Saturday, April 23, 2005
Let Me Put it Another Way...
Let me put it another way. You have this hill called Mt. Olympus and up there live these spirits called Bach, Beethoven, Brahms (and people who brunch would say Mozart). This is the Big Show, the immortality thing, the Ted Williams/Henry Aaron tier, the William Shakespeare Parkway, composers whose work is so ubiquitous that children in remote French villages have heard their names. Who, since Brahms, is likely to end up there? Some misguided readers obviously disagree but I say Bartok is there already. But who comes next? Wagner and Janacek are very close and personally, I think Messiaen is a shoo-in and John Adams has a shot at being the first American to reach that level.
posted by Jerry Bowles
1:07 PM
Friday, April 22, 2005
Top Ten Give or Take Ten or More
Making a list of influences makes sense to me, but I don't see the point of each person making a list of the all-time top ten composers of the 20th century?
Some composers have been remarkable new music citizens.
Some composers have been fantastic mentors and have inspired “disciples” to carry on a certain approach/philosophy.
Some composers have made an undeniable impact on how people think about music and approach composition and performance.
Some composers have written compelling music outside the establishment.
Some composers have written compelling music within the establishment.
While these are not necessarily mutually exclusive qualities, there are many people who rank high in one and not the other. A top ten list doesn't do them justice, and I don't understand what purpose it serves except to incite an endless and tautological debate about whose list is most accurate?
And what about the very 20th-century phenomenon called jazz?
posted by Corey Dargel
5:42 PM
an unscientific top 10
It's not my place to say who would be the top 10 composers of the last century based on establishment cred and respect of musicians; one would of course have to do a real survey. My $0.02 (in no particular order) of whom I would rate in terms of credibility and lasting influence:
- Stravinsky
- Schoenberg
- Cage
- Reich
- Shostakovich
- Webern
- Bartok
- Copland
- Messiaen
- Feldman
A few observations: note that neither Carter nor Boulez are on my list (like that's a surprise). I would also posit that Feldman is among the most significant composers on this list, up there with Cage and Schoenberg (of course, MF would have despised that dichotomy). Not all of these are particularly well-programmed in the US, including Feldman.
A more interesting list, however, would be that of composers who should be on the list, but generally aren't:
- LaMonte Young (his significance is far underrated)
- Partch
- Lou Harrison
- Dallapicolla
- Riley
- John Adams
- Hindemith
- Varese (would have been in the list above except none of the others could be bounced from the list)
- Scelsi
- Part
Again, this is just my opinion and has no validity whatsoever.
posted by David Toub
3:39 PM
Top 10 of the 20th
Okay, so we all love lists. Let's cut to the chase--the top 10 composers of the 20th century based on both place in the "establishment" repertoire as well as respect of fellow musicians. Is there anyone who would disagree that Bartok is ichi ban?
posted by Jerry Bowles
3:32 PM
Thursday, April 21, 2005
Pruning the List
Lawrence Dillon is pruning his list based upon comments and further reflection. Take a look.
Also, who is the most underrated 20th century composer? I'm torn between Silvestre Reveultas and Villa-Lobos, who wrote a lot of wonderful music that was not for the guitar.
posted by Jerry Bowles
12:59 PM
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Sexual Politics
I don't mean to chum the waters here (actually, I do, or otherwise we have to talk about Pierre Boulez some more) but I can't help observing that the responses to Elodie's blue Monday career crisis divide themselves rather predictably along generational and gender lines. The women are generally sympathetic and encouraging, as are the younger men from the "sensitive" generation born in the 70s and 80s. The older men tend to be from the "stop whining and get on with it" school of thought. I'm not making a judgement--we are all products of the times in which we come of age--but simply making an observation. Am I wrong?
posted by Jerry Bowles
4:15 PM
I can't think of any reasons.
