian Dodd s recent TED talk proves, the debate rages on. Is it even music? Yo
u decide.
Four Organs by Steve Reich (1970)
New York classical concert-goers are generally a pretty demure bunch, but not so
on 18 January, 1973. Reich s piece, scored for four Hammond organs and maracas, h
ad been commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra s visionary young conductor
Michael Tilson Thomas, who had no qualms including it in programmes alongside th
e likes of Mozart, Bartk and Liszt. (These composers had themselves once been the
architects of musical revolutions.) But reactions in the audience that night at
Carnegie Hall ran the gamut from lusty boos , according to one critic, to yelled t
hreats, to someone running down the aisle screaming All right, I confess! , to an o
ld lady banging her shoe on the stage in a bid to get the BSO to shut up.
Cut to 2011, and Carnegie Hall was mounting a landmark celebration of the 75th b
irthday of one of American s greatest living composers . You guessed it, Steve Reich
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