My new piece - Symphonic Suite [WIP]

[teamsaint]

Yes, they are; but, in the case you offer, it's a creative response to an existing artefact (A Shakespeare play). Shakespeare didn't write his texts in ancient Greek, nor did he observe "the Unities" - they were redundant for his expressive/communicative needs. Similarly today it would be risible if someone wrote a play in 17th Century English using iambic pentameters and an assumption of the cultural (scientific and religious) values of that time.

Creators (including the responsive creatives you mention) can only reflect the cultural concerns of the times in which they live critically (in the full sense of that word) by formulating new means of expression and communication to reflect what is perceived to be new in their times. This has ever been the case - it is only today that such a statement could be considered provocatively controversial.

Isn't this exactly what musicians like those in The Imagined Village are doing? But the musical basis of their work is rooted very firmly in the deep past.
At any rate, they are likely perceived by their audience as " formulating a new means of expression"',( in their case by absorbtion of musical ideas from other cultures) at the very least for them, and for their time. That is surely the intention of the creators too?
And some of their work might assume some virtue in the cultural values of the past, through use of some of its idioms, whilst also being seen as culturally relevant now?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

.. but in the meantime in what sense was it ridiculous of me to write this?

http://youtu.be/wZeUpHkUr8Y

Well, in the sense that Debussy had already done it, and better (more economically, with more elusive phrasing and more interesting instrumental, structural and harmonic features). This is no insult - Debussy does most things better than most composers, but I cannot hear the point of producing work like this. Where are you in this piece? What is there to identify the piece as a work of its time? And, more to the point, what is there that also makes it "timeless" (in the way that Debussy's Music is) rather than referring to an identifiable earlier style? Why should anyone listen to this instead of the Debussy Sonate? What pleasure is here that isn't in the Debussy?

Listening to this piece, you wouldn't believe that yours was written as long after it as it was written after the Debussy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNPAD-yKJQ0

Stravinsky, reinventing beauty.

[Barbirollians]

What about it? What do you think Neoclassicism is? Is there any work that can be so described that actually uses the harmonic and melodic style of Music written in the Classical and pre-Classical eras?


Thank you for describing me as a nobody: I love you, too. Do you really describe the Music of Richard Glover as "squeaky door Music" (or Different Trains for that matter)? The point is not to create Music that sounds like Ferneyhough or Lachenmann or Sciarrino or Barrett - it's that we are living at a time when "Music originating from the early twentieth century [a hindred years ago] still works as contemporary Music" as Ian so well put it. For the first time in history, an anachronistic Musical style is preferred by many to genuine exploration and development of the medium. I can only hear ossification in such an attitude (yes, it is, BeefO) - there is plenty of Music from the early Twentieth Century that isn't performed regularly (Schreker, Zemlinsky, Magnard, Ropartz) - why accept imitations if you don't like the genuinely new?

The clue is in the word "everyone " . What is "genuinely new " by the way ? Or genuine exploration and development of the medium - where is the starting point and who decides what it should be ? Why say is 1960 more valid than 1920.

I do not doubt that the history of music and all our lives have been enriched by its progression but where is it going to go ? Is only Music that sounds like Ferneyhough or Lachenmann or Sciarrino or Barrett acceptable when to some ears it may seem like a hideous dead end appreciated by an ever diminishing number .

[Richard Barrett]

to some ears it may seem like a hideous dead end appreciated by an ever diminishing number

You say the nicest things. But they don't make much sense. There's no "starting point" of this "exploration and development of the medium". (As a wise person said, there's more tradition in Webern's op.9 than in Prokofiev's "Classical" Symphony.) And what do your ears know about how many people appreciate some music or other? And "where is it going to go?" - I wonder that you ask this question since you clearly have no wish to find out.

[Ian]

Why should anyone listen to this instead of the Debussy Sonate?

There is absolutely no reason why anyone should listen to this instead of the Debussy. What the many people who have performed this tend to do though is play it as well as the Debussy (and the Bax for that matter)

Have you considered asking yourself why people perform it - rather than focus on reasons why you think they shouldn't?

[Barbirollians]

You say the nicest things. But they don't make much sense. There's no "starting point" of this "exploration and development of the medium". (As a wise person said, there's more tradition in Webern's op.9 than in Prokofiev's "Classical" Symphony.) And what do your ears know about how many people appreciate some music or other? And "where is it going to go?" - I wonder that you ask this question since you clearly have no wish to find out.

With respect , few posts are less illuminating than this one . It appears merely to be saying unless you agree with me you must be wrong . It is fhgl who used those terms I am looking for an explanation of them .

[Richard Barrett]

I don't think anyone has tried to claim that it "shouldn't" be played, or that it "shouldn't" be listened to, or that it "shouldn't" have been written. Your answer to fg's questions, which doesn't answer them at all really, seems to imply that its raison d'être is to exploit a relative lack of repertoire for this instrumentation. Although actually there are something like 200 pieces in existence for flute, viola and harp.

