ted hearne
bio // calendar
// music // links
// webpage
// katrina ballads
Feb 8, 2009
11:10pm
Oh, Indie Rock… you’re just so… Indie.
all weekend I’ve been mulling over Nico Muhly’s extremely interesting response to an interview with John Adams that appeared in Newsweek last week. essentially, when the reporter offers nico and caleb burhans as examples of composers who broaden audience appreciation of classical music, adams lets loose this bomb about how “a lot” people in that generation are “creating a level of musical discourse that’s just really bland.”
let me paste muhly’s full response in here because it’s not printed in its original form on his blog anymore:
I suppose that when John Adams has my name in his mouth in print, I should respond! In an interview in Newsweek, of all places, the following exchange takes place:
Interview Dude: Isn’t that changing, to some degree? Aren’t composers who cross streams with “indie” or experimental rock - people like Nico Muhly or Caleb Burhans - bringing non-instrumentalists into the concert hall?
Adams János: But both of those guys, they’re highly trained musicians.
ID: Yes, but their fans aren’t, necessarily.
AJ: Possibly. But there’s another side to that. Some of the music that these composers are producing is so simple that it’s in danger of dumbing-down. Not necessarily Nico and Caleb. But there are a lot of young composers in their 20s and 30s who are very anxious to appeal to the same audience that would listen to indie rock. But they are creating a level of musical discourse that’s just really bland. I don’t think it will have a very long shelf life. The bottom line is art really can’t be made easy and palatable without simply losing its meaning and importance. I had this conversation with the new executive director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. We all went out to dinner and this fellow said, “I think we should make concerts interactive.” Here I am, someone who’s always been the renegade. “Wait a minute,” I said. “You can’t listen to a really important piece of music and have people banging on their BlackBerrys.”
Oh, hell no! There are a lot of things to unpack here, so, let’s go in order. First of all, why is there such an obsession with the “crossing-over” discourse? Nobody is crossing shit. I speak only for myself here, but my music is a pretty direct representation of my musical interests, which, in my case, express themselves more like obsessions and tropisms. The fact that anybody likes it is, I hope, the result of the honesty of the project expressing itself through the way it sounds. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is, I’m not sure that I buy the notion of “simplicity –> dumb.” A lot of very complicated music is pretty stupid, too. Don’t make me put examples up here. Anyway, the moral of the story here is that if one more interviewer asks me a question using either the word cross-over or something that implies A on one side and B on the other and me, like, estraddling the liminal space, I’m going to cut a bitch.
The second thing is, nobody needs interactive concerts. I like concerts because I don’t have to interact with anything, and I pay the nice people cash money to sit down and have a non-interactive expurrience.
Also, let me be catty here for a second. John Adams wrote a musical, like, musical musical a decade ago. This thing, beloveds, is out of control. It’s called I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky and I just want to post a little audio here:
CLIP: «John Adams Your Honor my client he’s a young black man from I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky »
Okay? Okay. So, let’s take it easy with the accusations of a bland musical discourse.
Wait, one more:
CLIP: «John Adams Crushed by the Rock I Been Standing On from I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky »
Now. John Adams is so 200% my homegirl. I love, like, 88% of his music with all my böðy and if I were to make a desert island list, his music would account for a third of it. Also, the remaining 12% of it always seems appropriately problematic to me, as in, it makes me mull thangs over rather than just discounting the music. I’m thinking specifically about The Dharma at Big Sur, which is kind of hippie this and that, or this musical, above. But as a rule, his music engages with me on a corporeal and mental level basically unparalleled by most other musics of this century; this isn’t a choice as much as a reality.
And in the spirit of I <3 Adams, let me direct your attention to a very interesting post by Mark Adamo over on his blog about Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer. It is worth a read in its entirety, mainly because this opera is one of the first contemporary ones that I really connected with (at age 14).
