[Fmpro] Shore, Burton, Wood

[Ted Peterson]

I never said Shore's work was lowered in my estimation just that it  
was not as original as I had first thought. It's funny because  
usually I have good musical memory for things like show themes and  
movie themes. Being a SCI-FI buff, I saw "Plan 9" when I was a kid  
but just never associated the two. I happen to think Shore is one of  
the better composers. So, I still think he wrote a nice score but the  
innovation side took a hit. So what? Isn't that the way things are  
supposed to work? We come out of ignorance into knowledge? Listen to  
Mozart's symphonies and you will see a great development of style and  
complexity over a period all based on Mozart's personal style. (By  
the way, when Stockhausen was editor of a music publication, he wrote  
an article tracing cadential formula used by Mozart. He came up with  
four basic formulae that can be use to analyze much of Mozart's  
work.) Then listen to "The Requiem." What changed? What happened to  
Mozart that all of a sudden we get this incredible counterpoint? Does  
anyone know? Was this an evolutionary step in Mozart's style or  
something else? A gold star for the person with  the correct answer.

But we're investigating innovation here not whether a person is a  
good composer or not. Most A and B list film composers are top-notch  
technicians in my book. In the symphonic realm, anyone getting  
performances however irregular is a good composer. In a few years of  
teaching, I never encountered a "bad" composer but have encountered  
many who based their stuff on triteness. There were also many who  
were looking for acceptance not innovation. Some of these were less  
capable craftsmen than others but even  then, they weren't "BAD." I  
wrote a strict 12-tone piece when in university but none of my  
professors thought is was written that way. Yes, it was 12-tone  
technique (based on Perle) and strict but my style wasn't as disjunct  
and I actually created melodies and secondary themes. One part of the  
seven movement work was in sonata form. I got into a lot of trouble  
during juries when I said it was a 12-tone piece and had to justify  
my piece to pass. Luckily, I had everything charted and every note  
accounted for based on the row, it's inversion and retrograde and RI  
and showed how it all fit together. My advisor, one Dr. Aurelio De La  
Vega was puffing his cigar and laughing as I embarrassed one teacher  
after another by being able to  explain how the piece worked. But  
before that they were adamant that I was misrepresenting when I said  
the piece was 12-tone. See, they only associated 12-tone music with a  
particular style which was a knockoff of the  Viennese school founded  
by Schoenberg and manned by Berg and Webern.

If you look at Slonimski's' "Lexicon of Musical Invective" you will  
see that every composer has had his/her critics at some point. The  
composers we revere today were considered outlandish at some time in  
their careers. (I have enough bad reviews to fill a binder.) But one  
thing is constant: The composers who have remained were the ones who  
innovated. The ones who didn't innovate were left in the trash heap  
of history. And some of those composers were capable indeed. Luckily  
for us, most of the works have been forgotten but every once in a  
while, some performing group will find a treasure from a forgotten  
composer which shows a lot of originality if the work had been  
written 100 years before the composer lived.

So I don't call this innovation. Good craftsmanship, yes. But  
innovation no. There is a movement about to "discover" the music of  
the Americas circa California Mission Period and Pre-Revolutionary  
War period in the Northeast.  There is some good music but 99% of it  
could have been written in the 1600s instead of the late 1700s for  
the colonial music and the  same can be said for the mission music.  
Should the composer who worked in CA writing "new" pieces in an out  
of date style be considered the same as the composer who innovated  
the style? I think not and here's the reason.

Back in the 1950, a person was discovered who had on his own worked  
out Pythagoras' theorum. He had no formal education but did live in  
the world around him. So initially people were crediting him as the  
"new" Pythagoras and tried to equate his genius with that of  
Pythagoras. Why was this a false association? It's because the world  
has changed as a result of the use of Pythagoras' theorum and this  
person lived in that world. There was more of the application for him  
to see. Musically, it's the same thing. Music and musical style  
changed based on innovation and people hearing the music or  
ramifications of the music in things as simple as folk tunes are the  
beneficiaries of the earlier discovery. Also, and this is rather  
esoteric, once something is created and used, it becomes part of the  
human consciousness in a strange way that alters the world  
perception. So rediscovery, however isolated is appears, never merits  
the same as the original.

I'm not writing out of conceit or snobbery but from a sense of  
reality. I wrote before about a conversation that William Kraft,  
David Ocker and I had about this same thing and David finally said:  
"You have to make a distinction between "new" music and "New" music.  
If I had no musical knowledge, had never travelled and both given and  
been to concerts in other countries, I might be able to get away with  
compartmentalizing my perception into a small area like film music  
and find lots of innovation in the works there. But with knowledge  
comes understanding of what is really new and what is novel or clever  
but not necessarily new. None of us will live 150 years into the  
future but if we use history as a guide, composer like Williams will  
be forgotten and their contribution to music will be minimal. The  
same will be for all film composer with a couple of exceptions and  
those will be the composer who came to film after establishing a  
career. After all, Glass is most known for his operas most of which  
have never been performed in America.

I'm compiling the reading list but there's a lot of typing. So give  
me some time.

Ted Peterson

On Jun 3, 2008, at 1:53 AM, <bipcress at comcast.net> wrote:

> Ted, it's like you don't get it, or that you are obsessed with your  
> own
> private notion of originality (read "innovation"). Obviously you are
> effectively educated and informed, and I have respect for your  
> views (and by
> the way slick, you never sent me your offered reading list). You  
> probably
> know more about music (technically, historically) than I ever will,  
> but
>