Category: Articles

In these completely surreal and horrific times, I count myself among the lucky who have not lost any family, friends or colleagues in the horrible tragedies that occurred at New York City’s World Trade Center, at the Pentagon in Washington DC, and 80 miles outside Pittsburgh. Thankfully, the same is true for all of us here at the American Music Center. Although the AMC is less than three miles away from this still unbelievable nightmare in lower Manhattan, on some levels, it seems much further away. An important component to overcoming this sadness and regaining our strength is to reflect on what this loss represents for all of us who care about new music.

I’ve lived in New York City my entire life and remember the World Trade Center being built when I was a child. And throughout my life, I have walked there and back. But, the things I will remember most about the Twin Towers are the many remarkable concerts that I attended there.

Attending the world premiere of Wendy Mae Chambers’ One World Percussion, an hour-long tour-de-force for 50 percussionists performing on 500 instruments in between the Towers and reverberating well beyond them is an experience that made me forever an apostle of new music. I will never forget John Schaeffer’s wonderful series of New Sounds concerts in the Winter Garden atrium of the World Financial Center, whose personal recent highlights included the Hildergurls, Robert Fripp’s solo soundscapes and Stephen Scott’s Bowed Piano Ensemble. I remember being mesmerized by the Philip Glass Ensemble, staring up at the seemingly infinite floors of the Towers and finding slight variations in visual patterns as I heard their analogous variations in the gradually shifting melodic cells of Glass’s music.

Most recently, I remember braving the rain for the X-ecutioners, a group of experimental turntable artists, and the majesty of the world premiere of Glenn Branca’s new Symphony #11, Hallucination City, reportedly for 100 electric guitars and described better than I ever could in a column Greg Sandow contributed to NewMusicBox. What strange and awful new meanings are conjured up by the name of the group of DJs and the title of Branca’s new symphony, both of which brought such vibrant life to the Plaza of the World Trade Center!

It is the “bringing to life” that new music represents that should comfort us and move us beyond these tragic events. New music is a beacon for our hopes and our future.

Frank J. Oteri
Editor
NewMusicBox

Greg Sandow

I was deeply moved when I heard the premiere of Ingram Marshall‘s Kingdom Come, played by the American Composers Orchestra in 1997, and I wasn’t alone. The piece got an ovation. I left the concert with two members of the ACO’s board. Both had been as touched as I was; one said he’d been in tears.

Now Kingdom Come has been recorded by the ACO on a Nonesuch release, and I can hear it again. If anything, I love it even more. Right from the start, it’s strongly emotional, with a timpani roll leading into an unhappy minor triad, which rises through the orchestra from the low strings to the flutes and violins. Then all this happens once more, though now it’s a different minor triad, entering underneath the first one almost like a shudder.

But then strong emotion is a constant trait of Ingram’s music, growing from—or pervading; this is like the chicken and the egg; which comes first, style or content?—what sounds like tonal harmony. But are the triads really tonal? They sound as if they are, and so do the descending scalar passages, lovingly harmonized, that slowly appear perhaps a minute and 20 seconds into the piece. (They’re really two-note figures, pulling downwards, now filling in the space between top and bottom in the reverse direction, starting at the clear, untroubled top.)

But I don’t think the chords here function tonally. Sometimes, as in those loving scalar passages, chords might connect in what sounds like a tonal progression, carrying an emotional charge remembered from tonality. But moments like these sound, to me, like reminiscences. In longer spans, the chords don’t sound as if they move like tonal chords, responding to the gravitation of a central key. (This is also true in Gavin Bryars‘s music.) Instead they tend to hang there, not motionless, but moving slowly in a weightless space.

The only force they carry is emotional. Anything that might seem too emotional—like the taped choruses, or the high trumpet that starts to sing five minutes after the beginning, or the hymn (or what sounds like one) that comes a little later, more quietly in the lower brass and which urges the trumpet toward a melody—all this gets strengthened by the underlying shudder, which keeps returning like an emotional and musical motif. Some nine minutes in, the shudder seems to fill the music, as if the choral voices were melting on each other and over the orchestral chords. Ingram, as he himself says, is best known as an electronic composer, and here acoustic sounds, even in the orchestra, are piled upon each other like layers of a tape collage. That, too, is an obvious departure from tonal harmony; the notes (or so it seems to me) have lost their structural connection.

