The New York Times


May 10, 2011, 9:00 pm

The Composer’s Other Voice

The ScoreIn The Score, American composers on creating “classical” music in the 21st century.

I have been a composer for my entire adult life. And for the most part, despite the exhaustion and relative poverty it has entailed, this self-styled “job” has been a source of satisfaction, even great joy.

But in those moments of panic every artist has, I experience fears: perhaps foremost among them, the fear of losing my “voice,” that unquantifiable quality that makes the music I compose exclusively my own. And as a citizen of a musical community, I at times fear something even more dire — a collective loss of voice for all of us practicing this ever-more-rarefied art of “concert music.”

It is important to hear not just from the listeners and critics, but from the artists.

It is not only that we composers lack a place at the cultural and political conversational table, but that most of those at said table hardly know we’re there. Composers of this genre (variously labeled “concert” or “classical” music for lack of better terms) seem to have less of a public platform than ever before, even for addressing matters musical. This was not always true. Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann, Claude Debussy, Ferruccio Busoni, Richard Wagner, Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Milton Babbitt, to name only a few — each exercised a prose voice as well as a musical one. Wagner, through his music and prose, even effected acts of political upheaval, including the burning of an opera house (not recommended). Among contemporaries, composers like Louis Andriessen, Steve Reich and especially the prolific Ned Rorem, have distinguished themselves as thinkers and writers in the public sphere. But on the whole, the lack of the composer’s voice in our discourse is near deafening.

Today, when we hear about concert music we hear almost exclusively from critics. And while I do not question their necessity, theirs is only one perspective on this important aspect of our collective cultural life. It is important, I think, to hear not just from the listeners, however educated, but from the progenitors, the makers, the artists who have historically been harbingers and instigators of both aesthetic and social change.

When I was asked to contribute to The Score last spring I was both flattered and daunted. Though no stranger to prose (I’ve written about music for almost as long as I’ve composed it), this was new thinking for me, the placing of myself in an historical continuum. My contribution, an essay called “Rebel Music,” was an elegy to becoming a classical musician in 1980’s Orange County, Calif., (which seemed then the least likely of places), and it abutted the wise words of several others, including visionaries like Michael Gordon, Annie Gosfield, Alvin Curran and Glenn Branca, composers whom I admire deeply but who are also, musically, quite different from me. My experience writing for The Score turned out to be an important one: not only did I get a chance to speak in public as a composer, but I felt I could contribute to something rare, a public forum for composers to speak on their own terms, in their own words. Having this other space — free the constraints of journalistic “peg” (a profile to support a world premier, a retrospective on a long career, a roundup of fresh faces or numbered list) — is not only invigorating but in my estimation essential.

Now, in the coming weeks, I will be serving as a guest curator of The Score, charged with the daunting responsibility of overseeing a public conversation among my peers. In doing this I believe it is important to include composers from a range of musical styles, but perhaps more important, to feature those who, in my view at least, possess a unique perspective coupled with a strong and very personal musical identity. I aim to cut across the old sectarian rancor of the musical “schools” or at least try, thereby taking the smallest step not only to eliminate the echolalia of the inside chatter of our profession, but also to scale the walls to the world outside.

Of course, along with the duties of such a project comes the complicated and not-always-popular task of pulling back the curtain.

When Leonard Bernstein famously took to the airwaves to bring “art music” to the masses in his Young People’s Concerts, he was accused, in snobbier quarters, of something akin to giving away magicians’ secrets: when he, for example, explained the rudiments of conducting a symphony orchestra, music stores (then common) were besieged by people buying batons. They knew, at least a little bit, about how it was done, and some argued that this removed an important shroud of ineffable mystery. With that, I cannot disagree more. By disabusing the public of the idea that those supremely talented people who wrote symphonies, operas, chamber music (or performed them, for that matter) were akin to gods atop Parnassus indulging great draughts from some eternal spring, Bernstein acknowledged the truth — that those so-called gods were actually people, people with a trade even, a craft. It was not mystery or the divine touch that got them where they were, but labor, discussion, thinking, study, trying, failing, trying again.

We begin tomorrow with an essay by the composer and Bang on a Can co-founder David Lang, on what classical music can learn from baseball. Then in coming weeks, we’ll hear from more contemporaries — Martin Bresnick, Lisa Bielawa, David T. Little and Luke DuBois and others — on topics important to them as composers and as citizens in the wider world.

Please tune in.

And chime in.

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Daniel Felsenfeld

Daniel Felsenfeld has written music for the string quartet Ethel, the pianists Simone Dinnerstein and Andrew Russo, the DaCapo Chamber Players and Real Quiet. He lives in Brooklyn. More work can be found at his Web site.


The Score features the writings of composers on their work and the issues involved in creating music in the 21st century, as the traditional notion of “classical” continues to be reconsidered, revised and reimagined. The guest curator of the series is Daniel Felsenfeld.

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