In This Issue
Spring/Summer 2008 (Vol. 15, No. 2)
We bring to the fore two essential aspects of art music: education and creative freedom. Whenever we read or hear about the dropping of music and art from school curricula, we are reminded of the state of traditional human values in our society. It’s difficult to compete with the kinds of projected salaries outstanding professional football and basketball players can expect vs., say, the members of a symphony orchestra.
Music education is facing all sorts of challenges, some of which are posed by the new technologies, such as how to use computers or iPods or DVDs (see review of Jan Tucker Rhoda’s violin lesson) to open up new worlds of possibility. Still in play are the challenges of paying for a good music education one wants to pursue, what schools and/or what private teachers to choose, etc., etc. The good news is that, despite rampant commercialism, American music education is perhaps at the highest level of achievement ever enjoyed. Just look at the quality of the young performers you see at concert venues. They are equipped to perform the most complex music being produced today, music by their equally young peers who have chosen a career of composition. The question is no longer musical training—the supply of skill and talent is overwhelming. The issue is economics—the demand no longer meets the supply.
Is this the price we pay for the freedoms granted us to live our lives as we choose, without interference by government or the various institutions that serve our secular society? It is not our intention to write an essay on sociology in music, but let’s just look at one example of a society that did not offer the creative artist total freedom, the Soviet Union, where one of music’s greatest figures faced the everyday pressures of survival, both personal and creative. Dmitri Shostakovich managed to produce symphonies and concerti and chamber works, music that at times seemed to rise from the depths of his soul. Yet much of his music was also lively, full of good humor and, we are told by those who lived in that society at the time, some of his passages contain hidden messages for his listeners pointedly denied by Nicolas Slonimsky, by the way, (see NMC v14#3).
Have we produced music of that caliber? Perhaps not. If we listen to the works of other European composers, one gets a sense of the tradition of music as a profound form of expression whether tragic or celebratory. From Bach to Stockhausen, composers were all well-schooled in every aspect of music, but the greatest among them never allowed the academy to dampen the powerful emotions expressed in their music. The American approach has been far, far different. One Russian emigré once said to me that he found so-called American art music “superficial.”
Such a comparative judgment is meant to suggest nothing more than that the nature of a society has at least something to do with the kind of music that is produced. Our personal rap is that composers need to free themselves from the precepts they may have been imbued with by their pedants. For it is in those 40 or more years of the past century when they were smitten with mathematical models, either by choice or coercion, that we lost a good part of our audience for new music. Composers produced all too much music devoid of any passion, any sense of life. There was too much emphasis on musical engineering, as if there were a structural problem that had to be solved. But we also recognize that many of the pedants of that era were truly influential figures in the best sense, and we urge you to read the marvelous tribute to Andrew Imbrie by Joshua Kosman in our obituary section.
Still, it is healthy to see that composers are beginning to regenerate themselves and be free of the straits of academe, for that association has not always produced “good” music.
There is a tradition going back to European musical society in which composers resorted to certain structural forms to achieve all-out fun with music. One of the cleverest examples of the musical palindrome, for example, was Paul Hindemith’s Hin und Zuruck, an opera whose story leads up to a murder whereupon everything stops and the action, the performers’ movements, the music, the words—everything—is then performed in reverse. We are constantly on the lookout for the use of such creative devices, especially when they produce laughs. We see no reason why good musical training ought not go hand in hand with musical fun, and we can name several living composers who use cinematic, poetic and enigmatological models with which to compose. We think we have found an outstanding example of a composer who fully agrees with us on the notion of having fun with musical ideas.
We dedicate this issue to that discovery, Mr. John Lampkin, known to many as the creator and publisher of The Cracked Soundboard, a monthly music humor e-magazine. Throughout these pages of NMC, the various interests of this unusual composer will be highlighted. (BLC)
