There's a very attractive house that sits a short distance down the street from us. It's one of the nicest on the block, if not the nicest. The house itself is very well-maintained, clean and clearly the subject of someone's ongoing attention. Beyond this, however, the entire front yard is beautifully landscaped, and done in a manner that must require regular maintenance. The lot is impressive for our area, and it would seem at a glance that the owners are individuals who indeed understand how to care for things.
Every time either my wife or I walk past this house when we're out with our dogs, an angry German Shepherd emerges in the driveway to bark at us relentlessly. Though we usually keep to the opposite side of the street, the dog nonetheless starts before we're in front of the house and continues barking for some time afterward. Going on and on at the top of his/her lungs, the dog leers at us aggressively through the high metal fence. I am always proud of our dogs in these moments, who stare quietly at the insane spectacle as we walk past. The German Shepherd is almost always there when we pass, and we have yet to see anyone come out and comfort the dog or even communicate with it during these spells. (I did see the people who lived in the house once, getting into their car; I'm pretty sure they were wearing Christmas sweaters.)
I used to feel frustration at this dog and its relentless barking, so uselessly loud and obnoxious, until the Redhead pointed out that this poor animal is just unsocialized, alone, perpetually trapped behind a fence -- not getting what it really needs and reacting accordingly. A prominent Beware of Dog sign on the driveway fence and the giant Merry Christmas permanently affixed above their porch remain the only text adorning the house. This poor, scary dog serves to protect these people's precious things and to complete an image, and has the terrible misfortune of being treated like just another ornament -- living under the control of humans who are either too stupid to understand or just don't care what this decorative creature living at their mercy might really need. But honestly, how could either of these realities be possible? The truly sad thing is, this dog would most likely be willing to die in defense of these people. It doesn't seem uncommon, but it never stops being disappointing -- seeing everything so well-maintained but real life itself.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Thursday, January 20, 2011
American Repurposing
I’m not going to pretend that I know all that much about wind bands. What little information I do possess comes largely from friends working in that world. Nonetheless, the recent full completion of a very good experience involving large concert wind band brings to mind a few observations prompted during the project.
The modern wind band tradition remains a relatively successful “classical” musical tradition of those presently operating in the US, due largely to the simple fact that this particular tradition continues to be relatively well funded. It manages to maintain this ongoing support because a band’s typical raison d’arte derives from its relationships to various popular athletic activities – that is, it doesn't usually depend upon the whims of "artistically" interested patrons or generally underwhelming art concert ticket sales.
In addition to offering the obvious benefits of relatively consistent support, this detail also carries another positive consequence: While much of the currently practiced wind band repertoire may not be our favorite, when a spot for something truly adventurous does indeed open up there would actually seem to be far fewer compromising artistic actors directly involved in that decision-making process. (It’s also worth remembering that the typical American orchestra isn’t usually all that renowned for its experimentalism or adventurousness either.)
The modern art music composer may be attracted to wind band composition projects for a variety of good and interesting reasons. However, one obvious point worth mentioning is simply that modern concert wind ensembles are typically quite large. And while these groups admittedly don’t tend to offer an orchestra’s expansive string options, for instance, concert wind bands nonetheless boast their own endless spectrums of instrumental and timbral possibilities.
In the present climate of perpetually diminishing resources and extremely limited artist support, as US orchestras experience ongoing funding challenges and symphonic opportunities vanish, composers of inquisitive contemporary art music will need to remain as innovative as ever. Continuing to seek out fresh, more available large-scale ensemble options, it seems somehow appropriate that we might among other possibilities turn to this this classically vernacular European tradition that has now also become very American. Yes, there are indeed significant trades, and a wind band is NOT an orchestra. Nonetheless, it certainly seems like a monster worthy of our investigation.
Special thanks to Eric Hewitt and the Boston Conservatory Wind Ensemble.
The modern wind band tradition remains a relatively successful “classical” musical tradition of those presently operating in the US, due largely to the simple fact that this particular tradition continues to be relatively well funded. It manages to maintain this ongoing support because a band’s typical raison d’arte derives from its relationships to various popular athletic activities – that is, it doesn't usually depend upon the whims of "artistically" interested patrons or generally underwhelming art concert ticket sales.
In addition to offering the obvious benefits of relatively consistent support, this detail also carries another positive consequence: While much of the currently practiced wind band repertoire may not be our favorite, when a spot for something truly adventurous does indeed open up there would actually seem to be far fewer compromising artistic actors directly involved in that decision-making process. (It’s also worth remembering that the typical American orchestra isn’t usually all that renowned for its experimentalism or adventurousness either.)
