Who's afraid of the avant garde?

Why do people find it so much easier to "get" modern art than they do experimental music? Philip Ball in Prospect reviews a book on the subject by David Stubbs, "Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Not Stockhausen".

The writer Joe Queenan caused a minor rumpus in the austere world of contemporary classical music last year by complaining about how painful much of it is. He called Berio’s Sinfonia (1968) “35 minutes of non-stop torture,” Stockhausen’s Kontra-Punkte (1953) like “a cat running up and down the piano” and Birtwistle’s latest opera The Minotaur “funereal caterwauling.” “A hundred years after Schoenberg,” he wrote, “the public still doesn’t like anything after Transfigured Night, and even that is a stretch.” Music, like any art, must be constantly rejuvenated by experiment. But “experimental” music surely only qualifies as such if it includes the possibility of failure. Often the only thing that stands in the way of comprehension is a refusal to adapt on the part of audiences—to realise that it is no good trying to hear all music the way we hear Mozart. We need to find other “listening strategies.” Yet it could benefit all concerned if some experimental music, like much of Stockhausen’s oeuvre and the ambient noises of John Cage’s silent 4’33”, were viewed as “sound art,” a term coined by composer Dan Lander and anticipated by the futurist Luigi Russolo’s 1913 manifesto “The Art of Noises.” That way, one is not led to expect from these compositions what we expect of actual music. For if music is not acknowledged as a mental process, sound is all that remains.