You Have To Be Really Stupid To Not Understand That You Don't Have To Listen To Music You Don't Like

I got into a bit of a spat over a composer whose music I don't especially like, though, once in a while, I'll listen to it.  The composer is the British Brian Ferneyhough, known as one of the more well known composers of "the new complexity".   If you want some idea as to what that means, at least in Ferneyhough's case,   Here's a video of his Lemma-Icon-Epigram with the score of very knotty rhythmic problems and not a few of articulation, as well.

I have mentioned a few times over the years that one of the reasons I decided not to smoke pot was because I found I couldn't count Milton Babbitt's Post-Partitions which I wanted to study if I smoked pot.  If nothing else I would guess that Brian Ferneyhough's music might keep some musician, somewhere drug-free because his music makes Post Partitions look like the contents of the Grade 2 volume of a piano method.

I didn't argue in favor of Ferneyhough's music which has a certain charm as to sound to it but which isn't anything near my favorite listening.  It sounds a lot easier than it would be to play. It wouldn't tempt me to go to the bother of counting it out to try to play it.   My argument was with a really arrogant, pissy French-Brit piano player, "Pianopat" who is a total asshole and too stupid to be intimidating who used Ferneyhough to sound like some mid-20th century arch-conservative who blames the financial problems of symphony orchestras on "modern music".   Given what symphony orchestra programs have been like all through that period, very very heavy on a very limited playlist of alleged audience pleasing masterworks, chestnuts and a list of a couple of hundred such pieces, a stupider argument about music has never been made.  I'd argue that it's over-hearing of that limited number of mostly 19th and early 20th century masterworks that might have more of a responsibility for audience indifference, since that's what's been being played, not what hasn't been.   I would imagine the performance of Brian Fernyhough's music is rare enough so it wouldn't produce a discernible effect of the kind that "Pianopat" attributes to it.

My question is why these idiots who are so impressed with themselves and who make such displays to impress others don't seem to realize that:

A. there has never been anything like a mass audience for "classical music" that compares with pop musics or TV or the movies.   That's with a possible exception for opera in the 19th century in some places.

B. Anyone who wants to avoid "classical music" they don't like is entirely free to avoid it because, unlike pop music and FOX, its presence isn't ubiquitous in the modern world.  Of no music is that more true than "difficult music". *

C. That their claims don't prove they're smart, they prove they're too stupid to get either of those points.    I wouldn't want the kind of people impressed with such statements to be impressed with me.  They're too stupid to care about.

Such people are endemic to what is alleged to be the educated class who think they're impressive when they make such condemnations, they're also not uncommon among the lower ends of the scribbling class.

I would go into the war that this idiot has with those who take composer's intentions seriously when performing their work but that's a whole story in itself.  The guy's an ass.

Composers whose work I don't like have every right to go right on composing the music they want to write, those who like listening to it have every right to go right on listening to it,  those who don't like it have every right to not listen to it.  They even have the right to go on blathering in the way "Pianopat" does, they just shouldn't expect smart people to be impressed with them.

*  You can contrast the lather such people of style get into about the totally innocuous character of listening to "difficult music" with the one they don't get into about the ubiquitous ad campaign of inequality, violence, exploitation and criminal assault that the porn industry is, with the promotion of racism in the media.  There's something to be learned about which stuff such people champion, generally some of the most demonstrably dangerous content and that which they condemn which is not only innocuous but rare to the point of obscure in the everyday lives and social and political environment.