Me on Me

[sen_no_ongaku]

Thanks to those who indulged me by responding to my previous post. Here's my own perspective, with the caveat that I often believe that the person least qualified to talk about someone is h/hself.



I guess to start, the reactions to my music I least want to hear are:

1) It was boring.

2) It was interesting.

Obviously, I want my music to be engaging for the listener, for them to think it worth paying attention. Both answers tell me I failed. Of course I don't want to hear that my music made somebody unhappy, or that they really despised it. But it's preferable to what amounts to no opinion at all.

As for how I do want my audience to respond...obviously, each piece is written with something different in mind; but it's important that my music move something in people -- I want it to inspire emotion in them, or make them want to sway and dance, or evoke some memory, sweet or bittersweet. And I want the memory of that to stay with them.

I've often been told -- you're not alone, ellinor -- that my music has a significant visual component. I'm happy to hear it, but it strikes me as odd, since I certainly don't consciously compose with any sort of imagery in mind.

But, as ltlbird notes, it's also important to me that my music have an abstraction to it, an intellectual aspect. Exactly what that means, I don't know, but it's nevertheless true. Maybe the rigor of structure is just something I need to delineate a boundary within which I can create. I do want to make my listeners think as well as feel. I want to tell them something they haven't heard before, or cause them to look at something familiar as unfamiliar.

dietrich, as for the difficulty of the music I write, I actually wish I wrote music that was easier to perform. But it's simply not my mindset to compromise the music I want to hear for ease of performance[1]. If I have an idea, I go with it to the limits of my imagination, and if it's within the technical constraints of the instrument I'm writing for, it's fair game.

That's not entirely true.

Something else that's very important to me is revitalizing modern music by trying to incorporate the rock music and the electronica that, honestly, comprises the large bulk of my daily listening, and that really gets me excited about music. Much headway has been made in the last 30 years in our field about breaking down the artificial barrier between modern composition and more popular music, but there's still much to be done, and many avenues to be explored.

I don't know -- has reading this been illuminating in any way?
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(1) wavyarms has argued that that's a fundamentally flawed, meaningless distinction, that that perspective is invalid. She's welcome to.

Comments

[thomascantor.livejournal.com]

Yes, thank you.

[wavyarms.livejournal.com]

So why do you not want to hear "It was interesting"? Because that means that the person can come up with nothing better or more specific to say?

We should discuss this more in person so I can go off on tangents.

[sen-no-ongaku.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

[ltlbird.livejournal.com]

I see that fear, since "That was interesting" is often used when one can think of nothing better to say, but I don't think it is wise to avoid that response for that reason. There have definitely been pieces of music and other art that literally provoked interest as my initial response - I wanted to hear or see more, to delve deeper, to more fully understand or experience the piece. That doesn't necessarily mean that the piece didn't move me in other ways as well.

Basically, what I am trying to say is that an, "I'm trying to be nice" description of "interesting" is unflattering, but if the person is honestly interested, I'd say that's a good thing.

[sylvantechie.livejournal.com]

I find it strange how many people (you're far from the first) consider 'interesting' to be a negative term. To my mind it's a very positive one - i.e. when X is interesting that means it caught and held my attention, it made me think (usually about things other than X as well as X itself), and it made me want more of X or at least some element of X.

However, as related to your other post about meaning vs intended meaning, I try to avoid the term because most of the time it does not adequately communicate what I intend.

It's strange how politeness has changed the language so that what was once a compliment is now widely considered a statement of no opinion or actual lack of interest. I think 'uninteresting' is the correct word to use when describing such a thing (or perhaps more accurately and politely 'It did not interest me').

[ellinor.livejournal.com]

dissapointingly, I wrote a rather long response that got swallowed up. I'm going to try it again.

This is very enlightening. Mostly because, without knowing that these were your goals, I expressed something quite similar to them them more or less unbidden, at least based on the portion of your music I have heard. (I say more or less because I know you, so I can't be said to be entirely ignorant of the source). I've already conveyed my reactions to you verbally once, but my summary of what I thought you wanted reactions to be was pretty much a summary of my reaction, so that's a good sign.

It's interesting to me that our reactions/assumptions about your goals and your actual goals intersect so well; they wouldn't have to. As a composer, I suppose you have to write for yourself as much as your audience. If your audience doesn't react the way you hope they do, I guess that would be disappointing on one level, but on another, I doubt that's why you are writing the music. Because if I said that I had a different reaction, I doubt you would change your music as a result. Fortunately, this is not a concern, since this unscientific several-person survey seems to bear out your goals quite well:

1. I have had a simultaneous thinking and feeling reaction to each of your pieces that I have heard. That is very rare for me. Usually I will have an "enjoyment" reaction that is neither thinking nor feeling, and often I will have either a thinking or a feeling reaction. Your music is nearly unique in that I will have all three at once (to differing degrees depending on the piece); that is, I like the listening on a purely aural level, but I also have an emotional reaction (such as tension, humor, rising emotion) and an intellectual one (e.g. what's the math here? what story is this telling? what's the meaning of life? etc.). The list of other composers for whom I have that reaction is short and the reaction is not universal across their music. Satie maybe the closest; occasionally some of the Russian composers, or Reich or Messiaen. I also experience it, on occasion, with jazz soloists.

2. Your music is sufficiently different from what I am accustomed to that I will listen to it over and over again without interruption. I do that with a few things; they tend to be things that make me think, but they are also usually things that I can sing along with. That makes your stuff very unusual.

2. Your music creates a bridge between what I see as concert hall music (which seems to have either stagnated or moved away from my aural-enjoyment zone, depending, in the last few decades) and laptop or club music (where all the excitement seems to be, and I don't know why the concert hall people aren't paying more attention). As I mentioned to you before, I think you have a facility with expressing what makes the electronic music exciting to me, in the musical language and medium of the concert hall crowd. I don't know if it will break down barriers as you hope, but it gives me some hope for the future of concert halls.

Sorry about the chattiness. I haven't thought in such a meta way about music in, well, years. I miss it. Turns out, I miss writing music. A lot. But that's a post for another day.
smiles -