Two-thirds of the way toward the end the orchestra subsides, and something troubled buzzes like a stubborn fly. To me this sounds as if it had been spawned by the shudders. I’m not sure what sound the buzzing is; probably some transformation of what Ingram’s liner notes tell me is an old recording of a Bosnian Muslim gusle singer. I hadn’t remembered (or maybe I never knew; did I read the program notes in 1997?) that Kingdom Come is filled with the pain and sorrow of the former (now tortured) Yugoslavia; it’s dedicated to the memory of Ingram’s brother-in-law, Francis Tomasic, who was killed working as a journalist in Bosnia. Maybe that explains the shudder. We often act these days as if we’re frightened of emotion. By “we” of course I mean sophisticates who like new music, and one reason we shy from feeling that’s too blatant or too obvious is that we’ve seen it turn to dishonest sentimental mush in the more commercial regions of pop culture, like pop-song hits and network television. Earlier, our modernist forebears distrusted blatant feeling for similar reasons. And now it’s also not hip to be emotional; when I worked at Entertainment Weekly, one editor blanched when I put feeling into pop reviews, as if I’d revealed myself as some kind of drooling geek.

But as I wrote last month, there really are some problems with emotion, in our present age, or rather reasons why it easily can grow so sentimental. If we think that we can create a good life simply because we have good feelings, then surely we’ve forgotten everything we should have learned from history. There’s painful trouble in the world; we can feel joyful, but if our joy doesn’t also capture the pain that’s inevitably near us (linked through everything we buy, everything we consume, from food to energy to ideas), then it’s empty. Ingram’s music clearly touches pain, not just in Kingdom Come, but in everything I’ve heard from him. The melancholy fog that I associate with him—maybe an unfair generalization of his most famous piece, Fog Tropes, for brass and tapes of foghorns, along with other sounds, like distant seagulls—reads to me like genuine regret for all the things in life that, right now, we don’t know how to change.

Kingdom Come takes just 16 minutes of the CD it’s on, whose full title is Kingdom Come/Hymnodic Delays/Fog Tropes II. The four movements of Hymnodic Delays, for a four-voice madrigal group and digital processing, help demonstrate why Ingram’s harmony isn’t really tonal. They’re based on early New England choral music, and when once or twice they seem to literally reproduce their sources, they seem a little jarring. The rhythms don’t float; the harmony has structure and direction. And that, in Ingram’s context, makes the music seem a little obvious (though in its original setting, it surely wouldn’t).

Fog Tropes II is a reexamination of Fog Tropes for string quartet and the varied twilight sounds on tape. It’s worth studying to see how stabbing chords and tremolos expose themselves without losing any dignity, and how the seagulls—which, along with the recorded sound of waves, are cliché of sentimental new-age music—do as well. Grown-up regret is far from sentimental. Fog still can be evocative (we’d better enjoy it, like everything in nature, while we can). And one function of music ought to be to help us mine our souls.

Ingram seems to mine his depth of memory on Evensongs, a 1997 CD from New Albion, a label that’s recorded him for years. The memories here are, externally at least, both of hymns and classical chamber music. The piece that grips me most is a long (20 minutes) piano quartet, In My Beginning Is My End (a title suggested by T.S. Eliot‘s Four Quartets), played with stunning unashamed passion by the Dunsmuir Piano Quartet. It has a striking, unexpected, almost bouncy, rhythmical beginning
, which segues into music that’s more lyrical, and almost sounds as if it could be French (César Franck? Debussy?). Then there’s a harmless-seeming pause, the same kind that separated bounciness from lyricism—and all at once comes something for the strings alone, so high and sad it seems (in context) almost like a child’s premonitions of adulthood.

Rhythmic sections alternate with sadness; the piece starts to sound like a collage again, but this time a horizontal one, of moments juxtaposed without (or, once again, so it seems to me) a structural relationship. The piece, as I hear it, doesn’t unfold like classical chamber music. Instead it reconstructs how chamber music sounds.

