a little depressing, perhaps.......

I have been trying, over many years, to put together some kind of coherent understanding of music, composition, life, etc., and have never been able to do so.  Somehow, there is something elusive happening.

I believe I have completely grasped one important concept:  to be an interesting composer, first you have to be an interesting musician; to be an interesting musician, first you have to be an interesting human being.  Composition (all art, for that matter,) is a by-product of life.  You need a life to create art.

Composition, solitary as it is as an act, is inextricably interwoven with the world around it.  Much as some of us deny it, when the work is going well, life seems better, and when the work is going badly, life seems difficult.  As I have gotten older, this has become less and less true, but there is still a strong element of it present in my life.

But here is where it gets complicated.

It really doesn't matter whether or not the work is going well or badly.  It really doesn't matter whether or not our lives seem better or worse because of our work.  It really doesn't matter what we think or say about music, what we sacrifice to or gain from our work, or even whether or not we are "successful".

"Music" is only three things:  writing music, performing music, and listening to music.  Everything else "about" music is not actually music itself.  Whether or not the music we write is any good is completely beyond the control of any external reasoning, thinking, planning, expectation, philosophy, or technical control.  You can write music with any agenda you wish to engage.  But there is absolutely no relationship between your agenda and the quality of the music you write.  Composers with agendas (if you think about it, almost exclusively a phenomenon of the 20th and 21st centuries) have written some very good music and some very bad music.  Composers with agendas have come and gone; some have made lasting statements, and most have vanished completely into the mists of time.  Just like composers without agendas.

Rich composers have written some great music, and poor composers have written some great music.  Composers who lived a long time have written some great music, and composers who died young have written some great music.  Debauchers and saints, arrogant bastards and generous mentors, starving artistes and fat cats, all have written both great and bad music.

I have seen many composers obsess over the importance of their work.  They lose sight of the fact that the process is more important than the product for them.  Composition ceases to be about music, and becomes about some kind of agenda, or, worse, an act of high vanity.  The next performance, huge applause at the end of the work, money, a recording, all become more important than the music itself.  Proving that their aesthetic is the "one true" aesthetic, proving that they are right and everyone else is wrong, proving that they and they alone have the secret of music, these are all agendas that have nothing whatsoever to do with music.  Music is wordless.

I know of one composer (long gone) who refused to teach or perform, because it compromised his work as a composer.  He took his wife with him on his lifelong voyage.  They died in absolute poverty.  His music has vanished.  I have seen his name once in the last 10 years.  I wonder if that would have been enough for him?

Stravinsky, Part 2

It is a fact that it takes a long time to assess the importance of any composer.  We are too often blinded by our enthusiasm for a contemporary composer, and assume that they are more important than they actually are.  For example, I am completely convinced that Donatoni will be be remembered as one of the greatest composers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, but to honest, I can't really see beyond my own enthusiasm.  I can make an educated guess, but only history can judge.

Stravinsky occupies a strange place in history.  There is absolutely no question about The Rite of Spring:  it is one of the cornerstones of music, a turning point in music history, and a masterpiece from beginning to end.  But remarkably, our enthusiasm for the Rite has completely subverted any kind of objective assessment of the rest of Stravinsky's work.  I read a series of comments about Stravinsky lately from some of my colleagues, and absolutely every comment seems actually to be about the Rite:  "exciting music", "changed music forever", "rhythmically revolutionary."  Yes, some of these comments apply to other works by him, but really, when we talk about Stravinsky, aren't we really talking about the Rite?

I recently tuned in to his Symphony in E flat major, a work he wrote when he was quite young.  I was impressed with how completely he had absorbed Rimsky's influence, and I was dazzled, as always, with the orchestration, although in the Symphony what is dazzling about the orchestration is how textbook perfect it is.  But the work is not imaginative.

I like much of the Firebird.  I am largely indifferent, even slightly hostile towards Petroushka, although many people I respect very much consider it to be his best work.  From the post-Rite years, I adore the Octet, I enjoy L'Histoire in suite form, I like the Violin Concerto, and I worship the Symphony in C.  The first movement of the Symphony in Three Movements is one of the finest pieces of music written in the 20th Century.  The second and third movements are simply awful.  The ending is genuinely sleazy.

I conducted the Piano Concerto with a well known soloist several years ago.  He opined that no one plays it because it is so difficult.  I pointed out that no one plays it because it is terrible music.  Terrible, terrible music.

The Septet is a genuine abomination.  The much-touted serial works are just bad, with the exception of the Requiem Canticles and The Owl and the Pussycat, where the old Stravinsky shines through.  No one can tell me that Movements for Piano and Orchestra is good music.  It isn't.

