...is new again...

In my recent music-turncoat theme, I'm starting to latch on to the commentaries found on websites like newmusicbox.org. A striking theme on the site has been that of "newness", or, that undefinable American urge to be revolutionary and original. Again and again, Ives and Cage are held up as model mavericks, as if a new-music society full of barely comprehensible creative rebels were the goal of music-making.

What is "newness?" Must we reinvent the wheel every time we sit down to compose? Considering the dizzying blur of the past century of musical innovation, is it any wonder that we're slowing down a bit in this day and age? Even electronic music, that self-proclaimed new creative frontier, has already become bogged down in its own cliches and traditions (as humorously expressed in Mark Applebaum's piece "Precomposition.") The composer who is slowing down, taking stock of what has occured, and creating a meaningful synthesis -- is this not "new" as an approach? What about the composer who actually tries to build an audience with his work -- is he not, in recent light, doing something radical and "new"?

We do not see authors chastise other authors for using words that were in use more than a half-century ago, nor is an aspiring artist told "don't use so much red: it's SO 1950." I've never heard a poet say: "my work focuses entirely on words beginning with consonants." Tell a jazz musician that they play with Coltrane's fire or have a harmonic sensibility comparable to Miles, and you'll see a beaming smile. Why then this "newness" obsession in new music? I ask: what IS new? Is it perhaps possible that certain pre-formed elements of music simply... work? I'm not sure there is a more self-conscious and hypocritical strain of thought amongst new music composers than our pandering to the "new," whatever such a term actually means anymore. What about music as a process of synthesis and discovery? Ives certainly discovered new modes of expression, as did Schoenberg. Ives was also a synthesist, blending the great European tradition with his (and his father's) more individual ideas. Ives also believed in the transcendent element of music: something most modern music is lacking to its detriment.

This whole obsession with newness is absurd, and is clearly a cover for the fact that much new music simply lacks meaning. It lacks meaning, because much of it is self-centered and unwilling to look outside of itself. Write the words "God" and "Soul" in a newmusicbox commentary, and you'll be either hammered or ignored. Or, as one composer put it to me: "you lost me when you brought up the whole soul thing."

Funny, considering that the concept was part and parcel with new music for Bach, Beethoven, Ives, Messiaen, Penderecki,.....