A “defence” of any musical period is both superfluous and impossible to accomplish with a mere thousand words, if at all. So why this article? Well, because too often contemporary music is mercilessly written-off due to its ostensibly “difficult” nature, which is rather sad. The music itself doesn’t need defending, but the charges of pretentiousness frequently levelled at it must be addressed, allowing it to have a chance to be appreciated as something more than narcissistic indulgence by a quasi-intellectual elite, and a bandwagon for bourgeois pseuds to jump on.
While “contemporary music” implies the mainstream Western avant-garde of the last sixty years, what’s referred to here is the broader range of Western “art” music from ca.1945 to the present day. A link between most musical movements in this epoch (complexity, electroacoustic music, spectral music etc.) with exceptions like minimalism, is a lack of acceptance by a large audience; the many reasons for this are often instigated by the sonic quality of the music itself, but few solely concern themselves there. The initial alienating effect of, say, large-scale chromatic saturation of a chord across an orchestra (as in Berio’s Sinfonia), or the use of sound effects as material (as in Schaeffer’s Études aux Chemins de Fer), causes some listeners to infer that all such work is “unmusical”, and therefore that those who participate in it are deceiving themselves. Not only does this betray a certain degree of arrogance, it’s simply unfair; how can a vast repertoire of music be overlooked just because the little part that was heard didn’t do what was expected? While free speech, and the fact that people usually vote with their record purchasing, mean that pragmatically whether or not contemporary music achieves mainstream recognition remains a financial issue, it’s a shame that its potential rewards are obviated simply because it’s a bit challenging.
But then there are intelligent, musical people who like a challenge, yet who also feel put off by contemporary music. What is it, then, that causes such animosity? Last term, whilst grappling with Stockhausen’s Kontakte for an essay, I myself briefly wondered whether those of us who bought the idea that this was a seminal electroacoustic work weren’t being conned. Yes, “moment form” made sense, and learning about how the erratic whine at Struktur X was created, and its aesthetic implications (a symbolic “contact” between duration and pitch, amongst other things), was fascinating and elucidated that section wonderfully–but what was the point? If Kontakte requires fairly in-depth study to appreciate it, and as a result is unlikely to interest an “average listener” (whoever that might be), despite its wonderful construction and aesthetic intentions, is it ultimately an unsuccessful piece of music?
Of course, the answer is no–the nature of quality in a musical work can never be determined objectively by how the public respond to it. If it could, then criteria based on numbers of people who liked a work could be established to determine its worth–an idea which, although perpetuated by the commoditization of music, is patently absurd, not least because it also implies a strict stratification of quality levels. Again, if a composer’s work doesn’t sell then he’ll just become bankrupt–that is, assuming he does nothing but write music for his living (unlikely). The music’s quality is a completely unrelated factor. Anyway, in the example of Kontakte, I wrote about that section because it did appeal to me on the first hearing. The fact that I was able to enjoy such apparently difficult music before analysing it challenged my own preconceptions of how music should do what it “should do”, and rather than an implied lack of relevance on grounds of diminished public appreciation, it’s this that leads to the reason why contemporary music annoys so many people.
Views about musical quality are obviously related to its perceived role in, and significance to, daily life. The variety of such perceptions among the public will be familiar to anyone who’s admitted to studying a music degree a few times. In the case of those clever musical people who still berate contemporary music, ultimately they do so because it contradicts in principle their view of how Western music’s “function” should be achieved, informed by centuries of, for example, tonal harmony and the prioritisation of pitch over noise, as well as the more recent itemisation of music into “teenfs” of aural weed by the recording industry. Any view that all music should serve one purpose or another, no matter how loosely defined, implies attendant criteria to be satisfied, and ultimately, that quality in music is directly related to the listener’s gratification.
A resulting subjective interpretation would be perfectly valid, but should not be transposed onto objective quality even for a single work, let alone an entire movement. Stockhausen himself has a nice anecdote about Adorno’s reaction to Goeyvaerts’ piano sonata at Darmstadt in 1951:

He attacked this music of Goeyvaerts, saying it was…only a sketch for a piece that was still to be written. He said, “There is no motivic work.”…I said, “But Professor, you are looking for a chicken in an abstract painting.” It showed…he was basically not a creative person. A creative person is always most excited when something happens that he cannot explain…

Wouldn’t it be great if this acceptance of the disconcerting wasn’t exclusive to “creative people”? Just as–importantly–contemporary music isn’t necessarily “good” because it’s challenging (to paraphrase Panos Demopoulos in the last Zahir, a “pianist in evening dress walking around the piano without playing it”, as Berio put it, and the music of a dead fat man who once wailed banalities over three chords are equally bland) it needn’t be “pretentious” either. Anyway, challenge itself achieves the beneficial goal of stopping the listening process becoming a fix. Contemporary music ought not to be seen as the product of egomaniacs who should stop annoying us all with their noise and get a proper job. While not all of it is brilliant, dismissing it completely on the grounds that music must achieve this or that does no one any favours, least of all the listener who might enjoy some of it if he overcame his prejudices.