here and there

Flower

Carter: Boosey & Hawkes have posted an interview with noted composer and Elliott Carter scholar John Link, who has some important insight on how and why the composer developed his “late late” style. In addition, Mr. Link lives up to his name with several Carter resources:

www.elliottcarter.com/ 

www.facebook.com/chronometros

twitter.com/Chronometros

amphionfoundation.org/

#musochat: On Sunday evenings at 9 eastern, any interested party may join in a virtual gathering at twitter under “#musochat” to discuss contemporary classical music[1] and related subjects. Even if you can’t participate in the discussions in real time, the chats are available under the hashtag. Molly Sheridan has more at newmusicbox.

Quote:

This demure woman . . . declared that "making even one colored mark on a blank piece of newsprint should be an act of moral revolt." More than a revolt: an appeal for grace. All human beings were due a full accounting, but they had to ask for it. Art was a way of asking.

--Richard Powers, Prisoner's Dilemma, p54

---

[1] It happens that much of this past Sunday’s (16 Aug 15) discussion centered on what to call this thing of ours,* whether that matters, and why it probably does.

*The Sopranos reference is intentional, because another art form, filmed televisual entertainment, often presents its best work on Sunday nights and I believe that one way for us to engage with the contemporary world is to engage with other, more popular, art forms.

not queen, not duke, not prince

Some follow-up to the previous post, on what I would try to do were I Music Director of an orchestra in Utopia:

--in line with more concerts and an economy of abundance would be lower tickets prices

--the atmosphere at concert music concerts is daunting to some people, mostly people new to the experience, and I really don't know what the answer is. I like to dress up to go to concerts and, especially, the opera, but I have absolutely no problem with people who don't

--the applause issue is complicated beyond my poor powers to resolve it. Applauding after a solo in jazz is expected, and the rhythm section can vamp until the applause subsides, but there is no such vamping in concert music. And the shushing of clapping after movement is as distracting as the applause itself might be. Plus, there are many pieces with movements that seem to call for applause at their conclusions, so, as I said, I don't know the answer to that one

--other audience sound, such as talking, and other distraction, texting, etc. Concert music typically has a wider range of volume levels than do other kinds of music, and the "average" volume level of concert music in undoubtedly lower than most others, and if the audience is talking one may miss some music; common courtesy towards one's fellow concert-goers would seem to be in order

--the balance between being welcoming to new and inexperienced audiences and respecting the ability of others to experience the music in a focused way is not an easy thing to achieve

--theme concerts are, or can be, a very good thing. They can also be achingly precious, so tread lightly

--composer birthday concerts are too easy and too common, unless it's mine, and you take me out to dinner afterwards

if i were king of the forest!

Keith Chaffee, proprietor of the fine LA culture (non-pop and pop) blog In Which Our Hero, has asked, in another forum, what you would do if you were Music Director of the Utopia Symphony. Here's my answer:

--shorter concerts and more concerts (the concert music world operates economies of scarcity when they should operate economies of abundance)

--no big name soloists unless they play unusual (and by that I almost always mean "new") repertoire

--frequent premieres; even more frequent second performances

--local composers, especially if they are unaffiliated

--talk about the music from the stage, with examples

--as a general rule, talk about unusual pieces as if they are familiar (I can almost guarantee that they all have effects that everyone has heard before) and the familiar repertoire as if it were fucked up (because it is)

--I would have the occasional concert or semi-staged version of certain operas; it can make you hear them differently, which is always good (NOTE: Keith had said he would not have these, as the are being produced by the Utopia Opera Company)

--give the strings a rest every now and then; the wind/percussion repertoire is rich and expanding

--I'm not sure what you (NOTE: a different poster had called for such explorations) mean by exploring the boundaries between concert and folk music, so I won't comment

--no film music unless the film is being projected behind the orchestra

--no fucking pops; I mean it

EDIT: The indispensable Lisa Hirsch programs the Utopia Opera Company here. 

Some Informal Research

For research purposes: What do you consider to be the most important concert music institution where you live? Define the terms any way you wish. Please provide an answer in comments, through email, on your own blog, or anywhere else you think I'll find it.

Thanks.

Mirrors and Lamps

A. C. Douglas says composers should post this quote from Schoenberg above their desks:

There is still plenty of good music to be written in C Major.

ACD includes this admonition in a post whose central point (read it for yourself, of course) that composers should be more concerned with writing the most substantial music they can, and not be concerned about being (or finding) the Next Big Thing. His point isn't, I don't think, that composers should write tonal music, but that they should be open to everything that is of musical value.