The more I hear it, the more astonishing it seems. The second movement, Ingram says, could be called a set of variations, though in a formal sense I’m not sure it really is one, because I don’t hear a theme whose structural elements Ingram systematically elaborates. In his liner notes, he says something that seems very much like this, and puts it in a lovely way—he says the movement “dwells on” two hymns. “Dwelling on them” (returning to them, lingering around them) is more relaxed than “varying” them. The separate “variations”—not separated by formal stops and starts, but still made distinct, as they’d be in Brahms or Beethoven, by sound and gesture—function, once again, as reminiscences, this time of the idea of writing variations.

Though at this point, I can’t help wondering what Ingram would think of what I’m saying, if he’d think my conceit of reminiscence has any meaning in his music. I feel a little helpless, as if I’ve gotten lost in abstractions, and lost my simple love of music. I only know this piano quartet wows me, contents me, and delights me. My only complaint might be with the recording, and with the recordings of every other piece on these two CDs—they all should be more distant. We don’t need to hear the physicality of each separate instrument, and even less the breathiness of voices in Hymnodic Delays. The music, paradoxically, would seem more tangible if its separate parts were less so, if the microphones had stepped back, to let us hear the sounds blending in a larger space.

But that’s a small thing, which didn’t stop me from being utterly absorbed by what I heard. Ingram is a treasure (a master composer, but even more a treasure). I wish he were more widely recognized as one, and I hope that these recordings help.

Frank J. Oteri Photo by Melissa Richard

Standard repertoire apologists who are loathe to acknowledge the scarcity of new music in orchestral programs or on the radio frequently make the claim that for people who’ve never heard the music of Mozart or Beethoven, their music is new music.

This line of reasoning has always struck me as somewhat disingenuous. It’s almost like saying that for people who don’t know Harry S Truman is dead, he’s still alive! The music of Mozart and Beethoven is old music. That doesn’t make it any less exciting to experience, but it is NOT new music.

So what is new music? And what is old music? With today’s exciting stylistic pluralism, there is no overarching element that applies to all new music other than the fact that it’s being written now. In the year 2001, in addition to composers writing advanced electronic scores and exploring their own microtonal scale systems, there are also composers writing symphonies that sound like Haydn, liturgical music that sounds Medieval, and chamber music that sounds like it was written in the late nineteenth century, as if the entire twentieth century never happened. There are also a great many composers still exploring integral 12-tone serialism as if the last half-century of indeterminacy, minimalism, totalism, and rock never happened. And, if you have open minds and ears, all of this music, if it is well crafted and has something to say, can be equally valid.

To throw a monkey wrench into the whole notion of new music, we’re devoting the September issue to exploring new music which on the surface appears much older. We spoke with Richard Einhorn about how the ghosts of the music of the past inevitably intrude upon the music of today. Craig Zeichner has supplied us with a fascinating overview of new music composers and early music performers who have come together to forge a truly post-modern sound world. We asked a group of six composers whose music may appear to be anachronistic to folks with set notions about what the music of our time should sound like to explain why they write the music they write. And John Luther Adams wonders if all this recent interest in the music of the eighteenth century and earlier is not so much a throwback but rather the natural course of music making which somehow got side-tracked during the nineteenth century. What do you think?

The issue of timeliness was a big part of Greg Sandow’s “Kitsch-O-Meter” last month which prompted Ingram Marshall, whose music is also deeply indebted to early music practices and who was the subject of last month’s In The First Person conversation, to wonder where he fit in. To add another layer to this cross-relational chain, this month Greg Sandow responds to Ingram Marshall. Other items in News&Views include information about the Hechinger Fund’s new Encores commissioning project, Harvestworks incursion of experimental music into DJ culture, and Steve Heitzeg’s new Nobel Symphony, created for an upcoming gathering of Nobel laureates. And, of course, the newest concerts and recordings featuring American repertoire are included in our Hear&Now and SoundTracks compendia regardless of what anyone thinks about their “timeliness.”

So where does all this time warping fit in with the folks who say that Mozart and Beethoven are new music? Well, listeners might be better served if we celebrated Mozart and Beethoven as well as Roger Sessions, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and Thelonious Monk as old music, and concentrated on all the new music being written today—from the latest piano trio in c minor to a chance experiment involving 500 kazoos attached to ring modulators—as new music!

Dean Suzuki Photo by Ryan Suzuki

In last month’s column, I discussed the significance of the Paul Dresher Ensemble Electro-Acoustic Band and the Bang On A Can All-Stars as ensembles featuring composer/performers and which also commissioned works by other composers. Both groups, along with a host of others of their generation, share another common element: Their music is informed and shaped by rock music.

