Why New Music? A Performer Speaks

Please give a warm welcome to Alphabet Soup’s first guest blogger, saxophonist Jack Kinsey. Please see below for his bio!

Hello everyone. First off, I would like to thank Sarah and Natalie for inviting me to write for their blog. I am a performer, and have gotten to see new music from a different angle than their backgrounds as composers generally allow, so hopefully I will be able to add some new perspectives on new music, what it is, how it’s generated, etc.

For starters, I am going to ask a very simple question with a very complex answer: Why new music? Performers get asked this a lot (especially by their families. A few weeks ago my grandmother asked me when I was going to start playing music people like. Sorry Gram, don’t hold your breath on that one).

When you’re a young musician, it’s very common to hear that musicians turn emotions into music and they communicate without words in the pursuit of their art. This is not too far off base, as a fully realized performance of a well-constructed piece by a trained and developed professional can elicit emotional responses from audience members (however, it is important to keep in mind that there is a craft and science to music, both in terms of the generation of a musical work and the interpretation of the symbols of musical notation in a score).

The key point of this digression is that musicians are supposed to communicate. On a small scale, performers have to communicate with their fellow performers, they have to understand the musical symbols on the page, they have to have some level of communication with the composer (even if the composer is long dead, the communication comes from understanding performance practice and historical information). On a meta-scale, musicians have to communicate with their audience (communicating abstract ideas to a large crowd of people you have never met can be insanely difficult). The whole point of being an artist in any medium is about having something to say.

That being said, why would I want to keep saying things that have been said for hundreds of years? Where is the dialogue in that? Where is the communication? The idea of having something to say presumes that you are saying it in a timely manner. Because of this, art (music) tends to mimic and replicate certain characteristics found in the time in which it was written. My former band director used to say, “Music only exists in time.” He is absolutely correct. Besides the fact that sound does not exist in a fixed medium, the time period in which a piece is written can tell you a lot about the piece (and vice versa). Here are some ways that time affects music:

1.  Large Scale Design Elements (form, instrumentation, structure): Certain design elements go in and out of style over the course of time due to changes in society, culture, technology, etc. You won't find Mozart compositions based on the I-Ching, and Bach certainly never composed in Sonata Rondo Form. (Here's another link that explains the specifics of the form.)
2. Musical Lexicon: By this I mean the smaller scale elements used to fill out the musical form, or the “content” of a piece. This includes anything from arrangement of rhythm to pitch class selection to dynamics. For example: Back in the 18th and early 19th century, composers wrote mostly tonal music (music using harmonies largely based on major and minor scales), however as time progressed composers started to use the chromatic scale and even synthetic scales (scales made up of contrived sets of pitches, such as the octatonic or whole tone scales) as a basis for musical composition. In the mid-20th century, John Cage provided a musical example of composition that didn’t involve pitch construction at all (he believed that every sound in the world is a work of art).
3. Instrument Design: As time has moved forward, the design of musical instruments has improved drastically and things that were not possible in 1750 are quite commonplace today. For example, the placement of tone holes has gotten more accurate (making proper intonation easier), better greases and metals have been used for key construction (making keywork much lighter, faster, and tighter), and key placement has become much more ergonomic (making technical passages much more comfortable and easier to play). Thank you, Industrial Revolution!
4. Performer Virtuosity: The abilities of performers have increased in a way similar to the design of instruments.
5. The Internet: As more and more information becomes accessible at the click of a button and social networking is adopted, the conversation between composers, performers, and audiences becomes much closer and much faster. People are able to share ideas much more rapidly and in greater detail more easily. This flow of information will carry new ideas around the world faster, allowing for greater implementation on a grand scale. 

People today (especially artists) have more to say than ever before, and they can say it faster, louder, and with more accessibility. Given all of these reasons, I will now ask you to make a choice between two options:

1. Johann Sebastian Bach died in 1750. I want you to play his first Cello Suite in G in appropriate musical style, saying nothing original and doing the piece exactly as he wanted it. There are hundreds of recordings of the piece, and yours will probably get lost in obscurity somewhere between a grain of rice and some moldy cheese.
   
2. Your neighbor is a composer. Go knock on their door, invite them over for dinner, and embark on the adventure of generating a new piece of music relevant to your generation. Then share it with the world, which is equipped to access your work easily. 

Which would YOU choose?

Posted by Jack Kinsey

Jack Kinsey plays new music, drinks tea, and plays with his dog. He has a Master's degree in Saxophone Performance from the University of Florida, where he won things and did stuff. He is a member of the Vanguard Saxophone Quartet and teaches saxophone in the Metro Detroit area.