Anyone who can bear to compose should, and Elodie Lauten is in my mind a complete success story.
posted by David Salvage
10:25 AM
Ten Reasons
I say this in full knowledge that it's an unfair oversimplification, but Elodie's reasons to stop composing seem to all add up to "I'll probably never be a superstar." So really this isn't so much a response to you, Elodie, as a chance to get up on one of my hobbyhorses.
Now it's true that most of us will never be superstars (although Corey and I are young yet. . .), for all of the reasons Elodie lists and, other reasons as well. And in fact, as musical genres proliferate fewer and fewer of us will be superstars across genres, but everybody will still have a reasonable shot at reknown within genres. The real problems here are the prevailing attitudes that classical music is The Great Music Of Our Society and that classical music is One Monolithic Genre (Or Maybe Two). Neither has been true for 75 years or more, but we are all so brainwashed by these ideologies (I include myself in that "we," although I struggle against the brainwashing every day) that we still measure our success and failure against those metrics.
How many of you have heard of the band VNV Nation? Not many, I would guess, but in the industrial music world they are huge. I don't know if they have done well enough for themselves that they need to keep dayjobs or not, but either way in the microcosm of the industrial music world they are a big success. In the Pop Music world, however -- and industrial is a subgenre of Pop -- VNV is nobody. Classical music has the beginnings of the same kind of genre fracturing, and when we get comfortable with that idea it will be good for everybody. True, a smaller and smaller percentage of the classical composer population will make a living composing, but that's okay -- it's economics, not failure. True, a smaller percentage of classical composers will be covered in legit journalism, but that's okay too -- journalism covers common denominators, which coincides only incidentally with artistic greatness.
Keep composing, Elodie -- some of us think you're awesome.
posted by Galen H. Brown
12:17 AM
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
better dead than...
Any composer who can bear to stop writing music should.
posted by Rodney Lister
10:58 PM
The Play's the Thing
I think Elodie Lauten has it exactly backwards when she writes that because of film and television people need stories. People have always needed stories and therefore we have film and television (and opera, theater, novels and yes, program music.) Charles Fussell once told me that he thought Mozart was such a great chamber music and symphonic composer because he was such a consumate theatrical composer. Even if a piece of music isn't literally "about" something it had still better feel like it is.
posted by Tom Myron
10:23 PM
Reasons to Stop
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
Focus on the Writing the Music
Elodie is totally eloquent, and a realist. And Beth is right on when she writes "I think we need to focus on writing the music itself". That's the be-all and end-all of why we're composers in the first place -- right?
A composition major in a lesson this morning asked several questions about how to
gain a reputation as a composer...I know what I answered -- what would you say?
posted by Judith Lang Zaimont
4:07 PM
Can't Stop
In response to Elodie Lauten's Ten Reasons to Stop Composing:
The value of music-making cannot be measured by statistics, numbers, or demographics (as the NEA would like to believe). It cannot be measured by financial success. Composing, performing, and listening to music is a spiritual activity, and its primary value lies in the spiritual realm.
Our society is uncomfortable dealing directly with spirituality. We tend to commodify (package), rationalize (theorize), and shift the focus away from (educational outreach) the spiritual role that musicians play in our society.
I know very few composers who don’t have a day job or another source of income. We keep composing because we can’t not compose. If we stop making music, there will be a spiritual void in our lives.
