Thanks for that link, Reiner. Let's have a look at Stephen Hough's website to see the extent to which he is "strongly committed to performing and promoting contemporary music". Brahms, Liszt, Rachmaninov, Chopin, Hummel, Schumann, Franck, Saint-Saëns... ah, here we are: Corigliano, Liebermann and MacMillan, there's a few names on the cutting edge of 21st century pianistic composition. Now I'd certainly not wish to discourage performers from composing (still less composers from performing), but Hough's dilettantish attitude and naïve advice to all those non-composing performers out there - have some fun, earn some royalties! - is to my mind a pretty threadbare reason for writing music, and certainly doesn't encourage this listener to want to cross the street to hear his work. Whatever happened to the idea of having "something to say"?

I felt sorriest for the bassoonist who'd asked Hough for a work... Hough got started and found he preferred what he'd written if it was played on the cello...

...  "and so the poor doggy had none".

I do think that all musicians ought to have a working knowledge of compositional technique, just as all composers should have a working knowledge of instrumental technique, even if it's obviously impossible for them to actually play all the instruments they write for, like for example the bassoon - if you start off writing a piece for bassoon and find that it sounds better on the cello, the implication could be drawn that it isn't particularly idiomatic to either. The specialisation of roles into composition and performance to which Hough refers is indeed a recent historical phenomenon, but actually that case can be hugely overstated - this specialisation has been more imposed on musicians through the structure of music education and the music industry than brought about by the musicians themselves. Actually very few of the better-known 20th century composers had no involvement in performance at all, while on the other hand musicians like Klemperer and Furtwängler were far more active as composers than their "image" would lead one to think. Also, the development of electronic music especially since the advent of portable computers is engendering a new kind of composer/performer (and new kinds of connection between "cöassical" and other musics) which presumably Mr Hough knows little or nothing about, so that his arguments come out sounding (at least to me) stale and uninformed, indeed belonging to a century which is receding into the past.

Yes, George, of course you're right. But "a bit of composing" is one thing, while writing a cello (né bassoon) concerto to be performed by Steven Isserlis and the RLPO under the composer's direction is quite another, especially when there are dozens if not hundreds of people around who have devoted their lives to composing, instead of doing a bit of it on the side, and never have the chance to put their work anywhere near a professional orchestra.

Maybe I should now flounce petulantly over to the Grumpy Old Rant thread.

At 0658h I misread this through coffee steam, but I think the resulting question needs answering anyway:

How would you feel if your composition became known as a ringtone?

Have you already forgotten what comes out of my phone when you call, Richard? 

 

No, Ollie, by no means, but Kitty was asking about how one would feel about a composition "becoming known" as a ringtone, and (being something of a phonophobe myself, unfortunately) I don't think I call your mobile often enough to achieve that.