Quote:
Originally Posted by Gardener
Can we please stop discussing Boulez? Otherwise I feel constantly torn between not wishing to help derail this thread (since clearly Boulez has nothing to do with minimalism), and wanting to defend Boulez against "cheap" accusations.
|
Yeah, let's stop discussing Boulez in this thread. For a moment, I felt the urge to passionately defend Boulez against those ignorant insults (such as the ones uttered by that Daniel guy), but then I thought they were too foolish to be taken seriously.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike
I derive as much satisfaction from reaching out to my audience (whoever they may be) as I do creating something I am personally satisfied with.
|
To me, reaching out to the audience and writing something I am truly satisfied with as a composer are two irreconcilable things. Maybe things were different in former times when the general public was still slightly more musically educated. But nowadays it seems that, to quote Carter once again
"most audiences are in same position I was in when I was a little boy." Even worse, the only musical language most audiences nowadays will understand is the language of
pop music (which, as you may know, I see as the enemy of classical music and as a form of intellectually vacuous and regressive culture, but that's a different discussion). As composers of art music, we strive to communicate deep and profound things, yet this only seems possible through a musical vocabulary that is unfamiliar and unintelligible to most listeners (and certainly not through the vocabulary of pop music). However, I take comfort in the fact that the works which, in the end, turned out to be important landmarks in the history of western art music were very often works which were not understood by audiences in their time and which considered reaching out to the audience as a secondary matter.