During two years as General Manager of Soundstreams Canada, a new music concert presenter in Toronto, Canada--the conversation we hosted that most animated the music community here was a lecture given by Sir John Tavener. He was in town at our invitation for a concert we were presenting of his music. It might be added that unlike the small attendance at most new music concerts, this was an SRO concert. We crowded about 1200 into an 1100 seat cathedral and had to send hundreds home in disappointment. Clearly this is a voice that is reaching people musically.

Prior to John's arrival, he and I had discussed by phone, the fact that both the music community and the theological community wanted to sponsor a lecture and there was insufficient time in the schedule for two such events. At his suggestion, and with the cooperation of the two sponsoring faculties, we had combined the two into a lecture entitled, "The vocation of the sacred artist".

In the lecture Tavener presented the view that music had a purpose and that purpose was to reach the soul of individuals in an uplifting, encouraging and enobling way. The purpose of music was fulfilled when the audience left the concert hall feeling troubles lifted and with a desire for a better world, filled with beauty. He continued in voicing the opinion that music had lost its way when composers began to use music as a way to express their personal tragedy and turmoil, unloading that depression and tortured visions on the audience. In so doing, he continued, the composer was contributing to a negative world-view and the entropy of a corrupted civilization.

Although I found myself uncomfortable with a certain black-and-white nature to his arguments, I found myself fundamentally agreeing. The idea that "if the world is to be saved, it will be saved by beauty"-- a Tavener quote that so struck me that I made it the featured quotes in our marketing campaign--was certainly the central theme to my own love of music and what I want to achieve in music and also what is at the root of my own assessment of "good music" and "bad music". I don't necessarily want music to make me "feel good" but I want to leave the concert hall with the sense that my soul has been touched and nourished.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Critical Conversation has truly been a fascinating read. Thank you all for your thoughts and observations...you have really made me think. And though I refer to give my answer in the music that I write, I was reminded of a recent concert at the Caramoor Festival, in which both John Rockwell and myself were participants. At this concert, he expressed his concerns about the lack of a Big Idea. I had responded that I find this actually exciting, because I can get up everyday and try something new or different in the music that I write.

I realized about a day after that concert, that I actually do have a Big Idea in my composing, and I just didn't think to say anything in our public forum...this might be because I was thinking of styles when he made this comment.

But my Big Idea is more of a philosophy: I want the music to be interesting and to communicate...which doesn't rule out any "isms" but generally acts like a guide in my composing. It sounds simplistic and it's definitely not unique, but it is for me of paramount importance. So thank you all for your wisdom, experience, and wit. It is much appreciated by many folks.

I hope at almost 32 that I still possibly qualify as a young(ish) voice. Here's a letter I wrote to Alex Ross not too long ago in response to a New Yorker article, that I think addresses Mr. Dargel's question:

Dear Mr. Ross,

As an emerging student composer, I'd like to commend you for paying attention to the future of classical music: student composers. We are largely ignored by the media, while we watch our rock'n'roll peers get all the attention. I urge you, however, to follow up this article with two more installments: public university music departments and young composers working outside of school. Everyone knows about the music departments at Juilliard, Yale, Columbia, Mannes, NYU, and so on. A portrait of music students in the New York City area is hardly complete with private schools alone. CUNY and SUNY schools in the area have several fine music departments with student composers just as exciting and edgy as their private school counterparts. Furthermore, there are several groups in the area comprised of young performer-composers working outside of the academic arena: Anti-Social Music, Wet Ink, Common Sense Composers Collective, Vox Novus, to name but a few, and new ones are popping up all the time. All of these groups and students would love to see you at one of our shows and hear your opinions, whether or not they turn into a New Yorker article.

In short, we young composers are out there and we are getting our music heard; the critics aren't showing up to hear us. I suspect their bosses aren't interested in letting them explore the "underground" classical world, because they think their readers aren't interested.

As a member of the aforementioned Anti-Social Music, here's what I see are the big ideas in classical music: --a d-i-y attitude: put together your own shows with your own music. --think like a rock band, not an orchestra. --don't be ashamed of what you listen to, everything is potential creative fodder; if Josquin can use drinking tunes in his music, so can I. --don't wait for your audience to find you, go out and find your audience; lots of people are interested in more "difficult" or "challenging" music that you can't dance to.

Classical music is not dead or dying any more than punk or disco or bluegrass. It's just not your grandmother's classical music, anymore.

"But one thing classical composers could learn from pop is a sense of fun...Mozart thought of himself as an entertainer as well as an artist.." Justin Davidson

No. Unlike in Mozart's era, in 20th century America - and now in the rest of the world - entertainment is a business and an industry, and except for a few powerful artists (often for a short amount of time), it the business of entertainment that determines its rules, reception and quality, at the center of which is the most researched, defined and marketed product: fun. That is why the "fun" most entertainers produce fades when a new concept of "fun" arises, one version of which is "pop" entertainment.

Although he has his moments, T.S. Eliot is not fun in entertainment terms; Andrew Lloyd Weber is. How about asking Aavo Part to lighten up? I recall an incident a few years ago with a composer commissioned by Disney. In a final rehearsal, a Disney executive tried to have the last movement of the piece, which was an elegy or requium, become more lively. After all, why make death something so sad? It won't play in the 'burbs.

There are some artists who can do business and entertain, not a problem. And some whose work, uncompromisingly, can flourish in the two domains (e.g., Glass). But fun and entertainment should be left to those who do it best and the meaning that artists convey should not be entertaining when it

needs to be.

As a composer and performer (see Kyle Gann's list of postminimalists), I know that when I compose, I am not trying to follow a musical trend or style, nor am I aiming to create a new one. I want to write music that will speak to all listeners; music that is true and sincere.

As artists, we each bring our individual histories, whatever that may be, to our work. Because I was classically-trained as a pianist and didn't start composing until after college, my musical influences growing up were dominated by the Western, traditional piano repertoire. I didn't even know that living composers (let alone women composers) existed until college.

Regardless of style or genre, I think music with a strong, sincere voice will be heard and most likely will endure. My question is how can we make new music relevant in today's society?

As Greg wrote, we are suffering from a disconnect between classical music and the rest of our culture. Wasn't there a time in this country when everyone shared common classical musical references? Household names included not only performers and conductors (like Horowitz, Heifetz and Toscanini) but composers and music educators like Leonard Bernstein, Deems Taylor and Sigmund Spaeth.

