We should not waste time beating about the bush. Mr. SimonSagt! might learn something about some of those he inadvertently offends at the following links (and I've not yet worked out the others - but give me time!):

LINK 1

LINK 2

LINK 3

Those who can at this time add others might care to do so (but I'll work them out in time anyway!).

(Link 1 has been restored. Many thanks to all parties concerned for their understanding and cooperation in this. RD)

And for good measure, I suppose (although not exactly a composer):

(This link has been restored by the moderators.)

See previous post!

4'33" falls into this category then?

Well, thanks very much for the invitation and I'll certainly give it my best shot. By way of introduction, I'll state that, whatever my differences with Simon over contemporary music and his and others' perceived and actual difficulties with it may be, I have no evidence to suggest that Simon himself is doubting the genuineness of my commitment to what I'm seeking to do, especially since he says that he's heard nothing that I have done in any case.

OK, so let's start by dealing with your assumption that my "line...seemed to be 'This is what I do because I like it and that's nobody else's business'; the actuality is that I do what I do beause I feel compelled to do it in the way that I do it - and it is the business of everyone else that does me the favour of listening to it when it is performed. You also wrote in this context of your impression that my apparent lack of forthcomingness about my work "seems...like putting all the balls back in the puzzled listener's court", whereas not only do I not seek to do this but I also do not set out with the assumption that all such listeners are necessarily going to begin by being "puzzled" in the first place. I've already indicated that my hope is to write music that puts itself across to people and that any absence of verbiage about it on my part is purely for the purpose of ensuring, as far as it may be possible, that it does just that, without let or hindrance. I am also conscious of - and accordingly wish to avoid - the occasional potential danger that, when a composer talks about his/her work, he/she may even contrive, albeit unwittingly, to muddy the waters rather than clarify matters. I quoted Delius on this subject elsewhere recently:
Music that needs "explanation", that requires bolstering up with propaganda, always arounses the suspicion that, if left to stand on its own merits, it would very quickly collapse and be heard no more of.
Now I accept, of course, that this was written almost 80 years ago by a composer who could at times be extremely forthright in his verbal expressions and that his use of the term "propaganda" is arguably an emotive one (and not one that you're talking about here, either), so it's by no means an ideal illustration of the reasons behind what some might regard as my taciturnity about my music, but when I embark on a piece, I always find myself faced with two questions - the first is "is it absolutely necessary that I do this and in the way I hope to try to do it?" and the other is "could I express what I now want to express in words instead?". I know that it's an old cliché to say that "music begins where words leave off", but I do really feel this very much (although, of course, it's a somewhat different issue when word-setting is also involved).

Now let's look at those questions - what contemporary music means to me, why and how I got into it, why it's important to me and why I feel that it should be important to other people. I began my musical life as a result of listening to a broadcast of Chopin's Fourth Ballade; at the time I'd had no previous experience of listening to music and I was completely turned on my head by this - the phrase "baptism of fire" is, I know, another cliché, just as it is yet another to say that "life was never the same afterwards", but both are true in this instance. I had suddenly found the direction in which I must go and I just wanted to find out all I could about music and learn how to make some. Very early on I came into contact with a musician who had been a pupil of Webern just before WWII and he introduced me to Webern and some of the latest Darmstadt, etc., developments in music at a time when I'd heard almost no earlier music at all, apart from a few works by Ravel, Roussel and Stravinsky. He didn't even mention Schönberg for quite some time. I therefore experienced quite a lot of contemporary music before I knew anything much about earlier music, a situation that I only later found was far from the norm. As time passed and I did discover more music of the past, I began to feel less excited about some of the more recent music than I did by some earlier music, yet, from then on, I've always nevertheless retained a fear of the prospect of music becoming a kind of "museum-piece" art and that, without the constant prospect of new music, one's life in music might threaten to become ever more like that of the historian. So, contemporary music means what it does to me because I and many others are writing it, I got into it following a chance event that grabbed me by the scruff of my ears and gave me the desire to write music, it's important to me because music as an expressive force has the power to be important to all of us and, if composers do not continue to give us more of it, its importance may risk becoming compromised to the extent that it may lose some of its immediacy and contemporaneous relevance as an art, which would be nothing short of an international tragedy for humanity.

