from a response to a reader, re new york city

I like that you ‘get’ how I’m into disrupting the notion of specialized music for specialized people. I’ve gotten into passionate arguments about this (one is in the book), arguing with people who think that classical music, and modern-classical music especially, must require special training to hear it, let alone understand it, and that if someone doesn’t enjoy something, it’s automatically their own fault; it couldn’t possibly be that the music wasn’t engaging, or the performer. I call bullshit on this all the time, and think that so-called difficult music can be framed (not dumbed down or even explained) and just presented in a way that can engage people. So much of this is a performer’s job, by the way (at least in my opinion), and yet so many performers subscribe to this warm-fuzzy idea of the music “speaking for itself.” Well, music can’t speak for itself. Someone speaks for it, by default. Think of a sign-language interpreter for the hearing impaired. They’re translators! They don’t let the language “speak for itself”… Anyway, so many performers lose their audience before they even sit to play. So many composers are already cut off from the river of creativity and communication before they set a note to paper. It’s all about motivation, maybe. Why are we doing what we’re doing? To me, it should be about sharing, communicating, and creating intimacy through art. In performance, there’s no room for walls or pretense. It serves nobody. But this is happening all the time, even with so-called hip ensembles and performers. Everyone’s still jerking each other off and pretending they’re engaging (new and existing) audiences with audacious music. Maybe they are. A lot of the time I think they aren’t. I still think everyone is chasing “the cool” and playing for the rich. 

And how boring.

xoxo
Adam