Morty and Me: Appartment House perform Patterns in a Chromatic Field at the Purcell Room

Patterns in a Chromatic Field was the second piece by Morton Feldman I ever heard, and it remains one of my favourites. The first time I encountered it was in Huddersfield in 1996, in a late-night concert straight after the one that featured the first Feldman piece I'd ever heard, For Samuel Beckett.

I was there because I had a piece in contention for the festival's Young Composer Award. (I didn't win, although I did get beyond the workshop stage and get a proper concert performance alongside the piece that did win. Long story.) Feldman was one of the featured composers that year (the first time a dead man had been featured this way in Huddersfield, I believe), so there was quite a lot of his music to hear. Being a provincial boy who'd been to a provincial university, I'd never heard of him before. Hearing For Samuel Beckett was an extraordinary experience. I'd read about him beforehand and so had an idea of what to expect (slow, quiet, goes on a long time), but I really wasn't prepared for how it would feel to sit through something like this. It started off well; Feldman's music has a sound that's immediately attractive. So for the first few minutes it was great. As it progressed though, the sheer apparent stasis of it began to get to me. By about 20 minutes in it began to feel like some form of torture. After that confusion and disorientation began to set in. And then something odd happened. The music seemed to be putting me into a kind of trance like state, not entirely unlike the state of mind you might find yourself in after a low dose of hallucinogens. By about the 50 minute mark when the piece finished, I couldn't decide whether it had gone on far too long or not nearly long enough. We left the hall and walked over to the venue where the late-night gig was happening. This was Patterns in a Chromatic Field, and here everything clicked into place, I experienced that rare sense of revelation that classical music delivers rather more rarely than it promises, and I became the devote of Feldman's music that I remain today.

So Patterns holds a special place in my heart. It's where I "got" Feldman, and it came into my life at a very exciting time when it briefly seemed I might amount to something. It's also a piece for cello, so I also get to have the (probably futile) notion that one day I might play it myself. In my mind it's become a rep piece for cello. I've heard a good four or five recordings of it since then, but last night's performance by Anton Lukoszevieze and Philip Thomas of Apartment House is only the second time I've heard it live.

That's important, because Feldman's is a music that feels significantly different in concert. It's something to do with commitment. Listening to a recording in your own living room, there are always distractions, the possibility of doing something else while the music's playing. Going to a performance requires a higher level of commitment. You're there for an hour and a half of quiet, often superficially uneventful music that demands a level of concentration that's almost superhuman. (This goes for everyone there, whether they're performing or listening.) At the same time, the fact that there's nothing else but you and the music (well, and the rest of the audience), makes it easier. It's just you and this intimidating experience ahead of you, and the only thing that can distract you (apart from the rest of the audience) is whatever thoughts spring into your mind as it struggles to maintain its focus on the moment.

I say superficially because of course there's actually a huge amount going on. You hear a lot of music written under the influence of Feldman, and what most of it fails to grasp is that although tiny motifs and ideas return and reiterate again and again, over and over, there's actually very little repetition in Feldman. Like walking into a dark room, once you've acclimatised yourself you find there's actually a huge amount of detail to appreciate where initially there seemed to be nothing. Patterns is unusual in late Feldman in that it's often quite antsy and fidgety in texture, and has a sense of nervous activity that only periodically dissipates to reveal a more glacial texture. Lukoszevieze and Thomas's performance tends towards the slower end of the range I've heard (they come in at just over 90 minutes), and yet they still mange to convey this jitteriness, a quality that I think often gets lost in the race to play Feldman as slowly as possible. This is quiet and defective and profound music, sure, but there's also humour to be had, another element of Feldman's personality that often gets neglected, and which they convey deliciously here in the the throwaway ending, for instance.

One of the startling things I find listening to this piece on the flesh again after all those years is how much of it has seeped into my own music. Feldman's been a huge influence on me, of course, but it's startling to sit listening to Patterns and real is how much this specific piece has left its mark on my own work. Sometimes this is the result of initial enthusiasm and half-absorbed lessons: you can hear this in Infinite Breathing, where a Feldmanish texture jostles for supremacy with passages in thrall to Ustvolskaya, whose music I discovered around the same time as Feldman's. Later on in Le tombeau de Feldman it's a more deliberate allusion, but it's startling to realise how what I thought at the time was a kind of generalised ersatz-Morty was a half-memory of this particular piece, the main difference being that my figures tend more towards the diatonic than Feldman's (that at least was a deliberate thing).