And yet, we have a Stravinsky cult.  A few years ago, it became fashionable among European new music types to assert that serial Stravinsky was music of the highest order, better than his early music.  Nonsense.  In fact, I challenge the very notion that Stravinsky was one of the great composers of the 20th century.  Certain works of his are undisputed masterworks, and his influence was and is tremendous, but as a composer, I strongly suspect that most of his work, once the dust has settled, will disappear.  This is in contrast to the composers he is most often compared to, Bartok and Prokofiev, whose music is now so deeply woven into standard repertoire that it is impossible to imagine concert programming without it.  Think about it:  what Stravinsky do we actually hear regularly on orchestra concerts-- or for that matter, on any kind of concert?  The Rite, The Firebird, sometimes Petroushka.  Maybe the Symphony in C or the Symphony in 3.  Maybe, maybe the Violin Concerto.  Compare that to the regular appearance of Prokofiev concertos and symphonies, and Bartok concertos and the Concerto for Orchestra, not to mention the quartets.

Stravinsky asserted that he was a journeyman, taking work as it became available, doing the job as well as he could.  I believe this is a perfect assessment of him.  That he was capable of greatness is undeniable, although it seems to me that most of the greatness is early in his career.  But his catalogue is such a bizarre mixed bag that a complete assessment of his achievement seems to me to be impossible.

Time will tell.

Expect the unexpected

For reasons too difficult to explain, I have found myself lately listening keenly to a wide variety of music by composers who are virtually known today.  Among others, I have heard substantial works by Gustav Helsted (Danish, 1857-1954), Hakon Borreson (Danish, 1876-1954), Joseph Holbrooke (English, 1978-1958), Hamilton Harty (Irish, 1879-1941), Alexander Goedicke (Russian, 1877-1957), Hugo Alfven (Swedish, 1872-1960), and a number of others, all of whom span the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

It was an intriguing era.  These composers were schooled in high Romanticism, and probably never imagined where music would go in their lifetimes.  Almost without exception, they ignored the innovations swirling around them, and continued to pursue their musical ideals as they had imagined them in their youth.  Goedicke adapted to Soviet Realism when he had to, but remained close to his Romantic ideals.

I am astonished at the craft.  Not one of these composers was anything less than highly accomplished technically.  I would be eternally proud if any of my students could produce music as technically confident and well formed as these gentlemen.  Their grasp of traditional forms, their expertise at orchestration, their confidence with the control of their material, all these are beyond question.

And yet they are all but forgotten.  Most of the recordings are very second rate (except Alfven, who is enjoying something of a comeback.)  Live performances are fairly rare.

Is the music bad?  No, definitely not.

Is the music good?

I honestly don't know anymore.  There's no question that there isn't a Beethoven symphony in this group.  There's no question that there are some very bad choices about content-- silly dances, overwrought adagios, showpiece finales without any actual material, etc.  But I never, at any point, felt compelled to stop the music and go on to something else.  I sat and listened respectfully to several large works, and, honestly, I never lost interest.  But does that make it good?

It occurred to me that we need to try programming some of this stuff again.  Audiences are tired of the tried and true.  And yet, when we try to programme something off the beaten path, ticket sales dry up.  Marketing divisions run screaming from this kind of repertoire.  There is nothing in this music that a regular subscription audience would find difficult, except for its unfamiliarity.  A chamber music series could comfortably programme music by these composers, tucked in safely between more familiar works, but an orchestra would have to be very brave to try it.

When I was young, there were no recordings of anything other than the most famous works.  When the CD boom happened, the market quickly saturated with Beethoven 7's, and the labels began to look towards the less familiar.  Works that I had heard about but never heard suddenly got recorded.  Now, the catalogue is bursting at the seams with the unfamiliar.

Can this ever happen in live concerts?   Can we re-vitalize concert going with the unfamiliar?  I am listening as I write to Hugo Alfven's 4th Symphony.  I am enjoying it.  Most of my composer colleagues would probably call it a little obvious, but that doesn't bother me.  Wouldn't a subscription audience enjoy it too?  While I never grow tired of Beethoven 7, I need to hear something fresh once in a while, and not just new music.

Can we reinvent ourselves?  Can we recapture concert audiences with a fresh mix of new work, unfamiliar older work, and the warhorses?  It's worth a try.

Stravinsky, Part 1

I have a special problem with Stravinsky.  It has two parts.  In this posting, I want to talk a little about how annoying it has become to hear people quoting the balderdash that Stravinsky wrote.

It is, at best, dangerous to take too seriously what composers say about their own work.  I fully grasp the irony of saying that on a blog about music.  But some composers are more consistent in their writings than others.  Debussy, for example, was quite focused and articulate in his writing.  The writings of Tchaikovsky, almost unknown, are in fact incredibly perspicacious.  Busoni and Ives were thoughtful and even visionary.

