In Part 1, I talked about some of the economic implications of the indie model increasingly being adopted by classically trained chamber musicians. Here, I want to look at some of the cultural trends involved. While the general economic climate certainly played a role in creating this movement, I think changing cultural shifts are just as important.

The end of the culture wars

Part of the reason I think indie classical has flourished is that the rift between traditionally highbrow (classical, modernist, etc) and lowbrow (pop, folk) genres has essentially disappeared. While highbrow artists from time immemorial have drawn upon popular or folk styles, there has always been the assumption that the purpose was to make something better, somehow more refined.

It’s true that other generations have proposed a kind of contrarian “nobrow” equivalency or reversal of genres but usually as a means to stir up controversy. Indie classical still cherishes the distinction between the highbrow and the lowbrow, but the distinction is no longer stylistically defined, which is a historical first. And not just in theory, but in practice. Alarm Will Sound’s well-known album of Aphex Twin covers is a good example. The Magik*Magik Orchestra regularly records with indie rock bands. The Family Crest describes itself as a orchestral indie rock band with a rotating cast of some 250 musicians. Genre crossing has become an intuitive step for many groups.

Although it’s a cliché, I need to give credit to the Internet for this opening up of genres. When you’re bombarded by a pluralistic musical world that includes not only 700 years of the Western canon but folkloric, classical, and pop music from cultures around the world, it makes sense that you start to question the inherent superiority of one genre over the other.

Audience perception of classical music

Part of the reason indie classical works is that classical music has largely lost its stigma as an entitled, stuck-up affair. I think all the hand-wringing about classical music being too elitist is passé. The people who still think classical music is an elitist waste of time aren’t going to go to cultural events anyway, no matter how “accessible” you try to make them. Besides, people like elite artistic experiences (though they use the positive version of the word: exclusive), that’s how they form communities around them, that’s why they care about art. Accessible art is like riding the bus: there’s absolutely no way to make it sexy.

Elitism has been a big part of the “underground” pop music scene of the last few decades, where 20-somethings pride themselves on their knowledge of obscure bands and deride those who are uninformed. After all, this is the very definition of a hipster (Question: “How does a hipster screw in a lightbulb? Response: “Oh, you mean you don’t know?”). Why do people crave exclusive experiences? Because the purpose of listening to music is to bond with a community. If that community gets too big, it no longer feels special.

It wasn’t cool to like classical music 15 years ago. Today, classical music is no longer an overbearing cultural threat, so it’s no surprise that people are rediscovering the genre (if not necessarily the standard canon). The communities are of a manageable size, and getting into indie classical is no more difficult than getting into shoegaze or mumblecore or 8-bit or dubstep or any of the other indie subgenres floating around.

Thus, what we have is a grassroots cultural movement that reflects a real artistic desire in the general population, or at least those of a certain age group. Indie classical may not be drawing stadium-packing crowds, but there is a steady stream of interest, proving that classical music is, in fact, a living, breathing, 21st-century genre.

Twenty years from now

In indie classical, we have a vibrant cultural movement that, like most cultural movements, isn’t a great fit with 21st-century capitalism and reflects the growing income disparity problem that we see throughout society. It emphasizes the development of a set of entrepreneurial skills that have been absent from classical music for a long time and it encourages innovation, but it doesn’t reward that innovation in a material sense and it hasn’t come up with a clear model for collective action that might allow it to do so.

This leaves me asking myself, what prospects will indie classical musicians have twenty years from now? Presumably, at some point millennial musicians will stop wanting to play for free or next to free because they have families to support or other life goals. Will indie classical music give us a stepping stone into some other, more stable artistic employment, or are we looking at a form of disposable music in which groups can only hope to survive for a few years before disappearing into oblivion, their members no better off than before?

There’s clearly going to be some of both, and I think the musicians that end up succeeding are going to do so either because they have an innate business sense or they recognize the importance of not reinventing every wheel. A certain sense of pride comes from the scrappy, do-everything-yourself model common in indie classical, but all the economic evidence suggests that larger, collective organizations are more viable. We eventually need to work together and with “non-indie” classical organizations in order to succeed in the long run. Great indie classical musicians need to develop models of collective action, partnering with great arts administrators, existing ensembles, publicists, marketing professionals, and patrons of the arts.

It’s maybe not sexy to suggest that the spunky indie classical movement should form strategic alliances with established groups. But I do think the missing piece of the puzzle right now is the connection between the new and the established. There’s a lot of value already in existence in the art world, and to succeed on the long run we need a solution that doesn’t involve every generation rebuilding everything from scratch.

I’m envisioning a scenario where eventually the transition from indie to established will be smoother. Indie groups will collaborate with orchestras or established chamber groups or opera companies to reach new audiences, embark on projects neither could have done alone, and remain relevant to the communities they live in. Entrepreneurial musicians will be rewarded by frameworks that recognize and build upon their contributions. Musicians with different skill sets will be able to find a niche that makes best use of what they have to contribute. And then, as the indie and establishment trends continue to evolve in this way, they’ll engender a diverse scene of rich, interconnected musical experiences.

I’ve noticed that every month or so I run across another article lauding an ambitious group of young chamber musicians for forging their own non-traditional path: playing in nightclubs and bars, using non-standard setups, playing amplified, writing/commissioning all-original repertoire, etc. This is what indie rock bands have done for decades, hence the oft-used labels “indie classical” or “alt classical”. And I think it’s great that classically trained musicians are doing this—what better proof of the vibrancy of chamber music?

But… most of the articles I’ve seen focus either on (1) “Isn’t it great what those kids are doing?” or (2) “Does this qualify as classical music?” I personally think those are two of the least interesting questions to ask about the “indie rock”-ification of chamber music. There’s a lot to learn by taking a critical look at this trend, weighing the pros and cons, and trying to figure out what this means for music and musicians at large.

