Experiments
Renewable Music, an experimental composer, looks hard at contemporary experiments in unexperimentalism. Well, I'm confusing things, so just follow the link. He seems slightly doubtful that such retrograde efforts can be sincere, but he is otherwise open minded and curious.
Me, I'm not much pro-traditional as I am anti-emperor's-new-clothesism; I resent any suggestion that complexity and difficulty lead inevitably to aesthetic superiority. On this topic, I am the classic evangelist, railing against the temptation I feel most strongly.
My latest vanity project tends to want to settle into a conservative tonal language. I'm continually adding dissonances to spice things up, but most of my experiments along those lines have been failures; they simply don't belong in this piece. I am writing for an a cappella choir, and as I have complained before, most choral singers have special needs that limit a composer's adventurousness, but that's not the controlling legal authority in this case. The text I've chosen calls for a neo-romantic treatment, and I simply cannot hear this poem sung without an effervescent joy with which dissonance would be not, uh, consonant.
This project is very hush hush, so I won't say more about it, except that I'm having a blast writing it, and the things I'm learning will more than justify the effort even if I don't get a performance out of it. The deadline is supplying just the right amount of pressure, the technical problems are just difficult enough to be interesting, and I'm in love with the poetry. (No, it's not Longfellow. A thousand quatloos to the first person to guess the author! And no, you'll never guess.)
Umie the Umlaut says, "ask your doctor about the Fredösphere!"
4 Comments:
"I resent any suggestion that complexity and difficulty lead inevitably to aesthetic superiority."
Hooray! Well put. The piece I just finished is similarly conservative. It will be fun to play for the orchestra, and the audience will enjoy it and "new music" people will roll their eyes.
As for choral music, it just plain sounds better when it's singable. Maybe it's just me.
Good luck with the project, and enjoy.
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I agree with michel, a very quotable line, but i cant say how much more can still be done within a tonal framework! its mind boggling to me the possibilities a composer has, but they just have to be realized, structural possibilities, even harmonic possibilities- i get antsy that contemporary music is not moving forward enough sometimes.
And i dont mean experiments for the sake of experiments of course, but the integration of a viable new with whats well established.
But i find experimental music to be refreshing too- it makes you look at that old art differently. Im babbling...
Excellent post!
"I resent any suggestion that complexity and difficulty lead inevitably to aesthetic superiority."
I sure hope that you haven't gathered that this is my attitude. I rarely use complexity as a term when I talk or write about music. Complexity can be a measure of so many different qualities, that unless the particular criteria are spelled out, the argument is lost. For me, the argument was lost in a big way in the early nineties when the "new complexity" school was holding forth. Simply overlaying a large number of technical operations -- many of which were in themselves musically attractive, not unlike the technical treasures found in Lou Harrison's Music Primer -- until the page had more ink than white space was never convincing to me.
By a number of measures, a composer who replicates a particular historical style is doing something rather more complex than either the hyper-notater described above or the experimentalist (as I identify myself) who is working from first principles. I think here of Borge's Pierre Menard, whose replicated sections of the Quixote were -- although word-for-word identical -- considerably richer for their effort and anachronisms than the Cervantes original.
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