Perhaps is it no coincidence that composers such as Dresher, Wolfe, Lang, Gordon, and Ziporyn have put together electro-acoustic bands to perform their compositions. All have included a rock component to their music with some frequency, if not often, and “cover” works by others. All are baby-boomers who grew up with rock and roll, some of them playing in rock bands or at the very least, playing a bit of air guitar and fantasizing about being in the Beatles, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Talking Heads, or the Clash. The ethos of creating music in the context of an ensemble, playing original and cover material seems to be encoded in the DNA of baby-boomers and subsequent generations of composers.

Of course, for years, the very thought of an electric guitar, especially one featuring fuzz, wah-wah, or other outboard devices, was considered anathema (in fact, it wasn’t so very long ago that even the classical guitar was not embraced by musical academia, but that’s another issue altogether). Today, it seems quite natural that the electric guitar figures in the concert hall, whether in the hands of Dresher, Bang on a Can’s Mark Stewart, Steve Mackey, or Glenn Branca and his minions, though it is still a stretch to imagine the Juilliard String Quartet or the Berlin Philharmonic performing along with a rock rhythm section.

The electro-acoustic instrumentation is the most immediate manifestation of the rock influence: the Bang On A Can All-Stars include electric guitar, electronic keyboards, and other amplified instruments. The Paul Dresher Ensemble Electro-Acoustic Band includes, in addition to amplified acoustic instruments, electric guitar, a MIDI mallet instrument, electronic keyboards, and electronic drums. Indeed, all of the instruments are not only amplified but are often processed and otherwise electronically manipulated, and the entire sound derives from the rock as well as classical tradition.

Dresher writes: “[I] formed the Electro-Acoustic Band in order to offer to composers a group of virtuoso musicians able to use the extraordinary advances in music technology of the past 15 years and who possess the ability to perform music which has roots variously in the classical tradition, rock and roll, jazz and world music. Throughout the band’s work, our goal is to expand the boundaries of what is considered chamber music and to challenge the boundaries which separate ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ culture, and musical styles which may have origins in diverse cultures.” He also says: “My goal in integrating traditional acoustic instruments with the new electronic instruments is not to explore the technology for its own sake but rather to approach these developments as the next step in the evolution of the resources from which composers may draw their sounds and compositional resources. Musically, my goal is to bring to as wide an audience as possible a repertory of contemporary chamber music which is largely unavailable from existing touring chamber ensembles and which I profoundly believe can cross traditional aesthetic boundaries and appeal to many diverse audiences.”

When one simply looks at titles of works on their CDs, the rock influence in Bang On A Can‘s repertoire is manifest. Of course, Bang On A Can made a big splash with their arrangement of Brian Eno‘s ambient masterpiece, Music for Airports, in which each of the four movements was painstakingly transcribed and then freely arranged by Bangers Gordon, Lang, Wolfe, and Ziporyn. “I Buried Paul” by Gordon, featured on the recently released Renegade Heaven, makes a clear reference to the Beatles’ “Paul Is Dead” controversy and is based, in large part, on the extended or false ending from “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Next spring, at a concert billed “Bang On A Can Rocks” at Merkin Hall, the All-Stars will perform arrangements of numbers by Nirvana and Steppenwolf, in addition to Eno.

What of other recent attempts at a synthesis of styles or sounds? Certainly the biggest flop that comes to mind is Third Stream Music. This failed hybrid of jazz and classical music garnered a great deal of attention and press, but ultimately failed. Why? On the one hand, one might hear the Modern Jazz Quartet performing swing versions of Bach preludes and inventions. Likewise, the Swingle Singers, a French chamber vocal choir, also performed jazzy arrangements of Bach, as well as Handel and Vivaldi, with upright bass and drum (most often with brushes). The group was led by a conservatory trained American who also studied piano with Walter Gieseking before making the transition to his own brand of faux jazz. On the other hand, you had Gunther Schuller and others attempting to infuse their works with jazz elements. In both instances, there were commercial successes (mostly on the jazz side), but it seems to have been more of a gimmick rather than a visionary artistic statement. The idea seemed timely, even brilliant and
inevitable, but the finished product did not live up to expectations.