We live in such a different world today, and I think the lack of acceptance of new music in American society has a lot to do with the decline in music education throughout the nation (in addition to the kind of world we live in - faster-paced, technology-driven with overwhelming amounts of information, all competing with one another to distract and entertain us).

If everyone in this country had music education that was thorough and more open-minded in its teachings, I believe they would be able to connect and relate to more of the music that is being written today.

Since unfortunately this is not the case, composers and performers must reach out to audiences beyond the traditional way of doing things. I commend cellist Matt Haimovitz's efforts to reach out to broader audiences by performing both traditional and contemporary works in unusual venues.

I'm at work on my second disc of original chamber works, Earthshine, (due out in the fall) and I aim to promote my CDs by selling them at solo piano recitals. Nowadays, we composers must do it on our own. Since the support isn't out there, we have to be innovative and think like entrepreneurs.

I'm proud to say I produced this upcoming disc, as well as my first one, Perigee & Apogee, through funds raised from private donors. This time around, I am launching Earthshine on my own label so as to sustain funds for future projects.

Getting new music out there is an uphill battle, but I am hopeful. I work with many children and adults of all backgrounds as a music teaching artist with Lincoln Center Institute. I know that they, the children especially, are so open to new music when they are exposed to it by someone they can relate to and trust.

Audiences need new music guides they can trust, and I don�t think critics are always looked upon as reliable sources. Composers and performers need to work together, regardless of style or genre, to invite others to join us in our diverse musical worlds.

It's not unlike the lobbying efforts of the politicians today. Composers need to reach out and connect with people outside their field, their potential audiences, and convince people why they should listen to us.

Beata Moon
Composer/Pianist

Scott Cantrell wrote: "I'm apparently not alone in feeling that too much of this has degenerated into one-upsmanship and looking down noses. Let's have disagreement, fine, but the condescending tone of at least one contributor hardly illuminates anything except--well, we won't go there. No wonder readers don't like critics."

And John Rockwell commented: "And I definitely agree with Scott's latest posting, about civility."

Interesting. That fraying of the edges of civility among the professionals here seemed to me a most welcome sign of critical good health, and the very thing that made this symposium's exchanges (among the professionals) so encouraging.

Time enough for dispassionate civility in your print columns, gentlemen (and ladies), where y'all are peddling learning and wisdom to the Great Unwashed. Here, among yourselves, it seems to me, is the place for the free and forthright expression of your informed passions and prejudices, and their justifications.

It's the lack of that free and forthright expression in print that makes what should be a vital and vigorous public conversation in the media among professional music critics seem instead (to quote myself), "...[arguments] more appropriate to genteel luncheon and dinner parties where it's considered the height of gauche to argue in any manner that might upset the digestion of those seated at table. Arguing in that dispassionate, genteel way makes members of [the mainstream critical fraternity] feel they've been informative and reasonable, when all they've managed to be is glib...while at the same time keeping hands clean, hair un-mussed, and digestion undisturbed -- theirs, their fellow music critics', and their readers'."

Well, admittedly, John Rockwell, I do not read everything you write, so I will defer to other commentators. But, while you might think you are Mr. Context, your reviews, not feature writing, too often become strongly evaluative. I think Gann & Ross are more artist oriented in their writing. That is not a problem, however, unless your intent is to be more historical than judgemental, etc. In any case, I still do not see the basis for stating that Gann (or anyone of the principle writers involved in this discussion) do not hear enough or write about a breadth of music.

Random aesthetic questions (wrapping a few assumptions) that I've been turning over ever since reading Leonard B. Meyers' "Music, The Arts and Ideas" many years ago:

Which metaphorical direction do ideas have to be in to become "big"? "Up"? "Out"? Against"?

We can call anything a work of art; what kind of attribute are we imbuing it with, that a moment before the same object wasn't given?

The Earth is only so big; given enough time running around the surface of it, we end up never able to climb a new mountain, discover a new island, etc. We still create new, important, personal experiences, but the direction is different. Is there something similar in Aesthetics?

What happens when we include ideas in the artstic "sphere" that were excluded before? More specifically, what happens when we finally allow the last door in the sphere to be opened, that includes everything in the sphere? Where do we "go" then for the next big idea?

Is Aesthetics in the big sense, like the universe itself, a kind of finite-yet-unbounded place? If it is, how do we come to terms with it ? Where do we find the same level of value and importance when the direction can only go "back", around", "through"?

When John Rockwell gripes that Kyle Gann has devoted his career to certain composers and suggests that he pick up on the composers Alex Ross mentions, he indirectly brings up a point regarding musical worlds and critical positions that needs further discussion. From my reading over decades, I find Gann to have a far more thorough social and historist sense of contemporary composer's careers and the specific trajectories of their music than John Rockwell.

Rockwell is the type of critic who seems far more willing to hear (and judge) music piece by piece and not as part of an artist's life's work. I often stop reading him when I discern that he fails to place music he is writing about in any context, as if just the sound and performance of one piece on one night were enough to know what a work may mean or what a composer's ideas are. Unfortunately, I think that has something to do with the uptown/downtown and NYC vs. non-NY music worldview, not to mention academic/non-academic approaches.

That last comment also pertains to Alex Ross' work. Nearly all of the compositions Ross mentions are by composers-who-need-no-introduction and whose works are presented in major, oh well, uptown venues. Ross, for the most part, generally contextualizes the work he reviews in the New Yorker, but he rarely ventures into Gann's musical neighborhoods. This is, in some sense a good thing; and thank-you, Greg Sandow, for being all over the place. (Sandow, by the way, recently had a perceptive AJ Blog on the different audiences & the places in NYC they hear and respond to music). This is all not meant to be personal, each writer represents a "type" and, in a way, an aesthetic that could be addressed.

Points of discussion: there are no transcendent ideas without history and context, which audiences bring to work and is sanctioned by the institutions and discourses that surround productions. To respond to music or art without contexts is to buy into (sorry for this old term) anonymous commodification of material and denial of individual creative evolution. This is especially significant when writing about living composers whose work or ideas are not known.

Second, as Alex Ross points out, there are no ideas without accounting for artistic lives and careers. This applies to critics as well, who need, as Gann often does (following Virgil Thomson, for one), to declare their positions and allegiances. Purely "detached" or "objective" critical writing is credible only up to a point, which is nevertheless generally determined by the publication (like one that would hold to the convention of such form of address as "Mr. Ice Cube.") This is, of course, not to argue for impressionistic responses; there is much more at stake.