Most composers I know and that I know of aren't looking for (or to be) the Next Big Thing. Many are looking for a Next Big Idea, but I can't see anything wrong with that,) What most composers are looking for is a way to find their voice, to find a way to say in music what they want to say. A more relevant Schoenberg quote may be this:

Once, in the army, I was asked if I was really the composer Arnold Schoenberg. 'Somebody had to be,' I said, 'and nobody else wanted to, so I took it on, myself.

My personal response to Schoenberg's  C Major comment is this: no shit. Really, if anybody despairs of hearing new tonal music they aren't looking very hard, or they expect it to be delivered to them automatically. The vast majority of composers, in and out of the academy, write tonal music of some kind or another. They always have and they always will. It's easy to find, even if it doesn't get the most publicity, even though it usually does. You can't demand that the public face of the music world to offer a reflection of your tastes or that the music press feature music that isn't pursuing new ideas. It doesn't work that way in music, or in any other field of human endeavor.

Art is a lamp that sheds light on our lives; it is not a mirror offering us a flattering reflection.

Here endeth the lesson.

Prize Possession

I’ve read Greg Sandow’s recent series1 of posts on the Pulitzer Prize in Music with a great deal of interest and no small incredulity2, and I am in complete agreement with Greg about one thing: the Prize process as it exists undoubtedly privileges concert music over other kinds of American music. Maybe you don’t care about the Prize at all but maybe you do kind of care about what the bias in the Prize process is and what it means.3

Greg points out how the language in the Prize guidelines reflects how composers and others involved in concert music think, to the exclusion of how people involved in other manifestations of music think about their artifacts. Specifically, the guidelines refer to “performances” and release dates of recordings. Submission of a score in support of a nomination is optional.

I think Greg overstates how the guidelines are biased towards concert music—you could change a word here and there and there would be no bias. I think his larger point, that the structure of the Pulitzer Prize is biased towards concert music, is manifest more in its administration than in its guidelines, in who does the judging. (I think Greg’s nomination of Greil Marcus as a judge would, if it came to pass, make his idea of a ban on Prizes to concert music unnecessary.)

All of this led me to ask my son, who has a couple of degrees in American Studies, what he though of all of this. He answered, without hesitation, that “popular music and classical4 music should be treated as entirely different artforms”. I don’t know that I would completely agree with that, but the more I think about it the more it makes sense. On the issue under immediate discussion, it would be easy to administer separate Pulitzer Prizes in popular music and non-popular music. The guidelines could refer to release dates vs. premiere dates, remove instrumentation and length requirements for popular music, etc.

But what about the bigger issue? Are popular and non-popular/concert music different artforms? They share an aesthetic medium (sound/silence, like fiction and poetry share words) so there’s no brick wall between them. But, as Greg points out, there are significant differences in how they are made and in how they are distributed.

What are some of the implications of thinking of them as different artforms? Can these differences be exploited to the benefit of everybody? I think it's worth talking about.

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1. The link is to the last of the series, which includes links to the first two posts.
2. How is making concert music ineligible for the Prize supposed to help it? Maybe we should be even more helpful and ban the performance of concert music for a similar period.
3. I’m pretty sure I don’t care about the Prize beyond noting who wins every year. As to the bias, read on.
4. Hey, it’s concert music, son; read my damn blog!

Bands Apart

Essay/review, Sequenza21.

On the Outside

I’ve been grazing through last year’s A New Literary History of America (Belknap/Harvard, 1095 p., edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors). This fascinating, informative, and sometimes moving book is a history of the United States told in essays about the cultural artifacts produced by Americans and, in a few cases, about America or Americans.

This broad definition of the “literary” is fleshed out in an Introduction:

Thus this broadly cultural history—a history of America in which literary means not only what is written but also what is voiced, what is expressed, what is invented, in whatever form. (p. xxiv)

“[I]n whatever form”? Strong words. Did Messers Marcus and Sollars write a rhetorical check their editing asses can’t cash?