The modern art music composer may be attracted to wind band composition projects for a variety of good and interesting reasons. However, one obvious point worth mentioning is simply that modern concert wind ensembles are typically quite large. And while these groups admittedly don’t tend to offer an orchestra’s expansive string options, for instance, concert wind bands nonetheless boast their own endless spectrums of instrumental and timbral possibilities.
In the present climate of perpetually diminishing resources and extremely limited artist support, as US orchestras experience ongoing funding challenges and symphonic opportunities vanish, composers of inquisitive contemporary art music will need to remain as innovative as ever. Continuing to seek out fresh, more available large-scale ensemble options, it seems somehow appropriate that we might among other possibilities turn to this this classically vernacular European tradition that has now also become very American. Yes, there are indeed significant trades, and a wind band is NOT an orchestra. Nonetheless, it certainly seems like a monster worthy of our investigation.
Special thanks to Eric Hewitt and the Boston Conservatory Wind Ensemble.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Great Audiences
We went out last Monday for our inaugural Los Angeles new music experience. The NYC-based Argento Chamber Ensemble returned to LA's Monday Evening Concerts, presented at the Colburn School’s Zipper Concert Hall. Justin Urcis’s exceptional Monday Evening Concerts series remains a Southern California haven of thoughtful, adventurous programming, and the longstanding Argento Chamber Ensemble serves as one of new music’s most dedicated advocates in the States, maintaining a well-deserved reputation for cutting-edge choices and world-class performances. Needless to say, the concert was fantastic. Ferneyhough, Pesson, and Sciarrino occupied the first half with density, playfulness, and fragility. However, this collection principally served as exceptional amuse-bouche for the second half of the show, which consisted of a dynamic West Coast premiere of Fausto Romitelli’s Professor Bad Trip (so much fun!).
An informal discussion was held following the concert, for which a healthy quorum of aficionados remained. More than one audience member posed a question to Argento conductor and point man Michel Galante regarding the nature of new music audiences, and something that Michel said in reply to one of these struck me. He remarked that, as opposed to the typical classical music fan (who "know what they like and like what they know"), new music audiences tend to be interested in ideas – basically that one of the defining characteristics of a new music audience member is the quality of creative curiosity. I agree with this, but besides that, I just like the idea. It also reminds me of something Walt Whitman once said, that “To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too.” We may not have a lot of resources nor a huge audience, but one thing I can say for our new music audiences is that they are indeed great and we are lucky to have them.
An informal discussion was held following the concert, for which a healthy quorum of aficionados remained. More than one audience member posed a question to Argento conductor and point man Michel Galante regarding the nature of new music audiences, and something that Michel said in reply to one of these struck me. He remarked that, as opposed to the typical classical music fan (who "know what they like and like what they know"), new music audiences tend to be interested in ideas – basically that one of the defining characteristics of a new music audience member is the quality of creative curiosity. I agree with this, but besides that, I just like the idea. It also reminds me of something Walt Whitman once said, that “To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too.” We may not have a lot of resources nor a huge audience, but one thing I can say for our new music audiences is that they are indeed great and we are lucky to have them.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Support and Incentive
I know that extraordinary contemporary art music exists. In a world overrun with the mediocre and inauthentic, I've had the chance to experience deeply honest, considered, spectacular, and cutting edge music. The possibility of the thoughtfully fantastic is a principal reason why I love this tradition, why I'm still listening. And it's this music that I also feel compelled to spend so much time trying to write. Since a principal justifying value for the modern art music tradition is for me this quality of the extraordinary, or at least the possibility of the extraordinary, I find myself endlessly frustrated by what I see as an array of counterproductive tendencies at work in our already strapped and struggling little universe.
Deciding this last year to actively return composition to the forefront of my working life, I’ve reinitiated the process of regularly looking around for various grants, performances, contests, etc. to which to apply. While it's important that composers and artists continue to search out new and innovative ways of sustaining themselves and making it all work in modern society, nonetheless it also makes sense to try to plug into those systems that already do exist. In particular, my recent re-foray into searching for opportunities and support as an American art music composer has led to a few observations I wanted to share.
We already know that far too many pieces receive only one performance. Good new musical works should be played again and again and again. Well, at least more than once, right? Combing through the calls for scores, however, I see listing after listing requesting previously unperformed works – new, unperformed, unawarded, and so forth. Often, the group or institution is asking the composer to write a brand new piece that they will then consider or enter in their little contest, with no guarantee of any actual performance. Spend a bunch of time investing in a great new work and maybe we’ll perform it. Nice.