I sometimes wonder if Feldman, who twenty years ago was a fairly marginal figure, isn't now becoming too pervasive a figure. I certainly worry that it's become  cliché to write music under his influence (albeit often without a real understanding of what he's doing and why he uses those textures and strategies), and periodically try to kick the Feldman habit in my own music. Having said that, he's clearly not edged quite so far into respectability that some people won't walk out before he's done. Five did last night. One of them was a woman who heroically and selflessly sneaked out as quietly as she could before she succumbed to a coughing fit. I salute her. The other four confuse me (why on earth stick it out for over an hour and disappear with 20 minutes or less to go?) and annoy me (if you are going to duck out early, couldn't you at least try to leave quietly?).  But to come back to this piece, to her it live in that situation where you're stuck in a hall with it, and just as you settle in having made sure you went to the toilet first, you experience a momentary frisson of exhilarating fear as you register what you're committing yourself to, banishes thoughts like that. What's wonderful, what makes it great music, is its capacity to come out and startle you, and (particularly in a well-judged performance like this one) make you feel like music you've been listening to for years is music you've never properly heard before. You thought you had it figured, and then you realise that you've hardly scratched the surface.

For Steve

There are plenty of people who knew Steve Martland better than I, and could tell you better stories than I. My principal encounter with him was in 2001, when my string piece "Infinite Breathing" was chosen by him for a SPNM workshop and concert. So I got to experience the generosity and big-heartedness of the man first-hand. Between the workshop and the concert we went for a meal and we had a fantastic conversation, which I can't really relate here because it largely consisted of things that would be libellous if i wrote them down. Very funny, though.  When I bumped into him afterwards at other events, he remembered who I was. This may not sound like much, but believe me that's a rare thing in this business. Steve was a man who cared about people above all.

I can't quite believe he's dead. No-one else can, from the people I've spoken to.  It's particularly sad because I gather that after a long period of creative stasis he was feeling re-energised: the commissions were coming in again, he was full of ideas and the hunger to realise them, and things seemed generally to be coming together for him.  It's a sad thing to consider what he might yet have had to give in music. It's a greater loss to the world though, no longer to have the man himself in it.

This is a tiny thing I did today as a memorial.  It seems dreadfully inadequate, but I couldn't not make the attempt.  I hope it's not sentimental, at least. Steve wasn't a sentimental man, just a passionately caring one.

Over the edge

So, what have I been doing since the last time I declared I was reactivating this place and then didn't?

Well, teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown for one, but that's another story.

I wrote a fucking amazing piece for orchestra.  The conductor was scared of it though, so I had to write a less scary one. In two days. TWO DAYS! I'm brilliant, I am.

I went to some gigs and listened to some music. Maybe I'll tell you about that sometime, maybe I won't.

I mucked about with some other people's music.

I did a bit of my own.

I started recording versions of songs from Beck's Song Reader.

I entered a competition for amateur musicians.

Gulp.

Yes, I am going to perform my cello all on my own-some (OK with a pianist).  The last time I did this was in 1989 and it was a disaster.  I have suffered crippling anxiety about it ever since.

But in the last few years, I've been doing a lot of recording of my own stuff - mostly drones with cello, processed cello sounds, that sort of thing.  I realised what I should have realised about 20 years ago really, that it's fundamentally a waste of time and energy trying to foist your music on other performers who are on the whole at best indifferent and at worst condescending or actively hostile.  You know - classical musicians.  (There are of course one or two noble exceptions to this.)

So I was making this music all by myself, without any need to rely on pothers, and it felt good.  I played some of it to my friend Rhodri, and his reaction was, "this is really good.  You should get yourself a gig at Cafe Oto or something."

Well, he's right of course.  It's all very well sitting in your front room recording stuff and fiddling about with it, but music's a performing thing, yes?  It's intriguing to think how this stuff might be done live - it would have to be executed in a different way to the way I go about constructing a recording of course, but having to adapt to that could spark off some new and interesting avenues.  But the thought of getting up in front of people and performing as the centre of their attention was just terrifying.  This was something I needed to address.  It's closed off all sorts of opportunities for my for two decades.

