Individualism and accessibility: the moderate mainstream, 1945–75

Abstract

God forbid that there should only be radicals in this world …[I]t may be that the conservative composer is very necessary for an overall, general balance and correct rate of development. What we do want is probably a kind of controlled instability. In other words, it takes all sorts to make a world of contemporary music. Roberto Gerhard, ‘The Contemporary Musical Situation’, 1956 No serious aesthetic analysis can be conducted on the principle that individualism and accessibility are incompatible. The history of the arts offers countless examples of works which are highly personal to their creators yet far from innovative in matters of style and technique. Doing something new with existing styles and techniques is a more common phenomenon in the arts than the kind of individuality that seems to succeed in avoiding all significant connections with other creators, whether from past or present; and this is as true of the years immediately after 1945 as of those just before 1914. The era of the Cold War, though not without military confrontations, was also a time of reconstruction, of steadily improving communications: and those improving communications – perhaps symbolized most acutely for musicians by Stravinsky’s return visit to Russia in 1962 – only rarely gave prominence to cultural events of a specialized, radical nature. Even though the liberating effect on the musicians of Poland or Hungary of their limited contacts with the Western avant-garde was considerable, and the impact of the cultural ‘thaw’ of the late 1950s on, for example, Lutosławski, was dramatic, it is not always easy to distinguish genuine enthusiasm for the avant-garde from the more basic need for artistic freedom and access to all kinds of cultural production.

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