Words Finally Fail me

Something else I’ve been thinking lately builds on my recent postÂ What Composers Talk AboutÂ – Â and it will seem self-contradictory to say it, but I can’t tell the absolute truth if I’m constantly on the watch-out against self-contradiction. Someone nominated me for some award, and for the first time in quite a few years I had to write an artistic statement. I used to love doing this. I had all kinds of “reasons” that had led me to write the kind of music I write, I had studied subjects that backed up my choices, I had followed a logical chain from my experiences to my aesthetic, and could delineate it. These artistic statements never won me any awards or anything, but boy, did I find them convincing.Â

Lately, though, I’ve felt that my music has ridden rationalism to the end of the line, and I’ve got little left to say about it. It’s not that I feel my future musical goals are less clear, but that I can no longer articulate them. The multitempo and microtonal structures I’ve come up with through study and experimentation are still, I think, interesting, but their interestingness is beginning to get in the way. It’s time for them to fade into the background, and to simply be there in the service of something inchoate, something I can’t specify because if I could specify it, it wouldn’t surprise me the way I want it to. So I’ve reached the point at which a lot of musicians always have been, who can’t bear to say why they’re writing music or what they want it to do. And I, long-time maven of blindingly logical artistic statements, am feeling the unfamiliar suspicion that artistic statements aren’t of much value. It seems to vary by field, possibly by age; I read a lot of visual artist statements, and they always seem able, even driven, to scope out some field of exploration whose premises they can explain. In recent visual art, the work and the explanation even seem to go hand in hand. Perhaps younger artists should need to explain where they’re headed better than older artists with larger portfolios need to – but to conclude that would be merely to extrapolate from my own possibly idiosyncratic experience. Now I find myself having a hippie-ish, totally uncharacteristic urge to just write “My music is…” and then leave it blank, or draw a psychedelic picture or something.Â

But here’s what I came up with under duress, partly remembered from the kinds of things I used to write:

I recently joked in print that I write a cool, steady music in an attempt to calm myself down, and it wasn’t entirely facetious. I think I’m also trying to calm the world down. Modernist music was an honest reflection of tensions underlying the veneer of civilization, but in the end it morphed into a self-fulfilling prophecy – people now know the world is chaotic, violent, and disappointing, and no longer need to hear that in the concert hall. I believe in the artist’s ability to envision a future, and at this point that future must be sustainable and ecological. Toward that end, I think the future of music lies in increased sensitivity and perception, which is why I work with tempo complexities and higher harmonics among the overtones (with an increased array of expressive intervals). In other words, I think music has gone as far as is currently meaningful in an outward, extroverted direction, and now needs to turn inward, to become more meditative and develop finer gradations (much like Indian music, a tradition I admire but have never studied). The challenge now is to absorb dissonance and complexity without giving rein to anguish or anger. My music sometimes employs political texts, but I don’t believe the artist has much right to preach: I prefer to state ideas in sharp focus but with their ambiguity intact so that people have to settle within themselves what their reaction is.Â

I’m not as impressed as I used to be.