Sunday, April 03, 2005
influence
My question What pieces from the 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s have changed the way composers think about composing? has touched off an amazing range of answers, far more diverse than I would have guessed. I’ve learned a lot in the process, and now have a number of pieces I would like to track down.
I’ve tossed off a few specific titles that I think have had a broad cultural significance onto my blog, hoping to spark additions. But a more personal response is much harder for me to verbalize. I’m finding that I am more influenced by ideas than individual works.
As a young composer, I soaked up everything I could of John Cage, Morton Feldman, Roger Reynolds, Robert Ashley, SOURCE, etc. and responded accordingly.
In the early 90s, I started focusing on vocal works, writing pieces that combined words and music in new ways. The catalyst at that time was a single, 14th-century motet by Guillaume de Machaut: Se j’aim mon loyal ami. In it, three singers, all portraying the same person at different points in her life, sing three complementary texts simultaneously. The simultaneity was typical of the ars nova: the time warping and harrowing story-line was not. I started writing a series of pieces -- sometimes using singers, sometimes narrators -- that bent time in different directions, in an effort to arrive at a more personal relationship with stasis and progress.
Someone once said (I wish I knew who) that creativity is finding what’s been lost and making it new.
In the late 90s, I became more and more interested in the problem of European Classical forms. Conventional wisdom says that these forms are irrelevant to contemporary life. But experience has shown me that they are irrelevant in very specific ways, which means that they also have important kernels of relevance. The more I explored these forms, the more I discovered truths that our culture can ill afford to forget.
We live in a culture that rejects the lessons of the past. The media discuss music history as if it were something that began with the invention of television. The current administration, posing as conservative, is actually putting a radical agenda into place, an agenda that goes against so much of what I believe. My response has been to question the so-called “self-evident” truths of the past in a way that honors their true values, instead of taking them for granted, or brandishing them as weapons against thought.
I am finding that they are strong enough to withstand my questioning.
posted by Lawrence Dillon
6:06 PM
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