The focus is on the whole range of all those things that have been created in America, or for it, or because of it: poems, novels, plays, and essays, but also maps, histories, and travel diaries, sermons and religious tracts, public speeches and private letters, political polemics, addresses, and debates, Supreme Court decisions, literary histories and criticism, folk songs, magazines, dramatic performances, the blues, philosophy, paintings and monuments, jazz, war memorials, museums, book clubs, photographs, comic strips and comic books, country music, films, radio, rock and roll, cartoons, musicals, and hip-hop: “Made in America.” (p. xxiv)

This list is pretty comprehensive—the essay on porn star Linda Lovelace can be included under “film”, for example, so let’s see if there are any form of literary artifacts “that have been created in America, or for it, or because of it” that are left out. (Hold on, I’m reading.) OK, no concert music or concert dance (ballet or modern), either. A reading of the Index shows only fleeting references to composers like John Cage, Charles Ives, and La Monte Young. And no choreographers, or at least none whose names I recognized.

There was no explanation of the omissions. Was it an oversight? I really don’t know. They could have covered both with a discussion of Appalachian Spring or with the work of Lincoln Kirstein’s Ballet Caravan or with the epic Cage/Cunningham collaboration. This not to mention what could have been contributed on either concert music or dance alone. I don’t know why they were not included.

Greg Sandow wrote this weekend about people who claim that classical music is inherently superior to other musics. Sandow need not worry about such claims, except to the extent that they are horrible marketing devices. It’s clear from this book as well as countless other cultural conversations taking place on and off the web, that concert music and its equally-unloved artistic sibling may be the least-important artforms going.

If concert music is on the outside looking in, and there’s plenty of evidence that it is, the ongoing conversation about the issue is extremely important. What I haven’t seen is a great deal of thought about what it means to be on the outside; to be, as Alex Ross has correctly put it, counter-cultural. Are there advantages to being on the outside? The disadvantages are clear, but aren’t there good things about it, too? Can part of our art be inside and part out? These are questions that should be asked, and suggestions tossed around. And now’s a good time to do it, since nobody’s paying attention.

In the long run,

we're all dead. (John Maynard Keynes)

But for some of us, our music will live on. Norman Lebrecht wants to know whose music (of composers living today) will be played 50 years from now. There have been responses at Mr. Lebreacht's blog and from other bloggers. If you are surprised that the leading vote getters are of a more-or-less minimalist/not-Modern bent, you haven't been reading about concert/non-pop music on the Interweb very much. In addition, this result shows one inevitable result of predictions--that what is happening now will continue indefinitely, and that the predictor's values/tastes will be confirmed.

With that in mind, I'd like to add two predictions of my own to this little exercise.

The first, and I'm damn confident of this one, is that some composer who dies 49 years from now will have a pretty good year, performance-wise, 50 years from now.

The second is that John Mackey's music will still be performed in 2059. Mr. Mackey writes very solid and very educational music for winds and percussion (mostly). I've heard a good bit of it, and it mostly works. I think band (for lack of a better term, and I don't think we really need a better term) music is an increasingly important part of the art's future (especially in the US), and Mr. Mackey's is as good as there is.

Free Music!

Alex Ross, writing in the 2 February 2009 issue of The New Yorker:

The image of the classical concert hall as a playground for the rich is planted deep in the cultural psyche. When Hollywood filmmakers set a scene at the symphony, twits in evening wear fill the frame, their jaws tight and their noses held high. The monocle returns to fashion for the first time since the death of Erich von Stroheim. One day, an intrepid art director will come to a concert and discover that the classical audience is well populated by schoolteachers, proofreaders, students, retirees, and others with no entry in the Social Register. They can afford to attend because classical events aren’t nearly as expensive as most people assume, especially in comparison with the extravagant pricing schemes for élite pop acts.

Here in Tallahassee, there is an incredible amount of good concert music-making available for free or close to it. This is true of any city, regardless of size, that is home to a college or university with a major music school.

There is far more inexpensive to attend music here than there was in the far-more-populated Research Triangle area of North Carolina when I lived there. Even so, I'd be surprised if there wasn't at least a handful of free or near-free concerts every week of the academic year/music season.

To be sure, the music-making at a music school is not going to be world-class, though doctoral performance recitals can be very good indeed. At traditional music schools (like Florida State) the programming tends to be onthe conservative, standard repertoire side, though less so than when I was a student.

Most of the over 450 concerts given at Florida State every year are free, but the publicity for these concerts and recitals would require a serious upgrade to be graded "poor".* Part of a music school's responsibility these days is to teach students how to market themselves and the music they perform, using the new media that are very likely familiar to these students in their personal lives. In addition to teaching these ideas and techniques, the schools should model more aggressive marketing strategies for their students. Concert music is, as Alex Ross demonstrates in his article, generally less expensive to hear in performance than the more popular mainstream genres, but we have to let people know it's here. How else will potential audiences become actual audiences?


