Archives for May 2008

A few years ago, I was one of the featured composers/performers on the ASCAP Foundation’s Thru The Walls concert series.  The initial plan, devised by curator Martha Mooke and members of the ASCAP Concert Music staff, was to have Marc Anthony Thompson (aka Chocolate Genius) M.C. the concert.  Unfortunately, that fell through shortly before the concert happened.

What would happen if new-music concerts were M.C.-ed by artists who have their feet firmly planted in the indie-pop/rock world?  Among other things, I think it would counter the viewpoints of some new-music connoisseurs that pop/rock musicians have no interest in adventurous art-music.  My experience has led me to believe that this is patently false.  Sure, there are some who couldn’t care less, but I think that many pop/rock artists are well-versed in contemporary art music.  They would probably be happy to lend their star-power to advocating for us less-commercially-oriented (or less-commercially-embraced) composers.

We should approach songwriters like Chocolate Genius, Sufjan Stevens, Jamie Stewart, Suzanne Vega, Andrew Bird, Joanna Newsom, Michael Stipe, and others.    These are all people who have been explicit about their interest in present-day composers and improvisers.  Maybe they’ll turn us down.  Maybe plans will fall through at the last minute like with the Thru The Walls concert.  Maybe we won’t be able to pay them enough.  Maybe we’ll be accused of selling out.  (Maybe we’ll literally sell out.)  But, really, I can think of no significant reason why we shouldn’t try this.  Can you?

I found this on breitbart.com:

MILAN, Italy (AP) – First it was the film and the book. Now the next stop for Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” is opera.

La Scala
officials say the Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli has been
commissioned to produce an opera on the international multiformat hit
for the 2011 season at the Milan opera house.

There’s something perverse here, but I can’t articulate what it is…

The late Robert Solomon was a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas.  He had a very fun cameo in the animated film Waking Life. 

Solomon created a lecture series called Philosophy and the Intelligence of Emotions. One of the lectures was titled “Laughter and Music.”

Solomon argued that laughter has very little to do with what’s funny and what’s not funny.  Rather, he believed that laughter is a bonding mechanism; its primary purpose is to create a feeling of connection between members of a certain group.  That’s why people are more likely to laugh at a movie when they’re watching it with a group of people than when they’re watching it alone.  That’s also why racially oriented jokes, for example, are funny to some people and offensive (or at least unfunny) to others.

Solomon believes that music, like laughter, is primarily a bonding mechanism.  Just as people’s senses of humor depend on the groups they associate with, so do people’s feelings about music depend on the context in which they experience it. 

To be sure, music and laughter can still have a bonding effect on someone who listens alone to a recording.  Even in that isolated context, there’s a sense of connection with the artists who made the recording and/or with other people who have listened to the recording.

If you ask someone why a piece of music is “sad,” they tend to give one of the following answers:

1) A piece of music is sad because it arouses sadness in the listener.

2) A piece of music is sad because it was sadness that the author or composer was expressing when he or she composed it.

But, alas, it’s not that simple. 

Music that comforts some people can be used to torture other people.  Conversely, I would bet that we’ve all had the experience of listening to a really depressing piece of music and yet feeling euphoric while listening to it.  Also, the first time people hear a piece of music can sometimes set up a
powerful association that recurs on every subsequent hearing.

According to Solomon, recent research
suggests that adolescence is a special age of life when people are
particularly receptive to different kinds of music.  Perhaps what they hear during that
time is something they carry with them, something that sets the
patterns of musical meaning for the rest of their lives.

Eric G. Wilson’s polemical book, against happiness, is not as dismal or misanthropic as you might expect from its title.  It’s less against happiness in general than it is against a certain kind of performed happiness or superficial happiness.  Wilson wants us to embrace melancholy as a means of experiencing beauty in the world.  After all, he argues, part of what makes something profoundly beautiful is knowing that it will eventually pass away.