John Rockwell advises Gann to spread his wings, to which, I would suggest Rockwell grab a Metro Card to visit more composers at work, pick up his his walking stick, and use his expense account to get on the road and not just in the concert hall.

"The musical equivalent would have been a composer who, in a white heat of creation, spewed out music -- but writing it down, not improvising it in concert. (Of course, somebody's sure to point out some composer who did just this." - Greg Sandow

I'd like to be that somebody - Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892 - 1988) an enormously prolific composer, who completed more than one hundred works between 1915 and 1984. Many are for piano solo; some are of enormous dimensions. He wrote over 10,000 pages of manuscript. His works are fearsomely complex, through composed with no direct repetition of any kind. They where written from top left to bottom right at break neck speed with no pre-sketching and virtually no correction after the event, even the two massive symphonies for huge orchestra and chorus, 824 and 1001 pages of A2. Those who actually saw him compose (which were very few indeed) said that he indeed "spewed out music*in the white heat of creation".

Very much a minor figure (indeed a non-figure) during his lifetime entirely by choice and the thought of being part of any "idea" let alone a "big idea" would have been completely repugnant to him. Sorabji was himself a prolific critic and music journalist. One of my favourite Sorabji quotes was directed against his fellow critics "Insects that are merely noisome like to think that they can also sting."

David Carter
London

While my background is in the visual arts, I am an accomplished guitarist. As Wynne Delacoma accurately points out, none of us are ever going to become capable of predicting the "next big" anything. Worse yet, while John Cage's incorporating Zen Buddhist practices to composition and performance may still have a strong potential, his 1962 "Silent piece 0' 0" personifies Delacoma's statement:"...schools of thought that stifle creativity rather than stimulate it."

Whenever mediocre thought and subsequent performance are elevated to the level of being news worthy based on timing rather than content, a glaring problem exists. The hell-bent attempts to periodically merge "art and technology" into some magical Disneyesque experience for artdom to celebrate, has most always resulted in shallow, human removed exercises that the advertising industry thrives on to reach their mass of consumers. Rauschenberg's "Mud Muse" is a case in point, what is even the intended content of that piece? Computer-generated imagery on the same level of accomplishment and/or content as the Chauvet cave horse paintings.

Sorry, does not compute. Former U of M artist/instructor John Link, once astutely observed: "Art doesn't give a damn who creates the next masterpiece, just so long as someone does." I think music will continue to operate under that same decree.

Greg: I've read your 3rd point, where you ask why improvisation, as manifest in the 1950s and likened to the procedures of Pollock and Kerouac, seemed to be rejected by the musical mainstream, in favor of a kind of musical formalism.

The idea that improvisation can be handily introduced into classical concert music has been largely built on a misunderstanding of the nature of both of those great processes. Each requires far different musical skills, and more importantly, each requires a dedication to a unique sensibility that transcends the skills themselves. It seems to me that on balance, the separation between traditional Western improvisational and interpretive forms has proved to be a healthy one. Much of the enjoyment of hearing fine musicians lies in the appreciation of the dedication to a particular point of view come to life in a specific performance. And I'm sure we've all had our disappointments with hybrids that end up at best as a musical "surf 'n turf."

Improvisational forms are present in much experimental music of the last few decades. If the likely roots for this are in jazz, it has certainly moved into procedural realms that are as far-removed from those origins as they are from so-called concert music. There's your "third stream" - at this point, a wholly different genre, much more open to the changeable ideas of the Art world at large, and much more able to participate in that change. Whether it's part of the NY Times-reading mainstream or not, is (to me) beside the point: It is the life work of musicians more interested in creating the present than connecting to the past.

I have been following the Critical Conversation discussion, and I would like to offer my contribution:Compared to the NYC new-music scene, the NYC independent (pop) music scene consistently draws a wider demographic and larger pool of listeners to hear its emerging artists. The venues and the artists themselves take a more proactive role in marketing emerging composers, songwriters, and musicians, so the interesting things that are happening in the pop music world are heard about and talked about a lot (and by a lot of different people).

Interesting things and Big Ideas are certainly happening in the concert music world, but they're not being heard about or talked about because concerts are not being marketed well. New music promoters should focus on attracting young audiences and emerging composers before we all become completely jaded.

Music critics should write more PREview articles, in an effort to bring more audiences to upcoming events. Positive REviews of one-time concerts of music by emerging composers may be forgotten by the time the composers' music is performed again. [Nobody take this personally please!]

Finally, venues/presenters that tend to present established artists should host events in which a collection of emerging artists are presented (on one bill) with the same courtesy, production values, quality performers, and publicity that established artists enjoy. I believe it would not be difficult to find funding for such an "outreach" event, and it truly *could* strengthen the community, if it were handled with genuine and professional care. The Kitchen (NYC) may claim to do this with Kitchen House Blend, but KHB usually features established and semi-established composers, not truly emerging composers.

I've had a lot of support from composers, performers, and some smaller presenters in the concert-music world, and this support has been invaluable to me. That is why I strive to advocate change in the concert-music world rather than just removing myself from it. But the support I've experienced from the independent (pop) music world brings with it the potential for my music to reach a broader and more diverse audience, and sadly I can't imagine such potential in today's concert-music world. How jaded am I?

When I put on concerts, one of the main obstructions to bringing in an audience is marketing. The amount of money spent to promote the LA Phil and related organizations gives many people a sense that it is the "thing" to do. The practicality of putting on a concert in an alternative venue (church, art gallery, museum) can limit the exposure and coverage of the event. In Los Angeles, the official Green Umbrella "New Music" Concerts are really setup to promote the direction of the LA Phil and the orchestra as a whole. Their mailings, posters, radio ads and banners give the public a sense of confidence in the quality of the presentation. Of course when you attend the concert you realize that you might have been swindled. Or feel that you are not smart enough to "understand" the music.

So the problem for any alternative ensemble, is that unless we are playing in an establishment venue or concert series then we can only bring in the same 50-60 people (heavy on friends and family) that come out to our concerts on a consistent basis.

I recently met a music producer, Ronan Murphy, who I found out I had much in common with. Although he makes his living making punk, and progressive rock records, we both could talk in detail about early Glass and Reich records that we really love. Knowing this I wondered his views on why they had not "caught on" more. He said it was like teaching the public to eat sheep heads.

What?

He was recording an album in Iceland and having a dinner with a Afghan and a Swede. They saw that there was sheep head on the menu and ordered it immediately. He was horrified, but decided to try it. Of course it was wonderful, but it was not something he ever thought he would like. So our goal is getting people to like sheep heads. Maybe, with the right marketing campaign...

