By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff, 11/14/99

Aaron Copland tried to create "American" music.

t is sometimes said that 20th-century music began at the riotous premiere of Igor Stravinsky's ''Le Sacre de Printemps'' in 1913. But you could also claim that it began with Strauss's ''Salome'' in 1905, or Charles Ives's ''Variations on `America''' for organ, which was written in 1891 - or for that matter, if we are talking about ''modernity'' of sound, one could cite some of the madrigals of Gesualdo, collected in 1611.

Puccini's ''Tosca'' was probably the earliest masterpiece to appear in this century, though not everyone thought so at the time. The premiere came Jan. 14, 1900 in Rome, and when the opera was played in London a year later, one critic wrote it was ''brutal ... demoralizing ... induced a feeling of nausea. ... What has music to do with a lustful man chasing a defenseless woman or the dying kicks of a murdered scoundrel?'' This doesn't sound all that different from the fulminations of critics of popular culture today - or some of the complaints following the Boston Symphony Orchestra's performances of Oliver Knussen's ''Where the Wild Things Are'' a week ago.

History (and within it, the history of music) doesn't fall conveniently into centuries, though centuries do seem to reflect biorhythms, the way people do. Music that bade poignant farewell to the 19th century - like Mahler's Ninth Symphony, first performed posthumously in 1912, and

sounded unimaginably difficult at the time - now speaks with particular directness to music lovers at the close of the 20th.

The music of the first half of our century has been seen as some kind of battleground between Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, or between their supporters. Schoenberg carried the implications of Wagner's ''Tristan'' chord to its logical conclusion in atonality, and the organization of atonality into system. He felt it was a historical necessity to do so, and it was not a burden he carried lightly. If there was a battle, there wasn't a winner; Stravinsky wrote 12-tone masterpieces late in his life, and Schoenberg ''returned'' to tonality in certain of his late works - and both composers always sounded like themselves in whatever they wrote.

Simple-minded commentary has cast Schoenberg, or his followers, as the villains of the century. The myth goes that only the free-spirited composers of the very recent past have escaped the ''stranglehold'' of '50s academicism by responding to the basic elements of music (as in the school of ''minimalism'') or by assimilating the musical achievements of popular culture (which has been going on since medieval and Renaissance composers put ''pop'' material like dances into counterpoint with Gregorian chant; Bach's ''Goldberg'' Variations end with two folksongs in counterpoint). A lot of the controversy came from outside the musical world; composers themselves tend to be curious about everything that's going on around them - Puccini attended the Italian premiere of Schoenberg's ''Pierrot lunaire.'' Schoenberg himself famously remarked that there was a lot of good music still to be written in the key of C major. A lot of argument could have been circumvented by making the concession that technique and style are elements of musical value, but not the only ones; talent and urgency count, too. Twelve-tone masterpieces like Berg's ''Wozzeck'' and Violin Concerto have entered the standard repertory, and their descendents and successors will too, if they continue to compel the attention of performers and of audiences.

Benjamin Britten composed unforgettable operas.

Most generalizations about historical periods don't hold up. It is a commonplace to observe, for example, that the 19th century was the golden age of the symphony, which has come under threat in our own - but Shostakovich and Prokofiev wrote all of their symphonies in this century, Sibelius all but one of his. For years, it was claimed that Puccini's ''Turandot'' (1926) was the last opera to enter the international standard repertory. But then ''Wozzeck,'' ''Peter Grimes,'' ''Les Dialogues des Carmelites,'' and ''Mahagonny'' became more familiar in the international repertory, and part of the cherished experience of most operagoers, and each country also produced its own national repertory of favorites (''Porgy and Bess,'' ''The Ballad of Baby Doe,'' and ''Susannah'' are American examples). As in previous centuries, it takes time, often decades, for the public to catch up to the musical thinking of the most original and challenging composers. Janacek and Ives, for example, wrote their music in the first half of this century, but became national and international figures only in the second half, and there's little question that some composers the 21st century will come to value highly are little-known today.

Effects of war

The central historical events of the 20th century, the two world wars, profoundly affected musical development. In the most basic sense, the wars interrupted - or, in many tragic cases, ended - the creativity of gifted musicians who might have contributed more to musical history, or changed it. Only now is some of the most important music written during and before World War II coming to attention. That war in particular altered American musical life for several generations because of the arrival in this country of composers (Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, Hindemith, Weill), conductors, instrumentalists, and a whole support system of managers, critics, and other members of a discerning, public-spirited audience.

