Music Composition in the 21st Century: A Practical Guide for the New Common Practice by Robert Carl

Author:Robert Carl [Carl, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Modern, 20th Century, Music, Instruction & Study, Composition, History & Criticism
ISBN: 9781501357572
Google: 6ZMyEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 53265594
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2020-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

7

All Together Now

At this point, having discerned many of the forces that will shape the composer’s immediate future, we can begin to tie them together into a series of observations and recommendations. But before that, this chapter deals with one last piece of unfinished business. It’s a postscript to what just preceded, and it enlarges the circle of openness one step further. Moving from the many forms of new choice and variety offered to the individual composer, this chapter suggests the opportunities and challenges that interaction with other composers and artists present. In short, it addresses collaboration.

The term has been trendy for some time now, and is in fact a buzzword of arts and academic administration, something that suggests another tiresome term “synergy.” Let’s try to forget that boilerplate for a moment and get back to essences.

Interaction of music with other disciplines is traditionally long and noble—ballet, incidental music for theater, film soundtracks, and of course opera have been ways to reach a far broader audiences than the concert stage alone. Let’s accept that they continue to be an important part of any composer’s output, and any chance to participate in them is welcome and should be seized. In this venerable tradition, perhaps there is no greater example than Philip Glass, who has not only created a body of opera that has redefined the medium but also emerged as one of the most original and effective film composers of the era.

And then there are artists pushing the envelope still further. For example, the recent “immersive theater” movement seems to have shaped a piece that has created a great deal of buzz, Chris Cerrone’s Invisible Cities (2014), where the piece unfolds in a train station, the performers are mixed with audience (and often disguised so that their emergence as singers can be shock), and the distribution of the music throughout makes it impossible to hear as a whole (though audience members can get a more global feel for the score by wandering through the space with headsets tied to a central feed. The parallels to installation and sound art such as Cardiff’s walks should be clear).1

But I’d like to think a bit about even more novel forms of collaboration that are emerging, ones that enlarge the very term. One of the simplest is the composer collective. While there have been groups of composers who established a profile based on a shared aesthetic (Les Six in France, the “Mighty Five” in nineteenth-century Russia), composers who band together administratively as well to present concerts of their own (and affiliated) works become more evident in the later twentieth century. L’Itinéraire is one example, Bang on a Can another, Boston’s Composers in Red Sneakers an 1980s avatar, and Brooklyn’s Sleeping Giant the current gold standard. This is a way of circumventing power structures that might otherwise keep younger composers outside the limelight. In fact, cultivating an aura of independence, it may make such composers more visible than otherwise possible, maybe even give a certain notoriety as a “salon des refusés.

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