David Matthews SYMPHONY NO. 8 First Performance 17/04/15

[jayne lee wilson]

Roehre extends ahinton's comments (to the effect that all Musics are available now and therefore contemporary) by mentioning the Internet. It's undeniable that a mind-boggling amount of Music is available free at the click of a mouse in ways that would have been unimaginable a quarter of a century ago.

But I don't buy it.

The very same Internet makes available an equally staggering amount of the world's visual Arts - but we don't have visual Artists so keen on revisiting the expressive styles of their grandparents in the way that some composers do. There aren't drip paintings, sculptures of reclining nudes with "holes", multiple screen prints of Madonna. Young visual Artists are much more enthusiastic about discovering their own ways of doing what they do than many of their contemporaries in the Music world.

Kindle and other internet devices have made available novels, poems, and play texts - but there is no equivalent eagerness to reproduce kitchen sink dramas, taller windows or an Alexandrian Quintet from younger writers as there is to look back in hunger amongst the creative choices of some Musicians.

I'm sorry fhg, but isn't this all a bit one-note, one-trick-pony?
I really think you've missed Roehre's point here...(and why should music relate to its past in the same way as the Visual Arts? The way in which Art or Music is stored, carried and "consumed" is different, after all...we don't generally download paintings to an iPhone, or listen to Smooth Classic Poems FM with the washing-up).

Because I could ask you - just how old does a tradition have to be before you would accept an artist reaching back to it as some source, inspiration, or model for "new work"? Evidently you would rule out anything between, say, 50-100 years ago...? Is there a "60-year rule" operating here?

Penderecki, starting from Webern and Boulez, feeling that this tradition could no longer express what he needed, drawing on late-Romantic orchestral styles and imagery, using Silent Night in a piece called the Christmas Symphony...
Max Davies going back much further to plainchant, which led to his development of the "decorated cantus" of the leading symphonic line..
Giles Swayne, also fed up with his Webern-Boulez inheritance, turning to "Bach, Mozart, Fats Waller, Bob Marley, David Bowie..." Then chancing upon African Music and writing CRY...

***

Surely there's a danger that if you seek the "new" and the "original" so fiercely, chase them down to the ends of the earth, you end up in your senate of high hopes, like Cavafy in Waiting for the Barbarians...

http://www.cavafy.com/poems/content.asp?id=119&cat=1

If they never come, maybe you're looking in the wrong direction.

I think Roehre's point is not so much about a "supermarket", more that in 2015, all styles are eternally present, and a given artist may connect with a given musical style or phenomenon at any given time; or it may just erupt into her work. Perhaps more Chance than Necessity. The raw materials for an artwork lie about, instantly accessed & multiplicitous, waiting for that shaping spirit of imagination to find them, copy & paste, remake & remodel...

Or maybe just waiting for a commission, first off. Then a first performance. Then hawking around to find the cash for a recording...

[ahinton]

Among the plethora of good points here,

Because I could ask you - just how old does a tradition have to be before you would accept an artist reaching back to it as some source, inspiration, or model for "new work"? Evidently you would rule out anything between, say, 50-100 years ago...? Is there a "60-year rule" operating here?

strikes a particular chord (which could have any number of notes in it!) and I do not wish to sound entirely frivolous when suggesting that the term should perhaps be 70 years, equivalent to the copyright term. It's a valid question, though.

Penderecki, starting from Webern and Boulez, feeling that this tradition could no longer express what he needed, drawing on late-Romantic orchestral styles and imagery, using Silent Night in a piece called the Christmas Symphony...
Max Davies going back much further to plainchant, which led to his development of the "decorated cantus" of the leading symphonic line..
Giles Swayne, also fed up with his Webern-Boulez inheritance, turning to "Bach, Mozart, Fats Waller, Bob Marley, David Bowie..." Then chancing upon African Music and writing CRY...

Certain purists might call that kind of thing "copping out". And no, I don't, since you ask....

Surely there's a danger that if you seek the "new" and the "original" so fiercely, chase them down to the ends of the earth, you end up in your senate of high hopes, like Cavafy in Waiting for the Barbarians...

http://www.cavafy.com/poems/content.asp?id=119&cat=1

If they never come, maybe you're looking in the wrong direction.

And, as I suggested earlier pace Sorabji, what's oh so modern this week is in danger of becoming oh so passé next week anyway.

I think Roehre's point is not so much about a "supermarket", more that in 2015, all styles are eternally present, and a given artist may connect with a given musical style or phenomenon at any given time; or it may just erupt into her work. Perhaps more Chance than Necessity. The raw materials for an artwork lie about, instantly accessed & multiplicitous, waiting for that shaping spirit of imagination to find them, copy & paste, remake & remodel...

