In his excellent blog, Night after Night, Time Out New York's classical music writer Steve Smith writes of a Steven Paulus premiere:
"The senior figure on tonight's concert at the tender age of 56, Paulus is one of America's most celebrated, frequently commissioned composers. His capacity for skillful orchestration is undeniable, but Paulus's music has always struck me as defiantly atavistic...Opening with a Hollywood flourish, Paulus's score referenced Bernstein's urban sensuality, Copland's "lonely city" rumination, Prokofiev's martial drive, the bustle of Stravinsky's Petrouchka and the wistful nostalgia of Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915. Everywhere, the piece provided well-worn musical cues to elicit appropriate emotional responses... Eighty years ago, this would have been innovative; tonight, it just felt derivative, even manipulative. Ultimately, Erotic Spirits was the orchestral equivalent of Zalman King's cable-television fare: a softcore fantasy with a stunning leading lady in suggestive settings -- only the heat is simulated, and so are the climaxes."
Now, I don't know this new work of Paulus'---it's quite possible I'd disagree with Smith if I heard it--- but I have played other chamber works of his, and I do understand what Smith is talking about. My reason for posting this is that Smith could just as easily have been writing about any one of a score of prominent American composers active today. Note that he doesn't take Paulus to task for using some of the specific language of composers of the past; it's the use of that language and those devices in the service of an unoriginal, hackneyed musical narrative that bugs Smith, and bugs me too in a lot of new music.
This is a kind of contemporary music that classical musicians who don't like contemporary music enjoy playing. As I said in this New Music Box interview, "they want to draw on the same emotional 'cues' with which they are familiar—they want to be able to make the same contorted facial expressions they make while playing Brahms." Another way of putting it is to say that while they may not be familiar with every word of the text, nevertheless they know the story. And that's comforting to them and comforting to the audience. So the commissions and performances pile up.
Personally, I'm more drawn to the kind of music that my friend the Canadian composer Martin Arnold calls "What the F...k?" music. I have other composer friends who say to me "I just feel like using tonality, what's wrong with that?" Nothing. Use whatever material you want to use. It's how you traverse the span of time that matters in music, how you get from point A to B, or maybe you want to go from B to A instead, or you don't go anywhere at all, least not in any dimension with which we are familiar. Make me say, "What the f...k?" Make me think, "I don't know this story." Take me to a place I don't know, someplace I've never been.
