I was picking up my research into graduate programs recently when I came across the this:
I guess what bothers me most is how the document seems to talk out both sides of its mouth. It's littered with ambiguity, pretentiousness, absolutism and broad, sweeping statements without context.
Creative work...is directed to an audience; but its proper role is to define an audience, not to respond to one.
I thought we had gotten past this. I thought the creator/audience dynamic was, to a certain extent, a give-and-take situation. Even Pierre Boulez recently admitted that, in retrospect, perhaps they (the Darmstadt crowd) should have taken their audience into greater account.
I understand what is being got at in many cases here; it just seems that the wrong path is being trod in order to get there. Additionally the thesaurus seems to have been open for the duration.
It's okay to take seriously what you do; just don't be so damned serious about what you do.
We're composers. We move blocks of sounds, no, the representations of sounds, around on a piece of staff paper, a notation program or a digital music creation program. We do this in a manner that is pleasing to ourselves and, if we're lucky, others as well.
Feel free to argue, disagree, enhance, etc. I leave you to it.
6 comments:
First of all, you are wrong, according to them. That is to say, a composer doesn’t move around representations of sound on a piece of staff paper, he or she actually moves around blocks of sound. Thanks for playing. Here’s your consolation prize: a real music degree that trumps their program. I hope you can live with that.
“…it challenges the status quo by demonstrating the validity of alternatives, including the reader's own, not by asserting new dogma.”
They must be related to BGSU, because that’s exactly the intention of the composition program there. And, just like with BG, I’m absolutely certain that they have asserted a new dogma, whether unintentionally or simply by deliberately calling it something else.
This website reeks of Bowling Green: false humility, pretentiousness, deceptively strict dogma, and hypocrisy. Been there, done that.
Reading between the lines, I can envision what it would be like to study there. You won’t learn much. Trust me. The site is laced with reasons to herald experimentalism and technology above all else, even before you get to their conclusion: Experimental music, then, especially when linked with technology, is among the most effective ways of accomplishing the objectives described more generally above.”
The whole thing, really, is an Apology for music technology and experimental music…
It seems to me that if you have a doctorate in music composition, you should know every single instrument inside and out, have your counterpoint down like a Marine cleaning his rifle, and know how to orchestrate shit. At most, music technology should only be about one third of your education.
Digressions aside, they have brilliantly set up a system in which they don their BGSU-like hoods of false humility and self-imposed infallibility, meaning that the students are never wise enough, no matter what. Convenient.
This is hardly a new menace, hardly a revelation; these programs are all over the place… only most of them aren’t as obvious about it. This manifesto almost seems like a parody of itself. Of course, you could tell just from the title of the site that it would be nauseatingly pretentious and full of pseudo-philosophy.
And the first paragraph tells you that you are absolutely right: “The principal end-purpose of successful teaching is a student who has learned to sustain a self-conscious, self-critical stance and who will encourage and facilitate such a stance in others. Such a student no longer requires a teacher; and every such student brings nearer a day in which such a stance will be universal.”
Such a student no longer requires a teacher… so give me my honorary doctorate now.
None of this matters, really. I don’t even find it all that aggravating; like any cult, their power does not extend beyond the reach of their oppressed and/or brainwashed congregation. So I’m not too troubled by the discovery of this program. I just wonder if they really know what it means to be “self-aware,” since they are throwing that philosophical phrase around a lot.
I’m just shaking my head in sadness in the background. I operate under the maxim “choose you battles”… so yeah, this one I don’t care enough about to actually try to convince people of anything, because I’ve wasted enough time in existential discussions with composers at both universities I attended.
But I do feel like Bail Organa at the end of Attack of the Clones.
"To the extent that creative work is easily grasped, it is easily disregarded; to the extent that it is unobjectionable, it is ineffectual."
Much of my favorite music (Minimalism and post-minimalism) is that which is easily grasped and yet the best of it constantly reveals new layers with repeat listenings.
Also, the point regarding experimentalism begs the question: Is experimental music all that matters? Some of us just aren't meant to be experimentalists. Some of us are just meant to be.
It seems like the stance is a program in which all the music is stripped from the composition process in some form of twisted Kolinahr ceremony.
Dr. Gooch’s piece Clockwork was, according to his words in a master class, intended to be accessible and hopefully entertaining to the layperson while simultaneously offering a lot to the educated, critical listener. There’s a duality there that stuck with me. That’s what I strive for in my music.