It does concern me that some people seem to find problems engaging with contemporary music, but my thoughts on this include the following. There have almost always been those who have, at least initially, found difficulty in getting to grips with new and recent music, so this is nothing unusual. The sheer diversity of stylistic persuasions, amount of music and ease of access to music to which we are ever-increasingly becoming accustomed have, I think, helped to bring about increasing levels of confusion in more people than ever before, as well as providing all manner of fresh challenges and excitement; this is another reason why I'm not going to get too worked up about it if some people can't bring themselves to cope with, say Adams, Torke and Reich but can identify with Carter, Ferneyhough and Finnissy or vice versa (and I apologise unreservedly for the appalling arbitrariness in my spur-of-moment choice of names there), for there is just so much and so many contrasts that even to speak of "contemporary music" at all can feel abit like trying to put a parcel label on a cathedral in the sense that, even if a specific time-frame is identified to cover it, all the term can really define is music written within that time-frame. We can't all empathise with all contemporary music - not even us composers - but then what's wrong with that, especially in a world with so much from which to choose and with which to identify or not? For example, I have a great admiration for quite a lot of Carter's music and find that I can engage with some of his works again and again, rewardingly, yet can I get my head around his Third Quartet? Not abit of it! and that's after almost 50 listenings over the 35+ years that it's been around. Whose fault is that? Carter's? The Arditti Quartet's? Mine? Probably the best answer is "none of the above" (although nevertheless remain tempted to answer "mine")...

Another important issue that is all too often the subject of misunderstanding (sometimes genuine, sometimes wilful) is the question of whom a composer is addressing or seeking to address and how he/she expects or hopes to put his/her message across. This misunderstanding often arises from a received assumption that the composer is, or ought to be, trying to please this, that or the other group of people and that this is the beginning, middle and end of his/her purpose, duty and responsibility; when some people perceive that the evidence is suggesting quite otherwise, they sometimes attribute an arrogance to the composer that is usually unwarranted, in the sense that they assume that the composer couldn't care less what anyone else - or perhaps anyone other than his/her small circle of like-minded cronies - might think and feel about his/her work (hence the oft-quoted - though I'm uncertain of its authenticity - "who cares if you listen?" attributed to Babbitt). Composers as diverse as Birtwistle, Carter and Sorabji have tried to explain to people that the composer simply cannot know who is going to listen to his/her music, when or where, or performed by whom and, as a consequence, it is a practical impossibility for a composer to "target" an audience by writing in a way that is predetermined to elicit positive responses (although some composers nevertheless do on occasion try to do that, usually with less than admirably compelling results - no names, no pack-drill and no Masterprizes for guessing the kind of thing I'm thinking of here...). That, however, doesn't mean that one "couldn't care less", or that how one writes is "no one else's business"; as Ian wrote in another thread in another context recently, "communication is everything" - and, by definition, one of the things it involves is giving and receiving, so of course it matters very much how people will respond to what one writes.

I'm all too well aware that I've thoroughly outstayed my welcome in what I've written here, so I'll shut up now, but I hope that it makes at least some kind of sense and answers the questions that have been asked. I've already cited one composer, so let's leave the last word to another - Nielsen:

Music is the sound of life!

Now quite how it is so may be impossible to determine with absolute certainty, but that does not deny Nielsen his great truth!...

Best,

Alistair

Not just well written, Ron; they are a first rate example of how to talk about music in a way which engages with both its ‘expressive world’ and the technical means and preoccupations associated with the attempt to give that world a voice, without the slightest hint of dryness. In other words, the writing is predicated (if the author will forgive me) on the fact that the two things don’t just go hand in hand, they’re essentially the same thing.

