[All this is going to be streamed, conversational response, so please pardon any typos. I don't use a spellchecker other than my eyeballs!]
At 11:16 AM 1/31/05 -0800, you wrote: >Let's address your premises in reverse order: first, your "don't crawl, fly first" theory: >Well...if we don't know where we came from, how can we know where we're going? I don't accept the premise. We *never* know where we're going, and Wagner proved that brilliantly. >It's hard to tell if you're being facetious, and particularly in >light of the interesting ideas you promoted and then self-deflated >in your online piece - are you really serious? Did I deflate my ideas? I think I might have softened a few things, since it was deliberately meant to provoke a reaction from the mainstream nonpop community. And darned if by 1998, through several of us working diligently, politically *and* confrontationally (good cop/bad cop composers) every Vermont group that played classical nonpop was also including new nonpop in the presentation formula. But maybe that's not what you're asking. First, you probably gotta know me. I am very serious about the promotion of new music, and have given thousands of hours to it during my lifetime. I estimate that our radio show/website alone has consumed 10,000 hours of my volunteer work, not to mention festivals, ensembles, concerts, etc., not a one of which has ever broken even, and most of which have been paid out-of-pocket. Every dollar that doesn't get spent on essentials goes to this effort, which is probably why at age 55 my bank account is pretty much empty. That should reveal I'm also not very cautious. The other side of me looks at everything for its enjoyment value and humor. The whole field of new nonpop is rife with opportunities to prod and puncture and have a good yukk -- not least of which my own work. I mean, the very idea of people making noises with their mouths and blowing into plumbing and scratching hair back and forth! It's ludicrous -- as are the pretentions of most artists. Almost anybody who's visited our home has experienced the absurd laugh riot here. My point is that if I get too puffed up with a cause, I have to sit back and laugh at myself. And because I've always been poor, I *can* laugh with almost no risk that my offense will somehow make my economic life worse (though it might make people reluctant to play my music). >Are you now reverting back to your earlier position that we MUST >throw out everyone and everything which has come before us; that >we must have enforced ignorance of all precedent work? Who is "we"? My manifesto (and for those interested, this 13-year old essay is here: http://maltedmedia.com/books/papers/s5-necro.html) comes out of the Laszlo Toth School of Art, and organization several of us founded in honor of the guy who smashed the Pieta with a hammer. There is a time when the only way to address severe imbalance is by some sort of provocative, even revolutionary, behavior. That's not very popular at the moment, unless it's the US invading some small country that can't defend itself. "The ignorance of all precedent work" is entirely valid from both a revolutionary standpoint for today, and from a standpoint of bringing new audiences to the artform. I have several times referred to the "museum culture", and classical nonpop suffers worst of all from that. It's the mistaken idea that somehow knowing what came before is valuable for the uninitiated, the lay nonpop and potential nonpop listener ... as opposed to a slow drag that pulled them increasingly into the past with no hope of recovering the present again. Let me talk about that drag. (You're gonna hate me for making all this even longer!) When music was essentially a live event, it proceeded through and ended. Repetition was needed, and pieces could grow in length to support increasingly intricate ideas as well as additional inclusions, such as picture-painting and calculated emotional content. And right then -- right then! -- recording technology appeared. And you can draw graphs of some interesting consequences. One might be a reduction in attention span to music with the promotion of the single-side song. That's not the graph that interests me, although it has significance (viz. O-list discussion). What I'm more interested in are the investment consequences -- *audience* consequences. A more significant mass market was born, and along with it, a distribution of music to the home where before it was dependent on concerts or sheet music (or for a while, piano rolls). The ease and relatively low cost of hearing and *having* 'real' music (professional, not homemade) was a social shift. The relatively low cost, though, was still a cost. And if there's anything entertainment marketers learned over the years, it was that people like what they know. Consumers are not risk takers, which is why reviews and word of mouth and advertising are important. Give people more of the same, and they'll continue to buy it until the sameness (and reviews and word of mouth and advertising) encourage a change. It doesn't mean that change is ended. It means that it is slowed, and occurs in kind of quantum jumps when a new idea fires. Some composers also worked in quantum jumps and many others progressed steadily with their work. But with few exceptions, they were not on the parallel track of the audiences. What once was done by temporally evanescent offering (the concert: here now & gone) was remade as a consumer product with replicability. A continuing-past/continuing-present crack opened between flowing, muddy composer and glaciating audience, with the presenter straddling both sides. For a while, the straddling was comfortable, but at some point -- most notably at the Great End of