Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Ten Reasons
I say this in full knowledge that it's an unfair oversimplification, but Elodie's reasons to stop composing seem to all add up to "I'll probably never be a superstar." So really this isn't so much a response to you, Elodie, as a chance to get up on one of my hobbyhorses.
Now it's true that most of us will never be superstars (although Corey and I are young yet. . .), for all of the reasons Elodie lists and, other reasons as well. And in fact, as musical genres proliferate fewer and fewer of us will be superstars across genres, but everybody will still have a reasonable shot at reknown within genres. The real problems here are the prevailing attitudes that classical music is The Great Music Of Our Society and that classical music is One Monolithic Genre (Or Maybe Two). Neither has been true for 75 years or more, but we are all so brainwashed by these ideologies (I include myself in that "we," although I struggle against the brainwashing every day) that we still measure our success and failure against those metrics.
How many of you have heard of the band VNV Nation? Not many, I would guess, but in the industrial music world they are huge. I don't know if they have done well enough for themselves that they need to keep dayjobs or not, but either way in the microcosm of the industrial music world they are a big success. In the Pop Music world, however -- and industrial is a subgenre of Pop -- VNV is nobody. Classical music has the beginnings of the same kind of genre fracturing, and when we get comfortable with that idea it will be good for everybody. True, a smaller and smaller percentage of the classical composer population will make a living composing, but that's okay -- it's economics, not failure. True, a smaller percentage of classical composers will be covered in legit journalism, but that's okay too -- journalism covers common denominators, which coincides only incidentally with artistic greatness.
Keep composing, Elodie -- some of us think you're awesome.
posted by Galen H. Brown
12:17 AM
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