Everyone loves entrepreneurs right now

Top of my list of pros for the indie classical trend is that young musicians are taking their destinies into their own hands. Gone are the days of secure music gigs (or of job security more generally). Cultural critics of the ‘90s predicted that the trend toward defunding classical music would lead to the death of the genre, and that classical musicians would either find other jobs or jump ship into wholly popular music forms. This hasn’t happened. Instead of giving up, young musicians are innovating, finding new ways to make the music they love. This is entrepreneurialism in its purest form.

In a sense, the entrepreneurial solution isn’t that surprising given the political discourse that surrounds us (or at least Americans, where the indie classical scene is most visible). From the tech bubble of the late ‘90s through the boom years of the early ‘00s and the 2008 crash and subsequent recession, the underlying message is that people should be looking out for themselves: start a company, invest your money (stock market or sub-prime mortgage, depending on the year), support local businesses, use ingenuity and innovation to solve difficult problems. Of course young musicians coming of age in this environment are going to apply these ideas to their music making. And it’s even more to be expected from classically trained musicians, who have already proven they have the discipline and perseverance to make it through the cut-throat world of the conservatory. Not that it’s easy to make your three-chord punk band into an international sensation of course, but it usually doesn’t require 15 years of preparatory training on the guitar.

Indie classical as small business

I think it’s fairly accurate to consider indie classical to be basically a type of small-business model for chamber music. As such, we also need to look at the economic realities of small businesses. Studies have shown that they’re not usually the amazing innovators that the politicians would have us believe. The vast majority fail. Small businesses are also usually less efficient than established competitors. Walmart has lower prices than the corner-store bodega partially because it can create efficiencies of scale that smaller stores can’t (among other reasons, and at other costs). Of course, you might still decide to boycott Walmart (as I do) for very legitimate reasons, and cultural products are not the same as manufactured goods on a fundamental level.

Yet the trend in entrepreneurialism, at least the successful forms of it, has been toward collective efforts for at least the past 100 years. Some 80% of Bangladeshis are independent entrepreneurs, but the vast majority earn under $1/day. Similarly, small indie classical groups have a limited ability to make an impact (and hence earn money) when compared to orchestras or opera companies. Does it matter? I don’t know, but indie classical seems to be largely destined for the small-scale, local scene, except in rare occasions. Classical Revolution, started in the tiny Revolution Café in San Francisco’s Mission district, has become an international movement but its members still play to crowds of 10–20 people at a time. It’s great for the audience, but unless you charge $50 at the door, it’s hard for the musicians to get paid a living wage.

Taken from a purely economic perspective, indie classical is an expansion of the winner-take-all model of mega art events (like the opera or the soloist touring circuit or the Top 100 pop charts) to the local level. Winner-take-all models support a few superstars and leave the rest with next to nothing. Granted, this isn’t a phenomenon unique to music, it’s also appearing in virtually every other sector of human activity and is part of the reason top CEOs keep getting paid more and more (Apple’s CEO Tim Cook received $378 million in compensation in 2011). The indie classical model isn’t bucking the economic trend. That’s not so much a criticism as an observation, as virtually no one in any sector has found a reliable way to do that (because it would require sweeping policy change internationally), but I’m just saying indie classical isn’t exempt from our greater economic problems.

So okay, indie classical is not a great business model in its current form, that’s the downside, but it is helping to spawn a generation of go-getter, DIY chamber musicians. It’s also an innovative cultural movement, and I’ll talk more about that in Part 2.

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Hans Abbing’s Why Are Artists Poor?, which formed an important source in my last two articles. Abbing is an economist and a visual artist, and he tackles the broad question of artist poverty from the perspective of both disciplines, trying to filter out the biases and myths that color traditional interpretations.

As a part of his discussion, Abbing brings up the question of what constitutes a professional artist. According to economists, professionals are people who earn some non-negligible portion of their living via their professional activities. This definition works for a lot of the activities humans do, but it’s problematic in the arts.

Abbing comes up with a range of interesting workarounds, but by the standards of most professions, the vast majority of musicians working in the arts are either amateur or semi-pro. University professors who do not receive monetary commissions for their compositions are amateur composers and professional pedagogues. Pianists who earn most of their money from a piano studio and only earn some money performing are semi-pro performers and professional educators.

Obviously, this kind of pigeonholing is offensive to a lot of artists and to people who care about the arts. The mismatch between artistic quality and income is so obvious to most observers that it’s hard to argue that money is a good measure of professionalism in the arts (or art-like activities like family-run artisan wineries that need to charge a significant premium to be viable).

Money is a human technology and it has strengths and weaknesses like any other technology. The fact that we have defined professionals as people who earn money for performing specialized, skilled work makes me wonder if the term professional is even applicable in the arts. After all, Abbing compares the situation of professional artists to professional sex workers, which is perhaps an apt parallel on levels beyond the economic ones—the whole negative concept of “selling out” is tied to the idea that art is somehow dirtied by money, as is sex. Yet we still hold ourselves to a double standard. I know that my paid commissions stoke my ego more than the freebies.

From what I can tell, the term professional had less importance before money was the major means of transferring value between people. Musicians in Europe were organized into guilds, with apprentices and masters, designations that signify only ability. Others worked as servants of a patron, either the Church or royalty. Only with the rise of the bourgeoisie did professionalism really enter into music. Money became important in music because people with money were becoming more important, and it was assumed that art could be evaluated according to these same terms.

None of this matters to daily music making, of course, but the point I want to make is that art and money are not particularly good fits for each other. Both are byproducts of human interactions, but not parallel types of interactions. We try to make them fit because our society has so strongly focused on money as a means of organizing value. It’s not the only means, though, and we all intrinsically realize that money has a tendency to destroy certain kinds of value even as it creates others. Thus the permanence of the “selling out” stigma. It’s cool to buy an Apple product, but it’s not cool to be the band in the Apple commercial.

