Music That Accelerates from 0-60 p. 3

Serialism suggested new directions music could go but created slaves to compositional technique again and created a new form more rigid than the old one. Their call to greater chaos and complexity for no other reason than that seems to be the direction we are going is like stepping on the gas while approaching a fatal fall from a cliff. Serialism should only be one technique in an repertoire not an inflexible totality.

Minimalism started out all too formless, limited, repetitive, long and boring. However, it was good for getting more out of the traditional keys and showed that playing in the Major/minor/modal system wasn't dead yet. Minimalism has matured recently often having the flexible form I'm thinking about and not just a bunch of copy cats arriving too late to be respected minimalists.

Like minimalists, contemporary composers could also be working with limited pitch sets such as different forms of the pentatonic and diatonic tetrachords in the range of a perfect fifth. This serves two purposes. This eliminates some of the directionality and linearity of the western traditions and allows a composer to slowly reveal the scale as is done in India's classical music so as not to blow all their cookies too soon in the longer form we could be working in.

The one good thing about ambient music, which isn't much distinguished from minimalism by the lay populace, is bringing back composition for a specific purpose. The church provided this function before but its really a lost cause now. Music for airports fits the bill nicely much better than Muzak.

The minimalists have this down better. Music can be wallpaper until you pay attention to it and then discover its nuances. The way to do that is not through simultaneous keys or atonality which, though somewhat interesting for the musicians, alienates the audience.

The music can be challenging to musicians through simultaneous tempos and rhythms while saving the melody for the audience. The minimalists also broke out of the 31/2 minute radio format along with some rock bands like Yes and Pink Floyd. In fact, we can include the audience without pandering to the junior high school, Britney Spears, lowest common denominator.

Modal jazz artists like Miles Davis and John Coltrane among others had mastered playing over changes and were looking to move toward what they considered to be more spiritual in India's and Africa's music. They utilized a slower harmonic rhythm staying on the same chord for a longer period of time in order to prevent the harmony from controlling the melodic direction and to be given enough time to develop the melody similar to the Indian because India's (and the Middle East's) melodic sensibilities are far superior to the western.

However, the Modal Jazz school (and the New Age movement) are mistaken about Indian music's spiritual purity.

Be that as it may, modal jazz was abandoned because it had been done and it was time to move on because of the contemporary demand for originality and newness which is sometimes a mistake.

Music That Accelerates From 0-60 p.2

The latest events in contemporary music history the way I see it are atonality (innovation away from traditional harmony), serialism (innovation away from traditional melody and tonality.), minimalism (innovation away from preconceptions about instrumentation and form, ambient (innovations away from the traditional purpose of music) and the postmodernism of John Scoffield, Pat Methany etc (innovations away from traditional voicings, progressions and rhythmic approaches).

The serialists thought they were composing the music of the future. Bach knew he was composing the music of his present which is what I believe we need to be doing.

Postmodern art and literature leans decidedly toward an ugliness which I would not want to replicate in music. Its based on a false assumption that in rightfully reacting to the suffocating constraints of traditional forms etc that we should swing toward complete formlessness.

The cut up technique in literature, more often than not, leads to gobbledygook. Nailing a toilet on the wall and calling it art is also nonsense. The postmodern dilemma is how to publish the denial of publishing and mean the absence of meaning. John Cage summed it up well, "I have nothing to say and I'm saying it." The performance of his piece for piano in which the pianist never plays is the height of this wrongheaded philosophy.

My idea is that we don't want ugly formlessness. We want a flexible form. We want enough flexibility for artistic freedom and enough form to have a place to exist.

There is room in the music for a place where, like in abstract art, the motif only has meaning to the composer and whatever meaning the audience derives from it is O.K. and not wrong also, but it can't be the whole thing because art really isn't self expression in a vacuum. Its a dialogue with an audience and other musicians.

Also, when art doesn't have a frame, this can lead to non-art but it can also lead to an art that is not complete without audience participation which can be a good thing. This is one direction which I think music can profitably go now and in the future.

Another idea is using non-traditional media. The expanded definition of what constitutes a musical instrument or music lets a cool breeze into a stuffy room but we still need the room. We shouldn't say that anything is music.

We can use techniques like cut up to suggest new directions without being a robotic slave to the technique, allowing it to make every artistic decision for us. If so, then we are not musicians, artists or writers but dispensable automatons.

The movement away from traditional tonality can free up the strangle hold tonality has had on melody. Utilizing harmony in service of the melody is the challenge of the day. Indian and middle eastern melody far outpaces western melodic practice by leaps and bounds precisely because its making up for the lack of harmony. Modal jazz and free jazz artists were going there but took a left turn at the last minute and free jazz was having too much of the undesirable open ended formlessness. It would be nice to hear more inclusion of Indian embellishments in western music.