Why do they bother?

I was forced today to hear several hours of programming on BBC3 which comprised: a string quartet by Ludomir Różycki, Grieg’s Incidental music to Sigurd Jorsalfar, Bruckner’s motets, Mendelssohn’s Seven Last Words, Brahms songs from opus 3... and each one worse than the one before. I nearly exploded, when the tenor asked: "My lord, my lord, why hast thou forsaken me?" I wanted to cry out with exasperation "Because you suck God-damn awful, you fool!".

When I was finally able to flee, I switched to Vivace, only to be waylaid Esa-Pekka Salonen's songs (Good God!); then quickly over to PR2 where another modern luminary (Magnus Lindberg) was given after a long-winded introduction regarding his sources of inspiration. This (an equivalent of a classical motto in a modernist poem) should have been my warning; such fancy introductions usually announce lousy work. No good work needs the appeal to its sources: it can stand on its own two feet. Really, if you have a good motto, why bother adding anything to it? Just leave it at that.

Please.

And so, yet again I was astounded by the realization how much really horrible music has been written in the western canon. I was reminded of an entry in one of Kapuscinski’s Lapidaria in which he describes a visit to an airport bookstore somewhere and reports seeing masses upon masses of books he has never heard of by writers he has never heard of. They were all ephemera – books now here but gone tomorrow, pulped and forgotten and replaced by the next year’s crop of equally execrable crap.

Why do these people do it? Why can’t these people do something else with their time – I don't know -- bake bread, design widgets, take walks along the sea, spit and catch? What sort of perverse ambition drives them to waste all that precious time doing this awful awful stuff? Do they not realize how short their lives are and how precious every hour?

I mean, really, listening to the Bruckner I could not help thinking how much time he must have taken just writing out the utterly damnable score; all that time, all that time -- and it was no use, no use at all.