Get out there.

In a 2004 New Yorker article profiling a few young composers, Alex Ross makes the following observation about American composition pedagogy:

"There have been three great academic orthodoxies in American music: the late-nineteenth-century New England School, which worshipped Brahms and rejected any résumé that lacked the words “Hochschule für Musik”; the neoclassical school, which adored Stravinsky and Debussy, and required Nadia Boulanger as a reference; and the twelve-toners, who idolized Schoenberg and his ways. In the end, the house god is always the same—a European-oriented pedant who demands that young composers “justify every note,” develop every idea ad nauseam, and rise above the vulgar herd."

He goes on to suggest that today "no single regime holds sway" in academia, which is true except with regard to the note-justifying crowd, which still includes roughly everyone. We may eventually regard the great revolution of 20th century music in the Western world as not the emancipation of dissonance, but the emancipation of composers from the tyranny of notes. This is part of the John Cage legacy, the idea that we can make classical music that does not use the note as its primary structural unit, that we can still be "composers" without justifying every sound rationally in terms of pitch relationships. R. Murray Schafer gets at the same point in The Soundscape when he suggests that perhaps Luigi Russolo was the most revolutionary musical innovator of the 20th century; Russolo threw open the doors of music and let in the noises of the world.

The trouble is that sometimes composers still want to use traditional notes, but without subjecting themselves to the old-school, European-inherited conveyor belt of rational explication. This gets them in trouble with their teachers, who see conventional notation and conventional instruments and immediately assume that the aims of the notes on the page are hence conventional. This is why so much interesting music is currently taking place through unconventional groupings and using unconventional notation (if any). Using new instruments and new groupings, and/or presenting this music in new or different venues, provides a clear and immediate break from traditional values and norms, and leads your audience (or your teacher) to expect something that isn't traditional. We need these major gestures, clear breaks from the past.

These developments just haven't made it to academia yet in force, but my hope is that when they do, teachers will be forced to address the humanistic aspects of music composition as well as its formalistic side. Literary theorists have been doing this for ages, yet musical inquiry continues its obsession with things technical. I don't mean to suggest that there isn't a great deal to be learned from the music of the past. But we must not assume that 20th-century theory, or 18th-century theory, for that matter, will ultimately have anything to do with 21st-century composition. And 21st-century theory cannot exist yet. Not before 21st-century music happens.

And 21st-century composition is already underway, of course. We may not be able to pin it down or categorize it yet, but it's out there. All we can do is join in with what we find exciting and ride it out. 21st-century music will be there. And for those who are still doggedly focused on the 20th century? (Or, more specifically, the early 20th century, which is all most academics have thus far cared to assimilate?) For them, 21st-century music will likely come from where they least expect it. From somewhere out there in the noises of the world.