Through marketing we could get there, but who will pick up the cost? I feel that whoever gets some traction and gets halfway their will open the door for the rest of us.

Until then we push on.

Yes, that's helpful, and a nice list (though not terribly "new" to anyone paying fair attention over the last couple decades). For a really broad slice of the current spectrum, including much fine work by people that don't even begin to approach the fringes of the "official radar", I'd like to recommend two sites:

In both of these cases, What becomes important is not the name, affiliation, publisher/label, awards, reputation, "buzz", etc; rather it's simply do they make good music?

Is it too much to expect that nearly the entire significance-sickness in nonpop has to do with the dearth of effective investment and imaginative marketing -- as well as, to some extent, the noose of intellectual property laws that strangles compositions that might use popular work as source material?

As for marketing, I don't think my (our) ears are exceptions. My wife was a blues and rock listener before she met me. Yet she has developed not only a discernment but also a true enjoyment of new nonpop because of its presence in the home, and my own enthusiasm for it. My one-on-one marketing has expanded my friends' listening habits. Our tiny radio show has developed a local audience that faithfully listens every week -- an audience of largely 'naive' listeners that is very different from our much larger on-line listenership. Our local audiences *and* critics have grown into nonpop over the past decade in live concerts as well; Vermont is small, so change can be more easily effected, but after 15 years of our composers working together in promoting and marketing our work, nearly every Vermont nonpop ensemble includes new compositions in its concerts ... *and* an audience eager to hear them.

Today, the larger consumer world doesn't really care about composers, doesn't know what they do for the most part (as in the term 'songs' in place of 'compositions' in almost every piece of commercial software), and, when nonpop rises at all above the horizon, it's limited to marketing of "The Most Beautiful Music in the World: 99 Classics to Go to Sleep By".

Yet I truly believe that a marketing entrepreneur coupled with a group of serious investors could turn around the public attention, and that would reveal the occasional Big Ideas by sheer mass presence and subsequent mass filtering. A single movie turned enthusiastic public attention back to bluegrass. Yanni dragged the concerto soloist model into the pop world. Sir ALW has skirted the classical model and brought attention to a certain concert-ish sound through spectacle.

I tried to get through to the Spectacle Man himself, Richard Branson. This little Q&A from 1998 is still valid today (though I'm more optimistic about the investment issue). An excerpt:

===

What is this music?

Once it was called 'classical' music, but that word doesn't fit now. For a while people tried adjectives like serious, avant-garde, concert or art music--a panoply of terms that tried to identify this music as different from entertainment music. Yes, this music is different because it asks the listener's intimate attention and involvement. You might say that entertainment music wears familiar clothes; this music--this art music--simply drops its clothes to the floor, inviting a longer look. It's quite a story. Let's talk about it.

Who cares about this music?

Few enough people, but that's because they don't know much about it. An entire generation--maybe two--simply got out of the habit of listening closely to music. Maybe the music wasn't listenable for a while. Maybe recordings overtook the concert hall. Maybe music became a commodity or a utility. The reasons aren't important, because listeners are ready to re-discover this music-without-a-name.

With so many important causes, why should I care about this? For the same reasons people buy recordings or wear fashionable clothes or fly balloons--because, when the day is done, there's growth and good beyond raw survival. Perhaps, in a world of pain, all pleasure is indefensible. So ultimately, if you don't want to do this, nothing can justify it.

What will I get out of it?

This is not a financial investment. It's an open question whether you will reap a penny. History will hardly know you, any more than it remembers the Margrave of Brandenburg. But there will be Branson compositions and dedications and concerts and recordings. Something will be forever changed in the musical and cultural history of the world. But your own reward will be entirely personal.

Isn't arts sponsorship the government's business?

Hardly. Who knows why they continue funding the arts? Maybe it's a hand-me-down from royal patronage. Perhaps it insulates artists from a commercial world. But I believe--and have lived the belief--that individual risk sharpens appreciation for the imagination of art and music.

But isn't it just charity anyway?

No. Here's the difference. Society pays for what it values, or perceives to have value ... the basics, travel, entertainment, and even one-of-a-kind artwork by the Great Masters. By hiring living composers and paying for their products, you, Richard Branson, assign value--cash value--that others can wonder about, consider, and emulate. Don't call the awards or commissions or fellowships; call them the Branson Positions, where you hire composers as inventors of worthwhile products.

What am I actually doing?

Consider it R&D--I like the research and development analogy. To start, you'll hire 100 composers as 'creative developers' to work in an environment free from outside pressures, perhaps for two years. When they've completed their experimental designs, you'll bring the results in for engineering (rehearsals), improvement (revisions), beta-testing (concerts), and production. Then, with all your enthusiasm behind them, you'll market the products under your own New Virgins label and purchase time on concerts for their performance. Aside from the artistic integrity guaranteed the composers, it will partly be a commercial venture in the public's eyes. If orchestras and chamber groups play the music, they will receive payment, publicity, and your good graces; if they don't, they'll continue to beg for contributions to play more Mozart. Audiences will pack the halls for Branson Concerts.

And then what?

If you've done it up right, others less artistically aware will emulate you--the technological barons, the financiers, the Wall Street investors. Where millions went to purchase paintings of the Old Masters, millions will also go to create new musical masterpieces. You will have met the challenge

===

Branson didn't answer, of course, but I thought it was worth posing the questions if only to frame them.

There's also the intellectual property issue. With sourcing new tunes so legally complicated and often nasty, who will have the fortitude of a John Oswald? His Pluderphonics, of course, worked in the electronic medium that needed no skittish performer or performance organization base. A set of textural and tonal variations on, to use the current blog-mentioned pop diva, "Oops, I Did It Again" would be a legal navigation nightmare. And speaking of ALW and his hard lock on contracts, what sort of nightmare would result from using his tunes as source material?

This is a major issue, especially considering that nonpop also forms the essential research & development system for the mass-audience arts.

Nonpop by nature will never be popular in the same entertainment-based way as the pop tune, but that does not mean it should lack visibility. Again using a blog example, "Fahrenheit 9/11" transformed (for now) opinion of & attention to the documentary form.

Somewhat as an aside about the local complaint in one comment: From reports I hear from hundreds of our guests, the local audiences are almost always enthusiastic -- outside the provincial cities such as New York, that is. This is personality at work, don't you think? A good marketing scheme to present nonpop composers as personalities is not a bad idea. (As you can guess, I think it's a great idea.)