Adamo’s arguments are interesting for a variety of reasons, but mainly, because his interest in opera is about the Vital Drama of the thing. For Adamo, the ostinato-driven chorus/recit pattern of Adams’s operas is fundamentally off-putting. Why is it, then, that for me, as a teenager, I found it so appealing, and traditional opera structure so alien? I don’t have any answers to these questions.
The ending of this opera rocks my world still:
CLIP: « John Adams You Embraced Them from The Death of Klinghoffer »
There is so much to love here; what’s difficult, in Adamo’s mind, is how it relates to the overall structure of the opera as well as to the Political umbrella under which the opera hovers. Go know. It’s well worth (a) a listen and (b) a read. Isn’t the point of these things that we all listen more anyway?
i think muhly hits several nails on their heads, and i’m glad he did. clearly, it sounds like adams is equating “indie rock” with simple and “simple” with bland. whether or not he would agree with that statement, he comes off that way. and that is bullshit. also, as a commenter mentioned on muhly’s page, to be concerned with “shelf life” or endurance or whatever is to be sincerely elitist. if you think that all good music endures for future generations, or all bad music has a limited shelf life, you are both lying to yourself and buying into an antiquated classical-music notion of high v. low art. especially now, art sticks around for all sorts of reasons - quality may or may not have something to do with it.
also, as judd greenstein pointed out in his post on the article a day earlier, it was wrong for adams to question younger composers’ desire to connect with audience bases that don’t come from classical-music supports. appealing to a young audience is not a bad thing; if fans of Indie Rock like it, that’s not a bad thing; John Adams, you are being such an Old Man.
(also, for the record, people CAN listen to great music and use their blackberrys at the same time; we are capable of absorbing all sorts of information in all sorts of ways. perhaps you’ll catch more of the details if you aren’t writing a text message during part of the piece, but maybe that’s not always the case. and if it’s the kind of piece that does require your full attention, shouldn’t it be “important” enough to provide at least the level of engrossment that keeps you away from your mobile devices? are we not free to be bored at a Classical Music Concert? oh man, i HATE Classical Music Concerts.)
but that’s a side topic.
anyway, while i am not as big of a fan of adams’s music as some of my best composer friends, some of his pieces mean a lot to me and others i have real respect for even if they don’t fill that primal need. and i think because he’s proven himself to be a good composer who (at one point anyway) had something meaningful to say, i should try to figure out what he MIGHT have been getting at.
because john adams talked about a bland level of musical discourse, and muhly didn’t really address the bland part of it, only that he wasn’t “crossing over” but rather directly representing his own musical interests. a composer who does this is doing something really good, i think - it’s like being true to yourself. (this is clearly true of muhly’s music, it is very honest.) i can think of all sorts of composers who think they should be writing Classical Music and end up injecting it with a bunch of formal nonsense that just bores everybody. lame.
but, even if a composer’s music is honest it can still be bland. if a composer doesn’t push the limits of what they’re willing to accept in their own taste - rediscovering their interests, getting new ones - as much as they value expressing what those interests are, they run the risk of blandness. honesty isn’t really enough, because then it just comes down to: i know what i like, and here it is. (also boring.) that’s no different from The Real World; everyone’s being honest. everyone is their own person. wow, how enthralling. for me, honesty has to be combined with some element of sincere exploration, some risk. and i really think that idea is valued by fans of Indie Rock or whatever just as much as fans of any music.
so i guess what i’m wondering is, what does john adams think musical discourse SHOULD be, in order for it to be NOT bland? instead of throwing vague and negative comments out there, can he offer his blueprint for stimulating musical discourse? coming from someone who three questions earlier in his interview was praising that there-is-a-picture-of-me-next-to-the-word-bland-in-the-dictionary piece of garbage yo-yo ma was rocking out to at the inauguration, his opinion on this subject is probably unconvincing anyway - and i guess this was muhly’s ultimate point - but let me agree with big john on one important idea: musical discourse is good when it is NOT bland.
