My new piece - Symphonic Suite [WIP]

[Richard Barrett]

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

It isn't "incumbent". And as has also been said, every artist's work necessarily reflects his/her time. The question is whether one merely reflects it, which in this case might be connected with a prevalent and (by its practitioners) largely unquestioned conservatism in 21st century music which (IMO) harks back to earlier styles without any of the sense of necessity which gave rise to those styles in the first place, or on the other hand responds to it, for example by rejecting that conservatism as the expression/celebration of a nostalgic sense of comfort in an imagined past. In my opinion the most valuable thing artists have to contribute at the present time is the expression of the possibility of freedom of the imagination, especially given that this freedom is one of the few that isn't currently being gradually curtailed. So many creative musicians make their work as if it were hedged around with dos and don'ts - "Capitalist Realism" in (I think) Serial_Apologist's memorable formulation.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

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 think that this brings me back to the main point of my first post - if a composer "expects to be taken seriously", then it is their responsibility to explore how Music can be made to sound different from anything that has previously been heard. This is not a radical statement: think of all the composers you adore, Barbi, the ones you consider "great". Did any of them make a career out of writing Music that used a Musical language from even fifty years before they were born? No; they heard the latest Music and used what they heard to work out new ways of creating harmony, and/or rhythm and/or melody and/or structure. Brahms, Bach, Elgar, Mahler ... they all did this. Now, of course, along with these most interesting figures there are those who weren't concerned with such matters and simply continued writing the sort of stuff that was around in their parents' generation and were content to do their best in that idiom. But no composer, no period of history other than ours, has produced a body of Music that uses a style fashionable a hundred years earlier. And 1960 shouldn't be the "starting point" for a composer born in 1987 - if Music is to continue the traditions as a serious Art that it has followed for as long as we know, then it is work by composers born in the 1970s that should form the basis of their language (just as RB, born in 1959, heard Music from the generation of Ferneyhough and built from that, and Aaron Cassidy, born in 1976, built from Barrett's generation of composers). That is how Music has developed - serious composers create Music that hasn't been imagined like that before.

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 .

"Where is it going to go?" EXACTLY! That's the point of creating new Art - that's what keeps it alive and a vital cultural ... thing! Never "This is where it's coming from, wasn't it nice back then when we all had rickets?"

And isn't it strange that, in a time of economic recession, at least three CD companies (KAIROS, AEON, NEOS) have come into existence to promote exactly this repertoire? And they are keeping their heads above water. Not bad for something that is targetted at "an ever-diminishing" clientele. Ooh! You wish!!!

[hedgehog]

Ferney (if I may ) I agree with you and I agree with Richard Barrett, BUT many of today's young composers identify with, say David Lang, Julia Wolfe (Baby Boom composers ) or Pärt or Kancheli (& here I must agree with Ian, that dreadful Lament imo doesn't look much past or present beyond those two composers). They are young and maybe their sense of history and placement will come later (& then they stop composing) but their first fervor can come these days from anywhere & so too their leanings with regards to material. In such a situation choices leaning toward say a lyrical melody shouldn't imo be judged more "retro" than a massed cloud of dissonance - they have all already been "done". Perhaps exactly this - a disregard for the historical order of things might also throw up something new? ( & let's face it Beethoven didn't have to deal with Machaut before penning a note)

What then - as the composer matures - should come into play is, as RB referred to as a corollary, I would tend to place it as a thesis is the notion of awareness and especially that one can hear in the work the "why" - why still one chooses to create a narrative on a texture of melody, counter melody and harmony, or why one chooses to have a "glue" of clouds of dissonant chords etc, etc.

For example, take Tristan Murail ( I know Richard Barrett does not rate him highly!). Well on the one hand there are imo some works that do tread in unknown areas ( Godwana is one). Others however are a mix - fascintaing sounds, but the piece could be fitted into a mould of Debussy - just with other even more cloudy chords than Debussy, but the piece itself depends on a motivic interplay & use of pedal points just like e.g. prelude l'après midi d'un faune or Nuages.

I don't mind - there is enough new there - but it's quite a fine line to tread here - what part of a style is considered OK to keep whilst exploring other areas and what not.

