Outside the music 'museum' Modern composers say symphonies cling too tightly to centuries-old sounds by Jen Graves The News Tribune, Tacoma, April 22, 2001 ......................... Visual and sound artist Dan Senn, foreground, is the designer of the 'Sound Garden' in the Point Defiance Park in Tacoma, where 12 stones are carefully placed in a ravine so you can hear different sounds when standing or sitting on each of them. On three of the stones are, from left, composers Clement Reid, Gregory Youtz and Michael Davenport.
No, it wasn't W. The resistant one was fictitious President Josiah Bartlet on TV's "The West Wing," who was not moved when his assistant explained that the composer was reworking his piece until just hours before the concert after he found out the president would be in the audience.
Bartlet proclaimed, "It is not classical music if the guy finished writing it this afternoon."
New music is oft-maligned and misunderstood. (President Bartlet ended up loving the piece.) Obscurity is often the reward for most contemporary classical music composers.
But this past arts season, South Puget Sound composers became much less obscure.
So, who are these people and what is this music?
A group of professional players who perform only new music sprouted, led by Michael Davenport, a returning Tacoma native who plays the bass clarinet and also does jazz.
Tacoma New Music devoted an entire concert to Puget Sound composers, including Clement Reid of Tacoma, who played his own surprisingly lyrical composition - on his own teensy toy piano.
Reid and Pacific Lutheran University professor Gregory Youtz wrote fanfares for the Tacoma Symphony Orchestra. Another of Youtz's new compositions was on an Auburn Symphony Orchestra program.
Davenport, Reid, Youtz and Tacoma visual sound artist Dan Senn, who recently had an installation at Seattle's Volunteer Park and whose "Sound Garden" permanently graces a ravine near the beach in Point Defiance Park, gathered March 13 at The News Tribune to discuss the classical music of our time.
Below are selections from their conversation.
Gregory Youtz: A guy asked me once, "Why do we need any more music?" And I thought that raised an interesting perception, one that is probably very typical of audience members, and it really begs the question, "What is music for?" Because, if music is to relax you or calm you or soothe you, then the guy is absolutely right.
There's already more music in existence than anybody could listen to in a lifetime. As a commodity, it's there.
But if on the other hand you think of music as an adventure or as something that you enjoy being actively involved in, then of course, you're not just listening, you're part of a human activity that happens to take place in sound.
Clement Reid: Even if music has the limitation of being something that's soothing, the kind of things that are soothing change over a period of time. ... But to the average person, they'd probably be quite satisfied with nothing else new.
Jen Graves: Often, an audience experiences new music once and doesn't have a record of it. Do you consider the way the music enters the audience's memory?
Youtz: Absolutely. (For the Auburn Symphony) I consciously tried to make the piece itself teach the audience how to hear it.
Dan Senn: I work in a real broad area. ... I'm going to do an installation up at the Volunteer Park Conservatory. Of course I'm thinking of the audience that's going to be coming to this. But I also think about the whole space as a compositional space.
When you were mentioning before what music is for, to be perfectly frank, I never even think about that stuff. It comes back to some really fundamental thought about why we exist in the first place, that being to improve ourselves, to reach our full humanity. The reason I keep making stuff is to assist that.
I see myself as subversive. I'm interested in getting into this space up there and putting (this work) in front of people who would never cross the threshold of a contemporary art gallery or a contemporary music concert.
Reid: Does that seem to bring people that wouldn't normally be involved?
Senn: I think that it changes society. I think there is no moving back. When you take people and you capture them in this way, it doesn't make any difference if they're Rush Limbaugh fans or baseball fanatics or one of us coming from the choir, there is a shift that you can never come back to.
Youtz: It also (brings) people together. You lose your sense of being an isolated individual. That happens to an audience in a really good performance.
Reid: I just ... write stuff, and I try to have it played.
Graves: Where does this work belong?
Youtz: There's all kinds of work, and there's a place for all of it. If I write something that's really crunchy and hard to fathom, I would probably try to place it at a university first. I might try a concert series.
But if I'm going to write something for a general audience that is not used to new music, I write a different piece. If Mozart was going to write the dissonant String Quartet, he's writing for a different audience than when he's writing "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik." I think composers have always been aware of, who's the audience for this piece?