We're in a golden age of musical composition. Much as I prefer to think that the voices of nonpop art and music can be heard because of their sheer ability to inspire the imagination and participate in a community of cultural growth, I have concluded that the willingness to dismiss (or at least subjugate) all the mechanisms of public outreach -- marketing, IP, R&D investment -- means the Big Idea (or even the Little Ideas that I have dedicated my own life to in creating 650 compositions over 40 years) will rarely be felt in practice. And as I said to Branson, "individual risk sharpens appreciation for the imagination of art and music."

It seems to me a critic's role might include addressing how nonpop has failed to come of age, not as an artform in its own time, but as a vital participant in contemporary enterprise.

My apologies if these points have been discussed. If so, just refer back to the letters...

Here are several questions: I think that among of the implicit questions "high art" poses to popular, even folk cultural art forms, musical and otherwise, with regard to Big Ideas, are:

- What does it take, formally, to address a Big Idea? Will there, really, ever be a rock and roll Wagner? How much can three-seven minute songs say, after all?

- Are there limits to forms and genres and artists' careers and choices? Conversely, are not forms and genres (and, even of instrumentation, styles, etc.) tied to history and place? If a Big Idea were to arrive today in the form of a symphony or large orchestral work, would not the very fact that is an orchestral work already inhibit its potential meaning or impact, especially for American audiences?

- Is it enough to address a Big Idea once? Or, does not a Big Idea require sustained investigation, variation, exploration and depth? Is this not the difference between pop cultural production and its demands (which is extraordinary as far as it goes) and what historically has been the domain of artistic work?

(And if you dig Andre or Bernstein, please don't get mad at me -- I'd sincerely love to hear why you do love them. And I do like a poem or two of Bernstein's.)

For me, I'd rather listen to the most hermetic of the serialists than read Bernstein or look at Andre.

Further parallel with academic-hermetic music: The university poets (Bernstein is one, and of course he RAILS RAILS RAILS against the "other" university poets) pause in their civil war and unite to condemn slam poetry. You know, the stuff that's passionate, engaged, often political, quite popular, populist, verbally rhythmic & often wildly inventive. Sound familiar?

My point is -- things are just as socially complex in the other "high" arts; there's no need for classical musicians to feel the grass is greener elsewhere. (Fiction has always been a popular art -- the novel didn't get going until after the printing press & it's always had "mass audience" in mind. Though of course there are hermetic fictionalists now too, and have been for 70 years.)

In the spirit of Alex Ross's all-purpose retorts, I will self-retort and say that Monsieur Croche is rolling in his grave that I'm taking part in this discussion at all.

Please keep it going.

A couple contributors have mentioned they'd be curious to hear from composers themselves. At the risk of making this blog a little Seattle-centric, let me try to describe what's going on in the compositional scene here with regard to the "Big Idea" idea.

Naturally, composers write for the musicians and venues that offer the most encouragement. Seattle has its share of contemporary-music groups, but composers get a gratifying amount of attention from mainstream classical ensembles too. Choirs are a particularly rich source of opportunity; Opus 7, Seattle Pro Musica, and The Esoterics have all staged all-local-composer concerts in the last few seasons. Stylistically, this music tends to be well within the grandstudents-of-Nadia-Boulanger tradition, but stronger and fresher than the word "conservative" might suggest. Community orchestras keep up good relations, and usually offer one or two local pieces in their four-to-six-concert seasons.

There's also a lot of improv going on, from free jazz to real-time electronic collage stuff, with regular performance series in at least three different venues. The Seattle Composers Salon is an open-mike night the last Friday of every other month (i.e. tonight) at Soundbridge, a little pocket recital hall in Benaroya Hall's music education center. It's non-curated-anyone who wants to present a piece can, signing up one or two Salons in advance until an evening's slate is full. Composers arrange their own rehearsals and performances, and there's a Q&A after each piece. (Audience size is gratifying-the 100-seat space is invariably packed.)

At Cornish College of the Arts, there's a lot of interest in jazz-world music-crossover stuff-but not at all to the point of being a party line. There's collaborative new-music activity in the dance world, and composers involved in commercial music, film music, game music. And of course at the University of Washington, all composition students are forbidden from writing anything, ever, for their entire four years, other than strict twelve-tone piano pieces.

What we all seem to share is an almost complete lack of self-consciousness. Composers just do what excites them and gravitate, naturally, toward other musicians who share that excitement, but really don't seem to see themselves in terms of schools or trends (or, God forbid, antagonistic camps). If they do, they're keeping quiet about it; the topic where-is-music-going-and-where-do-I-fit-in almost never comes up in conversation, even at the Salons. We tend to talk about things like inspiration and expressive intent; people seem more interested in tracing a piece's origin and development back into the composer's personal experience, not outward to sociopolitical contexts.

In an odd way, it's almost like a reprise of the 18th-century attitude toward composition. Composers keep a keen eye out for practical opportunities to do what they want to do, and think less about the grand march of music history and the immortality of their art. Used to be that notions of historical style were determined after the fact (as Kyle pointed out, sonata form as a concept wasn't codified until Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven were dead)-we look back at the music written during a given period and try to make meaningful generalizations about what it all had in common. But in the 20th century, historical style became an a priori notion-invent the "ism" first and then work within it.

To me as a composer and a listener, the un-self-conscious approach is a lot more attractive, producing music that's more honest and consequently more interesting. So though the search for a Big Idea makes a fascinating topic for online discussion, when I'm sitting at my desk and making art, it just gets in the way-and my guess is that many composers feel that way.

Kyle Gann calls me out -- I've never heard any of the music of any of his totalists. I get the strong impression that most of the assembled critics haven't heard much of them either. I think he's right about composer bashing, whether people have intended it or not. I am embarrassed to have contributed.

Though I haven't heard any of the music of the totalists, from Kyle's description, I would hesitate to dismiss it as "art pour l'art," as someone here did about minimalism. In Evan Eisenberg's phrase, which I can only paraphrase (not having the book handy), when we listen to music most deeply, we seem to trace with one hand the workings of the universe and with the other the folds of the mind. What's always struck me about Ives's gorgeous polyrhythms and poly-everythings is how they get at the simultaneous polyrhythms of experience. (Cage has written about this in regards to Ives -- more than one thing happening at once.) The universe is heavy polyrhythmic, polycyclic -- the cycles going on now -- breathing, heart pumping, earth rotating, earth orbiting, and on and on and on. And it wouldn't surprise me at all that the totalists get at that. Such relevance may not be relevant to you, but it's relevant to me, to how I feel about life and how I experience it.

