Oh to hell with it.

At this god-forsaken hour a topic’s buzzing in my brain like a pillow mosquito. No, I don’t want to be awake, I’ll be a basket-case tomorrow! But when it comes to drowsiness, our preferences are not consulted. Syllables clatter in my brain like a domestic spat next door. I don’t want to listen, but I can’t not.

The topic is… I don’t even want to say, lest you decamp. It’s way too esoteric, inside-the-beltway, for our morning stroll. Trends in what’s called classical music don’t tempt many curiosities, especially in this moment fraught with violence, risks, dread. Panic and aesthetics don’t mix.

Yet for me the question New York Times critic Joshua Barone wrestles, “Did a Single Generation Ruin Modern Music for Everyone Else?”, has been central to my existence, almost as central as “Will you marry me?” or “Should we have another kid?” If a certain kind of classical music hadn’t been in vogue when I was choosing careers, I might have been composing sounds now, not syllables.

(While I’ve hyperlinked Barone’s piece, I’ve also appended it below, lest the link crash you into a paywall. I loathe paywalls. You’re reading along pleasantly and whammo, to continue you must subscribe for a lifetime to the Whatyamacallit Gazette. No, I don’t want to subscribe, I just want to finish reading this article! Tough luck, fella, pay or scram. Paywalls transform genial discourse into a cat-and-mouse game. We at the Good Morning Project use paywalls sparingly.)

Music was my first love. I played the piano and the organ in church, tried my hand at composing, went to college as “an intensive music major.” Bach and the bros were my gods, still are; but the “hot” classical music of that moment burned my ears and baffled my brain. Composers like Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio, Nono, Ligeti, Webern, Babbit, Carter, Cage, darlings of the academy, swamped me with despair. That was the generation Barone’s article focuses on. And yes, they spoiled music for me – as a career – though Bach and his brethren will cradle me till my grave.

Modernism misled – in all the arts – by forgetting art’s purpose, which is to please. That conviction may make me sound like a fuddy-duddy, but so what? The composers named above, like Ezra Pound or the James Joyce of Finnegans Wake, like many dumbfounding visual artists of our era, may shock, stagger, perplex, but they do not please. What pleases in music are melody, rhythm, repetition, the ingredients of song. What pleases in writing are melody, rhythm, sense. Subtract these and, to my mind, you are left with zero.

Artists, like chefs, should make to be devoured. That’s my conviction, which I refuse to debate. Arguments about aesthetics are exhausting at the time and tedious in retrospect. If I have a polemical flag to wave, it’s “DARE TO DELIGHT!”

Making is a moral act. As a maker, what do you mean to give? How do you want to affect your listener’s life? Are you a preacher, teacher, pal, or just a show-off?

I write to befriend. I want you to feel better in this dire hour, consoled you are not alone. It’s OK to rage, rejoice, sob – we all are convulsed with such feelings on occasion. The Good Morning Project is to make your morning good – at least better.

So much of the public discourse of our moment, like the music, has been harsh, hostile, discordant. Lying is a hostile act. Cursing is an assault. Melody, rhythm, honesty are blessings.

*

By Joshua Barone

If you speak with casual fans of classical music, whether at a concert or a party, you tend to hear something similar: They love this art form, but they don’t really like “the new stuff.”

Ask them to explain what they mean, and the answers will vary. But it’s common to hear that contemporary music lacks melody or sounds atonal. Listeners can feel that there isn’t an easy way in, or anything to hold onto.

That description may fit some pieces composed today, but it more accurately describes much older music, like Pierre Boulez’s “Le Marteau Sans Maître,” a masterpiece of musical modernism that premiered 70 years ago. It’s not to everyone’s taste, and it doesn’t have to be. But if there’s any point to agree on, it’s that works from the time of “Le Marteau” aren’t contemporary enough to qualify as “the new stuff.”

So why, in the popular imagination, does this style of iconoclastic avant-gardism endure as contemporary music writ large? Especially when the music of today has no definitive sound?

We live in an age with no musical orthodoxy or hegemony. There may be trends, such as explorations of identity through sound, but there is no governing style, or any all-powerful gatekeepers. Missy Mazzoli’s “Dark With Excessive Bright,” an acoustic score influenced by centuries of music history, is just as broadly “contemporary” as Annea Lockwood’s “A Sound Map of the Danube,” a collage made of field recordings.

“There are so many simultaneously existing musical languages,” said Matías Tarnopolsky, president and chief executive of the New York Philharmonic, which is presenting two weeks of Boulez programming this month to celebrate his centennial. “Some composers are writing in a way that’s super familiar to Classical and Romantic music. Others are very modernist, and others bring in jazz, narrative and elements from their own musical traditions.”

Contemporary music is far from a monolith. But if its reputation is sometimes that of a vegetable to be endured before a 19th-century dessert, that might have something to do with Boulez’s peers, who reigned for decades with a sound that, depending on whom you ask, was either an acquired taste or the stuff to spoil your appetite.

“There is still a lingering knee-jerk reaction to modernism,” said Ara Guzelimian, a former provost and dean of the Juilliard School, who now runs the Ojai Music Festival in California. “But it was self-inflicted by that generation.”

He was describing the generation that, beyond Boulez, also includes Luigi Nono and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who wrote with a style that emerged from the ruins of World War II. Already in thrall to Arnold Schoenberg’s tradition-shattering system of composing in the early 20th century, they now also rejected the Romantic spirit appropriated by the Third Reich. It’s telling that Darmstadt, the city in Germany that would become a hotbed of musical modernism, was mostly destroyed in the war. It needed to be rebuilt, and in these composers’ eyes, so did music.

