I had the interesting experience today of playing a bunch of piano pieces for a friend's Intro to Composition class. It was a course for non-majors with little musical experience, and these pieces were their final projects, each one a couple pages in length.
As young composers, even in grad school (or rather, especially in grad school), we are quite frequently reminded of our own ineptitude. Grad school is in some ways mostly a process of being constantly shown all that there is that you don't know, and your success is measured by how much of that you can manage to assimilate in an extremely short period of time. For this reason, seeing the work of younger composers who are just starting out is, as might be expected, encouraging. Playing these undergrads' pieces made me realize how far I'd come, took me back to the days when my pieces looked a lot like theirs, and made evident the ways in which my pieces are now different.
This much is perhaps obvious. A few other observations, though. The difficulty of good composition teaching is one. These pieces were littered with what might be called amateur mistakes. The piano writing was sometimes awkward, the harmonic choices occasionally bizarre, the forms generally nebulous. These students don't have what we call technique, they haven't spent enough time with the literature for these things to come naturally, but their attempts to meet those standards are quite interesting. These "mistakes" are not necessarily mistakes, because they were made in the absence of knowledge of the standards and customs of Western classical music. So why treat them as mistakes? The best thing would be to point these things out and tell the student why they seem odd to a more experienced ear. They don't necessarily need to be "fixed"--they can be made light of, and the student can decide to what extent they want to follow upon them or "correct" them. Awareness is good. Imperatives, dicier.
So, technique. And then of course there is style. From the students' descriptions there were three main influences on the pieces today: Mozart Sonatas, Chopin Nocturnes, and video game music. The first two are a result of the syllabus, I think, and the third is just their experience. It was interesting to hear the students talk about their intentions and then hear the extent to which these were achieved. (One said his piece reflected stress and anger, but it didn't, in any way, it was bouncy and in a clear Major key.) But the video game music! That's an interesting place to come from, and so I thought about the effects this could have on their musical view points.
For one, although I'm unqualified to comment on film music, it would seem that video game music is similar, at least in that each piece is constructed to correspond to certain scenes, certain characters, certain events. In some video games there will be one theme that recurs whenever a sad scene occurs, for example, or a major battle is taking place. Like in the baroque doctrine of affections, this means each piece reflects a singular emotional state, or by extension a single place, a single character. They are not kaleidoscopic in character, but focused on one element of expression. I heard this in the students' descriptions: "it's happy," "it's sad," "it's about autumn," "it's about my car." And so on.
Another key feature of video game music is that, by necessity, it must endlessly loop. Each piece is one theme, or perhaps one melody and a contrasting one, that continue to cycle. I don't doubt that exposure to this has dented my generation's ability to perceive and create musical development, or at least affected our sensitivity to that process.
So, technique and style. And then there is approach. Their relationships to their pieces was delightfully uncomplicated, like a summer camp romance that's going to be over in four days regardless. There are no strings attached. I wrote this piece, it's happy. I heard this tune in my head, so I wrote it down. No pretense, no inflated expectations. I don't necessarily think that all composers should emulate this--on the contrary, as anyone who knows me can attest, I consider ambition to be a virtue--but it's refreshing to see, and it can make our angst seem a bit less important, a bit less consuming, and there's value in that.
This'll be the last post of my first semester of grad school. I'm taking off tomorrow for the frigid North for a nice one-month winter in Iowa, punctuated by trips to Chicago and Bloomington to visit IWU and see folks. Large-scale personal reflective essay to follow. Or maybe not. I don't think I'm going to be composing much over break, although I'm hoping to practice up my revising skills. Happy Holidays, all.
14 December 2007
08 December 2007
Reproduction
In an earlier post I made the analogy between different performances of a classical, notated work and different performances of a rock song. In rock music, when you take another's song and perform it yourself, this is generally referred to as a cover--or perhaps, if you significantly change things and especially if you write it down in a certain way, it might be called an arrangement. In the classical realm, on the other hand, when you perform a piece you're expected to do so completely faithfully, and indeed, precise notation makes it seem odd that you would consider doing anything else.