In retrospect, it appears that the problem was with the practitioners, not necessarily in the concept. Certainly, there were some similarities in musical construction between the then contemporary be-bop and cool jazz styles and both baroque and contemporary classical music. They shared a fast harmonic rhythm, the rapid change of harmonies, perhaps as frequent as every beat. Melodies were often angular and disjunct in both styles. With such similarities in structure, why the problem? Some might assume that the problem was in rhythm. The swing rhythms of jazz were rather alien to the classical musicians. Falling somewhere between the triplet and dotted rhythms, jazz was more fluid, spontaneous, and personal than the precise, measured rhythms of classical music. Perhaps Bach can swing and the classical musicians made valiant efforts to make their performances swing, but some would argue that neither were entirely successful.

There was, in fact, a larger and more intractable problem. Neither camp truly understood and practiced the idiom of the other. While one might make an argument that the classically trained composers may have had an understanding of the jazz idiom, the performing musicians certainly did not. Many of us have heard classically trained and ingrained musicians attempt to play jazz or rock and the results can be mortifyingly painful, stilted, and unnatural. And, of course, virtually all classically trained musicians have no training whatsoever in improvisation which is the heart and soul of jazz. Likewise, while perhaps more musically savvy and informed than their classical brethren, jazz musicians in the hay day of Third Stream Music often had little or no experience performing classical and especially contemporary classical music. Anyone who has heard Andre Previn‘s Concerto — a piece written for classical guitarist John Williams which includes a small jazz combo along with an orchestra — knows how false and contrived it sounds.

This is not to imply that Third Stream music, or at least the concept, has been an utter failure. The intersection of jazz and contemporary classical music thrives today in the work of composers such as John Zorn, Anthony Davis, Fred Frith, and a plethora of others who grew up with the jazz and improvisational traditions.

On the other hand, the current hybrid or synthesis of rock and classical traditions seems to have found success where most Third Stream Music failed. The generation which has embraced both rock and experimental music has grown up in both worlds and seems to move naturally and easily between them. Dresher grew up learning guitar solos by Hendrix and Clapton, and inhaling music by Parliament/Funkadelic, the Beatles, the Stones, and many, many others, while at the same time developing his classical chops. Indeed, Dresher composed, played, and recorded with Touchstone, the Grateful Dead, and the Country Joe & the Fish off-shoot band that included Tom Constanten and “Chicken” Hirsh (track down their LP Tarot on United Artists to see what Dresher looked like as a hippie with hair flowing down to his chest and requisite ‘stache). While in college studying music and preparing to be a “classical composer,” Dresher discovered and learned non-Western musics, studying both Indian and Indonesian music. He also developed a passion for the experimental arts, especially theater, which has served him well as a composer for the theater. He even dabbled in instrument building and the fruition of his early efforts has shown up in new works for sound sculptures which he helped to design and create. In depth training and life experience in various musical styles has paid off in handsome dividends for Dresher and many of his colleagues, as opposed to the nearly fruitless cramming of Third Streamers.

Rather than inserting an electric guitar into a composition willy-nilly, composers such as Gordon, Lang, and Wolfe know what the instrument can do by virtue of their working relationship with All-Star guitarist Mark Stewart. Guitarist/composers such as Dresher, Mackey, Frith, or Scott Johnson have an even more intimate knowledge of the instrument’s potential, not only through their understanding of the idiosyncrasies of various makers and models, but also of the seemingly infinite spectrum of outboard gear and effects. The incredible variety and malleability of sounds from the electric guitar is so great, one wonders why composers have not gravitated towards the instrument long ago, in spite of the prejudice against it which prevailed for so long. In addition to electric guitars, one now finds all manner of electronic keyboards, drum kits, both acoustic and electronic (though even the best electronic drums still have that annoyingly artificial sound), electric basses, MIDI instruments, and all manner of electronic and digital processing and manipulation which are part and parcel of the rock world and increasingly embraced by the “legit” music culture.

In addition to the instrumentation and sound of rock, composers are also incorporating elements of the musical style into their work. One can hear the guitar hero’s solo, full of bravado and histrionics in any number of works. The rock back beat, the simplicity and power of punk, the grooves of James Brown and subsequent funk masters, the ferocious and savage decibel level has been compositional fodder for many composers. The deafening drones of La Monte Young‘s Dream House have done the same kind of damage to the composer’s hearing as The Who‘s live concerts have done to Pete Townshend. The brutal and all-encompassing power of Glenn Branca’s music led John Cage to accuse his younger colleague of being a musical fascist. The bass heavy funk groove of James Brown is unmistakable in any number of works by Jon Hassell.

