Some Remarks About Composing Music and Teaching Composition — in the First Decades of the 21st Century

1. Introduction

Instead of addressing theories and their fundaments, I’d like to focus on remarks and procedures that have guided, for over 20 years and almost unconsciously, both my academic life at a university music department and a considerably sparse compositional activity¹.

Among the remarks, I’d like to highlight: the multiplicity of elements raised by the composition practice; the increasing generality of the means in use; the need to question and reframe established structures, a vital concept for not a few artists; the increasing diversity of places and situations for musical diffusion; the coexistence of written instrumental music with other modalities of écriture; the growth of various improvisatory practices, which also encourage collective creative practices; the distance and complementarity between teaching and learning; the heterogeneity present among the new students searching for a composition degree, etc.

The list of the general adopted procedures is the following: recognition of the importance of the local idiosyncrasies and forces, present everywhere; incorporation of new technical means to the compositional palette; relativization of the seduction exerted by new theories and compositional methods; search for interactions with other modes of expression; public diffusion of every new composed piece.

We always find a multiplicity of elements involved in the conception of a musical work, and not rarely we admire the technical means developed for its realization (e.g., Stravinsky and the ballets, Messiaen and his Quatour, Ravel and the Concert for the Left Hand, Ligeti and the African music, Schoenberg and the future of German music, etc.). (Un)fortunately, these conditions are not easily replicated in pedagogical environments, and therefore reinforce the difficulties in teaching composition in our days without the support of a “common language”. By the other side, good intentions lacking the proper technique are also unfruitful. Some quotations of 20th composers and thinkers, gathered in a non-systematic way (like a compositional sketch), will help illustrating the points raised above.

2. Selected quotations

At this point, then, I want to pick up a suggestion made in Chapter 2: that outside the imagination of aestheticians and analysts, music never is alone. (Cook, 1998:265)

This remarkable man’s mental conceptions, lost in visionary moods and revelling in transcendentalism, as his writings set forth in oft inimitable fashion, must naturally — so one would infer — have found in the dreamlike and transcendental art of tones a language and mode of expression peculiarly congenial.
The veil of mysticism, the secret harmonies of Nature, the thrill of the supernatural, the twilight vagueness of the borderland of dreams, everything, in fact, which he so effectively limned with the precision of words — all this, one would suppose, he could have interpreted to fullest effect by the aid of music. And yet, comparing Hoffmann’s best musical work with the weakest of his literary productions, you will discover to your sorrow how a conventional system of measures, periods and keys — whereto the hackneyed opera-style of the time adds its share — could turn a poet into a Philistine. (Busoni, 1907: 16)

The tonality was the result of a historical gradual stylistic change against a social background. This had profound implications for the whole society. The tonality was not decreed. Schoenberg, however, has decreed his twelve-tone system. Actually, that is a total nonsense. (Ligeti, 2003: 196)

With the Violin Concerto and the Horn Concerto I’ve been trying to find new ways in the overtones field. I do not know if this is going somewhere. They are all dead ends. (Ligeti, 2003: 198)

The general becomes a self-set rule, dictated by a particular and therefore illegitimate against every other particular; the particular becomes abstract randomness, devoid of any self-determination (only imaginable as subjective mediation), a mere exemplar of its principle. (Adorno, 1962)

Since the abandonment of tonality, there has been no criterion for truth or common reference for those who compose and those who hear. Explicitly wishing to create a style at the same time as the individual work, music today is led to elaborate the criterion of truth at the same time as the discovery, the language (langue) at the same time as speech (parole). (Attali, 1977: 113)

Now we can imagine very well that the sounds and rhythms of music will be joined by new sonorities, sonorities from different spheres… (Weill, 1925)

Every audible from the whole world becomes material. (Ruttmann, 1929).

The rediscovery of the musical note in sound and speech, the welding of music, sound and speech into a single material… (Arnheim, 1933:30-31)

At all times, the machine has always been necessary for the production of music, its development, its analysis, from the Pan flute to the Martenot waves, from the Pythagorean monochord to the instruments which equip today our laboratories. However, the use of electronic means does not mean that the instruments used to the present day should be discarded. (…) The use of the aircraft does not preclude mounting the horse. (Varèse, 1955: 146)

Who knows what will happen? Perhaps something new comes through electronic pop music and rock music with electrified instruments. But I do not like this world of popular music. It is rude and always focused only on the success. The plates must be sold. (Ligeti, 2003: 205)

These newly won sound colors resemble one another monotonously, whether because of their virtually chemical purity, or because every tone is stamped by the interposition of the equipment. It sounds as though Webern were being played on a Wurlitzer organ. (Adorno, 1954)

