I study music composition at a university; should I shoot myself?

I used the term "influence" up there. Guilty!

I guess I'm asking a lot of questions about a lot of different things but right now, at 1 in the morning, my inability to answer these questions is really bothering me.

The line above implies that you seem to believe in some of the music being made so carry on. I can't really say anything else becuz i only buy some music by the some of the ppl you mention and you have a lot of concerns and those aren't well put together.

This sense of, "Okay, so we had Cage, etc. Now what's next?" makes me wonder. Has Cage really been so thoroughly digested? Has his revolution succeeded? I don't think the most radical proposals he made have really been widely embraced (and that's all for the good, as far as I am concerned).

I know this thread isn't about Cage, and I admit I don't know much about Partch, and know even less about Xenakis.

How long can a tradition of constantly over-turning tradition last?

If not many people actually listen to academic music and it no longer has the ability to change minds in new ways, shouldn't the universities rethink who they hire and what values their professors embody? Who, then, should be teaching composition in the universities, and what should they teach?

But on some level I'm concerned about the validity of academic music composition in general

at this point in time academic composition seems to lack the ability to shock anyone

These are potentially iatrogenic (!) statements. In other words, yes, you're describing a problem that's real, but the premises you're using to examine it may ensure that the problem, as you're choosing to view it, is inherently unsolvable. ("Doctor, I have a headache." "OK, I'm just concerned about how we'll treat the infection." "What infection?" "Well, the one that you'll get in your neck, after I cut off your head.")

So for instance, I would ask you to define your terms a little bit better: what does "valid" mean, in your first statement, and in what way is it significant to a composer? And in your second statement, when you refer to "shocking" people -- or, as you put it later, causing a paradigm shift -- there are all kinds of assumptions about the value of these things, assumptions that I think are worth examining. For example: what does the choice of these particular terms imply about the aesthetic valuation behind them? Do you think there's a broader way of describing those phenomena -- shocking, paradigm-shifting -- that would encompass other kinds of affect and aesthetic response, or do you think that there's something singular about those phenomena that makes them more valuable, or indispensable if music is to remain "valid"?

I realize these questions may seem simplistic, or even condescending: they're not meant to be. It's just that I think the way you're asking these questions is almost guaranteeing that their pursuit will lead you into a blind alley. The last time I saw an old friend of mine, six or seven years ago, he was going on and on and on about how no human actions were borne of altruism, and everything people did that seemed generous was done strictly out of self-interest and selfishness, etc., etc. I tried to argue with him at the time, and obviously didn't get anywhere, since there was nothing in his position that was logically unsound: the problem was his premises, which couldn't really be argued with -- and which, in some sense, were true -- but which need not be accepted as the only way to look at things, particularly if you're aware of how many of these arguments have been had before and how articulately they've been examined (esp. by the Greeks).

There are so many assumptions in this statement, I don't even know where to begin, but the main one is that "it no longer has the ability to change minds in new ways": ??!!?!??!!

Here's another question, by the way: what are the (aesthetic) things that one can get from academic music (what does this term mean, anyway?) that one can't get (or can't get as consistently/efficiently/articulately/etc.) from other forms of music, and why are they important?

I suppose I didn't mean the music was invalid, and "valid" is a really loaded term that I probably should have avoided. What I meant was just what I said later: if no one hears it, and it doesn't have the same power to impact people, why should today's crop of professors be the ones, of all the interesting music in the world, that are allowed to teach?

"do you think that there's something singular about those phenomena that makes them more valuable, or indispensable if music is to remain 'valid'?"

No. I guess I'm using a couple standards of value here; you'll easily tear them apart. The first is: the sort of person who ought to be teaching music in a university ought to be the sort of person who can teach people how to write music that people actually like. Muisc is entertainment, right? If that's not the case, then they ought to, like Cage, have some really new ideas. You're right, I was assuming a lot. That looks pretty ridiculous now that I've written it out.

See, that statement seems plausible on the face of it, but not only does it fall apart under analysis, but it leads to exactly the kind of careerism that is, far and away, one of the biggest boils on the face of current musical academia. I mean, of course one wants to write music that's capable of being liked (i.e. communicating) -- otherwise, you might as well just sit in your attic, writing the musical equivalent of confessional poetry, right? And in a sense, that's what I want a teacher to do for me, and what I want to do as a teacher -- to give people the tools, technical and otherwise, to write music that is capable of articulate aesthetic communication. (Exempting overtly experimental music -- where the purpose is explicitly to explore a particular vein that may or may not yield anything compelling -- music that doesn't [intend to] communicate = "self-expression" = tedious narcissism.)

But using "will/do people like it?" as a litmus test is very, very pernicious, in part because it brings to bear an unbelievably set of conservative forces on the act of music-making, and places the cart before the horse to the point of absurdity. Sure, a teacher should give you a modicum of practical advice about how to build a career -- I'm not denying that, and I think it's part of the responsibility of any good mentor to advise one's students of the often-harsh realities of professional life. But the last thing a good teacher should do is dwell on whether or not future audiences will like a particular student's music. Rather, he/she should be trying to apprehend each student's particular compositional voice, and to do everything in his/her power to equip that student with the tools to articulate the music that student wants to write, and to help to make that music as self-consistent, coherent, and communicative as possible. The idea isn't to supply a product that will be pleasing to some hypothetical audience, but rather to take an inchoate aesthetic vision and give its author the technique/confidence/etc. to realize that vision -- with the assumption that, if you take an aesthetically interesting idea and are able to articulate it coherently and fully, then a receptive and literate audience will at least theoretically be able to engage it: it's up to them whether they do, and to decide whether it's music they want to hear or not.