Senn: Something that you (Reid) said really rung true with me. You said, "Well, I make pieces, and I try to get them performed." That's precisely what drove me into the visual arts aspect of sound.
I come from a musical family where I wrote pieces, where I was truthful in those pieces, and it was harder than hell to get those pieces performed. That society is very resistant to the slightest alteration.
Graves: Which society?
Senn: The symphonic society. By the way, I turn on the classical music station, I love it. I go to the symphony occasionally. But when I listen to it, I listen to it as contemporary music. I don't listen to it as theirs, I listen to it as my music.
Graves: What do you mean?
Senn: Well, if Beethoven was alive today, he wouldn't be writing like John Williams (pop composer who wrote the theme to "Star Wars").
Graves: Who would he be writing like?
Youtz: (Influential American contemporary composer) Elliott Carter.
Senn: Right at the edge. Why would he write at the edge then and not now?
Reid: I'm not so sure about that. It was a moderate edge.
Youtz: It was a successful edge. It was an edge that was in the concert hall.
Senn: Goodness gracious, the (late) string quartets weren't played until the 20th century!
Michael Davenport: This is uncomfortable, I think. We have to be honest about the fact that it's gone downhill. We have to deal with the fact that we have a very uninformed audience (because of a lack of early music and art education) that's easily frightened by new anything almost.
Reid: One of the problems is that it has been ever thus. I was reading about Mozart, and Mozart's father was recommending to him to not write too complicated things.
New conservatism, that can be a reaction. The pieces that won the Pulitzer Prize - there's a long stretch in the '60s of very thorny pieces. There was a big change in 1975, when Dominick Argento won the Pulitzer Prize for his "Diary of Virginia Woolf," which is using tonality as if "Oh, what a brilliant concept." The pendulum swings a lot, and it may be that we went too far at a certain period.
But then it comes back again. I think we're in a time when, literally, anything goes.
There seemed to be a direction, say in the '20s, there was experimental music, '30s, the Depression era, you really had to write stuff that was of public use. And then in the '50s, there was a very intense avant-garde in Europe, and America lagged.
I remember at Eastman (School of Music) when I was a student there (from 1973-'77), you couldn't write anything that sounded tonal or nice. They would literally kick you out. One guy wanted to write something in the style of a Broadway musical, and they said, "No, you can't do that. You're not on Broadway. This is Eastman."
Youtz: Doing a public piece is kind of like doing public art. If you're commissioned to do something for a bus station, you ought to have the social responsibility to think about where you are and who's going to look at it.
I think it's easy for a composer to slip into a position of feeling like it's me versus the world. But from that position, it's also easy to become critical of those who don't immediately glom onto your work.
It's useful to a composer to keep a sense of balance and remember that it's not me versus them, it's in fact us.
If I write a piece for an orchestra, I am not invited to write a thorny or complicated piece.
Graves: Do you get instructions?
Youtz: Oh, absolutely. They're either overt, or they're implied. Like, "There are (only) two rehearsals."
Or, I'm told it's going to be an overture. Well, I know what that means. Happy, energetic, not too long. Or sometimes, they might say, "You know, this is Enumclaw, so ..."
But I do understand that this is my culture, and I don't condemn it. I try to think as a teacher, or like an example. And I think that's worth doing whether you're getting paid for it or not.
Davenport: I think we all agree or we wouldn't be in this room.
However, I think it's important that we work hard to watch what's going on. We've had a huge chop in funds, and that means those funds are going someplace else, and I don't think they're going to very good places.
Chamber Music America had a good article this month about the reality of not just new music, but smaller, or chamber, music in America. Only 1 percent of all the chamber groups make their primary income doing that. The Emerson String Quartet members can make a house payment. Other people can't.
Youtz: I just think a composer thinking sympathetically about culture has to keep in mind that, over the centuries, different cultures change where they put their energies. We have undergone a profound artistic revolution - 100 years ago, reasonably educated middle-class people would go to the concert hall to be told a story by Richard Strauss.
Well, 30 years later, they went to see Charlie Chaplin. And now, 100 years later, they very happily go see new art. In fact, they're craving new art. They can't wait to see what X director in Hollywood is going to come up with next.