Justin is right that Hip Hop and Steve Reich's "City Life" do not equal a parody mass (although maybe the Low Symphony could be somewhere close to one). But I disagree that a flattened history is not terribly useful for critics. It simply means that there need to be different intellectual strategies for evaluating musical composition than those that insist on the primacy of historical progress in assigning critical importance to new works. I am not advocating relativism or even the appropriation of old techniques as a "good" thing: Joe Jackson's fugues were a terrible idea, for example. All I am saying is that it is not terribly useful to point to a trend, or a group of trends, as historically *compelled* in the way that Schoenberg believed that composition with 12 tones all equal to each other was. When the conventional wisdom agrees that tonality has little left to say, along comes Part to tell us otherwise. The moment we think that atonality and serial techniques are dead ends, Die Soldaten rears its head in New York. And as soon as multi-culti eclecticism seems like the harbinger of the future, Marco Polo reminds us how embarrassingly trite such stuff usually sounds.

In short, rather than look for trends in an attempt to re-linearize music history, critics might be better off focusing on other things, If you want "big ideas," one of the biggest of all is money vs. "music that matters." It's a subject that is treated as patently obvious by earlier critics like Adorno (mammon always is a bad thing for Real Art) but he is clearly wrong. Zappa is closer to the mark when he said, "My imagination is only limited by the size of my bank account" but even that is a gross oversimplification (and too cynical by half).

Surprisingly little is written or known about how new music is paid for, whether the composer is Mozart or Boulez (I gather that, amazingly, Mozart's finances only attracted scholarly attention in the past 30 years or so).

Another issue is a deeper exploration of the notion of "musical integrity," which like pornography we recognize when we encounter it but is maddeningly difficult to define. It brushes up on the issue of artistic standards - most folks passionate about music make a qualitative as well as a stylistic distinction between, say, Jordi Savall and Neal Sedaka, or Kenny G. and Ornette - and the questions are how, and why? Again, Adorno is hardly the last word.

One more clarification about the flatness of history. It's not that history is bunk, but rather that the standard historicial paradigms of classical music musicology don't apply terribly well to what is going on now in the music that's composed for reasons beyond the enrichment of a company's bottom line or to secure a university professorship.

This seems the case regardless of idiom, be it chamber music, Bulgarian vocal music, or bossa. (BTW, some of the "big boys" of musicology share my dissing of linear, progressive narratives of musical style. In his own field and with far more eloquence, Treitler has made a brilliant case that traditional understandings of chant and early polyphony are woefully inadequate when you carefully look at the evidence. This should come as no surprise, but apparently it does. )

"To thine own self be true" may be a thundering cliche, but cliches are true. When I came in to composing, back in the stone age, you HAD HAD HAD to do serial (or twelve-tone--what a misnomer!) music. (And my freshman college harmony teacher was Leonard Stein, Schoenberg's right-hand man!)This was THE wave of the future, this was THE language of music forever and ever, amen.

Well, half a century later, guess what? Serialism has made its contribution, but it is by no means ubiquitous. Many youngsters were damaged to one extent or another (Lee Hoiby related to me in conversation an incidence of suicide.)

So listening to today's fashion, only too often flogged by critics looking for novelty, is not where it's at.

One of the words I see conspicuously absent from the conversation on CC over the last few days is "jazz." I'm assuming this is so because nobody wants to open that particular can of worms: it's bad enough to thrash about what "pop" and "classical," high- mid- and low-brow mean, without tossing into the pot another label guaranteed to raise the ire of the readership.

That doesn't mean it mustn't be addressed. The critical contretemps between enthusiasts of jazz and classical musics in the first half of the 20th century mirrors the controversy between pop and classical musics now: the assimilation of traditional folk forms like the blues into a more rarefied, academic concept of jazz composition and improvisation is a case in point. Is it that much different from the discussion of whether or not hip-hop or high-minded populists like Elvis Costello have anything to offer our traditional definition of "classical music," even in a post-Terry-Riley world?

And, tangentially, what of contemporary jazz artists who exist on the fringes of the jazz scene? Even veterans like Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman (and I'd make the argument that Taylor may be one of the most significant composers of any sort in American music today) have a hard time being heard even at Birdland or on more mid-stream jazz stations.

Dear Alex Ross,

Thanks for the early Bjork history. Very interesting! (And thanks for your blog and work in general.)

2 minor points of disagreement with things you've said here:

* I agree that most of the new developments in music of the last 40 years have come from pop, but not all. Minimalism is just about 40 years old (dating it from "In C," when it got its "pulse"), and as you've written, it's a Big Idea. What made minimalism "click" was Riley's decision to have someone hammer the pulse throughout "In C." Steve Reich, a jazz drummer as well as university-trained composer, was in the original ensemble to perform "In C," and -- interestingly -- according to him he made the pulse suggestion. (I believe Reich because the source I got it from would have had access to a rebuttal from Riley if it existed; and my take on the contentiousness of that scene is that Riley would have made one if he had one to make.) The collaborative creative dynamic modeled here is much closer to jazz and rock ensembles than the traditional notion of classical composition, where the composer comes up with the ideas and the players execute. (I've written about this on my blog, utopianturtletop.blogspot.com )

* Just my opinion, but pop is not off-topic in a discussion of the future of classical. Maybe the "In C" story is relevant to why. Maybe more collaborative modes of production have something to offer to classical.

An aside: it seems to me that a discussion of the future of jazz would be just as fraught as this one is. Has jazz had a big idea since Miles Davis hired a Chess Records session man to play electric bass in his band? And -- I wouldn't be surprised if jazz critics were more hostile to pop influences than classical critics.

This is a difficult topic, inherently. And interesting!

I have to admit that even though I spend my days writing about the hard to classify "new classical music," I was initially disturbed by the "Classical Music Critics on the Future of Music" premise. At first I thought it was unintentional, this implication that the "next big thing" in all of music will necessarily come out of the concert hall/conservatory (my best guess at what was meant by "classical music" today generally). Some of the subsequent posts seemed to take this to be inherently true, however, even though the unlikeliness of at least the very next big thing to come out of our field was driven home by the fact that the conversation almost immediately turned to serialism! This seemed a dramatic contradiction, even taking the position that big ideas come along less frequently than teen pop idols...but hey, maybe that means we're due.