The twelve-tone system is simply an extension of the natural character of the tonality, which?an unexpected statement at least on his part — “was not invented, but found”. If there is a true revolution in the “spirit” of music in the twentieth century, it comes later, with the advent of the synthesizer, and especially, in spite of the Stockhausens, the Berios, the Xenakis, with the almost complete disappearance of the concert, if not — am I being too pessimistic? — of the musical work as an autonomous and specific product. (Rohmer, 1997: 68)

The performance of a play, like that of a ritual, cannot simply be detached from the play itself, as if it were something that is not part of its essential being. (Gadamer, 1960: 121)

(T)he great majority of present-day recordings consist of a collection of tape segments varying in duration upward from a twentieth of a second. (Glenn Gould, apud Chanan, 1995)

The musician, like music, is ambiguous. He plays a double game. He is simultaneously musicus and cantor, reproducer and prophet. If an outcast, he sees society in a political light. If accepted, he is its historian, the reflection of its deepest values. He speaks of society and speaks against it. (Attali, 1977: 12)

“If you are willing to deal with grain export and import, come to America. If you want to be a composer, Europe is better.” He was right. In America, you can be a composer only in the context of a university, and it smells like university or dilettantism. (Menuhin to Ligeti, in a letter from the fifties. In Ligeti, 2003: 164)

Alone in today’s Europe, about 50,000 composers of contemporary art music fight for that first place in the chaotic concert of nations: it is technical impossible to absorb their products even in the remotest sense, to register or even: to understand. (Boehmer, 1998: 5)

As new technologies come into play, people are less and less conviced of the importance of self-expression. Teamwork succeeds private effort. (McLuhan, 1967: 123)

3. Final remarks

Rather than making any kind of conclusion, I’d like to leave some questions, which could help us finding points of contact, delineating differences and directing better our efforts and eventual contributions to such a complex field like the musical composition and its theorization: Is there any pre-requisite to compose? How do we choose our materials and methods, and also musical works that deserve a closer analysis? How do they come to us, and how they are diffused by us?

References

Adorno, Theodor. 1962 (1954). “Das Altern der Neuen Musik”. In: Gesammelte Schriften: Band 14 (Dissonanzen. Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,143-167. Translated into English by Susan Gillepsie.

Adorno, Theodor. 1962. “Modern”. In: Gesammelte Schriften: Band 14 (Dissonanzen. Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie: 12 theoretische Vorlesungen). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Arnheim, Rudolf. 1933 (1936). Rundfunk als Hörkunst. London: Faber and Faber. Original in German. First published in English as Radio (1936). Translated into English by Margaret Ludwig and Herbert Read.

Attali, Jacques. 1997 (1985). Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Original in French. Translated into English by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Boehmer, Konrad. 1998. “Komponieren im Disneyland”. Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, vol. 158, no.1, pp. 4-9.

Busoni, Ferruccio. 1911 (1907). Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music. Original in German. Translated into English by Th. Baker. New York: G. Schirmer.

Chanan, Michael. 1995. Repeated Takes: a short history of recording and its effects on music. London: Verso.

Cook, Nicholas. 1998. Analysing Musical Multimedia. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1960. Wahrheit und Methode. (Gesammelte Werke, Band 1). Tübingen: Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Revised edition from 1990. Translated into English by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall.

Ligeti, György and Eckhard Roelcke. 2003. “Träumen Sie in Farbe?” György Ligeti im Gespräch mit Eckhard Roelcke. Wien: Paul Zsolnay Verlag.

McLuhan, Marshall. 1967 (2001). The Medium is the Massage: an inventory of effects. Berkeley: Gingko Press.

Rohmer, Eric. 1997. Ensaio sobre a noção de profundidade na música. Originally written in French. Rio de Janeiro: Imago.

Ruttmann, Walter. 1929. “Neue Gestaltung von Tonfilm und Funk. Programm einer photographischen Hörkunst (1929)”. In: J. Goergen (1994). p. 25–26. Originally published in Film-Kurier vol. 11, no. 255 (26.10.1929).

Varèse, Edgard. 1955 (1983). “Les instruments de musique et la machine électronique”. In: Écrits. Paris: Christian Bourgois.

Weill, Kurt. 1925 (1975). “Möglichkeiten absoluter Radiokunst”, in David Drew (org.) Kurt Weill. Ausgewählte Schriften, pp. 127-32. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main. Originally published in the magazine Der deutsche Rundfunk, in Berlin, 28.06.1925.

Notes