posted by Corey Dargel
3:11 PM
nonmusical influences
This may or may not be of interest to anyone, but I would consider the following nonmusical influences to have been important to my writing:
- Sartre and other existentialist writers (because they all "think different" and maintained that there are no absolute truths)
- James Joyce (I just like his writings, and wrote two works based on his poetry when I was younger)
- Edward Hopper's paintings (they're expressive yet not obviously so)
- Japanese "Mandara" paintings (influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism---I like the repetitive elements and the elegant structures)
- Bridges, particularly in Manhattan (probably because of their expansiveness and elegance)
- Architecture, most notably in Chicago (as with bridges, the structures generally contain repetitive elements and, particularly in Chicago, are very stark and innovative)
- The writings of Richard Feynman (he didn't care who he pissed off so long as he was intellectually honest. Feynman was probably the most brilliant physicist of the 20th century and appreciated the beauty in nature, be it large-scale or subatomic)
- S. Chandrasekhar (a great man I used to see at the U of Chicago during physics colloquia. He would study something obscure (like ellipsoids) for about a decade, publish the definitive book on it, and move on. He believed in getting into something as totally as possible; he wasn't interested in a subject unless he could explore it completely. I think that idea is something I follow in music; I want to explore something in as complete detail as possible)
- Object-oriented design (I think of many of my musical ideas as objects that can be reused, manipulated, etc.)
Musical influences would include:
- Bach
- Glass, Reich, Riley, Young, Adams
- Shostakovich
- Schoenberg, Berg, Webern
- Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden
- Morton Feldman
- Harry Partch
- Copland
- David Borden
- Messiaen
I'll probably think of others after I post this, but it's a start.
posted by David Toub
10:43 AM
definitely better off
I had read Elodie Lauten's post yesterday and am glad others did as well. While I don't think composers are better off dead, I don't think it's that easy to get works performed, particularly if it's new/unusual music. As with anything (business, politics, medicine, law, etc), networking helps, regardless of one's intrinsic talents.
My music has only rarely been performed, to the degree that I'm exceptionally excited that Christina Fong and the Rangtzen Quartet are being kind enough to release a CD containing a short work of mine. I do not make my living from my music, which is probably really good since I would have starved to death long ago. I give a lot of credit to anyone who can earn their living through composition or any artistic pursuit. Because I write for my own pleasure, I've done so for almost 30 years regardless of whether or not anything gets performed (although it is better to be performed than not, of course). So I think any composer is better off writing, regardless of performance opportunities, commercial success or whatever, than not writing.
posted by David Toub
10:29 AM
At Least We're Not Better Off Dead
Elodie Lauten’s Ten Reasons To Stop Composing was a shock. “Are we better off dead?” I am very happy to hear that her answer is “No.” I was afraid that I was going to read “Suicide is painless…”
It is not that I disagree with her facts, it is just that I’m not willing to stop composing just because the world isn’t paying me for it. And she isn’t either, even though she has not yet discovered the logic to support her activities.
In fact it has been liberating to be ignored most of my career. When no one is listening there are no inhibitions. It is encouraging to be heard from time to time and to be koshered by the NEA and paid by a wonderful ensemble. But those things do not provide a living. For that you have to find your own way. Certainly my music has wandered sufficiently away from the mainstreams of music (off into the swales…) that I can’t expect to be a major grant/prize winning composer. The people that make those decisions are usually riding a wave, way beyond rivers and swales.
I think we need to focus on writing the music itself and stay healthy, make enough money to live, love, and try to live to be old. I think they may start celebrating us after we hit 80, Elodie. Oh yeah, positive thinking..that could help!
posted by Beth Anderson
10:17 AM
Today's Agenda
While we're all having a lot of fun beating up an 80-year-old man over on the front page, there are a couple of other items that need our attention. The first is Elodie Lauten's 10 Reasons to Stop Composing. It's a serious piece that needs a response and I recommend that everyone make a point of reading and leaving some thoughts. The second item is Tom Myron's list of non-musical influences. I'd like to see more of this but not simply a list but an explanation of how and why the influences are important to you. By the way, thank you all--readers and bloggers alive--for your generous contributions here and for creating a real spirit of community. Yesterday was a new record for us in terms of visitors and it's all thanks to your efforts.
posted by Jerry Bowles
9:27 AM
Monday, April 18, 2005
Pierre de France or Pierre Lapin?
Don't miss the discussion of Pierre Boulez over on the front page, especially Frank J. Oteri's comments on Boulez's butchering of Berg.
posted by Jerry Bowles
12:42 PM
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