[Fmpro] Shore, Burton, Wood

[bipcress@comcast.net]

We're getting better - nothing you said here made me mad! Also, as a painter 
(2D visual artist) I have spent the past two decades trying to be 
innovative, so I know from innovative - I've been years in the trenches. 
It's tantamount to impossible to create anything that's absolutely new to 
the world of High Art, but there is much value gleaned from an on-going and 
painful effort. My brain hurts but I can feel it getting bigger. - JohnB

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ted Peterson" <ted.peterson at tcsn.net>
To: <fmpro at nxport.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2008 2:24 PM
Subject: Re: [Fmpro] Shore, Burton, Wood


>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
>>
>
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