The Fredösphere

It's the La Brea Tar Pits of composing:  the masterpiece syndrome.  Lawrence Dillon knows it well and wants to rescue his students from it.

Meanwhile...New Music Box has an interview with Walter Simmons, who has written Voices in the Wilderness:  Six American Neo-Romantic Composers.  Having never quite recovered from the oppressive environment of my youth, wherein only atonal music was respected in academic circles, I tend to react to any promotion of neo-romanticism with a sense of relief.  But then, as I look further, something shocking and shameful happens:

I notice that music labeled as "neo-romantic" tends to disappoint.

Of course that's not fair.  For starters, even in mid-century tonalists were thriving -- ever heard of Copland or Barber, fer heaven's sake?  So the big atonalist conspiracy was never so powerful; plus, there's nothing disappointing about Copland or Barber.  But the fact is, I don't think of the really good guys as belonging to the neo-romantic movement.  They just wrote good music.  Why is that?  What's wrong with me?

Maybe the neo-romantic label is assumed by people with a taste for very low levels of dissonance.  Keep in mind, "dissonance" doesn't really apply in the atonal world; dissonance can only occur in the context of some kind of consonance.  My preference is for lots and lots of dissonance -- which means, it must be tonal, but it must also be edgy.  Both neo-romantics and atonalists minimize dissonance, albeit by completely different means.  Schoenberg announced the emancipation of dissonance; who the heck asked him to emancipate it?  I want my dissonance contained, confined, bound, chained, whipped

Where was I?  Oh yes, neo-romanticism.  I seemed to have blacked out there for a minute.  Anyway, I'd like to live in a world where the neo-romantic label is not a stigma in any way.  I'm afraid I'm not quite ready to help make that world a reality.  I'm a bad person.