Neighborhood Gossip
A week or two before I got on my British Airways flight to Heathrow, I sat down with an émigré familiar with the London new music scene and received some critical advice: Steer clear of the politics. Don’t get embroiled in the he-say-she-say and the neighborhood highlights, to borrow from Gang Starr. (I’m paraphrasing here.) At the time, I didn’t think too much about this admonition; after all, I’ll only be a student, content to absorb performances and labor over my scores. I won’t be in competition for resources with established figures. And besides, how bad can it be?
It can be pretty bad. I’m sure London isn’t unique in this respect—shifting alliances and bitter enmities are bound to develop wherever passionate people struggle for pieces of a small and inexorably diminishing pie, from New York to Champaign-Urbana—but I have to say that the caution I heard so many months ago continues to resonate as I learn more about the maze-like network of social scar tissue that connects the UK’s greatest minds in contemporary music. Slights real or perceived, creative or personal, can produce decades-long beef, severing equally lengthy ties of friendship and mutual respect. Compounding the problem, of course, is that composers—like members of any enclosed community—love to gossip, so complimenting a colleague’s orchestration with a raised eyebrow can conflagrate rapidly into the accusation that he is an intellectually bankrupt capitalist running-dog.
Just as I’ve tried to hone my craft and musical instincts during my time here, I’ve given some thought to how to replicate the best features of the UK new music situation when I get back home. But it’s worth considering, too, how to avoid the kind of strife I’ve witnessed here and cultivate an environment in which people can interact comfortably and feel as though they’re all on the same team, differences of opinion notwithstanding.