The Fredösphere

Der Drübermensch is starting to pay attention.  As I drove him home from the Good Friday service at our church, he asked, "if I lived when Jesus was alive, should I have stole those thirty pieces of silver?"  I asked a few questions to uncover the idea behind the question:  would such an act have been justified if it would have prevented Jesus' crucifixion?  The boy has been stuck in a Law mentality -- wanting to categorize everyone as either a Bad Person or a Good Person -- and up until now, his mind has been impervious to Gospel, that fundamentally we are all Bad Persons until God forgives us.  I hope this year he will begin to understand why "we call this Friday Good."

Don't miss these Easter wishes from Charles T. Downey of Ionarts -- but save them for later if you were so foolish as to choose ancestors who came from some place east of the Danube.

[Update:  a glance at a map indicates the Danube River is a particularly poor indicator of the division between East and West, particularly since it mainly flows east and empties into the Black Sea, not the Adriatic as I assumed.  I thought of it because I remembered it to be one of the boundaries of the Roman Empire.  I'm not sure where the Catholic-Orthodox division lies, but I expect it runs north and south and is called the Masoni-Dixonopoulos Line.]

Kyle Gann has an edgy description of the limits imposed on those who write music for existing, high-profile ensembles.  His post makes me feel a bit better about my lack of experience with -- and interest in -- orchestral-scale instrumental compositions.  Quoth he:

Of course you can express some individuality within these molds - but ultimately, the medium is the message, and unless you have a strong talent for subliminal subversion, your orchestra music, or string quartet music, is still going to sound “classical,” with a European tinge. What’s more, when you write for orchestra, you are going to hand over your music to a powerful organization that cares little about your needs or artistic vision, and you are going to give up considerable control over your own art.

It never ceases to amaze me how many young composers follow this path anyway, for it’s not an easy one to follow. But there are some young composers who look up the road and can’t bring themselves to take the first steps, who imagine their own wild, proliferating music and blanche at the thought of seeing it pruned with institutional shears. Like novelists and sculptors, they want to make art from their own personal experiences, from materials in their environment, and they want control over the results. They become Downtowners. For, quite simply, Downtown music is that which cannot be accommodated by the musical ensembles and organizations that are created and maintained to play 19th-century European music.

The uptown path is hard to follow, but isn't the downtown path hard too?  Doesn't it require an enormous amount of non- or extra-musical skills -- like self-promotion and leadership and, and ... oh, let's call it visionaryism.  Building an audience from scratch is a bear.  I'm not even a downtowner, I'm an out-of-towner, but for those for whom an orchestral composition is an attainable goal, I can understand the temptation.