blog comments powered by Disqus
Page 1 of 1
bio // calendar
// music // links
// webpage
// katrina ballads
Feb 8, 2009
11:10pm
Oh, Indie Rock… you’re just so… Indie.
all weekend I’ve been mulling over Nico Muhly’s extremely interesting response to an interview with John Adams that appeared in Newsweek last week. essentially, when the reporter offers nico and caleb burhans as examples of composers who broaden audience appreciation of classical music, adams lets loose this bomb about how “a lot” people in that generation are “creating a level of musical discourse that’s just really bland.”
let me paste muhly’s full response in here because it’s not printed in its original form on his blog anymore:
I suppose that when John Adams has my name in his mouth in print, I should respond! In an interview in Newsweek, of all places, the following exchange takes place:
Interview Dude: Isn’t that changing, to some degree? Aren’t composers who cross streams with “indie” or experimental rock - people like Nico Muhly or Caleb Burhans - bringing non-instrumentalists into the concert hall?
Adams János: But both of those guys, they’re highly trained musicians.
ID: Yes, but their fans aren’t, necessarily.
AJ: Possibly. But there’s another side to that. Some of the music that these composers are producing is so simple that it’s in danger of dumbing-down. Not necessarily Nico and Caleb. But there are a lot of young composers in their 20s and 30s who are very anxious to appeal to the same audience that would listen to indie rock. But they are creating a level of musical discourse that’s just really bland. I don’t think it will have a very long shelf life. The bottom line is art really can’t be made easy and palatable without simply losing its meaning and importance. I had this conversation with the new executive director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. We all went out to dinner and this fellow said, “I think we should make concerts interactive.” Here I am, someone who’s always been the renegade. “Wait a minute,” I said. “You can’t listen to a really important piece of music and have people banging on their BlackBerrys.”
Oh, hell no! There are a lot of things to unpack here, so, let’s go in order. First of all, why is there such an obsession with the “crossing-over” discourse? Nobody is crossing shit. I speak only for myself here, but my music is a pretty direct representation of my musical interests, which, in my case, express themselves more like obsessions and tropisms. The fact that anybody likes it is, I hope, the result of the honesty of the project expressing itself through the way it sounds. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is, I’m not sure that I buy the notion of “simplicity –> dumb.” A lot of very complicated music is pretty stupid, too. Don’t make me put examples up here. Anyway, the moral of the story here is that if one more interviewer asks me a question using either the word cross-over or something that implies A on one side and B on the other and me, like, estraddling the liminal space, I’m going to cut a bitch.
The second thing is, nobody needs interactive concerts. I like concerts because I don’t have to interact with anything, and I pay the nice people cash money to sit down and have a non-interactive expurrience.
Also, let me be catty here for a second. John Adams wrote a musical, like, musical musical a decade ago. This thing, beloveds, is out of control. It’s called I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky and I just want to post a little audio here:
CLIP: «John Adams Your Honor my client he’s a young black man from I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky »
Okay? Okay. So, let’s take it easy with the accusations of a bland musical discourse.
Wait, one more:
CLIP: «John Adams Crushed by the Rock I Been Standing On from I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky »
Now. John Adams is so 200% my homegirl. I love, like, 88% of his music with all my böðy and if I were to make a desert island list, his music would account for a third of it. Also, the remaining 12% of it always seems appropriately problematic to me, as in, it makes me mull thangs over rather than just discounting the music. I’m thinking specifically about The Dharma at Big Sur, which is kind of hippie this and that, or this musical, above. But as a rule, his music engages with me on a corporeal and mental level basically unparalleled by most other musics of this century; this isn’t a choice as much as a reality.
And in the spirit of I <3 Adams, let me direct your attention to a very interesting post by Mark Adamo over on his blog about Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer. It is worth a read in its entirety, mainly because this opera is one of the first contemporary ones that I really connected with (at age 14).
