Did a single generation ruin modern music for everyone else?

Ask them to explain what they mean, and the answers will vary. But it’s common to hear that contemporary music lacks melody or sounds atonal. Listeners can feel that there isn’t an easy way in, or anything to hold onto.

That description may fit some pieces composed today, but it more accurately describes much older music, like Pierre Boulez’s “Le Marteau Sans Maître,” a masterpiece of musical modernism that premiered 70 years ago. It’s not to everyone’s taste, and it doesn’t have to be. But if there’s any point to agree on, it’s that works from the time of “Le Marteau” aren’t contemporary enough to qualify as “the new stuff.”

So why, in the popular imagination, does this style of iconoclastic avant-gardism endure as contemporary music writ large? Especially when the music of today has no definitive sound?

We live in an age with no musical orthodoxy or hegemony. There may be trends, such as explorations of identity through sound, but there is no governing style, or any all-powerful gatekeepers. Missy Mazzoli’s “Dark With Excessive Bright,” an acoustic score influenced by centuries of music history, is just as broadly “contemporary” as Annea Lockwood’s “A Sound Map of the Danube,” a collage made of field recordings.

“There are so many simultaneously existing musical languages,” said Matías Tarnopolsky, president and CEO of the New York Philharmonic, which is presenting two weeks of Boulez programming this month to celebrate his centennial. “Some composers are writing in a way that’s super familiar to classical and Romantic music. Others are very modernist, and others bring in jazz, narrative and elements from their own musical traditions.”

Contemporary music is far from a monolith. But if its reputation is sometimes that of a vegetable to be endured before a 19th-century dessert, that might have something to do with Boulez’s peers, who reigned for decades with a sound that, depending on whom you ask, was either an acquired taste or the stuff to spoil your appetite.

“There is still a lingering knee-jerk reaction to modernism,” said Ara Guzelimian, a former provost and dean of the Juilliard School, who now runs the Ojai Music Festival in California. “But it was self-inflicted by that generation.”

Each major artist from that generation had a personal style (Source: Freepik)

He was describing the generation that, beyond Boulez, also includes Luigi Nono and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who wrote with a style that emerged from the ruins of World War II. Already in thrall to Arnold Schoenberg’s tradition-shattering system of composing in the early 20th century, they now also rejected the Romantic spirit appropriated by the Third Reich. It’s telling that Darmstadt, the city in Germany that would become a hotbed of musical modernism, was mostly destroyed in the war. It needed to be rebuilt, and in these composers’ eyes, so did music.

Each major artist from that generation had a personal style, but there were common traits: serialism, a focus on structure over emotional appeal, an electronic incursion. New extended techniques were introduced. Composition began to thrive in academic spaces.

Boulez was perhaps the most prominent avant-gardist during those years. At the very least, he was one of the most outspoken. He was severe and often damning, which is one thing for an ordinary musician and another for someone who also built institutions like IRCAM and Cité de la Musique in Paris. His opinions, while full of contradictions over time, mattered.

That’s part of what makes his legacy so complicated. As a conductor, Boulez could bring remarkable clarity to the challenging works like those of Second Viennese School composer Anton Webern. But he was uninterested in vast swaths of the repertoire, like Brahms symphonies, at a time when younger musicians were looking up to him and paying close attention.

Composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, who is leading the Boulez performances at the Philharmonic, said in an interview that early in his career, Boulez offered an “attractive” vision of right and wrong, “an ethics of contemporary music.”

“Boulez was like a moral beacon,” he said. “So, in a way, you felt that if you followed him, you would be safe.”

Salonen once conducted a performance of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” that led Boulez to comment wryly, “You almost convinced me about this music.” But Salonen also witnessed Boulez “effectively end” the career of a young composer whose work he didn’t like.

There were, of course, other styles that gained ground in the second half of the 20th century. In the United States especially, Philip Glass was elevating minimalism to the realm of pop culture. By the 1980s, John Adams was emerging as a torchbearer of the orchestral tradition. But with that diversity came a sense that musicians had to pick a side, with Boulez’s cohort or against it, and they were encouraged by avant-gardists who were in the habit of making aesthetics seem like a moral choice.

Few of Boulez’s disciples actually emulated his sound. But they might have carried on his pick-a-side approach to education. Mazzoli said that when she was finishing school two decades ago, academies were still “under the hold” of that mentality, even though the reality was freer, and rich with variety.

The composers who write in the shadow of Boulez’s generation are mostly in Europe. They include Olga Neuwirth and Matthias Pinscher, two artists capable of brilliance; a work like Neuwirth’s decade-old “Masaot/Clocks Without Hands” is a lot to take in casually but rewards repeated listening, even study.

Remarkably, the cliches of the postwar avant-garde’s sound have endured while that sound itself hasn’t. The works of Boulez and his peers are still programmed, but they are hardly repertory staples, and each performance has the air of a special occasion like the Philharmonic’s concerts.

In schools, idioms of that time have been assimilated into education, such that students are as capable of playing “Le Marteau” as Boulez’s contemporaries. And when they perform it, they probably don’t feel like they are making a major statement. “For them,” Salonen said, “Boulez is just like any historical figure.”

If there is a guiding principle now, it’s that music is music. Tarnopolsky, influenced by his college-age children, doesn’t think about genre; Mazzoli, who now teaches, encourages her students to listen to pop hits alongside Elliott Carter and Messiaen.

Boulez, who died in 2016, composed into the new millennium, but the heart of his catalog is a thing of the past. And it’s good for his generation to be treated as history. Now, their works can be presented like any other movement, enriched by context yet standing on their own: Nono’s “Il Canto Sospeso” made better by understanding the politics of resistance, just as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is entwined with the writings of Friedrich Schiller, while both can be appreciated on purely musical terms.

With that, maybe there could be more room in audience’s minds for music that really is of today, which is almost always more welcoming than its reputation. Mazzoli said she thinks constantly when writing music about “how to bring someone in” with a balance of familiarity and surprise. She, gloriously, is just one example of many composers whose works are proof that contemporary music is something to be enjoyed, not endured.