That's true insofar as it goes, of course, but it's also the case that a composer capable of appropriately uniting his/her integrity with his/her technique and imagination will write, as I believe that David Matthews has done, what he/she feels impelled to write in the way that he/she feels motivated to write rather than first saying to him/herself "this is what I think is required of me" or "this is what I think will go down best", still less "this is the order of the day". No supermarket pick-'n'-mix, indeed...

[MrGongGong]

WOMAD and similar "world music" events strike me as more or less synonymous with the latter: acts decontextualised from their sociopolitical milieux and put on western display for magpie pick'n'mix. Maybe not having attended many such events I am misrepresenting what they are about, but I don't think so.

I haven't listened to the Symphony (or any of the others) so really don't feel able to contribute to this interesting thread
BUT

I'm not sure that this is always right.
Having worked with several musicians who regularly play at WOMAD one of the things that is obvious is that they are as eager and interested as any musicians to collaborate and develop their music in different ways. Many performers of non-western musics don't want their music presented as an exotic novelty for the tourists to gawp at.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

why should music relate to its past in the same way as the Visual Arts?

This joins quite a few "why shoulds" on this Thread. I hope you ask yourself this question, Jayne - just as I ask myself why tMusic so often doesn't relate to its present in the same way as the visual Arts. (The "present" in the Matthews' Eighth rather like a pair of hand-knitted socks from an elderly relative; competent, but ill-fitting and not something you remember.)

And it probably isn't wise to talk about others missing the point if you then go on to write

Because I could ask you - just how old does a tradition have to be before you would accept an artist reaching back to it as some source, inspiration, or model for "new work"? Evidently you would rule out anything between, say, 50-100 years ago...? Is there a "60-year rule" operating here?

when the subject isn't "tradition" but one of style - Bach, Bruckner, Schönberg and Lachenmann are all part of one "tradition", but their styles are very different - just ask Barbirollians! And I repeat the challenge I set him - can you name a piece of Music written before 1980 that uses the style/language of sixty years before in the way that Matthews' Eighth Symphony does; that is, in a way that a casual listening to the whole work could identify it as having been written sixty years earlier than it was? Are you suggesting that any of the symphonies of PMD could be confused with Mediaeval Music, or that someone would say after a performance of Webern's Op 21 "Ooh! I so love Isaacs, don't you?"

You seem to have such low expectations of Music, jayne - the disabled child that needs mollycoddling unlike his brother and sister arts who can look after themselves. You also seem to have an image of me sitting alone listening to new Music and being disappointed in it all because of my "fierce" expectations. On the contrary, there are so many Musicians whose work doesn't so much "meet" my expectations as "set" them. Leaving aside composers older than myself (to spare Richard's blushes - and Alistair's, for that matter) there's

Pier-Luigi Billone, Rebecca Saunders, James Saunders, Aaron Cassidy, Liza Lim, Bryn Harrison, Tim McCormack, Evan Johnson, Joanna Baille, Martin Iddon, Richard Glover, Tim Parkinson, Jurg Frey, Radu Malfatti, Sam Sfirri, Katherine Norman, Manfred Werder, Natasha Barrett, Paul Durant, Mary Bellamy, Angharad Davies, Jason Brogen, Taylan Susam, Hector Parra, Antoine Berger, Stefan Thut, Annette Nemath, Michael Pisaro, Jason Brogan, Eva-Maria Houben, Phil Durrant, Jamie Fawcus, Thomas Wenk, Claudia Molitor, Domonic Lash, Stephen Chase ...

... and so on! All very different composers producing very different Music - and I don't claim to enjoy all of it equally greatly - but all with the common aim of finding new ways of saying the new things that they have to say. None of them have been broadcast in the past twelve months - much of what they create won't find a large audience, but they do what they do because they feel the inner compulsion to treat Music as if it were still a healthy vital expressive medium (or set of media), ripe for further exploration, with new, valid and vigorous things to say about the way we live now. That desire to continue finding things out that, regardless of income or promotion - that's what I refer to as "brave"/"courageous" etc - and what I believe to be in the genuine Traditions of Western Classical Musics.

Which is a pretty damn fine corner to have backed myself into, if that's what I've done: the view is breathtaking, the vista inspiring. So, perhaps that's where I'll finish contributing to this Thread - with a real sense of optimism in Music and its future, and a real revelling in the Music I've mentioned - and, with genuine good wishes, leave others to enjoy their own alternative arrangements.

[ahinton]

for those of us who lived in the UK at the time, the policies of the Thatcher governments were the most obvious symptom of these trends

Were they? Or were those trends a symptom of those policies?

