In Which I am having post-minimalist thoughts, post-production.
I had a great nerd-out this week with composers Adam Sherkin, Alex Eddington, Brian Harman, and Mitch Renaud. Our topic was post-minimalism, and as we started, it became apparent that our first task was to define post-minimalism. The scores that we brought in as examples of the style included elements of hard-core minimalism, but all seemed to use this minimalism less as a style to be adhered to than as one compositional tool available to be exploited. Minimalistic concepts were found to be in cahoots in various scores with post-modernism, DJs, drum and bass, theatre music, neo-romanticism…. From what I remember, the only conclusion we came to was that we will need to reconvene in 50 years, to see if we can make sense of the jumble of new sounds we were hearing. (Perhaps the others can provide a more conclusive conclusion for me?) But it was great fun to think about sound on such a basic level: what is a style of music? How many people have to practice the same style for it to become a movement? Where are its edges?
This is a pretty fun time to be a composer. As I confirmed in our discussion this week, we are intensely lucky to be writing music in a Western Classical tradition now; this is a time when so much has been built up in this art form, so many sounds discovered and tools provided, so many barriers between sub-genres broken down. As a composer, I have instruments, techniques, performers and ideas available to me from literally all over the planet and all throughout human history. I have unparalleled access to information about music, and brand new ways to document what I create and provide it to an audience. Many times, I think this panoply of stimuli leads me to act more as a curator than as a composer. It also opens up all of the questions of classification mentioned above.
These questions come at an interesting time for me. A few months after the monumental effort that was “Safe and Healthy Homes for Children,” I am still feeling a little lost musically. In post-production now (recordings coming soon!), I am completely baffled by the recording of this concert. Over 65 minutes of music, I pretty much pulled in every style of music that I know how to write (and a few that I discovered, listening back, I do not yet know how to write). In the end, I seem to have produced a series of études about the edges of various contemporary pop music styles; this work is the outlines of some musical shapes that remains slightly obscured to me. Here in the Land of Outlines, I have written music that is so many different things that it is not actually a Thing. What remains now is for me to reason my way back inside to the Land of Things, to clarify the intention of each individual musical shape. It’s time for me to start being deliberate about classification.
To do this, I am going to step back from the current compositional track on which I’ve been careening lately. “Safe and Healthy Homes” will mark my last self-produced show on this scale. I’m going to take a break from Alligators and focus on writing music for smaller ensembles for the next year: upcoming projects include a piece of art music about contemporary wars for chamber strings and male voice; I’m also working on a pop music/performance art collaboration with poet Linda Besner and singer/songwriter Abigail Lapell about model trains (model trains!). With each of these projects, I am hoping to find myself more in the centre of each respective musical style, instead of mucking about with outlines. I look forward to reporting back in a little while from the Land of Things.
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Footnote: There are MANY people to whom I owe very much for the time and creative genius they gave me for “Safe and Healthy Homes”. A more thorough thank you will be forthcoming, but right now, the work that Gary Gray is doing on the recording of the show is foremost in my mind. I can’t wait to post the recordings online shortly- Gary has somehow managed to make it sound like we spent days in a professional studio, instead of doing the whole thing live in one shot in a theatre…. Thank you Gary!
