There is indeed “trouble in the bubble”! There has been a lot of blog-talk recently about the ‘alt-classical’ scene and its relationship to pop music. Being the new music troll that I am, I injected myself into some of these discussions and stirred the pot a bit. I’ll explain my perspective a bit more in depth here at my virtual home.
Let me preface this by saying: I don’t love the term ‘alt-classical’, but it’s fine. Sure, call me an ‘alt-classical’ composer/performer if it looks good in print, whatever. As I understand it ‘alt-classical’ is a loose description of the new crop of music written by predominantly classically-trained composers for predominantly classically-trained musicians, which often blurs the distinction between ‘classical’ and pop music. It’s a substantially broader term than say, minimalism, but folks tend to define it in a number of unnecessarily specific ways, even though it’s a very large tent. It includes folks who are influenced by post-rock, math metal or IDM; folks who write dense, modernist music with significant pop influences; folks who write atonal music for rock instruments; folks like me who literally write 3:30 pop songs; and innumerable other types. Those of us who find ourselves labeled ‘alt-classical’ almost certainly do not identify with all of its manifestations. Where it is in a fact a loosely-associated movement though, is in its tendency to use pop in strikingly less self-conscious ways than previous movements/generation.
In his blog, Brian Sacawa highlighted a comment I made in his discussion of whether the ‘alt-classical’ scene is a fad or not:
IMO most of the ‘compromise’ young composers make is in making sure their music sounds ‘uncompromising’. What’s unique about the ‘alt-classical’ scene is that these composers are no longer forcing their music to sound ‘challenging’ and are rather letting it sound like the music they (we) grew up with: pop. This seems to be the main difference between earlier generations and ours. They added (forced?) pop flavor into their pieces. We are simply allowing it to naturally come out.
Now, I’m not arguing against modernism or atonality or for the irrelevance of ‘uncompromising’ music here. In fact, I’m a huge fan. My favorite Alarm Will Sound concerts are usually the ones in which we play Birtwistle, Rihm, or our own John Orfe (even if it means I have to practice a whole bunch). What I am trying to highlight is what I believe to be the pressure that many young composers have faced to disregard the pop music they love as a serious influence. Brian mentions something to the same effect:
Composers, correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that in the past when a student went to college to study music composition, they were more or less required by those in charge of their compositional development to check their pop music influences at the door. Though you could be a pop music fan, there really wasn’t any place for that sort of trite, repetitive music in the realm of “serious” music composition so composers were passive-aggressively required to repress these lascivious musical tastes; a sort of elitist musical don’t ask, don’t tell (and certainly don’t you dare write music like that!) policy.
It would be easy to create a caricature of the ‘alt-classical’ scene – and indeed many are – as a bunch of naive young composers thrusting their iPods in the air vowing to write un-self-conscious pop-style works as an affront to The Classical Music Establishment. That is not what’s happening here. This is not an active movement, its a passive movement. What my comment was acknowledging is the fact that the use of pop music in my generation, or the ‘alt-classical’ scene, is not deliberate, it’s organic. We’re not trying to put it in; if anything we’re trying not to keep it out, and trying not to assimilate it into the boundaries of classical music. This is what I mean when I write about why we shouldn’t ”compromise’ to make our music sound ‘uncompromising”.
This brings me to previous generations and their use of pop music and how that differs from the current generation’s. Gabriel Kahane responded to my comment on his blog stating his preference for art music that, while utilizing pop as inspiration, is more committed to the traditional ‘rigorous’ process of composition that, he claims, much of the ‘alt-classical’ scene ignores. He characterized my position as such:
In response to Sacawa’s exploration of whether or not the alt-classical scene— in which composers of new music draw liberally from contemporary pop sources (harmonically, rhythmically, texturally, otherwise)—is a passing trend, Marks suggests that in fact, this movement away from “uncompromising” sonic landscapes is actually a welcome unshackling of new music from its long-held snooty academic dogma that shunned any hint of diatonicism.
Whoa Canyonero! I could care less if someone’s music is diatonic or not, and I certainly do not think that adherence to diatonicism is any sort of litmus test for alt-classical music (btw, I’m officially losing the quotes since Gabriel just did). As I stated above, my comment was about freeing composers from the idea, mostly-self-imposed btw, that their music has to be utterly distinct from pop music.
[UPDATE: Luke Rinderknecht showed this LOLCAT to Chuckie Dubs himself, sentimentality ensued]
Gabriel goes on to suggest the work of John Adams and Thomas Adès as examples of successful uses of pop inspiration in art music:
It should be said that part of what makes Adams and Adès successful in this mode is that they are applying uncompromising procedure to vernacular music that they clearly love. When academics had a stranglehold over what was and was not acceptable vis a vis vocabulary in classical music, they were encouraging the marriage of, to put it crudely, uncompromising materials to uncompromising procedure. I have no doubt that the recasting of the vernacular by my peers into the concert realm is done out of a similar genuine love of this music we grew up with, but I wonder whether or not we have paid our dues in developing a craft that supports it sufficiently in the context of concert music.
