Inhalt: #9 – Herbst 2007
DÁNIEL PÉTER BIRÓ
CROWNS
NIKOLAUS BRASS
DIE ABDANKUNG DER WERKE
MORITZ EGGERT
HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING
GEORG HEIKE
ÄSTHETISCHE PHONETIK ALS WISSENSCHAFT VON DER ÄSTHETISCHEN KOMMUNIKATION IN SPRACHE UND SPRACHMUSIK
GEORG NUSSBAUMER
EINIGE ERINNERUNGEN AN MUSIK, VERSCHWIMMEND
MANUEL SOSA
THE EAR AND THE EYE: CONVERGING IN THE SOUTH AMERICA OF THE SECOND HALF OF 20TH CENTURY
This is an essay about the need to stop being clever. I think trying to be clever is actually counterproductive, as many composers spend so much time trying to be more clever than others that they forget how to compose. I try not being clever for cleverness’s sake. I strongly believe that following one’s intuition is underrated as a concept. If you’re lost as a composer in the labyrinth of today’s profusion of styles, directions, schools, one has to follow the Ariadne thread of intuition. It’s the only way. And that’s perfectly fine. Intuition and the vague desire that contemporary music could be so much more than it is today.
But before we continue I would like to give you an example of some music that might sound vaguely familiar. This music is on a CD released by the Deutsche Musikrat. The CD was a kind of experiment, done by a musicologist, in order to give an overview of their line of contemporary German music CDs. In this CD, called “cross-cut edition,” they simply put together bits and pieces from various composers from all fields of composition in contemporary Germany and thus created one big metapiece where it’s difficult to tell where one composer’s work ends and the other’s begins. Listening to this CD—and music of mine is on it as well—absolutely paralyzed me. It all sounds the same! Contemporary music cliché after contemporary music cliché becomes glaringly obvious—removed of their content they blaze at us in all their boring glory. I’m self-critical enough to recognize that my little excerpt also doesn’t jump at the listener and say “hey, this is different.” It sounds the same as well.
The dreadful “cross-cut edition” reminded me of one thing that I am completely sure of, and that is that every musical cliché is probably better than a Modern Music cliché, because the contemporary music cliché only refers to itself, to it’s own little boring world of pieces that love to begin with the slow circumcision of one single note, or that have that kind of jarred new music rhythm that never really grooves, that have the forced desire to be taken seriously, that have a total absence of humor, of liveliness, the obsession with creating interesting “soundscapes” while forgetting what the music actually wants to tell, we all know the drill.
Imagine a hip-hop musician who suddenly avoids a hip-hop cliché and uses a cliché from ... Dixieland music. At least it would jar so much that it would be interesting. We all probably think we can do it better by ourselves, but very often, when we avoid one cliché, we stumble into the next one. We stumble into the boring pattern-happiness where even the most uninspired ideas suddenly succeed at hypnotizing the audience. Into sleep. Or we produce post-postromantic pieces that simply dish out the old cadenzas from way back, simply ignoring 100 years of musical history. Or we stumble into the even smaller world of ultra-complexity or electronic music, where granular synthesis and the newest gadgets from the internet or IRCAM simply replace the old serial techniques that were already old when they were invented. Now please don’t take me for a boring grumbler. It is actually extremely easy to complain about the situation of contemporary music today. Most of us do complain all the time, because we long for the recognition of contemporary music in earlier times, when it wasn’t even called contemporary music, even if the recognition we imagine it got is probably an illusion, as composers were basically slaves to counts—and I don’t mean Count Basie—and the church.
But let me just grumble on one tiny bit to make my point. Never fear—the essay is called “how to stop worrying” and not “how to continue worrying.”
In Germany most composers I know use the term “Neue Musik” or “New Music” in a derogatory way. You go to a concert, a friend asks you how it was, and you say, “oh, it was typical New-Music-like,” and the other person knows exactly how the piece sounded, without ever listening to it. The paradox lies in the fact that on one hand we use it as a derogatory term, but at the same time all of us would call ourselves “Neue Musik” composers. Now I don’t know if contemporary painters would talk to each other about an exhibition and say, “oh, it was typical contemporary painting-like,” I think they would rather say “it was typical new photo realism” or “new fauvism” or something similar. But for us composers “New Music-like” says it all because actually it doesn’t matter if it’s new minimalism or new serialism or new complexity or whatever. The word new never sounded so “old” like in contemporary music today. One feels already old when one lifts a hand to write a note, because of the immense burden of history, of Adorno, of how you can’t write a poem after Auschwitz, and so on. […]
Excerpt from Moritz Eggert: How i learned to stop worrying
Read more in the physical issue #09 !