[msluyter]

I majored in flute performance in college, and have listened / played a lot of avante garde music. My roommate, a bass player, and I were really into it at the time. We once played Shoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire on a tape loop over and over for an entire week -- and emerged with our sanity mostly intact. (An interesting side fact is that now I can barely recall it.) I played Luciano Berio's Sequenza on my Sr. recital. In retrospect, I think I was mostly relishing playing the role of enfant terrible, playing weird music just to get a rise out of people.

These days I don't willingly listen to atonal music of the Shoenberg/Carter/Boulez variety. I have a variety of theories about why modern classical music tends to be rejected, but in the end, all I can really say is that I have a subjective response to, say, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, that's entirely different from his Movements for Piano & Orchestra.

[pclmulqdq]

You ended up listening to Schoenberg at his best, and Sequenza is also a pretty good piece. As a composer and pianist/harpsichordist, my theory on this is that at some point, modern classical music became postmodern in terms of rejecting the concept of objectivity and beauty in the experience of music. That allowed composers to write truly horrible garbage with an air of superiority because "you just don't understand it" if you don't like it. This seems to have been a largely failed experiment: there are things that you can do in a piece of music that are more beautiful than other things, even if there is some subjectivity in terms of exact taste.

Ironically, the current period of music is starting to be called "postmodern" music, but it's returning a bit to the harmonic aesthetics of the romantic period (not purely, it's mixed with music from around the world as well as jazz and pop/rock ideas) and innovating more around music production technology - like adding electronics to the orchestra and experimenting with microtonal instruments - rather than trying to innovate on the concept of harmony itself. I would assume that this is in no small part due to the influence of film scoring, which is largely considered pedestrian by hardcore modernists, on the new generation of composers.

By the way, I happen to like a lot of the modernist stuff that I am rejecting here, but I think that's more out of familiarity (through study) than anything else.

[gnulinux]

Luciano Berio's Sequenza aren't traditionally considered serialist (absolutely gorgeous and stunning set of compositions BTW). Although he certainly "sounds" serialist "as a style" the same way Elliot Carter is a "serialist" even though he claims he never used it as a "technique".

I really like your point with respect to "Rite of Spring" vs his "Movements for Piano & Orchestra". But let's please note that he likely never attempted to invoke the same kind of vibe anyway, so I don't think it really proves anything. The reality is, composers used serialistic techniques for something other than what neoclassicists wanted to create. For a better comparison, compare Elliot Carter's late piano works with his first piano sonata, which he wanted to write in neoclassical style. You can see the same Carter hue (that's likely more similar to "Movements for Piano & Orchestra" than Stravinsky's "Violin Concerto") in both so it's a more direct comparison in my very humble opinion.

With respect to:

> why modern classical music tends to be rejected

I find this claim that contemporary Western classical music is irrelevant wrong. I think its cultural force is significant. I wrote more about this in HN here [1] if you care to read. But in short, just because an artistic movement inspires artists and not the audience, it doesn't mean it won't indirectly impact the audience, since artists who will go and create mainstream art may be inspired by the innovators of their era.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37424409

[Tainnor]

Pierrot Lunaire is pre-dodecaphonic Schönberg, though. I actually find it quite charming, in a way.