The writings of Stravinsky are genuinely crap.  Stravinsky was, more than most, a product of his time.  A quick glance at his work confirms that he essentially went where the wind blew.  He reflects every major "ism" of the 20th century.  I am not saying he was not a great composer (more on that in Part 2.)  I am not saying that The Rite of Spring didn't change music forever, in as profound a way as the Eroica Symphony.  I am simply saying that, as a result of his need to endlessly re-invent himself, he embraced many approaches to making music, some of which were mutually exclusive.

This is not a crime.  So he started by hating 12-tone music and ended up writing it-- so what?  He changed his mind.  He had a right to change his mind.  He was an artist.

The problem is that, at every later stage of his development, he seemed compelled to write about what he was doing.  So while his musical approach changed, his writings got published and remained constant.  People now quote things he wrote in mid-career which completely contradict the things he did in later career.

And here's the thing that really bothers me:  I strongly suspect he wrote deliberately inflammatory things entirely for purpose of staying in the headlines.  Think about it:  he enraged the world with the Rite, and never achieved the same public impact again.  He was in his 30s when the Rite was premiered.  It can't be a coincidence that he didn't really start writing about music until much later in his career, when he had already become a "grand old man".  (He was over 60 when he wrote The Poetics of Music, and was already writing some of the least interesting music he ever wrote.)

I really can't stand having one more person say to me "Stravinsky said that his pieces were really just objects", or "Stravinsky said that music can never really express anything".  Stravinsky said a lot of things.  Put down the writings, and listen to the music.  It will tell you all you need to know.

experimentation and integration

My own work comes directly from tradition.  I value the same things Beethoven and Mozart did-- clarity of form, dynamic harmony, counterpoint, melody (more or less), and a general commitment to the fullness of human experience.  I have, from time to time, experimented in works which do not embrace one or more of these qualities, but I return to them as "first principles".

There are those who seem unable to grasp that, despite these fundamental values, I am in great harmony with the music of Webern, the post-WW2 modernists, the conceptual art of the 50s, the high avant-garde of the 60s, the unbridled explosion of creativity in the 70s, the amazing accomplishments of Feldman and his followers, pattern music, crossover, post-modernism, New Complexity, New Age, meta-modernism, and almost every other stand of musical development in the last 70 years.  All of these musics make up music.  Each has its place.  I can name many examples of each approach which I not only respect and admire, but like and listen to.  I have programmed, performed, and recorded music written with virtually every one of these approaches.

Why are the exponents of so many of these artistic points of view so adamant that they must be exclusive?  They are not.  I won't, in this posting, go into the Freudian problem of insecure artists who need to band together to make sure they're right, but I will say that human beings in general seem to need not only to believe, but to convert, apparently to reassure themselves that they are doing the right thing.  This is truly unfortunate, because it weakens the art of music, which is a rich and variegated human experience.

I find it funny that I am often cast in a position where I am defending the work of someone who is absolutely certain I hate not only their music, but their point of view, and their own self personally.  Even more amusing to me is that many of these composers are convinced that I hate anything that does not sound like my own music.  Most of them would be surprised to learn that I actually largely agree with many of their tenets, but that I have no interest in applying them in a "pure" form.  Experimentation is vital to any art.  But after the experiment is concluded, a lesson must be learned.  That lesson is central to my artistic process.

I agree absolutely that music must be contemporary to be relevant.  Busoni actually first espoused this.  But what many composers seem to want is music that is ostentatiously, flamboyantly, and, frankly, rather stupidly "contemporary", a music which is so obvious that it ends up lacking the power to sustain anyone's interest except as an experiment.  I agree absolutely that the point of the art must be to move forward, and that moving backwards is not the real job of the artist.  But composers cannot agree on what this actually means.
 
I also believe that one cannot judge a composer's output on the basis of his or her lightest works.  We don't remember Beethoven for "Wellington's Victory" or the Equali for 4 Trombones.  And by the way, the finest composers of any era have light works in their output-- look at Ligeti's "Hungarian Rock" for harpsichord, for example.  Most composers have music in their output which does not push the art forward.  I have several works which are light and occasional, and they serve their purpose.  I would not disparage them, as many of them are, I think, rather well written.  But I point to works like my Symphonies and Concertos as works in which I am attempting to move the art forward in my own way.

And what is that way?  I hope I am integrating contemporary experience into a traditional framework.  Not obviously, not heavy-handedly, but in the details.  It is fascinating to look at Turandot by Puccini or several works by late Strauss or early Britten and find the subtle indication that these essentially Romantic composers were actually listening very carefully to Schoenberg, Bartok, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky, among others.