Adamo’s arguments are interesting for a variety of reasons, but mainly, because his interest in opera is about the Vital Drama of the thing. For Adamo, the ostinato-driven chorus/recit pattern of Adams’s operas is fundamentally off-putting. Why is it, then, that for me, as a teenager, I found it so appealing, and traditional opera structure so alien? I don’t have any answers to these questions.
The ending of this opera rocks my world still:
CLIP: « John Adams You Embraced Them from The Death of Klinghoffer »
There is so much to love here; what’s difficult, in Adamo’s mind, is how it relates to the overall structure of the opera as well as to the Political umbrella under which the opera hovers. Go know. It’s well worth (a) a listen and (b) a read. Isn’t the point of these things that we all listen more anyway?
i think muhly hits several nails on their heads, and i’m glad he did. clearly, it sounds like adams is equating “indie rock” with simple and “simple” with bland. whether or not he would agree with that statement, he comes off that way. and that is bullshit. also, as a commenter mentioned on muhly’s page, to be concerned with “shelf life” or endurance or whatever is to be sincerely elitist. if you think that all good music endures for future generations, or all bad music has a limited shelf life, you are both lying to yourself and buying into an antiquated classical-music notion of high v. low art. especially now, art sticks around for all sorts of reasons - quality may or may not have something to do with it.
also, as judd greenstein pointed out in his post on the article a day earlier, it was wrong for adams to question younger composers’ desire to connect with audience bases that don’t come from classical-music supports. appealing to a young audience is not a bad thing; if fans of Indie Rock like it, that’s not a bad thing; John Adams, you are being such an Old Man.
(also, for the record, people CAN listen to great music and use their blackberrys at the same time; we are capable of absorbing all sorts of information in all sorts of ways. perhaps you’ll catch more of the details if you aren’t writing a text message during part of the piece, but maybe that’s not always the case. and if it’s the kind of piece that does require your full attention, shouldn’t it be “important” enough to provide at least the level of engrossment that keeps you away from your mobile devices? are we not free to be bored at a Classical Music Concert? oh man, i HATE Classical Music Concerts.)
but that’s a side topic.
anyway, while i am not as big of a fan of adams’s music as some of my best composer friends, some of his pieces mean a lot to me and others i have real respect for even if they don’t fill that primal need. and i think because he’s proven himself to be a good composer who (at one point anyway) had something meaningful to say, i should try to figure out what he MIGHT have been getting at.
because john adams talked about a bland level of musical discourse, and muhly didn’t really address the bland part of it, only that he wasn’t “crossing over” but rather directly representing his own musical interests. a composer who does this is doing something really good, i think - it’s like being true to yourself. (this is clearly true of muhly’s music, it is very honest.) i can think of all sorts of composers who think they should be writing Classical Music and end up injecting it with a bunch of formal nonsense that just bores everybody. lame.
but, even if a composer’s music is honest it can still be bland. if a composer doesn’t push the limits of what they’re willing to accept in their own taste - rediscovering their interests, getting new ones - as much as they value expressing what those interests are, they run the risk of blandness. honesty isn’t really enough, because then it just comes down to: i know what i like, and here it is. (also boring.) that’s no different from The Real World; everyone’s being honest. everyone is their own person. wow, how enthralling. for me, honesty has to be combined with some element of sincere exploration, some risk. and i really think that idea is valued by fans of Indie Rock or whatever just as much as fans of any music.
so i guess what i’m wondering is, what does john adams think musical discourse SHOULD be, in order for it to be NOT bland? instead of throwing vague and negative comments out there, can he offer his blueprint for stimulating musical discourse? coming from someone who three questions earlier in his interview was praising that there-is-a-picture-of-me-next-to-the-word-bland-in-the-dictionary piece of garbage yo-yo ma was rocking out to at the inauguration, his opinion on this subject is probably unconvincing anyway - and i guess this was muhly’s ultimate point - but let me agree with big john on one important idea: musical discourse is good when it is NOT bland.
