It’s as if the last hundred years had never happened. In classical music, that is. Here in Argentina. Listen to classical music over the radio, go to concerts, browse the tiny clásica section in record stores, and you might as well still be in the nineteenth century or earlier. At best, early twentieth.

Buenos Aires is extremely fortunate to have no less than four radio stations that play classical. (New York, for instance, should be so lucky). Two that do so all or most of the time, FM 96.7 and 103.7. And two, FM 97.9 and 100.3, that started out that way, but that now have huge chunks of every other radio’s mix of pop and such plus talk talk talk (if not shout holler bellow).

All four are in a way offshoots of the defunct Radio Clásica, itself the moral successor of the AM Radio Nacional and Radio Municipal in their prime. Some listeners may also be able to tune in to Uruguay’s hallowed SODRE, AM 650. One should give thanks every hour on the hour for such riches.

However, their programming is extremely conservative. You run virtually no risk of hearing music by modern masters like Stockhausen or Cage or Adams or Ligeti over their waves. If they play, once in a blue moon, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, they clearly feel they have taken a daring gamble with such avant-garde stuff.

The Rite of Spring is the often agreed-on cornerstone of modern music, and when first played it famously started a near-riot. But for Pete’s sake, that was in 1913! In a piddling four years’ time, it’ll be a full century old. And here we are, still afraid of, or even still ridiculing, its discordant sounds. Let alone those of the music that followed and that is generated electronically or with conventional instruments but with comparable aims, dissonances, non sequiturs and effects.

There are only two radio programmes I’m aware of that regularly feature what can be called the modern or contemporary idiom, for want of a better term. One is led by Alicia Terzián, a great long-time leader in this battle: Tribuna Internacional de Compositores, Thursdays from 11pm to midnight on 100.3, Radio Cultura Musical (lots of pirate radio interference). The other is Industria Nacional, weekdays, also 11pm to midnight, on 96.7, Radio Nacional Clásica. If you know of more, please share the information through the letters-to-the-editor section.

Monteverdi, Mozart and Mendelssohn are magnificent, but from time to time one can ALSO CRAVE DISSONANCE. (Dissonance not of the habitual type discreetly woven into most music to liven it up, but as a guiding esthetic).
Not that there’s anything wrong with liking just one style or period of music. If someone fancies mainly early music and baroque, or only electroacoustic, that’s splendid, just as in jazz it’s perfectly fine to care only for New Orleans or only for be-bop or whatever. Personally, I just happen to like it all, and if I pound out this article it’s only to complain that one particular area is systematically blocked out as if it didn’t exist.

Here’s a way to look at the issue. The melodiousness and elegance of traditional classical music reflects, by and large, the relative ease and refinement (or at least those elements as an ideal) in the life of the aristocrats or elite for whom that music was largely created. But I am a creature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. My life, my world, are cacophonous, jangling, filled with mechanical noises. This can be echoed, filtered and reworked by an artist’s perceptivity for people’s aural contemplation — which seems a valid definition of one of the possibilities of music.

Of course I enjoy being soothed too, or moved by the traditional methods employed by classical music. Yet music that has the above-mentioned elements of cacophony and jangling, that is discontinuous and brings in sharp or extraneous noises, is music that relates to my contemporary sensibility. It’s the music of my world, not that of the Esterhazys (Haydn’s famous music patrons), whose sensibility, in a general way, is still effectively in power.
The music programmed for the overwhelming majority of concerts in town, as with radio broadcasts, only includes modern musicians if they basically extend traditional idioms with modern touches: people like Vaughan Williams and Leonard Bernstein. About the only “different” composer you’ll hear over the radio with anything like regularity, though still seldom, is Philip Glass, and that’s because his kind of minimalism constitutes relatively “easy” listening. That’s the key to it all. Perish the thought that listeners be challenged a bit, be forced to think, to ponder the sounds in themselves or if they so choose, to analyze their juxtapositions, perceiving a rhythm here or correlation there, losing it again, picking up another...
So keep it easy. Or your music will be blanked out.

Or worse, it won’t even be considered music at all. Raúl Minsburg, a composer of electroacoustic music who teaches at the universities of Lanús and Tres de Febrero, says he uses this neat argument on some students: “If you go to a restaurant which is featuring some exotic cuisine, and try something you don’t happen to like, you merely say you don’t like it — you don’t say ‘this isn’t food.’ It should be the same with music.”
With the other arts too, by the way.

Actually it’s pretty incredible that this debate should still be around. The question whether plink-tweet-crash “is music,” or whether dribble-disfigure-whatever “is art,” should be as closed as the debates over water fluoridation and rural electrification.
That’ll be the day.

Practitioners prefer to say “electroacoustic” rather than “electronic” music. It includes not only electronically generated or processed sounds but also “natural” ones. Mainly, the word “electroacoustic” avoids confusion with electronica rock and such.