I hope eventually we’ll come up with some alternative value-exchange systems that are more representative of human activities as a whole (an interesting model I read about is the equity-based restaurant network, where food is free but your ability to get service at any networked restaurant is dependent on your reputation as a fair payer. And yes, some restaurants are making versions of this work.). In the mean time, we need to recognize the limits of economic professionalism in the arts and act accordingly. There’s no point beating yourself up over the failed grant applications. Conversely though, just because you never get paid doesn’t mean you’re a genius. There are non-monetary ways to measure the value of human activities, and I think it would be interesting to try to come up with a viable non-economic definition of a modern-day professional composer. It doesn’t seem like anyone’s really tried to do that before.

In the first part of this article, I talked about some of the problems with studying composition in academia, and I offered some alternative ways that composers might cultivate their craft more effectively (and probably less expensively too). Here, I’m providing a sort of Top 10 list of life lessons for composers. Realizing that you have no reason whatsoever to listen to my advice, I’m trying to couch this in terms of wisdom I have received from others or that I can back up somehow, with attribution when possible. This is by no means comprehensive, but these are definitely issues that I think every composer needs to internalize for themselves in one way or the other.

It’s not about you

Music has never existed in a vacuum. The simplest way to contextualize this is the fact that we evolved as social animals and music is a part of human behavior. I’ve gone to talks by neuroscientists who study the musical brain, and I’ve read books by evolutionary anthropologists examining how music developed. Music fills certain biological functions for humans, and admitting that doesn’t make your music any less valuable. So whatever your take on the role of the artist in society, one immutable aspect of your role is affecting other people with your music.

Some interesting takeaways from various neuroscience things I’ve read/heard: Music is a group bonding tool. Music is used to create groups and define opposition against other groups. Music is primarily a way of communicating emotion to a group. Musical grammar is processed in the same part of the brain (and in the same way) as linguistic grammar. The ability to appreciate music is innate, but the skill needs to be developed in early infancy or it doesn’t appear (as does vision).

It’s all about you

Within any given social sphere, musicians hold a status similar to a shaman or priest. This isn’t to say that music is religion or can replace its social function, but for most people music does operate on a quasi-mystical level whose closest analog is religious fervor. We want to believe that great composers are endowed with some unique gift that can’t be purchased with money and that transforms our lives in wonderful and baffling ways. It has to be that way, otherwise music wouldn’t be such a powerful group-forming evolutionary adaptation.

So within whatever sphere of music you’re drawn to, you have to make a contribution that’s honest to who you are and goes beyond simple craft. Writing for other reasons, such as sucking up to someone in a position of influence, only leads to short-term gain. If you write to try to please others, you won’t be able to create transcendence; at best, you’ll generate some etudes. Listen to your instincts. Sometimes, the music will lead you in places you think you probably shouldn’t go—you need to go there. If the approach really does fail, you can fix it later, but more often than not, the “What? Did I actually write that?” moments lead to the greatest artistic growth. And people respect you for taking a risk and challenging the norm.

You may win competitions and build a career by pandering to others or copying your mentors, but what’s the point? Who do you admire most, Mozart or Salieri? Mozart wrote in 1781, “The only one who counts in [the Emperor’s] eyes is Salieri,” but in the eyes of my spellcheck, Mozart counts and Salieri is not a word…

Bach and Beethoven couldn’t exist today

The great composers are products of their own time. They exist not because some unique genius appeared only at one point in history, but because their personalities, coupled with the circumstances around them and the aesthetic tastes of the day, led to the careers they had. Those same people might have done something completely different had they been born today, due to the difference in cultural contexts. Or maybe they’d still be composers, but it’s hard to imagine that they’d have the same impact on history. Music just holds a different place in society today than it did at any point in the past, for a variety of reasons related to the mass market, communications technology, and the greater cultural plurality we’ve (rightly) come to  accept.

So while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with admiring the achievements of the great composers of the past, as role models they aren’t very useful. This applies equally, although to a lesser degree, to Debussy, Bartók, Schoenberg—even living legends like Boulez. In the 1950s and ‘60s, avant-garde artists were featured in mass-media publications like Time Magazine. (Amazingly, Time publishes articles dating back half a century freely online, including this review of Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique from 1965.) Can you imagine that happening today? You can’t measure yourself by the standards of the composers who came before you, and if you do, all you end up doing is becoming a pale imitation.

You learn about music from life

As I was writing this section, composer Christien Ledroit made this exact same point as a comment to Part 1 of this article. Music as a human activity did not evolve in classrooms, so if your only life experience is a classroom, how do you expect to write great music? It’s a disservice to artists to repeat the trope that art comes from suffering, but there is a kernel of truth to the idea that worthwhile things come through striving and effort, not by picking the low-hanging fruit. This concept applies across a broad swath of human activities outside of the arts too.

Many students interpret the heritage of the atonal, modernist tradition as a rationale for ignoring the question of what their own context is, because a context-free music was the aesthetic project of the modernist generation. The modernists thought they were writing pure music, free from the Western European cultural evils that they believed led to the Third Reich (note that the Second Viennese School had no such ambitions). Yet looking back, their music was so seamlessly integrated within the cultural context of the Cold War that they didn’t even notice they were a part of it. There are even U.S. government documents describing how the post-war administrations wanted to use modernist art, supported by government subsidy, to combat the Soviet threat.

Rhythm, pitch, form, and theory are inconsequential elements of music

We talk about these things because it’s easy to analyze and describe them, not because they actually matter. Going back to biology, what matters is how people react to music. Animals can’t even recognize music as a distinct category of sound (with the exception of Snowball the dancing cockatoo). The fact that musical grammars are learned in the same way linguistic grammars are learned also speaks to the ephemeral nature of the elements of music. The building blocks are a byproduct of creating a successful musical expression; they aren’t the expression itself.

