On Jan 31, 2005, at 7:27 AM, John Howell wrote:
At 1:08 PM -0800 1/30/05, Lon Price wrote:
The problem starts at the college level. Performance majors are so busy learning the established literature that they have no time to devote to a new student work, or at least that was my experience when I studied composition at USC. If the composition was technically difficult, requiring a lot of rehearsal time, which a lot of new music tends to be, no one seemed interested in investing the time and effort it would take to learn it. It seemed to me that composition students tended to "dumb down" their music in order to get it played. I refused to do that, so the only piece of mine that got a performance was the aforementioned orchestral piece.
So writing music that is accessible and playable is dumbing down?
I've also heard that called pandering to one's audience.
Which means that complexity and difficulty equals quality?
No, but neither does it mean complex and difficult equals bad, just because it's hard to play and hard for the general public to accept.
Forgive me, but that does not compute. I don't know your work, Lon, and it may be terrific, but aren't you describing everything that went wrong during the 20th century in the shrinking world of "art" music, where most composers have to have day jobs?
When I was in college the first time, at North Texas State, Gunther Schuller spent a week there as composer in residence. He gave a lecture in which he stated, "All tonal music is dead. It is impossible to write original music in the tonal realm. All tonal music has already been written. Serial composition is the only answer." This was in 1965, and the jazz composers in the audience nearly rioted, since most jazz has always been tonal. Even the Avant-Garde jazz of Coltrane, Shepp, Ayler, et al, usually at least had a tonal center. We put on a concert that week, and it was the only time that jazz players and what we "jazzers" called "legit" players shared the stage. I played an alto sax solo on a twelve-tone big band piece title "Volume Twelve." My solo was completely free-form--no key, no tone center, no strict tempo. Some of Schuller's Third Stream music was performed as well, all of it twelve-tone. It was pretty funny hearing the "legit" players trying to swing.
When I enrolled at USC in 1993, my background was as a jazz and rhythm & blues tenor sax player. (My screen name is "Texas Tenor" without the vowels.) I had no experience composing "legit," or what most of you guys like to call "Art Music." (I don't like that term, because it implies that other music genres are not art. But that's another can of worms.) As a listener, I was drawn to the Twentieth Century composers: Stravinsky, Bartok, Messiaen, Schoenberg, Berg, etc. None of these composers wrote music that was particularly easy to play, and their music is not featured in concert programs nearly as often as the DWEM club. But that is where I'm coming from as a LISTENER, so it was fairly logical to go there as a composer. Of course the composers that I listed wrote in a pretty wide variety of styles, but I think it's safe to say that all of them wrote music that I would find hard to just sightread flawlessly on the first reading (or second, or third). So my "serious" compositions tend to be atonal, and not always easy to play.
Find a market. Compose for that market. Or don't; it's your choice
Well, I live in Hollywood, so I know all about that. I could have gone the smooth jazz route. I could write and play that music in my sleep. But that's not what I'm into, as a player or a composer. I've written some jazz tunes that I think are fairly accessable. But I was under the impression that the college experience was all about experimentation, pushing the envelope, trying new things. It certainly was that way back in the '60s at North Texas. My belief is that one should write what he or she feels, not influenced by any particular market, and then hope that there's a market for it.
******************************************** Lon Price, Los Angeles <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://hometown.aol.com/txstnr/>
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