________________________________________________
*A particular bugaboo for me is that it is extremelt difficult (damn near impossible, in fact) to find out in advance of a concert exactly what music is being performed. The fact that an event is a flute recital will draw flute fans. If it was publicized that the program includes Density 21.5, the Varèse fans would be there, too.

If I Were a Rich Man

So, when I've won a substantial jackpot from the Florida Lottery, my big project (after assuring that me and mine are never again subject to The Man and his markets) will be to establish, endow, and run an ensemble dedicated to new and recent music.

A Board of Directors would develop an artistic vision and mission along guidelines broadly laid out by me (Hey, it's my unearned wealth!). The centerpiece of the project would be a core group of musicians, with the following instrumentation:

-string quartet (two violins, viola, cello);
-one of each of these wind instruments: flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, saxophone, forn, trumpet, trombone, tuba;
-two keyboard players;
-two percussionists;
-one laptop artist; and
-one conductor (I would be Assistant Conductor).

Each performer would receive a full-time salary and benefits (all of which would be open to negotiation), and would be free to teach and to play other gigs, in addition to their strivings as a member of Steve Hicken's MetaMusical Entity (or a better name, if possible).

The endowment also would fund a development officer and a robust publicity operation (including web presence). Outreach programs would target schools and civic organizations, and would include low- and no-price tickets for underserved populations. Tickets would be inexpensive to begin with, as the group would operate in an econmy of abundance rather than one of scarcity. There would be a commissioning component to all of this as well.

The question of home base is an interesting one. The home base should be enough of a music center that the performers could readily find other gigs. At the same time, it should be in an area that is undersupplied with performances of new and recent music. Unfortunately, it won't be hard to find places that meet that requirement.

Anyway, if I were a wealthy man.

New Resources

I want to draw your attention to two new resources for concert music on the web. Classical DJ is a compilation of web radio stations that play concert music. Medici TV hosts filmed performances of concert music and concert music documentaries. (NOTE: My understanding is that some of Medici TV is free, and some is pay-to-play.)



Both of these resources look very promising. I've added links to them on the right side of the page, under "Links and Resources".

Lisa Hirsch on Women Composers

Blogger Lisa Hirsch has written a fine article (published in New Music Box) surveying the status of women composers in today's musical world. Lisa covers the isue from a variety of angles, and notes the need for discussion of the music as well as discussion of the situation facing these composers.

Check it out.

A Hit by Varèse

Greg Sandow has a series of posts up about popular vs high culture. (Nothing new about that.) Several times he (or someone he is quoting) refers to Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men and Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood as works of popular culture, and this brings up what I think is an interesting issue.

The project of postmodernism to remove the taxonomic wall between "popular" and "high" culture has been remarkably succesful. In fact, it has been so succesful that there are signs that it is being rebuilt, this time with "popular" culture occupying the "superior" turf, with its "authenticity" and "audience ownersdhip" tropes carrying the rhetorical day.

It looks from here as though this new wall is as artificial as the old one, and the seemingly automatic classification of There Will Be Blood as a product/artifact of "popular" culture is an example of its arbitrariness. Under what criteria is Mr. Anderson's film on the same side of a defining line as, say, Blades of Glory, and on the opposite side of that line as Edgard Varèse's Amériques or Elliott Carter's Piano Concerto or Symphony of Three Orchestras (not to mention Wagner's Ring cycle), all of which have much in common with There Will Be Blood?

I have some ideas about this, but I am interested in reading your thoughts and reactions first. Please leave a comment if you are so inclined, and I promise not to drink your milkshake.

Corporatism and Art

Kyle Gann has posted about a musicology class he spoke to at the University of Kentucky. He begins by describing the way the class' usual teacher structured the session:

The group had been reading my book American Music in the 20th Century, and he had each person prepare a question, the questions all asked in turn without being immediately answered; after which discussion could proceed with all the questions in mind.

I agree with Kyle that this sounds like a great way to structure an appearance by a guest scholar. It forces (or rather guides) the lecturer to relate the questions to each other and to answer them as a whole. The questions Kyle got led him to think about our current situation, which can be described as "music under corporatism":

We used to think the state was the government, but it's now become obvious that the state, in the U.S. at least, is the corporations that own and control the government, and the state's only interest, musically speaking, is in providing mass distribution to the music that can make the most exorbitant short-term profit, and squelching any musical outlet that threatens to pose competition to that profit.