The extension of this point is that you shouldn’t take your ideological leanings too seriously. People have created great music in any number of ways and by breaking any number of rules. Maybe you think it’s “wrong” to use tonal harmony today, or that atonal music was a distraction that hurt Western music, or that minimalism is annoyingly repetitive, or that pop-inspired chamber music is the future—good for you. Someone else is bound to use the exact opposite stance to do something amazing and world-changing. There’s no shortcut to writing masterpieces.

The score is not the music

Write your score and parts as if you were writing IKEA assembly instructions: make them as straightforward as possible, minimize the use of words, and be succinct. Big print, conventional notation, and good page turns will win you friends and performances. Reinventing the wheel will get you an invitation to speak in front of a bored group of grad students.

This is one of those issues where people never tire of debating the philosophical and psychological implications of what one notation does over the other. I’m going to put my foot down and say that this isn’t one of those unanswerable, shades-of-gray questions: the right answer is to stick to convention whenever possible.

You want your music played well. You want performers to understand your intention. They’ve spent their lives learning how to draw nuance and interpretation out of the flawed system that we have. You’re not going to get a better result by making them learn a new system; they’ll basically just be translating back to convention in their minds as they play anyway. Some even rewrite the parts themselves into conventional form. Unnecessarily complex notation is like asking an actor to play a part convincingly in a language they don’t speak, or writing an English play with the Cyrillic alphabet because you think it adds a certain je ne sais quoi. The problem is that when you do that, personne d’autre ne sait quoi non plus.

True, sometimes you do need to create something new, but 99 percent of the time you don’t. And when you do create something new, you should be able to explain it in 10 words or less. Otherwise, go back to the drawing board because what you’re actually doing is being lazy and hoping the performers will finish the idea that you couldn’t be bothered to develop yourself.

Don’t fall in love with your material

Often there will be some great musical idea that serves as the genesis for your piece. That’s great, but as the piece progresses, you may very well need to throw that out. The best composers are ruthless self-editors. Approach your scores with the question, “Can I delete this?” at every measure. You’ll write better music as a result. Sometimes a passage that you worked on for ages and that you really love just doesn’t fit into the piece anymore. A focused piece is always more successful than a piece that tries to do too much. You’ll get another chance to use that cool idea. Better to leave the audience wanting more than groaning that your piece was long-winded and uninteresting.

The audience does not have a collective mind

I read this great article on the problem of understanding and defining what the audience actually is. As I’ve said, your music obviously needs to be about other people and group building, but you can’t predict how any one person will respond. So many composers make the mistake of typecasting their audiences. It’s simplistic and counterproductive. Give people something you would be excited to hear, and write music that you are proud to present. Then let them judge as they will.

Serendipitous circumstances are a major part of success

Harry Partch rode the rails and lived on the streets. Aaron Copeland couch-surfed between commissions. John Cage wrote for instruments that most people at the time would have considered to be garbage, simply because he didn’t have access to anything else. Just make the music that matters to you. That’s the best way to ensure that you’re going in a direction where you have a chance of creating something meaningful. And if you’re lucky, someone will recognize you for that contribution.

Becoming popular is about marketing and public relations

The “general public” (to the extent it exists) has never recognized great artists for their own merits. Most people don’t have the time to look for great art, and even in their spare time, they don’t have the mental energy to grapple with a challenging work of art. This was true 500 years ago and it’s true today—being able to expend energy on art is a luxury, even though of course most people believe art should be accessible to all. So most people most of the time focus on the art that is able to cut through the background noise of daily life.

Composers and performers do too. In fact, musicians are some of the busiest people you’ll meet, so if you want them to appreciate your music, they need to know about you and be reminded about you regularly. Nobody likes to be spammed though, so here is where creativity and tact come in. To repeat a cliché, don’t sit around waiting for the phone to ring. Start projects and be a part of your community.

Art is about making life worth living

The uselessness of art is its greatest virtue. Art is something people do that has absolutely no connection to physical survival, and yet everyone loves it. African American plantation workers sang as they worked. In Brazil, escaped slaves developed capoeira first as a means of defense and then as a competitive dance form. Even in concentration camps, people make music and art—Messiaen wrote Quartet for the End of Time in one.

I think this supports the theory that music is a group-building tool: it helps people function better collectively and overcome their challenges. Hopefully you’ll never have to go through such harrowing experiences, but it’s useful to remember that art is about quality of life. This is why I think transcendence should be the goal of every piece. It’s also why there’s nothing wrong with trying to make music people will like, although you should get to that music through your own interests, not by second-guessing the non-existent “audience”. You’re a person, so follow your gut: would you go to hear this piece if an unknown composer with no relation to you had written it? That should be the standard of excellence that you set for yourself.

(Research assistance: Carolyn Smith)

I’ve always said that I learned despite my education and not because of it, and after my master’s degree I decided to put my money where my mouth was and not pursue a PhD—much to my relief, the commissions and composing continued anyway. A few months ago I read a great article in Slate by William Pannapacker that really struck home for me. The basic premise was not that new: universities are making themselves irrelevant in the humanities, arts, and sciences. What was refreshing, however, was that this wasn’t an anti-intellectual rant, it was just an honest examination of what higher education as an institution is trying to do and how it thinks it should fit into society. So what if your goal is to be the best composer possible and to have your music heard by other people who are interested in similar types of music? Should you get a degree in composition?

Sure, I did get a lot out of my post-secondary music studies, especially in terms of meeting interesting people and mentors that helped me to realize what I was really after. School also gave me a kind of legitimacy that was useful when networking with other people and organizations outside of school. I don’t regret any of that, but when I think back, school certainly wasn’t necessary to develop these things, and I am wondering if it wouldn’t have been better to develop them in some other way instead.