More in a moment...

It's a fundamental problem of educative institutions worldwide currently that the pull towards Archiving (storing up the past so that youy can access it to understand the world) and the pull towards Exploration (divising ways to looking at the world which respond to the latest things you have found out about it, or think you have) are NOT intrinsically in the same direction. I think the generation of teachers you're talking about — paradigmatic example, Charles Wuorinen? — is caught EXACTLY between these poles. And some of them respond to this fact with moralising and mystification, obviously. Cz it's a hard row to hoe.

This plus the vast pressure on funds as more and more people are hoping-planning-needing to pass through academia for a variety of reasons, good AND bad, has produced all kinds of difficult currents in Higher Ed. My underlying feeling is more of Everything for Everyone: absolutely not chuck out the apparent anomalies.

Xenakis was a qualified architect: he certainly studied higher applied mathematics, possibly engineering also. He is possibly not "the greeks" phil is referring to!!

as for no one listening to academic music, has this widely happened at all in the last century or so? even Cage - yes his name is widely recognized and invoked but often second-or-third-hand by people who don't actually listen to his music (haha me)

(arg! curse you mark and phil with yr goddamn quick expertise while i'm hunting and pecking and stating the obvious)

but I'd say Phil is OTM here...and very well put as well.

Muisc is entertainment, right? If that's not the case, then they ought to, like Cage, have some really new ideas.

First of all, this is a false binary -- there's a whole lot more to music than entertainment and novelty!

And second of all, I would argue that every composition is, at least potentially, a new idea. There is, in my view, no era, no "genre" of music in which new work could not be fruitful. Obviously, a world of Beethoven pastiches and pseudo-Mahler is of little appeal, but at the same time, the notion that tonal music -- or atonal music, or twelve-tone music, or just about any kind of music! -- is "done" seems, to me, neither interesting nor truthful.

It feels like you're superimposing a kind of teleology on music where it doesn't need to exist. I know the feeling well; for many years I had a severe compositional block because I let my impulse towards criticism get out of hand, and became obsessed with the idea that I had to say something new, that I couldn't retread the past, and so forth. Those kinds of thought-patterns just aren't conducive to writing music, and they're mired in the old Romantic ideal as the composer as the agent of revealed genius, pieces springing forth like Athena from Zeus' head. (This is also where the toxic "no technique = genius" equation comes from.)

Rather than dwell on notions like these, I find it much more useful to think of myself as being, in part, a kind of lens. My mentor describes composition as being inherently an act of historical engagement, one in which the vision we're trying to enact draws, both consciously and unconsciously, on our own musical heritage -- a heritage that grows richer the more we've engaged with the rest of the universe (musical, and otherwise too). It's a synthesis, in other words, so that the creator-genius model and the product-of-his/her-culture-and-biology-etc. model are both seen as incomplete without their respective other half.

(haha but you then also have to recognise that eg the 18th century's idea of eg the 14th century was abt exploration also, eg re-explaining their present in terms of what they just thought discovered about the world of the past, which is nevertheless the CAUSE of the present, even though you just "changed" it... it's like THARG'S TIME-TWISTERS!!)

we're got taught computer engineering (albini, not xenakis; ie how to maximise an apple g3 potential using academic and free/share-ware tools) -- that's the rub right there as far as i'm concerned -- computer programs using interfaces (GUIs if you like) to in some cases simplify, demystify or re-inforce an older _music_ _making_ _paradigm_ (or heuristic)

so protools perpetuates the 48 track sound on sound recording system of old, in some ways, while other programs present the same old additive/subtractive (not x)or fm synthesis or sampling or the latest but well documented tiny sample granular synthesis (Wishart et. al.)

yet jumping between these apps allows new links to be made between trad systems and the latest plugins, so the overall effect is hardly institutional, but one has to work at getting around the industry heuristics deeply entrenched within these working methods

getting back to the influence of the big 3,5,8 whomever, well they're omnipesent -- everyone everywhere including people in ilm who have nothing to do with the music industry except as consumer critics are well aware of the "paradigms" inherent in the developements of cage, varese, burg/berg or webern to boulez and babbitt, and i agree wuorinen represents a handy half-way house into many areas as do sesions, carter, birthwistle, and not just xenakis but throw in henry schaeffer, bayle malec pargeminini ferrari terrugi sheyder schwarz teruggi etc etc or larry austin (is it ?) morton subotnik, oliveros, or later ones like richard karpen, robert normandeau (bourgesy types) and then there's mills colleges of this world with braxton, bill dixon, milford graves -- i mean the list of influeners goes on and on and yet they're all doing their own stuff -- spread your boards

the big-time cage partch and xenakis helped those other people but it was always a two way street -- how many people take it to where cage got really, how many people can actually make the sounds partch's instruments made ? does xenakis loom larger as a recently deceased veteran of the wars making him somehow more influential than all those electro or acoutic people i mntioned above ?

i don't think so -- paradigm is a difficult all or nothing cult status way of lionizing, seperating, a pedant's way of teaching -- i'm not into taking issue with your logic, just this assumption that there are a few paradigm shifters and then the rest -- no, they all help each other out, and partch went out of his way to be anti-academic anyway -- he did't want to be on that sort of list

academics will roll out the more challenging composers over time, but it didn't begin with cage partch or xenakis -- they aren't giants amoung mortals any more than other composers, but music being popular rock music generally means "rock stars" will emerge -- if a professor said to me "how about some zenaki cage plus partch, that's a challenge isn't it ? why try to copy partch of all of them ? aren't they just symbols that will inspire you to do your own thing ? caught emulatng cage is too asy -- use your own inventions -- arent these big names just easily accesible