Additionally, groups and institutions sometimes request pieces that for various reasons might be particularly difficult to stage more than once, or that don't make sense to have performed by another group or at another time. Sometimes the reasoning behind this makes artistic and logistical sense and the project is still absolutely worth engaging. Most often though, unnecessary stipulations result from some gimmicky marketing-related tactic that won't really help the group stand out from the crowd the way it imagines anyway. All these unnecessary rules do is serve to limit the composer and handicap the artistic possibilities of the project.
Since the premiering ensemble or individual too often performs a work only once, it becomes especially important to get a good piece of new music out to others who might then take it on, or at least perform it again. As much as people seem enamored with premieres, a work really comes alive and shines only after an ensemble has honestly decided to own it - like a rock band with a song that it's played over and over. There's really no other way to really get everything out of the music that it deserves. Instead, what happens far more often is that a composer invests a ridiculous amount of energy and thought into creating a complex and considered work that will be performed once, maybe a few times, but that will never really be given its due because no one will ever really commit to owning it. Instead, we're already on to the next thing.
New music composers never have enough time, especially when it comes to writing music. Consequently, while an artistic project should be led first by an artistic impulse, composers also need to be smart about which of their good ideas they spend their time developing. Unless one's game is simply to produce as much music as possible without great regard as to its quality (often a successful marketing technique), writing only for the single instance is not usually the ideal move given the heavy artistic investment required to create something truly new and good. The truth is that this sort of opportunity is most often what's available, and it's certainly better than nothing. However, wouldn't it behoove those claiming to be advocates of new music to consider exactly what it is for which they're advocating? Are we as a tradition out just for the next exciting premiere, or to directly encourage the creation of exceptional, lasting works?
While I understand and appreciate the impulse guiding these kinds of contests, opportunities, and so forth, this approach will nonetheless tend to incentivize a get-it-done attitude toward art music composition that often ends up awarding composers who write more music rather than those who write better music. For me, it’s always been the great and individual pieces that have held our tradition together, that make it all worthwhile. This is what I want to hear and what I want to spend my life trying to write. I love many kinds of musics, for the various purposes they all serve. But this is not film music nor popular music. Art music is about the individually spectacular, the rare and adventurous, the risk for a chance at an extraordinary and truly surprising musical journey.
For me, a great modern art music work should to be experienced like a rare chocolate desert, a complex Scotch, or a painting by Pollock; it’s not necessarily designed to be consumed like Skittles and it doesn't end up doing its job all that well when treated like just another commercial commodity. When art music invests not in the truly experimental but instead in the next flashy redux or another film score hiding in the concert hall, we're no longer wandering in the realm of art music. It's not even honest music at that point. It's just commercial composing that couldn't survive among the popular trying to hide among the art. At least Brittany Spears isn't really trying to fool anyone into thinking she's doing something experimental.
Shouldn’t our support systems concentrate on really encouraging stronger, better pieces, not just more pieces - truly taking care of the ones that stand out while concomitantly encouraging fresh work? Shouldn’t we cultivate patience and quality and endurance, not speed and efficiency? This is art music after all, not the mass production of food. And what is this obsession associated with musical premieres anyway? It's indeed worth being proud of having done the work of encouraging and/or presenting a new work. This of course make sense, and presenters who take chances should be greatly commended. However, when taken to excess this tendency starts to remind me of high school, when you needed to buy a t-shirt from the concert for the new band in order to prove that you heard of them first. Promoting new works is fantastic. It's just important that we continue to balance this tendency with remembering and nurturing the good pieces that already do exist but that most people have not yet had the chance to hear.
What I want from new music is to experience extraordinary musical works. It doesn’t matter whether I hear it first so long as I get to hear it. I believe that ensembles and institutions of contemporary art music advocacy should be helping me to find those pieces, and helping composers to make those pieces. I am open to listening to whatever's out there, but for the most part I end up coming back to a handful of favorite works over and over, a slowly growing handful. Isn't this the core of it all? Isn’t finding and loving the truly questioning and enduring music the thing for which we should be searching and promoting and trying to support? Shouldn't our art music institutions and systems be designed to strongly incentivize both the creation of the new as well as the thoughtful ongoing maintenance of the potentially exceptional? New music organizations, groups, performers love to brag about advocacy; it's always worth considering precisely what is being advocated.
Deciding this last year to actively return composition to the forefront of my working life, I’ve reinitiated the process of regularly looking around for various grants, performances, contests, etc. to which to apply. While it's important that composers and artists continue to search out new and innovative ways of sustaining themselves and making it all work in modern society, nonetheless it also makes sense to try to plug into those systems that already do exist. In particular, my recent re-foray into searching for opportunities and support as an American art music composer has led to a few observations I wanted to share.
