Jazz Monthly's March 1970 issue had a passionate rebuttal of an article by a Mr Peterson, who believed 'serious' music had ended fifty years previously. Clearly, people still found New Music ugly in 1970. Not just Avant-Garde and Free jazz, but atonal classical music also. At least Mr Peterson thought so. PROGRESSIVE ABSORPTIONS / TONY SELINA THE STUPIDITY which has gripped serious music. That phrase has echoed down through the auditoriums of the ages. I‘d give a kreutzer if it would only end! said one critic listening to that first, enormous, movement of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, with its climactic grinding discord, those six fortissimo beats from the whole orchestra, the sheer power of the thing: all of which must have quite disturbed an audience nurtured on the classical purity of Haydn and Mozart. Had it been socially acceptable, some would probably have walked out: perhaps some did. But it had to be done, otherwise European music would have run itself into the
Jamo Spingal