Of course, no one knows if today’s rock informed “classical” music will be embraced in the years ahead. It may, like Third Stream Music, be viewed as a naïve and contrived musical cul de sac. There can be no doubt, however, that rock music has captured the imagination of a host of composers, from John Cage (who wrote “Beatles 1962-1970” for pianist Aki Takahashi), to La Monte Young (whose Theatre of Eternal Music included John Cale and Angus MacLise, founding members of the Velvet Underground), to hordes of student composers entering college music programs as of this writing. As contemporary music has become rather less elitist and more accessible, the rock component is unquestionably a part of new music’s current efflorescence.

Dennis Busch

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The operative term in all art forms is “universal appeal.” The true creative artist is creating for the future hoping to have his name immortalized.

But the modern composer who is presently having difficulty gaining public acceptance will always “fall back” upon the same line: “The work of J.S. Bach had trouble gaining acceptance when Bach first composed it.” Nonsense! Bach never experienced a failure in his life.

It was the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881) who attempted to blaze new trails in music and was a “modernist” of his time. But the unfortunate Mussorgsky trampled on the rules and crushed the life out of them by the sheer weight of his thought. Consequently, most of his work had to be “repaired,” revamped, and revised by Rimsky-Korsakoff.

The work of Mozart, more so than any other composer, utilizes the “universal appeal” aspect. It would not take an expert to determine that in my own work, Mozart is my prototype. Even a non-musician would get the impression that there appears to be a close “parental tie” between Mozart and myself. I owe my orchestration to Haydn. One can find in my orchestral works the same treatment of winds, brass, and strings based upon the same method Haydn utilized in his own symphonies. But while in a minor key, I can almost approach the styles of Beethoven. In some isolated instances, I can approach the lyricism of Schubert. In my operas, one can detect a marked influence of Rossini —a composer who gave the public what they wanted to hear. But the modernist hardly is. Who attends performances of modern music? A handful of curiosity seekers. The general public are at home and they are listening to Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms (and hopefully Busch).

I have always maintained that music is an imitative art entirely based upon a routined system of harmony. I have often been told, “You’re a hard man to argue music with.” But possibly Mozart himself was on “my side” when he stated, “Passion, whether great or not, must never be expressed in an exaggerated manner; and music —even in the most ardent moment —ought never offend the ear, but should always remain music, whose object it is to give pleasure.”

It appears that Mozart’s statement is the “operative term.”

Stefania De Kenessey

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At the beginning of the twenty-first century, “new” music seems to find itself in a quandary. Its predecessor, the twentieth century, was unlike any other hundred years in the history of music: it gave itself over almost completely to experimentation, to questioning past practices, to jettisoning historically accepted “truths.”

The question for us is simple: What can be genuinely “new” when virtually everything new has already been tried within the not-too-distant past?

The answer, I believe, is equally simple: The newest of the “new” must now return to tradition, to sonorities, techniques and idioms that are somehow familiar. Not blindly, not stupidly, and certainly not as a retrogressive gesture —but with judiciousness, intelligence, and taste, synthesizing diverse influences and forging ahead to create a new, distinctive voice.

To showcase this new aesthetic, I founded the humorously named “Derriere Guard” a few years ago. Our initial four-day festival took place in 1997 at that bastion of the avant-garde, The Kitchen, and featured concerts of contemporary chamber and orchestral music, gallery exhibits of art, sculpture, and architecture, poetry readings, round-table discussions, the events capped by author and cultural critic Tom Wolfe giving a (hilarious) keynote speech. The music was tonal, the paintings and sculptures figurative, the poetry metered and rhymed —and yet everything had been produced within the last five years.

I need only add that we sold out almost every show. Audiences —including the trendy downtown audiences —simply loved it. There is a genuine hunger out there for music, art, and poetry that is beautiful, well crafted, and comprehensible yet aspires to the high standards of the classical legacy.