I was chatting with fellow composer Noah Taylor just now, and he gave me permission to quote him on a few things:
“The problem with the academic world of writing music, is that it has to publish research and explore philosophy to justify its existence. Or at least this what has been taught and then learned to be. However, I think in certain circles, people just write music in a composition program - Like Julliard, USC, University of Kansas. These are places that are extremely hard to get into and not convenient for us at the moment. But I think if you find a place where you can propagate, then you will be successful.”
“Quote me... we are missing the whole point. I view composition as a practice, not a philosophy. Personal philosophy and aesthetic is very important... on an individual basis... not to be applied to the composition practice as a whole. It is fine to study for a bit, but the focus needs to be on the practice of compositional theory/techniques/orchestration - not the other way around.”
It strikes me that the people who make the best teachers don’t teach.
Not to make this about BG, but… an example of the secret agenda rearing its ugly head would be when Aaron Marx had a solid point that happened to contradict the hidden intentions of the faculty in the huge discussion about “Who Cares If You Listen,” and Dr. Shrude rather curtly told him, "Well, you need to read the article again." He had carefully picked apart the article eight times, I think. So… I guess he clearly didn’t know what he was talking about, huh. Right. The validity of alternatives.
“Demonstrating the validity of alternatives” is exactly what lessons with Beerman were all about... and the problem is that the faculty are so used to people not fully understanding everything that they repeat themselves for months on end, and you get nothing out of it because you are trying to say, "Yes, okay, I GET what you are saying, but that's not what I'm doing with THIS particular piece..."
It becomes a broken record, not a teaching method. Flexibility, man. Each student is different, and what they failed to mention in their haughty profiling of a teacher’s role in the universe is that the teacher should be sensitive to the nuances of the student, to better learn how to reach them instead of repeating rubric from the past ten years without budging. If the student isn’t immediately receptive to your aesthetic, maybe they require a different approach.
”How… do I reeech… these keeeds?!”
Or it could be that they have something to teach you, esteemed teacher. If you really are open to that notion, then you truly are capable of teaching. If not, get away from the podium.
With regards to audience respect: it's like New Yorkers saying the Midwest doesn't matter, but that's where all their FOOD comes from. There’s a give and take with the audience, and despite their preemptive protests, they leave enough clues to imply that they don’t put as much stock in the audience as they should.
I would like to say that I really don't care about this all that much.
I guess it bothers me because it's attitudes like this that drive the wedge deeper between composer-performer-audience. I would say it's akin to someone walking out onstage, launching into a long diatribe in Sanskrit, not caring that the audience are English speakers and then decry them for not being able to understand him.
I would like to think that this is a narrow-minded point of view with diminishing returns and is, in general, just diminishing.
I tried to explain that very perception: that they decry the audience for not being mind-readers. The faculty still didn't get it. These are the composers, the teachers (sadly enough), who truly believe that they are doing a service to the audience member who doesn't understand or like what he hears and walks out in the middle of the concert. They believe they are bringing some sort of gospel message to the "little listener," brought down from their golden thrones on the Mountain of Higher Education. And those who are in the program and don't immediately collapse and tremble with adulation are irreverent, block-headed, and in need of almost punitive measures of new composition assignments. It comes down to this, the same mentality that makes me despise most groups in society, of any kind: "Well, since you don't think exactly the way I want you to, you are both wrong and of lesser intellect. But I will save you by forcing the ideology upon you. You'll thank me later."
It really is diminishing to all parties involved. That's a good, conclusive way to put it.
The music doesn't "speak for itself" anymore, not by a long shot. The composer (or a faculty member who happens to champion the music) gives a fifteen-minute lecture on his piece before it is played. See, they're not even disguising the fact that they are there to teach something to the poor, illiterate audience.
Do you know why northwest Ohio doesn't have trees, unlike the rest of the state? It has nothing to do with the edge of Appalachia stretching across the rest of the state, tapering off before the former swamplands of the northwest. It's because they had to clear out entire forests to make paper for program notes. That's why there are no trees in northwest Ohio. Program notes.
Bowling Green State University sounds nearly identical to this place, but think how many more there are. Ideas never die, and there is always room for another clone or offshoot. You said you thought we were past this, but we never will be. These people will always be living in the Sixties, always carrying their crosses on their backs, always taking the path of reverse-discrimination when it comes to "validity of alternatives."
I've come to ignore them, so they'll go away. I have bills to worry about, not whether or not a thirteen-minute manipulation of bubble wrap sounds is an insight into the tormented soul of the composer because she happens to be a lesbian.
Hell, I'm not stopping anyone from doing their thing. Even Andriessen has a couple pieces I'd like to see performed. I don't discriminate against anyone (except maybe the Dutch), but I have a valid voice, too... and when they silence me preemptively, that's when they reveal their hand. That's when the bullshit rains down like cats and dogmas.
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