Composition, performance, and research

Creative work–scholarship, performance, composition–is directed to an audience; but its proper role is to define an audience, not to respond to one. It stands with respect to its audience in the same relation that teaching stands with respect to students: it seeks to make itself unnecessary. To this end it seeks to enhance its audience's ability to draw distinctions, to stipulate differences; that is, it seeks to make its audience creators. It does not seek to perpetuate categories of resemblance, habits of thought; that function is served more than adequately by the repetition of existing works and by mass entertainment. To the extent that creative work is easily grasped, it is easily disregarded; to the extent that it is unobjectionable, it is ineffectual.

In the present climate of media generalizations, research and scholarship are most usefully oriented towards the proposition of differences, the assertion that an entity–composer, subculture, tool–differs fundamentally from all others. Such scholarship instructs a reader in drawing distinctions and invites a reader to construct new distinctions; it challenges the status quo by demonstrating the validity of alternatives, including the reader's own, not by asserting new dogma.

Performance can serve substantially the same ends; but the centuries-old performance tradition has recently been additionally problematized by the introduction of recording, which is both its partner and its antagonist. To continue to exist, performance must distinguish itself from recording; it must reconstitute its audience by supplying a critique of technology's objectification of music. In this effort composers are its natural allies. Performance which serves this end is an essential part of any composition program; and composers who address this issue–whether by the creation of electro-acoustic music or by the construction of indeterminate, interactive, improvisatory, or other variable works–are essential to performance. Both will contribute substantially to the re-creation of informed audiences for traditional music. Paradoxically, however, the composition of new traditional works—works designed to be captured, reproduced, and disseminated in recorded form—is likely to undermine performance and accelerate the dissolution of its audience.

Composition always entails drawing distinctions, but it does not always invite its audience to draw its own, to enter into the creative act. That invitation is issued most consistently by experimental music, defined as music in which the process of composition is of an interest commensurate with the result. Engagement of an audience with the compositional process demystifies composition, making each audience member a student of compositional thought. (For this reason experimental music is doubly valuable in an academic context.) Such engagement also requires that the compositional process be either transparent or explicated, so that the audience is appropriately informed; and this in turn requires a high degree of self-consiousness and self-criticism from the composer. In achieving this, technology is an especially useful partner, since technological processes require the use of unfamiliar, unmusical languages and do not tolerate ambiguity, error, or intuition. Experimental music, then, especially when linked with technology, is among the most effective ways of accomplishing the objectives described more generally above.

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Service

Experimental music occupies a peculiar middle ground in the dialectic between egalitarianism and elitism. On one hand, its aesthetic and techniques are implicitly egalitarian; they seek to give listeners (and performers) at least part of the authority traditionally reserved for composers. On the other hand, it requires explication, study, and discipline; and this restricts its actual audience to individuals willing and able to make the necessary effort. The result is an elite, but one which is self-defined and which encompasses many individuals who are not part of the traditional, socially and culturally constructed, art-music elite.

As a result, experimental music—and all music which challenges the status quo—is rarely undertaken by traditional ensembles. It tends to be written for individuals known to the composer and to be performed in venues not devoted to art music. Its audience is dispersed and disparate; it gathers at professional and academic meetings or non-academic concerts and festivals, not at concert series designed by commercially driven promoters and arts managers.

Music which challenges the status quo is, in that sense, peripheral; and therein resides its most valuable service. A center without a periphery is lifeless, inert. In the School, in the University, in the wider community, music's future is threatened not by an extremism of speculation but by an extremism of conformity. At a research university, especially, to encourage self-conscious, peripheral creativity is to strengthen the dynamic which animates the entire discipline. The center, too, is thereby strengthened–not by the imposition of doctrine, which ultimately ossifies and enervates that which it seeks to save, but by the exercise of self-analysis made necessary by the very existence of legitimized irrelevance.

In this process too technology is essential. The internet facilitates the egalitarian creation of self-defined elites as never before; the internet is the quintessential media application of an experimental aesthetic. Recorded music is already being distributed in a wholly mutable form, and the most ordinary home computer will soon be as capable of de- and re-composing each sound file received as today's large computers can. Every listener will have the tools necessary to act as a composer; the great challenge for musicians over the next few decades will be to maximize the likelihood that each listener will choose to do so in an informed manner.

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It is clear from the foregoing that in all domains the work of the Composition-Theory Division manifests two central characteristics: respect for (indeed, insistence upon) the importance of difference; and a critical engagement with the uses and consequences of technology.

The latter does not imply that all Division members must be devotees of music technology; to require that would undermine the former. But the Division does believe that the state of music today requires that technology be ever more central to the Division's activities. The teaching and composition of acoustic music should and will continue within the Division, but a continuing engagement with technological innovation is essential.

Respect for difference has two noteworthy consequences. It requires, first, a reconsideration of evaluative procedures; we do not accept the validity of benchmarks by which all can be measured. To respect difference is to mistrust comparison; in a very real sense, the value of a person or a work can be measured by the extent to which it cannot be evaluated by conventional means. Second, respect for difference does not require respect for intolerance. The Division is and must continue to be host to a wide diversity of views, but it does not and will not accept the view that other views are intolerable.

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