Signage

This is the writing on the wall:

Increasingly we are told what to do, what not to do, and how to do whatever it is we’re still allowed to do. Collectively we grow increasingly comfortable with the extent of optional outside influence that we have permitted into in our lives, to the point where we now expect it, even demand it. What would we do without it? Packaging geared to the most pathetic, lazy, and ignorant of us conditions a population not to think independently or self-police, but to expect instructions as the default. We grow progressively inured to the notion that someone else will tell us what to do – the tragedy is how many people here might see that as an advantage. However, the cost of claiming this right to be sheep is that in doing so we cede the right to think and make decisions for ourselves. Now, what would “civilized” people these days do without signage? Even the most ridiculous instructions and warnings have to be articulated, since in the lieu of instructions all bets are off: reason is no longer expected or assumed. Reason is no longer the burden of the individual in the world. But as everyone knows, freedom doesn't work without responsibility, and so, in the end, those who choose to be sheep with receive a sheep's reward.

Incremental Improvements in Reality

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Small Investments in the Continuing Composition

I was sitting in my little workroom when a towel that had been hung over the shower curtain rail since the previous morning suddenly slipped down and dropped gently to the floor. Though up to this point it had appeared to me to be still and unchanging, the forces leading up to this final and seemingly jagged action had in fact been present and progressing all along, patiently mounting their attack, adding in some small way throughout to the richness of the whole. This final action was simply an investment waiting for its moment of realization, until then just another unnoticed part of the whole mechanism of the fluid and continuing composition.

Size

“My music is never chamber music, not even in the case of a solo sonata.”

- Galina Ustvolskaya

Incremental Improvements in Reality

The American Tradition

While many countries can claim more or less logical progressions of collectively cogent cultural traditions, the catalogue of truly excellent American New Music and its corresponding composers is for me a lineage of mavericks - determined, visionary individuals who have each to some extent made up their own musical traditions.

The ability to believe in and to follow out ones craziest imagining, ones most beautiful idea no matter how strange - even in the face of utter solitude and misunderstanding - this is the revolution in the blood and the core of our inherited legacy.

No matter where it happens, the art music scene will in one way or another continue to be mired in a milieu of marketing and very clever yet ultimately vapid and content-free filler, an onslaught of distractions and replications with only a handful of real treasures or worthwhile questions scattered among them. However, while it should be expected that garbage and mediocrity will continue to be the preponderance of what this scene exhales, I hope our best individuals never lose the ability and the courage to think and act beyond the common belief.

Ives, Cage, Bernstein, Partch, Nancarrow, Crumb, Zorn, Reich, Davidovsky - this is the American tradition.