Composers

Ever since my earliest attempts at composing, I’ve had a growing suspicion that this activity, which essentially involves constructing patterns of sound, is far more complicated and intriguing than I initially understood.

As a conductor and musical performer in Atlanta, I realize the importance of understanding how musical thought becomes physically expressed, how it’s perceived by listeners, how it acquires cultural value. And, in order to answer these ontological questions about music (thus helping me develop as a composer), I realized the necessity of analyzing both sound and the contexts in which it is produced in modern society.

This, in turn, quickly led to questions of philosophical aesthetics, representations of culture and hybridity, mimesis, instrumentality, the body, temporality, cognition, commodification, and even, ultimately, theology.

The act of music composition in highly technological and culturally diverse societies requires a new literacy of sonic and social phenomena. For me, the process is essentially a humanistic endeavor. Indeed, this inquiry-driven role for Western composers dates back to the mid-1800s.

Before that time, musical compositions in the West were often celebratory: to praise God, to congratulate the city council or court patrons, to recognize important liturgical events. That purpose changed slightly for the 19th century composer, whose aim also involved evoking a wide array of emotional and psychological states. By the 20th century, the purpose of composers became to think—to provide a philosophical basis of thought and human action, with vague analogues in sound.

Richard Wagner is perhaps the earliest example of this emerging genre of modern composer-intellectual. He commented on topics as diverse as the origins of classical Greek drama in folk art, early Christian asceticism, alliteration in German verse, and dreaming in the philosophy of Schopenhauer. Wagner became an intellectual at large, confrontational and often erudite, whose public persona was much larger than that of a musician focused on local performance conditions.

As the century wore on, composer-intellectuals took a much stronger interest in politics and social criticism. These individuals usually were not directly involved in political action but rather attempted to effect change through illustrating technical possibilities in their work. The 20th century, modernist composer devised theories and structures that themselves become forms of action, as well as forms of art. As music became self-conscious—intricate, cerebral—the composer became engaged with a range of intellectual activity; musical compositions became models for problem-solving, as if music itself were a type of thinking.

Many such composers emphasized the social and cultural aspects of musical practice. Listening to music for its own sake—disinterested contemplation in a quiet concert hall, for example—became only one of the uses for music. This practice eventually led to the present, in which an acute understanding of how our own physical, neurological and cultural makeup shape musical practice. Today, music plays an important role in how we come to terms with the world, in negotiating the realities of our environment and relationships, and in forming cultural and personal identities.