[Richard Barrett]

With respect

Sorry, Barbirollians, but respect is what you don't have. Your question about "1960 or 1920" makes no sense since indeed there is no starting point, or to put it another way, every present moment is a starting point. Secondly you say that some music is "appreciated by an ever-diminishing number" and it's your ears that tell you this. I know of no mechanism by which this is possible. So yes I am saying you're wrong, not because you disagree with me but because these statements are meaningless.

[Ian]

I don't think anyone has tried to claim that it "shouldn't" be played, or that it "shouldn't" be listened to, or that it "shouldn't" have been written. Your answer to fg's questions, which doesn't answer them at all really, seems to imply that its raison d'être is to exploit a relative lack of repertoire for this instrumentation. Although actually there are something like 200 pieces in existence for flute, viola and harp.

Why SHOULD anyone listen to this instead of the Debussy Sonate? is the only question I have addressed. In what sense does my reply not answer that particular question? I agree that there is no reason why anyone should listen to this instead of the Debussy.

The piece hasn't got a raison d'être. It's the instrumentation it is because it was commissioned by a trio, and the music is what it is because because those are the ideas I had and liked. The trio were thrilled with it, btw.

Also btw, I think the other questions are not for me to answer - if indeed they were non rhetorical.

[Richard Barrett]

I think the other questions are not for me to answer - if indeed they were non rhetorical.

Of course there's no reason why you "should" answer them, except in so far as people might find it enlightening to see what a composer might have to say in response to such things, and how what he/she says might have more general implications and/or contribute to an ongoing discussion. There's no aspect of musical thinking which is out of bounds surely.

[richardfinegold]

It could be, but I would make a difference between something which "reflects" its time, as a symptom so to speak, and something which responds to its time, which takes the stylistic stance that it does through a positive decision rather than by default. This is what I mean by awareness.

Why is it incumbent about Alex--or any other composer--to 'reflect ' his time, or have 'self awareness'?

[kea]

Of course there's no reason why you "should" answer them, except in so far as people might find it enlightening to see what a composer might have to say in response to such things, and how what he/she says might have more general implications and/or contribute to an ongoing discussion. There's no aspect of musical thinking which is out of bounds surely.

Indeed. When I started composing music, I would be asked questions about why I did particular things. The answer I would give would usually be some variant of "well, that was how I heard it in my head." But after a while I started to realise this answer was tautological. Of course that's what I heard in my head, otherwise I wouldn't have written it. The question is really why did I hear this thing in my head, and not some other thing?* Which is a much harder question to answer and I suppose most composers don't really bother trying.

* a question which does not in and of itself imply that "some other thing" is more desirable than "my thing", but rather is an attempt to get to the root of "inspiration" and what causes it, rather than writing it off as the Muses or God or some other ineffable force

[ahinton]

Is it any good? is a question only an individual can answer, and that answer only really holds for that individual.

I wasn't necessarily suggesting otherwise; I merely omitted mention of it!

[ahinton]

Indeed - I don't think we can talk about a "contemporary Musical lingua franca", the huge variety of Musical styles is polyglot. Nor do I think that any successful Musical style has ever swept away what came before (in spite of what the young Boulez might have wanted) - except in the very real sense of how Beethoven did this: not "sweeping away" the language of Haydn and Mozart, but making the idea of returning to it ridiculous. But that is what some composers seek to do today - to pretend that Varese and Xenakis and Gruppen and Birtwistle and Feldman and Scelsi and Reich (to say nothing of Coltrane or Captain Beefheart) never happened.

Do they really do that! Mon Dieu! Daft as of course it is, that must be quite an achievement in itself!

It is "a bad thing" because Music based on denial has its own built-in obsolescence.

Indeed.

[ahinton]

In response to ahinton:

Oh, yes - choice of an idiom doesn't guarantee quality - there's a lot of Music "in the 'style' of" the composers I cited that isn't particularly good, just as there is genuinely new and good Music using a language (allow that word for the time being) closer to older traditions: Ronald Stevenson, for example (to save your blushes - no, sod it) or Alistair Hinton.

You're very kind.

My thoughts on this are that there's no point in writing at all unless one writes in the way that one feels motivated to write. My earliest experiences in studying composition were exclusively Darmstadt oriented, with a teacher who had studied with Webern and who immersed me in Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono &c. at a time when I'd heard no Mahler, let alone Mozart and Beethoven. Eventually, I realised that, whilst this had been great training for sharpening the ears, I seemd to have been pursuing what was incrasingly beginning to feel like someone else's path and then I really had to start thinking about what I felt that I should be doing. It wasn't easy and, for a while, it raised all sorts of questions that made composing at all seem harder than it might otherwise have been...