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DERIVATIVE
March 06, 2010, 10:17 AM posted by Maria Choban Yesterday, after a lecture given by Carter Pann on having the courage to be an unabashed tonalist composer, Brent pulled me aside following a tussle with a couple of composers, one of whom obviously isn't afraid to fight. Brent said to me "I think folks get confused and think that you don't like earlier classical music and want to chuck history, when in fact that's not what you're saying at all". Yup. I use a word - "Derivative". I apply it to Rzewski and maybe most of the Movie/Film score composers. I could apply it to a few of the composers I heard on the 10am Chamber concert yesterday at the symposium for the Society of Composers, inc. I am very much against derivative composition. Derivative to me means someone who is not only adopting the style of something in the past (distant or near), but staying totally within that box so that the composition sounds like imitation and not at all infused with personality and the goings-on of today. So, Billy Joel's "Fantasies and Delusions" are derivative of Chopin and Fields. I have to be both careful and sensitive when I apply this word, Derivative. Sensitive because many of these composers are simply immersed in their own worlds, their own heads, and don't really come up for air and smell what's going on around them - involve themselves in the world today. One older composer tagged Pann for using too many notes in his piano concerto. And while I too had the same reaction, I was struck by this gentleman's reasoning. Essentially, he argued that the return to diatonic composition created a profusion of composers who used more notes to build quality ("more is more"). This gentleman seemed to espouse that 12 tone made it possible to be more discrete, more selective and perhaps more better. Brent Weaver is definitely a tonalist. And his music is extremely discrete. There are no spare notes. Playing his stuff is like competing in Olympic Figure 8 ice-skating (do they still do that in the Olympics?). It's extremely difficult to play something so distilled. It's poetry. But, do I think Carter Pann's composition(s) are derivative? See - this is where I get knotted up. I recognize that I really really really like Carter Pann the person. He's smarter than hell, very circumspect without being cloying or falsely modest. He has backbone, he's respectful, he has fun doing what he's doing, he has a shitload of knowledge (he's not a philistine). It's much easier for me to use the word Derivative with a composer I don't know (Rzewski or Joel). But with someone I've met and like and respect, I want to find a loophole, I want to just be able to say "okay, he's a great craftsman with good ideas, but not my cup of tea". Now, Andrew Walters, who's "Moth to Flame" for flute and two-channel electroacoustic playback which opened that terrific concert yesterday afternoon, is clearly an example of my previous wish in my last sentence. Upon hearing the piece I knew immediately that this was extremely well crafted, great innovative art, held my attention, well performed, NOT derivative, fun to listen to - but not something toward which I naturally gravitate. Later, upon meeting Walters I had the same impression as with Pann: very very bright, personable, honest humility, nice guy. Walters is someone who's pieces I will wrestle with because I have a certain personal instinct that I will grow as a musician to encompass something I haven't naturally gravitated toward. The Stravinsky Sonata had the same effect on me. I chased that thing for a couple of years before my insides accepted it and now I LOVE it. BTW, the composer who wasn't afraid to tussle with me mentioned Stravinsky's Pulcinella as a derivative work with merit, querying me on my thoughts. I answered that Stravinsky's Rite of Spring will outlast Pulcinella by at least a thousand years. |
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