What happens after composers finish their degrees

Even at the best of times, the relationship between academia and the creative arts (composing, filmmaking, literature, choreography, visual arts, etc.) has been problematic. Today, it’s even more so—many schools have an overt interest in producing unsuccessful artists. It’s not that there’s some nefarious grand agenda, it’s just that the economics of art and of art school are very complicated, and well-meaning educators haven’t found a better solution. The many “failures” end up subsidizing the few superstars. From the perspective of the student, it’s a bad deal, but maybe it’s the best deal there is. When they realize this, most students become disillusioned and cynical and choose one of three paths: (1) drop out of music altogether; (2) carve out their own bunker within academia; (3) look for alternative ways to make music. I know lots of people in each of those categories.

All three of those models are less than ideal. The first is a tacit admission that the program was a waste of time—worse than that, it can destroy the individual’s desire to do music at all. In the best case scenario, it creates an educated consumer of cultural products but does nothing to educate the student beyond what any liberal arts degree would do. It’s hard to justify the existence of music programs based on their ability to create ex-musicians who might go to concerts.

The second solution is dishearteningly cynical: “The system is broken, but I’m going to milk it for what I can and ride it through until the end.” To be fair, many composers also take the academic route simply because they love teaching. And yes, teaching is important, but how we teach is perhaps more important than where we teach. Great artists have taught, mentored, and taken on apprentices for millennia. They would continue to do so outside of a university context.  How many university composition professors would keep their teaching positions if they had a guaranteed stream of well-paid commissions outside of academia? I suspect almost all of them would quit their jobs, take their best students on privately, and just compose.

Solution three is what I decided to do: look for alternatives. Here there’s a lot of variety. Some people decide that their artistic vision is what’s most important, regardless of how well it is recognized, and subsidize their music with non-musical income. Some decide it’s better to earn a living making music, no matter what that music is, and find creative solutions to be able to scrape by. Some find a mix of music-related livelihoods and try to put together the projects they feel most strongly about (a sort of middle ground; this is the “slash” crowd: composer/performer/organic farmer/stunt driver). The common thread here, however, is that the education begins where academia ends. You make connections with people, you find a community, you decide what really matters, you find time to do what you love, you find a way to earn a living. You might do some of this while at school, but little or none of it is taught at school. So why don’t more composers just skip straight to the career and not bother with the degrees?

Why music school will always be optional

Some of my favorite composers are people who have no university music training. As Hans Abbing points out in Why Are Artists Poor?, the arts would never be able to enforce the kind of certification that is essential to the medical profession or law and which makes these quintessential university disciplines. It’s repulsive to most people to think that a group of artists might bully a self-taught artist out of the profession by reason of not holding the correct certifications, or that the police might arrest you for practicing guitar without a license. Yet even biochemistry, physics, and mathematics majors are having a tough time making their university educations relevant (i.e. applying their knowledge after the end of their programs), and those are some of the most university-esque of academic disciplines. I’m not saying this situation is right, or that our society isn’t nearly completely dysfunctional (because I think it is), but this is the age we live in.

Another major issue with teaching music in a university is that you can’t teach someone to be creative. Shortly before I started grad school, I met iconic Canadian composer and philosopher R. Murray Schafer. He asked what I was doing after my undergrad. I told him I was going to grad school. He replied quite bluntly, “That’s a fucking stupid idea.” After some more conversation, I asked how he learned to compose. He said it happened naturally as he was pursuing his career in journalism.

You can teach theory and music history and give students performance opportunities and introduce them to interesting people, but all of this is essentially beating around the bush. To a composer, none of those things have value without the creative spark. Yet schools emphasize conformity and reward students that model themselves after their teachers; the best composers have to be creative enough on their own to break out of this mold.  It’s like what the young Arthur Agatston, fresh out of med school, purportedly received as advice on starting a successful cardiology practice: choose patients with healthy hearts.

If great composers come into music school as such (or less refined versions of such), why do they go to school at all? It might be for the stability of an academic job, but that’s a false hope. Only a small minority of composition PhDs get teaching positions. Of those, almost all are teaching for rock-bottom wages, some without health insurance and no hope of a tenure-track position, and most holding course loads that prevent them from finding real time to compose. Universities are increasingly folding music chairs, asking professors to teach more classes and/or hiring grad students at paltry wages to teach them instead. Funding is usually connected to enrollment, if not directly then at least indirectly, so undergraduate programs attempt to attract as many students as possible with popular offerings instead of with meaningful material. Courses are developed using essentially the same criteria as prime-time television.

Amazingly, many music students are at least somewhat aware of this, and yet they continue to go to school. I suspect it’s because most don’t see a better alternative. It is, after all, an opportunity to focus on your craft with few other distractions, and it provides structure. To the “focus on your craft” argument, I would suggest artists’ colonies and residency programs, many of which count as academic courses, so you can get student loan funding for them. If we all went that route, it would create a model more like culinary school, and would that be so awful? To the question of creating structure, there is no such thing once you finish your degree anyway. Great artists have always been self-driven—it’s simply antithetical to the definition of being an artist that you would need to be micromanaged in order to get your work done.

Making a career versus being a composer

Many people have written at length about what would make for a better post-secondary arts education, so I won’t get into that here. I also won’t get into the philosophical questions behind what being a composer actually is. I’m simply going to start with the assumption that the goal of composing is to create transcendence through music: composers want to write music because great music gives people (themselves and/or others) a sensation they wouldn’t have any other way.

I also don’t really care whether or not music pays your bills. Very few of the best composers in history made a living directly from their music, so I don’t think that’s a question worth considering, and I’ve talked before about the fundamental problems of earning money through the arts. You’ll find a source of income that works for you.

Making a career is all the stuff I described above: how people get teaching positions, or how they hustle up a grab-bag of income sources, or how they do something else (German composer Thomas Stiegler lists his medical CV in his CD liner notes). Being a composer, on the other hand, is more of a journey in self-awareness.