But after reading through the posts, the big stumbling block was soon obvious if not easily remedied in a "defining your terms" sort of challenge: we can't delineate between "popular" and "classical" music anymore. If we were using the terms to mean Tommy James & the Shondells and Beethoven respectively and nothing more complex, then it works quite well. But just a few steps further and the meaning is hopelessly muddled and the conversation grids to a halt. Commercial and non-commercial break down just as quickly.

Categorization is useful, but classical and pop aren't real categories anymore, they don't square off with the needed specificity, esp. for the conversation that's being attempted here. I tried to come up with definitions and the words slipped through my fingers fast as water. I can't say I feel this as a loss, since when I sit and talk with young musicians in Brooklyn (arguably a good place to look for the NBT) neither category is ever mentioned. The artists creating the most poignant, creative music I have heard recently wouldn't identify with either. There are composers who do command cultural/critical recognition or will (as much as any one person/project can these days), but they've absorbed what they've had the opportunity/desire to from the past of both canons and moved on ahead. Trying to write or talk about their music with depth, let alone the future of music, while at the same time staring from such meaningless generalities seems impossible, doesn't it?

Most of the writers here assume, with a greater or lesser sense of defensiveness, that distinctions between high and low art are pretty meaningless when you're dealing with great artists (eg, Hugo Wolf and Kate Bush). You'll get no argument about that from me, but I'm not sure there's much more to be said about this. The logical next step would probably be in theory: comparisons of technical means. What, for example, are the stylistic differences in articulation in accompaniment within a Haydn quartet and a Beatles song? How do they affect melody, harmony, beat? Interesting questions!

But back in the land of meta-criticisms, a half-examined assumption remains and that is the notion that "musical history," in the sense in which it is usually invoked -progress, complexity, trends- has any meaning.

Whether a piece was written 600 years ago or 70 or yesterday is the least interesting thing to be said about it, from a composer's viewpoint. The past is an illusion, all musics are entirely present.

Put another way, given the vast repertoire on cd's, the relative ease of finding scores and other study/performance material, and the incredible diversity of music on any single night in a major city like NY, all epochs in all cultures are, for all intents and purposes, equally "relevant" and exciting: Rameau's operas coexist with Berio's, Dowland's songs with PJ Harvey's. The effect is that nothing is obsolete, ancient, or even old-fashioned.

Nor, of course, is anything really that new. With the history of music "flattened" by the sheer availability of musical material for performance and enjoyment, the concept of musical progress really has to take a hit. It's silly to proclaim, say, Ferneyhough THE beacon into the future if you've ever tried to hear - really hear - Ars Subtilior scores; so Brian's work can just as easily represent an atavistic tendency towards mannerism as a progressive New Complexity. Vice versa for Part.

One interesting example of this can be found with electronic music which, because the development of electronic/digital instruments appeared to go hand in hand with the sounds, would seem to date rather quickly. But not so fast. Recently, I heard an amazing set of pieces from '61/'62 by Raymond Scott called "Music For Babies." There are pieces being written and performed today with uncannily similar harmonic, rhythmic, textural, and timbral characteristics. Scott's electronic music hasn't dated at all, even in terms of the timbres.

So I'll go out on a limb and state that there is no genre today that can be said to "progress historically" anymore. There are simply new pieces of music and a composer of any genre is just as likely to cop a riff from Dunstaple as s/he is to spend a few years studying Charley Patton. The date of the music is the most trivial of all concerns.

Richard Einhorn

I'm not sure I would agree with you as far as pop music being in the forefront of extending the borders of tonality, but I do concur that elements of pop could be heeded by composers. I believe that most people enjoy listening to what is deemed serious music, it's just that they can only give so much amount of time to it, (alas our attention spans have been unalterably shortened). Art which is complex lends itself --in many cases-- to a greater length in order to work out it's complexities... I believe that if the composers of today and tomorrow can find a way to shorten their pieces, to work within the confines of the average pop song --time wise-- but still retain the intellectual integrity. Mastery of the miniature, I guess.

J.H.
Dallas, TX.

Big (non) Idea: "Classical Music" is Dead

Yo! Since no full-time musicological critics were invited to the party, and it's such an amazing party, I couldn't resist crashing. This discussion is at such a high level - it proves the hypothesis that in the Darwinian world of classical music journalism, where fewer and fewer critics are allotted less and less space to cover the phenomenon, only the strong survive. Kudos!

So, much of what I might observe, as a music historian and critic, has already been said: Big Ideas were less prevalent (and less salient) in the history of Western Art Music than one might assume; the hope that another Big Idea will arrive and "rescue" our stalled history of "great" music seems kind of like nostalgic, wishful thinking; and, crucially, popular music seems to have taken over the Big Idea carrier function that we once assumed only "classical" music could serve.

Watching pop music seep into the conversation has been fascinating. Many participants in the discussion know it well, write about it, even pioneered critical approaches that allowed some of it to mingle with the contemporary "classical" stuff (shout-out to you, Mr. Rockwell!). But maybe, for once, the ivory tower gives me freedom of speech (and employment): I'm a professional musicologist - I just study "music," and I can write about whatever kind of music I want, whether or not my training was designed to interest me in it.

I think the Big Idea here is the collapse of the biggest Big Idea of classical music: that there *is* such a thing as a single "classical music," analogous to the classical literature of the Greeks and Romans; that it defines the roots of "our" musical civilization the way Homer and Sophocles once did for Western Europe; that every educated member of the society should know at least that this "classical music" exists and that it is more important than ephemeral works in the vernacular; and that any serious contemporary composer has to fit into a canonic narrative selection of "great works" that can be traced back in the classical line to our Homer and Sophocles, .

So, I would submit for discussion the Big (Non) Idea: you cannot understand our culture¹s musical creativity at this moment in time if you persist in splitting the world of music up into "classical" (i.e.: art, serious, etc.) and "popular" musics. "Classical Music" (as a critical Big Idea) is dead.

This leads to some warpage in even the most determinedly ecumenical attitudes on display in this blog, as people struggle to reconcile the way they feel about current music with the ideological need to preserve some domain as "classical" and assert rhetorical control over it.

Examples:

1. The consistent desire to analogize the current moment to moments in the canonic narrative of classical music from the past. The names of Brahms, Wagner, Beethoven have been invoked, and standard debates like the formal autonomy of great art re-opened. But would we be so sure that "art music" is the "timeless" music that, by definition, has trouble relating to culture outside if our story wasn't so focused on "abstract" instrumental music? Verdi¹s audiences were under no illusion that his art was "classical," or that you couldn't understand what it was "about" in terms of day-to-day political and moral issues.