I think this is a spot-on and very creative response. Corporatism dominates public life in the United States these days, and its effect on the arts is far from salutary. I don't have much to add to Kyle's analysis, I really just wanted to make sure you didn't miss it.

If I were to quibble, I would only object to the use of "populist" and "elitist" in this:

An elitist and a populist would certainly choose different paths through the socio-musical pinball machine, and there's little reason one might not be as successful as the other.

I know what he means, or rather what he means to mean, but I think it's a little sloppy, but not enough so as to undercut his very important argument.

In Concert

Yesterday, I quoted Alex Ross on the value of concert attendance:

Recordings capture only a fraction of what makes classical music compelling—the social experience of listening with a crowd in real time, the physical and psychological effect of hearing natural sound reverberate in a room.

Today, Eric Alterman publishes a letter from Roger H. Werner that reads in part:

I once heard a marvelous Russian pianist play Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, music I've heard a thousand times. The people sitting next to me must have though I was crazy because the music was so beautiful it made me cry. And I recall the first time I heard the 1812 Overture live more than 20 years ago, and it's something I shall never forget. I've been to a hundred rock concerts, and while most were enjoyable, they mostly blend together and all I can recall are the awful concerts.

[If you go to the letter, make sure you click through to the letter that prompted Mr. Werner to write his.]

I'm sure many rock/pop concerts provide the kind of experiences Mr. Werner recounts here, and this is by no means an attempt to downgrade that particular communal experience. It is to point out that performances of concert music are not exercises in the celebration of the past or of the establishment/enforcement of cultural hierarchies.

At their best, performances process the expressions of one heart through the body of another into the vibrations of an instrument (or voice) that sends waves into the air, where the ears and minds of other hearts make them their own. And that is magic; living and breathing magic.

Elsewhere

Kyle Gann posts a fine talk on Morton Feldman he delivered last week in Seattle. I might quibble with Kyle on a few details about the atmosphere in the seventies and the meaning of Feldman's achievement for composers, but it's a compelling and well-thought-out read. Among the gems:

One of my favorite stories Feldman liked to tell was of Marcel Duchamp visiting an art class in San Francisco, where he saw a young man wildly painting away. Duchamp went over and asked, "What are you doing?" The young man said, "I don't know what the fuck I'm doing!" And Duchamp patted him on the back and said, "Keep up the good work." In music, it was Feldman, more than anyone else, who gave us permission not to know what the fuck we were doing.

Jen Carlson, of The Gothamist, interviewing Alex Ross, asks what he would recommend to a new classical music listener. Alex responds, in part:

First, go to a live concert. Recordings capture only a fraction of what makes classical music compelling—the social experience of listening with a crowd in real time, the physical and psychological effect of hearing natural sound reverberate in a room.

This advice can't be repeated enough. Alex notes that there are cheap concert tickets to be had, even in New York City. In a college town like Tallahassee, Greensboro, Iowa City, or Ithaca, there are literally hundreds of free concerts and (especially) recitals to attend.

Matthew Guerrieri meditates on the idea of composers having a "late style":

Elliott Carter, who continues to cheat the actuarial tables at the age of 99, has become a fount of energetic, bracing, quirky works that defiantly insist on being encountered on their own terms, rather than through the prism of their composer's age. It's those of us who think we have a fair amount of time left that are concerned with stage-managing our exit; closer to the deadline, it seems that the best revenge is often just to keep on keeping on.

Matthew is quite right when he argues that when he hear autumn in music, it's more us than the music itself. I'll add that that's a good general rule--when we leave the "text" of the music, usually what we say about it reveals more about us as listeners than it does about the music under discussion.

Listening:

Beethoven--Quartet in a minor, Op. 132; Guarneri Quartet.

Michael Hersch--The Vanishing Pavilions; Michael Hersch, piano.

Feldman--Rothko Chapel; UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus; David Abel, viola; Karen Rosenak, celeste; William Winant, percussion.

Concert Notes

The concerts I attended this past weekend brought up several issues related to the whole future of concert music issue:

Diversity—The Calder Quartet is made up entirely of white men. They are very young, to be sure, but it was interesting that it was noteworthy that there were no women or minorities in the group. Not too long ago it would have been notable if they weren’t all white men.

