composers » David MacDonald, composer

I happened to be reading a book by Brian Christian called The Most Human Human ¹, which deals a lot with human language, when I wrote that last blog post/rant about the way musicians talk and write about music. In the book, Christian cites a George Orwell essay called Politics and the English Language. I happen to like Orwell, so I checked it out. I found a couple of passages that I thought related to my last post so I thought I’d share.

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

Orwell is demonstrating how “ugly and inaccurate” language affects politics, but I think it affects the arts as well. By writing thoughtlessly about music, our language becomes less meaningful. Without meaningful language to describe music, we will conceive and thus create thoughtless music. Orwell posits that this kind of writing “consists less and less of WORDS chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of PHRASES tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.” (emphasis in original)

He gives five examples of what he calls typical political writing and then lists several common shortfalls demonstrated in the examples. Two of them, “pretentious diction” and “meaningless words” are my biggest pet peeves in arts writing. I won’t copy them here; you can check out the essay for yourself. The underlying issue is that people are just putting these word-Legos together because they fist, not because they make a worthwhile thought.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing, is that it is easy. It is easier–even quicker, once you have the habit–to say IN MY OPINION IT IS A NOT UNJUSTIFIABLE ASSUMPTION THAT than to say I THINK.

See! George agrees with me!

Notes:

The Most Human Human is about an annual computer science competition called the Loebner Prize, in which software developers compete in the Turing Test. Alan Turing proposed the test in 1950 as a standard for evaluating a computer’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior by conversing with a human. Christian discusses what the research involved in developing these chat bots tells us about what it means to be human. ↩

I may have mentioned this before in this space, but I’ll say it again: I like words. I like them a lot. Some people have said and written in the past that music is impossible to describe in words. I would never say that putting important and insightful ideas about music into words is easy, but it’s far from impossible. You’ve probably heard the absurdism “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Alex Ross, whose writings about music are among the best in English today, tackles the issue in the preface to his most recent book, Listen to This.

Certainly, music criticism is a curious and dubious science, its jargon ranging from the wooden (“Beethoven’s Fifth begins with three Gs and an E-flat”) to the purple (“Beethoven’s Fifth begins with fate knocking at the door”). But it is no more dubious than any other kind of criticism. Every art form fights the noose of verbal description. Writing about dance is like singing about architecture; writing about writing is like making buildings about dance.

I fought the urge there to give a longer quote from Ross because his writing is so engaging it can be hard to find a point at which to cut him off. Seriously, you need to get this guy’s writings.

"Magnetic Poetry" by Natalie Roberts (surrealmuse on Flickr)

Anyway, given that writing about the arts is a “curious and dubious science,” I’m prepared to accept many ways of doing things. But please, can we just rein things in a little bit? Don’t use words unless they mean the thing that you mean. I heard a very bright person recently describe a part of a work as being “asynchronous” (not at the same time), when he really meant that it was “asymmetrical” (not the same on both sides). Obviously, this was likely a simple mistake for this guy, and I still have a great deal of intellectual respect for him.

However, composers need to figure out how to talk about their music. I’m as guilty as anyone. In my last post, which I’m embarassed to say was two months ago, I linked to a Michigan Radio story that included an interview of me. When I sat down with the reporter (Jennifer Guerra), I struggled to describe my music to her. In the story, she quipped that my “elevator pitch” could use a bit of work. She was right.

A friend of mine recently described a piece of his on Twitter as being “abstract.” First of all, the artificially-imposed brevity of Twitter can be both a rhetorical blessing and descriptive curse. I understand that it’s not easy to describe a new piece, even without the 140-character restriction. However what could my friend possibly have meant by “abstract”? Was he just trying to tell non-musicians that it’s scary-angsty-dissonant music? If so, is that really the thing you want to squeeze into your 140 characters? Let us assume, for now, that my friend was trying to make his music sound appealing rather than threatening (an assertion which it would be fair to doubt). To me, especially in art, “abstract” means the opposite of “concrete” or “representational.” In this sense, isn’t most music abstract? Surely, Bach was not writing the Goldberg variations to represent sounds heard in nature, right? Of course there is quite an expansive continuum between abstract and representational, but I think most music, especially music that doesn’t use any sampled “found sounds,” falls much closer to the abstract end.

