At 07:17 PM 3/4/03 -0500, David W. Fenton wrote: >It interests me a great deal how antithetical to Cage's philosophy >your comments truly are. You seem not to delight in fortuitous >"mutations" of your compositional efforts. That is, of course, your >right, but it seems rather arrogant
I don't consider the inability or unwillingness to play what actually is written to be fortuitous. What I *do* consider fortuitous are the surprises that come during a correct reading. The rest is too commonplace to be interesting anymore. And, of course, Cage has been dead for a while. His impact has been felt, and the world has now moved on. (I'll leave the story of my overture with interior improvisation for another time, but the score and premiere performance of "Mountain Dawn Fanfare" is on line if anybody would care to look it up on http://maltedmedia.com/scores/) >I don't really understand your point of view, and have a hard time >comprehending where you are coming from with "why should distortion >be the goal of performance," which seems needlessly combative. You >seem to be heavily damaged emotionally by the apparent inability of >every performer who's ever given your music a whack to get it right. That's either a bit extreme or I'm in good company. Performance failure has inflicted more damage to new nonpop in the past century than any critic could. Go to a real crackerjack performance and the audience is with you, no matter how tough the piece on the ears, the heart, or the intellect. Now find one. :) >My only reaction to that is to ask: if none of them can do what you >want, maybe you never should have been composing for live performers >in the first place? Blame the victim? No, seriously, you're wrong. I spent some time with a musician who was working on a Ferneyhough piece -- really working on it, not dilettanting his way through it. It made him furious, but he kept at it. Ultimately, he understood what Ferneyhough was getting at and fell in love with the piece. A musician with less time, interest, energy or budget (the dominant case) would have given up and, of course, blamed Ferneyhough for writing impossible music. That's not historical news, either. >(on NPR I heard a back-to-back comparison of live performers with a >conductor-guided MIDI performance, and while there was a difference >in sound quality, the MIDI performance sounded quite acceptable). But >while replacing a few dozen musicians with a conductor driving an >array of sophisticated synthesizers might very well require little >compromise in the basic sound quality of the ensemble or of >individual instruments, it replaces the give and take of ensemble >playing with the conductorial interpretation. The conductor has no >initiative from other players to play off of, to encourage or >discourage, and only her own internal tempo and agogics (I'm assuming >we're talking relatively sophisticated equipment here). To use your words from earlier, "Some people, including a lot of composers throughout history, would consider this a feature rather than a bug." >The problem, perhaps, is that such performances are only possible for >music that is representative of a clear-cut style, and that modern >composers possibly fall into a trap of inventing new stylistic >conventions with every piece they write. And that's bad why? >I also think that many of the composers I know aren't sufficiently >sensitive to what is idiomatic on instruments and what can and cannot >be done well. That's more blame-the-victim talk. I think composers are by and large as or more skilled at their art than the average performers are on their instruments. But I'm a strong defender of composers, who have little defense when their piece is slaughtered. (Film directors have a different version of that slaughter, but now DVDs have opened up those undamaged cuts for inspection. My DVD player makes me happy.) >While there's nothing wrong with stretching the performers, you can't >have every single measure of a lengthy piece be at the edge of the >advanced performer's capabilities and expect the piece to be >absorbed, mastered and performed with any kind of authority or >security. That's not even in question, even for Ferneyhough. I think we've all been talking about more general situations with respect to the capabilities of electronic/Midi performance. I certainly have. And I'd guess that Liudas has. I've never written anything comparable to a Ferneyhough, and good performers still muck it up or, in some sort of self-defense mechanism, cloud it with rubato where they haven't quite learned it, or change tempi, or simply reinterpret (rather than analyze) to come up with some arbitrary presentation that fits their mood, skills, or current case of hemorrhoids. >I have often felt that if I were God and in charge of teaching >composers, I'd make all of them do internships as >organists/choirmasters in small churches, and require them to write >one simple anthem a week that was within the capabilities of the >amateur singers they had available to them and could be prepared and >performed with authority and security in the minimal rehearsal time >available under those circumstances. Again, since I'm speaking personally and not generically about a lot of this, I can say that I have done such things all my musical life. My recording of "Sumer Is Icumen In" with my little amateur church choir recorded in 1988 was even just released last month on the Longman Anthology of English Literature accompanying CD to represent music of that era. I've written compositions and arrangements for them. I taught elementary school music for six years and wrote every band and choral arrangement for them. Our little tiny choir also did Bernstein's "Chichester Psalms" and Stravinsky's "Anthem: A Dove Descending" as well as early American music and music of the middle ages, and buckets of regular old hymn tunes (some of which I wrote). My arrangement of "How Can I Keep On Singing" has for some unknown reason just surged in popularity in both sales and downloads. And before MP3.com limited songs to three, we had a 40-piece recorded compilation that had (as of today) 17,277 downloads. I'm not patting myself on the back, only pointing out that knowing and being able to do this sort of stuff does in no way convince me that I *should* do it when composing. I still (or even moreso) expect a performance that actually represents the music as best it can be understood to be the creative output of the composer who wrote it. >Music doesn't have to be difficult to be interesting. >Music doesn't have to be complex to be affecting. >Music doesn't have to be entirely novel to be worth hearing. None of those address the question. I agree with all three. >But your hostility to performers seems to me to bespeak a real >misconception about customary relatuonships between the composer, the >piece of music, the performers and the audience(s). There has been almost no "customary" relationship between composer and performer in my lifetime. As a younger generation of energized and (thank goodness) competent performers begins to appear (and Non Sequitur is a fine example), this relationship may grow once again. But it was disrupted long before my birth 54 years ago. Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