I know the student composers reading this are probably not going to drop out of school because of what I’m writing, but I wish more composers would. It would force universities to develop more relevant programs. Like how German consumers in the ‘90s forced manufacturers to deal with excess packaging in the store, eventually leading to the successful Grüne Punkt program. Apparently, the number of musical masterpieces being produced has remained roughly stagnant for the last 800 years, despite a 1,000-fold increase in the number of artists and many doublings of the world population. I just think our educational system should be able to do better.

Whether you drop out of school or not, you’re going to have to teach yourself how to be a composer. Although I’m still in the earlier stages of my career, what I have noticed from hanging out with successful, established composers is that certain trends manifest themselves over and over. Some of these people went to school, others didn’t, and they have varying opinions about the value of post-secondary composition education. However, I have been quite interested in the common threads in their words of wisdom, which will be the focus of the second article in this series.

(Research assistance: Carolyn Smith)

Like most composers, I absorbed certain widely accepted musical axioms from my university studies, but they’ve never been entirely satisfying. As a consequence, I constantly search for better explanations, in the process hopefully becoming a better artist. One of the issues I’m increasingly focusing on is how music history is interpreted. Although I have previously argued for an enhanced role for music history in composer education, I also think we need to re-examine how we use (and abuse) that history. In my own practice, letting go of false history-based causative associations, what I see as a kind of compositional historicism, has paid creative dividends.

I’ve been working in this anti-historicism vein for a while, but a couple of experiences this spring really drove things home for me. In March I spent two weeks workshopping the first act of my opera-in-development with Tapestry New Opera and a fantastic pick-up cast of singers. Then in April the Quatuor Bozzini premiered a new string quartet of mine in Montreal. I’ll explain more below, but first let me explain what I mean by “false history-based causative associations”.

Historicism as a handicap

The teleological view of music history does an artistic disservice to composers. We can learn a lot about the right and wrong ways of employing music history by looking at economics, especially the lessons of the “chartists” or technical analysts that started using price data to predict trends in the 1970s. In the stock market and in music, what worked in the past tells us exactly nothing about what should work in the future. True, we know that certain patterns repeat themselves, and that on average trends have followed those patterns most of the time, but none of that knowledge matters when you sit down to make a trading decision. The only thing that matters is whether your stock goes up or down, and if you buy or sell it at the right time. For those decisions, you’re at the mercy of factors that don’t care about the averaging process or your trend, and you may end up losing all your money because what looks like a string of textbook long-legged doji ends up being an anomaly before a price crash. On a larger level, this same problem is plaguing Ben Bernanke, who is a student of the Great Depression yet grappling with why the Great Recession seems to be behaving differently.

Composition history is similar to economic history in many ways. What worked historically does not tell you what will work today, and therefore it doesn’t matter what trends you think you see—all that matters is if your amazing piece of music ends up making an impact or not. In the end, the complex theories people have proposed basically boil down to the same stuff as leading high school essay questions like “Explain why the United States Constitution makes America the freest country in the world”. Sure, the U.S. Constitution, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and aged Gouda cheese may be great things, but their greatness doesn’t necessarily solve your problems if you are a Bolivian, a 21st-century composer, or a vegan respectively.

Historicism versus historical persons

There was great music created in many periods before our own, but from what I can gather, little of it gave much thought to its place in history or what had come before it. Although great composers such as Bach and Beethoven turned to the generations immediately preceding them for inspiration, the long view of the progression of music history didn’t really exist. Even theoretical texts such as Fuchs’ Gradus ad Parnassum simply tried to codify the “right” way to compose music. Historical musicians weren’t justifying themselves against something else; they were simply trying to explain how the music they liked worked, and in many cases, they didn’t even acknowledge that other kinds of music even existed.

Yet when I started googling Fuchs to fact-check my claims, the first site I came across opens with this statement:

The whole history of western tonal music could be seen, in a way, as the history of the treatment of the vertical dissonance.

A prime example of an academic historicist platitude, incidentally followed by lip service to the problems of such a linear view of history before doubling back to say, “To a large extent, that notion is true.” I’m not saying there’s no truth in this historicist view of music, but it certainly isn’t the only view with merit. After all, the authors of the 18th-century texts being cited on contrapunctus.com didn’t espouse modernist historicism.

That doesn’t mean the treatment of dissonance wasn’t a unifying trend in Western tonal music. It also doesn’t mean a composer can’t write great music based on that principle, but that’s besides the point. The music Western composers have written is not good because it might reflect the march toward ever more complex dissonances; it’s good because it found a place in people’s hearts and minds. Yet historicism encourages us to focus on certain ways of looking at the world that have nothing to do with the reason the music has lasted.

Historicism was perhaps the single most unifying trend of 20th-century art music, and indeed, of much 20th-century thought. We see this attitude most directly with the serialists, but it’s also a powerful force in the branch of the minimalist movement that reacts against those ideas by creating progression-free music, or the neo-Romantic movement that tries to “go back” to a purer time before the “mistake” of modernism, or in the totalists or maximalists who eschew anything from the European tradition because it’s somehow not relevant enough today. All of this is beating around the bush, justifying away the problem that it’s simply hard to create good music, no matter when in history you happen to live.

Music as Biology

We know more today about the anthropological development of music than ever before. Looking at human evolution, there are clear reasons why music was invented. Some of them have to do with memorizing and transmitting information, or reinforcing group rituals, or organizing a large group of people for a given task. Since the development of music, some of these purposes have been essentially replaced by more efficient technological breakthroughs (writing is a more effective way of storing information than epic ballads). Other uses, however, remain entirely or at least predominantly musical. Few forces bond and join groups of people together like music. This is why music choice is so essential to the identity of teenagers, who are frantically trying to define themselves within society. It’s also why most songs are about love or religion.

