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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Wednesday, March 09, 2005
"Music's Elemental Powers"
Just discovered that Alex Ross, as usual, has already said what I was trying to say below but much better (also, as usual). The Atlanta Sympony is doing Osvaldo Golijov's one-act opera Ainadamar next year and I searched through Alex's archives to see what he had said about it when it premiered at Tanglewood. This seemed especially on point: His (Golijov's) works arouse extraordinary enthusiasm in audiences, because they revive music’s elemental powers: they have rhythms that rock the body into motion and melodies that linger in the mind. Golijov lacks the intellectual caution that leads composers to confine a quasi-tonal melody within knotty, twelve-tone-ish figures. Instead, he lets his melodies wing their way into the open air. Which is another way of saying I gave it a 95, Dick. The beat was good and it was good to dance to.
posted by Jerry Bowles
10:07 PM
On Rhythm
In a comment below, Jerry writes of rhythm being hardwired into our brains: “we all respond to rhythms in some strange primitive way that is basically emotional.”
I’ve often wondered about the sound-world we experience in the months before birth, a sound-world dominated by our own internal pulsations, which must create fascinating patterns with our mothers’ heartbeats. A four-month fetus heart-rate can be three times as fast as its mother’s.
That’s the most predominant sound we know from the first moment we experience sound, and for quite some time thereafter -- what must feel like eternity -- until birth. Would that hard-wire a powerful predilection?
posted by Lawrence Dillon
9:50 PM
Meaning
Well, whatever meaning is, I don't think anybody intends to write pieces that don't have it. I'm not sure that anybody intends to write music that won't evoke some sort of reaction from those who hear it. The trick, of course, is to manage to succeed at doing that.
posted by Rodney Lister
10:41 AM
Intentional Fallacy
Aren't we overreaching by assuming that "meaning" is something a composer, or any artist, can build into a work rather than what the listener or viewer gets out of it? I would argue that what most modern music lacks is not meaning but an emotional payback to the listener. The most successful (commercially and artistically) modern composers--John Adams, Osvaldo Golijov, Arvo Part--succeed not because their work "means" something but because it stirs the emotions of listeners. Never underestimate the power of a good hook.
posted by Jerry Bowles
10:08 AM
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