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Doublereed Archive - Posting 000037.txt from 2003/11

From: Jennifer Paull <jennifer.paull@-----.com>
Subj: [DR-L] Composers and their problems
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 01:32:54 -0500

Dear List,

Being a composer is the hardest job in music. Being a composer today
versus
the apathy of a world wishing for repetition of all things comfortable
and known,
is even more so. At the time of Telemann, one played music written at
the
moment, not music written several hundred years before. Today, one must
do
the latter to fill the hall.

Today's interpreter often prefers what has gone before, yet today's
composer
rarely has the supporting job to help him whilst he struggles to let
his voice
be heard. There are also many more of them around. Populations figures
are many times greater than they were a few centuries ago.

(S)He is also obliged to find his/her own fingerprint, his/her own
trade mark.
(S)He cannot write in the style of another because communication has
made
the world such that everyone hears and knows what everyone else is
producing.
Telemann did not know what everyone of his contemporaries wrote any more
than did Purcell or others restricted by horse, quill and candlewax.
Half the
population in Western society - those with an X chromosome - were not
allowed to enter into the question. How much of Felix' music was really
composed by Fanny Mendelssohn, obliged to hide her identity by the same
injustices still perpetuated against so many women today?

We take so much for granted. My heart goes out to Bear and other
composers who are struggling within a system that is axed against them.

As someone who believes in contemporary music and has performed it all
her
life upon an instrument initially considered unworthy, then considered
to be
baroque only in amplitude, I know how difficult it is for the innovator
to cross
the barrier of audience and performer conformity.

Bear, take heart. According to the teaching of Cathy Berberian - one of
the
greatest musicians of the 20th Century and also one of the greatest
innovators
- there are but 2 types of music; the good and the bad. She sang
Monteverdi
and Purcell as well as the Beatles, Cage, Berio, Weil, Gershwin and
jazz songs
(and a Macedoine of everything between).

There is place for everyone; but everyone does not give all music its
place. I
think that we should bear in mind (no pun intended!) the frustrations
and endless
obstacles in the pathway of a composer living today and ask - "do I
play enough
contemporary music? If not, why not?"

Music is not meant to be shrouded in a mist of naphthaline. It is made
of contrasts;
light and shade, forte and piano, yesterday and today. There will also
be tomorrow.
Our concerts and recitals should reflect this proportionately. Do they?

Seventy odd years after Schoenberg's 'Pierrot Lunaire' - how many
people can
honestly say that they have studied and followed the process of
creativity through
its transformations, mutations and development?

Every composer cries from the heart. (S)He is MUTE without the
performer. To
paraphrase John Lennon, "Give contemporary music a chance!"

Jennifer

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Jennifer Paull,
Amoris International
http://www.amoris.com
Rare music at the press of an oboe and a computer key
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