Why New Classical Music?

One of the strongest motivations for me to compose new classical music is the belief that a musical work reveals something unique about a composer’s life, times, and place. When I write a piece of music, I believe that I am discovering and representing something about what it means to be alive in this place and in this time. I relate this perspective to the novelist Walker Percy’s description of what writing fiction meant to him:

For, if I believe anything, it is that the primary business of literature and art is

cognitive, a kind of finding out and knowing and telling, both in good times and

bad, a celebration of the way things are when they are right, and a diagnostic

enterprise when they are wrong. (p. 207)

Looking at musical works in this way, Beethoven provides us with a vivid example. At first, he dedicated his Eroica Symphony to Napoleon, being inspired by what he thought would be a leader who would realize the ideals that the French Revolution had set out to achieve. Once Napoleon declared himself emperor, however, Beethoven cancelled this dedication of the Eroica Symphony. Nevertheless, the ideal of a heroic mythical figure continued to be an important impetus for Beethoven’s compositional output. Twenty years later, while creating a musical setting of Friedrich Schiller’s poem “An die Freude” (Ode to Joy) for the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony, Beethoven’s sense of the heroic had evolved:

In effect he was rejecting the idea of the violent overthrow of regimes, seemed to

regard the French Revolution as a failure, and had shifted his gaze towards a

Utopian future. (Lockwood, p. 200)

Musicologists like Lewis Lockwood would suggest additional qualities of Beethoven’s music as contributing to his lasting impact as a composer. For example, his “command of form and expression” (p. 132) and his ability to draw from “deep within himself, creating music that arouses the most basic emotions with an intensity unparalleled in symphonic music before his time.” (p. 99) My point here, however, is to consider how Beethoven’s music may have helped people of his own time to make sense of the social and political forces affecting them.

When I consider what contemporary social or political issues might influence me as I engage in the creative process of composing new music, I am drawn to consider the prevalence of online virtual reality and social media. More people are interacting only through technology, rather than face to face. The risk of dehumanization posed by overuse and over-dependence on technology can perhaps explain the tendency of much contemporary classical music toward minimalist forms.

If one of the primary challenges that people are struggling with today is appreciating and engaging with one another in person, then perhaps we need to appreciate the simplest types of human interaction and how they can be made meaningful. For example, it is not the complexity of the formal elements of a piece of music that touch the human soul, but the depth of connection that is established between the composer and performer, and the performer and listener. As the pianist Glenn Gould noted:

The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but

is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.

(Interview for Musical America, 1962)

Lockwood, L. Beethoven's symphonies: an artistic vision. WW Norton & Company, 2015.

Percy, W. Diagnosing the modern malaise. In Signposts in a strange land (pp. 204-221). New York, NY: Picador, 1991.