Composers Forum is a daily web log that allows invited contemporary composers to share their thoughts and ideas on any topic that interests them--from the ethereal, like how new music gets created, music history, theory, performance, other composers, alive or dead, to the mundane, like getting works played and recorded and the joys of teaching. If you're a professional composer and would like to participate, send us an e-mail.
Record companies, artists and publicists are invited to submit CDs to be considered for review. Send to: Jerry Bowles, Editor, Sequenza 21, 340 W. 57th Street, 12B, New York, NY 10019
At the conclusion of Bergman’s Winter Light, a minister holds a service in an empty church for a God he no longer believes in. At the same time, the woman who loves him decides to stay with him despite the fact that he finds her repulsive and abuses her mercilessly.
Bergman challenges us to come up with some reason to feel good about this ending, some source of human hope. All he offers is his own stark need to create something out his despair, a need he deliberately minimizes throughout the film.
That kind of mid-century modernist hopelessness was behind a lot of the music we (often flippantly) revile half a century later, so it’s good to have someone like Elodie Lauten who is unafraid to face it, unwilling to sugarcoat it. She has many more reasons not to compose than to compose, and yet she composes. That’s the way it is, and that’s the way she tells it. What more could we ask of her?
posted by Lawrence Dillon
5:42 PM
