Modern Music? Ask a Composer

Hi all,

I am a composer of some 15 years now having studied at Uni but learned as much from just listening and meeting other composers. I left a Phd cos I found it too stifling. I felt the academic thing was not for me. The rivalry was something else at that level.

My question is as follows...

I assume you are composing what might be called contemporary classical music in the sense that is it notated for the most part and is in some way part of a tradition that includes folks like Bach and Beethoven.

Now though it is a new century. It has been a hundred years nearly since Schonberg's first breaks into atonality and since then we have had serialism, integral serialism, chance, new complexity, minimlism etc etc.

Where do you fit? What is you style? Do you feel you need to be a certain way considering the music that came before. Are you more new-complexity or post-minimalism for example.

Do you accept there are many valid approaches to composing or are you convinced your way is the only legitamate way given the history of music so far?

How do you feel about dwindling audiences for new music, do you care?

Seems like a lot of questions but even if you answered a few it would be great. This is a very interesting topic I think that we as composers need to look at.

:phones: thanks

J

This is a great topic :)

Personally I am in a process of embracing more modern genres of classical music. I have listened to a lot of the music on a youtube channel called "NewMusicXX", it's mostly 40-70's though, and I also listen to contemporary danish composers; still I find myself not really liking most of the music. I always try to approach it with an open mind, but I guess I'm still firmly rooted in tonality :P

I have great respect for these contemporary composers, and I completely acknowledge the hard work, references to the past etc. in their music, but I just don't feel like listening to it. If I don't feel anything when I listen to a piece, or if I just feel confused/puzzled, I usually don't like the piece. I'm reading a book with quotes from John Cage, and I learn a lot from how he thinks, although I never listen to his music, his thoughts on the process, and his questioning of what is beautiful and what is not, is challenging me to think more out of the box.

I don't think of myself as a composer writing music similar to the times of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven or Tchaikovsky, I don't know where I would fit in though. If I was an arrogant fool I'd compare myself to Arvo Pärt, but frankly I don't know enough about the different genres to tell which one I fit into. And the reason for that is that I simply don't care :P I try to project feelings in my music and experience with chromaticism. And that is pretty much it.

First off, I disagree that there are dwindling audiences to new music. There are dwindling audiences to old music. New, popular music has huge audiences. Just because its not the music we composers favor doesn't mean there aren't audiences. Also, in this internet age, despite the downfall of record companies, it can allow listeners to discover and appreciate more and more obscure and uncommon music than ever. I feel that the current state of the industry is of great opportunity. We face the challenges all composers of any age face: How can we make music new? Despite what we may think about tonality being exhausted and all techniques being used, in reality, they have been explored in some manner for years before all of the great composers. While some see this as a bad thing, I feel that we should view this as a great opportunity to explore many styles and combine them in our own ways. I don't think any style is more valid than another and all techniques can be great.

This is a great topic :)

Personally I am in a process of embracing more modern genres of classical music. I have listened to a lot of the music on a youtube channel called "NewMusicXX", it's mostly 40-70's though, and I also listen to contemporary danish composers; still I find myself not really liking most of the music. I always try to approach it with an open mind, but I guess I'm still firmly rooted in tonality :P

I have great respect for these contemporary composers, and I completely acknowledge the hard work, references to the past etc. in their music, but I just don't feel like listening to it. If I don't feel anything when I listen to a piece, or if I just feel confused/puzzled, I usually don't like the piece. I'm reading a book with quotes from John Cage, and I learn a lot from how he thinks, although I never listen to his music, his thoughts on the process, and his questioning of what is beautiful and what is not, is challenging me to think more out of the box.

I don't think of myself as a composer writing music similar to the times of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven or Tchaikovsky, I don't know where I would fit in though. If I was an arrogant fool I'd compare myself to Arvo Pärt, but frankly I don't know enough about the different genres to tell which one I fit into. And the reason for that is that I simply don't care :P I try to project feelings in my music and experience with chromaticism. And that is pretty much it.

