CucosBlog

Here are 25 interesting questions published by Glenn Branca in the New York Times in early 2007. I’ve included my responses which are hopefully not too flippant.

Glenn’s intro: “I got the idea for this piece from mathematician David Hilbert’s well-known list of 23 “Paris Problems” (1900) that he hoped to see solved in the new century. Of course there is not the slightest connection between Hilbert’s list of problems and this list of questions. Not to mention the fact that many of these questions contain the answer simply in the asking.”

1. Should a modern composer be judged against only the very best works of the past?

Everyone’s going to judge based on what they think is a great musical work – that’s only natural. It is surely a huge compliment to a composer even to put them in the same frame as one of the great works of the past.
Anyway, it’s probably clear from the composer whether he or she wants it to be judged against those great works. If you write in a 4 movement symphonic form then you are inviting comparison with other symphonic works. If you wrote exactly the same piece and recorded it and released it as a neo-prog rock album, then you would probably be inviting other comparisons. If you wrote the same piece and then blew your brains out, you probably cared too much. And ironically the work would then almost certainly be compared to Nevermind.

2. Can there be a truly objective criteria for judging a work of art?

Probably you could do it on an individual basis. But only after the individual’s life has ended. Only then could somebody sift through all the information available about my personal taste in music, and come up with an objective criteria about the qualities or combination of qualities that I judged as being exciting or enjoyable or cool. But if someone tried that while I was alive, I’d almost certainly start listening to Australian pop and throw the whole project off.

3. If a composer can write one or two or more great works of music why cannot all his or her works be great?

Because you can’t repeat greatness. And because there’s no truly objective criteria for greatness.

4. Why does the contemporary musical establishment remain so conservative when all other fields of the arts embrace new ideas?

Because other art forms are more conceptual and therefore embrace new ideas. Music itself does not deal in concepts, even though you can conceptualise about music.
Personally, I wish we could find new ways of socialising and experiencing music. Apparently in India one can enjoy late night raga performances while seated on cushions and being served chai.

5. Should a composer, if confronted with a choice, write for the musicians who will play a piece or write for an audience who will hear it?

For the audience. Anyway what’s the difference between musicians and players? The only question is physical capability.

6. When is an audience big enough to satisfy a composer or a musician? 100? 1,000? 10,000? 100,000? 1,000,000? 100,000, 000?

The whole of humanity must always be the audience. You write for everyone and see who shows up. If you don’t compose for all humanity, you are excluding certain individuals from hearing your work. Why would a composer want to exclude any audience?

7. Is the symphony orchestra still relevant or is it just a museum?

Really, it’s still relevant – as are museums.

8. Is micro-tonality a viable compositional tool or a burned out modernist concept?

Micro-tonality as a word turns me off totally. But then again, the slight beating/dissonance in a guitar chord of a rock band caused by bad intonation in the instrument or careless tuning is one of the most exciting sounds I know. Then think about double-tracking or use of chorus effects in rock and pop – both used to thicken or make the sound more exciting. Shouldn’t all of that come under the umbrella of micro-tonality?
I think I’ve missed the point on this one. I used to own a Phill Niblock CD. Not my cup of tea.

9. In an orchestra of 80 to 100 musicians does the use of improvisation make any sense?

When you put it like that, it sounds unlikely. Yet in Hallucination City, the ending of the 4th Movement is precisely that and totally works. There’s just that incredible density of sound which goes beyond electronic noise.
But it’s just one way to employ that number of musicians, and to make a whole piece out of that would be too much for me.

10. What is the dichotomy between dissonance and tonality and where should the line be drawn?

They are 2 manifestations of sound, dependant upon each other and completely relative to each other. Eastern and Western style music scales contain dissonance (not that I have the slightest clue what I’m talking about really) – it’s everywhere. And when it comes to the subjective experience of life, everyday sounds, listening to music with background sound happening – there is no dividing line.

