If You Need An Audience, We Don't Need You

https://www.cmc.ie/features/if-you-need-audience-we-dont-need-you

What are your thoughts on this article? I am not disposed to summarize my feelings on it at the moment due to illness, but I will probably post a response later.

I really agree with Mr Volans on basically everything he says there.

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The reason I have a bugbear about this is that it is my opinion that the standard of composition in the 21st Century amongst the young, is far lower than that of the 20th Century. If you don't agree, you at least have to agree that composers are far less ambitious. The norm nowadays is to produce little pieces of under 10 minutes, very often under 5 minutes. This is another byproduct of the so-called music industry. The most obvious difference between 'serious' music and 'popular' music has always been duration. 'Serious' music composers always wrote works on average of over 20 minutes. This requires a more complex and taxing technical ability than writing 5 minutes. Writing a 5 minute piece is frankly, a piece of cake. The difference between writing that or a work of 90 minutes is like the difference between designing a 2 bedroom cottage or a 60 storey skyscraper.

You can do both badly or well, but the skill-set required for the latter is completely different from the former.

And why should one want to write a longer piece? Because like Proust, we need time to get deeper into the thought. More profound ideas usually take longer to present and longer to absorb. There has been a compositional consensus on this idea for at least 300 years. A sound bite doesn't cut it.

Yet now we find even the ISCM (International Society for Contemporary Music) calling for orchestral scores of less than 15 minutes! Do they realise that almost no major piece of the 20th Century would qualify? This is like an international art fair asking for work no larger than 1 metre by 1 metre. Where did this idea come from? Three guesses.

This part is my absolute favourite.

All that buzz , but in the end the article discusses how to make and keep an audience for new music. So in the end I don't really need it, do I?

"The norm nowadays is to produce little pieces of under 10 minutes, very often under 5 minutes".

Absolutely true. And it also has to be written for the weirdest possible chamber ensemble. No works for solo piano. And don't waste a dime writing for orchestra. It must be a chamber piece, and include the wackiest instrumental combination you can imagine used in the most puzzling way (extended techniques only, please!), lest you never be considered a "serious" composer. And forget about having an audience!

thanks Volans for introducing me to Steve Reich!! my god steve reich, totally adore him! I was looking for that kind of Mathematically music. without  (noise?) can't find the right translation for what i mean. rustle perhaps? Volans is right, maybe music should be more like the sciences, finding truths about the world or for the musics, truths about the mind's perspective( he was telling about More education). also with more education needed to be an ''serious composer'' the non-serious will fall off since the way is so long. but i don't think this is the reason why the music scene is rotten, it has more to do with the overpopulation of seriously old people, I would like to go more to concerts, but i dont like sitting as only young person between old carcasses. i know some people who have this aswell. i know in the netherlands they are trying to change this by charging 40 euro for people over 25 years and only 10 for people under 25 years. but price is not the only thing what makes people want to go to concerts, i want to socialize a bit with people who i can be an aquintance of, so i won't do this with old people. I dont want to start attending funerals when i'm in my 30s!!