Tonality -- the presenters had to step to one side or the other. They went with the glacial stability and the money (whether from audiences or record companies) and stayed on the slowly moving side. The composers, particularly since the increasing ego-fication of artists, did what they did and kept moving ahead in their big muddy mess. That was the slow drag ... more of a continental movement: One mass moving faster than the other, audiences investing in more recordings that they had enjoyed and listened to over and over before buying another similar one; presenters feeding that expectation as marketing rose on a mass scale; composers responding to the world around with its chaos in ways artists often respond; listeners increasingly interested in solace in the storm of 20th century history. It was a geography of separation, continental movement apart. So now that brings it back to the question of "we", as in, "we MUST throw out everyone and everything which has come before us". "We" is us: the musicians who have the tools because it is our field. We are the only ones capable of initiating that change. The layperson has neither ab initio need nor interest in the past of a given artform, but that's what they are given, so that is what they learn. As laypeople are increasingly educated, they may by themselves make discoveries from the past. That self-directed behavior can depend on an extant body of recordings (viz. yet another fork of this discussion). Now another prose swerve. I write that last sentence by extrapolating outward from my humble little self. As a child, I lived in a music-less household without radio or record player. My introduction to classical nonpop was a mix of Wagner, Stravinsky, Bach, etc., none of which I had any auditory tools to separate as a young teenager with a single Reader's Digest record set put in his hands. Stravinsky "Rite" was the thing that captured my interest first as a 12-year-old. And when I heard jazz two years later, it was Coltrane's "Ascension", not historical jazz. (Some of you already know this story.) The point I'm making is that I had a completely scattershot introduction, and settled immediately on the most *recent* sounds as the most interesting, the closest to my life. I was your classic lay listener, unwashed and just plain surprised by what I heard. Okay, now extrapolating from the specific to the general is a nasty business, but short of studies that couldn't have a big enough control group, it's what I've done in my own presentation. That is, I have believed that the uninitiated have *no* preference for the historical over the present. I spent six years teaching elementary school specifically to test my hypothesis, and the results bore it out. I had kids for whom Bartok and Crumb and Reich and performance-art style music were as natural as pop (and more natural than, in many cases, except for those with traditional music lessons outside of school) and Beethoven. I watched the kids in rapt attention during the video recreation of the "Rite" ballet, and was stunned by my third- and fourth-graders shushing the school classes around them because they wanted to *hear* and *watch* that live performance of "Soldier's Tale". Now you may be thinking "hey, that is old stuff" and you would be right -- but unfortunately, it was the only material and concert work I had available in rural Vermont. We listened to recordings of newer stuff, but even more important we played around. We performed music (from Cage's great "Notations" collection, for example) and created music (whether for pianos or vacuum cleaners or farm animals) and recorded it. Yes, Mozart was included, but as historical content like George Washington or Washington Irving or Irving Berlin or the Berlin Airlift. And Mozart was at the time cool, because we could all sit around and hoot together watching "Amadeus", where this "classical music" they had heard with little enthusiasm took on some extra-musical life as a kid their age had been composing some of it, and grew up to be socially embarrassing. And so, to wrap up the first question of "we", I mean those of us responsible in any way for education or presentation or performance -- we need to be educated in our profession, and like all professions, that includes a knowledge of history ... as composers, an excellent knowledge of history, for that is how we can make our references. But we do *not* have to use the *history itself* as our body of offered material. The collective, ubiquitous "we" of the audience is different, and is fully capable of grasping the wonders of new work without being dragged slowly through the swamp of history as if discovery were not by itself enough! We'll lose some of them, those for whom Handel and Dvorak are old friends, their only friends. But we'll also gain those who, like my own wife, loathed the orchestral concerts on which my piece was played because she had to sit through Handel to get to my piece and sit through Dvorak afterwards to be polite to the musicians who had worked hard on my music. This is the fact: We cannot 'catch up' audiences by working historically. We have to go through a revolutionary period that cuts that music out of the programming (and the lay education, but that's already happening, unfortunately not replaced with any new nonpop) because museum-culture programming is a consequence of marketing behavior that has had an ultimately damaging effect on the artform which, for the first time since probably the Council of Trent that outlawed troping, is being consciously and deliberately defaced by outside forces. End of Part I. And that only covers your first 110 words! (Yes, you can tell me to stop at any time.) Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
