Pardon the length but I've a few things to "get off my chest"

"Who Cares if You Write?"
An Anti-Manifesto

While reading several of the postings to the "Accessible Music" and
"Soundtracks" threads, I noticed that some terms used to cast aspersions
on one or another active composer.  One such term was "hack," referring in
this case to a composer who had been lucky enough to be recorded.  "Hack,"
as I'm sure most of you are aware, comes from the British hackney cab, a
carriage for hire, and thus means doing work for hire.  It has also come
to mean trite and commonplace.  That is, unfortunately, the result of
Sturgeon's Law which states that ninety percent of everything is crap.
Whether done for self, for money, or for some other consideration, a large
percentage of everything done in art is going to be, for want of a better
word, crap.  When a person of incredible talent such as Beethoven put pen
to paper to compose something, the result was considerably more likely to
be something worth rehearing than a piece by Schindler.  Composers seem to
be as unreliable as anyone else in judging themselves and their peers; in
fact they seem to have a rather dismal track record.  For every accurate
assessment (Schumann seems to have been incredibly lucky to predict two
great composers, Chopin and Brahms), there are a dozen examples of what
might be considered envy, were not most composers the generous and gracious
good people they seem.

Therefore accusations of "hack" and "sell-out" need not be heeded by
those of us who only wish to experience and enjoy as much music as we
can in our lifetimes.  My preference, and apparently that of the Western
world, is tonal music.  Bitonal, multi-tonal, whatever, I need some audible
relationships between harmonic material.  Audible to me, that is, in my
pitiful, uneducated state.  Years of ear training and classes in harmony
and counterpoint would likely rectify my ignorance, but at the age of
forty-six I am neither financially able nor temperamentally inclined to
embark on such a course (even if it were available locally).  It is perhaps
my fault, but I have yet to hear a twelve-tone work that makes me feel
anything better than despairing and miserable.  And this is how I feel
during and after the pieces (Berg's Violin Concerto, Schoenberg's early
orchestral pieces) that I think are probably good.  The rest of the
militantly contemporary (Boulez's Piano sonatas, etc.) just bore me.  When
the occasional such piece plays on my local classical radio station, I
usually listen to the end to find out the composer's name in order to avoid
him (or her) in the future.

I do not reject new music out of hand, but I will not willingly waste
what little time I have relistening to stuff that made me want to vomit,
or simply go to sleep, the first time I heard it.  Some of Arvo Part's
music has intrigued me (Cantus in memory of Benjamin Britten), as has the
occasional Gorecki (the choral antiphon Totus Tuus) and Christopher Rouse
(Symphony 1).  But a composer has to give me a reason to want to rehear a
work beyond the simple assurance that, after innumerable hearings, I'll
suddenly "get it." I don't demand instant gratification, but as the
"consumer" I'll simply vote with my feet (or my wallet, if I hear the music
first on record) if I haven' t heard something that interests me in the
first five or ten minutes of a new piece.

I find myself turning more and more to soundtracks (where, as one wag
said, you can be ignored by a much larger audience).  Film music is, at
its worst, trivial or obnoxious.  But if done well, it enhances the film
experience.  If done superlatively, it can deepen our understanding of
character and story and can stand on its own as music, much as Wagner's
music can often stand without his lyrics.  Bernard Herrman wrote a great
piece of music when he produced his score for Hitchcock's Psycho.

Now, if some of my esteemed fellow list-members consider the previously
mentioned Messrs.  Part, Gorecki, and Rouse "hacks," you'll get no argument
from me.  I won't waste the ink (or electrons, whatever) to argue the
point.  Nor will I argue that John Williams (the film composer) and John
Barry are great composers.  I enjoy Williams and Barry for what they are:
composers with individual, recognizable personalities.  While not easily
definable, that personality is the thing that makes you say after a few
minutes listening, "That's by (insert composer here)" when you haven't
heard a particular work before.  Not to be confused with self-plagiarism
(a common trait in many greats), it goes beyond mannerism.  It's a
characteristic style of handling the material and sometimes a quality of
the original material itself.

You frustrated, angry composers out there, please keep writing (as if
you could stop).  Without you there won't even be that tiny percentage of
great music.  Be as angry as you like when your work is rejected in favor
of some simplistic "hack" work.  But keep in mind that you and the "hack"
will both likely be forgotten.  It is a very Darwinian world out there, and
the definition of fitness is what lasts.  It is sad that by enlarging the
audience for "classical" music, the record companies may have succeeded
in watering it down to a level that is only marginally higher than the
obnoxious obscenities of "gangsta rap." When music became a commodity, it
began to suffer from that common condition of all commodities: obedience
to the law of supply and demand.  It is unfortunate (for composers) that
there are no Baron von Swietens or Prince Lichnowskys anymore, no rich,
knowledgeable amateurs to underwrite composers they like.  And this is
unlikely to change, as those who have a great deal of money seem to spend
all their time making more money, with little time or inclination to learn
the ins and outs of "classical" music.  The lover of music today is more
likely to be cab driver (hack?) than a wealthy businessman.  Aristocracy
nowadays is only of the mind, and the mind alone will not supply food and
shelter.  So rail against the system that keeps you down.  Just don't
expect it to change anytime soon.

