“…To The Place I Belong…”

I spent this past weekend in Huntington, West Virginia, for the 2010 Student Conference of the Society of Composers, Inc., which was hosted by Marshall University. Conference coordinator Mark Zanter, an extremely versatile Marshall-based composer, guitarist, and conductor who is active in both the worlds of postclassical music and jazz, asked me to be this year’s keynote speaker and I took the opportunity to attend everything.

Although Huntington is a mere ten hours away from New York City by car, getting there by airplane actually took as long as flying to London. There are no direct flights and the connections between flights are not optimal. My talk wasn’t until 7:00 p.m., but in order to get there in time for the first concert on Friday afternoon at 1:00 p.m., I had to wake up at 4:00 a.m. and take two flights that ultimately landed me at the Charleston WV airport, from where I was picked up by Gregory Richmond—a Marshall grad student who was one of the composers featured during the conference—and driven to Huntington.

I recount the particulars of my journey there not to get sleep deprivation sympathy, but to illustrate how obstacles separate composer communities in this country, obstacles that are as much a product of our sizable—and not always easily navigable—geography as they are of a general lack of connectivity among composers on the whole. I say this as someone who has spent more than the last decade of my life working as part of a team for a national service organization devoted to promoting a greater sense of community among composers. The Society of Composers is another such organization. Yet our paths have too infrequently crossed. Hopefully this will change.

Now, at last, a few words about the conference: Works by a total of 30 composers from various parts of the country, most of whom I had never heard music by before, were featured on five consecutive concert programs presented over the course of two days. The participating performers included Marshall students and faculty, as well as a few invited guests. And the music ranged from solo piano and percussion showcases to art songs to “fixed media” electro-acoustic pieces to hefty compositions for brass quintet, saxophone quartet, and wind symphony. Stylistically, the offerings encompassed post-modernism as well as defiant modernism and unabashed romanticism. It was all over the map, although none of it really blurred boundaries with other genres of music. It was all work that was clearly in the realm of “contemporary classical music.” However, curiously, the conference was tied to the 2010 Birke Symposium, also held at Marshall under the banner of “Giving Voice: Social Justice in the Arts.” That symposium featured a politically charged art exhibition juried by Mark Hosler, who is probably best known for his work as part of the provocative appropriation-based experimental rock band Negativland.

Several of the works featured on the SCI conference’s concert programs were in fact inspired by social justice issues. There were pieces that referenced everything from current conditions in North Korea to the debt-based nightmare of consumerism. Additionally, three of the composers whose works were performed—James Bunch, Roc Lee, and Josh Perry-Parish—presented papers about the intersection of music and social concerns, and my own talk was about how composers could be more involved in society overall. But unlike visual art, which can represent just about anything equally effectively, or literary works that can persuasively narrate an even more specific viewpoint, music is at its core an elusive medium. Take away recognizable prerecorded sounds, lyrics, and titles, and just leave pitches, rhythms, timbres, and dynamic levels, and it’s nearly impossible to drive home a specific message that will be universally comprehensible. That’s an obstacle that might ultimately be even greater than the flight paths between New York City and Huntington, West Virginia. But that obstacle might also be our greatest asset. Since the abstraction of music does not offer us the ability to give a definitive answer about anything, our music is not limited to a single interpretation. The very specificity of literary and visual art works that makes them such effective portals to particular times and places also locks them to those times and places. Music, on the other hand, can travel freely without such borders; the only barrier is our willingness to accept information that is mostly not concretely explicable.