This whole concept, of reproducing music that has been previously laid down in some form, is full of issues. Even for a rock band performing their own songs, there is the question of whether they will reproduce the canonical recorded version, or instead expand or change it for the concert. The same question applies when you do a cover song--it can be faithful to the original, or it could drastically change the feel of the song to the point of reinvention (the classic example of this being Jimi Hendrix' version of Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower"). And then, of course, you have rockers like Frank Zappa, who with his band "covered" pieces by Stravinsky.
The current oddness in this subject is most certainly due to the advent of recording technology and the ubiquitousness of the loudspeaker. Before this development, live music the only music, and as such there was no reproducing an exact musical moment. You could play something, but then it was gone, and if you wanted to hear it again, you had to get the musicians together and play it again. Recording does not truly mean reproducing an exact musical moment, of course, but does provide us with a close enough illusion that it often suffices.
In the tradition of notated music, where I have spent much of my time, we have a bizarre obsession with "control." I discussed this issue also in the aforementioned post. Frankly, I think it's a pipe dream, for reasons that relate to this issue of reproduction. Once I've written down my ever-so-specific markings and set away the final version of my score for posterity, I've supposedly ended the discussion on what my piece is, how it works, and what it will always sound like. We should not underestimate the closed-mindedness of this perspective. Perhaps once a composer gets a few degrees under her belt she begins to feel that her ideas are precise and well thought-out that they should always be reproduced exactly. But this approach effectively vetoes an entire dimension of musical possibilities. It precludes Hendrix' cover, certainly. And we shouldn't be surprised that it also puts audiences off. After all, why should one want to go to a concert to hear a piece done just like it already has been on numerous available recordings?
Needless to say, I have at least the ambition to approach my notated music differently. This perspective does not mesh especially easily with graduate school, and with good reason: the less control I impose, the less in the score that my teachers can help me with, the less that can be changed and revised for the better. And at worst I've used this tendency as an excuse for my own compositional laziness, being in general the type of person who loves to start projects and who finds polishing them to perfection far more dull.
But I think this ideal generally leads to healthy attitudes as a composer as well--when rehearsing a piece with players, I like to see what they bring to the table, I want it to be their performance as well as mine, and it helps to have a less than autocratic approach to the choices in your score. I really think that encouraging this view, especially in notated music, could enliven the concert experience for performers and audiences. And this is something we're very much in need of, particularly those of us who aren't fans of the synthesized orchestras and canned instruments that are increasingly seen in the theatre world. It seems twentieth-century composers were traumatized by performers who scorned and misunderstood their very difficult music, but it's time to give the performers back some power and influence. We'd all benefit from it.
This whole concept, of reproducing music that has been previously laid down in some form, is full of issues. Even for a rock band performing their own songs, there is the question of whether they will reproduce the canonical recorded version, or instead expand or change it for the concert. The same question applies when you do a cover song--it can be faithful to the original, or it could drastically change the feel of the song to the point of reinvention (the classic example of this being Jimi Hendrix' version of Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower"). And then, of course, you have rockers like Frank Zappa, who with his band "covered" pieces by Stravinsky.
The current oddness in this subject is most certainly due to the advent of recording technology and the ubiquitousness of the loudspeaker. Before this development, live music the only music, and as such there was no reproducing an exact musical moment. You could play something, but then it was gone, and if you wanted to hear it again, you had to get the musicians together and play it again. Recording does not truly mean reproducing an exact musical moment, of course, but does provide us with a close enough illusion that it often suffices.
In the tradition of notated music, where I have spent much of my time, we have a bizarre obsession with "control." I discussed this issue also in the aforementioned post. Frankly, I think it's a pipe dream, for reasons that relate to this issue of reproduction. Once I've written down my ever-so-specific markings and set away the final version of my score for posterity, I've supposedly ended the discussion on what my piece is, how it works, and what it will always sound like. We should not underestimate the closed-mindedness of this perspective. Perhaps once a composer gets a few degrees under her belt she begins to feel that her ideas are precise and well thought-out that they should always be reproduced exactly. But this approach effectively vetoes an entire dimension of musical possibilities. It precludes Hendrix' cover, certainly. And we shouldn't be surprised that it also puts audiences off. After all, why should one want to go to a concert to hear a piece done just like it already has been on numerous available recordings?
