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.
