Monday, August 07, 2006
consumer-driven music?
A friend recently raised an idea that, while I don't agree with it, I thought might be of interest to others. Should a composer rework his or her music into various shorter works based on listener feedback? According to my friend, this is what Philip Glass is doing of late. I was with my kids at the Franklin Institute's IMAX Theater to see Roving Mars, a film about the Mars Rover Mission, and the opening credits were accompanied by really great music that I assumed was a near-verbatim rip-off of the opening of Glass's Music With Changing Parts. A lot of the other music also sounded like Glass, with some motifs regurgitated from earlier works, and sure enough, it was by the man himself.
My friend's questions to me:
* "Is it wrong to rework a composition in the manner of a consumer-tested product?
* Is it possible for composers to use listeners in such a way as to refine their final product?
* Why not offer 30 minutes of what they really want to hear, based on their prevailing opinions?
* Glass has always said his main concern is the average listener and that he wants to be popular ... what is the result of a consumer tested piece of music?"
My response was that, while I endorse the notion that even if the customer isn't always right he/she is still the customer, there’s a difference between a customer of a business and someone who chooses to listen to a particular piece of music. Businesses are revenue-generating organizations and are ideally service-oriented. Composition is an art. That doesn’t mean composers are indifferent to listeners, just that the music doesn't have to pander to consumer tastes. Music that does pander would fall under the rubric of popular or commercial music. Nothing wrong with that---I love my Pearl Jam, Linkin Park and Souxsie and the Banshees like anyone else. But my music is not intended to be commercial or popular. If it were, I’d be in big trouble!
Clearly composers who are working, often daily, with skilled performers will certainly bounce ideas off of them, and take their responses into account. I know that Steve Reich did that when composing Music for 18 Musicians; if his ensemble's reactions indicated that they were less than enthralled with his sketches for the piece, he abandoned the sketches in question. That sort of collaboration is wonderful and very important. But at some point, Steve Reich had to still do his own thing. At the end of the day, if he wasn't happy with the final result, what would have been the point?
But intentionally writing music to please this person or that person ultimately leads to a situation where the composer pleases no one. Are there sections of, say, Music for 18 Musicians that work better for me than others? Of course. Same with works by Glass, Feldman...even Mahler. But none of these composers would have had any obligation to remove portions of their music that I don't like as much as the other parts. I'm really fond of Glass's Music in Twelve Parts, particularly Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, ,8, 12. Not that the other Parts are bad at all, but if I had to pick my favorite ones, I just did. So should Glass have written Music in Six Parts just to keep me happy? Should the most popular portions of a composition be culled into a suite akin to those shortened versions/suites that are produced from many operas (like Berg's Lulu Suite or Adams' The Klinghoffer Chorales)? I like Berg's Lulu Suite, but it hardly compares to the complete three-act opera.
I'm sure there are moments of Feldman's String Quartet #2 that grab some people more than other sections of the work (one of my personal favorites comes 37 minutes before the end of the fifth CD in the FLUX Quartet's recording). Would this work be performed more often if the more popular measures were preserved and the less popular ones removed? Does anyone think this string quartet, one of the greatest in the literature IMHO, would still work as a whole were this to be done?
So what do people think---should composers produce different versions of their music to suit audience tastes, removing the less popular measures? What would this lead to: better music, or just more popular music?
posted by David Toub
12:38 PM
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