What’s on your iPod? We know it’s not just the classical warhorses. Here Steven Winn — arts journalist, critic and co-moderator of our live events in San Francisco — poses some of the questions we’ll be asking about creativity as part of the American Orchestra Forum.
For most orchestra patrons, “tradition” means music they know (or that sounds familiar) and “innovation” is music they don’t. Is the 20th century still the great dividing line? If so why?
Has the iPod Age, where Rachmaninoff and rap can live side by side inside anyone’s ear buds, made the boundaries between “popular” and “classical” obsolete? Has music become so completely portable, pervasive, fragmented and fungible that we actually hear differently now? If Google is making us stupid, or at least changing the way we think (or don’t), as some cultural critics claim, have we become different kinds of listeners as well? Is Mahler just too long for our short attention spans? Or is that exactly what we need because of it?
Might the punchier popular forms begin to influence the kind of music that composers write? Are they thinking more about venues like nightclubs and alternative spaces where the music might be performed (and received in a different way, by people who might be drinking and talking)? Do composers think about (and “use”) popular forms the way Gershwin or Milhaud did? How has irony and culture of coolness changed the temperature for contemporary composers?
Good questions here Steven! I’ve found one answer in the music I’ve started writing after 22 years in the orchestra and 25 years collecting CDs and going out to enjoy all kinds of other music. I never studied composition but after several years of transcribing symphonic hits for my “band”, I began writing some cool, tonal, conventional music that surprisingly blends with every other favorite style of mine. Chunks of pseudo rock, blues, tango, bluegrass, Latin, Latin folk, negro jubilee, gospel, soul and funk all find their appropriate place in my writing. And they find their way there I think because I’m focusing on those NEW to classical music. How can I give them enough familiar rhythm and improvisation to draw them into our world of themes, counterpoint and modulations? One of my best works came out resembling HIP-HOP in the A sections! I don’t even listen to that stuff… but it’s everywhere today… and it’s a way INSIDE the hearts of those I desperately want to reach. Maybe we should be doing outreach with IN-reach! (You heard it hear first!) Young and dark music lovers want boldness and SOUL in all their music! My creativity came up with Classical Soul.