We already know that far too many pieces receive only one performance. Good new musical works should be played again and again and again. Well, at least more than once, right? Combing through the calls for scores, however, I see listing after listing requesting previously unperformed works – new, unperformed, unawarded, and so forth. Often, the group or institution is asking the composer to write a brand new piece that they will then consider or enter in their little contest, with no guarantee of any actual performance. Spend a bunch of time investing in a great new work and maybe we’ll perform it. Nice.
Additionally, groups and institutions sometimes request pieces that for various reasons might be particularly difficult to stage more than once, or that don't make sense to have performed by another group or at another time. Sometimes the reasoning behind this makes artistic and logistical sense and the project is still absolutely worth engaging. Most often though, unnecessary stipulations result from some gimmicky marketing-related tactic that won't really help the group stand out from the crowd the way it imagines anyway. All these unnecessary rules do is serve to limit the composer and handicap the artistic possibilities of the project.
Since the premiering ensemble or individual too often performs a work only once, it becomes especially important to get a good piece of new music out to others who might then take it on, or at least perform it again. As much as people seem enamored with premieres, a work really comes alive and shines only after an ensemble has honestly decided to own it - like a rock band with a song that it's played over and over. There's really no other way to really get everything out of the music that it deserves. Instead, what happens far more often is that a composer invests a ridiculous amount of energy and thought into creating a complex and considered work that will be performed once, maybe a few times, but that will never really be given its due because no one will ever really commit to owning it. Instead, we're already on to the next thing.
New music composers never have enough time, especially when it comes to writing music. Consequently, while an artistic project should be led first by an artistic impulse, composers also need to be smart about which of their good ideas they spend their time developing. Unless one's game is simply to produce as much music as possible without great regard as to its quality (often a successful marketing technique), writing only for the single instance is not usually the ideal move given the heavy artistic investment required to create something truly new and good. The truth is that this sort of opportunity is most often what's available, and it's certainly better than nothing. However, wouldn't it behoove those claiming to be advocates of new music to consider exactly what it is for which they're advocating? Are we as a tradition out just for the next exciting premiere, or to directly encourage the creation of exceptional, lasting works?
While I understand and appreciate the impulse guiding these kinds of contests, opportunities, and so forth, this approach will nonetheless tend to incentivize a get-it-done attitude toward art music composition that often ends up awarding composers who write more music rather than those who write better music. For me, it’s always been the great and individual pieces that have held our tradition together, that make it all worthwhile. This is what I want to hear and what I want to spend my life trying to write. I love many kinds of musics, for the various purposes they all serve. But this is not film music nor popular music. Art music is about the individually spectacular, the rare and adventurous, the risk for a chance at an extraordinary and truly surprising musical journey.
For me, a great modern art music work should to be experienced like a rare chocolate desert, a complex Scotch, or a painting by Pollock; it’s not necessarily designed to be consumed like Skittles and it doesn't end up doing its job all that well when treated like just another commercial commodity. When art music invests not in the truly experimental but instead in the next flashy redux or another film score hiding in the concert hall, we're no longer wandering in the realm of art music. It's not even honest music at that point. It's just commercial composing that couldn't survive among the popular trying to hide among the art. At least Brittany Spears isn't really trying to fool anyone into thinking she's doing something experimental.
Shouldn’t our support systems concentrate on really encouraging stronger, better pieces, not just more pieces - truly taking care of the ones that stand out while concomitantly encouraging fresh work? Shouldn’t we cultivate patience and quality and endurance, not speed and efficiency? This is art music after all, not the mass production of food. And what is this obsession associated with musical premieres anyway? It's indeed worth being proud of having done the work of encouraging and/or presenting a new work. This of course make sense, and presenters who take chances should be greatly commended. However, when taken to excess this tendency starts to remind me of high school, when you needed to buy a t-shirt from the concert for the new band in order to prove that you heard of them first. Promoting new works is fantastic. It's just important that we continue to balance this tendency with remembering and nurturing the good pieces that already do exist but that most people have not yet had the chance to hear.
What I want from new music is to experience extraordinary musical works. It doesn’t matter whether I hear it first so long as I get to hear it. I believe that ensembles and institutions of contemporary art music advocacy should be helping me to find those pieces, and helping composers to make those pieces. I am open to listening to whatever's out there, but for the most part I end up coming back to a handful of favorite works over and over, a slowly growing handful. Isn't this the core of it all? Isn’t finding and loving the truly questioning and enduring music the thing for which we should be searching and promoting and trying to support? Shouldn't our art music institutions and systems be designed to strongly incentivize both the creation of the new as well as the thoughtful ongoing maintenance of the potentially exceptional? New music organizations, groups, performers love to brag about advocacy; it's always worth considering precisely what is being advocated.
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