Thoughts on Music
Last Tuesday, I had "The Mechanics of a Blue Sky" performed by a new ensemble at my alma mater comprised of both students and faculty, whose mission it is to perform and explore new works. This particular concert featured works by alumni composition students of the school, so I was among the composers featured. Anyways, it was great to be in that atmosphere again, and so it got my mind going in that sort of direction, whereas I have been mostly just idly composing since graduation almost two and a half years ago. The drive to and from the concert, I was riding with a fellow composition alumnus--a fine gentleman with whom I've always been able to discuss higher ideas. (It's an hour-and-a-half drive each way, and save for a couple respective phone calls, we chatted with each other the entire way both to and from.)
Among other things, we talked about exploring new sounds and the direction of music in general, and I had a sort of realization. As composers, it's not composing music itself that proves the biggest challenge. It's not even trying to find one's own voice. The real challenge is trying to figure out what we haven't been able to say yet with music, and how we can say it. Music is such an outstandingly far-reaching entity. It's always dynamic, never static, and it can affect us all in ways that no other art nor any other thing in this universe can. It's said to be a universal language, but I know of no one who speaks it completely fluently. If you look at its history, music, like all arts, is always developing over time to present us with completely new sounds and moods and ideas--we've gone from the most simple homophonic melodies with the crudest instruments, slowly developing at first, gradually adding more voices, newer instruments, newer sounds...adding and changing more and more, become ever more complex, until in the latter half of the 20th Century we started throwing out all the rules completely and have developed digital sounds mixed into absolute chaos. The challenge, perhaps especially with our age, is to figure out what we have NOT yet heard or felt or conceived in music, and to present that to the world. To present the world with a new layer, a new facet of that majestic, most glorious art-language we call music.
Among other things, we talked about exploring new sounds and the direction of music in general, and I had a sort of realization. As composers, it's not composing music itself that proves the biggest challenge. It's not even trying to find one's own voice. The real challenge is trying to figure out what we haven't been able to say yet with music, and how we can say it. Music is such an outstandingly far-reaching entity. It's always dynamic, never static, and it can affect us all in ways that no other art nor any other thing in this universe can. It's said to be a universal language, but I know of no one who speaks it completely fluently. If you look at its history, music, like all arts, is always developing over time to present us with completely new sounds and moods and ideas--we've gone from the most simple homophonic melodies with the crudest instruments, slowly developing at first, gradually adding more voices, newer instruments, newer sounds...adding and changing more and more, become ever more complex, until in the latter half of the 20th Century we started throwing out all the rules completely and have developed digital sounds mixed into absolute chaos. The challenge, perhaps especially with our age, is to figure out what we have NOT yet heard or felt or conceived in music, and to present that to the world. To present the world with a new layer, a new facet of that majestic, most glorious art-language we call music.