It has been said that one of the merits of getting a music education is to be able to communicate about music in a clear and concise manner. I'm sure I've mastered the first point but perhaps I have not mastered the second. In any event, this article delineates, in as concise a manner (in a field as complex as music) as I am capable of at this point in time, what contemporary composers could be doing and why.
In talking about it I will attempt to show how to balance competing forces that transmodern composers are faced with. The competing forces I see are to a) be different, b) be likeable, c) be accessible to performers, d) be flexible, e) be inclusive of the community,
First of all, the contemporary mature audience requires something they can sink their teeth into. The music can be different enough to sound fresh, keeping up with modern developments such as additive techniques and self-retrograding rhythms as in one of the most recent developments, the downtown school of postminimalist music which has also been titled Totalism. Its better if composers don not talk in terms of their influences.
That usually means a composer might be openminded but doesn't prove originality or anything else. Originality is also over rated. It will become clear why I think so. I prefer to talk in terms of ideas especially the ones based on philosophical considerations whether they're unique or not.
It has been suggested that one way innovation occurs is from contributions made by fields tangential to the one in question, in this case music. If a person trained in car design is asked to make a radically new design, they usually can't do it. They can't think out of the car design box in which they were trained.
But if someone trained in hydraulics is asked ,they come up with a car that accelerates from 0-60 without even turning on the motor by storing the normally wasted energy, the last time the car came to a stop, as hydraulic pressure. This is what innovative composers do with music. I aspire to be innovative in the same way. Architecture, geometry, developments in art and literature to name a few can and do influence music in the transmodern era.
So, that's where a composer can look for inspiration. For example, some postmodern architecture goes through different detail elaborations as a person walks through a building. This can be translated into music.
Techno is similar in this respect. Geometry has made gains in recent years with the development of fractal geometry. Music usually isn't very fractal but some aspects of self similarity can be used in music composition.
Gamelan music is more fractal than western music. Post-postmodern art is putting the frame back on the canvas while still incorporating some process oriented and audience participatory elements. Musically this means, that chance and serialist procedures can be a tool in the compositional arsenal but not the whole deal.
Experimental music is for working out compositional ideas and not for holding up to the world saying this is the best art on offer. Only the ideas that work are published. Recent innovations in art were impressionism (innovation which
moved away from well defined lines), abstract (innovation away from traditional subject matter) and postmodernism (innovation away from preconceptions about art having a frame where the art stops and the media used to create it).
They are sweeping simplifications, to be sure, but not without their usefulness.
In literature, a fairly recent innovation is the cut up technique. A piece of text can be permutated at the level of paragraph, sentence, words or syllables to achieve unique interesting juxtapositions. It helps achieve a unique approach to self expression and can even create new words.
This really works well to break out of the stranglehold of convention. It has been applied to music also in various ways but the ramifications for it have not been fully explored or explored down sonic dead ends. Tony Williams, Bill Bruford and Allan Holdsworth to name a few postmodern performers used the technique in the studio after recording.
They would cut up pieces of music and rearrange them with other pieces they recorded for the albums. Allan didn't like it that much because he had to relearn all the songs for performance in their new arrangements but the music is really good because Tony's ears have a good aesthetic sense.
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