Necessary listnin and your biological family

"Yes ma’am. Composers: do you ever feel like you want to make a little mix-tape of “necessary list’nin’ before people sing or play your work? One thing I always think is interesting is how crucial Wagner is to play Adams…? Maybe he’d disagree, but I feel like the tropical storm section from Nixon requires a stylistic awareness of Glass’s Satyagraha that slowly morphs into Das Rheingold.

I think most composers have these kinds of strange connections that resist their normal press narratives or, for that matter, the oppressive linearity of the way musical history is taught. There’s this idea that you can draw straight lines like, Schönberg -> Babbitt -> Carter -> Jonathan Dawe or whatever, but the reality is always going to be much more complicated. Like a big messy family, influence skips generations and comes, oftentimes, through surrogates: oftentimes one has less to do with one’s biological auntie than with one’s friend’s older, wacky sister, for instance."

- Nico Muhly

I read this and found it extremely interesting, and I think the question should be posed to an audience that might actually answer. Do you ever find yourself wondering who your own "ancestors" are in music, or, for that matter, have you ever looked at a new piece by someone else and thought, "man that really draws a weird line to Schumann/Riley/Carter/Schoenberg/Bach"? The whole idea of this very wide net of influence is something that interests me greatly, and I think it shouldn't be overlooked. What do you think?

Basically agree. I would find an 'essential listening' mixtape quite a useful tool for introducing my music. It would, I feel, avoid many questions along the lines of 'why does it sound like that?' if I could point to older works and show where the models for my ideas come from. I like to pepper many pieces with references either to other music or to real-life ideas and occurrences, so it would have to contain an element of biography too. And yeah, from a more academic angle, it can be fun to spot influences that might seem unlikely or unnoticed. I think Mulhy is great to point out that we think too linearly in dealing with influence, and that they can jump generations and styles. There seems to be a feeling currently of abandoning the idea that everything in constantly moving in a single progressive direction through time.

On the other hand, we as composers ought to avoid being seen only as mixtapes ourselves - the 'logical' product of whatever lineage you care to pick out through historical figures. I have a good idea of who influences me, but I don't consider myself a descendant of any of them because there's always going to be something we would do in completely opposing ways. If you can write really good music it doesn't hang on having some prior knowledge of anything other than that it's going to be worthwhile hearing it.

I like the metaphore of genealogy, but I think the image of a roadmap is more appropriate. Becuase it would be a mixtape for someone. And that someone is at a certain point. If he used to listen to Bach, I would send him to Brahms, but if someone else comes from, say, MUSE, I would start with Rachmaninoff.