Thanks for the first reply. Hope there will be many too. I personally admire works by people like Webern in his serialism, Xenakis and pretty much any stuff, even if it is very dissonant or complex. I see the work put in and sometimes when I give myself to it, this kind of completely chromatic, microtonal and metrically unclear music can be moving. However! In a year I have listened to Webern maybe 3 times and Beethoven I listen to every week :) I prefer the older music. We are not alone in this. I was hoping things were starting to move on. When I studied music there was a strong intellectual snobbery against anything remotely tonal and if it was not totally original in every way many of my peers would tear it apart.

There is a thing that modern classical music is somehow meant to be completely chromatic, without a regular discernable beat and use instruments in a more advanced often 'experimental' way. These are cliches. I wonder if they are appropriate still. This approach has certainly helped cut down on audience numbers.

John Cage and Morton Feldman I like too :) because they questioned all the dogma of the tradition as well as the current complex music of the time. They were different and I admire that too.

Thanks! :phones:

I tend to think that the more thought you put into writing the less likely you are to end up using other people's solutions to your own problems. So, when I hear someone who writes what is basically the same old ideas, I pay attention if they're just the old ideas being used instead of actual thinking or if they're being used in a personal and different way.

That's it, really. It's a personal distinction, it has nothing to do with any particular technique or style, but as a general thing. Someone who produces a copy of Ligeti is just as boring to me as someone who produces a copy of Bach or Mozart.

I think I am in a similar position as Silasj. Trying to be openminded but still rooted in tonality.

I am at the moment trying to enrich my tonal language with quartal harmony and experimenting with modalities like the octatonic scale. I recently discovered the music of Barber. Sometimes he is using atonal tools within a tonal setting. These kinds of things intrugue me. I find it difficult to label myself. Because I fear to be too old-fashined to be considered a post-romantic.

my 2ct.

interesting topic indeed

Great to get these replies... I am noticing between here and another classical music forum where a number of composers post that individuality is more important than stylistic fashions. I wonder if we are living in a time where many styles are indeed on equal footing. I hope so :)

Individuality is a difficult thing. Trying to be as unique as possible is not unique if everybody tries to be as unique as possible...

Individuality is a difficult thing. Trying to be as unique as possible is not unique if everybody tries to be as unique as possible...

True but it is about being true to yourself as opposed to being unlike anyone else. It is impossible to derive nothing from anybody that came before you. There is no such a thing as totally innovative in every way, anymore. I don't think so. But there still is 'doing your own thing.' Not so much what you do but how you do it.

Agreed, this is a nice mid-way. After you stated one extreme I felt the need to state the opposite. There is need for some intersubjectivity, some common ground. I think moving between those two poles is an art in its own right.

Where do you fit? What is you style? Do you feel you need to be a certain way considering the music that came before. Are you more new-complexity or post-minimalism for example.

I think it's too early for me to define my style, but the music I've written so far is all tied to tonality. I don't feel like I have to be a certain way considering the music of the past. I go on the assumption that if I enjoy creating and listening to my own music then there will be others who enjoy performing and listening to it too. I am somewhere in between new-complexity and post-minimalism.

Do you accept there are many valid approaches to composing or are you convinced your way is the only legitamate way given the history of music so far?

Of course there are many valid approaches to composing, just as there are many valid approaches to any art. However, there are far fewer approaches that I find relevant to my life. For example, while I might write a 12-tone piece, I already know that serial composition is not where my energy will be focused in the larger scheme of things. I have other avenues that I prefer to explore.

How do you feel about dwindling audiences for new music, do you care?

I'm not sure about this one. I think it's getting harder and harder to get young people in a concert hall to listen to old music, but it's also difficult to try and get the general public interested in new music that is very distant from what they are used to on the radio and in film. As a composer you sort of have to find your niche market, I guess.

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However, with post-modernism, I think we've come full circle. Radical innovation has been taken so far that, if you pardon the pun, there's nothing radical about it any more. The good side is that this means that it is once again an academically responsible position to write conservative, accesible art music. In a review of the newest CD one of my professors, Ståle Kleiberg (I would recommend everyone to check him out! I love his music, and he's a knowledgeable professor and great chap to boot! :), a reviewer wrote (quoted freely): "There are still people who write in inaccessible, unlistenable music, but these are the ones who are antiquated." Although agressive sentiments like these generally out me off, the positive statement (that you do no longer have to be "difficult for it's own sake" to be respectable) I sincerely hope is true.