This is putting things the wrong way around though

So perhaps they were, then...

as if there were some preexistent set of rules which music must be deemed to obey. As I said before: one "reacts in a certain way to this music, and then (and only then) tries to find some kind of coherent and expressible reason for this reaction."

Indeed - except (at least in this instance), we not only don't all react the same way but also even those of us that do react similarly might well find different "coherent and expressible reasons" for their reactions.

I don't on the other hand see why the immediate availability of so much music needs to affect a composer's choices in the way you describe. Making artistic choices doesn't need to be like wandering around a supermarket.

I don't think that it does "affect a composer's choices" in such a way but what I do think that it might do is dilute the sense of "time and place" that could be ascribable to any invididual available style, process, &c.; this is why I am not persuaded that this, that or the other trend, style or manner is any longer as modernist/avant-garde or nostaligally antediluvian or any points in between that was once deemed to be the case.

[Roehre]

.....
Which is a pretty damn fine corner to have backed myself into, if that's what I've done: the view is breathtaking, the vista inspiring. So, perhaps that's where I'll finish contributing to this Thread - with a real sense of optimism in Music and its future, and a real revelling in the Music I've mentioned - and, with genuine good wishes, leave others to enjoy their own alternative arrangements.

Not in my opinion - as the viewS are breathtaking. But to appreciate the views and the vistas it is necessary not only to reach the summits from which to enjoy them, but also to compare them with the other summits and not to forget the foothills surrounding them, as only by comparison one is able to appreciate those views and vistas......

I personally would regret if you wouldn't contribute here anymore.

[ahinton]

Not in my opinion - as the viewS are breathtaking. But to appreciate the views and the vistas it is necessary not only to reach the summits from which to enjoy them, but also to compare them with the other summits and not to forget the foothills surrounding them, as only by comparison one is able to appreciate those views and vistas......

I personally would regret if you wouldn't contribute here anymore.

So would I - and so, I imagine, would anyone else who's ever read fhg's contributions here!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Erm - with apologies - and thanks for the notes of appreciation, but I really think I've said all that I can say on the topic; I'm not sulking or boycotting the Forum, but I've made clear my thoughts and feelings on the this topic and don't want to keep on repeating myself: I've taken up enough of people's time and attention as it is.

[Serial_Apologist]

I haven't listened to the Symphony (or any of the others) so really don't feel able to contribute to this interesting thread
BUT

I'm not sure that this is always right.
Having worked with several musicians who regularly play at WOMAD one of the things that is obvious is that they are as eager and interested as any musicians to collaborate and develop their music in different ways. Many performers of non-western musics don't want their music presented as an exotic novelty for the tourists to gawp at.

I hadn't intended casting aspersions on any participants at WOMAD-type events, more on what I feel to be ineluctably the character of such events, but on reflection I have to admit that I probably did.

[eighthobstruction]

This joins quite a few "why shoulds" on this Thread. I hope you ask yourself this question, Jayne - just as I ask myself why tMusic so often doesn't relate to its present in the same way as the visual Arts. (The "present" in the Matthews' Eighth rather like a pair of hand-knitted socks from an elderly relative; competent, but ill-fitting and not something you remember.)

And it probably isn't wise to talk about others missing the point if you then go on to write

when the subject isn't "tradition" but one of style - Bach, Bruckner, Schönberg and Lachenmann are all part of one "tradition", but their styles are very different - just ask Barbirollians! And I repeat the challenge I set him - can you name a piece of Music written before 1980 that uses the style/language of sixty years before in the way that Matthews' Eighth Symphony does; that is, in a way that a casual listening to the whole work could identify it as having been written sixty years earlier than it was? Are you suggesting that any of the symphonies of PMD could be confused with Mediaeval Music, or that someone would say after a performance of Webern's Op 21 "Ooh! I so love Isaacs, don't you?"

You seem to have such low expectations of Music, jayne - the disabled child that needs mollycoddling unlike his brother and sister arts who can look after themselves. You also seem to have an image of me sitting alone listening to new Music and being disappointed in it all because of my "fierce" expectations. On the contrary, there are so many Musicians whose work doesn't so much "meet" my expectations as "set" them. Leaving aside composers older than myself (to spare Richard's blushes - and Alistair's, for that matter) there's

Pier-Luigi Billone, Rebecca Saunders, James Saunders, Aaron Cassidy, Liza Lim, Bryn Harrison, Tim McCormack, Evan Johnson, Joanna Baille, Martin Iddon, Richard Glover, Tim Parkinson, Jurg Frey, Radu Malfatti, Sam Sfirri, Katherine Norman, Manfred Werder, Natasha Barrett, Paul Durant, Mary Bellamy, Angharad Davies, Jason Brogen, Taylan Susam, Hector Parra, Antoine Berger, Stefan Thut, Annette Nemath, Michael Pisaro, Jason Brogan, Eva-Maria Houben, Phil Durrant, Jamie Fawcus, Thomas Wenk, Claudia Molitor, Domonic Lash, Stephen Chase ...

