Washblog

Today's practitioners of what we once called "modern" music are finding themselves to be suddenly alone. A bewildering backlash is defined against any music making that requires the disciplines and tools of research because of its genesis. Stories now circulate that amplify and magnify this troublesome trend. It once was this 1 could not really approach a major music school in the US unless well prepared to bear the commandments and tenets of serialism. When one hears now of professors shamelessly studying scores of Respighi to be able to extract the magic of their mass audience appeal, we all know there's a crisis. This crisis exists in the perceptions of even the absolute most educated musicians. Composers today seem to be hiding from certain difficult truths about the creative process. They have abandoned their seek out the various tools that will assist them create really striking and challenging listening experiences. I believe that is since they are confused about many notions in modern music making!

First, let's examine the attitudes which are needed, but which were abandoned, for the development of special disciplines in the creation of a lasting modern music. This music that we can and must create provides a crucible in which the magic within our souls is brewed, and it is this that frames the templates that guide our very evolution in creative thought. It is this generative process that had its flowering in the first 1950s. By the 1960s, many emerging musicians had become enamored of the wonders of the new and exciting new world of Stockhausen's integral serialism that was then a rage. There seemed limitless excitement, then. It seemed there would be no bounds to the creative impulse; composers could do anything, approximately it seemed. During the time, most composers hadn't really examined serialism carefully because of its inherent limitations. Nonetheless it seemed so fresh. However, it soon became apparent that it was Stockhausen's exciting musical approach that was fresh, and not so much the serialism itself, to which he was then married. It became clear, later, that the techniques he used were born of two special considerations that ultimately transcend serial devices: crossing tempi and metrical patterns; and, especially, the style that treats pitch and timbre as special cases of rhythm. (Stockhausen known the crossovers as "contacts", and he even entitled one of is own compositions that explored this realm Kontakte.) These gestures, it turns out, are really independent from serialism in that they may be explored from different approaches.

Probably the most spectacular approach at that time was serialism, though, and not so much these (then-seeming) sidelights. It is this very approach -- serialism -- however, that after having seemingly opened so many new doors, germinated ab muscles seeds of modern music's own demise. The strategy is highly vulnerable to mechanical divinations. Consequently, it generates composition easy, like carrying out a recipe. In serial composition, the less thoughtful composer seemingly can divert his/her soul far from the compositional process. Inspiration can be buried, as method reigns supreme. The messy intricacies of note shaping, and the epiphanies one experiences from necessary partnership with one's essences (inside the mind and the soul -- in a feeling, our familiars) can be discarded conveniently. All is rote. All is compartmentalized. For a long time this is the honored method, long hallowed by classroom teachers and young composers-to-be, alike, at the least in the US. Soon, a feeling of sterility emerged in the musical atmosphere; many composers began to examine the thing that was taking place.