[ahinton]

I think that this brings me back to the main point of my first post - if a composer "expects to be taken seriously", then it is their responsibility to explore how Music can be made to sound different from anything that has previously been heard. This is not a radical statement: think of all the composers you adore, Barbi, the ones you consider "great". Did any of them make a career out of writing Music that used a Musical language from even fifty years before they were born? No; they heard the latest Music and used what they heard to work out new ways of creating harmony, and/or rhythm and/or melody and/or structure. Brahms, Bach, Elgar, Mahler ... they all did this. Now, of course, along with these most interesting figures there are those who weren't concerned with such matters and simply continued writing the sort of stuff that was around in their parents' generation and were content to do their best in that idiom. But no composer, no period of history other than ours, has produced a body of Music that uses a style fashionable a hundred years earlier. And 1960 shouldn't be the "starting point" for a composer born in 1987 - if Music is to continue the traditions as a serious Art that it has followed for as long as we know, then it is work by composers born in the 1970s that should form the basis of their language (just as RB, born in 1959, heard Music from the generation of Ferneyhough and built from that, and Aaron Cassidy, born in 1976, built from Barrett's generation of composers). That is how Music has developed - serious composers create Music that hasn't been imagined like that before.


"Where is it going to go?" EXACTLY! That's the point of creating new Art - that's what keeps it alive and a vital cultural ... thing! Never "This is where it's coming from, wasn't it nice back then when we all had rickets?"

And isn't it strange that, in a time of economic recession, at least three CD companies (KAIROS, AEON, NEOS) have come into existence to promote exactly this repertoire? And they are keeping their heads above water. Not bad for something that is targetted at "an ever-diminishing" clientele. Ooh! You wish!!!

Interesting points here (no surprise there, then!).

One thing that concerns me is when composers fall back on certain aspects of music of past generations, what their motive might be in so doing; are they consciously and deliberately "rejecting" the present and immediate past, are they merely lacking in courage and/or inagination to face up to their responsibilities as composers and resort to some kind of nostalgia-mongering predicated largely upon sentimentality (which calls to mind that, just as MacDiarmid [I think] once said that talent is the worst enemy of genius, so sentimentality is the worst enemy of emotion). I'm sure that there are several differert reasons why certain composers do this, although by no means as many as there are composers who do it!

You mention Bach. In his final years, the way he worked might have been seen as somewhat antediluvian by those then embracing the style galant, but this would have been a fundamental misunderstanding of the way in which Bach perceived his own development as a composer in his 60s; that said, of coure there was not the same established tradition in performing the music of the past that there is today, so perhaps more people listened to more "modern" music more often in the mid-18th century than is the case now. In more general terms, we're also most of us far more aware of our history than many people were in Bach's day, so the notion of engaging with one's past as well as one's present is arguably stronger now than once it was. That's all a gross over-simplification of just one aspect of the subject now under discussion, of course, but I think that it's worth considering nevertheless.

I wonder what the OP now thinks of the entire shelf full of cans of worms that introducing his work to us has inadvertently opened!...

[Richard Barrett]

Lots to say...

kea: I've always had a bit of a problem with this idea of "how I heard it in my head". I guess you'll probably agree but I think it might benefit from underlining that this is only a part of what's going on - a starting-point for explorations into the unheard, for example, or a source of constant feedback about the discoveries made on those explorations. I cure myself of earworms by saying to myself "if you let yourself hear this one more time you have to put it into your ongoing composition". That gets it out of my head pretty quicly, which is just as well if it happens to have been the theme from Postman Pat.

fg: I'm sure you're aware that the "generational" thing isn't as simple as that - as far as I was concerned the input came potentially from everything up to and including what was going on at that moment, and it still is. (That is to say, not from any particular generation.) There is no starting point either in time or in space, and actually no endpoint either, since another influence comes from asking the question "where is it going to go?", especially given that an extensive composition project is going to take several years to complete. My ideal is total openness combined with a total lack of eclecticism.

As for those CD companies, well, their heads are never that far above water, but that's not because nobody's interested in their repertoire but because fewer people are interested in CDs. I'm always hesitant about playing the popularity card, but my involvement in contemporary music (not "my ears") tells me that audiences are not diminishing. Over and above that, the difference in size between the audience for something of mine and something of let's say Arnold Bax is tiny compared with the difference between either of these and a stadium pop concert or a football match, so this tells us very little about anything anyway.

hedgehog: your desire "that one can hear in the work the "why"" is exactly what I've been trying to say.

[kea]

Ferney (if I may ) I agree with you and I agree with Richard Barrett, BUT many of today's young composers identify with, say David Lang, Julia Wolfe (Baby Boom composers ) or Pärt or Kancheli (& here I must agree with Ian, that dreadful Lament imo doesn't look much past or present beyond those two composers).

