Foreword

Summary

It is impossible to evaluate the true worth of composers when they are alive because their works are not heard as pure music but rather as political statements by their creators. Today, when they are still alive, self-consciously modern and would-be progressive composers are often elevated to great heights in our cultural conversation regardless of the actual quality of their musical imaginations. In the past, this was not the case. As a result, composers more talented than radical, who are interested in the new only insofar as it relates to the good, are pigeonholed into the “traditional” or “conservative” categories. The quality of the work matters less than what it represents in the current discourse. Barber was of the latter kind and was stereotyped accordingly.

During his lifetime, people who liked “old-fashioned music” liked him; people who liked “modernist and experimental” music did not. Ironically, even Barber himself succumbed to this if-new-then-good dogma. He once told me that during his student days at the Curtis Institute, he and his composing friends used to sit in the balcony listening to premieres of Rachmaninoff with disdain. “How foolish I was then,” he sighed.

I sent Sam a copy of my chorus and orchestra setting of Dylan Thomas's “Fern Hill,” at that time for chorus and piano, and he liked it and gave it to Schirmer. He made one or two suggestions—mainly cutting a measure or two to dovetail a transition or changing one note he thought clumsy—but said he was sincerely impressed. For many years afterward I showed him my works before sending them on to Hans Heinsheimer, Schirmer's legendary publisher.

Fortunately, the minute a composer passes away, his place on the artistic/ political chessboard vanishes with him. Shostakovich, for example, when alive, was considered too cheap, too vulgar to be respected. But his music has survived, while the disdain for it has not. Shostakovich is now considered a great composer by the very people who dismissed him when he was writing. Barber, now gone, is appreciated as a master and grouped with the great composers of the past. Nobody cares whether his music was groundbreaking, like Berlioz’s, or not, like Mozart’s. And so we are free to listen to a true musician writing eternal music. Barber would have loved that!