A couple of years back I purchased the score for Finnissy’s piano collection English Country-Tunes, a beautiful score and equally arresting music. The first time I listened to it it deeply terrified me. Following that, and following along with the New Complexity composers, I purchased Ferneyhough’s Lemma-Icon-Epigram. Another stunning piano work. (And one, equally, I’d never be able to play.) Since then I’ve purchase a couple of other beautiful modern scores.
I’ve just started the 5th movement, Fire, in which our heroes are trapped in a conflagration in the field of local villagers. (In my research notes, I have it covering pages 94-115 of the 2020 Penguin/Vintage edition I use as reference.) At this point I am struggling with the idea of program music in contrast with soundtracks. A few months back I had an abbreviated, stumbling Twitter conversation with an individual Much Better Informed but we ended up having the same opinions of soundtracks-as-pure-music. That is: a low one. In these days of a renaissance of quality composers, it’s admittedly a bit unpopular to get all academically scoffy about music written for movies.
One lesson I learned back in 2019 when I was experimenting with orchestral writing was that–one personal revelation that is–I love writing for percussion. From college-and-after-days I’d always admired the drummer and their skill of body-wise coordination rather than hand coordination; admired it likely because it was simply of equal competency to a pianist yet foreign. And that sounds really arrogant, but I think it’s just more naivety of the percussionists’ milieu. No offense, but you’re awesome.
I finished the book by Barry England, Figures in a Landscape, maybe a year ago and it tore me apart.
It, and it’s ideas, came back to me recently for no particular reason, but the story immediately felt like a primal source of expression for something current in me. As inspiration, you look for the internal emotions–those that are the wordless–that you hope to express to others so that They Can See the Importance of those subjective ideations. More to the point: I look for those aspects of what’s in me to be important out of me… but I think it’s uncontroversial that this concept is universal w/r/t artists in general.
That’s a sloppy way of pointing out that: you say what you want to, and have to, say, and hope others enjoy it.
