Tuesday, April 05, 2005
A Composer Under the Influence
Lawrence Dillon’s thoughts about the nature of influence and Rodney Lister’s point about the vast body of music available to young composers today have got me thinking about how our relationship to the historical past might affect our conception of “influence” as a force connecting the work of composers over time. It makes me wonder if the aspect of our culture that most defines our modernity is our consciousness of history, even if that consciousness attempts to take the form of "rejection".
Recently I heard Peter Sheppard Skaerved give a riveting performance of the complete Rochberg Caprice Variations. He played them on the Stradavarius used by the concertmaster at the first performance of the Symphonie Fantastique. The Variations came across as possessing a terrific line of musical continuity, from late Baroque collage through variations on Schubert, Brahms, Mahler and Webern. The piece ends with Paganini's famous theme and, in a tour de force of in-the-moment poetic license, Skaerved played it pianissimo- as if the previous 60 minutes had been generated by a single fleeting echo.
So I guess it boils down to this- does it have to "sound modern" to be modern? Can a composer, like any artist in any other medium, write a "period piece" or a time travel science fiction epic? When Scorsese engages history by putting 19th century New York on the screen the validity of the endeavor is never in question, only the degree of its success.
While understanding that there are no guarantees, I think that a piece of music can embrace "discarded" or "discredited" forms without having to become hopelessly bogged down in either self-consciousness or details of period accuracy. For me the success of a work of art that engages the past will always be a function of the degree to which it manages to create a meaningful dialog between the past "depicted" and the present of its creation, whether it is skeptical about, or affirming of, the possibilities of such a dialog.
And while our experiences are without question quite different from those of composers who lived 150 (or even 50) years ago, I don't think our relationships are. We are all still husbands, wives, parents, sons and daughters and we all need meaningful connections to our personal and our collective past in order to both make sense of the present and to lay the groundwork for possible futures. In the words of Berio:
"There is a great deal of mystery around us. Romantic man was surrounded by a mysterious and impassive nature. Today, man is surrounded by an equally mysterious and substantially malign culture: a culture that, both on a planetary and a local level, often presents itself as a very unstable and dangerous emulsion of transformations, oppressions and (often mishandled) skirmishes- with few prospects for an amalgam. ...If this emulsion one day "precipitates" and explodes, we should at least be able to offer- to those that come after us, God knows how and god knows from where- real and historically responsible things and not false things, unworthy of memory."
posted by Tom Myron
12:40 AM
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