I'd heard of Music in Offices before, and in fact I know a couple of people who've entered their Office Musician of the Year competition. One even won it! And the other reached the final. No pressure there, then.  So when some people turned up at a rehearsal of my orchestra before Christmas touting it, it planted a seed in my mind.  Perhaps this was what I needed? Something to force me to stand up and play in front of other people.  I spoke to one of my friends who'd done it before.  She told me she'd entered it for pretty much the same reasons I was thinking about it, and it had done her a huge amount of good; boosted her confidence in her own abilities and opened up all sorts of opportunities to play that she'd never even conceived before. I um-ed and ah-ed about it for a few weeks, then bit the bullet and sent in the application form jut before the deadline at the end of November.

The heats stage is at the end of February. But on Monday night my accompanist and I went along to a masterclass that MiO had organised for the participants.  It seemed a good idea to have a dry run where it didn't matter too much if I fucked up.   The two musicians taking the class, Joel Garthwaite and Maite Aguirre were both lovely and positive and had plenty of wise advice.

And you know what? I didn't fuck up. In fact I was OK. Not perfect, but OK.  It's a couple of weeks to the heats, so there's time to sort out the rough edges. Suddenly it occurs to me I might have to start practising the stuff I planned for the final, because there's a possibility I might get there and actually have to play it.

Essays before a composition (4)

The complete consort dancing together by petemaskreplica

The last time I wrote a piece for a symphony orchestra was in 2005: a small piece with a long title to celebrate Kensington Symphony Orchestra's 50th season. The last time I wrote for orchestra before that was in 2001, a work which got a play through in rehearsal but has never been publicly performed. When you're 20 years old and filled with energy and idealism you think nothing of churning out enormous pieces of music without a thought for who's going to play them, but as I get older it seems a waste of time and energy to slave over an orchestral score with no prospect of it being heard. It's so easy now and so satisfying to produce something large scale in my own living room, and immediately get it uploaded and out there; why sweat over something as arcane as an orchestra when I'll probably never hear the result?

As a result of this ideas stew in my brain for years. I've had the idea for the piece I'm about to begin work on for a long time. In fact, when I wrote The complete consort I had it in mind that it might be in part a preparatory sketch for the bigger work I wanted to write but couldn't at that time justify spending time on.

Over time ideas get half buried, maybe rethought for more realistic projects. Meanwhile new influences continually change my ideas of how to make music, and what sort of music to make. These new ideas and strategies sink into those half-buried seeds and mutate them. You'd think having had the germ of a piece fermenting in my mind for the best part of a decade would make it easy to produce when the chance finally comes. In fact it's hard: I and my music have changed in so many ways I couldn't have foreseen that the idea itself has begun to change, and many of the aspects that I thought were most fixed turn out now not to fit in with how I currently do things. It's not impossible that I'll raid the older music for elements I can use in the new piece, but it seems unlikely that it'll be as straightforward a relationship as I once thought it would be. Music's always on the move; any particular piece that's set down in a definable form is only a snapshot of a moment that's already gone.

Stretching it

I've got a new toy.

In a Cavern by petemaskreplica

Essays before a composition (3)

They chase, they chase their quarry, or the idea of it. Look at them, wildly swinging their nets, each lunge met with empty air. And still they hunt. And meanwhile I sit here, chasing an imagined sound, pen skittering across the page trying to capture my quarry, my conception, even as it recedes ever before me and behind me, each moment gone before it happens...

Essays before a composition (2)