It seems too obvious to say that the purpose of music is to move listeners, but we tend to forget this because such a basic explanation doesn’t strike us as insightful enough. But biology is what it is. Language is designed to communicate information, flirting to produce offspring, taste to lead us to quality foods, intelligence to develop a survival advantage, and music to motivate us. There’s nothing wrong with it being that simple.

Music is the original—and remains the best—way of transmitting motivational, transcendental, emotional information. That’s why everyone knows the two-note scene transition phrase from Law & Order. It’s also why retailers play loud, trendy music in clothing stores to get you to buy something.

Transcendence versus Selling Out

You may think I’m trying to justify the abuse of music here, but it’s not necessary to abuse music to rely on its fundamental principles. Humans are social animals designed to react emotionally to music, but emotional reactions don’t need to be clichéd or uninformed. People with developed palates find richer experiences emotional and transcendental, but they still seek that social connection of feeling like they are part of something grander than themselves. Even Anton Webern talked about “expression” and “keeping an open heart”.

It’s okay and even a valuable thing to write music that is meant for a minority. In fact, I think it’s one of the greatest things you can do as an artist: to represent the emotional and transcendental needs of an underserved group. Why should everyone have the same taste? We are richer as a society when we cultivate difference.

On the flip side, there’s little to justify the kind of high-brow cultural snobbery that fuelled so much 20th-century artistic discourse. Complexity doesn’t matter. Dissonance doesn’t matter. Nor does minimalism, tonality, grooves, pop music, or world-music influences. Use those things or don’t, but remember that the only important part of the music is the people who use it.

Case Study: Oksana G.

As a result of these ideas, I’ve been trying to make people the overruling concern in my composing, and the two pieces I’m going to describe are ones in which I felt I succeeded. I don’t have a grand theory about why or how I made them work. It was largely intuitive, and I avoided thinking too hard about the how and why because, frankly, I was on too tight of a deadline for philosophical musings.

My modus operandus with Oksana G. thus far has been to set the story in a way that expresses its underlying concerns while respecting the limitations of the human voice. My key concern has been diction. Some of the piece is tonal, some is modal, some is atonal. I think so anyway—I haven’t really looked at any of the harmonic structure that closely. Oksana G. is through-composed and there are no set numbers. Dissonance-wise, it’s somewhere between Richard Strauss and Alban Berg.

Now for the people part: The singers really loved it and gave their all, in a way I haven’t often experienced in rehearsal. It was really invigorating. The audiences both nights also had incredibly positive things to say. We even had a fair contingent that came solely for the subject matter (sex trafficking) with no interest in or knowledge of opera or new music, and yet who came up to me to tell me how moved they were and how much they looked forward to the finished production. Conversely, I got a lot of enthusiastic feedback from other composers.

Case Study: Se contourner se conformer

Se contourner se conformer is a short string quartet I wrote for the Quatuor Bozzini. In it, I wanted to go back to quartertone harmonies, which I had set aside in the preceding few years. I also wanted to write something sort of gentle and pretty, and also something idiomatic for the ensemble. I decided to try to make the quartertones disappear, so that the casual listener wouldn’t really notice them. I ended up with something sort of like twisted Renaissance just intonation.

In the first few rehearsals, the quartet was a bit confused. They thought it was just a bad neo-Romantic piece with quartertones thrown in to “make it modern”. But as they started to put it together, suddenly everyone’s perspective changed. By the concert, they were really loving it, jumping around on stage and breathing and swaying expressively. And after the performance, again, many people came up to tell me it was like nothing they had ever heard and that it moved them deeply. I received many, many vigorous handshakes from strangers, instead of the usual polite congratulations from colleagues.

As a result, I’m more convinced than ever before of the value of intuition and a tempered historical perspective. I love music history and find it fascinating. But I’m not going to take any career advice from Mozart.

I recently decided to try to encapsulate major lessons I learned from other composers’ music over the years into short one-liners. Sort of like the personality surveys that go around Facebook, but more about the musical personality of composers (perhaps my personality more than the people listed here). Anyway, this is what I came up with, in no particular order:

• Mozart – Variety is good, so don’t take your motives too seriously.
• Machaut – Rules are for theorists, not composers.
• Bach – Most people are content with a repetitive, symmetrical pattern.
• Vivaldi – History doesn’t always remember your best work.
• Palestrina – Pretty is always in style.
• Beethoven – Seriousness only gets you so far.
• Messiaen – There’s nothing more expressive than a long, held note.
• Debussy – How you say it is more important than what you say.
• Stravinsky – People like to compare every other composer to Stravinsky.
• Bartok – Logical structures are accessible, as long as they are audible.
• Lachenmann – You can write moving phrases with almost no material.
• Ligeti – The overtone series only takes you so far.
• Brahms – You don’t have to be good at everything.
• Steve Reich – Your material needs to be engaging.
• Jacob ter Veldhuis – Music is about culture.
• Chopin – Great music should be moving.
• Webern – Modernism doesn’t have to be heavy, and it is better to go too short than too long.
• Berg – Drama is an intrinsic part of all great music.
• Puccini – A great melody is an amazing thing.
• Grisey – The ear is mightier than the computer.
• Xenakis – Sacrifice the system and write from your gut if it makes the music better.
• Carter – Craft is boring without meaning.
• Feldman – You don’t always need to pay attention in order to have a great musical experience.
• Boulez – Ideas do not great music make. (This applies equally to many other composers but Boulez epitomizes it for me.)
• Andriessen – Some things really do sound better loud.
• Stockhausen – Everyone has hits and misses.
• Richard Aryes – Happy, sad, and funny are pretty much the only emotional concepts you need to think about when writing music.
• Wagner – People are impressed by big productions.

In early February, I interviewed Donato Cabrera, Resident Conductor at the SF Symphony and guest conductor for the February 28 SFCMP concert. In the interview, Cabrera discusses the differences between the American and European conducting traditions, the dangers of overspecialization, challenges facing the new music community in the United States, and how he thinks works by living composers should be programmed. You can read the interview on SFCMP’s blog.

