What lies on the other side of that boundary can still have its beauties. There is much to hear in the various possibilities of rhythm, instrumental timbre, and dramatic shape in the music of the advanced serialists or of other theoretical re-organizers like Elliott Carter. I’ve spent time studying and performing some of it myself, and am grateful for the experience. But I am pretty sure such scores can speak only to few – mostly, to professional musicians. Even for those few, contact with recognizable tonal centers, with a sense of pulse, and with identifiable patterns of closure probably remains a life-necessity. But their lives are full of ample provision for that necessity, and they find themselves able to suspend it temporarily while engaged with certain compositions that hold their interest in other ways. For most people, I suspect, such suspension is intolerable for more than a brief interval, and hearing an entire composition without those elements is something akin to eating a cupful of salt mixed with pepper.

Unless, of course, it is “background music” — serving to create a mood via the ear while conscious attention is dominated by visual information. Several great film scores use high modernism. And some valid modes of musical communication may indeed require the exclusion of melody. A tune, even an undeveloped one, might seem as alien on the glittering water-surface Saariaho conceived for L’amour de loin as a face from Hopper on a canvas of De Kooning. But is Saariaho’s score in effect background music for the dazzling light-show that accompanied it on stage? Successful musical theater, thus far in history, has been grounded in music to which attention can be paid directly and with satisfaction, and this has usually required command of simplicity as well as complexity, foreground as well as background, direct musical address as well as atmospherics. Verdi was Verdi because he could write both “La donna è mobile” and the interview between King Philip and the Inquisitor. Wagner had his Ride of the Valkyries and his Evening Star. The composer of the C minor quartet exalted in Schönberg’s essay “Brahms the Progressive” also wrote a certain lullaby. Where is the Schönberg Lullaby?

***

In finding against the thorny modernists I am rehashing a debate of my own generation that the younger generation has settled peaceably. Musicians who are drawn to Webern, Boulez, or Carter play them, do not expect their appeal to be broad, and do not feel obliged to disapprove of alternative paths forward in music. There is lively interest in rediscovering some of the mid-century independents like Martinu, and in exploring the unsuspected possibility that some Messiaen can be exciting and pleasing to a normal “classical-music” public. The tyranny of serialism in the academy has been overthrown and there is no danger of its resurgence. And yet our new-opera composers are still mostly at a loss when it comes to melody. It must be difficult, and may be impossible, to pick up the thread. To start with: which thread?