11. Can the music that soothes the savage beast be savage?

It certainly can be. Maybe for some, or on certain days, the savage beast must be engaged, engorged, intoxicated and exhausted in order to be acknowledged and accepted and reconciled. Is that musical catharsis? It doesn’t mean that all savage music soothes. In reference to the previous question, I guess at any given point we all have our own scale of what sounds savage. Some night I might hear Bohemian Rhapsody and it’ll do it for me. We’re probably just working out the very jarring dissonances that occur in our relationships with other people.

12. Should a composer speak with the voice of his or her own time?

Not if he/she doesn’t want to. Certainly not if you mean we’ve all got to use laptops and glitchy beats.

13. If there’s already so much good music to listen to what’s the point of more composers writing more music?

Because new people keep getting born who need to hear the contemporary take on what’s happening relative to what happened before.

14. If Bach were alive today would he be writing in the Baroque style?

Yes. But with laptops and glitchy beats.

15. Must all modern composers reject the past, a la John Cage or Milton Babbitt’s “Who Cares If You Listen”?

Composers can do whatever they want. You can’t reject the past, because rejecting the past is itself obsessed with the past. I don’t care if I never hear another note played in John Cage’s name. Wasn’t Milton Babbitt one of the characters in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?

16. Is the symphony an antiquated idea or is it, like the novel in literature, still a viable long form of music?

This is like question 7 Glenn. I can’t believe the NY Times let you get away with that. It is both antiquated and viable.

17. Can harmony be non-linear?

Pass.

18. Was Cage’s 4′33” a good piece of music?

It was an interesting concept about music.

19. Artists are expected to accept criticism, should critics be expected to accept it as well?

Critics who dish it out probably give themselves a hard time too.

20. Sometimes I’m tempted to talk about the role that the corporate culture plays in the sale and distribution of illegal drugs throughout the United States and the world, and that the opium crop in Afghanistan has increased by 86 percent since the American occupation, and the fact that there are 126,000 civilian contractors in Iraq, but what does this have to do with music?

Well everything is connected.
A US foreign policy that is based on fear, greed and stupidity.
Individuals on the street who are motivated by fear, greed and stupidity.
A music industry that tends to be ruled by fear, greed and stupidity.
Myself, a struggling musician still determined not to base what I’m doing on fear, greed and stupidity.

21. Can the orchestra be replaced by increasingly sophisticated computer-sampling programs and recording techniques, at least as far as recordings are concerned?

I reckon you can always tell the difference. I suppose financially you could save money by minutely programming samples of orchestral instruments instead of hiring the local symphony orchestra. Actually I rarely listen to orchestral music so I’m not the one to judge. Sampling could be useful as a compositional tool, but I haven’t got much out of it so far.

22. When a visual artist can sell a one-of-a-kind work for hundreds of thousands of dollars and anyone on the internet can have a composer’s work for nothing, how is a composer going to survive? And does it matter?

A few lucky or deserving composers have always been supported by patrons. I support Goethe’s approach, which is that one’s work will only be enriched by the experience of working in society. The other option is the academic route - but I’d rather support myself.

23. Should composers try to reflect in their music the truth of their natures and the visions of their dreams whether or not this music appeals to a wide audience?

This is my favourite question here. Composers have that choice and everyone is aware of that audience. Sometimes people make music that specifically does not appeal to a wide audience, but which is a betrayal of the truth of their natures and the visions of their dreams. Surely we must act true to our natures and dreams, period.

24. Why are advances in science and technology not paralleled by advances in music theory and compositional technique?

I don’t know.

25. Post-Post Minimalism? Since Minimalism and Post-Minimalism we’ve seen a short-lived Neo-Romanticism, mainly based on misguided attempts to return to a 19th century tonality, then an improv scene which had little or nothing to do with composition, then a hodge-podge of styles: a little old “new music”, a little “60s sound colorism”, then an eclectic pomo stew of jazz, rock and classical, then a little retro-chic Renaissance… even tonal 12-tonalism. And now in Germany some “conceptual” re-readings of Wagner. What have I left out? Where’s the music?

In my pants.