Backwards elitism is still elitism and is every bit as bad as academics who don't let you write chance music because it's old hat.

Likewise, I'm sort of sick of seeing the same excuse ("Oh but they did all the experiments already! So now is time to write old fugues/sonatas again, yay!") because it doesn't follow. Today is rightly the time you can do EVERYTHING, INCLUDING all the experimental and "alienating," "inaccessible" stuff you want. Otherwise, again, it's just backwards elitism.

So no, you don't get free pass to write style copies from Mozart and call it "postmodern" simply because others didn't. That's not how it works, and before you say anything all these people who note "I have a tonal background" don't go into tonality even as far as Mahler or maybe early Schoenberg or Berg, now do they? Most don't even acknowledge the actual neo-classical like Hindemith, Honegger, Stravinsky and Bartok and what THEY did with "tonality." No, I often see it's just a blanket excuse to be lazy and copy the old warhorses one more time.

Speaking of CPE Bach, I can't help but relate the current situation with what the composers of the mid-18th century faced: The old compositional idiom is gone, but a new style able to fill it's place has yet to come. The result was a flourishing of different ideas, from the light rococco style to the pathetic Sturm und Drang. It was only with the Viennese Classicism that these styles were fused into a whole that was as rich and coherent as the High Baroque idiom (or, at least, so will most text books say).

Which textbook, again? As far as actual history is concerned, the "Vienna classic" is an isolated phenomenon and now we know there's also tons of different things going on during the same period, CPE Bach is a unique case within all of that neither adhering completely to the Galante style (which btw is what "replaced" the late baroque counterpoint tradition and in fact is what the Vienna Classic is based on) nor leaving his father's work behind. But during the same time, the shift in how music was being written affected tons of people and some didn't actually stop writing "old music." Hell, by the time of Beethoven there were still people writing figured bass sonatas.

And the importance of the "Vienna classic" is in its influence in later composers and the introduction of various elements that later became the norm (like fixation with instrumentation and form type, etc;) considering how famous its members were (Beethoven and Mozart were still regularly played even around Schubert's time, rivaled only by Italian opera composers in popularity) they are historically relevant but whatever other claims like "coherency" and so on have nothing to do with history and if they are in an actual history textbook, it should be trashed.

The situation today isn't that different, at least on the face of it: Since the limits of tonality became more and more obvious, composers have developed a number of different compositional idioms and doctrines, without anyone being able to come close to the universal position tonality held in 18th and 19th century art music. Will the 21st century see the plenthora of post-tonal styles fused into a whole, greater than the sum of it's parts?

Tonality is still practically everywhere, unless you forget pop music and so on. Nevermind that the old warhorses get played 9000% more than anyone of any importance to the 20th century. And it's doubtful that the 21st century can "merge" anything considering that nothing has changed since the 20th century, since Cage and Ligeti. The "fusing" you're talking about is the closest definition of the musical post-modern: the pluralistic nature of what a "style" can be today from the mixture of all those techniques.

My background isn't really in classical music, so while I accept the challenging music of the 20th century for myself, I am interested only in keeping what I can transfer into a coherent scheme, that with some listening will not be beyond the grasp of your average listener of classical music.

Call me populist if you like, but I'm willing to stand by it :)

I don't even know if there's an "average listener of classical music" anymore, and if there is, that they would have nearly the same tastes or understand things the same way. I really doubt it, plus you're also closing the door to the other ton of people who actually appreciate all the other stuff (who may also be "average listeners of classical music," who knows?)

Ditch that esoteric goal and write what you want to hear, since you never know really who is going to be on the other end.

I have no objections to these comments; well said. Hopefully I didn't come across as "backwards elitist", that was not my intention at all.

When it comes to modern and contemporary pieces there are larger audiences for more simplistic pieces e.g. Arvo Part's Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten. Compared with the complexities of Penedrecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.

And at the end of the day schoenberg is right when he says art isn't for everyone so small audiences must mean its more of an art than anything else.

