The Fredösphere

Ian Moss is a composer and singer who promotes his music through the Music with a capital M website.  Since graduating from Yale, he has found a day job at the American Music Center.  After I blogged his choral music, we met via email, and I'm very glad he has agreed to guest blog here at the Fredösphere.  The following essay gives us a peek at the new music scene at Yale, and suggests one answer to the big  whither new music? question that is so much on our minds these days.  Perhaps I'll share my reaction to this question in a day or two.  As for y'all, the comments are always open.  Take it away, Ian!

Who says there's no new music in the schools? When I was in eighth grade or so, I was treated to a brilliant school recital "performance" of John Cage's 4'33" scored (in this instance) for saxophone and piano. I hated it. "What the hell is this?" I asked, along with 99% of the other kids who were my cellmates in this prison of offensive silence created by Mr. Genius 20th-Century Composer. The lasting educational value imparted to me as a result of this close encounter with modern music was that John Cage was full of crap.
 
Fast-forward to my senior year in college, when I participated in a performance of Cage's breakout "aleatoric" piece, Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for 12 radios (and 24 players). Contrary to my expectations after having read about it in my trusty 20th-century music textbook, the piece was meticulously notated with a separate "part" for each radio; one player was assigned to the tuning knob with the other in charge of manipulating the volume. We gathered a bunch of classmates to perform the piece, placed it on the program of the first Yale College Composers' Group concert of the season, and told all our friends. One hundred and fifty people showed up for this thing, at least five times the audience at most other new music events I had attended. The piece? Well, it sounded pretty terrible, to be honest with you. But that wasn't the point--and this time, I understood. There was something thoroughly magical in the combination of (a) engaging in a musical fashion with everyday objects that we don't normally think of musically; (b) the odd collision of 24 players who are all accomplished musicians but completely untrained on the "instruments" at hand; (c) the collaborative nature of having two performers for each instrument; (d) the "what?" effect engendered by bringing such an unusual work to life and having the temerity to present it in a concert hall. It helped that this was a piece that was mentioned prominently in the required reading for a class that every music major had to complete in order to graduate--a piece that many had heard about but almost no one had actually heard.
 
Similar experiences abounded in the time I was at Yale--there was the "piece that's also a sporting event" written by a faculty member which involved two percussionists, a graphical score, a referee, and lots of shouting (by performers and audience alike); a student piece entitled Ritual that alternated between stereotypically jazz and classical material, played respectively in a stereotypically classical and jazz manner; performances of Frederic Rzweski's Les Moutons de Panurge for any combination of musicians and non-musicians, Terry Riley's In C, and Fluxus pieces; and a rendition of Steve Reich's Clapping Music for confused passersby in the rotunda outside our dining hall. I'm told that the year after I graduated there was even a gargantuan production of György Ligeti's Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes. Yale has a tradition of this kind of postmodern concertizing; the venerable Bang on a Can festival partially grew out of the activities of an earlier student group called Sheep's Clothing, which put on all-night marathon concerts in the '70s that were veritable orgies of conceptual art. After lying dormant for some time, the all-night marathon tradition was revived the year before I arrived on campus as a freshman, and I had the privilege of participating in two of them. These were among the most wildly enjoyable experiences of any kind I had at school. Audience members were encouraged to come and go as they pleased; pizza and drinks were provided; people stretched out on the floor as they prepared for yet another hour of music. How many would make it to the end? we would all wonder. My senior year, 13 people performed In C as the sun came up; we constituted what was left of the crowd, which had reached nearly 100 at peak. About an hour and a half earlier, I had run across the courtyard to wake up my best friend, a saxophonist, who gamely dragged his horn over to the concert and played a duo of mine that was a literal transcription of my sophomore-year roomate typing to his friends on AOL Instant Messenger.
 
I've been out in the "real world" for nearly three years now, working in arts administration, and I have to be honest, something's missing. Going to classical concerts these days more often feels like that eighth-grade student recital to me than it does that evening when we performed Imaginary Landscape. When I was living in Philadelphia, there was a group of jazz composers who put on a concert series entitled Risk-Taking Type Music that could reliably be counted on to provide some good times. Nevertheless, too many performers and concert presenters seem to have forgotten that there are many reasons besides music why people attend and enjoy concerts. Certainly the social element is important, but the very best concerts reach even beyond that to create a sense of EVENT, either through programming, venue, structure, or some combination thereof. It's not just a matter of tying pieces together with some cute "theme" or haphazardly throwing cash at an elaborate production. What I enjoyed most about the Yale concerts was their utter fearlessness, and the exhiliration that goes along with the process of giving tangible definition to a crazy flight of imagination. We felt like we could do anything, and in our best moments I think our audience felt that way too.
 
So what of it, New York? Can't you do better than a ragtag group of college students? I'm all ears...