In today's society, new music is at risk of slipping farther into that most lonely of pits: irrelevance. Yet with the new millenium approaching, we have a great chance to recapture the imagination of the public. When a thousand years of human history leaves out the back door, and a thousand years enters in the front, society will turn with greater intensity to the arts, will demand new creations to help digest all that has happened and forecast all that might.
Opening words
by Anthony Brandt
To have everyone thinking like composers--that is one of the goals of this column. At present, a sort of educational triage takes place: it is most often assumed that the public at large is not capable of understanding the secret practices of the art-form; so they are entertained with pleasing anecdotes, and a few rudimentary morsels like the "identification of themes." Most of the musical information they are given restricts them within a narrow range of styles. It fails to show the principles that underlie all musical thinking. Indeed, this style-specific approach is also a problem with mainstream professional musical training.
It is my hope to sink beneath the surface of styles and era and examine these unifying principles. The principles are simple and easy to explain; it is only their elaboration which can be infinitely varied and intricate. Understanding them enables a listener to be truly adventurous, experiencing both familiar and unfamiliar music with insight.
In later columns, I will also discuss the way music is presented, and the social conditions of the composer. But first, I would like to explore the nature of music itself.
In painting, it is possible to perceive the entire canvas instantaneously. But in music, this is not so: music reveals itself in time, from one moment to the next. Each sound lives only for an instant, and then is replaced. It is our memory which must create the sense of the entire canvas. Form in music has no physical substance; it exists only in our minds. In my next column, we will begin to study how this fundamental quality shapes compositional thinking.
Next installment: Levels of Time
©1995 Anthony Brandt, all rights reserved.
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