{"id":1130,"date":"2017-08-21T07:26:55","date_gmt":"2017-08-21T11:26:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/?p=1130"},"modified":"2017-08-21T07:28:27","modified_gmt":"2017-08-21T11:28:27","slug":"appropriate-appropriation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/2017\/08\/appropriate-appropriation.html","title":{"rendered":"Appropriate Appropriation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Never been the kind of composer who slows way down during the academic year and then composes like crazy in the summer, but that seems to have changed this year.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been blasting out music the last three months like nobody’s business, and all in pairs: two sextets, two quintets, two large ensemble pieces, two songs.<\/p>\n

After fifty years of doing it, I\u2019m still always amazed at how quickly composing goes, and how slowly.\u00a0 Ideas are a breeze, they are wafting in faster than I can use them.\u00a0 Pencil and paper slows them down; midi input slows them down, because nothing could possibly be fast enough.\u00a0 But then there is the process of refining those ideas, of polishing them until they sparkle.\u00a0 I almost always underestimate how much time that will take.<\/p>\n

The outliers in this summer\u2019s group are the two songs.\u00a0 A month ago, I wrote a bluegrass song \u2013 my first \u2013 for two voices, mandolin, banjo and guitar.\u00a0 When I finished it, I had this nagging feeling that the lyrics could really benefit from a high, intertwining bassoon line, of all things, so I replaced the banjo with a bassoon (I sure hope, for the sanity of our civilization, that I\u2019m the first person to say those words: “replaced the banjo with a bassoon”) and started over, adding an electric bass in the process and ending up with a completely different piece to the same text.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an important lesson here.\u00a0 There are standard ensembles \u2013 for example, bluegrass band \u2013 that have cultural resonance, and we need to respect those traditions.\u00a0 At the same time, it\u2019s important to respect the imagination, especially when it comes up with something that doesn\u2019t fit a specific tradition.\u00a0 Finding the right balance between those two \u2013 tradition and imagination \u2013 is one of the tasks of art.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not a bluegrass player, not steeped in that tradition or culture, so what I do in that vein is not \u201ctrue\u201d to some people, and I understand and respect where they are coming from.\u00a0 It can be called appropriation, which is a dirty word in the music world.\u00a0 Generally, we use that word to indicate work that uses surface elements of a musical culture without respect or understanding for the original meaning of those elements, which can lead to distortion.<\/p>\n

But the experience of being awed by a culture that is not our own is an ancient one. As a common human experience, feeling admiration for things we don\u2019t completely understand is grist for artistic expression.\u00a0 So when I do bluegrassy things that are not true bluegrass, I mean no disrespect.\u00a0 I\u2019m just standing where I am standing (it\u2019s a place where no one has stood before, and yet it has a commonality with places where billions have stood), and responding to the things that catch my ear and my heart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Never been the kind of composer who slows way down during the academic year and then composes like crazy in the summer, but that seems to have changed this year.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been blasting out music the last three months like nobody’s business, and all in pairs: two sextets, two quintets, two large ensemble pieces, two […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1131,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1130","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1130"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1134,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1130\/revisions\/1134"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}