There have never been walls
There have never been walls
12 March 2008
COMPOSER JUDD GREENSTEIN ARGUES THAT NEW ‘CLASSICAL’ ARTISTS OPERATE IN WORLD IN WHICH TRADITIONAL MUSICAL BOUNDARIES NO LONGER EXIST
During my Masters study, many visiting composers would begin their colloquia talks by telling us how lucky we were: 'When I was your age, I couldn't write major and minor chords', and so on. That 'couldn't' stuck out as an object of distrust among me and my colleagues. You 'couldn't', we wondered, or you chose not to, for perhaps not the best reasons?
It is well known that previous generations set up their ideological positions in the 'for' and 'against' camps, then lobbed compositions at one another over these well-established, yet artificial walls. Walls in the arts are only walls of perception, erected by the cultural context in which one is situated. While those walls can have deleterious effects on one's career - should one choose to ignore them - they are not absolute.
My friends and I wondered, how can you break down something that was never really there?
In New York, where I was born and live, people still talk about the uptown/downtown divide, which apparently pitted the academics, the serialists and post-serialists, the spectralists, and their people (the 'uptowners') against the radical avant-garde, the performance artists, the minimalists and post-minimalists, and their crew (the 'downtowners').
I lived downtown and went to school uptown for 13 years and recall no checkpoints in between, even after I began writing music. When the supposed barriers between these scenes started breaking down, people wrote about this as a radical gesture. Again, my friends and I wondered, how can you break down something that was never really there?
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