There are a lot of questions you can ask a composer. Here are some:
- What’s your favorite note?
- How many times should dynamics change per minute?
- In a five-movement work, which movements should be slow movements?
Okay, these are all silly questions, and not questions anyone has ever asked me, fortunately.
One of the things I appreciate about the current era that’s different from when I was younger is a particularly silly question I don’t seem to hear much anymore. It used to be fashionable to ask composers “Where is music going?”
Never could stand that question.
Where is music going? What is the future of music? Or, to spell out the implication: given how crazy music is now, what is left to do?
This is a question with too many indefensible assumptions to keep up with, including:
- Music moves in a straight line from sanity to increased craziness.
- All composers face in the same direction, heading for one horizon.
- There are things that composers don’t do because they feel the right time hasn’t yet come.
- Composers are more interested in what will happen later than in what is happening now.
Truth is, though I say this question was asked more often in the past, to this day it still gets asked from time to time. Has it always been so? Did anyone ask Beethoven what music would be like fifty years after he died? How would he have answered? In what way would his answer have mattered? Is it important to answer such questions correctly and, if so, what does a correct answer tell us about the composer? Is a correct answer a good measurement of a composer’s artistic value?