Yes... reflecting the developments that came out of 1950s and 60s minimalism... which in turn reflect the development of culture from then til now as well.

In particular, creative artists have typically been associated with the political Left, and the mainstream style of creative artists has mirrored the political Left's development (?) from genuine revolutionaries in the 1950s and 60s to Starbucks-drinking, MacBook-using keyboard warriors with "Free Palestine" stickers on the back window of their Prius in 2014. Mainstream 'contemporary classical' music has similarly become an ode to capitalism, colonial 'multiculturalism' and first world comforts, I would consider John Adams possibly the most influential of these composers but they are everywhere. (Golijov, Adès, Turnage, ...) Obviously, many young composers support and affirm these values. And to some extent to be a composer at all requires you to support these values; otherwise you'd be doing something more useful than posh entertainment for the leisured classes, such as campaigning for transgender rights or volunteering in impoverished communities or fighting to halt logging operations in the Amazon basin or overthrowing the government in order to bring about an anarcho-communist utopia.

[kea]

Lots to say...

kea: I've always had a bit of a problem with this idea of "how I heard it in my head". I guess you'll probably agree but I think it might benefit from underlining that this is only a part of what's going on - a starting-point for explorations into the unheard, for example, or a source of constant feedback about the discoveries made on those explorations. I cure myself of earworms by saying to myself "if you let yourself hear this one more time you have to put it into your ongoing composition". That gets it out of my head pretty quicly, which is just as well if it happens to have been the theme from Postman Pat.

I probably do agree, but it is worth noting that a lot of composition seems to be instinctual/lacking any sort of conscious analytic underpinning, and being a composer doesn't necessarily make it easier for one to examine the process of composition in any detail. It took me about 14 years of writing music, by which point I considered myself rather a pro at it, to get to the point where I had written a piece that I looked through the score of and realised I had pretty much no idea what it was going to sound like, or whether it would 'work' at all—that what I had wanted it to sound like, in other words, was something I couldn't imagine. It was a bit of a scary moment but also quite liberating—since then I've never been exactly satisfied with just writing something that doesn't 'explore the unheard' as you put it.

I also keep a Postman Pat file around which I fill up with all the fake Mendelssohn and Schumann and Brahms that occasionally dribbles out of my fingers. (Though I don't abandon those things because they're 'stylistically unsuitable' or whatever, more because once I've got past the awesome melody I came up with and have to get to the real business of doing things with it, I lose interest.)

[Ian]

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.

OK then (but I don't think you'll get much out of it):

Ok then, to take fg’s questions/points in turn.

Debussy didn’t write this piece he wrote another piece (which I’m sure is a better piece) but the point is, better or not, it goes differently.

Fg cannot hear the point of producing work like this. Ok, but I can - so I produced it.

He asks where I am in piece? The answer is in every phrase - even the first one: Before I really started this piece I tried to remember the opening of the Debussy (which I probably hadn’t heard for 30 years) I wrote down what I thought it was. When I checked it was obvious I had got it completely wrong and decided that’s how my piece should start...

“ What is there to identify the piece as a work of its time?”

The date of composition and date of first performance on the title page.

“what is there that also makes it "timeless"”

So it’s not of its time and neither is it timeless... must be something else then.

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

No one has to listen to this instead of the Debussy.

“What pleasure is here that isn't in the Debussy?”

Hopefully the ideas that are found in this piece and not in the Debussy

[Richard Barrett]

to some extent to be a composer at all requires you to support these values; otherwise you'd be doing something more useful than posh entertainment for the leisured classes

Except that it doesn't have to be seen as posh entertainment for the leisured classes - that's not generally the sort of people I see at concerts, although it may well be the sort of people who'd go and hear the people you name. Certainly, not supporting those values is a "bad career move"; but thinking in terms of "career" is one of the problems in contemporary music (rather than being one of the solutions, as you'd think to listen to a lot of people).

Ian, you're right, there isn't much to be got out of your answers, but that's because you haven't really engaged with the questions but retreated instead into pedantry. Your choice of course.

[Ian]

Ian, you're right, there isn't much to be got out of your answers, but that's because you haven't really engaged with the questions but retreated instead into pedantry. Your choice of course.

You might think so, but I could equally claim that you are not really engaging with my answers. I think we live on different planets.

