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.
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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
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Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Music, Politics, and the Search for Meaning
As a politically active composer (I'm sure the FBI has a hefty letter file by now), I'm proud to be among the ranks of concerned composer/citizens who voice opinions about the often laudable, sometimes reprehensible actions of governments--both ours and others. And while I don't focus much on political issues in my music, it's bound to crop up occasionally. Artists, as well as politicians, have a rhetoric, and most feel at least some obligation to use it. (Now, if only we could only use our powers for good...)
But it does make me wonder--Many art music composers, myself included, have complained of art music being marginalized, that we're losing ground with an audience. There is reason for this, but it's not entirely the dumbing down of arts and educational programs. Hell, Plato and Socrates complained of that. The number of people seeking meaning (whatever "meaning" means) in their arts and their lives is actually greater than ever before.
So with so many kinds of interesting music and arts in this country, isn't it weird that NPR and others who bankrolled the research were surprised that people actually have more than a single taste in music? And is it any surprise, that so much "new" music in academia, say between 1945 and 1980 or so, with it's abstraction and sentimentality of despair to the exclusion of so much else, became marginalized?
But even with a diveristy of tastes and styles, I would suggest that there are common factors in keeping an audience: Meaning. Substance. Something new to say. Something worth hearing twice. Something that touches the human condition.
if "meaning" is absent, then no matter how beautifully crafted, simple or complex, powerful or beautiful on the surface a work may be, if an original voice and a sense of communication is absent, then the audience drops away. If there is nothing new being said, no element of the human experience touched, the audience drops away. If it's all about color or craft, then the audience drops away. It's not to say a new or radical piece may not have a rocky beginning. But over decades and eras, if there is no audience, then to ask a famous question the other way, "Who cares if we compose?"
It's an interdisciplinary age, both in politics and arts, as well as between artistic disciplines. We must learn to understand "those people" who are not like us. And I suspect art music composers had best learn to think outside of our narrow world of harmony and rhythm and into the world of context, drama, narrative, language, politics, meaning, substance, and so on if we want to get new, young listeners in the door, and sell more than ten CDs a year.
(Hmmmmm, makes me wonder....)
posted by Cary Boyce
10:19 PM
Music Critics and Re-viewing the Reviewers
In preparation for the March 20th panel discussion Re-viewing the Reviewers
(with Kyle Gann, Iris Brooks, Pauline Oliveros, Dr. Melanie Mitrano, and Al Margolis at The Gallery at Deep Listening Space in Kingston, New York. Information: http://www.pofinc.org/index2.html) I’ve been reading “Maestros Of The Pen: A History of Musical Criticism In America” by Mark N. Grant. It is a very interesting book partially because it looks at music history through the eyes of music critics. It is also well written, engaging, and tells a story never mentioned in music school.
posted by Beth Anderson
3:03 PM
Re: More Music and Politics
Congratulations to my colleague Rodney Lister for such an eloquent post on music and politics. I have very little to add to what he has said here and I have no quick fix about our current situation. Nevertheless, Rodney's post did persuade me to re-read some of Roger Sessions's essays on music and reflect on how our time is not entirely unlike the period of the thirties.
In an essay written in 1933 called "Music and Nationalism" Sessions writes: "This is of course the reason why modern political men of the type of the Nazi leaders whose power must ultimately rest on their ability artificially to stimulate and direct or even to manufacture popular passions, concern themselves inevitably with art and with culture in general. In its essence art reveals the inner nature of life and of men, and thus must be eternally opposed to those who are trying to force human impulses into purely interested channels. That art may sometimes be inspired by enthusiasm for a cause may be readily admitted, just as it may be inspired by any really profound feeling whatever. But when it remains on the level of an organ or reflection of popular prejudice, the artist has 'made the great refusal' and abrogated his responsibility as a man and therefore as an artist as well."
posted by Larry Thomas Bell
8:51 AM
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