Celebrating the Multiplicity of Modern Music
Just in time for this month's multi-dimensional Sydney Festival of music, dance, theatre, and more, the Sydney Morning Herald recently reprinted an essay by composer Nico Muhly published last fall in the Guardian, asserting that the cross-pollination between pop/rock and contemporary classical music needn't resort to anything as metaphorically contorted as the bending, breaking, or busting of genres at all. Rather, writes Muhly: "The best sort of interchange between experimental classical music and experimental rock and pop consists of a shared dialogue with the goal of making music."
Muhly points to the era of compositional experimentation of the '60s and '70s by leading figures like Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley as purveyors of "the productive intersection between notated and non-notated music" that would soon spread beyond the "classical" world. In the work of this vanguard could be seen "classically trained composers relinquishing control, backing off of the laser-like precision of Stravinskian detail and replacing it with a type of communal music-making more commonly found in rock bands."
Citing artists like Radiohead, Björk, and Sufjan Stevens (the latter two contributors to the Nonesuch Tribute to Joni Mitchell) as the heirs to this new mode of composition, Muhly points, among other things, to Björk's inclusion of the pipa on her latest release, Volta, not as some simplistic East-West "fusion" but rather as just one more component in her expansive creative palette. (Similarly, pioneering composer Terry Riley's Cusp of Magic, written for Kronos Quartet and pipa virtuoso Wu Man, brings together Chinese lullabies and digital audio samples of musical toys, so that, in the composer's words, "Western musical themes might be projected with an Eastern accent and vice-versa." Nonesuch will release the Kronos/Wu Man recording of the piece, pictured above right, on February 5.)
In Stevens's case, the singer-songwriter "makes active references to the American minimal tradition (Reich, Glass, Adams) in his music." His breakout album Illinois even includes a lengthy musical reference "lifted almost directly from Adams's Common Tones in Simple Time," writes Muhly. "But, Stevens has a more complicated compositional process than just borrowing." Referencing "an incredibly successful moment" in one song, Muhly says "it works because Stevens has harnessed his minimalist pattern-based energies and sent them straight up from the earth to the sky."
For Muhly, the emotional core is precisely where musical cross-pollination should begin, writing that it
is best achieved when it bypasses thought and operates through the nervous system, the spine and the fingertips ... Modern musicians can pick and choose what goes into their music. The literal crossing-over is already done. It is simply a matter of a making a plan and not giving it a name except your own.
To read the complete article, visit smh.com.au or arts.guardian.co.uk.