One of the problems for a composer trying to write a programme note is that the experience of listening to a piece of music is almost the precise opposite of the experience of writing it. When you compose, you begin with an idea, a concept of what impression you want the piece to give. The process of producing the music is then a process of unpacking this idea, expanding it and rolling it out into a time span. The listener does this process more or less backwards: over the time span, he or she absorbs the notes, the textures and so on and (if the composer’s done the job well) at the end will have a concept of the work in the mind (which may bear a greater or lesser similarity to the concept the composer had in the fist place). Moreover, what concerns and interests a composer in the act of writing isn’t necessarily what concerns the listener. The composer is concerned with processes: how do I put things together so a to realise this idea of sound? Of course, once he’s worked this out he feels very excited and pleased, and wants to tell people how he did it. But that’s exactly what a listener doesn’t need or want to know. Roberto Gerhard wrote, “Understanding comes first; knowledge second.” There’s a fundamental mistake that’s made all the time in the classical music world: people who like classical music know a lot about it, gos the reasoning, so if you tell people a lot about it they’ll like it. In fact what happens is that if you bombard people with technical detail they start to think that unless they know about it they can’t possibly like or even begin to listen to it. If people like a piece they may well find out more about it, and they may get into the nitty gritty of theory and technique, but that’s for later. Programme notes in which the composer drones on about the clever technical devices he used to write the piece are therefore the biggest turn off imaginable, and such notes often lose the audience’s sympathy before they’ve heard a note.

Essays before a composition (1)

When I was young I discovered the record section of Birmingham Central Library (something that sadly would be all but impossible now in more than one way, and will become utterly impossible if this government gets its way). I discovered many things within those thing cardboard sleeves, sounds that I’d never heard or imagined could be made. I devoured Nielsen’s symphonies, Stockhausen’s Telemusik and Miles Davies’ Bitches Brew with equal enthusiasm, if not immediate understanding. I pored over the sleeve notes for the Stockhausen. They were all but impenetrable, and if I’d been relying on them to guide me into the music I doubt I’d have made it far. Fortunately I just liked the sounds and didn’t worry about what I was supposed to think about them. It was gratifying years later to hear Stockhausen himself introduce his music. His advice on how to listen to his music mentioned nothing of tone rows or retrograde inversions, but boiled down to: you will hear some sounds. Listen to them and hear what happens to them. It turned out Karlheinz was a lot easier to get my head round than Miles.

Essays before a composition (preamble)

I'm about to start work on a reasonably big piece. I tend to steer clear of big pieces these days; it's all very well churning out page after page of music for an enormous body of musicians like an orchestra regardless when you're 20, but now it doesn't seem worth the effort unless there's a realistic chance of a performance. I'd rather work on the small scale, move fast, move on, have stuff ready that someone might actually pick up. Small forces make it easier to make a stab at originality, too; I think larger groups by their nature are more of the establishment and tend to drive out different ways of thinking.

But once the prospect of an actual performance raises its head all my worthy self-justification goes out of the window and I get childishly excited at the thought of having all those instruments to play with.

I'll have to write a programme note, of course. I was thinking about this at the weekend when I went to see the London Sinfonietta's "Pavilions" concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, a curious mixture of music, not really a programme, more just a bunch of pieces that got played on the same night. I liked about half of it, which I think is a decent strike rate (dear professional composer in their 40s with a teaching post and a decent stretch as a composer: by now you really ought to be able to work out how long your piece is. A couple of minutes out is understandable, but nearly double the advertised length just pisses people off, especially when it doesn't justify the length).

Anyway, I got to talking to my friends in the interval, and I mentioned that I thought on the whole that composers shouldn't be allowed to write notes for their own music, something demonstrated by at least two of the composers represented at the concert. They tend to forget that what's interesting for a composer in what he's written isn't necessarily the same as what a listener wants to know. It was pointed out to me that I'll be breaking my own rule next year and writing my own note for my piece. I said I might write a programme note about why composers shouldn't write programme notes. "I'll remind you about that next year!" said E.

So over the coming months I'm going to scribble random thoughts and stick them up here. Don't expect any continuity or even sense between the posts. It'll essentially be a series of random thoughts that I put down to try and help me get my head around the ideas I'm tackling with this piece, how I might try and explain them in a programme note, whether I should. I'm hoping tat something might emerge magically out of this. It might just turn out to be a disjointed sequence of uninteresting waffle though. So sorry if that's what happens.

How to compose

Erin, in the middle of kindly linking here, says she can't imagine how you'd go about composing. Well, it's easy! Here's the Defeatist's Ten-Point Guide to Composing:

1. Take your instrument. If you don't have one, just sing or hum or something.

2. Play (or sing or hum) a tone. Carry on as long as you feel like it (or can without asphyxiating)

3. Now do another one.

4. And another.

5. Maybe you fancy playing a bunch of fast ones? Or not? Well, do or don't, whatever you feel like.

6. Maybe you fancy playing more than one at the same time? Well, why not? If you can only produce one tone at a time, consider having a friend handy.

