Richard Todd wrote:

>In fact Jarvlepp is a composer and a respected one among those who know
>his work.  He has as thorough a knowledge of 20th century music as anyone
>I've met, including knowledge of Schoenberg and Webern.  He has a PhD in
>composition.  He's told me that his education was geared to producing an
>avant- garde composer.  I've often wondered whether his teachers wring
>their hands wondering where they've gone wrong, since he has chosen to
>develop a style that people actually want to hear.  For a while he bore the
>nickname "Mr. Postmodern" in Ottawa, where he lives and works.  However,
>in the years that he was director of a local new music society, he provided
>for 20th century music of every stripe, including some pretty fierce
>avant-garde stuff.

Art is the red queen's race we run to catch up to the present, for we are
all immigrants from the past.

I find it ironic that in a thread begun by a declaration that music, rather
than credentials and social standing, be the basis for writing - that
instantaneously fighting breaks out based on credentials and social
standing.

The irony about composers is that we are often uninformed, and uninformed
in a particular way.  Steve Hicken calls it the impulse to "Kill your
fathers." Everyone sensitive enough to be an artist feels an overbearing
sense of the recent past.  Either, like a good son, they strive to better
the past by extending it - or, and often and - they strive to kill their
past.  Beethoven said he learned "nothing" from Haydn.  If so, it is the
sweetest nothing anyone ever uttered.  Copland downgraded Berg - a composer
he owed much to.  Carter lamented Ives' limitations - and yet Carter was
one of Ives' first fans.  Ives, in turn, scoffed at Beethoven.  And so on.

For a period of time avant-gardism was de rigeur in the centers of
academia.  Many, many, many, many artists who were schooled in that time
have rebelled against it, simply because it was so pervasive, and so many
of the teachers - often people of the third or fourth rank of the third or
fourth rank - were so certain about it.  Guess what, many of the teachers
were avant gardists, because when they went to school 12 tone music was
sneered at by disciples of neo-classicism, who were certain that
Schoenberg's composition represented the ruination of music.

One can trace this back at least to the lament that homophonic music
represented the ruination of the polyphonic art of music.

- - -

But this is why I advised composers, writers, critics - to step away from
the grand socialisation of the past - Wagner is dead and his writing style
need not be resurrected, honest - and become specific.  Jarvlepp could have
easily written about his own direct experience, and the event which made
him decide to convert to writing differently.  I would be willing to bet
more than a little that it came from being fed up with evangelising from
people who were all for avant-garde music, felt themselves better human
beings for listening to it, and yet, in his observation, were inferior
musicians to himself.

Consider, for example, Phillip Glass' description of going to the school
of Paris, and "I found crazy creepy people writing crazy creepy music".
Whatever the sociology of the School of Paris, there is no denying that
the impression is what he saw, and its effects were direct and immediate.
History, and the writing of history, is full of compromise, the attempt to
balance out what competing groups thought, saw, did, felt, said - weighing
them against their circumstances and their actions.

While such history is essential, as history, every artist also has a
private history.  Berlioz put his in his memoirs - he saw music as a
succession of faddish devices which were, eventually, incorporated into
music by empirical observation of what had a good effect, and the rejection
of that which had a poor effect.  His own memoirs show that this empricism
competed with an ideal sense of what the composer actually wrote, as he
understood it.  He wrote about how a friend added an effect to a Gluck
opera, at first, Hector praised it, as striking.  But later condemned it,
as "Gluck knew the effect, and would have written it if he had intended
it."

In writing on music, musicians and composers must be more careful than most
- they must differentiate between looking back at the panopoly of History,
and their own sense of where they came from.  Almost every artist uses an
imagined distant past as a source for weaponry against a more recent
experienced past.

Perhaps, as is often the case, these pleas fall on deaf ears.  But so too
do most premieres, so it is something that should not bother a composer
much, if at all.  The point remains, and this most recent exchange is a
perfect example of it - oppressive social discourse is replied to with
appeals to authority and social discourse.  Not a word is mentioned that
identifies the works *as individuals*.  Saying that one person "writes in
a style that people want to hear" means nothing - Korn sold more albums
than the 3 composers who have written on this thread will probably sell
in their lifetimes.

Perhaps the people who have written on this exchange might want to take a
step back, and restate what they mean, as opposed to merely saying words
which reflect how they feel, but without conveying what they feel.  The
past as it really was is an important project, but the past as we have felt
it is the substance of art.  Though Wagner's idea of Greek History has both
good points and bad points, all would agree he is inferior as a historian
to many other people.  But his view of Greek History and Tragedy
undergirded his dramatic methods, and he is a much better composer
than anyone who was a better historian.

Stirling Newberry
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http://www.mp3.com/ssn