Two points:

Firstly - the prevalence of an extreme avant-garde movement in the latter half of the twentieth century, to which the loss of audience for art music is so commonly attributed, was almost entirely a product of its time. The Darmstadt festivals and the sort of composition that was encouraged in university departments was a political tool, for individualist avant-garde music was seen as a defence against the homogenising and subjugating art of Communist regimes. The fact that it wasn't trying to be 'popular' made it even more of a success (populism is the tool of totalitarianism, right?) and with boundless funding from the US government there was no need to even care what the public thought. Composers who were considered too populist or too conservative were denied serious consideration by the elite. Then the Cold War ends and composers are thrown out into the marketplace society they were ironically being used to protect, and find that the public opinion of their music ranges from disinterest to hostility. So it's quite natural that the last twenty years have seen countless different ways of trying to forge a modern style that is both personal and pallitable, because everyone is starting from the same background. As an aside, I feel the audience for new music is ideally sized; large enough that music can get reasonable expose, but small enough that composers can be innovative and need not worry about the potential conservatism of a mainstream mass audience.

Secondly, it seems to be a prevaling trend of postmodernism to conflate style and subtance, a distinction I've long argued for a greater awareness of. The actual sound of the music plays only a limited part in defining what the work is, such that we can see how Mozart and Haydn actually wrote very different music from each other. Similarly, a contemporary pastiche of an 'old style' (such as the viola partita by Schnittke) has almost nothing to do with the baroque as it was written in entirely different social and political circumstances. So in fact I feel that despite the diverse superficial differences mentioned above, contemporary music has a clearly deliniated set of parameters as much as a 'sound' defines earlier periods. The unifying substance of contemporary music is to do with more general paradigms of our age (a general obsession with security, a fear of real difference, the cult of the self and the free market); whether this manifests itself in realism or escapism is what provides its diversity. This is not to say the style is not transient, but we are looking in the wrong place if we try to define it by the sound of the music alone. Yet there is a deeper level of style which is actually common to all periods and can be seen to define, cumulativly, our aesthetic parameters. There is a common sentiment present in all the most accomplished music which transcends superficial style and periods, such that one can argue composers have always written similar music, just in a different surface style. As a composer, this is what I'm trying to do - essentially trying to write the same music as Bach, Beethoven, Elgar and Stravinsky, just in a personal style that is in some way affected by the culture of my age.

I think to add to that.. in a sense, it is quite difficult to write 'Baroque music' in this day and age if you are reflecting the time. Schnittke did this in his works and of course irony was never far away. If you be yourself and are at least to some extent of the times then what you create obviously is both relevant and has value. I think when you know what you want to say, or more, how you want to say things, then you improve based on your own criteria as opposed to someone else's. You become the disciple of your own method. You are the mentor and the pupil in one.

I assume you are composing what might be called contemporary classical music in the sense that is it notated for the most part and is in some way part of a tradition that includes folks like Bach and Beethoven.

Hmm... well not exactly for me. I don't ever or hardly ever I guess compose something like Bach and Beethoven, as great composers as they were!

Now though it is a new century. It has been a hundred years nearly since Schonberg's first breaks into atonality and since then we have had serialism, integral serialism, chance, new complexity, minimlism etc etc.

Indeed it has. We can't stick to baroque forever! (Unless your the local radio station here in AZ. The Tucson one is great but the Phoenix one isn't!)

Well I certainly fit in the 21st century. I like really modern classical music. Like the Rite of Spring, which to me was the turning point of old style to contemporary. Well, not entirely, but I do feel like because we are in this time, we should try not to write like Mozart and Bach, and such composers. Don't go poking around into them!

Do you accept there are many valid approaches to composing or are you convinced your way is the only legitamate way given the history of music so far?

Oh no. I feel that people should compose what they want, even if I don't care for that kind.

How do you feel about dwindling audiences for new music, do you care?

Indeed. People need exposure to ALL kinds of music.

Seems like a lot of questions but even if you answered a few it would be great. This is a very interesting topic I think that we as composers need to look at.

I think you're right. This is interesting and people should be answering these questions!

Edit: I don't know what happened there! I don't know how to fix it either. Sorry!