Somewhere, there is a scientist who is working on a new rubber-like compound.  It is, let us speculate, a compound which is sourced eco-responsibly, inexpensive, stronger than rubber, with excellent heat dissipation, a high degree of flexibility at low temperatures, and it can heal itself when it is cut.  Somewhere, there is a company manufacturing auto tires who could take this substance and make a new and better tire.  Somewhere, there is an scientist who has created a metal that is lightweight, completely rigid but flexible enough to withstand concussions, easily formed and with a "memory" which makes it return to its original shape.  Somewhere, there is a wheel manufacturer who can take this metal and make an almost indestructible lightweight wheel for an auto.  Somewhere, there is an auto designer who will take the tires and the wheels, along with the thousands of other developments born of thousands of experiments, and make a Porsche.

This is music for me.  Every strand of experimentation yields something.  But the highest accomplishment of a composer is to take these thousands of strands and make a coherent statement from them.  Not all of them will work in every piece.  Not all of them will be appropriate for every composer.  But each of these strands reflects a unique and different kind of human experience.  To be able to find a cogent way to weave them together would be a high accomplishment.  It would yield a work which truly reflects contemporary experience in all its complexity.  We live in a far more complex world than Mozart.  Art should not always shut out where we are as a species and reflect only one small part of what we are.  Of course, there are works where a narrow range would be acceptable, and even desirable, but for me, the goal should be a more human art, a more complete art.  Narrowly focused works are like experiments, in which we learn what that particular approach is capable of, but my goal is to take what is learned from these works and put them into a larger perspective.  Moving art forward, for me, means expanding our ability to make art reflect everything that we are.  This is the job of the artist.

...no, really......

I recently had the opportunity to see comments from a commissioning jury regarding a grant that was denied (not for me-- an incensed colleague forwarded them.)

- Over all, the jury was supportive of the [commissioning ensemble].
- They felt the support materials for this application were not up to the artistic quality they are looking for.
- They agree that Mr. X is an accomplished composer, however they feel he is limited to certain gestural language. His music is very reminiscent of film music.
- music is “well done, but what is the urgency for more music like this?” “what is the need or urgency for this new piece”
- “what is going to be new in this music”
- Great soloist.  The soloist could be taking more of a risk and it feels like the music would not be giving her that opportunity.
- The jury was not critical of the composer’s music but made the decision on the artistic assessment.
- Next time the project description can outline more of the risks, edge, what’s new about the project.

Does anyone in 2013 actually say "what is going to be new in this music" anymore?  Does anyone really still believe that unless music is completely lacking in direction and discourse it sounds like "film" music?  Do "artists" on juries really feel that they have the right to tell a soloist that they should be "taking more of a risk"?  Are there really composers out there who genuinely believe that there is something "new" about their own projects?

Musicians are the stupidest professionals.  If doctors or lawyers behaved the way we do, we would all be dead or in jail.

Many years ago, John Weinzweig told me something I have never forgotten:  the jury system stinks-- but it's the best we can do.

The Problem of Older Pieces

Recently, some good friends programmed a work of mine from more than 10 years ago and asked me to come to the concert.  I would normally say no out of hand, but because they were friends, I hemmed and hawed, and finally, when the day arrived, I just didn't go.  In fairness to me, I warned them that unless they heard from me, I wouldn't be there, but still, they were miffed.

I can't stand listening to old pieces.  There is a great deal of truth to the old cliché that your older works are actually works by a different composer.  I am not the person I was when I wrote my String Trio (which gets played a great deal) at the age of 16.  Commenting on it, introducing it from the stage, coaching it-- I might just as well be commenting on, introducing, or coaching a work by Beethoven or Shostakovich.  This music has nothing to do with me anymore.

I have observed with time that works of music have a life of their own.  It's another cliché to say that they are like children, but they are.  At some point, if a piece has been performed a few times, the composer has to let it go.  A piece of music has a karma which is distinct from the karma of the composer.  It will make its way.  Not only does the composer not have the responsibility to follow it, the composer does not have the right to claim it as his or her own anymore.  A successful piece becomes the property of something bigger, a biosphere of music.  Composers who can't let go become a liability.  There is only one way to play a bad piece.  There are many ways to play a good piece.  (I was never upset by the "early music" movement, because a masterpiece like Beethoven 7 can withstand performances by both Leonard Bernstein and Roger Norrington.)  A composer who does not believe his or her music can be interpreted in multiple ways has no faith in their work.

I still attend some performances of older works, but only rarely.  In fact, I am getting painfully close to avoiding even premieres, although that is for a different reason-- I can never hear anything good in a premiere, just all the bad things.

In the end, composing is process, not result.  Composition is personal.  The product is public.