I was too quick, though, in dismissing the more essential point of the post, namely that composers of new music work really hard for very little recognition. Widespread public recognition is essentially off the table from the get-go, but recognition from critics and even one’s peers is hard to come by as well. Given the essentially non-commercial nature of the work a lot of us do, what keeps us going is the chance to have great ensembles play our music, to collaborate with (for example) a video artist we admire, even just putting out a record (leaving aside profiting from it), taking part in interesting festivals, getting to a point where we’re taking the gigs we want to take, not just every gig that comes along. I am at a point in my career where some of these things are just starting to happen for me. I have an amazing 22-month-old son, an incredible wife who does work that just blows my mind, and for the first time since starting a family, things are beginning to pick up for me, compositionally. From my perspective, in other words, the new music scene (and life, generally) is full of exciting potentialities, some of which are beginning to be realized. Gann’s perspective, though, which he fleshes out a bit in his responses to several commenters (I encourage you to read the whole thread), is totally valid, and is based on decades of experience I don’t have, so I should not have dismissed it. He writes in the comments, “I thought that with enough work, what Malcolm Gladwell calls a tipping point was going to arrive, at which time everything would be no longer uphill.” I can certainly identify with the upward-looking nature of being a composer in this environment. It is unbelievably oppressive, and I would imagine the higher one climbs, the harder that next rung is to reach.

One thing I consciously strive for (and it’s a different kind of striving – more inward – than striving for recognition) is to get to a point where I can compose entirely for myself. I of course don’t mean no longer interfacing with the rest of the music world, but writing the music I want to write because I want to write it, without thinking so much about what anyone else (audience or critic) will think about it. I’m convinced that whether the recognition comes or not, I’ll be happier if I’m able to do that.

In short, I do think Gann was painting with a bit of a broad brush, and that there is a lot that is gratifying in composing new music, but I wanted to offer a small mea culpa for painting his post with an equally broad brush.

[PS Thinking about all of this, it strikes me that maybe what we need when we get down about the tough lot we've chosen for ourselves as new music composers is Alec Baldwin's character from Glengarry Glen Ross, berating us: "Money's out there. You pick it up, it's yours. You don't, I got no sympathy for you. You wanna go out on those commissions tonight and compose, COMPOSE. It's yours. If not you're gonna be shining my shoes. And you know what you'll be saying - a bunch of losers sittin' around in a bar. 'Oh yeah. I used to be a composer. It's a tough racket.'"]

“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.

- Charles Ives

I’m very grateful to know, though, about Anestis Logothetis, who’s score is the canvas for the piece below.  Beautiful score.  I want to get my hands on a copy.

The following image is a page from my newest piece, Study no. 1, for amplified acoustic guitar.

This is my first real foray into the world of graphic scores.  I have long been making unconventional scores, but they’ve always been essentially staff-based.  The Study uses a kind of staff, but the horizontal lines are not staff lines, but rather the strings of the guitar.  On the left are the tuning pegs, on the right the sound hole and bridge.  Time is not represented in the score – events are instead defined by space.

I didn’t jump right into this notation.  I tried more traditional ways of expressing the sounds I was making and the ways I was making them, using the horizontal dimension to represent time, and filling it with symbols to represent the different sounds, but I found that ultimately not to be really expressive of the piece.  When I hit upon this, it seemed actually to represent the sound much better, and sacrificing control over the order of events seemed a very small price to pay (that would be the micro-order – the above is page 5 of 6, and the pages do have to be played in order).

Also, it’s fun to play with colored pencils.

I am aware among my peers of a general desire to find new ways to engage an audience, to get out of the  you sit-we play-you-clap mold.  For some this has meant writing more pop-influenced music, for others it’s meant playing in more relaxed venues where people can drink and chat and move around, for still others it’s meant using technology to make their music interactive.  For the asphalt orchestra, the plan is one of elegant beauty: move from place to place and play music so great that people want to follow you in order to hear it. Walk away from the audience, around them, right into them, parting them with a trombone slide like Moses did to the red sea with his staff. Seriously, I wish I had a bird’s eye view of this concert I just saw, throngs of people clumsily getting out of the way of a charging tuba player, rearranging themselves as they try to predict what the best vantage point for hearing the music will be when the players come to a halt. People were involved!

But don’t get me wrong. This was no novelty act. These were 12 trendous musicians playing intricate, gorgeous arrangements of unusual music.  Their rendition of conlon nancarrow’s study no. 20, composed for player piano because the composer deemed it too rhythmically complex for human fingers, was a rare musical moment, at once tender and delightfully off-kilter.  I’m looking forward to hearing more from them, including more newly commissioned stuff (Goran Bregovic’s Champagne was aptly named – a celebration!)

Oh, and I’d be remiss not to mention the outfits.  A picture’s worth a thousand words:

HAUSCHKA – Eltern // live in the Berger Kirche from realiction on Vimeo.

Composer Brad Lubman devotes a few minutes to the idea of the masterpiece as it relates to music in our time in a recent Sequenza 21 podcast. It’s a short interview with some nice ideas – well worth a listen.

The way I’ve come to understand Feldman’s remark, he’s not saying “down with incredible music”.  When he says, “Down with the masterpiece,” it seems to me he’s saying down with the institution of the masterpiece, the piece that fits a certain mold in its scale or its scope, or its reach, or its presentation; the piece that becomes part of The Canon, or that every student plays and studies.  Recent classical music is so multifarious – one man’s “Partch!” is another man’s “Partch…” (eyes rolling) – the scene doesn’t lend itself very well to a contemporary Messiah.  Not to mention that Messiah wasn’t even Messiah until the 20th century.  The Masterpiece may in fact be a relatively recent idea, one that supported the monolithic institutions of classical music presentation that themselves only came to dominance in the last 150 years.

PS: a note on this post’s title, and totally irrelevant to its content, I learned recently that “death to [blank]“, in Farsi, is often used very casually, or simply to mean “down with [blank]“.  So, while “death to America” might sound scary, keep in mind the same crowd might later be heard saying “death to potatoes“.

Very interesting idea. My first crack at it:

FILL IN THE GAP