The invocation of life in musical text seems axiomatic, as music comes from a composer and life by-proxy. But what does it mean to be a composer of "new music" in plain terms?
Where does the line between its corollary "old" come in? In this blog post, I want to argue for the importance of contemporary experimentation with classical music and their forms. In short, the world is in need of new music because the typified manners by which we relate to the world musically must be upended in order for true progress to be made. How can us humans expect to be in the world if we do not respond to the world? Have we run out of ideas and are now forced into a life of servitude to the 18-20th centuries, relegated to utilizing antiquarian forms in the pursuit of drawing something new out? The defining feature of "new music" (according to Dr. Michael Rebhahn's defense of his controversial 2012 lecture "I hereby resign from New Music") is its timeliness, and the composer's eschewing of the attempt to purposefully make what is erroneously called "New Music."
As he states, at the end of his lecture he writes that the most pressing goal for young composers is to commit themselves to being responsive to the world they inhabit, and to create music that aptly responds to the surroundings they inhabit. Thus, a "timely New Music" is not about technical novelty or instrumental innovation but about decisively articulating the emotions, feelings, politics, behaviours, and "sounds" of the present world. Pulling out of life itself those subtleties which the common person glosses over, and inviting us to experience the present moment from a different perspective entirely. Yet, in Rebhahn's article he made a clarification between "New Music" and "Contemporary Classical Music," the former being a unending way-of-hearing-the-world while the latter is a fidelity to Academic regurgitation, bland reiterations of played-out compositional tropes, old tricks with new dogs as the anecdote goes. I find this dichotomy to be one of the clearest reasons why new music is so vital. If we wish to know our present world, we must listen to it!
Raymond Murray Schaefer (the father of the ubiquitous term "soundscape," the neologism schizophonia, along with his seminal work for the "World Soundscape Project"), in his 1969 book "The New Soundscape," had argued that contemporary music educators must not look only to the conventional musicks of historical epochs gone by but the present one as well. Moreover, it was the present world that could be of the most benefit to impressionable young minds interested in music. Teachers must learn to embrace the "world sonograph":
"Behold the new orchestra: the sonic universe! And the new musicians ~ anyone and anything that sounds! There is a shattering corollary to this for all music educators."
What this seminal quote denotes is the necessity, nay the requirement, to embrace the vibrant (and loud!) world around us in order to derive the best way to operate within it. However, while all of us can hear not all of us are capable of the ability to Hear, and it is this that the "New Music" composer must understand. While the use of "Academic formenlehre" (to use Taruskian terminology, 2010) is commendable and laudable in its own right, it cannot provide the audience of today with enough roadmaps to discover ourselves. One can argue if Glass and Muhly, Reich and Adams (and the countless others not named here) are fit for the job as "Voices of our Age" but my answer is will remain the same. NO! They are not the innovators who will challenge us to negotiate our aesthetic penchants, grapple with the fact that our desire for "newness" has run dry. There will never be another moment like 1805, 1824, 1869, 1893, 1911, 1913, 1917, and certainly 1952. Why? Because there is nothing "new" in the world, only slightly-lesser version of "new" things that have already been found.
Is this a particular view, one that may be wrong? Certainly, and of course there are new works that challenge conventions made and premiered each and every day. But one must ask themselves if it they are truly new or by-proxy? Zoom out and you'll see it's all the same. Tod Machover (and everyone mentioned here) simply are "Contemporary Classical Music" composers which isn't a bad thing. But they are not "New Music" composers and we must grapple with the fact that they are innovating within stylistic conventions of the 19th century.
If we want newness, we must want to search for new forms. But we haven't gotten there yet.
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