Needless to say, I have at least the ambition to approach my notated music differently. This perspective does not mesh especially easily with graduate school, and with good reason: the less control I impose, the less in the score that my teachers can help me with, the less that can be changed and revised for the better. And at worst I've used this tendency as an excuse for my own compositional laziness, being in general the type of person who loves to start projects and who finds polishing them to perfection far more dull.
But I think this ideal generally leads to healthy attitudes as a composer as well--when rehearsing a piece with players, I like to see what they bring to the table, I want it to be their performance as well as mine, and it helps to have a less than autocratic approach to the choices in your score. I really think that encouraging this view, especially in notated music, could enliven the concert experience for performers and audiences. And this is something we're very much in need of, particularly those of us who aren't fans of the synthesized orchestras and canned instruments that are increasingly seen in the theatre world. It seems twentieth-century composers were traumatized by performers who scorned and misunderstood their very difficult music, but it's time to give the performers back some power and influence. We'd all benefit from it.
02 December 2007
Miró Quartet's "Faces of America" Concerts at UT
This past Thursday and Friday I had the pleasure of hearing two concerts by the Miró Quartet, UT's Faculty String Quartet-in-Residence. I don't mean that as an empty turn of phrase. It really was a pleasure. The group was impeccably tight and indefatigably musical. I commend them on their programming as well. The concerts were paired under the moniker of "Faces of America," Thursday's concert representing the dark side and Friday's the light. More of my composer friends showed up to the "dark" concert. I could easily write a blog post on why this is, but I'll leave it as an amusing observation.
The programs themselves were diverse but convincing. The "dark" concert included George Crumb's creepy classic Black Angels (1970), John Zorn's extremely difficult necronomicon (2003), and a world premiere by the Austin-based composer P. Kellach Waddle, his overly-subtitled String Quartet No. 2: "The American Nightmare; The Marriage of Church and State"; Dark Fantasia on Hymn and Patriotic Tunes (2007). The "light" program presented Dvorak's "American" Quartet (which was composed in my home state of Iowa (w00t)), Ives' String Quartet No. 1, "From the Salvation Army," (1896) and a new piece recently premiered by the quartet, former UT faculty member Kevin Puts' Credo.
Of course, I appreciate the emphasis on living composers (4 of 6!), the inclusion of a local composer who was present at the concert to speak to us in a snappy red suit, and the fact that each concert contained one piece written specifically for the event (the Waddle and the Puts). This all proceeds naturally from my own perspective as a composer who is not dead. But as a music listener in general, I am impressed by the thoughtful and ecumenical approach, the placement of new works next to classics and that of living composers next to canonical ones with no sense of incongruity. The quartet clearly did so not because they had to in order to fulfill some contractual agreement, but because they thought it made musical sense--not because they felt obligated to perform new pieces, but because they liked the new pieces and could perceive distinct common and contrasting elements between them and the older ones. And this is all smart and healthy for composers, musicians, and audiences alike.
And this could perhaps be debated, but I'm very much in favor of the concerts' format. The musicians of course walked onstage to lush applause in the traditional, formal, civilized fashion. But before each piece, one player would stand up and take a few minutes to describe the piece, its history, its composer, and what to listen for. This was great. Program notes are fine, but regardless of intent, they can come across as at best dense and boring, and at worst pretentious, self-aggrandizing blather. I enjoy reading them, but I have a degree and a half in music. Of course I enjoy reading them. The difficulty comes in writing anything that will be informative and accessible to everyone, and talking to the audience has a better chance of succeeding in this regard. It personalizes the discourse, allowing the audience a close look at the players' real connection to the piece (if such a thing exists, as it advantageously did in this instance).
These concerts were my first experience with the Miró, but they do seem to have a refreshingly non-neurotic relationship with their audiences, which is more than can be said for many musicians and nearly all composers. The first night, first violinist Daniel Ching broke a string, and they stopped right there, talked to us for a while, and then started again after he'd replaced it and retuned. In the second concert, the players took a break between movements of the Dvorak so violist John Largess could walk offstage and clean the blood off his finger--hangnail issues. During the interval, cellist Josh Gindele regaled the audience with another story of mid-concert mishaps.