Which kicks off my two cents: BazEna and others, including Simon, are in their different ways asking the same thing, I think. Why don’t (some) composers express themselves through music that has enough commonality of discourse to be familiar (and thus appreciable) to a greater number of people? Right? It’s fair question, but I would have to go back to first principles, and of course can only speak for myself about specifics. In my time, I have written ‘pop’, jazz and a host of other kinds of musics than the kind I’ve devoted almost all my life to. I enjoyed it (still do, from time to time). I think I’m quite good at it. (I wrote the music for an aerobics fitness video by a rather well-known tennis star once!)  I could probably earn a living doing it now, with a bit of luck.

The reason I don’t is that I can only really express what I feel a deep need to express through the music that most feels like ‘mine’. To do otherwise feels like a sort of dishonesty, or at least playacting. I work very, very hard at trying to find ways in which I can do that in the most direct and uncomplicated way. It so happens that some of my music references other styles and genres (folk, jazz etc.). That’s never been, for me, because I wanted to ‘pop’ up my work and make it cheaply accessible; it’s because certain aspects of those musics (some technical, some aesthetic, some to do with performance practices) have fascinated me and I find the kinds of resonances that ‘invoking’ them bring about are deeply interesting and engaging. It’s about ME, really, see?! But I’d be a fool to pretend that I write SOLELY for myself, as some composers I think genuinely do.

That begs a lot of questions about ‘the state of contemporary music’; but as many have pointed out already, ‘contemporary music’ is a very variegated and complex cultural entity. It’s certainly NOT all like the Cutting Edge concert Ena cites.

And this thing about ‘intellect’. Of course all art has an intellectual dimension, both in the ways it invites us to perceive it and in the ways it is put together. Beethoven’s sketchbooks tell us just how worked out, and worked AT, his music is. In fact, you couldn’t construct anything like the intricate key plans and motivic networks he habitually uses without the intellect being engaged. But these are means to his expressive ends, of course, and as Richard has said, one possible motivation, one possible ‘end’, is sheer curiosity – the will to experiment and take risks, to find things out, about music and about oneself.

There is indeed a difference between an abstract title such as Symphony No. 3, a descriptive title such as Ein Hendenleben and one that seems on the face of it not to fall obviously into either category.

Whilst I am not denying the concept in principle, I think that you tend to exaggerate here (see below).

Fair comment.

Now wait abit; why might Waning not at least be allusory, or possibly even descriptive? And what's to object to in a title such as Vernal Showers? which could well be descriptive and indeed have ample similar precedents in so being. and if Book of Maps doesn't pass the Grew Title Test, what chance Schmidt's Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln - one of the composer's finest works?

Perhaps that he ought to have renamed himself "Bert-wistle"...

What this appears to tell us is that Member Grew is himself a discerning concert-goer and that, as such, he not only knows better than the composer about such maters but has the extraordinary skill that enables him to make such a blanket condemnatory deduction even in advance of hearing a work. What it also tells us is that Member Grew writes off certain music that he has not even heard; not a good idea...

The question of foreign titles has been responded to by Jonathan Powell already. If a work is given a descriptive title which is perhaps of a painting or other non-musical artefact, place or whatever else, should it always have to be translated into the composer's own primary language and, if so, why? For example, had Varèse been a Scotsman, should he have called his early symphonic poem Burgundy? Was Vaughan Williams out of order using the title Flos Campi? - and should we reprimand Elgar for Alassio and censure David Matthews for Concerto in Azzuro? (and, for that last one, Concerto in Blue might raise an eyebrow or three).

Is the occasional jocular title entirely off limits?

I must say that I agree with Jonathan Powell in that it's hardly a big deal, really and certainly not something to get as worked up about - still less draw exclusively negative conclusions from - as Member Grew appears to do...

Best,

Alistair

Actually - dare I say it - No!

Should "we" presume that you'll write your next post in Cymraeg?

Best,

Alistair