At 9:03 AM -0500 11/9/02, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
Well, sure. I spent half a century learning the skills it takes to be a "composer"... I resent the people who will not take the same trouble to learn anything but noodle into MIDI devices and call themselves "composers". I don't mind if they noodle... I like to improvise, too, but when I want to "compose" (according to the dictionary,"to form by putting together; to form the substance of : to create by mental or artistic labor': to formulate and write (a piece of music);to arrange in proper or orderly form") I commit the original musical thoughts I have to graphic representation that can be read, performed, and interpreted by others.At 09:54 PM 11/8/02 -0500, David H. Bailey wrote:I am growing weary of composers who can't write!Do you really want to go here? :)
OK, that's too rigid a definition, but sloppy definitions in most areas have always driven me nuts, and never more than in the use of "composer" by every Jackie Gleasonish clown or MIDI noodler who wants a place in the pantheon with Bach, Beethoven, Bernstein and the gang. Sorry, folks, but those hummers and noodlers, even the ones with good ideas, need another designation, not "composer".
Well, sure. And I don't mind, for example, Paul McCartney being called a "songwriter". But when he (and others like him) uses minimal skills to produce a serious work, by enlisting the help of skilled composers/arrangers to whom they hum and noodle ideas to be fleshed out, the result is either mediocre at best, and if not, then largely the work of others.In some composition -- especially improvisatory or collaborative forms in jazz and pop respectively -- writing is destructive to the process
The most annoying... no, infuriating recent application of this "composer" appellation happened last year when I worked on an educational project that provides listening examples for classrooms. The people who made up the list (which included a lot of classical masterpieces from across the centuries) needed a "minority" and a "woman" composer for the list in order to be PC. So they combined the two and chose Billie Holiday! With all the great music being written these days by people "of color" and with all the fabulous women who are writing music, they chose a . . . well, you know what the fabulous Billie was, and in the biography that accompanied each work, it was fairly clear that this was not a good role model for young women, African-American or not, nor for aspiring "composers". She was not a "composer" in any sense. Barely a song writer, even though she was a stunning performer. Anyway... I was furious. I'm still furious.
I'm not sure what this sentence was meant to say, but if I translate correctly, then I take exception to this as well. I consider those who fashion electro-acoustic pieces "performers" not "composers"... in the tradition of jazz and other non-transcribeable music. I don't invalidate it. I just don't want it called "composition".If notation were required for the 'serious' composers among us, the who field of electroacoustics the early 1950s would be washed away.
Are we going back to the caves? to the cloisters? Even then they were struggling to find a way to write music down so that others could perform it.Being a transcriber is usually no fun. . . I don't enjoy doing transcription of 'composers who can't write', but they are no less valid and valuable (and far more numerous, and with a longer history)
Of course not. And those who can't write their music down provide a lot of work for composers like me (and others on this list and around the planet) who labor to do the heavy lifting for the amateurs. But those people are not "composers."I don't think it's helpful to confuse the actual music with its translation into a notational system.
If I had spent my life studying and refining my skills as an architect, I'd resent it if some wannabe with a good idea as to what his house should look like, and who could draw a little, called himself an "architect."
Before this sets off an entire flame war or convoluted thread-debate, let me just admit that I am nitpicking, being rigid and narrow in my definition of the term "composer". Guilty as charged.
Linda Worsley
--
Hear the music at:
http://www.ganymuse.com/
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