I want to kick this off with this video from composer David Bruce:
I think he makes some fair points, but I'm not really in agreement. My course as a composer has been wildly unconventional--and not in the usual way where you start off as a punk rock guitarist and then move to New York and compose avant-garde music from Brooklyn. My main career was as a performer and sometimes I specialized in contemporary music and sometimes I avoided it, but I didn't compose very much. Then, after I retired as a performer I took up composing seriously.
I also moved to Mexico and I have to say the odds of me starting a musical conversation with audiences here are vanishingly small. Same for Canada, if I still lived there. I'm pretty sure Canadians have almost no interest in contemporary music of any variety (except perhaps in Quebec). My misfortune is to have received the bulk of my musical education in Spain, Austria and Quebec. So I really have a European sensibility. If I lived in Europe, perhaps I could have a musical conversation with audiences there. But, honestly, that's really not my aim. If someone wants to listen to my music, I am gratified, but I don't write it for that end.
The only terms on which I can be musically creative are if there really is no commercial aspect to it.
Comments?
2 comments:
I'd say a lot depends on what kinds of conversations we're potentially talking about and what kinds of communities are involved. I haven't been hugely active in person in the new music scene in Seattle, although I have tried to semi-regularly go to composer salons and keep track of local music. The covid-19 situation has substantially altered that. I do, however, try to post music online so that I'm making some contribution, however small, to an online musical scene.
But I've managed to interact with you, Bryan, and also John Borstlap and Ethan Hein and Kyle Gann has commented on a couple of my posts. The kinds of conversations and exchanges may be intermittent or regular but I am glad they can happen. Because I'm not situated to do a lot of in-person stuff or travel online conversations still count.
One of my passions, as regular readers of my blog will know, is exploring theoretical and practical ways to ameliorate and even eliminate the conceptual boundaries academics have erected between "classical" music and "popular" styles. I think that a synthesis of Haydn and John Lee Hooker is both feasible and desirable. I see Ethan just had a post about "Boogie Chillin" I'm going to have to go read soon since that's one of my favorite blues songs. My finding over the last twenty-five years is that people on the pop and classical sides tend to balkanize along their respective camps and what interests me is restoring a synergistic exchange between styles and traditions where academics don't seem to want that. I know John Borstlap falls back on the old "Ravel elevated blues materials to something `more'" but that, to me, concedes the point I've been making that composers who make lasting contributions to classical music have not completely cordoned themselves off from popular, vernacular and "lowbrow" styles. Pauline Fairclough's recent biography on Shostakovich mentions in a bit more than just passing that musicologists have not paid enough attention to how Shostakovich's works in film music influenced or paved the way for some innovations in his concert works. I'm just getting into that bio now and it's looking to be a short and breezy but informative read.
My gut reaction has been that since the emergence of the commercially recorded music industries "pop" and "classical" have balkanized into ruts that I hope musicians across all the genres can push back against by promoting conversations across forms, styles and traditions. I don't sense that that's a problem with the musicians themselves, but it can seem as though academics can actually and actively get in the way of such exchanges if they double down on paradigms of explication. If the new music scenes post John Cage keep exploring things only within the Cage vein then, well, I've got better things to do with my time. I enjoy the prepared piano pieces but a lot of where Cage and Stockhausen went just doesn't interest me (even if I was briefly tempted to get that album that JohN Cage and Sun Ra did together out of curiosity).
If the audience conversations involve discussing where the best pastry and wine shops are then I think it can have a lasting and beautiful meaning to it.
Back in the day the audience talked amongst themselves while playing cards. Was that so bad? Maybe that's the audience you are looking for Bryan?
if I were to seek an audience I would only be interested in one that pays cash I'm afraid. My time is valuable to me.
Leaving audiences aside as we all did for 16 months I think art is about communication in principle. So one's art should try to communicate something to someone else, whoever that might be. There is a discipline in that which would be lacking in diary art.
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