This all seems unremarkable, but it demonstrates the simple underlying fact that the players were not afraid to talk to their audience, indeed saw nothing problematic in it at all. Maybe if I went to more professional concerts I would be unsurprised by this, but for me, as a young composer, it was nearly epiphanic to realize that these musicians did not regard their audience like a large tank of bloodthirsty Piranhas. And this revelation only occurred after the fact: at the concerts themselves the approach only contributed to a pleasant and positive atmosphere.
Of the works performed, two made strong impressions that demand explication (although I'll mention in addition that the Zorn was mostly a gas and is recommended). The first was the Crumb. I've been familiar with this composer since I was about 14, and will always remember him as the first musical avant-gardist (excuse my negligent use of that classification) I'd heard, and one that I responded quite virulently against. I've since come around on Crumb, largely due to Black Angels (although perhaps primarily due to not being 14 anymore). Seeing the DVD and studying the score sufficiently demonstrated, even to a naive sophomore in music history survey, the piece's basic success as an exciting experience. It lends itself well to rock-and-roll reactions (e.g. "whoa, that's insane"), which I've said before is a key characteristic for a new piece that hopes to ingratiate itself with an audience.
The new experience here was hearing and seeing Black Angels live--the first time I had done so with any Crumb composition. I was already aware that his pieces are acknowledged as a sort of visual art in addition to auditory (he's famous for doing scores that look like this), but I'd never had the opportunity to experience the theatrical element of his pieces first-hand. At least in the case of Black Angels, it's nothing short of revolutionary. Traditionalist composers in the European tradition would likely argue that as a parameter it's only a novelty, but it's been exploited to great effect in recent music--off the top of my head, see Davies' Eight Songs for a Mad King, or Dun's Ghost Opera--and it's a topic that deserves extensive discussion, this idea of theatricality in musical works that aren't ostensibly theatre works in any traditional way. In Black Angels, the idea comes from the players stepping out of their boxes: shouting, pounding tam-tams, bowing crystal glasses in the back of the stage. It manifests itself in other ways in other works. This issue is discussed in Elliott Schwartz and Daniel Godfrey's Music Since 1945, where they ingeniously name the parameter "performance ritual" and list it among the seven central concepts in recent music. The result in Black Angels, combined with the purely musical elements of the composition, results in a live experience that a composer friend astutely described as "transporting."
The other piece I want to consider in detail is Kevin Puts' Credo. I missed Puts as a Professor at UT-Austin by two years, but in his time here he was in high demand as a teacher, and he's seen great success recently, taking a teaching post at Peabody and racking up loads of prestigious performances and commissions. I wasn't closely familiar with any of his music, but I adored Credo, and I can perhaps best summarize my rationale by admitting that I have little to no rationale. This was a piece that handily, demurely rejected my attempts to respond to it intellectually. Instead, the piece invited me in, took my coat, encouraged me to remove my shoes. It forced me to respond to it emotionally, and I did so, and it was a great experience. Instead of questioning whether this lifts Credo to the artistic heights of the Great Masters, I prefer to appreciate it for what it was. I say this with truest excitement and no hint of condescension: Credo was a great experience for me, a genuinely stirring listen.
Composers are incessantly cagey when it comes to praising new works that are effusively gorgeous. We have good reasons for this. For one, taking a strong stand on any new piece is always a risky venture. Praise of Bach or Webern is on the contrary always safe, because these figures are canonical and have gained that artistic holy grail that is Support Of The Institution. (Foucault's "regime of truth." Sorry. I'll drop the postmodernism.) If you praise a new piece--or condemn it, for that matter--you run the risk of The Institution adopting the opposite opinion, which is especially dangerous for young composers trying to succeed in academia. Among the reactions one can espouse, praise is riskier, because should The Institution end up disagreeing, you've opened yourself up to endless patronizing accusations. If one criticizes a work that is later adopted as canonical, at least that demonstrates a proper amount of Intellectual Seriousness.