Some things did not change during this century. Throughout most of it, most music remained specifically national in character and culture even as it sought to transcend national boundaries; the universal lies in the particular. It takes only a few bars to recognize Bartok as Hungarian, Shostakovich as Russian; Ravel, Poulenc, Dutilleux, or Boulez as French. The 12-tone composer Luigi Dallapiccola sounds as Italian as Puccini. Some composers, like Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, George Gershwin, and Leonard Bernstein set out quite self-consciously to create an ''American'' music; other American composers, like Roger Sessions, resisted such impulses and tried to compose in an ''international'' vein - although, with distance, it is hardly possible to hear Sessions as any less ''American'' than Copland.

Picking an audience

Also, composers continued to choose the audience they wrote for. Some tried to write for a large public and sought popular appeal; others pursued advanced musical thought wherever it led them, and wrote for a small and musically sophisticated audience. What was important was to compose from inner imperative. Problems arose only when composers didn't want to live with the consequences of their decisions - when advanced composers hankered after larger audiences, or popular composers complained about lack of respect.

Popularity and immediate appeal are dangerous criteria for musical quality. Some very great music has held such appeal; Verdi is a prime example, as Shakespeare and Dickens were in literature. It is equally certain that some very great music never did. Beethoven's ''Wellington's Victory'' was one of the great success of his lifetime. Today the piece is a minor curiosity - and audiences and dedicated performers are still grappling with the meaning of his late string quartets. Popularity doesn't always last, and the winds of fashion blow reputations around.

One significant change did occur for a while in our century. Up until the 1950s, much pop music was written and performed by composers with classical training who were quick to see the value and the quality of music developed by and for people who had little or no formal musical education. There was a lot of interest in building bridges between jazz and concert music. Rock music, on the other hand, alienated many composers who were already established by the time it came along, and there was a split. It is only more recently that composers who have spent their whole lives with rock music have tried to invest their own work with some of rock's best qualities.

Music has also been multicultural for centuries, as composers followed their curiosity wherever it led them; that tendency grew in the 20th century because of the single most important real innovation, the electrification of civilization. With the invention of the phonograph, by Thomas Edison and Emile Berliner, and its subsequent development, it became possible in for all the music of the past, and most of the music of the world's cultures, to become simultaneously present in the ear and imagination of a composer. The phonograph played a major role in awakening interest in unknown music; and so did efforts after World War II, centered in Boston, to build authentic copies of historical instruments like the harpsichord.

The electrification of music has been a mixed blessing. It led to experiments and achievements in music written for electronics, though composers soon discovered how quickly technology could outrace them; some masterpieces of the genre now require equipment as historical as a harpsichord.

It also became possible to divorce music from its original context; Bach's ''St. Matthew Passion'' could be recycled as background music for restaurants. The mediafication of music catapulted the business aspect of the art into a whole new dimension and led to the glorification of the performer at the expense of the composer. Paganini and Liszt were precursors of the modern superstars, but they were composers whose music was written, in part, to display their prowess as performers. But few of the great performers of our century were also composers. Early in the century, the superstars created by the new media, like the tenor Enrico Caruso, performed the music that was then new and that the audience wanted to hear them in; today's superstars, like Luciano Pavarotti or Cecilia Bartoli, do not sing new music, in part because that's not what the public wants to hear them do. The performers of this century that the public of future centuries will be most grateful to will be the ones who inspired the creation of great new work - performers like the tenor Peter Pears, or the cellists Mistislav Rostropovich and Yo-Yo Ma, succesors to performers like Joseph Joachim, whose abilities and spirit led to the creation of the most famous violin concertos of the 19th century.

Today, in this country especially, there is real concern about how to renew the audience for classical music in a time when cultural education has collapsed. The aging of the audience, and the always uneasy alliance between art and commerce, has had serious consequences for the music business: It is on the verge of a richly earned collapse. But as the scholar-pianist Charles Rosen has pointed out, there is no problem with the steady advance of central musical culture. A certain portion of the population continues to be born with musical abilities and an imperative need to make music, and a larger portion of the population is born with the need to hear it. In the forthcoming century, composer and public will find new ways to get in touch with each other, as they always have.

This story ran on page L04 of the Boston Globe on 11/14/99.
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