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 [log in to unmask] http://www.mp3.com/ssn