Sunday, March 20, 2005
"it's the music, stupid"
Not that the economy isn't important either, but...
Here's my take on a lot of the recent comments and posts about compositional style, technique, academia vs downtown, etc.:
* There is a lot of good music that has been written using 12-tone techniques
* Unfortunately, most of it has been written by a bunch of dead people who lived most of their lives in Germany (and let's not forget the sadly neglected Dallapicolla, who lived in Italy)
* There is a lot of good music that has been written using minimalist, postmodern, and other techniques/styles
* There is also a lot of not-so-good music written in all the styles that have ever existed.
* Ultimately, while technique is intellectually interesting, and certainly keeps musicologists in business, any music probably won't be compelling to an individual listener based solely on the technique used to compose it. In other words, even if the music is well-constructed, solving some amazing compositional challenges and using all sorts of cool canonical and notational tricks, who cares unless one likes to listen to the music itself?
Consider painting. Yes, there are art students who are probably forced to study the underlying painting techniques and even individual brush strokes. But if the art is ugly and expressionless, it doesn't matter if the painting technique is first rate.
Same thing with music. A first-rate technique can't guarantee a great work of music. A bad technique doesn't necessarily mean that the music is inferior, either. I wonder if some of the reasons why new music is marginalized relates to all the musicological analyses done on serial music, which makes it seem akin to string theory.
posted by David Toub
8:58 PM
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