7. Continue in this vein as long as you please.

8. Hey presto! You've just composed!

9. Write it down if you like. Or not. Doesn't really matter.

10. If you want to do something more complicated there'll probably be editing involved, but that's about it, really.

Old Fart at Play

I resent the caution that comes with age.

When you're young you're reckless. You don't think about the consequences of your actions. You don't wonder if the idea's any good — it doesn't even occur to you that an idea you've had might not be. You just plow on, what the hell. If everything goes to shit, oh well — the next idea's here already, and this one's brilliant.

As you grow older, you question your ideas. I've heard it said that you get fewer, but I don't think this is so: I think it's more that you accept each one less uncritically, you question, and fewer get past that initial thought and make it to something realised. This isn't necessarily bad, of course. It's got something to do with wisdom, the experience that enables you to dismiss the idea that isn't going to go anywhere. You learn to conserve energy, because you don't have so much. You think of the boundless energy you had when you were young, and stupid, and thoughtless, and profligate in your thoughts, and wish you had that energy now, now that you've got the wisdom to expend it on valuable activities more than frivolous ones.

There's more to it than that, though. Sometimes I start to think, is this wisdom stopping me doing this? Or the complacency that received wisdom generates? Or is it fear? Growing older you learn the tricks, you negotiate the traps better, you avoid the failures. But failure's not always such a bad thing is it? Sometimes the mistakes are more valuable than the assured, competent execution, because they shake you out of your viewpoint. Sometimes they can give you that sudden realisation that there's another way to do things, that you hadn't thought of before. That's what keeps music, or any art, alive.

Of course sometimes mistakes are just shit and you're wasting your time, but you've got to take the risk.

That's what I resent about the caution. It stops you fucking up, but it can also stop the interesting fucking up that real proper actual art comes from. It's easy to learn, harder to un-learn.

Post-It Score #3: Blue

The thing about Post-its is that they come in different colours:

After I did this one, I started wondering to myself: is the mood determined b the colour or the colour by the mood? So here's the same image on yellow. Does it make a difference?

Post-It Score #2

Land, sea and sky (?)

(or whatever you want to see)

Post-It Score

A slow day, a doodle, a vague desire to do something a bit loose... who needs staves anyway?

What's next?

Oh, you didn't think there was actually going to be a part 12, did you? Pff.

Anyway, poor quality pastiche be damned. I have determined that 2009 will be the year when slightly crazy plans are brought to fruition.

In particular, something to do with environments and participation, and something to do with time. A lot of time.

And something to do with a bunch of 19th century composers behaving badly.

More clues later. Gotta go chase the next deadline now.

Delta

I don't believe in fate, or synchronicity, or whatever you want to call it. But sometimes you have to wonder.

Christopher Small suddenly seems to be everywhere. I'd never read a word of his before last week, when one of those chains of link following that you do sometimes led me to his book Music, Society, Education. Reading it, I had the sensation of both elation and crushing disappointment, that someone had articulated thoughts and ideas that I've been half-having for years, much better and more cogently than I have, and 30 years earlier. And suddenly I seem to see references to this book, that I'd never heard of (why hadn't I heard of it?) and its author, here and there and everywhere. There's that sudden relief in knowing you're not alone, and that sudden disconcerting realisation that you're not alone. And all this is coming to the surface even as I write a whole series of pieces that touch on a lot of these ideas about performance, tradition, the whole question of what the Western European musical culture is, and what it needs to do to stop its slide into utter obsolescence. Or if it can do anything.



I don't believe in fate, or synchronicity, or whatever you want to call it. But sometimes you have to wonder. Sometimes things seem to pop up at an alarmingly prescient moment.



(By the way, is classical music dead? some people ask. The pedantic, correct answer, of course is that it died in 1827.)

More thoughts on Haydn

I'm entering the final stage of my trek through Haydn's symphonies, in the early 80's now, and the landmarks are starting to seem familiar as those works that are better known - the big, public works for Paris and London after the years of splendid isolation at Esterhazy - loom into view.

