Philosophical musings

My good friend and mentor Stuart Saunders Smith and I coorespond via letters.  Letters!  He recently pointed out that I have been incorporating more vernacular elements into my music.  This was not a calculated choice, though—certainly not a calculated choice regarding money or fame or something like that.  If I wanted money I’d work on WallStreet.  If I wanted fame I’d try to act in Hollywood.  No, what I really love is experimental music.  Or avant garde or whatever term we choose to use.  Perhaps “personal” is the best term.  I like music that is unique and personal and struggles to make sense of the individual in the larger world, especially the modern one, which I find fascinating, inspiring, noisy, disturbing, and exhausting by turns.

But “personal” can come in a lot of shapes and sizes and in a lot of different genres I think.  When I was in school I remember feeling that my composition and theory professors were pushing a very subtle but real attitude that only music that is written down and ostensibly “complex” was worth anything.  While I could sort of agree with them intellectually my gut told me otherwise.  Sure, Webern’s music is inspiring and gorgeous, but so is John Coltrane, and so is Sharda Sahai, and so is Aphex Twin or Autechre or Meshuggah.  Over the years I’ve realized that I have an omnivorous appetite for music of all kinds and shapes and sizes. And I’ve become more comfortable pointing out the emperor with no clothes. Just because something has the sheen of seriousness and complexity (i.e., complex notation, on a classical concert series) does not make it so.  Some of the music I hear at new music concerts has depth and complexity, but much of it is simple-minded and only has the appearance of complexity.

Of course I can’t comment on my own work in this regard.  Many people love it, but I’m sure there are just as many who think it is terrible.  But that’s true for every living composer and most of the dead ones too!  I do know that when I compose I don’t make charts or graphs and I don’t think much about the structure of the piece.  I stopped reading music journals like Perspectives of New Music for that reason.  Those articles were polluting my mind, making me think I needed to have some sort of hidden  architecture so that down the road some poor Ph.D. student would write a dissertation about how marvelously complex my music is and I would then be handed the keys to the pantheon of Western classical music.  I could almost envision the bust of my head in the hallway at the Eastman School of Music!  How noble and sagacious I would look!  A pillar of Western culture!  I respect the intellectual rigor that goes into those articles and on the resulting “mind play” can certainly be enjoyable, but in terms of my creative process I found them destructive.

When I’m composing well I’m assimilating and processing in an organic fashion the world around me, and the “canon” I’ve built for myself in my ipod.  In my canon you won’t find Brahms because his music just doesn’t speak to me.  But you will find Evan Parker.  Tons of it.  You’ll also find Bach and Victoria and Machaut and Xenakis and Metallica and Aesop Rock and Stuart Saunders Smith and all sorts of other stuff.  (I suppose I am truly a product of the internet age . . .)  Sometimes that means I write 4-4 beats and sometimes the writing is more “classical.”  I don’t worry about it too much.  The only time I get worried is if I start making a chart or a graph.  There’s a big difference between a piece of music and a piece of music theory.  I hope I’m creating the former.

At any rate, this does bespeak of a type of apolitical attitude that pervades my generation.  The good thing about this is that the walls are truly down now.  No uptown, no downtown, just music making.  The vigorous dialectics of the past—which seemed to me mostly had to do with egos and competition of resources—have been mostly subdued. However, the problem is that it can be difficult to discern whether the omnivorous appetites of composers of my generation are genuine or a result of laziness.  Are we really assimilating all that’s going on and creating a true “maximalist” style?  (Sorry, Charles Wuorinen, I couldn’t resist, but it really does apply to us more than you.) Or are we just slapdashing things together?  Copying and pasting our way through each composition?  A little of this and a little of that and a whole lot of nothing?  Are we hiding our lack of technique and thorough training behind a façade of eclecticism?

I don’t know.  But again I don’t worry about it too much.  I’m not a historian or a politician and political music has never had much traction with me.  I’m interested in sound.  And if I can put together a few moments of genuine, personal, wonder-inducing sound—even if just once in my whole life—then I will rest easy that I’ve made a valuable contribution tohumanity.  The only way I see it possible for me to do that is to get up each morning and write music.  Get it played.  Get it recorded.  Then move on to the next piece.

Like everyone else in my field I use the good quotes when they come in and I ignore the bad ones. The good ones look nice on my website and it feels good to be keeping up with the Jones, but as time goes on it’s harder and harder for me to believe that music criticism is worth much. That goes for art, dance, and film too. (In this post I’ll use “art criticism” as a general term that encompasses music, art, dance, film, poetry, etc.)