Applause—The audience at the TSO concert applauded (I would say it was close to half the audience) after the first movement of the Brahms Violin Concerto. It’s not unusual for there to be applause after the first movement of a concerto, especially of there’s a virtuoso cadenza just before the end. Miriam Burns (TSO Music Director) did nothing to stop the applause, and she has in the past. The violinist (Yang Liu) acknowledged the applause with a quick nod of the head. At the Calder Quartet concert the next day, which had a group of elementary school students in attendance, there was a little applause from the kids at the end of the exposition of the first movement of the Schubert “Rosamunde”. The players continued without stopping, with the first violinist giving a bemused smile.

Outreach—The elementary school students were there as part of an outreach program. They were from a school in an underprivileged area of Tallahassee, and the Calders had visited the school during the week. The experience seemed to be a positive one for the players as well as for the children.

Program order—I’ve always believed that the most difficult or unfamiliar work on a concert should be first after intermission. This is a guideline rather than a requirement, of course. I believe it is usually the best time for an audience to dig in, as it were. That why I was a little disappointed when I saw the announced order of the Calder program: Mendelssohn-Riley-[intermission]-Schubert. I don’t know why it was changed, but the order ended up being Mendelssohn- Schubert-[intermission]-Riley. The Riley came across much better that way than it would have the other. For the record, the Sessions (Black Maskers Suite) was immediately after intermission in the TSO program, right where it belonged.

Talking to the audience—the second violinist of the Calder Quartet gave some brief introductory remarks before the performance of the Terry Riley Cadenza on the Night Plain. I thought it was very effective and gave the audience some clear idea of what to listen for. The only suggestion I would offer would be to include some examples.

Audiences

I’m about halfway through Peter Gay’s Modernism: The Lure of Heresy. It is a fine book so far, full of information and insight. Gay lays out a description of how the public was viewed during the first half of the 20th century more than once. This description is from a chapter on modernist prose and poetry:

They [literary critics] saw three reading publics: by far the largest consisted of the “barbarian” masses, with no awareness of demanding fiction and inevitably content with shallow fare; the second, much smaller, though still substantial in numbers and with easy access to high culture, feeling superior to the multitudes but reluctant to spend the time and effort an avant-garde novel would exact; and finally, a small elite, an aristocracy of novel readers open to innovations and experiments. (p. 182)

The implications of this broad taxonomy are far-reaching, despite its roughness and its aggressively elitist cast, which few critics would embrace today, as least as stated here. It should be noted that the three categories outlined here do not directly map onto socio-economic groups, educational levels, or any other way of grouping people. The final, smallest group, the “elite” audience, is self-selected and potentially includes members of all demographic categories.

I want to look at these audiences from the point-of-view of a practicing artist. How do you get your work in front of members of the different groups, and get it there in a way that they can “get it”?

The smallest group, the self-selected “elite” open to “advanced” expression in art, would seem to constitute a (the?) natural audience for new music. For them, you do the best work you can and hope that they are a good faith audience whose taste hasn’t ossified.

The middle group, those “with easy access to high culture, feeling superior to the multitudes but reluctant to spend the time and effort an avant-garde novel would exact” presents specific challenges to artists. From the description you get the feeling that they like art, but that they like what they know—their adventurousness, if it’s there at all, may extend only a little bit outside their comfort zone. For them, you do the best work you can and hope that they are willing to extend their comfort zone a little to meet you.

I have to admit that the largest group, the “’barbarian’ masses” interests me the most. How could I get them interested in what I do? I tend to think that this is a, to an extent, a self-selected group as well; that, for a number of reasons, they “choose” not to have any interest in art. How to reach them? I don’t know, but again, it’s always important to do the best work you and work to put it out where people can be exposed to it.

Stockhausen and The End

Tom Service of The Guardian has compiled memories of the late Karlheinz Stockhausen from people associated with the composer in one way or another. The last line of the article is from a reminiscence of Barbican artistic director Graham Sheffield: In a way, his death marks the end of 20th-century music.

That struck me as having a lot of truth in it. Now I see that it struck Alex Ross more or less the same way:

The last line of the piece is absolutely right: the twentieth century, the epoch of vastly ambitious, at times megalomaniac musical conceptions, which really began with the late works of Wagner, is indeed over. But its echoes reverberate all around us. What next?*

What next, indeed. To that question I would add this: If Stockhausen's death signals the end of 20th century music, when did (or when will) the 21st century start?

*NOTE: What next? is the title of Elliott Carter's only opera, which ended a succesful run in New York Tuesday, the composer's 99th birthday.