----- Original Message ----- From: "Reggie Bautista" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Brin-L" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, May 05, 2002 5:34 PM Subject: Re: PoMo L3
> Dan wrote: > > Do you include the arts in your category of the humanities? If so, I > disagree with your idea that the humanities are too little constrained. Yes I do, but I do think the case is different from PoMo. By being able to pick a new set of rules for every musical composition, and by sampling the constraint space differently each time, a composer risks, and dare I say usually, composes something that is of interest to him, and his small group, and that's about it. I'm sure you've noticed that very few classical pieces written after, say, the 1920s are played. When they are, they are works from those who were considered tainted by popular culture at the time: like Copland and Bernstein. > > My undergraduate degree is in music composition. With "modern" >music, pretty much anything goes, but I and most of my fellow composition >students found that if we used self-imposed constraints, it allowed us to be more >creative. Without constraining ourselves, there were just too many >choices, too many possible ways to go with a piece of music that we were left >without a sense of direction. The constraints we gave ourselves helped us focus >our musical ideas. Choosing which constraints we would use in a given piece >of music became one of the most important pre-compositional decisions we >would make. A lot of composers don't think about it in those terms, >necessarily, but most seem to go through that process. I heard that before, and I can understand what you are saying. (One thing that helps me is that my wife was one semester short of being a performance major when she got a bone tumor and my younger daughter is going to be a music education/voice major). However, I think that there is still difficulty with modern academic music. The basic problem, IMHO, is that it is mostly written as an intellectual exercise. There is little communication of feelings. There is little connection with the culture. My favorite example of how modern music is disconnected from the culture is the piece "triangle". Notes are played according to a mathematical formula that is associated with the relationships between points on the triangle where the musicians are placed. Why not simply come up with a new type of math and be done with it? Why even bother with music? > The biggest difference between the current period of "classical" music and > the previous musical periods (the baroque, the classical, the romantic, > etc.) is that each previous musical period had a set of constraints that > applied for just about every piece of music written by just about every > composer in that particular time period, but with "modern" music those > constraints vary from composer to composer and often from piece to piece. > That seems to be closer to what you are getting at with your comment >above, if you meant to include the arts as part of the humanities. It is. Let me ask you. How much do your friends listen to popular music, old classical music, or the new academic music (which you call the current period of "classical" music). The only modern work we listen to are choral works, which seem to be more tied into modern culture. I think it has to do with the demand for church music. I don't think modern academic music is inherently bad or wrong, but I do think that the disconnect between them and any set of listeners is a measure of something gone wrong. IMHO, the arts should be an expression of the culture of the times. I cannot imagine any of the academic musicians from, say, 1950 on, being remembered in 100 years unless they crossed over. (Well, I'll probably be proven wrong by one exception we can't pick out today). However, I'm sure that Beatles' songs will still be part of the culture of 2100. Dan M.