The particular reticence in the case of beautiful music is explained easily enough in the context of the previous century. The 20th century was one in which beautiful music was often dismissed as Not Serious, its merits undermined by intellectual pretension. There are not many teachers left who still unilaterally reject tonal music, but the phenomenon remains with us, and it has caused psychological scars that remain strong even in my generation of composers. We are constantly suspicious of beautiful music, never flatly dismissing it but always keeping our distance. One time after a concert I mentioned my enjoyment of Philip Lasser's Piano Trio and a composer friend responded that he thought it may have been "too beautiful." I do not deny the value of intellectual engagement with and intellectual exploration of music, but to deny a piece your affections on the grounds that it is "too beautiful"--that is not fundamentally intellectual. It is fundamentally neurotic.
Puts' Credo is just another in the lengthening litany of examples. Composers now feel that they can once again write several minutes of gorgeous chords with lyrical lines and diatonic bass lines, as Puts did in the Coda of his piece. The composers in the audience, however, still react with only carefully qualified praise.
I'm the first to admit that the line between the beautiful and the maudlin is thin and subjective, and that this issue should remain a point of discussion. After hearing Credo I did briefly discuss this point with a composer friend, who also enjoyed the piece but did mention his concern that it may have bordered on the sappy. And indeed Credo does flirt with sentimentality in a way that could be seen as embarrassing or as courageous. The reader can obviously see where my opinion lies. To be specific, the piece is a programmatic painting of three unrelated tableaux from Puts' experiences that gave him positive feelings about America: visiting a violin repairman's shop in upstate New York, observing the suspension bridges of Pittsburgh, and watching a mother teaching her daughter to dance. The latter especially sounds perilously like Hallmark material, but Puts had been charged with writing a piece about the light side of America, and as such one can hardly impugn him for taking on such subjects.
I think it should always be a general rule for living our lives that we let down our guard now and again. I insist on having purely emotional experiences with music that transcend the intellectual explications I'll later use to tame them. Sometimes I worry that increased immersion in the intellectual sides of music is challenging my ability to do this, but thank God, there still come moments when I find that I am wrong, when I find myself once again charged up in a way that defies and transcends explanation. Some composer friends tell me that their standards have heightened to a degree that they rarely have these experiences anymore. This is likely a beneficial development for scholarship, but more definitely a horrifically inimical one for composition. Certainly dulling one's senses to these experiences does not help one to live better and more fully. I hope I never build such walls around myself that I can't let a new piece in and allow myself to react to it as I will. That's simply no way to live life, denying and denying and never stopping to appreciate something in a way that is utterly incompatible with this world of juries and dissertations and fixed standards.
I would like to think my musical perspective is not quite as incorrigibly Dionysian as it seems in this statement, that in truth I stand for a more balanced and nuanced musical understanding. But at the moment it is the sensuous side of things that needs a boost--and a significant one--in the world of new music. Ironically, in pop music today the exact opposite is the case. Perhaps we do live in an era of extremes.
For more ideas on this subject, see Kyle Gann's essay Naive Pictorialism.
The programs themselves were diverse but convincing. The "dark" concert included George Crumb's creepy classic Black Angels (1970), John Zorn's extremely difficult necronomicon (2003), and a world premiere by the Austin-based composer P. Kellach Waddle, his overly-subtitled String Quartet No. 2: "The American Nightmare; The Marriage of Church and State"; Dark Fantasia on Hymn and Patriotic Tunes (2007). The "light" program presented Dvorak's "American" Quartet (which was composed in my home state of Iowa (w00t)), Ives' String Quartet No. 1, "From the Salvation Army," (1896) and a new piece recently premiered by the quartet, former UT faculty member Kevin Puts' Credo.
Of course, I appreciate the emphasis on living composers (4 of 6!), the inclusion of a local composer who was present at the concert to speak to us in a snappy red suit, and the fact that each concert contained one piece written specifically for the event (the Waddle and the Puts). This all proceeds naturally from my own perspective as a composer who is not dead. But as a music listener in general, I am impressed by the thoughtful and ecumenical approach, the placement of new works next to classics and that of living composers next to canonical ones with no sense of incongruity. The quartet clearly did so not because they had to in order to fulfill some contractual agreement, but because they thought it made musical sense--not because they felt obligated to perform new pieces, but because they liked the new pieces and could perceive distinct common and contrasting elements between them and the older ones. And this is all smart and healthy for composers, musicians, and audiences alike.