We have to remember that as composers, when we write about our music, our audience has likely never heard it and in some cases never will. When words are all we’ve got (and I think they’re pretty damn good), we have to choose them more carefully. Composers and musicians, how do you describe your music? Is it as big a struggle for you as it seems to me?

J.S. Bach had the Lutheran Church.

Haydn had the Esterhazy family.

Beethoven had Archduke Rudolph.

Bartók, Stravinsky, and Copland had Koussevitzky, Diaghilev, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

People with lots of money, we’re talkin’ Esterhazy money, are not, by and large, spending it on the patronage of classical music the way they might have 250 years ago. There are certainly some who are, and while the NEA is funded less and less each year, there are still a handful of composers (mostly already well-established) that are receiving commissions from individuals and government/non-profit grants. They are, however, the exceptions.

In addition to people like Rich Uncle Pennybags and non-profits, one of the biggest support groups for composers has historically been performers, particularly over the last hundred years or so. Conductor Serge Koussevitzky commissioned Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra; clarinetist Benny Goodman commissioned Copland’s Clarinet Concerto.

The internet has lowered the entry cost of so many industries and other ventures. Why not patronage? In Spring 2010, Facebook ruffled feathers with some new policies about privacy (and a leak of some personal info). Many informed users were worried that Facebook had too much control over the internet and users, and up popped a little startup called Diaspora. Diaspora was working on a new kind of social network to compete with Facebook, and to raise money, they turned to Kickstarter. Kickstarter allows users to pledge support to creative products. It brings together people who are creating niche products with the niches they want to access and influence. Diaspora was able to raise over $200,000 mostly with donations of $5 to $25.

Kickstarter has an interesting all-or-nothing approach to fundraising. When starting a project, you set a goal and a deadline. People pledge various amounts. Different amounts get different rewards. If you reach your goal, backers’ credit cards are charged for their pledges and you get the money. If not, no money changes hands. This makes sense. The Diaspora folks couldn’t have done much with $200, and it would suck to be one of the people who gave part of the $200 just to see nothing come of it.

That got me thinking about my own niche, contemporary concert music. How could this model work for us that are creating music which unfortunately (yet honestly) has a very small audience? Kickstarter could be perfect for arts patronage in the internet age. Commissioning consortia have been around for quite a while, but when was the last time you heard of a commission that you could participate in for twenty-five bucks? (crickets)

So, I’m going to try it. I’m going to use Kickstarter to put together a commissioning consortium for a solo saxophone piece I’ll start working on this summer with Tim Rosenberg. I’ll keep updates on the blog, and on the Kickstarter project page. I’ll have a link to that here when I launch the project. My goal is to raise at least $500 in 90 days. Wish me luck!

It seems that at least once a week, I see or hear a conversation among composers that goes something like this:

composer 1: Nobody ever comes to our concerts.

composer 2: Tell me about it. I spend months writing a piece. Then, I have to beg performers to practice, rehearse and perform it. I tell everybody I know, put up flyers, and after all that effort, only a dozen people show up to hear the thing. Heck, there are usually more people on the stage than in the audience!

composer 1: Why doesn’t anybody support new music?

There are a lot of reasons people don’t go to recitals or concerts. I understand people are busy. But this Monday night, I went to a composition recital by Matt Karram, a talented undergraduate composer here at MSU. I don’t know how many students are in the composition studio, but it’s at least twenty. At Matt’s recital, I counted no more than five composers (outside of Matt).

How can we expect other people to support new music when we don’t even support each other? It’s simple. We can’t.

</soapbox>

David MacDonald, composer

Orwell Corollary

Word Up

The Future of Arts Patronage? All or Nothing!

Put your money where your mouth is.