Hey, Colin. Thanks for your post. Do you have a word count limit? I was hoping you'd expand a bit more on what you are saying here. Perhaps in comments?

Let me paraphrase one thing you say in hopes that being blunt about it will force you to be slightly more explicit: "If we were completely honest, we wouldn't compose."

If this is indeed a fair paraphrase, then the solution is not to stop composing but to re-define what you mean by 'honest.' Honest about what? And honest to whom?

Thursday, July 09, 2009, 11:37:50 AM

Further to pgblu's comment, I'm unclear as to the degree to which a work can be 'honest' or 'dishonest'. Is this something tied up in the work being in some way explicitly referential/representational?

I suspect that there is a difference between writing "music that reflects [your] experience and understanding of the world" and "music that expresses [your] experience and understanding of the world". The former implies that your (hopefully critically interrogated) experience of your broader environment impacts the way you engage, as a composer, with sound. The latter implies that you are attempting to replicate, presumably by some form of analogy, your experience of your environment in sound (which is very fictive indeed).

I'm not necessarily suggesting that there isn't a place for both modes, but the second, representational way of engaging with the world through music seems custom-built for purposes at the didactic or escapist extremes.

Thursday, July 09, 2009, 10:33:46 PM

Honest about what?

Honest about the economic and cultural situation we're confronted with, I guess. I'm not suggesting that composing concert music is phony or duplicitous–rather, I think there's a productive tension that exists between the desire to write music that has a genuine connection to the real and the aspirational character of music that gestures toward the ideal.

Probably not the answer you were hoping for - but your question might get a good discussion going here!

Friday, July 10, 2009, 10:45:31 AM

An ideology, a weltanschauung: yes, perhaps a completely natural and impossible-to-avoid aspect of having an artistic voice. In one respect isn't this what we want from artists, even if it's an obvious construction? What does this amount to though? A clever wordsmith can make "new simplicity" (to conflate ideology and aesthetic commitment for a moment) into a Pragmatic response to a manneristically exhausted Idealism, as is endlessly done. Similarly, the discourse of learned and vernacular styles (read: serial and post-minimal) has been utilized by a broad group of composers to stand for something like the musical elite vs. the common man. Adorno's negative dialectic actually turned around a similar set of assignments: Music that is entertaining, nostalgic, backward looking, etc. was a product of the culture-industry contrived in order to disguise the structures of social domination. The "truth" of music is non-identity, i.e. to resist "identification-compulsion."

Sorry, my point is that questions of musical "truth" have to be somehow divorced from simple questions of musical materials or styles - or another way - one's expression of the musically true can only be dramatized in their own conception of the sub-textual meaning of their musical choices. There exists no possible objective aesthetic ideology, only enacted ones.

May I ask, are the people who are "telling the truth" the same ones that are "lying?" Is lying the same thing as "capitalizing on the artificial sensual?" Is there such a thing as music that is "organically sensual?" What's the difference? Is telling the truth a different sense of the same thing as lying? I confess I don't understand that part...

Friday, July 10, 2009, 9:19:37 PM

Honest about what?

Honest about the economic and cultural situation we have to confront, I guess. Although music is no substitute for a pie chart, I think there's a productive tension between the metaphorical or impressionistic (say) illustration of the real and an aspirational gesturing at the ideal.

I wrote a longer and probably clearer response to you earlier, but I think the intarwebs ate it.

Saturday, July 11, 2009, 9:57:04 AM

Bruno Liebrucks' most memorable assertion (in Sprache und Bewusstsein - or "Language and Consciousness") is that "Truth never appears as itself, but always as the negation of a specific un-truth of its time." To the cursory reader this sounds not unlike a plea for relativism -- if we can't express truth, then why not just stop worrying about it? -- but the emphasis is really on the term 'specific'.

In 1908 or thereabouts, composers recognized a certain untruth in tonality: namely, that in the face of a rationalized temperament where all half-steps are of equal size, tonality was less of an acoustically motivated organizational strategy, and had devolved into mere habit. That doesn't mean that atonality, where the logic of intervallic symmetry trumps tonal hierarchy, is somehow more truthful, but that its implementation changes the terms of music's debate in a fruitful way.

Thus it makes little sense to pit schools of thought against one another (speaking now as a commentator who for his own part is trying to pinpoint an 'untruth'). Sibelius, Stravinsky and Schoenberg simply had 'different priorities', considered different untruths to be more urgent objects of critique. As much as Adorno dissed Sibelius, wouldn't it have been absurd if the Finn had composed Schoenberg's Suite for piano, op. 25?