This isn’t sour grapes. Like I’ve said, I’ve enjoyed a lot of good reviews from major news outlets. But since I’ve been on both ends of the critical spectrum my skepticism is informed. I used to write music criticism for American Record Guide. I poured over a dozen or so CDs a month and published a column titled “The Newest Music.” It was a good gig. I earned a few bucks and got an excellent survey of the field. I also honed my ability to discuss esoteric music with a lay audience. But after three years I threw in the towel. So many of the discs I was getting were from friends and colleagues that it became a conflict of interest. I couldn’t reasonably write anything objective.

Supposedly art criticism serves as an objective filter so that the public can make better decisions about where and how to spend their time and money. But most of the critics have their favorite styles and tend to stick with them, thus precluding any objective survey of what’s really going on in our incredibly diverse artistic world. Furthermore, many critics are friends with the artists they’re writing about. No matter how objective they may try to be, there’s no doubt that the line between criticism and PR becomes blurry at times.

Aside from those issues, the biggest problem I’ve found is that art criticism is often polemical and simple in a way that doesn’t reflect the complexity of an individual’s output. For example, here’s a passage from a recent New Yorker regarding the Royal Danish Ballet’s reception in recent years:

. . . . Partly, this was because the critics were then facing the full onslaught of Europe’s so-called ‘contemporary ballet’: rage, despair, panties. Such ballet, in the hands of Kenneth MacMillan, John Cranko, Maurice Bejart, Roland Petit, and others, stressed excitation above all: great whirlings and twirlings and pitchings of self and others onto the floor.

I’m not an expert on modern ballet, which is why this passage struck me. It’s not the content, but the form. Or, more precisely, it’s the lack of content. How is it that four accomplished choreographers’ life works can be summed up in one sentence as “great whirlings and twirlings and pitchings of self and others onto the floor?”

It’s no different in the musical world. For example, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, and Michael Gordon are often lumped together. That’s not entirely unfair as they’ve worked as a trio for over twenty years to build the Bang on a Can empire with the music marathon, record label, summer festival, etc, but in fact they write profoundly different music. Sure, there are some basic sonic similarities in Michael and Julia’s music, but when you get to the details that count they’re really entirely different composers. And David’s work is different in all respects.

I’ll also admit that I did the same thing when I wrote for ARG. “Isms” are convenient. Modernism, minimalism, post minimalism, whathaveyouism make writing criticism a snap. Lump, knead, write, and you’re all set. The writing part is the fun part. I suspect many art critics are frustrated poets who have found an outlet. They love to write and they love what they write. However, it’s doubtful whether any of that verbiage has anything to do with the complexity and nuance of art.

Alarm Will Sound is enjoying our third year as the resident ensemble for the Mizzou New Music Festival. Stefan Freund and the University of Missouri hosts the festival, as well as Jeanne and Rex Sinquefield. We are deeply grateful for Rex and Jeanne’s support. They are visionaries in many areas and are quickly turning Missouri into a center of creative activity for contemporary classical music.

We’re here for two weeks. We’ve just finished the first week at Rex and Jeanne’s gorgeous 1,000-acre retreat where we’ve been rehearsing. My days have been fantastic: I wake up and compose for a few hours, then do my workout of the day, then rehearse for about six to eight hours with AWS, then hang with my buddies, then go practice and read for a while, then bed. Perfect.

I’m involved with three concerts next week: Super Marimba as part of an AWS chamber concert, a concert of eight new pieces by our guest composers, and the AWS concert, which includes world premieres of my new piece METADRUM and a piece by fellow-AWS member Matt Marks. Matt’s piece is a messed-up doo-wop tune. It is funny, elegant, and heartfelt. My remarkable colleagues in AWS not only play their instruments on the piece, but many of them sing as well. They sound incredible. Matt has a solo voice part and he’s totally convincing.

My piece is about 20 minutes long and it’s very intense. I’ve tried to create a powerful ritual experience for the audience. The title METADRUM refers to the drumming that permeates most of the piece. At times it is like a double percussion concerto with me and the phenomenal Chris Thompson as soloists. At other times the entire ensemble turns into a giant drumming machine. It’s a tough piece. It demands a high level of stamina and energy from the players. There are very few groups who have the chops to handle it. I’m fortunate to be working with such amazing players.

Alarm Will Sound is without a doubt one of the best musical ensembles in the world. Not a day goes by that I don’t thank my lucky star that I get to share the stage with these musicians. Not only do we play great music at a high level, but we discuss our repertoire and our projects democratically. Although we have an Artistic Director (Alan Pierson) and a Managing Director (Gavin Chuck), most of the artistic decisions are made by the group as a whole. It can be a laborious way to operate, but the result is consistently brilliant performances that display a level of courage and daring that is entirely unique. There are many ensembles that play music at a high level, but I can’t think of another one in this genre that puts together such original and compelling programs.

Alarm Will Sound rules.