I’m sympathetic to Wilson’s point of view, but when I think about art and culture (as opposed to, say, friends, loved ones, and pets), I’m not sure his philosophy of beauty holds up.  

Certainly the performing arts are ephemeral, but what about sculpture, painting, and film?  What about recordings of music?  Maybe Wilson would say that while some objects of art are relatively permanent, our experiences of them are not, and it is our experiences of these objects that we find beautiful.  Or maybe he would argue that sculpture, painting, film, recordings, etc., are representations of something ephemeral (i.e. a photograph of a time and place that no longer exists)

As I’m writing this, I’m thinking about the cellist/singer/composer Arthur Russell who died in 1992, at the age of 40.  Every time I listen to his music, I imagine what a better place the world would be if there were twice as many Arthur Russell songs in it.  What if we could still go out to see Russell perform his songs in concert?  How would he have embraced the exponential progress in music technology since his death?  

Maybe Wilson is right.  Maybe the fact that Arthur Russell passed away enhances my experience of his music, but I think I would be just as madly in love with it if he was still alive.

Greetings, everyone, and thank you to Molly for the invitation to drive this thing while she’s away. 

I’ll shift into third gear immediately by raising an issue that has caused much internal conflict for me, as a composer/performer and especially as a writer of songs — my desire to balance personal expression with multiplicity of meaning.  This conflict of mine was recently reinvigorated by a performance of Sean Griffin‘s piece, Buffalo ’70, at the final concert of the 2008 MATA Festival in Brooklyn, NY.

Buffalo ’70
is a fine piece of music.  It is intricate, funny, smart, theatrical,
and thoroughly engaging.  The performers at the MATA concert — a
combination of musicians from the New York-based ensembles Newspeak and Either/Or — executed the piece with precision and conviction, and the audience responded very positively.

Nevertheless, Griffin said some things about the piece that drastically restricted my experience of it.  In the program notes, he writes:

[Buffalo ’70] is a musical question about an encounter between John Cage and Julius Eastman… I hope to dramatize a shift in aesthetics and political strategies employed by composers at the time.  My intention is to have this work speak to the broader cultural shifts in expression and identity in the political landscape of the late 1970s and the return to a more brutally conservative America in the 1980s.

In 1970, composer/performer Julius Eastman was performing sections of John Cage’s Song Books and included gay references in his realization of the work. Although allowed by the score itself, Cage became angry and famously objected with a violent outburst…

Before the performance, Griffin spoke briefly to the concert audience.  He clarified his intent by announcing that Julius Eastman was his favorite composer and that Buffalo ’70 is comprised of a number of John Cage’s pieces all realized with deliberate inappropriateness.  He also put forward a dubious theory that Cage’s outburst somehow led to Eastman’s tragic personal unravelling.

Knowing that Buffalo ’70 was, at least in part, a disparaging parody of John Cage’s music all but erased its potential for multiple interpretations.  This constriction of meaning is, I think, one of the things that upset Cage about Eastman’s performance of Song Books.  And Cage was not the only one who was upset.  The conductor of that performance, Petr Kotik, described Eastman’s behavior as “sabotage.”

All of this got me thinking: It may be that Cage represents the epitome of one kind of high-modernism — the desire to create works of art in which the personal identities and emotions of the artists are completely absent.  The opposite of that, I suppose, would be art as purely a vehicle for self-expression, or what I like to call “art as therapy.”

Is the incorporation into “fine art” of identity politics and self-expression the kind of “cultural shift in expression and identity” that Griffin is referring to in his program notes?  Is the “more brutally conservative America” a reference to the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s during which Senator Helms et al attacked artists who received government funding to create so-called blasphemous works of art?  That is what I assume Griffin is talking about.  

But there’s another side to that argument.  The mentality of art-as-self-expression, combined with the politically correct, uncritical acceptance of identity politics in art, has led to plenty of overly sentimental vanity projects.  This is another kind of “brutally conservative” approach to making art which is just as lamentable as the reactionary philistinism of Helms and company.