What It Means To Be You

What It Means To Be You

By Frank J. Oteri
No matter what you attempt to do, you will leave certain identifiable signs and these are beyond your control.

Written By

Frank J. Oteri

Frank J. Oteri is an ASCAP-award winning composer and music journalist. Among his compositions are Already Yesterday or Still Tomorrow for orchestra, the "performance oratorio" MACHUNAS, the 1/4-tone sax quartet Fair and Balanced?, and the 1/6-tone rock band suite Imagined Overtures. His compositions are represented by Black Tea Music. Oteri is the Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and is Composer Advocate at New Music USA where he has been the Editor of its web magazine, NewMusicBox.org, since its founding in 1999.

I initially thought about responding to the insightful comments by Dennis Bathory-Kitsz, mclaren, and Kyle Gann that were prompted by my ruminations last week about the viability of juvenilia and other abandoned compositions (“I Gotta Be Me”). But where those comments led me was to a place that wasn’t as pithy and succinct as responses to comments (especially from threadstarters) should be, so I decided it was better just to start a new thread. So here goes…

According to mclaren, there’s an “us vs. them” among composers: some fall into the camp of “stylistic monoculture” (writing similarly identifiable pieces time and time again); the others “practice musical xenogenesis” (each piece is its own new world). I’m never particularly comfortable with binaries, and I’m equally ill-at-ease with universal paradigms. However, a universal paradigm in this case rings truer to me than a binary. It seems, at least to my ear, that it’s pretty impossible to completely mask who you are in the things that you put forward as creative work, even though there have been many composers (most famously John Cage) who attempted to do just that. Despite his attempts at taking his own ego out of the compositional process, there are through-lines that are audibly Cagean from his earliest serial-esque works through to his proportional duration works of the ’40s through to the indeterminate scores of the ’50s and ’60s, the “cheap imitation” derivations of the ’70s, and the Number Pieces of his final years. More than five years ago during a talk I did with John Corigliano, another composer who has very publicly eschewed adhering to a specific compositional camp, I thought he quite convincingly described personal style as the “unconscious choices” that get made during the creative process. No matter what you attempt to do, you will leave certain identifiable signs and these are beyond your control. And a decision that comes from not deciding is itself also a kind of decision making.

On the other extreme, the demand to conform—especially in the creation of cultural artifacts within a market economy—can be extremely high. This is not only true for music. In fact, it is even worse in the visual arts. If you establish a reputation as a portrait painter and decide to exhibit a series of abstract sculptures, your gallery will most likely not be very happy about it. A visual artist friend of mine has spent his entire life creating a body of work about which, on the surface, it is extremely difficult to generalize. It has made his work, despite its quality, difficult for galleries to promote, and yet there are things that even he does in his disparate output that reveal his “unconscious choice” fingerprints.

That said, I think that listeners, viewers, readers, etc. will always search for such identifiers and perhaps make them larger than they might actually be. For over ten years I’ve hosted a series of concerts at a club in which performers are requested to present two sets that are completely different from one another—I was inspired to curate in this manner since in addition to the structure-obsessed chamber music I compose for other people, I front a bluegrass-type band, a duality which usually totally disconcerts people. It’s always fascinating to me how related the things that are seemingly unrelated wind up being. Perhaps that’s why it is so exciting to listen to that early Philip Glass Brass Sextet and the Babbitt musical theatre songs I brought up last week. While clearly not in the styles those composers became known for, there are small details in both of those pieces which offer clues about the future directions those composers would take. That said, I’m still not convinced that those of us whose music is not widely known or disseminated should put every iota of music we have ever written out there on equal footing. How the pieces of the puzzle fit together—evolve, devolve, seemingly stay the same, seemingly always change—ultimately determines who you are, but even if we might not have complete choice about what we write, we ought to be able to initially determine the context in which people experience it. But we also should reserve the right to always be able to change our minds…