AN ESSAY BY WRITER AND ART CRITIC PERSIS BEKKERING ABOUT INNOVATION IN ART

Suppose Poème Symphonique were to receive its world premiere tonight. Would we be shocked? Could we once again feel what the Hilversum audience felt in 1963: a mixture of disbelief, anger, discomfort and confusion about something that falls outside traditional paradigms? I imagine that I am walking into the hall where the muffled voices of the meagre audience, given the maximum number of visitors that are currently admitted, can be heard as they look for a place to sit. Hundreds of analogue metronomes are lined up on stage, as if it were an orchestra.

And there stands Ligeti in his oversized tailcoat. The performers appear wearing smart concert attire. For several minutes nothing happens, which makes me a bit anxious, and, judging by the nervous coughing around me, I am not alone. And then, finally, the conductor gives a signal with a big sweep of his arm and the players go into action. They hurry along the rows of metronomes, setting them in motion. A disorderly wave of ticking swells up. For fifteen minutes it sounds like heavy rain tapping on a sloping roof.

My mind involuntarily tries to make head or tail of it. Sometimes I recognize rhythmic patterns, but the metronomes soon diverge again and lose coherence. Slowly the sound dies out, but the last metronome valiantly keeps on ticking, for significantly longer than the rest. Then silence returns. The audience waits to see if anything else happens, but Ligeti makes a gesture and we understand it’s time for applause.

I think I would have found Poème Symphonique an interesting work without prior knowledge. Challenging, playful, but not staggeringly new. Maybe I would have said something like ‘hypnotic’ at the after-concert drinks, or ‘meditative’. It certainly helps that I am a fairly experienced music listener, with a taste for adventure, but still: I would not feel that I was being confronted with the future. Logical of course. Nowadays we have a completely different view of music’s possibilities than in 1963.Our sensitivities have changed, perhaps been stretched, and we have learned that anything can be music. Silence, for instance, or metronomes. We now find experimental music ‘inaccessible’ rather than unacceptable. I honestly can’t remember ever leaving a concert hall in a state of shock.

But compared to 1963, what we expect from music, and from art as a whole, has also changed. Gone is the time when a new art movement was created every month, with a great deal of fuss. The avantgarde seems to be a concept that has got stuck in the twentieth century. If a riot ever breaks out in the hall or the museum, it is more out of dissatisfaction with ideological, economic or political matters than with the artistic strangeness of a work. Are we still striving for innovative art? Is ‘the new’ possible at all, now that everything is allowed and everything has already been done?

The complete essay by Persis Bekkering is available in the special Gaudeamus anniversary book. A limited edition of five bundled booklets full of extraordinary stories out of Gaudeamus history since 1945.