Minsburg was one of the local organizers of a major event in the modern music world which took place right here in Buenos Aires in late June, at the Borges Cultural Centre: a symposium of the French and British-based Electroacoustic Music Studies Network. Next year: Shanghai. There’s more on it at www.ems-network.org/ems09.
Naturally there’s a larger background to the near-vacuum built around contemporary classical-music sounds in Argentina. It is just one expression of the colossal conservatism of Argentine society. You can see it in everything from food — until quite recently any restaurant that offered any foreign cuisine with some spice in it was all but doomed to fail, and most still are — to politics. The latter still essentially revolve around an issue straight from the 1940s: Perón: good or bad? (The only good thing about this is that it stops the main debate from being out of the eighteen forties: Rosas: good or bad? That debate still exists, of course, but on a largely academic level.) Why should it be any different in classical-music tastes?

Granted that people who consume classical music are (in a sad loss for the others) a minority, and that those who like the contemporary sounds are only a minority within that other one. However, radios and concerts needn’t only reflect their listeners’ tastes. They could also, gently, slowly, guide them — a bit here, a bit there.
I myself have twice made a specific suggestion to the, in several ways, excellent Amadeus station, 103.7, using different channels each time. It has a standing feature called “A Classic Among Classics,” in which it showcases, oh, you know, Scheherazade, Bolero, Pictures at an Exhibition, the New World symphony. Why not do something similar for the opposite scale of “difficulty,” even if less frequently and with shorter snippets? A kind of “Two Avant-Garde Minutes,” say — too short to scar anybody permanently. But it would serve to acknowledge the existence of that kind of music — and maybe actually whet somebody’s appetite for more. Results of the suggestion: not surprisingly, nil. The “keep it easy” policy is a rock.

There’s a programming agreement between Amadeus and New York’s WQXR, the classical music radio of the New York Times, which is also hugely conservative in its tastes.
A big paradox haunts this entire situation. The fact is that what is called modern or contemporary music really hasn’t changed all that drastically from what was first developed in the late 1940s or so, and you can also trace it all the way back to the invention of the electronic instruments called the theremin (1919) and ondes Martenot (1928). The gadgetry has of course improved vastly; the basic esthetic hasn’t altered all that much. But then, if you think about it, that’s true for all the arts, save architecture. They haven’t ever shifted gears again as radically as they did in the artistically heady periods before and after the two world wars, especially the first. In effect, modern music is at heart no more modern than, say, the Chrysler Building, but even so it’s mostly kept under wraps so as not to put people off their lunch.      

In Argentina, things largely got under way when Francisco Kröpfl, then in his 20s (and still very much around today) set up the Musical Phonology Studio (EFM) at the UBA School of Architecture in 1958.
It’s fun to wonder how the giants of music would react if they came back to life and were exposed to contemporary classical sounds without a crash course in the intervening styles. Bach would certainly have a fit. Mozart might be delighted, and quickly toss off some frothy items in the new idiom that would outdo the genre. With Beethoven it’s hard to say, that is if he could hear the stuff at all, or didn’t think his ear trumpet was playing tricks on him.
If you’re casting about for some contemporary sounds at a well-stocked record store, or buying on the Web, one item you could try is Minsburg’s CD Entre sueños. It is often ruminative, although there’s also a notable crescendo towards the beginning, and on track 5 you seem to be caught up in the battle of the Somme.

In the CD Música Electroacústica en la Argentina — Perspectivas 1 (1993), on track 3, you hear the processing of assorted sounds (drumrolls, striking matches, a squeaking door?) by composer Jorge Rapp, and then applause breaks in. You imagine it was a live recording and that the audience’s clapping was included in the CD — only to realize that you’ve been had: applause was just one of the motifs that Rapp appropriated for this piece, which blithely goes on.
What didn’t manage to go on was the Perspectivas series. Through the overall indifference to the modern in this one area of art, there never was a Perspectivas 2. And 1 only obtained private distribution.

When listening to this kind of music, if you can get hold of some, remember to be careful with the dynamic range. That’s the difference in volume between a score’s loudest and lowest sounds. Classical music in general uses a far greater dynamic range than most pop music does. And electroacoustic and other contemporary genres surpass the classical median. Like Haydn’s Surprise (“Mit dem Paukenschlag”) symphony, only more so. You have to put up the volume a lot to catch all the subtle whirrs and murmurings they love, and be ready to jump to dampen it again with the arrival of the sudden SMASH-PLUNKS they sometimes seem to love even more, unless you’re sure the plaster in your house doesn’t crack all that easily.

If you still like to be creatively jarred from time to time by your music, and not endlessly lulled, there’s always some foreign radio stations on the Internet. For example, www.contemporary-classical.com (for starters click on the yellow button on the left, not the bigger one in the centre; ignore the sign-in and other boxes, and wait out the intro ads and silences). But you really shouldn’t have to go abroad for this.