blog comments powered by Disqus
Page 1 of 1
Oh, Indie Rock… you’re just so… Indie.
all weekend I’ve been mulling over Nico Muhly’s extremely interesting response to an interview with John Adams that appeared in Newsweek last week. essentially, when the reporter offers nico and caleb burhans as examples of composers who broaden audience appreciation of classical music, adams lets loose this bomb about how “a lot” people in that generation are “creating a level of musical discourse that’s just really bland.”
let me paste muhly’s full response in here because it’s not printed in its original form on his blog anymore:
I suppose that when John Adams has my name in his mouth in print, I should respond! In an interview in Newsweek, of all places, the following exchange takes place:
Interview Dude: Isn’t that changing, to some degree? Aren’t composers who cross streams with “indie” or experimental rock - people like Nico Muhly or Caleb Burhans - bringing non-instrumentalists into the concert hall?Adams János: But both of those guys, they’re highly trained musicians.
ID: Yes, but their fans aren’t, necessarily.
AJ: Possibly. But there’s another side to that. Some of the music that these composers are producing is so simple that it’s in danger of dumbing-down. Not necessarily Nico and Caleb. But there are a lot of young composers in their 20s and 30s who are very anxious to appeal to the same audience that would listen to indie rock. But they are creating a level of musical discourse that’s just really bland. I don’t think it will have a very long shelf life. The bottom line is art really can’t be made easy and palatable without simply losing its meaning and importance. I had this conversation with the new executive director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. We all went out to dinner and this fellow said, “I think we should make concerts interactive.” Here I am, someone who’s always been the renegade. “Wait a minute,” I said. “You can’t listen to a really important piece of music and have people banging on their BlackBerrys.”
Oh, hell no! There are a lot of things to unpack here, so, let’s go in order. First of all, why is there such an obsession with the “crossing-over” discourse? Nobody is crossing shit. I speak only for myself here, but my music is a pretty direct representation of my musical interests, which, in my case, express themselves more like obsessions and tropisms. The fact that anybody likes it is, I hope, the result of the honesty of the project expressing itself through the way it sounds. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is, I’m not sure that I buy the notion of “simplicity –> dumb.” A lot of very complicated music is pretty stupid, too. Don’t make me put examples up here. Anyway, the moral of the story here is that if one more interviewer asks me a question using either the word cross-over or something that implies A on one side and B on the other and me, like, estraddling the liminal space, I’m going to cut a bitch.
The second thing is, nobody needs interactive concerts. I like concerts because I don’t have to interact with anything, and I pay the nice people cash money to sit down and have a non-interactive expurrience.
Also, let me be catty here for a second. John Adams wrote a musical, like, musical musical a decade ago. This thing, beloveds, is out of control. It’s called I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky and I just want to post a little audio here:
CLIP: «John Adams Your Honor my client he’s a young black man from I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky »
Okay? Okay. So, let’s take it easy with the accusations of a bland musical discourse.
Wait, one more:
CLIP: «John Adams Crushed by the Rock I Been Standing On from I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky »
Now. John Adams is so 200% my homegirl. I love, like, 88% of his music with all my böðy and if I were to make a desert island list, his music would account for a third of it. Also, the remaining 12% of it always seems appropriately problematic to me, as in, it makes me mull thangs over rather than just discounting the music. I’m thinking specifically about The Dharma at Big Sur, which is kind of hippie this and that, or this musical, above. But as a rule, his music engages with me on a corporeal and mental level basically unparalleled by most other musics of this century; this isn’t a choice as much as a reality.
And in the spirit of I <3 Adams, let me direct your attention to a very interesting post by Mark Adamo over on his blog about Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer. It is worth a read in its entirety, mainly because this opera is one of the first contemporary ones that I really connected with (at age 14).
