My wife just walked in and saw the title of this post as I working on it, and figured I was writing about our almost-two-year-old, busy whining in the next room about matters large and small.  Actually, though, I’m writing because I’m very disappointed today to read Kyle Gann’s latest blog post.  In it, Gann waxes melancholic about what little hope there is of making an impact as a composer and scholar of new music.  A choice excerpt:

“We have three markets. There’s a commercial market, entirely determined by huge corporations whose sole interest is money. We’re never going to make a dent in that one. There’s an orchestra-music circuit that you have to enter young, and it’s all about who you know, and the music sucks. And there’s an academic market, which demands a healthy respect for the Schoenberg line and a suspicion against anything populist.”

First of all, as Gann himself points out, this is coming from someone who has had success, by every reasonable measure.  He’s a widely-known figure in the new music world, he’s the respected author of several books (and not unknown books one can only find in niche online stores – I’ve seen his 4′33″ book on the shelf at Barnes and Noble), he teaches at Bard (not a bad gig for someone so down on academia), and has an active composing career, not to mention a successful blog.  But, he writes, “People meet me, and I’m not the composer, I’m not even the author, I’m the blogger,” and, “why do I do anything but blog?”  Poor guy.  What an unfortunate circumstance, to have so much recognition and success that he can’t choose which of his pursuits gets recognized the most.

More to the point, though, Gann is being unnecessarily gloomy about the choices facing those of us devoted to new music.  First of all, I don’t think terribly many composers on the downtown/experimental/electronic spectrum (or “uptown” for that matter) get into this particular line of work with the expectation of signing a million-dollar record deal, so even to list that as something we’re unable to make a dent in seems a bit of straw-man.  I don’t know enough about the orchestral market to respond to his comment on that point, but I suspect he’s right about having to know the right people and start young.  His sweeping indictment of the quality of the music, though, is inappropriate, disrespectful, and stupid.  Lastly, academia, imperfect though it may be, gets treated really unfairly.  In my experience, academia has every kind of composer you can think of. The ivory-tower, we-only-respect-serialism thing is at best out-of-date, and I suspect that it was never really as pervasive as it gets credit for having been.  There are just too many schools in too many places with too many composers working in them to be such a monolithic force.

I reject Gann’s pessimism.  The new music scene is really exciting right now.  There are too many amazing ensembles to mention, and it seems like every single night there’s a concert I wish I had the chance to go to.  I wish I could keep up with all of the opportunities out there for composers.  I look at my friends and colleagues, at the amazing work they’re doing, the prizes and commissions they’re winning, and I’m incredibly excited to be working right now.  It’s easy enough to moan about not having a gold record or a bunch of orchestral commissions, but the opportunities don’t end there.  A lot of composers I know don’t even have those things on their radars, so not achieving them isn’t much of a disappointment.  There’s simply too much else to do.