Is this notion of different priorities more or less akin to your statement about 'understanding and experience'?

Sunday, July 12, 2009, 11:21:35 PM

"Nonetheless, I'd maintain that concert music lives up to its potential when it's an expression of ideology, an imagining of one's relationship with the world. To compose music toward this end is a fundamentally dishonest—fictive, at least—act..."

I'm not so sure how expressing one's relationship with the world around them would be a fictitious act. Maybe it if were fairly delusional, but if it is a sincere gesture or statement then why not let it be just that? (I know that must sound very naive, but roll with me here...)

If one's Weltanschauung were very skewed, then I could see how their musical statements could produce some maligned musical simulacrum... but I do believe that the simplicity of the sound in an "honest" (whatever that word implies to you) musical expression could still speak to the ears and minds of everybody. Having to read between the lines in sound seems like a subversive way to get your message across.

Then again, no two world views would (or could) ever be the same, and the "truth" could probably never fully be realized in sound (or any other medium). I don't know... maybe I just need to be more detailed in my program notes.

Monday, July 13, 2009, 9:09:25 PM

Also, when I said that having to "read between the lines" is a subversive route, I meant in the context of having music that is intentionally fictitious in it's design. I have nothing against subtilely.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009, 2:13:29 PM

I would think that everyone's relationship to "today's world" is very different. Some composers are insulated some are isolated and someone else might be in a great or a bad place. Add to that the question of different talents, abilities, and the ability to to get performed. Not to mention those composers who would throw their Grand Mothers under a bus to make it.

Composers don't always know themselves sufficiently well (at all point in their career) to make such judgments especially as the art form tends to work from the art back to the creator. On the other hand modern publicity works the other way around from the "artist" to the art.

So the dishonest composers can succeed just as well as the honest ones, at lest for a time.

Oh. Have you considered Colin that any music designed to be sad that is good will by it very nature make you feel bad?

Phil Fried, PhilFried.com, OperaBob.org

Tuesday, July 14, 2009, 5:09:49 PM

I would think that everyone's relationship to "today's world" is very different. Some composers are insulated some are isolated and someone else might be in a great or a bad place. Add to that the question of different talents, abilities, and the ability to to get performed. Not to mention those composers who would throw their Grand Mothers under a bus to make it.

Composers don't always know themselves sufficiently well (at all points in their career) to make such judgments especially as the art form tends to work from the art back to the creator. On the other hand modern publicity works the other way around from the "artist" to the art.

So the dishonest composers can succeed just as well as the honest ones, at lest for a time.

Oh. Have you considered Colin that any music designed to be sad that is good will by its very nature make you feel bad?

Phil Fried, PhilFried.com, OperaBob.org

Tuesday, July 14, 2009, 8:17:57 PM

Wow, lots to think about here.

Robd: I think I was talking about the first way of thinking about composing, but this dichotomy seems on one level to be more technical than philosophical? Maybe I'm missing your boat.

Pgblu: Liebrucks' formulation is very elegant, and I suspect I should consult some primary source material before engaging with it in a public forum!

Jbunch: Your comment about divorcing material and style from "truth" and "fiction" is one I agree 100% with, and this is something I wish I had realized years ago. I guess when it comes to separating the truth-tellers from the liars, I'd say that a convincing lie and a stark truth can be equally valuable in music. As a former teacher of mine likes to say, the opposite of a simple truth is a falsehood, but the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. (I'm amazed this quote hasn't surfaced in this discussion until now!) Was it Niels Bohr who first said it?

Jay: I see the "fictitious" part as having a kind of aspirational or maybe even utopian component - kind of like how the events of a novel or play are, strictly speaking, not true, but the work might unveil new potentials. Ben Johnston talks about Shakespeare in these terms, which is kind of cool.

Phil: These are all valid disclaimers. I guess the "throw grandma under the bus" are the people I really feel bad for, because if you're going to sell out, new music is hardly the most lucrative field to do it in.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009, 11:01:04 AM

Ah, well that I can get my mind around. To that end then, I can see where you're coming from. Interesting stuff!

Wednesday, July 15, 2009, 3:05:32 PM

Re Liebrucks -- good luck finding source material, but come by my office sometime :-)

The reason I like the quote, though, is that it can be taken at face value and discussed without recourse to the whole eight-volume text.

Thursday, July 16, 2009, 10:44:24 AM