A few weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to spend about a week as a visiting scholar at Williams College in Williamstown, MA. It was a delightful opportunity to share my work and ideas with some very engaged students and some wonderful colleagues.
Specifically, Jennifer Bloxam asked me to prepare a statement about the relationship between 'Early Music' and 'Contemporary Music' through the lens of my music. Likely motivated by a desire to make up for my (shall we say) uneven performance in her courses when I was an undergraduate, I put together a rather more substantial collection of thoughts on the matter than I had anticipated doing. Many of the thematics resonate with the conversation we're having here at Bigmouths, and so I'll be posting the essay here, though without the more detailed discussion of my own work.
As you'll see, the challenge will be how to make those arguments distinct and coherent; there is a complex intermingling of these ideas, and my current plan is to break this rather dense and far reaching preview into three or four essays; one on adoption and my notion of 'composership,' one on the notion of the Classical in concert music and Gadamerian hermeneutics, one detailed one on the relationship of my work to the so called Early Music, and one on the dialogue of music technology and haecceity in the quotidian, a question implicit but not directly manifest in the essay that follows.
This essay is about composers and history, about how the past is ineluctably linked to the instantiation of the future, an instantiation we generally call the present. Composership, modern or ancient, is a bridge between Early Music and what we perhaps should be calling "Late Music." Our understanding of the foundations of that bridge clarifies what is essential to composership. If we are to capture the intersection of memory and imagination, the dual role of heritage as generative gift and constraining obligation must be sorted, through a consideration of the adoptive character of compositional practice and the continual use and utilization of pre-existing techniques and stances. These composerly stances vary from the Medieval to the Renaissance to the Modern, but always manifest a process of adoption.
The historical breadth of this approach will provide us with certain challenges to our terminology, especially the inherited frameworks of periodization: Classical, Romantic, Baroque;— the chronological associations of these categories can make them seem natural and logically self-evident, but they are created constructs which demonstrate the ideologies of the milieu of their formulation more than they demonstrate the essential character of a particular span of calendrical time. These ideologies are particularly spidery and deeply embedded in the discourse surrounding the figure of the composer. The temporal distance between so-called "Early Music" and so-called "New Music" make comparisons between these practices particularly difficult but also particularly fruitful.
In this essay I will describe those two practices as Early Modern and Late Modern, in an effort to bring to the surface the commonalities and foundational modernity of those practices. I will examine Early Modern notions of authorship and draw connections to Late Modern composership. I will look at how compositional practices are adopted, used and utilized by composers from many periods, and will contextualize these adoptive strategies within the philosophical framework of 'technics.' I will consider the special and problematic role of Classical music (and classicism in general) has for Modern notion of composition (both Early and Late). I will also begin a catalogue of historical stances taken by recent composers, demonstrating how they reflect this common practice of adoption.
In this process, we will see how 'Early Music' can serve as a cipher to understand the 'classical' in music, how composition is inescapably involved a process of technical adoption, and how the very notion of the autonomous composer is an historical construct. In the end, I will argue that memory IS imagination, both technically and aesthetically;– that past traditions are not only present, but are continually re-created into a new which is already old.
~DB
(This essay continues HERE.)