Weirdos Like Me Blog

A friend of mine put the blog together for the Times...frankly, there are no uptowners represented because he's far more interested in downtowners. And we all win :).

I especially love what Michael Gordon said about the totalitarianism inherent in the modernist, academic music scene. Every time I question why there exists composition PhDs, or question the insular, academic mentality (which is a problem for many fields outside of music, such as medicine and even accounting!), the academic crowd tries to rip me a new one. So I give Michael Gordon a lot of credit for speaking out on this.

Your friend is probably right about the Uptowners. Still, I think some of them could be fun bloggers. Milton Babbitt would likely be a great read simply for his innate gift for transforming any concept that is easily explained in plain language into a syntactic/vocabularic steeplechase. (cf. hexachordal combinatoriality)

Unfortunately it seems that this blog is only available to NYT or Times Select subscribers.

I can't quite figure out the logic behind this.
I'm hoping that their rationale is that legions of intrigued new music fans will give in to temptation, thus counteracting the flagging number of subscribers.

For now I'll just sit and imagine what Michael and Annie et al are saying.

But what a drag that you have to sign up for "Times Select" to read the darn things. Something very ironic about that...

dan becker

I was also pleased at first to find that Branca, Curran, Gosfield, and Gordon were doing a joint blog for the Times...but I find it slightly ironic that their devotion "to free-thinking creativity" is only available for pay via TimesSelect.

Well, yeah... what I pay for Times Select seems a small price for the dollop of sanity Paul Krugman brings into my life twice a week.

Thanks for the link. It wasn't redundant at all. True music devotees always read PostClassic before the Times. I've also been able to access the blog, and I'm neither a Times nor a Times Select subscriber, so mileage definitely varies.

Well,with all due respect, it's easy enough to talk about those nameless composers who think that the point of writing music is to prove how smart they are and who aren't concerned with how music sounds. I'm not sure who those people are. I've never met a composer who I respect who wasn't VITALLY concerned with what the music they write sounds like (and that includes some of the usual suspects). I think it's just a matter of straw men (or women).

As to concern for credentials, since I've been nosing around blogs most of the people I've run across who are concerned with credentials are the ones who are concerned with how valid their claim to be the real-thing downtowner is.

KG replies: Alex Ross in his upcoming book quotes a recent interview with Pierre Boulez in which the interviewer asks why so little of that serialist music from the '50s is played now. Boulez's surprising reply: "Maybe we didn't think enough about how people actually listen to music." So there's one of your straw men. As for the Downtowners you cryptically allude to, I can't imagine who they would be - more chimerical than Boulez, anyway.

Another "straw man" might be Milton Babbitt:

"This fall from musical innocence is, understandably, as disquieting to some as it is challenging to others, but in any event the process is irreversible; and the music that reflects the full impact of this revolution is, in many significant respects, a truly "new" music, apart from the often highly sophisticated and complex constructive methods of any one composition or group of compositions, the very minimal properties characterizing this body of music are the sources of its "difficulty," "unintelligibility," and- isolation."

"Why should the layman be other than bored and puzzled by what he is unable to understand, music or anything else?"

"Granting to music the position accorded other arts and sciences promises the sole substantial means of survival for the music I have been describing. Admittedly, if this music is not supported, the whistling repertory of the man in the street will be little affected, the concert-going activity of the conspicuous consumer of musical culture will be little disturbed. But music will cease to evolve, and, in that important sense, will cease to live."

He spends a lot of that article comparing composers such as himself to mathematicians, which could be construed as trying to "prove how smart they are."

Thanks for the quotes, Kyle--I hadn't investigated the NYT blog.

On the subject of downtown "credentials," it has struck me that some composers who label themselves 'downtown' are concerned with defining who's in and who's out, so to speak. I've seen it on Sequenza 21...Elodie Lauten once commented that the co-option of stylistic elements from downtown would lead to a kind of "fake" downtown music, and someone would have to sort out who the authentic downtowners are. Even more interestingly, Mary Jane Leach made the argument (in a thread you once linked to) that the Bang on a Can composers can't be considered downtown because they all have advanced degrees from Yale and institutional funding. Whether BoaC should be seen as a representatively 'downtown' establishment isn't the point (and I know you've addressed that before); the idea that institutional backing disqualifies a composer from downtown-ness seems to contradict an argument you've made here, that downtowners would bear up well under funding and recognition.

I don't think Boulez makes a good "straw man" example. He is not claiming that the music he writes now is meant to prove how smart he is, or even that the music he wrote in the 50s was for that purpose. The quote only shows that in hindsight the total serialists didn't pay enough attention to listeners' abilities. I have to say that manifesto-based judging of composers is not helpful or accurate, just like the genre-based judging of AC Douglas and the old fart I just heard at an improv conference who dismissed all jazz as banal. There are good and bad Downtown composers, there are good and bad academic composers, there are good and bad composers of all styles. Let's judge them individually, or even better, let's judge the pieces individually.

Re: TimeSelect
According to our contracts, after 30 days we can republish the blogs wherever we like. So maybe Kyle can put them all up on PostClassic.