And this could perhaps be debated, but I'm very much in favor of the concerts' format. The musicians of course walked onstage to lush applause in the traditional, formal, civilized fashion. But before each piece, one player would stand up and take a few minutes to describe the piece, its history, its composer, and what to listen for. This was great. Program notes are fine, but regardless of intent, they can come across as at best dense and boring, and at worst pretentious, self-aggrandizing blather. I enjoy reading them, but I have a degree and a half in music. Of course I enjoy reading them. The difficulty comes in writing anything that will be informative and accessible to everyone, and talking to the audience has a better chance of succeeding in this regard. It personalizes the discourse, allowing the audience a close look at the players' real connection to the piece (if such a thing exists, as it advantageously did in this instance).
These concerts were my first experience with the Miró, but they do seem to have a refreshingly non-neurotic relationship with their audiences, which is more than can be said for many musicians and nearly all composers. The first night, first violinist Daniel Ching broke a string, and they stopped right there, talked to us for a while, and then started again after he'd replaced it and retuned. In the second concert, the players took a break between movements of the Dvorak so violist John Largess could walk offstage and clean the blood off his finger--hangnail issues. During the interval, cellist Josh Gindele regaled the audience with another story of mid-concert mishaps.
This all seems unremarkable, but it demonstrates the simple underlying fact that the players were not afraid to talk to their audience, indeed saw nothing problematic in it at all. Maybe if I went to more professional concerts I would be unsurprised by this, but for me, as a young composer, it was nearly epiphanic to realize that these musicians did not regard their audience like a large tank of bloodthirsty Piranhas. And this revelation only occurred after the fact: at the concerts themselves the approach only contributed to a pleasant and positive atmosphere.
Of the works performed, two made strong impressions that demand explication (although I'll mention in addition that the Zorn was mostly a gas and is recommended). The first was the Crumb. I've been familiar with this composer since I was about 14, and will always remember him as the first musical avant-gardist (excuse my negligent use of that classification) I'd heard, and one that I responded quite virulently against. I've since come around on Crumb, largely due to Black Angels (although perhaps primarily due to not being 14 anymore). Seeing the DVD and studying the score sufficiently demonstrated, even to a naive sophomore in music history survey, the piece's basic success as an exciting experience. It lends itself well to rock-and-roll reactions (e.g. "whoa, that's insane"), which I've said before is a key characteristic for a new piece that hopes to ingratiate itself with an audience.
The new experience here was hearing and seeing Black Angels live--the first time I had done so with any Crumb composition. I was already aware that his pieces are acknowledged as a sort of visual art in addition to auditory (he's famous for doing scores that look like this), but I'd never had the opportunity to experience the theatrical element of his pieces first-hand. At least in the case of Black Angels, it's nothing short of revolutionary. Traditionalist composers in the European tradition would likely argue that as a parameter it's only a novelty, but it's been exploited to great effect in recent music--off the top of my head, see Davies' Eight Songs for a Mad King, or Dun's Ghost Opera--and it's a topic that deserves extensive discussion, this idea of theatricality in musical works that aren't ostensibly theatre works in any traditional way. In Black Angels, the idea comes from the players stepping out of their boxes: shouting, pounding tam-tams, bowing crystal glasses in the back of the stage. It manifests itself in other ways in other works. This issue is discussed in Elliott Schwartz and Daniel Godfrey's Music Since 1945, where they ingeniously name the parameter "performance ritual" and list it among the seven central concepts in recent music. The result in Black Angels, combined with the purely musical elements of the composition, results in a live experience that a composer friend astutely described as "transporting."
The other piece I want to consider in detail is Kevin Puts' Credo. I missed Puts as a Professor at UT-Austin by two years, but in his time here he was in high demand as a teacher, and he's seen great success recently, taking a teaching post at Peabody and racking up loads of prestigious performances and commissions. I wasn't closely familiar with any of his music, but I adored Credo, and I can perhaps best summarize my rationale by admitting that I have little to no rationale. This was a piece that handily, demurely rejected my attempts to respond to it intellectually. Instead, the piece invited me in, took my coat, encouraged me to remove my shoes. It forced me to respond to it emotionally, and I did so, and it was a great experience. Instead of questioning whether this lifts Credo to the artistic heights of the Great Masters, I prefer to appreciate it for what it was. I say this with truest excitement and no hint of condescension: Credo was a great experience for me, a genuinely stirring listen.