[hedgehog]

When in doubt I will always find comfort in the supremely humane composer Luciano Berio. His "Why?" is unsurpassed in its enigma, humor and goddamn inspiration

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqlUhN7TbAk

[aeolium]

One thing that concerns me is when composers fall back on certain aspects of music of past generations, what their motive might be in so doing; are they consciously and deliberately "rejecting" the present and immediate past, are they merely lacking in courage and/or inagination to face up to their responsibilities as composers and resort to some kind of nostalgia-mongering predicated largely upon sentimentality (which calls to mind that, just as MacDiarmid [I think] once said that talent is the worst enemy of genius, so sentimentality is the worst enemy of emotion). I'm sure that there are several differert reasons why certain composers do this, although by no means as many as there are composers who do it!

ahinton, don't you think that throughout history there have been composers who have sought inspiration in earlier styles, coming from and appealing to an audience that is also of (for want of a better description) a conservative musical aesthetic? We have a somewhat distorted perspective on the musical past, seeing it as a succession of peaks (a perspective reinforced by the constant appearance of works by those pioneering composers on radio and in concert), forgetting that there were a lot more who lived in the musical valleys. For every one pioneering composer who altered the history of music there are surely many others who did not, including many who composed in a style looking back to that of an earlier generation. And the major composers often had a tough time with the reception of their works: some of Mozart's later works; The Grosse Fuge; Berlioz's constant struggles; most of Mahler's symphonies; the riots greeting Verklärte Nacht and the Rite, etc. For many music audiences, both now and in the past, the avant-garde only becomes acceptable when it is après-garde, when it has safely entered the musical canon, a process that can take decades. If a work is ahead of its time in that way, does not that present a problem for the audiences contemporary with it? It's no good to them that posterity will eventually declare it a classic if they do not understand it. We tend now to ridicule those listeners (including composers, like Weber with his comment on Beethoven's 7th symphony last movement) who could not comprehend works which now appear as "Essential Classics" but they were only responding as they heard it at the time, without the luxury of endless replay on CD. As Saki wrote, "I hate posterity. It's so fond of having the last word."

I think we underestimate the way in which many people in society cling to the traditional. In music this might especially be true of ceremonial music, e.g. in religious traditions, or folk music in a number of countries, or perhaps that music which in some societies is passed down orally without notation. And I think in the Western tradition there has always been that conservative aesthetic, sometimes valuable in consolidating a style, sometimes obstructive to the new, but with a powerful following. And major composers have at times looked back to much earlier styles: Berlioz in L'Enfance du Christ, the Holberg suite, Tchaikovsky's Mozartiana suite, Prokofiev's Classical symphony, Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances and Rossiniana, etc. And a phenomenon which fairly recently indicated the powerful appeal of 'retro' was that of Gorecki's 3rd symphony.

If there is this large audience for music written in a conservative, even backward-looking style, it's not surprising that it throws up composers who will want to write for it. And surely those composers are as entitled to write that kind of music as modernist composers are to write avant-garde music, in a pluralistic environment. Whether it survives or not for posterity is irrelevant. Like the music of many composers of the past, it may well disappear into oblivion, but that does not mean it is useless or worthless now.

[Richard Barrett]

those composers are as entitled to write that kind of music

There seems to be a constant undercurrent, in discussions such as this, of assumption that if an artist is committed to a particular way of looking at things he/she automatically thinks other ways are invalid or that people aren't "entitled" to do things according to other principles. That really isn't the point. As I've said, what's most important as far as I'm concerned is expressing the freedom of the imagination. Another red herring is the idea of posterity. There is no point in caring about posterity. I don't think there are many creative musicians who would appeal to posterity as a justification for carrying on doing something that conservative audiences find hard to take. And there's no point in second-guessing what audiences are going to think - if one is interested in intelligent listeners with minds of their own, and not in treating them as so many automata that can be trusted to react predictably to this semi-familiar musical stimulus or that, the best one can do is to to say something like: I find this so deeply engaging/exciting/fascinating/deeply expressive that there must exist other people in the world who would also be affected by it, given that so much of our humanity is shared... even if arranging for the music to find its way to those people is something of a challenge!

[ahinton]

ahinton, don't you think that throughout history there have been composers who have sought inspiration in earlier styles, coming from and appealing to an audience that is also of (for want of a better description) a conservative musical aesthetic?

Yes, I do, although it would seem to matter little what I might think when it's so obvious a fact in any case.

