Saturday, May 06, 2006
Writing for Amateur Ensembles
Antonio A. Celaya writes: Dear Sequenza 21 Editors (or whatever the title is for blog keepers),
I hope that you won't find it presumptuous of a mere lurker about sequenza21 to suggest a topic for one of the discussions chains. Please forgive me if it's been done.
I think that an excellent topic might be whether New Music circles have injudiciously ignored writing for amateur ensembles. While this is not 19th century Vienna and we have fewer folk who gather on Saturday evenings to play string quartets, the largest portion of the musical ensembles active in the United States are people who perform together for fun. There are probably many times as many amateur choirs in the country as there are paid orchestras. There are smaller numbers of orchestras and wind ensembles filled with doctors, engineers, janitors and carpenters who love to play.
I am a composer, albeit a composer unburdened with those pesky problems of commissions and frequent performances, and I recognize that writing for highly skilled performers allows one to stretch one's skills and expression in directions not possible with less skilled performers. However, there are a hell of a lot of ensembles out there that are strangers to much in the way of new music.
Getting those groups to play new music is no easy matter. This is especially true with choirs. There seems to be long established enmity between many a New Music milieu and choirs. Many composer friends have told me that they hate vocal music and in particular hate choral music. There is a ton of great choral music from the last 30-40 years, in particular there's an impressive body of works from the Nordic countries inspired by Eric Ericson's virtuoso ensembles and those of his students.
If sequenza21 readers don't know works like Ingvar Lidholm's "Arriveder le stelle" or Per Norgaard's "Wie en kind" or his "Frost Psalm" then they are missing out. I sing with various ensembles and it is true that many singers long ago closed their mind to anything written after Elijah. It's also true that a composer has to compose a piece for amateur choirs that is simple enough that amateur singers can get their pitches. Some genres of New Music may just not be able to crossover in that "unknown region."
There is an organization in England dedicated to commissioning and collecting new music for amateur ensembles. Ought the United states have similar organization advocating with ensembles for composers, and encouraging composers to write for amateurs both talented and not so talented?
Some of the distance between the New Music world and the amateur musical world arises from the New Music world's excessive anxiety about whether one is a "professional composer." The fact is few composers make the bulk, or any of their living, off their compositions. More power to those who do. I wish I were among them. They have my admiration. The goal is to get composers' music played, and only then can we begin to worry more about who's getting paid. The less relevant we become the less likely anyone is to get paid for their compositional life.
posted by Jerry Bowles
10:38 AM
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
positive and negative music?
It's been a while since I've started a thread here, but Glenn Freeman shot me an e-mail today about a Web site that provides information about what is termed "positive music" and "negative music." I'm providing some detail below, but I'll cut to the chase: positive music is music that is uplifting, negative music is that which is depressing:
The term positive music may be unfamiliar to some people. When we use the term positive to describe music, we are using it to describe music that has beneficial qualities and is emotionally and spiritually uplifting, perhaps even healing. Additionally, positive music can be relaxing, calming, and mentally invigorating. Positive music is not about lyrics, but about the music itself.
During the early 1950’s, every song that you heard on the radio was positive. Pop songs were romantic, filled with feeling; country tunes were upbeat, and fun; people listened to polkas: they were fun and spirited; and rhythm and blues (or race music, as it was called then) was clever and evocative. At that time, there was no term to describe positive music because there was little music that wasn’t positive. But now, the airwaves are filled with pain-filled, angry heavy-metal music: music that is grating and highly disturbing to the nervous system, and "alternative music" that is tortured, ugly, and nervous. Because of the quantity of negative music that society now accepts, there is now a great need to understand the difference between music that is positive, healthy and healing, and music that is negative, depressing, unhealthy and stress-inducing.
Needless to say, the author includes articles such as "Arnold Schˆnberg: Father of Negative Music" [what he has against spelling out Schoenberg's name is unclear to me, but as many religious Jews will write "G-D" and I consider Schoenberg to have been a god in his day, perhaps his incomplete spelling is really appropriate 8-) ]. And while he's no fan of the New Vienna School, he isn't completely positive about Cage, either. Cage represents "anarchy and chaos," although Feldman, with whom he studied, comes across more positively.
I don't like categorization, nor do I think anything is as simple as "black or white" or "positive or negative." I do think it's reasonable to claim that much 20th-century music is complex, depressing...whatever. But that's a subjective determination. Nor is it a value judgment. Admittedly, a lot of Shostakovich's late music is sad, but does that mean it isn't approachable, or that it's less worthy than "positive" music? Late Stravinsky, most Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Dallapiccola, Messiaen, Babbitt, Carter, etc. might then be lumped into a "negative" dumpster, and the word "negative" has unfavorable connotations, right?
So I'm not totally sold on the concepts expressed on this Web site. The manifesto is interesting, but I think I'm more of a fan of the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacree Movement.
So, do people feel this is a valid and/or useful distinction: positive vs. negative music? And is negative music such a bad thing? I mean, if everything were positive, we'd never know it, since there would be no opposite to call attention to it.
posted by David Toub
10:53 AM
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Photography as Music
Ed note: Owen C. Grant passed along the following thoughts for your consideration.
I’ve been debating for a number of years over the merits of popular music with a friend of mine. I’ve always argued along the lines of Stockhausen’s Advice to Clever Children...: I wish those musicians would not allow themselves any repetitions, and would go faster in developing their ideas or their findings, because I don't appreciate at all this permanent repetitive language. It is like someone who is stuttering all the time, and can't get words out of his mouth. I think musicians should have very concise figures and not rely on this fashionable psychology. I don't like psychology whatsoever: using music like a drug is stupid. One shouldn't do that: music is the product of the highest human intelligence, and of the best senses, the listening senses and of imagination and intuition.
Since then I have started to see similarities between photography, and popular music. I feel that like much photography, popular music is about capturing a moment of beauty, honesty, and truth. I think that popular music is about trying to find interesting sounds – whether it’s a riff, a groove, a texture, an arrangement, and so on – and displaying it clearly with little or no development. When one starts to consider popular music through the eyes of a photographer, I think it allows one to understand and appreciate the music much more easily on an artistic level.
The penny has dropped, and I am having a renaissance of popular music (albeit leftfield). I hope that this insight may allow others to as well.
posted by Jerry Bowles
3:16 PM
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