It doesn’t bother me that indeed, if you’re going to be well-studied in the conservatory that it may be late in your career or after your death when it happens. Very true. What bothers me is that everyone seems to think in terms of “Oh the suffering artist, I’ll be remembered when I die.” That’s a load of hogwash.

Here’s my goal: to write good music, to have it be played, to hear what people think of it, and to write more. Not to be widely accepted by an academic community that doesn’t love music but numbers and letters, and not to become the 21st Century’s version of Mozart.

Mahler’s own comment is a little narcisstic. One doesn’t write music 50 years in the future but right now. Mahler deserved attention, but I guess working at a top Conservatory in the world and being played by a massive symphony orchestra wasn’t good enough.

Good Lord, I’ve forgotten their music already.

Galen, I see what you mean now, I think–not that you have no idea what’s going on in a country song but that you don’t understand enough to tell the good ones from the bad ones. Fwiw, if you get around to it someday, there’s lots of great country songs to be found.

It’s easy to make too much of the fragmentation issue, in any case. The world of people you can relate to and whose musical interests and values intersect with yours is not that much different, in practical, psychological terms, than “the general public.” Kyle’s post of Feb 9 is as eloquent an example of that as you’re likely to find. I’m going out on a limb and saying that I’m pretty sure he isn’t motivated by the idea that the music he advocates will become universal, so long as it flourishes and can be heard. But his program strikes me as much more meaningful and generous than fretting about how no one will appreciate his music until he dies.

As for Corigliano, there’s a premise, I think, but not a false one or even an unspoken one, since Aaron raised the point yesterday. He’s already pretty darned successful with the audience that’s available to him. It’s conceivable that he’s concerned about his reputation in academic and critical circles. I don’t want to attribute anything to him, personally, based on a second-hand comment, but I’d love to hear what he has to say on the matter. He never drops in here?

I’m ultra doubtful that you don’t understand country music, Galen. If you tuned in a random country song on the radio, I’m sure you’d have no trouble picking out the verse and the chorus, the phrasing, the cadences. You’d follow the expressive shifts into minor, and you’d know why the strings come in with a big swell when she leaves him. You’d have no trouble with the lyrics, or the signficance of the twang. I think the strong dislike that country music inspires in American listeners (this is based mostly on my interactions with the students in my classes) is precisely because it’s read so clearly.

Obviously I’m speculating, not claiming to be able to read your mind–if I’m offbase I’d be very interested to hear about it.

Anyways, one miscommunication naturally leads to another. What I was reacting to with the Mozart/Armstrong analogy was Kyle’s saying “What you could mean by ‘absorbed and recycled’ I have no earthly idea.” Armstrong is, to my mind, continuously absorbed and recycled. You’d vastly underestimate his significance if you went by the amount of play his recordings get on the radio and his percentage of CD sales. In general I’m suggesting that this is the way things are likely to be in traditions where recordings are the primary means of transmission and where individuality and innovation are highly valued. I wasn’t at all suggesting we might be talking about Mozart or Armstrong-like figures.

Which is definitely not what I was trying to say, but, hey, it does, ironically, illustrate my point ;-)

“I’m not sure what to make, though, of ‘problematizing the full mobile, timeless notion…’”

Very simple. Let’s take, fairly arbitrarily, a ‘work’, say Moteverdi’s Vespers. We may assume that this ‘work’ is transcendental—that its identity is/was somehow stable and durable over time and (cultural) space. We may assume that what we (here and now) recognize, or understand, as Moteverdi’s Vespers corresponds in some way to an entity that may or may not have existed four hundred years ago.
These are, however, assumptions that, even with a cursory historical examination, do not stand up to scrutiny. Certainly from a reception history point of view, and that’s really what we’re discussing, it makes more sense to problematize this construct—the stable, durable, transcendental ‘work’—than to assume that this ‘work’, and its ‘value’, exists free of understanding, and independent of reception.

S, tig

Neither, quite obviously. Branca and Chatham have proved, so far, relatively one-dimensional figures, important innovators, but not the kinds of wide-ranging artists who excel in a variety of different genres. I’d think of either of them as being more like Debussy (in starting impressionism with Afternoon of a Faun), or like Reich in creating the first minimalist works. I think their early music will continue to merit interest and performance decades from now. That doesn’t mean I’m claiming that they’re the kinds of seminal artists around whom all future creation will revolve.

For that matter, I think Mozart’s racheted-up 20th-century reputation is a creation of the culture industry, but that’s another story.