Audience Torture at the Disney Hall

I HATE IT WHEN MODERN COMPOSERS who work a classical tradition feel it is their duty to torture audiences. Case in point, Nov 6, 2008 at the Disney Hall. The first clue is when you see on the program that the conductor is the composer, which means one thing: Vanity project. It will be atonal to “challenge the audience.” There will also be an overabundance of instruments — in modern classical, using lots of obscure instruments takes the place of anything as banal as a melody.

"Mozart was able to write some of the most beautiful music on Earth with only 23 instruments," I say to my friend Thurston. This in fact is true. Mozart composed with a great deal of economy. He is the Ernest Hemmingway of the classical music scene. "You can't keep playing the same thing over again," Thurston replies sensibly.

The evening starts off badly, with the symphony opening the program with “The Marsellais,” the French national anthem. Doesn’t this strike anyone as odd? Would the Paris symphony ever open with the “Star Spangled Banner”? We next come to Conductor Thomas Ades's original work, which is dreadful. Besides the use of bizarre instrumentation and an overstuffed orchestra, these modern pieces are always painfully discordant. It's as if they're trying to torture the audience.

It's like James Joyce's Ulysses, another audience torturer. Instead of just writing in a direct style easily understood by the reader, he opted for stream of consciousness, which is absolutley impossible to follow. People say it's the greatest novel in the English language, which is ridiculous, because no one has ever read it. Have you? Precisely. The reason is that Joyce has made his novel so prickly, so inaccessible, that it ends up being a big FU to the reader in the name of Art. Mr. Ades's pieces at the Disney Hall, America: A Prophecy and Tevot, were precisely the same.