It's a source of continuing amazement to me that there's such a wealth of imagination throughout these works, hardly a hint of routine. If these later symphonies, composed for very different circumstances than the earlier ones, seem less obviously questing in the search for innovation, that's not a reflection of any dimming of inspiration, rather perhaps the sign of a composer with absolute mastery of his medium writing for an audience less committed, and hence perhaps less open to overt experimentation, than the prince for whom he composed and performed every day for so many years. It's one of the things I admire moist about Haydn: his ability to write something that can engage on both a casual and deeper level - none of the schism between art and entertainment that we worry about so much these days here. And yet surprises abound; I think of the opening of the Symphony No.73, which sounds like nothing so much as an anticipation of minimalism. And where does the extraordinary moment in Symphony No.85 originate, when the raging fire of the Farewell Symphony suddenly erupts into the surrounding grandeur?

It always surprises me that not more interest is shown in things like this: Ian MacDonald's exhaustive unraveling of the web of self-quotation in Shostakovich is all too readily derided by academia (mainly because he was seen as not having the right credentials, not being a paid-up member of their club). The greybeards pore over every detail of a composer's life and technique, but can't abide the thought that elements from life might intrude on theory. Why did Haydn feel the need to insert the memory of something written over a decade previously here? It was highly unlikely that many, if anyone, would recognise the reference. What private thoughts determined this strange, disturbing intrusion?

Survival strategies for the average composer (5)

5: Stay away from composers

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the one thing a composer hates above all else, more than war, oppression, racism, Hitler, the Daily Mail, music critics, anything, is another composer.

That's not why I'm advising the average composer to stay away from other composers though, although that would go some way to avoiding a certain amount of bruising and bloodletting (if not seething, festering jealousy and resentment).

I don't mean you should never speak to another composer - you've got to learn something, for starters, and I'd not have got much out of the composers who taught me if I'd sat there mute, or refused to turn up to the tutorial. And I've enjoyed social congress with other note scribblers on many occasions, almost never ending in physical recriminations (it helps if you manage to get enough drink inside you to remove the ability to land a punch, of course).

No, what I'm thinking of is the sort of occasion you can see quite regularly in any place where scccm is being performed (perhaps, here in London - actually, almost certainly, here in London - a mini-festival organised by the London Sinfonietta or the SPNM). The performances come and go through the day, people drift in and out of the concert hall, gravitating towards the bar, usually, and little clusters of conversation can be seen. And here's the thing: it's nearly all composers talking to other composers. If you go along to one of these things, it's actually quite difficult to meet anyone who isn't a composer. Sometimes you might get the feeling that the entire concert scene in London is really just an excuse for a lot of composer networking opportunities.

Now, if making a career's your thing, blah blah, networking's one of those things you do, sure. But composers (mostly) aren't going to play your damn music. Unless you're writing stuff for yourself to perform (and that's a subject I'll return to), you need musicians. Friendly ones, who know you and will be willing to put up with your ill-thought-out notation and ignorance of what their instrument can do, and will gently, kindly tell you how to change it to make it better. Musicians are quite easy to meet - just go to the nearest pub after the gig. If you make friends with them, they'll be only to happy to offer advice, and it's not that big a step from there to persuading them to run through something you've written. So stop talking theory with all the composers and start talking practice with the players.

Survival strategies for the average composer (4)

4: Don't write for the Arditti Quartet

Let me make this clear right from the off: I've got no beef with the Arditti Quartet. They're an astonishing ensemble, who've brought some extraordinary music to life, and they and their contribution to so-called contemporary classical music (SCCCM) can't really be over-estimated. They reach heights of virtuosity that few if any other groups can, and when Stockhausen needed a quartet that could manage to keep time while flying about in four different helicopters, there was only one quartet to go to. I admire and respect Irvine Arditti and his cohorts immensely, and they are undoubtedly a Good Thing.

But even the Ardittis only work to a 24-hour day, some of which they have to sleep through, and there's a finite number of pieces they can look at.

When I go to composer workshops and the like, something that often strikes me is that many young composers seem to be unaware of this, and have written a piece that is, frankly, unplayable by anyone who isn't the Arditti Quartet. The Arditti's success seems to have encouraged a belief that nothing is unplayable, and that therefore everything should be made that much harder. It's like one of those Westerns when the local gunslinger has to put up with a succession of challenges of young bucks eager to prove they have a faster draw than him - the ultimate badge of composing respectability would be to write a piece that the Arditti Quartet couldn't play.