Adamo’s arguments are interesting for a variety of reasons, but mainly, because his interest in opera is about the Vital Drama of the thing. For Adamo, the ostinato-driven chorus/recit pattern of Adams’s operas is fundamentally off-putting. Why is it, then, that for me, as a teenager, I found it so appealing, and traditional opera structure so alien? I don’t have any answers to these questions.
The ending of this opera rocks my world still:
CLIP: « John Adams You Embraced Them from The Death of Klinghoffer »
There is so much to love here; what’s difficult, in Adamo’s mind, is how it relates to the overall structure of the opera as well as to the Political umbrella under which the opera hovers. Go know. It’s well worth (a) a listen and (b) a read. Isn’t the point of these things that we all listen more anyway?
i think muhly hits several nails on their heads, and i’m glad he did. clearly, it sounds like adams is equating “indie rock” with simple and “simple” with bland. whether or not he would agree with that statement, he comes off that way. and that is bullshit. also, as a commenter mentioned on muhly’s page, to be concerned with “shelf life” or endurance or whatever is to be sincerely elitist. if you think that all good music endures for future generations, or all bad music has a limited shelf life, you are both lying to yourself and buying into an antiquated classical-music notion of high v. low art. especially now, art sticks around for all sorts of reasons - quality may or may not have something to do with it.
also, as judd greenstein pointed out in his post on the article a day earlier, it was wrong for adams to question younger composers’ desire to connect with audience bases that don’t come from classical-music supports. appealing to a young audience is not a bad thing; if fans of Indie Rock like it, that’s not a bad thing; John Adams, you are being such an Old Man.
(also, for the record, people CAN listen to great music and use their blackberrys at the same time; we are capable of absorbing all sorts of information in all sorts of ways. perhaps you’ll catch more of the details if you aren’t writing a text message during part of the piece, but maybe that’s not always the case. and if it’s the kind of piece that does require your full attention, shouldn’t it be “important” enough to provide at least the level of engrossment that keeps you away from your mobile devices? are we not free to be bored at a Classical Music Concert? oh man, i HATE Classical Music Concerts.)
but that’s a side topic.
anyway, while i am not as big of a fan of adams’s music as some of my best composer friends, some of his pieces mean a lot to me and others i have real respect for even if they don’t fill that primal need. and i think because he’s proven himself to be a good composer who (at one point anyway) had something meaningful to say, i should try to figure out what he MIGHT have been getting at.
because john adams talked about a bland level of musical discourse, and muhly didn’t really address the bland part of it, only that he wasn’t “crossing over” but rather directly representing his own musical interests. a composer who does this is doing something really good, i think - it’s like being true to yourself. (this is clearly true of muhly’s music, it is very honest.) i can think of all sorts of composers who think they should be writing Classical Music and end up injecting it with a bunch of formal nonsense that just bores everybody. lame.
but, even if a composer’s music is honest it can still be bland. if a composer doesn’t push the limits of what they’re willing to accept in their own taste - rediscovering their interests, getting new ones - as much as they value expressing what those interests are, they run the risk of blandness. honesty isn’t really enough, because then it just comes down to: i know what i like, and here it is. (also boring.) that’s no different from The Real World; everyone’s being honest. everyone is their own person. wow, how enthralling. for me, honesty has to be combined with some element of sincere exploration, some risk. and i really think that idea is valued by fans of Indie Rock or whatever just as much as fans of any music.
so i guess what i’m wondering is, what does john adams think musical discourse SHOULD be, in order for it to be NOT bland? instead of throwing vague and negative comments out there, can he offer his blueprint for stimulating musical discourse? coming from someone who three questions earlier in his interview was praising that there-is-a-picture-of-me-next-to-the-word-bland-in-the-dictionary piece of garbage yo-yo ma was rocking out to at the inauguration, his opinion on this subject is probably unconvincing anyway - and i guess this was muhly’s ultimate point - but let me agree with big john on one important idea: musical discourse is good when it is NOT bland.