Recently I discovered the amazingly addictive new website Quora, where people ask questions on certain themes. After a basic setup, I was instantly directed to a very intriguing question for me: Why do people study music theory? I argued that music theory helped performers make more informed interpretations. I also argued that composers were generally hindered by music theory, because it’s a retrospective discipline and composing is inherently forward-looking. Lots of people disagreed with me of course… Still, I’m going to advance the idea that if we want to create better composers (though I’m not sure we really do—the competition is already pretty fierce), we need to reduce the emphasis on music theory, increase the emphasis on general analysis skills and critical thinking, and make music history the cornerstone of musical education.

First of all, I’ve studied it all. This isn’t some anti-intellectual rant (if you know me, you know this already). My bias comes more from my love of iconoclasm than anything else. As much as music theory makes contributions to academic discussions of music, I have seen little evidence that it advances creativity. And in the end, great composers just know what sounds good, they don’t spend weeks trying to prove it.

So, the kinds of theory I have studied (and enjoyed! It wasn’t begrudgingly that I took all these extra courses): 14th-century counterpoint (several versions of how it worked), 16th-century counterpoint, 18th-century counterpoint (nothing good happens in odd-numbered centuries apparently), classical harmony, romantic chromaticism, Schenkerian analysis, modal 20th-century harmony, jazz harmony, 12-tone theory, set theory, total serialism, Cuban rhythmic theory, classical rhythmic theory. That’s just off the top of my head, but I think you get my point. I’m no Sarah Palin when it comes to music theory.

Now, for all that theory, none of it made me a better composer, at least not directly. What did make me a better composer was the fact that by studying that theory I was exposed to a lot of new kinds of music, and I had to listen to it closely. I don’t remember exactly how 14th-century hexachordal theory works, but I remember that they counted it on their fingers, and that Machaut used it to write minor 9th leaps, and that thirds were “unresolved”. That’s amazingly powerful information! But did I need to study theory to get it?

Nope, I needed to study music history, and to be fair, I also needed to understand the basic mechanics of music. To be completely pragmatic, composers should know how to write key signatures and other essentials of applied theory, and they should understand tonal harmony because it’s a useful starting point in learning how you can train the brain to make associations between patterns of frequencies. That is technically music theory, and that much at least is useful. And if the student just doesn’t get tonal theory, have him or her study something else instead. The important thing is just to have a framework of understanding to start with.

After that, all you need to know as a composer is why musicians of the past thought the way they did. That’s a million times more interesting and useful than how one note (or chord) leads to another. You want to write music better? Then get inside the brain of the composers you admire. I’m willing to bet that, when you get in that brain (unless maybe it’s Milton Babbitt’s brain), you’re not going to find music theory treaties.

Like virtually all San Francisco Symphony concerts, I attended because there was a new work being played, in this case Israeli-American composer Avner Dorman‘s Uriah: The Man The King Wanted Dead. A programmatic work based on a gruesome Old Testament story, Uriah complemented the other programmatic work of the evening, Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, made famous by the Disney animation—but which I had never heard performed live, maybe also because of Disney.

Despite my inherent dislike of late Romantic music, hands down the Dukas was a better piece than the Dorman. Before the Dukas, I expected to be bombarded by Mickey Mouse imagery and that catchy 9/8 melody in grating repetition. Instead, I was surprised by the subtly of the score. A qualification: This is late Romantic program music squarely in the mythical tradition beloved by the period, so it is what it is, and you either love it or hate it. But even the harshest critic would have to begrudgingly appreciate its artfulness. Complex layers of melody intertwine at different tempos, large dynamic swells and unusual orchestrations dominate; it’s just an engaging piece on a lot of levels. Add to that a catchy tune and you see why it became so popular.

Dorman also displayed a striking command of orchestration and an appreciation for the need to keep the audience’s attention. His piece, however, lacked the cohesion and compositional mastery that made the Dukas stand out. Understandably (and thankfully), Uriah avoids the incessant, motif-based approach of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, yet Uriah doesn’t fill that gap with an equally evocative alternative. Certain moments in the piece strongly evoked John Corigliano, Dorman’s teacher at Juilliard, but not consistently. Other moments evoked Dorman’s interest in non-classical music—for instance, Middle Eastern–sounding drum riffs (presumably to reference the setting of the story) or a brief, 5-second jazz piano interlude in the Lento movement—but again these elements appeared fleetingly, as if he had forgotten he had intended to use them.

One consistency in Dorman’s piece was the frequent use of sudden shifts from relatively traditional, consonant harmonies to massive clusters. This didn’t strike me as particularly artful, unfortunately. It seemed as if, whenever faced with the challenge of making an intense, extreme moment in the music, Dorman would simply revert to the “dissonant = intense” cliché. I love me a good cluster as much as the next composer, but music just isn’t that formulaic. Dorman’s approach seemed heavy handed and awkward, and I felt a tiny bit embarrassed for him at points.

That said, let’s end with the positive. Dorman’s piece, despite a lack of compositional vision, was an orchestrational pleasure. He also managed to write in such a way as to create an engaging experience on first listen. Uriah is not one of those pieces where you squirm and look at your watch the whole time; it kept my attention to the end, although maybe not for the right reasons. And the audience seemed to like it, dissonant textures and all, which isn’t anything to scoff at in the world of contemporary orchestral music.

Perhaps the biggest problem was in programming. As I’ve said before, pairing a new work with a similar masterpiece from the past always casts the newer work in a bad light. Dorman had to compete with (let’s face it) a masterpiece of the programmatic Romantic tradition, and an extremely well-known and beloved one at that. Even on our best days as composers, it’s hard to measure up to that. Nevertheless, I hope that in future Dorman pieces I’ll hear a more evolved compositional structure that offers something beyond surface orchestrational fireworks.