From: fields@zip.eecs.umich.edu (Matthew Fields)
Subject: unflame
Organization: University of Michigan EECS Dept., Ann Arbor, MI
Date: Wed, 23 Dec 1992 14:55:25 GMT

On some of the recent discussions of truth and compromise: I
personally find that having to worry about the rent puts a great dent
in my creativity and libido.  While it may provide "experience" in
dealing with anxiety and elbow grease over long stretches of time, I
personally don't have a lot of faith that this experience contributes
to my music.

I view my own music (your milage may vary) as a cultural stuff to be
enjoyed by a lot of people, a part of a collaboration between me,
performers, and listeners.  While I retain copyright and royalties to
my "intellectual property", in an artistic sense my music is only
incidentally about ME and MY experiences.  Mainly it's about the sense
of recognition and warmth people feel when they share enthusiasm about
sounds, even if they fiercely disagree with each other on almost
everything else.  I just visited a community wind ensemble in which
almost everybody was a practicing Christian, and assumed that as a
Jew, I must be not only a theist practitioner of the Jewish religion,
but also a messianic Jew (a.k.a. a "Jew for Jesus").  It proved
expedient to simply not explain that I'm an atheist who toyed years
ago with worshipping the Heavenly Muses, then realized that I was
playing a psychological game that had nothing to do with belief.  But
though the Rightist pro-military Christian attitude that surrounded me
and was erroneously projected on me was pretty strenuous, I had no
problem sharing musical joy with these people.  We were fine as long
as we talked notes.  In very basic ways they didn't get to know me,
but in more fundamental musical ways, we all reached each other loud
and clear.

I guess my point is that while having lots of exciting experiences is
valueable for a composer (it does, after all, give her/him a broader
base of potential metaphors with which to think---which is also a good
reason to consider a liberal arts education), I tend to put less
emphasis on that and more on NOT assuming you have the musical Midas
touch---NOT quitting on polishing and optimizing your composition
before it's just absolutely ideal all the way through---NOT being
content with the first thing you improvise as necessarily the final
form of your composition, although improvisation is both an important
form of performance and potentially a great source of raw materials.

Well, that's how I see it over here.  I still think there are just as
many charlatans outside of as in academia, and that the point of
academia is for teachers of a wide variety of things to band together
and share financial arrangements, forming a group (the academy) which
can also encourage interdisciplinary discovery in a way not as readily
possible among unaffiliated scholars.  While the academy provides
fertile ground for charlatans, so does the rest of society.  The
struggle to preserve culture is just as fierce outside as inside the
university system, as far as I can tell.

Mr. Harrington's suggestion that if a composer feels like doing a
piece "in the manner of" composers of old, they should go ahead and do
it interests me in light of a conversation I had years ago with George
Crumb, who for years has taught a graduate composition seminar at
University of Pennsylvania which is devoted to exactly this kind of
project.

Hmmm.  Well, here I am being hypocritical again.  I said "get back to
composing", and I've just written 5 longish paragraphs on musical
philosophy.  I think I'll end with a Laurie Anderson quote.

"I was on a beautiful island
that rose up from the sea,
and everyone on the island
was somebody from TV;

and there was a beautiful view
that nobody there could see
because everyone on the island
was screaming "Look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me!"

Newsgroups: rec.music.compose