Thursday, April 14, 2005
What's New is Old Again
The classical tradition, and especially the 20th century tradition, and even more so the downtown tradition, make a heavy emphasis on originality and "progress." The "greatest" of the "great" composers are often called great not only for their brilliance but for their advancement of the genre, and composers who work exclusively in established forms and styles are often scored as derivative (take John Williams as an example. He's actually a masterful composer with excellent melodic, motivic, and harmonic sense, but because he picks styles and raw materials from different composers as appropriate for the movie he's writing for he has no cred in the academic world.) So to a certain extent we're all programmed to explore new territory as much as we can, and I certainly do the same. My goal in writing any new piece is to do something I've never done before -- in the end it still ends up sounding like me, but I hope that with this strategy my pieces will all have their own identities.
At the moment I'm simultaneously writing two pieces. In one, a trio for clarinet, bassoon, and piano, the newness is primarily that I haven't written for this ensemble before, and I have to find ways of getting the kinds of sounds that I like with only three instruments, and no strings (I am madly in love with strings). In the other, I'm in the early stages of experimenting with producing a layered saxophones, pianos, and electronics piece as if it were a rock album instead of a classical album -- extensive cutting and pasting and fixing, and composing with prerecorded sonic fragments rather than writing out the whole piece and then recording it.
But I do think that we emphasize total originality to an unreasonable extent, in that there are great composers out there whose greatness lies in mastery of existing forms and styles rather than in the invention of new ones.
Greg Sandow has an essay related to this topic in the October 2002 issue of NewMusicBox that people might want to read.
posted by Galen H. Brown
8:54 AM
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