A Problematic Diagnosis

Recently I accompanied my mother to a medical check-up since she was seeing a new doctor. At some point, he and I struck up a conversation and inevitably the topic turned to music—it turns out that he’s an amateur pianist. I tried to explain to him what NewMusicBox is, but he doesn’t spend much time on the web, so it didn’t quite click with him. But he did think he understood what I meant when I told him that I was also a composer.

“Oh, that unmelodic stuff,” he quipped. “That’s not for me.”

Although a great deal of music being written right now is by no means unmelodic, including a fair amount of things I’ve done, there’s still an assumption in certain quarters of the community that contemporary music equals gnarly music. If you’re alive and you write music, it’s bound to be a tough pill to swallow.

As a listener, I personally love a great deal of things that general audiences would probably find unpalatable: Stacks of minor seconds that never resolve? Stuff that sounds out of tune and downright wrong? Seemingly arhythmic angularity? Relentless repetition? Bring ’em on. As a composer, however, this is not always how I want to express myself and I sometimes feel stifled by perceptions of what music from our time is supposed to sound like, both from its practitioners as well as its detractors. And much as I’m attracted to the role model of the rebellious outsider, which is what got me excited about this stuff in the first place, always putting forward this image might ultimately not be in the best interest of new music. It’s also far from representative at this point in time. And if a doctor who is otherwise seriously interested in music—to the point of practicing Chopin in his limited off-hours—assumes that the music I compose is off-putting and not for him just because I’m alive, then despite the seeming bounty of stylistically varied new music out there today, we still have a lot of work to do.