One of the difficult things about writing the kind of thing that I write is that you find yourself complaining about things quite often, and especially if you're from a marginalised background - whether that's to do with your skin tone, your class, your immigration status, or anything else - complaining about the food when you're taught you should be grateful to have had a seat at the table in the first place is really quite frowned upon. I've been seriously composing since I became a student at the JRNCM at around the age of 14, and since then I have been extremely lucky to have had my music played by immensely talented people, some of which have been my closest friends. I would never downplay how much of a privilege that has been. That being said, complaining about the food is exactly what I'm going to do in this blogpost, because if we're going to start opening up these indisputably exclusive spaces, then having constructive conversations about exactly where and why we're failing is an absolutely vital step in doing so.
Decenter highly academic, hyper-intellectualised contemporary classical music
I knew I wanted to interview Anna when I came across this tweet of hers:
When I asked her why she describes her music in the way she does in that tweet, she replied that she wasn't always able to connect with what she calls 'over-intellectualised' styles of contemporary classical, even though it's this kind of music which is celebrated most in academic new music circles.
"Part of it is mainly an insecurity that’s possibly built up from how the education system [...] treats composing and treats new music, and the fact that a lot of new music is really very intellectualised - and in my opinion over intellectualised in some ways - to the point where the more hyper complex you can make your work, the more it’s held as the pinnacle of what you should hope to achieve."
I want to start by saying that there's nothing inherently wrong with this kind of music or the people that make it. I really enjoy a lot of it, and though I no longer write music like this myself, I can appreciate the art and the work that goes into it (check out this playlist if you're a new music newbie). The problem arises when it becomes synonymous with 'new music' itself, so that any other kind of music is seen as less imaginative, less thoughtful, or less crafted, and is devalued for those reasons. Anna and I have both found this to happen quite often in academic music circles. One of the first pieces I properly finished and had performed by anyone other than myself happened to be a pop ballad, and while the response to it from my peers was really positive, my tutor was, I think, less impressed. It became increasingly clear to me that if I wanted to be taken seriously as one of The Composers, I had to make music which was along the same highly intellectual, highly academic lines as that of the others. Though it was never explicitly said, there was always this sense that for some reason, pop music didn't fall along these lines.
So in an effort to elevate myself to the level of my more experienced peers, who I admired and looked up to, I started writing music I completely hated. I hated making it, I hated hearing it, I hated rehearsing and performing it, I hated talking about it to anyone other than my tutors and maybe the composers I was trying to impress. My scores began to look less like this:
And a little more like this:
Again, the problem isn't with this kind of music or this kind of score itself, but rather with the fact that I felt it necessary to spend my time making stuff I didn't connect to in order to gain access to the opportunities I wanted access to. I grew up listening to things like electro-pop and rap music - I knew the big names in those genres, I knew what I liked and didn't like, I knew how to use the conventions of those genres to express myself with composition - but this musical background was implicitly invalidated whenever I brought a pop tune to a lesson and was encouraged to go listen to some Ferneyhough. While a lack of knowledge about a style of music I was simply never interested in was perceived, in me, as a lack of knowledge about music as a whole, this was never the case for peers who couldn't name a single Kanye album between them (a travesty, I know). I do think Anna is right to connect this double standard to elitism - it's not, upon reflection, always to do with the complexity of the music, how philosophical its message is, or even really about how conventional or unconventional it sounds. Pop, rap, and any other genre of music can do and be any of those things. In my experience, and I'm guessing in Anna's, whether an artist is worth knowing or not is more about how many people already know them: if the 'regular' people have heard of the artist you're telling me about, your sense of superiority as a member of the Cool and Clever Composer Club™ is likely to take a bit of a hit, especially because this one tiny, rather obscure corner of contemporary music has come to represent all of music everywhere.
I think the landscape would benefit from a more diverse approach - we live in a time where music is incredibly varied, but where artists are, rather paradoxically, more connected and informed by each other than they've ever been. Decentralising whatever music happens to be glorified over the others at the moment would allow us to draw parallels we would never have otherwise discovered or even thought of, which can only be a good thing. I guess I'm suggesting that we start teaching Kanye alongside Ferneyhough. (Or better yet, scrap Ferneyhough altogether. Can you tell I'm not a fan?)
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