In the last half of the 20th century, it took alot of nerve for composers in academic circles to write tonal, listenable music.
In the “serious” music world, if you wanted to be taken seriously, your work had to be an impenetrable, dissonant intellectual piece of unplayable wankery. I know; I was there. I spent countless hours poring over Carter’s byzantine (and IMO, pointless) complexity, all the while wondering if anyone actually enjoyed this stuff.
I was an outcast for writing stuff that actually had recognizable harmonic structure. I was also the only guy in the department who didn’t have a scraggly beard. I think those two things might have been related. Continued...
Guys like Walter Piston were writing tonal and emotional music, but were often viewed as reactionaries in their own time. Piston, of course, wrote one of the cornerstone textbooks on orchestration, and his work, though a bit on the spiky side to a newcomer, carried more imagination, wit and emotion than a conservatory of elitist serialists could ever hope to muster.
