Concepts

I just attended a god-awful concert, with great players, a supportive audience, and a cool venue. These things do not make up for bad music. So I am going to rant.

HAVING A CLEVER IDEA DOES NOT MEAN YOU'VE WRITTEN SOMETHING GOOD

All of the pieces performed tonight were driven (I use the term lightly) by single ideas. The first was to combine piano in unison with recorded speech. Maybe this would make for an interesting part of a larger piece, but on its own it gets tedious quickly, and points to a lack of ability, creativity, or follow through on the composer's part.

The "concept" of the next piece was to play some white noise over pianissimo (very quiet) instruments, with silence in between. Again, maybe this is a "cool sound," but after the third or fourth silence, as the next bout of static with quietly useless melodies an audience member has either a) figured out that this is the whole piece, b) is hoping something else is going to happen soon, or c) both. In the case of A, if you're the composer you've failed, and quit immediately. With B, if something else doesn't eventually happen, you have an unhappy audience member. You can figure C out for yourself.

The next of the evening continued this way. One of the pieces was a descending chromatic scale (over and over again, at various speeds, for about five minutes), for cello, electric guitar, and keyboard synth. Just because you've added electronics doesn't mean you've written something good. How the hell is "contemporary music," which is supposed to push boundaries, so far behind? This stuff was okay when it was being invented, but let's get real here. Listen to some Aphex Twin (or Phillipe Manoury, or Matt Burtner, or any good rock, for god's sake) and keep your experiments to yourself (unless that's the point AND you know what you're doing). Give me something compelling. Here's an idea:

Get an idea, then compose to completely destroy that idea, to force people to figure out for themselves what it is you're doing.

Here's another:

Write something that sounds good.

Maybe if you combine those two ideas you'll make some art. Or maybe this is wrong and you'll totally fail. If you do, hopefully it will be a complete enough failure to elicit some booing and shouting from the audience, maybe even to have a performer get punched if you've done things right. Anything would be better than sitting quietly through an evening of this to watch another composer's undeserved bow. Please excuse me, I've got music to write.