Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - What's the deal with contemporary classical music?!

roachboy · 01-19-2005, 07:28 AM

dbass:
well, first thing is that a feel for you as a composition student for some reason: i think i say that insofar as you are running into one of the least pleasant situations in that context--you are moving in one direction---perhaps your teachers fight you--and both of you somehow believe that the edge of the classical world, such as it is, are the edges of the World---fall off there and....poof.....

i think you should feel free to let yourself change, move through phases, experiment and stop experimenting, adopt constraints and not adopt constraints. hopefully, you will have a long engagement with music and will, at some point, be able to look back across it, see how you moved, understand some of it, no longer understand some of it....what i think is most important within this is that you give yourself liscence to move, to change, even if that means you spend periods where you might feel a certain opacity within yourself about what exactly you are doing.

i would say something about "finding your voice" or an equivalent hallmark sentiment, but what i have figured out is that the problem with it (the sentiment) is that it assumes voice is one thing, when it might more accurately be the case that a voice is one thing at a given time, but that across time the matter is more complicated.

at any rate, there is a way in which frustration is good, it pushes you to sort things for yourself.

you really should check out the spectral folk--sounds like they are working in exactly the space you are thinking of--for example, the three scarriano pieces on garth knox's solo viola cd (he has a spectral cd as well, but i havent heard it)

as for the more general questions being discussed above:

dissonance: i dont really hear dissonance as such any more--more open versus closed intervals, with conventional harmony figuring as closed. dissonance for me is more a question of timbral contrasts. i am not saying that this place is in any way normative, but i understand how i arrived at it, i think: first in that what i am most interested in initially spun itself out of folk like cecil taylor, john carter, the art ensemble of chicago, ornette coleman: open intervals (or thier minor second inverses) open space for very different types of improvisation than closed intervals (lots of folk--lots of them--have worked this one out--see the shifts away from bop in the unfolding of jazz, particularly after 1958/1960)....from schoenberg and webern comes an emphasis on linear development rather than on harmonic and a different relation to space from that typical of 18-19th centuriy music....from doing group improvisation for years comes the rejection of any meaningful distinction between composition and improvisation in practice---they are different approaches to the arrangment of sonic material, thats it. but what really matters for me at least about group improvisation is that it opened up a way of thinking about manipulating sound and what i guess you could think about as meditation practices.

you'll probably move out, toward the types of sonic organization articulated by those who preceded you; inward in a sense--into your instrument, what it can do--and inward in another sense, moving as a variant of a subject across/within the previous two engagements. what will probably shift repeatedly within this is what you find compelling or beautiful. for example (and again, this is not in the least normative, it is only my experience) i am obsessed at the moment with overtones/harmonics and with what stockhausen called negative space--but when i was a student studying music (until i decided to move into something else because i wanted, for better or worse, to protect my sense of my own mobility), i had no idea these possibilities existed much less that they would be as engaging as they are to me.

dunno how relevant all this is. i hope that the encouragement comes across---------------keep going----------be stubborn-------if you want to find sounds that take your breath away (and who doesnt, really, regardless of the format you work in)----keep looking for them. they are, in all probability, right in front of you in one way--20 years from now, they might well still be right in front of you, but in a different way. you cant see there from here anyway--there is no here---there is no there.

01-19-2005, 07:28 AM	#12 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	dbass: well, first thing is that a feel for you as a composition student for some reason: i think i say that insofar as you are running into one of the least pleasant situations in that context--you are moving in one direction---perhaps your teachers fight you--and both of you somehow believe that the edge of the classical world, such as it is, are the edges of the World---fall off there and....poof..... i think you should feel free to let yourself change, move through phases, experiment and stop experimenting, adopt constraints and not adopt constraints. hopefully, you will have a long engagement with music and will, at some point, be able to look back across it, see how you moved, understand some of it, no longer understand some of it....what i think is most important within this is that you give yourself liscence to move, to change, even if that means you spend periods where you might feel a certain opacity within yourself about what exactly you are doing. i would say something about "finding your voice" or an equivalent hallmark sentiment, but what i have figured out is that the problem with it (the sentiment) is that it assumes voice is one thing, when it might more accurately be the case that a voice is one thing at a given time, but that across time the matter is more complicated. at any rate, there is a way in which frustration is good, it pushes you to sort things for yourself. you really should check out the spectral folk--sounds like they are working in exactly the space you are thinking of--for example, the three scarriano pieces on garth knox's solo viola cd (he has a spectral cd as well, but i havent heard it) as for the more general questions being discussed above: dissonance: i dont really hear dissonance as such any more--more open versus closed intervals, with conventional harmony figuring as closed. dissonance for me is more a question of timbral contrasts. i am not saying that this place is in any way normative, but i understand how i arrived at it, i think: first in that what i am most interested in initially spun itself out of folk like cecil taylor, john carter, the art ensemble of chicago, ornette coleman: open intervals (or thier minor second inverses) open space for very different types of improvisation than closed intervals (lots of folk--lots of them--have worked this one out--see the shifts away from bop in the unfolding of jazz, particularly after 1958/1960)....from schoenberg and webern comes an emphasis on linear development rather than on harmonic and a different relation to space from that typical of 18-19th centuriy music....from doing group improvisation for years comes the rejection of any meaningful distinction between composition and improvisation in practice---they are different approaches to the arrangment of sonic material, thats it. but what really matters for me at least about group improvisation is that it opened up a way of thinking about manipulating sound and what i guess you could think about as meditation practices. you'll probably move out, toward the types of sonic organization articulated by those who preceded you; inward in a sense--into your instrument, what it can do--and inward in another sense, moving as a variant of a subject across/within the previous two engagements. what will probably shift repeatedly within this is what you find compelling or beautiful. for example (and again, this is not in the least normative, it is only my experience) i am obsessed at the moment with overtones/harmonics and with what stockhausen called negative space--but when i was a student studying music (until i decided to move into something else because i wanted, for better or worse, to protect my sense of my own mobility), i had no idea these possibilities existed much less that they would be as engaging as they are to me. dunno how relevant all this is. i hope that the encouragement comes across---------------keep going----------be stubborn-------if you want to find sounds that take your breath away (and who doesnt, really, regardless of the format you work in)----keep looking for them. they are, in all probability, right in front of you in one way--20 years from now, they might well still be right in front of you, but in a different way. you cant see there from here anyway--there is no here---there is no there. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 01-19-2005 at 07:32 AM..