Each major artist from that generation had a personal style, but there were common traits: serialism, a focus on structure over emotional appeal, an electronic incursion. New extended techniques were introduced. Composition began to thrive in academic spaces.

Boulez was perhaps the most prominent avant-gardist during those years. At the very least, he was one of the most outspoken. He was severe and often damning, which is one thing for an ordinary musician and another for someone who also built institutions like IRCAM and Cité de la Musique in Paris. His opinions, while full of contradictions over time, mattered.

That’s part of what makes his legacy so complicated. As a conductor, Boulez could bring remarkable clarity to the challenging works like those of the Second Viennese School composer Anton Webern. But he was uninterested in vast swaths of the repertoire, like Brahms symphonies, at a time when younger musicians were looking up to him and paying close attention.

The composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, who is leading the Boulez performances at the Philharmonic, said in an interview that early in his career, Boulez offered an “attractive” vision of right and wrong, “an ethics of contemporary music.”

“Boulez was like a moral beacon,” he said. “So, in a way, you felt that if you followed him, you would be safe.”

Salonen once conducted a performance of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” that led Boulez to comment wryly, “You almost convinced me about this music.” But Salonen also witnessed Boulez “effectively end” the career of a young composer whose work he didn’t like.

There were, of course, other styles that gained ground in the second half of the 20th century. In the United States especially, Philip Glass was elevating Minimalism to the realm of pop culture. By the 1980s, John Adams was emerging as a torchbearer of the orchestral tradition. But with that diversity came a sense that musicians had to pick a side, with Boulez’s cohort or against it, and they were encouraged by avant-gardists who were in the habit of making aesthetics seem like a moral choice.

Few of Boulez’s disciples actually emulated his sound. But they might have carried on his pick-a-side approach to education. Mazzoli said that when she was finishing school two decades ago, academies were still “under the hold” of that mentality, even though the reality was freer, and rich with variety.

The composers who write in the shadow of Boulez’s generation are mostly in Europe. They include Olga Neuwirth and Matthias Pinscher, two artists capable of brilliance; a work like Neuwirth’s decade-old “Masaot/Clocks Without Hands” is a lot to take in casually but rewards repeated listening, even study.

I felt that way about Boulez’s “Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna,” while hearing it four times over two days earlier this year. (The Philharmonic is presenting it with an accompanying dance by Benjamin Millepied.) Each time, there were new structures, sounds and even emotions to uncover. But that was also my reaction; some people may love “Riteul” from the start, and others may just hate it.

And what if you don’t like it? Mazzoli said that she hasn’t eaten shrimp in 15 years because of one bad experience, and that classical music audiences may have similar reactions to contemporary works. “Something that put you off, or made you feel alienated,” she added, “could really become ingrained in your mind.”

When Mazzoli was composer in residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, from 2018-21, several longtime patrons told her, “I hope you don’t write like Ralph Shapey.” She was taken aback; Shapey was generations older than her and had been dead since 2002. Yet the controversial premiere of his “Concerto Fantastique” in 1991 “left a really bad taste in their mouth,” Mazzoli said. “So even though there had been probably a dozen composers in residence since him, that was what stood out.”

Remarkably, the clichés of the postwar avant-garde’s sound have endured while that sound itself hasn’t. The works of Boulez and his peers are still programmed, but they are hardly repertory staples, and each performance has the air of a special occasion like the Philharmonic’s concerts.

In schools, idioms of that time have been assimilated into education, such that students are as capable of playing “Le Marteau” as Boulez’s contemporaries. And when they perform it, they probably don’t feel like they are making a major statement. “For them,” Salonen said, “Boulez is just like any historical figure.”

If there is a guiding principle now, it’s that music is music. Tarnopolsky, influenced by his college-age children, doesn’t think about genre; Mazzoli, who now teaches, encourages her students to listen to pop hits alongside Elliott Carter and Messiaen.

Perhaps it’s just a matter, then, of that ethos making its way into the minds of concert audiences. Institutions can help. The evolution of taste is partially organic, but, Guzelimian said, “organizations create their own audience expectations.” When he was young, for example, programming Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” was adventurous; now, it’s a good way to sell out a concert. But while growing up in Los Angeles, long a haven for contemporary music, he heard the “Rite” as a matter of course.

This approach to programming, in which something like the “Rite” is given the space and repeated opportunity to be heard, is easier said than done. But it’s also necessary. So is a change of language. I once asked a conductor what contemporary music he was interested in. He mentioned a piece by Alban Berg, who died in 1935. Let’s try to at least reserve the word “contemporary” for music of this century.

Boulez, who died in 2016, composed into the new millennium, but the heart of his catalog is a thing of the past. And it’s good for his generation to be treated as history. Now, their works can be presented like any other movement, enriched by context yet standing on their own: Nono’s “Il Canto Sospeso” made better by understanding the politics of resistance, just as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is entwined with the writings of Friedrich Schiller, while both can be appreciated on purely musical terms.

With that, maybe there could be more room in audience’s minds for music that really is of today, which is almost always more welcoming than its reputation. Mazzoli said she thinks constantly when writing music about “how to bring someone in” with a balance of familiarity and surprise. She, gloriously, is just one example of many composers whose works are proof that contemporary music is something to be enjoyed, not endured.

Joshua Barone is the assistant classical music and dance editor on the Culture Desk and a contributing classical music critic.