A Composer's Manifesto

I've been reading a large collection of theories of art which comprises a great number of artist's manifestoes. This has led me to wonder just what I might write that would constitute a manifesto: what it is that I am trying to do when I compose music. As I have no discernible public career as a composer--or a very, very tiny one--I believe I can speak with complete honesty. If anyone is in a similar boat, it might be of some use. So here goes.

I have to give a little background: I was born and lived my early life in the far north of Canada, an area sometimes described as "taiga." We lived in quite a number of very small towns and even in the wilderness itself. In the farthest north of these if you dug down ten or so feet at the end of the brief summer, late August, you would find the ground still frozen--permafrost. So while I was very aware of nature, it was not until we moved to Vancouver Island in my mid teens that I encountered something you might call "culture." The one exception to this was my mother, who was a country fiddler.

Living in the relatively well-populated west coast of Canada I encountered popular music first, then later classical music (in the form of old, scratchy LPs) and finally, Asian culture (in the local library) and Asian music (at the listening library of the university). I only mention things that had an impact or influence. So my initial model of a composer was derived from reading the biographies of people like Beethoven, Schoenberg and John Cage. Later I read a large number of biographies and listened to many hours of music by these and many other composers, but these were the ones I encountered first. Thinking back, I think the first composer I really loved was Claude Debussy.

While I was playing popular music I wrote a lot of songs, probably the main inspiration for these was Bob Dylan. Later, when I became a classical guitarist, my early attempts at composition were influenced by poetry as much as music. Later people like Ligeti and Steve Reich were important. Many years later, after I had retired as a performer, I again returned to poetry as an inspiration and my first serious attempt at composition was a series of songs. Here is one, setting a poem by John Donne:

And another, on a poem by Li Po:

As you can hear, the musical "language" is very different and in a relationship with the text.

Moving to instrumental music, the problem of style was very difficult for me. Here is something manifesto-like: what I want to do is create something with a real, individual character, because that is, for me, a crucial element for something to be an artwork. It doesn't have to be in the current popular style (whether that be serialism or ethnic-derived or ecologically correct), it doesn't have to be initially well liked, it doesn't have to express my inner suffering or whatever--it just has to have a real aesthetic character because that is what I hear when I listen to music I admire. Whether it is Bach, Berg or Steve Reich, what I hear is an artwork with a real, individual character. I would say a characteristic beauty, but as we all know, "beauty" is impossible to define, besides,  aesthetic beauty usually contains elements of ugliness as contrast. Dissonance is essential for us to hear consonance.

So where I am now, is in the position of taking tiny hints from things I admire (and trying to conceal their origin!), trying to allow some influences to inspire other ideas and finally, trying to hew out something that has real character. Not many successes amid quite a few failures, but this piece for violin and guitar is not altogether bad (the reference there is to a comment Beethoven made about one of his finest pieces: he said it was "not altogether lacking in fantasy..."):

So there you go.