Essay: In Support of "Idea vs. Execution", by Lane Harder

When Chopin sent his unique sixth Nocturne (with no formal resemblance to any of the other seventeen) off to be published, the fair copy had a single inscription written in the composer’s hand after the final double bar (a technique Debussy would later make famous): “after a performance of Hamlet”. Upon receipt, the publisher wrote a somewhat embarrassed letter back to the composer asking if he really wanted this printed in the score. Chopin’s hasty response: “No! Let them figure it out for themselves!”

As a composer of (and devout believer in) Absolute Music myself, I admit to wincing at extended explanations of a composer’s process as evidence for the importance of a piece or as a qualification of a work’s success. When one considers the infinitely elegant and variable substance of what our musical tradition has given us to craft – i.e. the endless palette of color produced by the ever-shifting tendencies of pitch, the limitless possibilities of notated metrics, and the subtle and oft-ignored symbiosis of these two concepts (counterpoint and metricity), one has to wonder why that wasn’t material enough? (I haven’t even mentioned Harmony.) Since the combinatory effects of the Western musical tradition, both moment to moment and over the course of a large scale form, are infinite, why do so many ignore the exploration of these topics (which are like grammar to poetry) in favor of abstract and often non-musical ideas? 

We live in a world inundated by music. Not only do we have a thousand extra-Classical genres to either heed or (try to) ignore, but we struggle always with the immense weight of the Classical Canon, from which even the most dedicated student can only hope to know a small fraction. Hence, there is a mastery of the literature and fundamentals (that make up this literature) required in this age that exponentially surpasses the educational requirements of the composers of any previous age. To write something truly new, one must know what has come before, or risk an imitation which (like Borges’ Pierre Menard) is destined to live in the shadow of an earlier master.

Faced with this most daunting of tasks - the assimilation of not only thousands of works spanning centuries of history and countless hours of music, but the mastery of the crafts (syntax) of music itself (which exhibit a trait much like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal in physics; the space and time of any musical element is impossible to measure simultaneously) – composers in this day and age often choose an easy way out. Some, unable, unwilling, or uninterested in putting in the time required for this (admittedly life-long) study find other, non-musical, ideas that they “employ” to create something “new”. Predictably, the end result of all this extra-musical invention (without the proper tools and experience for its execution) is typically a palpable sameness and a uniformity of both sound and affect. 

Every composer wants to create something new, something that no one else has done before.  Yet, after attending countless concerts of new music, the audience is left feeling that the new music just heard sounds like all the other new music one has heard before. Ask yourself honestly, when is the last time you heard a new work that was truly new?  Why does the large majority of new music sound so tediously similar (though program notes elucidate a thousand different “methods” and “inferences” to “generate” the piece)?

New music of quality is music that can stand next to older music of quality (i.e. music of the Canon) without fear, without self-conscience parody, or without a jagged rift – a chasm – which has to be crossed to supply the slightest semblance of context. After all, music, by its very nature, provides ex post facto an infinite supply of contextualization unique to each individual participant, performer and audience member alike.   By tearing this self-contextualization away in explaining to the weary, yet still optimistic, concert goer, the intellectual processes and non-musical devices ("idea") employed in the work, a composer places even more distance between his/her work (which he/she wants desperately to be accepted into the lofty realms of Bach and Stravinsky) and the very music it is supposed to follow.

Benjamin C.S. Boyle, 6/14/11 Philadelphia