I speak and read (listen) in Tonal.  If you expect those who, like me,
haven't spent a year or two in a conservatory to like your music, please
have the courtesy to write in the language we understand.  If you insist
upon writing in Sanskrit or Esperanto, don't be surprised if English
speakers give you the bum's rush.  Can you blame the classical listening
public for swarming to Part, Gorecki, et.  al.? It's as if the only new
books were all by James Joyce or his imitators and suddenly along comes a
Michael Crichton or Danielle Steel.  It's not that their writing is deep
or even good (and here I 've probably butchered someone else's sacred cow),
but it's a relief to simply read and understand (even hackwork) after too
much stream-of-consciousness.  People are dying for something new they can
get their ears around.  There are many that would love to hear a new piece
that not only challenges, but also moves them.  Is that too much to hope
for?

Most good music contains a sizeable intellectual element and requires
a certain amount of effort to be understood.  But if I only wanted to
stimulate the logic centers of my mind, I'd open a calculus textbook and
do a few integrations.  A musical work whose emotional content requires
more study than the bar exam to appreciate has, to all intents and purposes,
no emotional content, and to me no worth.  I cannot pretend to explain the
involuntary chill, the goose bumps I get when I hear the "Nimrod" variation
in Elgar's Enigma Variations.  But it is one of the things I listen to
music for.  Not every piece does exactly that.  Sometimes it's an
excitement bordering upon mania; other times a tranquility with a sharp
sliver of pain imbedded within it.  Music is an infinitely varied
experience.  What brings me back is this synthesis of experience that
defies expression in words and requires music to awaken within me.  And
so I listen to a lot of music, new and old.

Most of us who love music vacillate between intense listening and
relaxing, depending upon our situation and the occasion.  But listening
to music should not have to be a penance.  Art music reached its pinnacle
of popularity long ago and will inevitably be the reserve of a relatively
small minority: a minority that wants music to be more than mere
entertainment.  And those people will respond to music that speaks to them.
But while we will willingly meet a composer halfway, if the composer says,
as did Milton Babbitt in the headline to his (in)famous manifesto, "Who
Cares If You Listen?", we will simply stop listening.  It is not a matter
of intellectual laziness for most of us, it's a matter of too much effort
for too little return.  What is the point in comprehending a twelve-tone
fugue if it still makes you feel as if either your fingernails are
scratching on slate or you took too many sleeping pills?

The great majority of people on this planet care little or nothing
for serious music.  Their deepest questions are those of survival and
gratification.  Music, if it has any significance at all, is important
to them as a shared ritual (hymn singing, chant, dancing).  Even in
the industrialized West, introspection is to most people deciding which
fast-food outlet to patronize.  Most of the people I know seems to go
about in a mindless daze, merely reacting to the world about them in some
pre-programmed fashion.  If I try to engage them in a conversation about
something beyond the routine, they shut down.  They don't want stimulation,
they want distraction, which television and the movies provides them in
copious quantity.  Music for them is something to dance to or sing along
with when drugged, drunk, or in a religious trance (the only times when
their inhibitions are low enough to respond to even the cheapest, tawdriest
music).  These people are never going to be your audience.

Your audience is that tiny percentage of people who think about their
place in the universe, who question the norm, who reach out to the new.
By writing without any consideration for them you are navel-gazing, engaged
in a form of musical autoeroticism (to euphemize a bit).  It has always been
difficult for a composer to get before the public.  One either had to be in
a position to put one's own music on (Bach), or one had to find a way to
convince someone in such a position that the music merited production.
That accomplished, (no mean feat) the music would, given adequate
performance, stand on its own merits.  At least it would if an influential
critic didn't skewer it or a rival's supporters didn't show up to boo.

It is ironic that the new technology may show a way out of the conundrum
of performance and distribution of new music.  I constantly hear how
recording companies are petrified by the new digital music compression
techniques that make music available as smaller and smaller downloads on
the World Wide Web.  This presents an opportunity for composers to get
their music heard with a minimum of outlay.  While synthesized MIDI may
be inappropriate for some music (because of its mechanical nature), if a
composer can obtain a single (even non-public) performance and record it,
then it can be posted to a web-site with little degradation in sound
quality.  Admittedly this tends to work better with shorter works, but
certainly these can be used to spark interest in the rest of the artist's
work.

Composers!  Instead of wasting your time blasting the "hacks" and their
comments in the periodicals, write something I can listen to.  If you're
not computer literate, get a friend who is to convert your score into MIDI
and post it.  Or get some friends to perform it with a tape recorder
running and get someone to make it into an MP3 file.  I already love the
music I know.  Give me some music I don't know to love.

David Simmons
[log in to unmask]
Virginia Beach, VA