There are several reasons why this is a Bad Thing, not least because music is a social force for bringing people together in a spirit of exploration and cooperation, and to reduce it to a complexity pissing contest is a woeful waste of everybody's time. But here are the main points to bear in mind:

1. While the Ardittis do devote a saintly amount of their time to looking at scores of young composers, they're getting music written for them by all the most prominent composers around, so stop and think: are they really going to spend time scrabbling round your parts rather than Jonathan Harvey's?
2. Just because the Ardittis can play anything, it doesn't mean that anything is writable. Sometimes a piece is unplayable not because it's fearlessly testing the boundaries of instrumental technique, but because it's just badly written.
3. If you spend your time writing for a performance by the Arditti Quartet, you're missing out on the possibility of performances by other quartets, who may not have Irvine Arditti leading them but are nevertheless very good. Write for the musicians who are actually going to play your music. If you make friends with Irvine Arditti and he asks you to write him something really, really difficult, then you can pull out your bag of near-impossibilities.
4. With regard to the point above, if you hadn't considered the fact that at some point your best bet will be to ask someone other than Irvine Arditti to play your piece, you really need to rethink your priorities. Now.
   

Survival strategies for the average composer (3)

Great things are afoot at Defeatist Towers, but it's important not to let real life get in the way of procrastination, so here is the third in what remains for the moment a regular series.

3. It's not your fault... but you still have to deal with it.

Bobbins's comment on strategy no.2 raises some points that regularly come up if you're in the business of what we are pleased to call Contemporary Music, and just like a drunk in the pub, no matter how friendly the initial approach, when they appear you know in your heart that things are bound to turn nasty eventually.

But, like the lairy pisshead waiting outside the pub at 11 o'clock to deck you for looking at his pint or spilling his bird, there's no avoiding it, so we may as well pile in. There is, ahem, a debate continuing about what's happened in SCCM* since the turn of the last century, whether it's a valid development, whether it has any future or will ever attract a large audience, whether classical music is dead**, and whether the perpetrators should be dragged outside and given a damn good kicking by hoards of indignant Classic FM listeners.

Arnold Schoenberg, knocking up a few volleys in between alienating the masses

Now there are many arguments and counter-arguments here: Who abandoned whom first, composers or audiences (answer: audiences, as it happens, during the 19th century), whether it's allowable to write music not based on the tonal system (answer: of course it's "allowed", I'll write whatever the hell I like, thank you very much), and so on and so forth. As with the drunk man we met in the pub at the start of this post, an awful lot of this fractiousness is down to some misunderstandings, but that doesn't make the outcome any less violent. Except that it's down to a lot of misunderstandings that happened years ago, long before you and I were around.

The practical upshot of this is that as soon as you're outed as a composer, and just after the inevitable question is asked "Do you write modern music?", you'll be expected to be on the defensive about what your interrogator perceives as a century of atrocities that were perpetrated out of personal malice for them.*** The honest answer is that a) it was like that when you got here, b) yes, there is a lot of bad modern music about, but there's a lot of bad old music as well, it's just that we've had time to forget about that, c) not all modern music sounds the same, d) there's nothing inherently wrong, as it happens, in writing music with a limited audience, e) Hey, Schoenberg's really not that bad, have a listen to this great Hilary Hahn CD of the Violin Concerto! and f) actually this whole argument is at least 20 years out of date anyway, if you took the trouble to pay any attention to current trends. Unfortunately, such arguments will fall on deaf ears. Sorry, but as far as the world's concerned, everything's ruined, and it's all your fault, you composing bastard.


*SCCM: So-Called Classical Music.

**Classical music actually died in about 1827, of course.

*** I remember an occasion as a boy when a piece I wrote for a school music competition making limited use of serial techniques was denounced by my housemaster (yes, it was that kind of school) as "a sick joke". I argued back in a very cogent fashion, explaining the history of Schoenbergian technique and the long establishment and academic respectability of such methods, and was I think very restrained in that I never once used the phrase "you narrow-minded wanker". Or even anything worse.