CULTURE

Last night, a concert was presented by a new American classical composer, named Rufus Noteworthy, who has taken the radical step of writing music that he hopes will find an audience. 

Mr. Noteworthy's concert was presented at a smallish hall at Lincoln Center, actually a practice room at The Juilliard School.

The composer, interviewed prior to the concert, stated, “I’ve done serial music, but it’s more mental than emotional.  You set up a tone row and then manipulate it – forward, backward, inverted.  I finally decided it’s more like note chess, and I never had the patience for chess.  When it comes to serial music, I prefer jingles for Frosted Flakes.”

He continued, “I also have to confess that a lot of atonal music – with its eerie dissonances and Klangfarben melodies – sounds a lot like the soundtrack to a horror movie.  I had enough of those when I was a kid.  Of course, there’s minimalism, but the more I wrote it, the more I felt I was just telling people the same joke over and over.”

He was especially influenced by the inescapable fact that, as he said, “Most people like to hear a melody.  You just can’t break them of the habit.  So that left me with only one choice.  If I wanted people to like my music, I had to start writing melodies.  One thing led to another and before I knew it I was even writing tonal harmonies for my melodies.  I mean, I still slip in a lot of dissonances, but I’m trying to limit myself to ones that won't make the people who are kind enough to attend my concerts long for earplugs"

He concluded, saying, "But, wow, touching melodies with harmonies – I never thought that would happen to me.  I also never thought I'd lose the respect of so many of my colleagues.  Well, maybe I’m just a barbarian at heart, but I would like to make classical music popular again, and I just don’t know how if I throw out what Lenny Bernstein called, “the music of the earth,” I mean the natural overtone series, which drags in all of those things that Hayden, Mozart, and Beethoven had to work with. No comparison intended, but I'm even starting to make contact with how Beethoven must have felt when he called himself 'a tone poet.' Awesome, right? ”

We attended the concert and, while we found the music unusually enjoyable and especially promising, we noticed that the reviewer from The New York Times went from initial malcontent to catnapping.  

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