People are as interested in new art as they ever were, but they need it in terms they can understand. Composers shot themselves in the foot pretty profoundly for 100 years, experimenting with all kinds of wonderful things which we love, but on the other hand, we got way ahead of the audience, and at the same time, not only did the movies emerge, but whole new genres of music emerged, like jazz and like rock 'n' roll. People are dying for the latest art coming out of U2 or name your band.
Dan is part of a whole movement that is pointing out there are new venues, new ways of thinking. You don't need to simply spend your life on your knees in front of orchestra conductors.
Davenport: I didn't answer your question, Jen. I think that the orchestras are basically historical organizations.
Graves: Should they be?
Davenport: They can't help it. The budget's not there.
I don't want old pieces to go away. But we need to have righteous titles, such as "The Historical Tacoma Symphony Orchestra," "The Museum of Music Philharmonic presents," and stop the confusion, because that's really what it is.
Youtz: (The symphony orchestra) reached a point of perfection in the 18th and 19th centuries. Of course, we're composers, and we love to keep writing for the beast. But I don't have any pretensions that it is anything other than a beloved museum.
I love that museum, but the next open doorway through which we're going to do a whole bunch of progressive looking - I don't think it's going to be the orchestra.
Senn: The symphony orchestra is finished. Since Mahler.
I don't really give a damn too much about the symphony. (But if they asked me to) I would write them a work and make sure it worked in that context.
That sort of demonstrates the contradiction of views. On the one hand, I don't care. But on the other hand, if they're knocking on my door, I'm for 'em 100 percent. So the lines aren't clear.
Davenport: Absolutely.
Youtz: This is a very touchy issue, particularly with those of you who are self-employed. (But) you find many cultures in which the making of art is never considered professional or commercial.
I remember when Steven Bloom asked me if I wanted to write for the Tacoma Symphony. They had 200 or 250 bucks. I probably put in 200 hours. A buck an hour?
Should I have turned down the Tacoma Symphony because they only had 250 bucks? If I do that, I don't have the opportunity to have fun or teach somebody or get them excited.
It's easy to say that the arts, if they're going to compete for respect on a social level, it must be paid for. Maybe that's wrong-headed.
Senn: Well, Greg, I 100 percent disagree with you.
Davenport: I totally agree (with Senn).
Youtz: All I'm doing is pointing out an interesting possible way of thinking about things that allows you to exist with less anger as a creative person.
Senn: I think you're right. I believe that I've overcome it, but most artists that I've come across are filled with a rage against this.
What I think is that orchestras ought to have 1 percent for the art. Let's say the orchestra is 100 pieces. They ought to take the equivalent of one position out of that orchestra and they ought to set - what is the Seattle Symphony average salary?
Davenport: Probably 80 now.
Senn: Take $80,000 and set it aside for commissioning new work.
Reid: I've noticed on programs that they seem to be doing more.
Senn: I'm talking about financial structure of the place. We'll take the last-chair violin. Fire him. We'll take that money. You can live without that violin.
Graves: Do all of you agree that things are getting better?
Youtz: I think we're a generation past the generation which just assumed that new music was awful. With startling regularity, there's a new piece sitting there in the middle of the concert.
I think that's great, and a composer who accepts that token spot better think carefully about what they're going to write. If it's done well, it can encourage audiences to want more.
Senn: (If) the attitude of "this is just the way that things are" had been taken, nobody would have come across 1 percent for the arts. I think something could be done. The place to do it is someplace we don't want to go, and that is to join the boards of the symphonies and to say, "We want 1 percent for the arts."
Graves: Though the financial structure in public art may be subversive, a lot of people consider public artworks to be unsubversive.
Youtz: It's perfectly possible to write drop-dead gorgeous subversive music, and I hope I achieved that in Auburn. This was a piece that any fool can understand, and its most subversive message is, next time you're stuck at a train crossing in Auburn and feeling pissed off at Burlington Northern for hurtling through your town at 80 miles an hour, listen to its music.
That ultimate message is one that I totally respect, a John Cagean (experimental 20th-century composer) "just open your ears and listen to the world."
Davenport: I think we're a very hopeful group of people, and I think it's definitely gotten worse. The reality is that the programs are basically music that has been dead for many years.
Youtz: Doesn't this go back to where we started? If this is a cultural museum, why should they listen? If it's an avenue for displaying human creativity, telling stories, waking people up, this is a great idea.
Really, it comes down to the question of, What does the culture think classical music is?