New Music Advocacy

Recently the Canton Symphony asked me to give a presentation on music from the perspective of a young composer. After much thought, I've decided to call my talk "New Music: Part of the Problem, Part of the Solution." The below thoughts are merely a preparation for this talk, and I ask for your detailed (and if necessary, brutal) input on the matter.

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For all of our griping, what exactly ARE we doing which is productively bringing new music to wider audiences?

I was recently sent comments from a talk by John Adams, in which he decries the overt conservatism of Orchestras and their audiences. He said that "all the interesting music being written now is generally not for Orchestra, as a result." (This is a loose paraphrase taken from a loose paraphrase.)

Mr. Adams is correct, of course: despite the many talented composers out there, our music is either not being performed, or being usurped by less-accessible "great" old-new music in Boulez-ite tradition. Another famous conductor, asked to defend such programming choices, said that the Bouleschoewebernites "need" such patronage.

Such programming attitudes beg the question: If 75 years of stuffing atonal-serialism down the throats of audiences has yet to do anything BUT alienate said audiences, at what point do we concede to the obvious?

While stubborn artistic directors and conductors seemingly purposefully only choose new (or, dubious 20th century) music to piss off their audiences, yet another generation of composers that DON'T sound like Boulez or any of the bergs and berns are being subsequently swept under the carpet of collective irreletivity.

If I didn't know better, I'd think that some of these "proponents of new music" were purposefully attempting to sabotage contemporary music.

I will propose that the average concert-goer over 50 doesn't realize that most new music being written nowadays is NOT being written in such inaccesible styles. In fact, I will submit (with personal experience) that most young conservatory students are equally in the dark as to what is available to us.

I've already named inaccessible old music and its entrenched proponents as part of the problem. I don't have a solution to this dilemma, but there are things that we can start doing TODAY to change the tide of artistic decline in America.

1.) Every graduate student or new professor who is "stuck" teaching music appreciation needs to quit bitching about it, and instead embrace the opportunity. What if every 200+ person lecture-course resulted in three passionate new music listeners? At over 10,000 universities in our country, we would be adding 20,000 new, hip, and curious listeners to the American audience. That's 200,000 potential new listeners per decade, which is easily enough to turn the establishment on its head by that time.

2.) In keeping with #1, education is always the key. Music teachers tend to be relatively ignorant about contemporary music as well, which is why composers need to start visiting classrooms. I know, I know, we're all ridiculously busy. But if every composer visited one classroom annually, we'd have over 5,000 classroom visits with which to inspire minds and build audiences every year. Think of it as contributing to your future audience, which definitely might make retirement a bit easier. I plan on making at least one visit before the school year is over.

3.) Groups such as Eighth Blackbird are putting on hip, varied, and wonderfully performed programs. In only a few years, they have nearly single-handedly revived the new music scene in Chicago. Here in Cleveland, I've become involved with what will hopefully be our equivalent. Any community with a few musicians can pull this off, and smaller communities are especially ripe for such endeavors. If 500 new groups of such a nature came about in the next five years, think of the possibilities for building audiences and getting new commissions!

4.) Wind Ensembles are our friend. To reject them is to do so at your own peril.

5.) Write music which is considerate of your performers, and treat your performers like gold. I recently had a musician from Taiwan tell me that I had "changed (her) opinion of composers for the better." She now plays in all sorts of new music projects in the area, all because a few composers were really nice to her. In contrast, I saw an established Cleveland-area composer selfishly berate a Pierrot Ensemble of younger grad-student musicians. He got his wish: a tight performance. The way he went about it, however, alienated his musicians from composers.

These are five steps which can change the musical landscape we live in. If we put down our bitterness and become real advocates for our art, the resulting tide will eventually sweep back onto the Orchestral stage.

Rather than be part of the generation of composers which has rejected tradition, I would rather be a part of the generation of composers which has revitalized it.

More about New Music

Are the dictates of modernism beyond repudiation, or is there room to launch an assault on the vaunted ivory towers of 20th century abstraction?

I love reading the posts concerning new music around the internet. The little bit of time that I have to keep track of "what's new" has brought me to a recent conclusion:

Musicians, especially composers, generally don't have a clue as to why they do what they do, nor do they have a clear idea of what music is.

Blame it on a shallow society. Blame it on a lack of (very necessary!) education in aesthetics. Blame it on a century of indeterminate creativity. Blame it on whatever you will, though the problem remains.

Some posit that music means nothing, without even scratching the nature of what we "mean" by "meaning." Some posters pitch the "art for art's sake" (whatever THAT means,) or the "I do it because I like it" modes of thought. (Both arguments are juvenile at best.) Others repeatedly try to justify music as a purely secular art, devoid of the necessity of any meaning or even coherent structure. I will humbly submit that such attitudes are what have alienated new music from performers and audiences.

I'll take the Beethoven-esque "artist hero" over the 20th century "invincible intellectual" composer any day of the week. Say what negative things you will about the Romantic Era's concept of the artist, but people as a whole actually liked it.

I'm not advocating that we throw out modernism as a whole. Far from it. The efforts of 20th century artists have greatly widened and matured our creative vocabulary. I only ask, for example, whether a poet who only writes with vowels would ever be taken seriously. (I know that somewhere out there, a vowel-poet must exist without a small but loyal following. I will question the sanity of such a following.)

In one of the more interesting (and rarely useful) posts on newmusicbox.org, a composer brought up a wonderful story about Moses and Schoenberg. Upon going back to the site to quote him and give credit, I discovered that the quote was gone. How sad.

Anyhow, Schoenberg said that a composer is like Moses going up to the mountain to talk to God. Upon his return, the prophet does not divulge the entirety of his divine communication, rather only giving the people what they can handle at the time. (Or, one could say, a little more than they can handle, to provide a challenge.)

In the case of Schoenberg, of course, we might be referring to another case of the Satanic verses...

Love him or hate him, I prefer Maslanka's take on music, which he divulged to us during rehearsals for the premiere of his 5th Symphony:

"Music is something from somewhere else, something that is constantly trying to batter its ways into three dimensional space. It comes, it is uttered, and it is never heard in the same way again."

Well, at least it gave ME goosebumps.

A century of agnostic politics has only given us a massive body-count. A century of agnostic art has only given us a lack of bodies to count. Is it perhaps possible to accept the grammatical expansion provided by modernism, while rejecting -- for the good of us all -- the philosophy of abstractness and relativism that comes with it?