It turns out that I can’t leave the idea of limits alone for very long. The world is conspiring to put it squarely in the center of my attention. A podcast from Poetry Magazine played a bit of Charles Bernstein reciting F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto. They talked a bit about the influence of futurism on several composers whom I enjoy greatly. One of them was Igor Stravinsky (namesake of my long defunct and badly mistreated iguana, may he rest in peace). I have read so much about his life and work over the years that when his name comes up my modest body of knowledge bubbles and I get excited. Alone in the car isn’t a great place for a conversation so the thoughts traveled inward. And that’s where I get back to limits.
Stravinsky believed that music was not a language in the sense that it cannot communicate fully on its own. In other words, meaning can be attached to music but the meaning is not present in the music itself. A simplistic reading of his work would lead one to believe that music exists for its own sake and nothing more. This eschews the romantic notion of the composer as a soul in the darkness, desperate for contact. Now no one who has been to a U2 concert will believe that music exists solely for itself, but I have seen King Crimson shows that support the thesis. As a young composer, I took the simplified version of Stravinsky’s words and followed this line of reasoning for, well, almost two decades. But this morning, something turned.
The assumption that music is not a language and cannot communicate both imposes and removes limitations. If we say that I can’t communicate using music, I don’t have to try. This also erects a wall. What if I really want to communicate? What if I see the simplest dances for the lute as communicating a cultural ritual and assume that this is good enough to pass for communication? What if I compose a piece with the intention of making someone cry? It looks silly in retrospect, but I never thought about it. And I never thought about it because by the time I started composing, all of the rules had already been broken or nullified.
I’ve never been one to have a school. That is to say, I’m not into pigeon holes or styles or -isms. I have always said that I want to make cool noises. Implicit in that statement is the assumption of sound for the sake of sound. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, but it’s interesting to note how willingly I took on so many limitations all the while thinking that I was freeing myself.
It should be noted that limitations or constraints are not bad or good, but they are necessary to make any kind of art. It is easy to argue that an artist is more fully defined by the boundaries he sets up than those he knocks down. Slowly it is dawning on me that the generation of artists to which I belong (the post-20th century whatever we are) will have to define ourselves by the mindful development of boundaries. What walls will we put up so that we may push off from them? How will we fence ourselves in? Criticism seems to be if not dead then severely wounded and down for the count. In a world of twitter and constant polling of opinion via news outlets that never sleep, there is no time to build a body of work in a given style because nothing has a change to establish iteself and grow. Anything and everything goes. But by saying we can do anything we’re also saying that we will probably do nothing. Make no mark. Push nothing forward. Stagnate.
That’s a lot more depressing and underdeveloped than I had thought it would be. But it won’t leave me alone so I’ll keep hacking at it.