2. The really problematic question of what "popular music" is like, other than a negative reflection of the painful virtues (abstraction, elitism,

unpopularity) of classical music. Somebody ascribes value to jazz and the Velvet Underground‹and somebody else ripostes with Brittany Spears. But what would ever make you put Lou Reed and Brittany in the same category, except for the fact that they share the property "classical = false"? Shouldn¹t we draw the lines so that there is one bucket for Beethoven, Public Enemy, Coltrane, Sondheim, and Stockhausen‹and another for Rossini, the "Macarena," Gilbert & Sullivan, Perry Como, and Celine Dion? [Warning: previous examples drawn off top of head. Your mileage may vary.]

3. The (I hate to say it but it¹s really sort of) colonialist attitude of even some pop music aficionados when it comes to the interpenetration of "popular" and "classical" musics. Even Alex Ross, who I don't mean to pick on, and who explicitly disavows the old Milhaud model of classical music "slumming" with jazz, uses the metaphor of a "goldmine" to describe art music composers' relationship to pop music. Is popular music really just primitive raw material for "real" artists, an unclaimed natural resource to be dug out of the earth and turned into lasting culture? (I think I'm going to start calling this the "Indiana Jones" theory of art-pop interaction.) Isn't pop music more advanced technologically than classical? Why not assume that Beethoven (Mahler, Stravinsky, Stockhausen, Reich) will chiefly be interesting in the future as a goldmine of raw material for (arguably) more advanced musics like hip-hop and techno? I'm thinking here of how Pachelbel functions for Brian Eno; how the sound of a string orchestra sounds in British Garage music; how Schubert shows up in Beck; how Xzibit, Dr. Dre, and Ghostface Killah use Bach.

[Oh, yeah, now I remember why no musicologists were invited to blog; we¹re not used to word limits and we can't shut up. Over and out.]

Robert Fink
UCLA

You know, Alex, if the "pop" music you mention is truly as interesting, intricate, and complex as you describe it to be (and I take you at your word concerning that as I know nothing of any of that music), then it's not "pop" music at all, is it. It's in fact "classical" music produced by non-"classical" composers, self-identified, and performed in and through non-"classical" venues. You simply confuse the issue by referring to such music as "pop" music. If your characterization of it is on-target, then it's nothing of the sort.

Hi Guys

Interesting stuff you're all writing. As someone who runs an ensemble that specialises in contemporary music and as one who works directly with composers every single day, I'd like to chuck my tuppence worth in, from a professional point of view.

The trouble with this entire debate is that "analysis (or criticism) is not composition in reverse" - you can't make a Big Musical Idea by talking about it and wishing it would happen. Some poor sucker (composer) has to write it, end of story. And we're all going to have to wait for it, like it or not.

The more we shout and wrangle, anguish even, about the loss of confidence in 'classical' (what is that?) music, the more composers are going to walk away from the heat and noise. Writing music for an orchestra or orchestral instruments within the current scene is akin to trying to write music in the trenches with verbal (critical) shells whizzing overhead, exploding nearby and picking off some other poor unfortunate who had the temerity to commit dots to paper.

When the next Big Idea does appear (it will - but it won't be what we expect, and we may not recognise it for what it is), treat it gently. Don't pounce. It will do better if it's ignored early on, to be honest ... perhaps it's already growing (but no-one's noticed yet?).

I would suggest that a major reason for withering of 'classical' music is that it is music that no longer serves anyone's purpose. It is becoming, literally, use-less music. 'Classical' music is no longer used to symbolise power, status, wealth in the way it once was: anyone who disputes that in the UK has only to note that of the two concerts staged at Buckingham Palace to celebrate the Queen's recent anniversary (one classical music, one rock), Tony Blair et al (and all of the powerbrokers of his generation) turned up to ... the rock concert. And those aspiring to wealth, etc no longer turn to classical music to prop up their image, either. All that is left is the dots, a pile of dust-gathering CDs, and the players. And some film scores (Aha!).

Anyone who wishes to re-juvenate classical music - as it stands - should find a use for it. Fast. (Maybe ringtone concerts are the answer?) Anyone who wishes to find the next Big Idea should get down on the ground and see where players are taking their (frequently valuable, antique) instruments to be used.

Follow the money ...

Yours

John Harris
Artistic Director
Paragon Ensemble Ltd

It’s interesting to see critics discussing the future of classical composition, because, as Wynne Delacoma and Jan Herman noted, critics almost never can predict the future. The only critics I can think of who’ve kinda sorta done so are R. W. Emerson, who kinda sorta predicted Whitman, and Lester Bangs, who kinda sorta predicted punk rock. I say "kinda sorta" because what they really did was write about the kind of poetry and music they wanted to experience, and then when against expectations it came along they were overjoyed with surprise.

So my question is (and I am enjoying your discussion), what, dear critics, do YOU want new classical music to be? Kyle Gann seems to know best what’s going on now, and I believe him that much of it is lovely. Greg Sandow with the touching Kerouac quote (damn! haven’t read that since I was 18!) comes closest to articulating something he holds dear in other arts that he misses in contemporary classical -- a mad rushing will to experience life life life. I believe him that he didn’t find it there in the ‘50s and ‘60s. But it was in music, big time -- in the music of Mingus, Roland Kirk, Coltrane, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Beatles (my examples may not be yours). And the ‘60s did register in the music of Riley, Reich, and Young.

I’d love to see new classical music go the folkie route, and organize house concerts of melodically lovely music in rhythmic and harmonic syntaxes that aren’t available or viable in other musics. There’s probably stuff like that out there, in NYC and maybe LA, and probably Kyle Gann could tell me all about it.

Keep on bloggin’!

When a composer friend of mine (who is traveling at the moment) heard about Critical Conversations, he wrote me: "If there are big ideas to be discussed, or even the possibilities of big ideas, it is much more likely to come from artists themselves."

This seems to fit what John Rockwell said when he remarked: "Big ideas tend to be backward projections." They're articulated, but not created, by pedants. I don't know who among the critics in this discussion, besides Kyle Gann, is a composer. Are there any others?

Also, does it matter? And further, as my friend also messaged: "Why not have a forum for a few of those kinds of artists who think and articulate themselves?"

How's GENDER PARITY for a big idea in classical music: within performing ensembles, administrative corps, boards of directors, journalists, and... the participants in artsjournal.com's blog?