NYTimes.com Article:
The Sound of Uncertain, Uninspired Grad Students
By PAUL GRIFFITHS
August 26, 2001
ENOX, Mass. -- THESE are hard times for young composers and,
therefore, in an important sense, hard times for music. Orchestras
and other organizations responsible for commissioning new scores are
looking more and more to the same few established names, those of
people now in their 40's or older. Opportunities like the one John
Adams had two decades ago, when, still in his early 30's, he was
appointed composer in residence at the San Francisco Symphony, are
unlikely to recur soon. Teaching jobs, too, are thin on the ground:
colleges and conservatories are eager to attract new composition
students but not so encouraging when it comes to providing faculty
positions.
Meanwhile, the avenues of musical dissemination are closing.
Publishers are ever less ready to take risks; major record companies
stopped doing so a long time ago. Both are on the lookout more for
glamorous crossover ideas, which stand a chance of big immediate
returns, than for creative artists of however great potential. And
although self-publication becomes an ever more practical option,
distribution difficulties remain.
So composers who are now graduate students have many good reasons to
see themselves in a precarious position. All of which might help
explain the anxieties voiced below the surface in the pieces by
advanced composition students that were heard here recently at the
Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music.
Tanglewood has a buzz. Gaining a place in the festival allowed the
composition fellows to learn from such distinguished elders as Charles
Wuorinen and Oliver Knussen, and to gain, too, from having their
pieces played by hugely competent and enthusiastic young musicians.
The two concerts of short pieces by six composition fellows had
an air of excitement and determination in the performance. As
compositional efforts, though, the pieces were marked mostly by
uncertainty and disappointment, almost as if they had inadvertently
been made to be disappointing, to convey the frustration and lack of
direction their creators might well be experiencing.
One was a set of songs for tenor and piano on the pain of love and
loneliness, expressed in a manner echoing Britten. Two were string
quartets: a meditative essay centering on a short melody of Asian
coloring, and a pair of essays in fake film music. Another took up
the ensemble of Schubert's "Trout" Quintet to make music that came
forward perhaps as far as the very young Webern. This piece referred
in its title, "Harrow Lines," to a scene in Thomas Hardy's "Jude the
Obscure," implying that what was heard was, again, an expression of
youthful loneliness. Yet another piece, "Cadence," kept repeating
the same awkward line in changing instrumentations. Finally there
was a string sextet, moving through - or rather mixing up - images
of malignant darkness and light.
Everything was perfectly competent. "Cadence" was utterly bald and
antipoetic in its effects, combining instruments with little care
for blend; but that seemed to be part of the point: to make a stir.
Otherwise the compositions were well wrought and nicely judged in form.
They did what they set out to do. But one wished they had set out to do
more. Expression was one problem. There is a tendency at the moment
for composers to go back to the expressive dreams of their predecessors
in the age of Liszt and Tchaikovsky, wanting to convey private feeling,
an identification with some story, an impression of nature, or an
emotional response to an image or event in a work of art. The trend was
evident in much of the music by senior composers included in the
festival. Such intentions worked very well in the 19th century, when
they had freshness and urgency, and when they demanded a revolution in
musical thinking. But now they too often result in music that sounds
comfortable and complacent, lacking the intensity and danger one might
especially expect from artists producing their first professional works.
We all fall in love; we all have moments of contemplation. These
things may appear most personal and particular, but in fact they
are universally shared, and the attempt to put them into notes
will usually result in music that is stale, muddled or nondescript.
Composers who start out, alternatively, prompted by musical ideas
they cannot get out of their heads - a chord or harmonic gesture, a
motif, a color, a notion about structure - will often end up with
music that speaks in expressive terms loudly and surely.
BUT it is easy to see why this lesson is hard to learn today. We
pride ourselves on our aesthetic pluralism, on the peace that reigns
after the paper wars of decades past between serialists and symphonists,
Romantics and modernists, Minimalists and maximalists, politically
engaged composers and detached, ironic observers. Yet student artists
might well thrive better under conditions of battle, when there are
taboos to be broken, issues to be fought for, heroes to be admired
and to measure yourself against. Lacking all those, the young
composers of the 21st century are thrown back on themselves, in
varying measures of puzzlement, as the Tanglewood performances
indicated.
The practical career problems of these young artists are clear enough.
But far more damaging is the malaise, uncertainty and discontent they
are bound to sense in a world that, in all its complexity, is simply
asking them how they feel. They need driving causes, which they
might discover if they had a wider, richer awareness of recent music
than any of these Tanglewood pieces so much as hinted at. Left to
themselves, they will be unable to put their passions into music,
only their inclinations.
This article from NYTimes.com has been sent by
Edson Tadeu Ortolan
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