Rusty Banks is a composer/guitarist/teacher originally from Jasper, AL, now living in Pennsylvania.
His compositions benefit from themes relating to regions or environments. For example, his composition commissioned by the Alabama Music Teacher Association's 2004 convention featured audio samples from the Cahaba River, Alabama's last free-flowing river. Another work, "Long Pine Creek: New Year's Day," uses sounds from Long Pine Creek in Nebraska. His compositions range from traditional concert music to sonic installations where boom boxes are scattered throughout a room. His music is described as thoroughly modern, yet accessible, a description he shudders at, but reluctantly accepts. His compositions may be heard on Living Artist Recordings, as well as his web site, rustybanks.org.
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Thursday, May 04, 2006
Alienation, animosity and audience
I love it when an audience responds well to a work of mine. That’s because there is a lot of “me” in the work and hearty applause (with positive and meaningful comments afterwards) is a sort vindication that my technical skills supported this transaction.
When I write music for commercials, I suspend my “voice” and provide what I think may strengthen the visual message. In this case, failure to reach the audience is indeed failure.
But for my concert music, I invite the audience to meet me half-way. I think it’s fine for composers to be critical of a close-minded audience. To be un-thinking is as dangerous as it is undesirable.
I say this, having gotten almost all positive reviews and comments and applause for presentations of my work. Whenever I am programmed on a concert the presenters love to point out that I’m “modern… yet listener-friendly!” which is far too apologetic for my tastes.
On Seq21, or any new music site for that matter, there is always talk of how our audience became alienated after WWII and whatnot. Personally, I'll be glad when animosity for the audience is hip again. Not that I really hate the audience, or write music that is not listener-friendly, I just don’t understand the pressure to bend towards the wants of overly-broad focus groups. What’s the point of making decisions based on likeability? Shouldn’t composers make choices based on clarity of idea?
posted by Rusty Banks
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