... and so on! All very different composers producing very different Music - and I don't claim to enjoy all of it equally greatly - but all with the common aim of finding new ways of saying the new things that they have to say. None of them have been broadcast in the past twelve months - much of what they create won't find a large audience, but they do what they do because they feel the inner compulsion to treat Music as if it were still a healthy vital expressive medium (or set of media), ripe for further exploration, with new, valid and vigorous things to say about the way we live now. That desire to continue finding things out that, regardless of income or promotion - that's what I refer to as "brave"/"courageous" etc - and what I believe to be in the genuine Traditions of Western Classical Musics.

Which is a pretty damn fine corner to have backed myself into, if that's what I've done: the view is breathtaking, the vista inspiring. So, perhaps that's where I'll finish contributing to this Thread - with a real sense of optimism in Music and its future, and a real revelling in the Music I've mentioned - and, with genuine good wishes, leave others to enjoy their own alternative arrangements.

....brilliant

[MrGongGong]

I hadn't intended casting aspersions on any participants at WOMAD-type events, more on what I feel to be ineluctably the character of such events, but on reflection I have to admit that I probably did.

Ok
I guess there are interesting things around how the "traditions" of music are presented and become inspirations for other works.
I'm always saddened when I encounter 12 year old composers who's music sounds like pastiche Brahms even if its very good pastiche (not that i'm suggesting that the symphony I haven't heard is pastiche).

[french frank]

Many performers of non-western musics don't want their music presented as an exotic novelty for the tourists to gawp at.

I think that sometimes people overlook the fact that music written by past generations does have a validity of its own. That's why some musicians choose to work in the HIPP tradition: they want to reproduce an 'authentic' performance, not a contemporary interpretation by people who think it's 'their' music. It isn't a novelty: it's centuries old. Novelty is the new stuff.

[Richard Barrett]

they want to reproduce an 'authentic' performance, not a contemporary interpretation

Now that is a can of worms to be sure. What does "authentic" mean? Different things to different HIPPsters - and I think the trend among them is in fact not to use such a loaded term for what they do... because what they are doing is creating a contemporary interpretation. I'm in the midst of listening through all of JE Gardiner's live Bach cantata recordings - the instruments are mostly those that Bach would have been familiar with, but both the vocal soloists and the chorus (if indeed there was one at all in Bach's performances) are in many ways quite different, and the performances are certainly not unaffected at all by the history of composition and interpretation between the 18th century and the beginning of the 21st. JEG's performances of Bach are to my mind more "contemporary" than David Matthews' symphony. But that's another discussion. Like FG, I think I've said all I have to say on this thread. (A nation breathes a collective sigh of relief.)

[Serial_Apologist]

I think that sometimes people overlook the fact that music written by past generations does have a validity of its own. That's why some musicians choose to work in the HIPP tradition: they want to reproduce an 'authentic' performance, not a contemporary interpretation by people who think it's 'their' music. It isn't a novelty: it's centuries old. Novelty is the new stuff.

But isn't this two-edged - rather like William Morris's well-intentioned craft-conserving attempt to baulk at history in the name of recreating forms of non-alienated labour by sidestepping the possibilities afforded by the new technology of his time? In a curatorial way it might well be instructive to recreate an idealised past seen through rose-tinted spectacles, but much as those attending performances of the John (son of Glen) Miller Band on Brighton Pier wearing WW2 uniforms and demob suits, how much does HIPP-correctness really illuminate the world of today? However performed, music of whatever period is still being made the possession of those performing it - even only for the duration.

[clive heath]

I was asked directly in a post from fhg ( if I may, sir) whether I had actually listened to the Matthews. Pressures of life have kept me away from this thread for a while but now I have indeed listened to all of the symphony and it was rewarding enough for me to consider hearing a live performance of the 7th given here in West London next weekend together with the Khachaturian piano concerto.
I was also asked to take note of the final paras of #145 which I have duly done. The sentiments expressed there do not alter my view that "cutting a sorry figure..." reads like an Ad Hominem attack.
I have also listened to a small part of a quartet by your good self for contrast. In the early 60s I attended "Invitation Concerts" in BBC Maida Vale studios and sometimes there were string quartets and sometimes the music was not Mozart , Beethoven etc. but was modern. So you can imagine that to my untutored ear there was a sense of "I've been here before". How many years is it ? 50 ish?