Quoting from a recently published NY Times review of a Locrian Chamber
Players Concert:

   "At its concert on Thursday evening at Riverside Church, the ensemble
   took a parting look at a few works composed in 1992 and offered some
   newer pieces as well.  It also celebrated Pauline Oliveros's 70th
   birthday (which was on May 30) by devoting the second half of the
   program to her works.

   One of Ms.  Oliveros's pieces, "Sound Fishes" is listed as having
   been composed in 1992, but a listener had to wonder whether the
   date has any relevance for a piece that is more a set of conceptual
   instructions than a notated score.  What Ms.  Oliveros came up with
   in 1992 was the idea of having the instrumentalists wander around
   the room and "pull the sound out of the air like a fisherman catching
   fish":  that is, feel the unrealized sound in the atmosphere and play
   it.

   The performance on Thursday was, in a sense, composed on the spot,
   as much by the players as by Ms.  Oliveros.  Was the piece the audience
   heard a decade old, or brand new? It was, in any case, entertaining.

   The ensemble, along with Ms.  Oliveros, who played the accordion,
   surrounded the listeners and produced an interesting splattering
   of timbres before seamlessly moving to another work, "Sound Piece"
   (1998), which required them to make sounds with objects other than
   their instruments.  They were inventive:  some zipped and unzipped
   (or snapped and unsnapped) their instrument cases, or produced
   percussive sounds of other kinds.  One scraped a rubber plunger
   along a wall

   Ms.  Oliveros's half of the program began with "The Heart of Tones"
   (1999), in which a small ensemble of strings, flute and piano played
   a single, unison note but varied the dynamics, timbre, mode of attack
   (bowed or pizzicato, for example) and balances to create a constantly
   shifting texture.  And Ms.  Oliveros closed her part of the program
   by leading "Heart Chant" (2001), an audience-participation ritual in
   which listeners were asked to feel their heartbeats and send out good
   vibrations."

Honestly now, haven't we yet gotten beyond this kind of non-creative,
no-brainer 60's vintgage schlock? It insults my intelligence for a
"composer, " no matter how famous to put his or her name on a notebook
page of improvization instructions.  This simply isn't composing music.
Rather, it's a set of gimmicks to convince a duped audience that they have
just witnessed something marvelous.  These so-called composers (Oliveros
and her ilk being the worst offenders) have been collecting perfectly good
grant money for years to sit around and dream up the kind of crap that I
and my fellow kindergartners created 35 years ago when we were given rhythm
sticks and told to play some music.

"Feel your heart-beat and send out good vibrations???" Honestly!  I can
do that in my bathtub.  I don't need to take up space in the Riverside
Church as 30 or so dollars a ticket to participate in some ridiculous
new-age ritual concocted by a left-over Hippie.

It's no wonder that the many think that the last great composer was
Stravinsky.  He and Britten seem to me to be the only people in the last
40 years who were capable of sitting down and actually creating something
that was original, and that stood a chance of lasting beyond the first
performance.

By the same token, what can we say of "musicians" who "specialize" in
this kind of nonsense.  Does it take a conservatory education and years
of preparation to be able to zip and unzip your damned instrument case?
Even if you can do it in some sort of tempo and rhythm, you're still an
idiot to call it music.

I miss the days when composers wrote music, and musicians played it.

Kevin Sutton