The first two pieces I’ve posted represent two entirely different worlds. Charles Wuorinen sits quietly at his piano with a cat, writing an operatic adaption of Brokeback Mountain, Aphex Twin… well, I’m not going to speculate. Sufjan Stevens sits between this world, in what I imagine is a field filled with unicorns, happiness and nine more seasons of Firefly.
If it’s one thing that really, really isn’t necessary at all, it’s another person waxing lyrical about Drukqs. But, I find myself consistently shocked at how few of my colleagues - especially in the classical world - have even heard of Aphex Twin. I was definitely one of them, but I happen to hang out with a couple of music technologists (always a good move), and they introduced me to an entire genre of music I’d never even considered as having serious implications for my musical language.
Let’s start this massive playlist of contemporary music - meant as a reaction against angry, old, white man enforced taste - with the music of an old white man. I don’t think he’s angry, though, look at him with this cat. How could anyone who likes cats be mean? You wouldn’t see Boulez holding a cat.
On a serious note, in our polarised musical culture, respect and - for want of a better term - “street cred” are volatile substances. Cultural figures can go from overrated to underrated in increasingly shorter amounts of time. Stockhausen, I think, is one of the early examples of this - he seems to be looked upon as the slightly terrifying, crazy German uncle that occassionally comes to Christmas and scares the pants off of everyone rather than the incredibly influential and innovative artist that he was. Wuorinen is going through a somewhat similar cycle at the moment and, if I was to hazard a guess, I’d say Osvaldo Golijov has potential to be the next victim.
Art Music. I live and breath it. I think it’s bloody great. Why don’t you?
We are taught to think of art as being somehow separate from life. For a variety of reasons - that are written about by people much smarter than I - we engage with modern architecture and design but most of us don’t seem to do the same with visual arts and new music. Art is the most honest, human reflection of our changing patterns of thought, our most deep convictions and, indeed, our unfolding history as a species. People say that listening to Mozart is good for you, and they’re right - his music says more about what it is to live than any textbook about 18th century Vienna can. Art, today, serves the same function. And art doesn’t have to mean String Quartets, it doesn’t even need to (shock horror) be written by someone with a music degree. There is so much to learn from popular musics, something which is often overlooked by the current academic establishment.
Speaking of academia, the last century has brought swings - between different schools of thought of composition - of such rapidity and ferociousness that, I think, have created an environment so polarised that we seem unable to have frank, apolitical discussions of music. The idea that students at well renowned, “solid” institutions wouldn’t hear and discuss the music of some of the most prolific, influential composers of our age because their professor’s “people” had a spat with the other side’s “people” is mind boggling. In the Australian context, we don’t often discuss why there is a generation of composers with such a rabid distrust of their aesthetic opposites. I think Melanie Walters (M.Mus, University of Adelaide), gives a good answer in her paper “Crossing the Modernist-Postmodernist Divide: Performance Challenges in late Twentieth Century Australian Flute Music” :
Composers and musicologists who adhered to the modernist aesthetic position described composersworking in simpler styles as ‘composer-prostitutes’ who sold out their artistic integrity in order to gain audience appreciation, while the music of modernist composers was described as ‘fruitlessly ugly’ and ‘taking very little talent’.
It troubles me that this was and, to a large extent, still is the way we talk about music in my country. We get it, Boulez is mean and French. John Adams likes to whine in interviews about how mean Boulez can be. It’s alright. Calm down. Have a cup of tea.
So, I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands. Why sit back and let a group of (for the most part) angry, old white men dictate taste? Why not let an angry, young white man do it? Or, you know, help you along. I would love submissions, I’m very aware of my own biases. Posts will depend on my own schedule, interest, and if I have any co-conspirators. We are young and hopefully unburdened by the apparent bitchiness of our elders. We can listen to music and learn something from it regardless of authorship. This is not a crusade, on my part. I happen to think it’s OK to like Stockhausen and Nico Muhly at the same time. I just think that broad musical experiences make great musicians, and lord knows we need more of those.
So, let’s learn.
How do you even notate this? I mean, it’s a bass clarinet harmonic gliss on T23|12, pianissimo (in terms of how much air I was using), but I genuinely have no idea how to actually put it on paper. Apologies for the awful recording quality.
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