We have a somewhat distorted perspective on the musical past, seeing it as a succession of peaks (a perspective reinforced by the constant appearance of works by those pioneering composers on radio and in concert), forgetting that there were a lot more who lived in the musical valleys. For every one pioneering composer who altered the history of music there are surely many others who did not, including many who composed in a style looking back to that of an earlier generation.

Indeed; Barenboim, in the first paragraph of a piece about Carter, cites Mendedlssohn as a composer whom many (including him, by implication) admire and love greatly but whose work did nothing whatsoever to alter the course of musical history - and he wasn't even a composer whose music is especially notable for having been "composed in a style looking back to that of an earlier generation"!

And the major composers often had a tough time with the reception of their works: some of Mozart's later works; The Grosse Fuge; Berlioz's constant struggles; most of Mahler's symphonies; the riots greeting Verklärte Nacht and the Rite, etc. For many music audiences, both now and in the past, the avant-garde only becomes acceptable when it is après-garde, when it has safely entered the musical canon, a process that can take decades. If a work is ahead of its time in that way, does not that present a problem for the audiences contemporary with it? It's no good to them that posterity will eventually declare it a classic if they do not understand it. We tend now to ridicule those listeners (including composers, like Weber with his comment on Beethoven's 7th symphony last movement) who could not comprehend works which now appear as "Essential Classics" but they were only responding as they heard it at the time, without the luxury of endless replay on CD. As Saki wrote, "I hate posterity. It's so fond of having the last word."

Fair comment, except that the reactions of "posterity" are not things on which a composer can speculate, let alone over which one can expect to exercise any control; we therefore cannot even be sure that posterity will declare anything to be a "classic", irrespective how it might or might not have been accepted at the time of its première.

I think we underestimate the way in which many people in society cling to the traditional. In music this might especially be true of ceremonial music, e.g. in religious traditions, or folk music in a number of countries, or perhaps that music which in some societies is passed down orally without notation. And I think in the Western tradition there has always been that conservative aesthetic, sometimes valuable in consolidating a style, sometimes obstructive to the new, but with a powerful following. And major composers have at times looked back to much earlier styles: Berlioz in L'Enfance du Christ, the Holberg suite, Tchaikovsky's Mozartiana suite, Prokofiev's Classical symphony, Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances and Rossiniana, etc. And a phenomenon which fairly recently indicated the powerful appeal of 'retro' was that of Gorecki's 3rd symphony.

One might also cite, albeit in a somewhat different contextual milieu but for similar reasons, the results of the art of transcription, from before Bach to Liszt, Godowsky and beyond, all of which by definition relate, each in their own ways, to the music of the past.

If there is this large audience for music written in a conservative, even backward-looking style, it's not surprising that it throws up composers who will want to write for it. And surely those composers are as entitled to write that kind of music as modernist composers are to write avant-garde music, in a pluralistic environment. Whether it survives or not for posterity is irrelevant. Like the music of many composers of the past, it may well disappear into oblivion, but that does not mean it is useless or worthless now.

Whilst the question that large audiences for any particular kind of music may be created at least in part by successful marketing hype is ignored at the ignorer's peril, I still think that you have a point here.

[Ian]

One thing that concerns me is when composers fall back on certain aspects of music of past generations, what their motive might be in so doing; are they consciously and deliberately "rejecting" the present and immediate past, are they merely lacking in courage and/or inagination to face up to their responsibilities as composers and resort to some kind of nostalgia-mongering predicated largely upon sentimentality (which calls to mind that, just as MacDiarmid [I think] once said that talent is the worst enemy of genius, so sentimentality is the worst enemy of emotion). I'm sure that there are several differert reasons why certain composers do this, although by no means as many as there are composers who do it!

I can only give you my personal perspective - as a composer of the type I’m sure you would think ‘does this’.

If I try to compose a (tonal) lyrical melody (as an example of an aspect of music from a previous generation) I don’t feel as if I’m ‘falling back’ on to an easy solution - I find it very challenging to come up with such melodic ideas that are both uniquely distinctive and original - at least in the sense that it doesn’t infringe an existing copyright. I’m not saying I ever succeed - but it is something I sometimes try and do. It would be easier to reject the concept of tonal lyrical melody all together, but that, for me, would be a cop out.

Neither would I accept I reject the present - most of my music is influenced hugely by various popular musics. However, don’t see that I have a particular responsibility to conform to any kind of received view that seeks to pre-determine what is worthwhile.

I don’t think music can be nostalgic. It’s people who, sometimes, can be nostalgic. The music I write has nothing to do with what, from time to time I might feel nostalgic about.