We don't often bring guest composers to speak at Bard, and sometimes we feel guilty about that, and make an effort. So a few weeks ago we brought in a fairly well-known composer of my own generation, who told the students that "the problem with minimalism is that it's self-indulgent to make attractive music just because people like it." I spent a long time trying to parse that - that it's self-indulgent to make music that people like. And today a composer slightly older than myself came to Bard - where we house the John Cage Trust, offer a course on Cage, and have a faculty member (me) who wrote a book about Cage and the introduction to the new version of Silence - and told the student composers that Cage was a "dangerous" composer who tried to destroy what great composers had been doing ever since Monteverdi. (For the record, he also told them Philip Glass wasn't any good and that Shostakovich's music "wouldn't last.") And suddenly I feel pretty good that we don't bring guest composers to Bard. I may even initiate a policy that composers are not allowed on campus.

UPDATE: I was discussing the second composer with a colleague, and he said, "It's not like anyone's forcing him to listen to Cage's music." But then we conceded that 4'33" seems to be playing almost perpetually, and that maybe he was just sick of hearing it.

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COMMENTS:

Lisa Chen says: It's childish and cowardly not to give the composer's name, in addition to making your post unintelligible. How about it?
KG replies: It would not be fair for composers to think, if they make an appearance at Bard, that I will write about them and criticize them by name afterwards.

McLaren says: It's even more self-indulgent to make ugly music just because people hate it.
Call it "inverted kitsch" -- the silly prejudice that anything most people don't like and don't understand must be wonderful and profound.
The motto of self-deluded Jonestown-style cult gurus for thousands of years.

Galen H. Brown says: I think the argument against minimalism was meant to be a specific case of an argument that looks something like this:
Seeking popularity for its own sake is a self-indulgent act, and so if your primary objective in composing is to write the music that will maximize your chances at popularity you're likely to compromise your ability to make a Meaningful Contribution to Musical Progress.
I disagree with some key premises of that argument, but at least it's sort of coherent. It's also genre-neutral, if you allow for different kinds of popularity. Steve Reich famously tried to write serialism in college because serialism was the coin of the realm in academia in those days. He finally pursued his real interests when Berio suggested 'If you want to write tonal music, why don't you write tonal music?'
But the blanket application of that principle to minimalism reveals a particularly ugly case of genre bigotry. Suppose I said "The problem with atonality is that it's self-indulgent to make ugly music just because that's what faculty search committees like." That's simply not what happens. Some people write post-serialist atonality because that's what they love, and some of those people get academic jobs. Some people write minimalism because that's what they love, and some of those people get programmed at Bang On A Can. Some people write country ballads because that's what they love, and some of them get record deals. It's too hard to make it in any branch of the music business for it to be worth trying if you're not making the kind of music you want to make. And even if there are people out there trying to work in a genre they don't like, as a bid for popularity, how good can they be at it?
KG replies: Very well said. I think there's also an attitude layer among perhaps a large majority of composers along the lines of, "If you write music that can be understood by the lay public, you're not a serious member of the confraternity of composers and we will not treat you as such."

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