Thursday 06/07/2001 1:00:13pm Name: James Sellars Homepage: http://www.hogriver.com E-Mail: sellars@hogriver.com Referred By: Just Surfed In City/Country: Hartford, CT Comments: Sorry, Anthony, but I’m not yet prepared to argue about Schenker. Give me a few months and I’m certain to have both positive and negative points to make. One thing though, I doubt you can completely separate Schenker's jingoism, xenophobia, and politics from the man’s approach to tonal music. More on that later.

Thursday 06/07/2001 12:57:58am Name: James Sellars Homepage: http://www.hogriver.com E-Mail: sellars@hogriver.com Referred By: Just Surfed In City/Country: Hartford, CT Comments: In the following 3 posts are some thoughts on music that one jots down while composing They are in more less in chronological order. Where I have dates, I include them. Composers writing since the early 60’s, should realize that music cannot be everything and remain music. In cannot be philosophy, revolution, psychology, acoustics, technology, science, public and political criticism; the burden placed on music is too great. The best of what’s being composed now is ‘Music come to its Senses’. The old battles--theoretical orthodoxy, stylistic dogma--have been fought; take what you will from the spoilage. But once we younger composers became aware that forced style and idioms, from inside or outside the score, brings with it sterility and a loss of musical purpose. I once knew a composer who said that his music expressed hatred for Richard Nixon. But the composer will change now. Perhaps it is not identity, but difference that we must search out. It may sound a little like Brahms or Stravinsky, but no one can become someone else. The DIFFERENCE is what must be comprehended and appreciated.-March, 1969 Composers have sought to outrage the audience (ever since “Rite of Spring”). Really the audience outraged us--by walking out. WARNING: Music is an aesthetic product. It may be harmful to one’s sense of form, logic, rigor, reality, political, or commercial thought. What it contains of specialized technique, technology, science, or philosophy is insignificant; however, inasmuch as it remains itself--all things human are eminently aesthetic, the arts are more a part of everything than anything is a part of it. -May, 1970 The ultimate goal is to compose without self-consciousness. - Time is more real than space (Bergson) - Surface is more real that space. - Beauty is skin deep, - But ugliness runs straight to the bone - The real is on the top. (January, 1971) Technology makes the world more vivid. POSTMODERNISM--I’ve been waiting for that to happen. (February. 1971)

Thursday 06/07/2001 12:53:56am Name: James Sellars Homepage: http://www.hogriver.com E-Mail: sellars@hogriver.com Referred By: Just Surfed In City/Country: Hartford, CT Comments: My piece for sting quartet, flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, double bass, and electric keyboard (later entitled “Return of the Comet”) is, to me at least, a new kind of music, a piece that is not concerned with organic growth, unity, evolution, progression, or regression. However, it is concerned with these matters in a positive relationship to past modernism. It does not repudiate modernism, but orbits around the last 900 years of it. Style and idea is what holds music together. Despite Schoenberg, style is probably more important What artificial cosmic ecstasy--Ah, yes, that’s what art can be—ecstasy, cosmic, fantasy--and we know it’s fake. To be art it must always remind us that it an artifice. Cage, in a radical way, rid music of relationships within and outside of the work itself; thus, the composer’s relationship to what is “composed” is transformed. What can you say about mastery in such a situation? Schoenberg probably got it right: “Cage is an inventor.” All composers have to digest Schoenberg and Cage before they can write music. Of all the fine arts, classical music is the last to rid itself of carrying the burden of social morality. Theater may make any subject theatrical; painting, sculpture, literature may depict any subject, no matter how outrageous or controversial. On the other hand, music, to a great extent, is considered second-rate, obnoxious, or “light” (“light music” is a strange term), if it does not bear an obvious moral, ethical style Music alone is involved with society’s guilt, a refuge for the bourgeois from moral hypocrisy. The middle and upper intelligentsia use music as purification; thus, “new classical music” that has the least bit of commercial value is tainted. In conservative academic circles, Satie is a heretic, French music, in general, finds itself on a lower moral plane than the German school. The Cage school is to be feared, a potentially revolutionary element that robs society of its musical catharsis. Ironically, Cage was one of the most moralistic of the lot. After a bit of nudity appeared in his Theater Piece at a SUNY Buffalo performance, he once said: “There’s no sex in my music.” Neither is there much, if any, sensuality.

Thursday 06/07/2001 12:50:40am Name: James Sellars Homepage: http://www.hogriver.com E-Mail: sellars@hogriver.com Referred By: Just Surfed In City/Country: Hartford, CT Comments: Automatic music made from charts or computer algorithms supposedly removes the composer’s bias (taste) from composing, a music game that plays by its own rules. Music without dirtying you hands. From 1900 to 1970 all the ground had been cleared. The only approach left is to revisit these sites and develop them (Postmodernism again). Now that Maynard Solomon has outed Schubert the music history books will have to be rewritten (but they won’t be). - If there’s a gay music, - There’s a lesbian music, - A hetero women’s music, - If there’s hetero men’s music, - There’s a gay man writing a hetero men’s music, - A gay man writing lesbian music, - A hetero women writing gay men’s music, - Then there’s transgender and bisexual music, - Permutations will drive you crazy. - No doubt, Max Reger and Buxtehude fit all these categories. Certainly complexity—from the mid-17th-century through the 1950s—appeared to be commensurate with “progress” and improvement of the human condition. Now, progress is called into question (pollution, anyone?). Complexity is a bane to the quality of our lives. I punch 11 numbers to reach a friends cell phone. And then there’s those endless menus when you call a big corporation. More in a later installment.

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