Re: concept queens

["Phil Thomson" <hellomynameisphil@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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"Asking people to listen to a piece of music takes some of their time,
some of their life: the composer is stealing a little bit from the life
of each listener.... This creates an enormous responsibility on the part
of the composer.

"This responsibility means that music can neither be purely experimental
nor can it eliminate all elements of research. It should always provide
interesting, and even new (daring though the word seems to us today)
propositions, while remaining perceptible so that it can be received by
the listener. This must be true even when the composer is looking for
extreme novelty or complexity; somewhere there has to be a common ground
where the composer and his audience can share an angle of approach.

"This leads to a number of consequences. Composers should not be
satisfied with music that is simply there to please. They should not
allow the style of their music to be dictated by fashions, by easy
acceptance of institutions,... or of the regular concert-going audience.
These are not sufficient reasons for [making] music, for stealing from
the life of another. Unfortunately, a number of trends are more and more
prevalent in composition today which either ignore the problem of
communication, or which - resting on the ambiguous notion of
post-modernism and on pseudo-musicologic or pseudo-philosophic
discourses - are in fact not much more than disguised academicism.

"We are often told that the avant-garde is behind us, that we have
achieved so much distance and perspective that only a 'post-modern'
perspective is possible. However, in my daily life as a composer, this
idea is disproved. I continue to search for new ideas and materials....
[I]f we stick to the etymology of the term, by definition there will
always be an avant-garde, or our [culture] is dead."

Tristan Murail. (2000). "After-thoughts." _Spectral Music: Aesthetics
and Music._ Contemporary Music Review 19(3): 5-9. (Quote is from pp.
5-6). 

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