Robert Sirico

“Classical music” is all around us. Familiar motifs permeate every aspect of our lives from commercials about how we dress to what we eat. Children’s cartoons like Bugs Bunny exposed us to some of the most dramatic and complex music ever composed. Who hasn’t at least once broken out into a verse of Elmer Fudd’s ‘Kill da Wabbit!” or sung the ‘Lone Ranger‘ while riding on a horse? Despite what “popular” forces are trying to communicate, and the “modern” direction in which they are trying to propel us, many still resort to what has been engrained into us for so long to get their point across. People “just know” that classical music is: “beautiful, moving, powerful, inspiring, relaxing.” There’s a piece written for nearly every mood and feeling and many find a solace within its framework. “Classical Music” conducts our senses to a higher plane.

From my personal experiences I have learned to associate great joy and exhilaration with Handel‘s “Alleluia Chorus” and tremendous feelings of piety with Schubert‘s famed “Ave Maria” (just hearing the opening arpeggios bring a tear to my eye as I get all choked up) to name just two of the many masterpieces that have touched my life. I have come to understand that I want to capture the same feelings of awe and reverence in my music as those that were evoked by the early masters.

I consider myself to be a “Liturgical Composer” because most of my output is based on religious texts and themes. I believe that I am participating in a “Sacred Art” and that the religious setting is where I feel I can make the most impact. Since religious practices mandate different services for different occasions, the repertoire has an abundance of examples such as Masses, Requiems, and Oratorios, to name just a few. Each ceremony evolved into an ecclesiastically prescribed rubric, and the accompanying music had to evolve with the specific rite being administered. For example, in the middle 1700s it became customary for the last lines of the Gloria and Credo sections to be closed in fugues for High Masses but not for Low Masses.

So far, I have not composed anything “new.” I am not a “modern composer,” rather a “plain old tonal” composer. My compositions are choral-orchestral adaptations of ancient Latin texts used for various holy days during the liturgical year. No listener will be presented with something that isn’t within his ability to understand. Many modern compositions are so esoteric with rhythms that are so bizarre that one may feel “assaulted” by the sounds. On the contrary I am looking to the “familiar” to soothe, to comfort, and to inspire. I was once derided by a “professional composer” who charged that I was wasting my time writing “tonally” because everything of great value was already composed and there was no need to “simply copy the Old Masters.” I insisted, as I still do, that there is great compositional freedom within old forms.

So why do I continue to compose “crusty old church music” in a language that is “dead” and in a style that is all but obsolete, for a church that has mostly adopted the “Contemporary Christian” genre and now no longer welcomes any semblance of its musical past? Because I feel that as a composer I have to passionately communicate what I believe in, in the way I believe in it, to touch souls and elevate them to thoughts of the ethereal. My liturgical compositions are not merely service music rather they are a living connection to our ancient past and an extension to our future. “Old forms” remind us of our roots. Understanding their function allows us to participate in history and to feel a pride associated with our ancestry. They transport us back to a time long ago and they preserve the “timelessness” of the very acts of worship they were created to accompany.

Milos Raickovich

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Since 1979, I have been composing in a “style” which I like to call New Classicism. This is what I wrote some twenty years ago:

“New Classicism may be roughly defined as a blend of musical Minimalism and the styles of Viennese Classical and early Romantic music.

Its form is classical (e.g. the sonata cycle), but the tonality is reduced to only a few notes of the scale. This reduction gives tonal music a new quality – a new energy.

New Classicism enables me to express my feelings while at the same time it satisfies my need for a clear and coherent musical language.”

This is, of course, a simple description of my music, and more can be said about its more subtle sides. A great text by Mark Swed can be found on the liner notes for my CD entitled New Classicism (Mode Records).

Today, my style can vary a bit from piece to piece, and different influences can be found, but the basic principles from the above description are still here. My music is mostly “abstract,” and its connection to the “modern world” is more in details than in the most obvious gestures. Occasionally, I do write music that is shaped by “outside” elements, like the score for Evans Chan‘s film The Map of Sex and Love (2001). Even then, I try to stay with my New Classicism, and to focus mostly on tonality/modality. My piece Alarm (1999), with dedication “to Mumia and the Yugoslavs, may the Empire fall!,” is yet another example of my dealings with the contemporary world: against the screaming, siren-like glissandi in violin and cello, a beautiful and quiet melody is played by the piano.