[Fmpro] Shore, Burton, Wood

Fri Jun 6 00:43:27 GMT 2008

Robert, I looked at your stuff and you are very good. The sci-fi piece was 
particularly impressive - hell, you could probably get work as a genre 
illustrator. I couldn't do that with a computer if my life depended on it. I 
also liked CONTEMPLATION NIGHT a lot. Had a strong sense of time, place, 
temperature, and just a tad unsettling. The stuff on page three was my least 
favorite, and whatever it was you were shooting for with the last piece 
(page 3) - don't ever do it again! Almost looked as if someone (a 
knucklehead) had prompted you to "try this". You are very talented and you 
certainly should continue making 2D imagery.
    "Pseudo art" doesn't mean anything. What does exist are valid 
distinctions between the following categories: the crafts, decorative arts, 
illustration (best fit for you right now), propaganda (a difficult area), 
pornography (supposed to be a difficult area but not really), art-brut or 
outsider art, and the fine or high arts. Your piece CONTEMPLATION NIGHT 
demonstrates you probably have the capacity to transcend illustration and 
evolve into fine art - if you should ever choose to do so, but LOTS of work 
involved and at least half of it in your head. As you are already are a 
composer I don't see this happening, unless you really are somebody special!
    I do not have a web-site for my work. I'll see about scanning some 
smaller things and sending them to you. You probably won't like it - mostly 
non-representational, advanced or distilled neo-expressionism and/or 
abstract expressionism. I'm a big fan of Twombly, Guston, and Schnabel, and 
I can't seem to fully break from Modernism - Picasso and that whole gang of 
dead Masters. Picasso was still alive and working when I was in University 
(undergraduate) and his presence was palpable - even from across the 
freaking ocean. We used to meet in the halls of the School of Art and ask of 
each other "Has anybody seen what God has been up to lately?" - JohnB

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Robert Stanton" <zolessi at comcast.net>
To: <fmpro at nxport.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2008 7:16 PM
Subject: Re: [Fmpro] Shore, Burton, Wood


>" . . . as a painter
> (2D visual artist) I have spent the past two decades trying to be
> innovative, so I know from innovative . . . "
>
> Hi JohnB - I didn't know you were a visual artist.  I do visual art for 
> fun
> with Adobe Photoshop - no 3D rendering - just color, brush attributes and
> some filtering - they take many weeks to complete.  But it's not 
> traditional
> paint and brush art so some people have attacked me as a pseudo artist - 
> but
> I'm a composer??? ;-).  If you're at all curious you can see some at:
> www.globalartsandmusic.ws.  The rest of my stuff is at my own gallery at
> gicleeprint.net but global arts has bigger, more viewable versions.  I'd
> love to see some ofyour stuff if you have it online somewhere.
>
> Be well, Robert
>
> Robert Scott Stanton
> San Francisco Bay Area, CA
> zolessi at comcast.net
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: fmpro-bounces+zolessi=comcast.net at nxport.com
> [mailto:fmpro-bounces+zolessi=comcast.net at nxport.com] On Behalf Of
> bipcress at comcast.net
> Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2008 3:48 PM
> To: fmpro at nxport.com
> Subject: Re: [Fmpro] Shore, Burton, Wood
>
> 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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>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Music
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>
> _______________________________________________
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> http://www.filmmusicmag.com
>
> Best of FMPRO: http://www.fmproquotes.com - Quotes site  by Billy Hale 
> Music
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