Composers are incessantly cagey when it comes to praising new works that are effusively gorgeous. We have good reasons for this. For one, taking a strong stand on any new piece is always a risky venture. Praise of Bach or Webern is on the contrary always safe, because these figures are canonical and have gained that artistic holy grail that is Support Of The Institution. (Foucault's "regime of truth." Sorry. I'll drop the postmodernism.) If you praise a new piece--or condemn it, for that matter--you run the risk of The Institution adopting the opposite opinion, which is especially dangerous for young composers trying to succeed in academia. Among the reactions one can espouse, praise is riskier, because should The Institution end up disagreeing, you've opened yourself up to endless patronizing accusations. If one criticizes a work that is later adopted as canonical, at least that demonstrates a proper amount of Intellectual Seriousness.
The particular reticence in the case of beautiful music is explained easily enough in the context of the previous century. The 20th century was one in which beautiful music was often dismissed as Not Serious, its merits undermined by intellectual pretension. There are not many teachers left who still unilaterally reject tonal music, but the phenomenon remains with us, and it has caused psychological scars that remain strong even in my generation of composers. We are constantly suspicious of beautiful music, never flatly dismissing it but always keeping our distance. One time after a concert I mentioned my enjoyment of Philip Lasser's Piano Trio and a composer friend responded that he thought it may have been "too beautiful." I do not deny the value of intellectual engagement with and intellectual exploration of music, but to deny a piece your affections on the grounds that it is "too beautiful"--that is not fundamentally intellectual. It is fundamentally neurotic.
Puts' Credo is just another in the lengthening litany of examples. Composers now feel that they can once again write several minutes of gorgeous chords with lyrical lines and diatonic bass lines, as Puts did in the Coda of his piece. The composers in the audience, however, still react with only carefully qualified praise.
I'm the first to admit that the line between the beautiful and the maudlin is thin and subjective, and that this issue should remain a point of discussion. After hearing Credo I did briefly discuss this point with a composer friend, who also enjoyed the piece but did mention his concern that it may have bordered on the sappy. And indeed Credo does flirt with sentimentality in a way that could be seen as embarrassing or as courageous. The reader can obviously see where my opinion lies. To be specific, the piece is a programmatic painting of three unrelated tableaux from Puts' experiences that gave him positive feelings about America: visiting a violin repairman's shop in upstate New York, observing the suspension bridges of Pittsburgh, and watching a mother teaching her daughter to dance. The latter especially sounds perilously like Hallmark material, but Puts had been charged with writing a piece about the light side of America, and as such one can hardly impugn him for taking on such subjects.
I think it should always be a general rule for living our lives that we let down our guard now and again. I insist on having purely emotional experiences with music that transcend the intellectual explications I'll later use to tame them. Sometimes I worry that increased immersion in the intellectual sides of music is challenging my ability to do this, but thank God, there still come moments when I find that I am wrong, when I find myself once again charged up in a way that defies and transcends explanation. Some composer friends tell me that their standards have heightened to a degree that they rarely have these experiences anymore. This is likely a beneficial development for scholarship, but more definitely a horrifically inimical one for composition. Certainly dulling one's senses to these experiences does not help one to live better and more fully. I hope I never build such walls around myself that I can't let a new piece in and allow myself to react to it as I will. That's simply no way to live life, denying and denying and never stopping to appreciate something in a way that is utterly incompatible with this world of juries and dissertations and fixed standards.
I would like to think my musical perspective is not quite as incorrigibly Dionysian as it seems in this statement, that in truth I stand for a more balanced and nuanced musical understanding. But at the moment it is the sensuous side of things that needs a boost--and a significant one--in the world of new music. Ironically, in pop music today the exact opposite is the case. Perhaps we do live in an era of extremes.
For more ideas on this subject, see Kyle Gann's essay Naive Pictorialism.
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