This insistence on filtering pop sources through the classical idioms of thematic development, adherence to form/structure, etc. to gain legitimacy seems unnecessarily conservative. I don’t believe that high-quality, complex music has to contain the same compositional traits as classical music. A cohesive pop album is just as much a grand statement of art as a symphony, concerto, or song cycle. Now, I don’t want to insinuate false equivalence. I do not think The Fame Monster (though I love it) is the equal of the St. Matthew Passion and I think both sides of this debate discredit themselves by falling into this fallacy. Where I am somewhat conservative is in my opinion that complexity is, in the words of Joe Biden, “a big fucking deal”. Pop utilizes complexity in a very different way than classical and cats need to recognize.
Now a single song on a pop album or a single 5-10 minute pop-style alt-classical piece tends not to be the equal of a major classical work, in terms of complexity – or: stuff goin’ on. But as part of a larger work it can be similarly complex and cohesive, even if the other songs/pieces are not utilizing similar themes and/or contributing to a grand architecture in the classical sense. Where Gabriel and I agree is that many of these new alt-classical works fall short of being great works of art. But in my opinion it’s that they fall short of achieving the deepness and complexity of pop music, for two main reasons: the lack of audio production as a major component and the lack of context as a part of an album or larger work.
In a similar discussion on the eighth blackbird blog – which started off as a debate on Greg Sandow but found itself in another art vs pop debate – I made a comment about the oft-overlooked role of production in pop music:
I worry that many folks from the classical world judge all music based on the notes, rhythms, counterpoint, etc. – essentially what the score would look like … Indeed if one were to take most pop music, be it The Beatles or Lady Gaga, the notes and rhythms laid out onto a score would look pretty simple. But that is only a fraction of where the care and work come into play. The producers behind the scenes meticulously shaping the audio work with just as much care and skill as ‘art music’ composers. No one would have heard of The Beatles if it weren’t for Sir George Martin. Behind every pop artist today is a producer (or producers), many of whom’s artistry is astounding, even if they tend to be ignored by the classical music establishment.
Whereas composers write crescendos they automate faders; whereas composers build sonic textures with instruments they create them. The crucial decisions about mic-placement, compression levels, synth patches, reverb, mixing, stereo panning, and hundreds of other facets are *musical* decisions. And whereas a great pop album might sound like a collection of loosely-related songs to the untrained ear, it is truly a unbelievably complex symphony of audio sounds, usually with hundreds or thousands of hours put in by the producers and engineers.
I think that many alt-classical composers compose acoustic works with the same “on the page” level of complexity as similar pop music, but ignoring a crucial element of its complexity, the production. This coupled with the fact that work is missing the larger context of the album as a large-scale work (again, equal to that of a symphony, albeit with rather different criterion), is why folks like Gabriel claim that “This music is often pleasant to listen to, but ultimately thin, lacking proper architecture and thorough procedure.”
In that sense he is correct, but it ignores an increasing amount of recent large-scale works that blur the line between pop and classical and are incredibly complex and meticulously organized. Examples that come to mind are: David T. Little‘s Soldier Songs, Corey Dargel‘s pop-album/song-cycle hybrids, Ted Hearne‘s Katrina Ballads, and Gabriel Kahane’s own Craigslistlieder (which I personally heart like a sweet tart).
However, I think it’s also important not to dismiss the less-complex works. Not every work of art has to be of the magnitude of a symphony. It’s incredibly healthy for composers to create works that are modest in scope: works that aren’t attempting to create a new harmonic language, works that don’t necessarily challenge the audience but are skillfully crafted. This has never been solely the realm of pop, but it seems to have become ghettoized into that sphere. Bach wasn’t trying to kick your ass with every new piece, many of which were quite modest in scope. He was simply getting the job done and exploring his unique voice. Young composers will learn to find their own unique (and complex) voice by learning to write the type of music they love rather than by focusing on challenging audiences and peers with seemingly ‘uncompromising’ works.
As my partner-in-crime, Melly Hughes, sings Rosh Hashanna services all this week I reflect on the recent arrival of September, which to folks such as myself – whose lives still oddly rotate around those calendars Academic and Concert – is a New Year of a different sort. It has been a fun, crazy, and not-very-relaxing summer here in New York (not to mention unbearably hot!), and the slow arrival of Autumn is achingly welcome. In the meantime, I close myself in my living room here in Park Slope (our recent annual lease-signing an additional New Year) and blast the A/C, pretending our electricity bills don’t exist. It feels like a personal New Year because I have literally one zillion new things to work on, almost all of them fun, exciting, and fulfilling in a way that frightens me. I miss my blog very much, so perhaps this can be a new beginning for it as well – despite my shameful history of repeated false starts. I’d like to get back into writing; Twitter seems to have stolen much of the steam that used to power many a late-night rant or three. Also, I miss the utter self-indulgence of writing a blog. I love being pretentious and I love living in a city that rewards pretentiousness. I want to write about my gigs with a false sense of modesty, dance the backspace bolero with my right ring finger, and rewrite it with an equal and opposite false sense of bravado. That kind of pretentiousness. Not in the situation I described but in how I wrote it. And that too.
