Guarding the Flame
Benedict Schlepper-Connolly
Anyone with a laptop can now release a record and call themselves a musician. Where does that leave professional composers?
John Cage, professional composer. Photos William Gedney (c) William Gedney Photographs, Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library.
Arnold schoenberg once asked his student, the young John Cage, if he was prepared to dedicate his life to composition. This was the 1930s and Cage agreed, wholeheartedly. But one wonders had the same question been asked of him today, what his reaction would have been. The difference between then and now is that the profession of composer is no longer such that one might readily devote one’s life to it.
I’m not talking about money – that is a seperate issue entirely. I’m talking about what it is in which one is supposed to have faith when dedicating one’s life to the profession. The profession of composer has become a vague, insecure, volatile thing – the job description has become clouded and the qualifications seemingly diluted.
My grandfather trained as a pattern maker, the specific profession that entailed forming a casting mould from wood. His craft entailed a number of distinct and skilled woodworking techniques. It was a singular task and his craft was well defined. His training promoted careful and thoughtful work, with the emphasis on quality rather than speed – hours could be spent examining the grain of wood, making flush a dove-tail joint or applying the sixth coat of lacquer.
My father, a bookseller, made his own shelves. But working only a generation after his father, his work was informed by the new exigencies of business. Speed and utility were the driving forces and, where the pattern maker had the luxury of time, the bookseller had to do what he could in order to be able to open the next day. As a result, his creations were rougher affairs, thrown together in record time from whatever wood came cheapest and with whatever techniques worked fastest. It’s a fable for the twentieth century: the breakdown of specialisation into generalisation; professionals replaced by dilletantes; craft replaced by DIY.
For sure, this democratisation of specialist activity was inevitable with the technological and industrial developments that the twentieth century was to bring. No profession has evaded the development of DIY culture: builders now often do the work of an architect; word processing software has largely eliminated the ubiquity of studied typography; consumer cameras (even before the digital revolution) automated functions previously operated by a professional; and just as anyone with a cordless drill and some common sense can construct a shelf in little time that will do the job, anyone with a laptop can now release a record and call themselves a musician. It’s not hard to see why the professional composer, who has dedicated a lifetime to music, might be disillusioned with the profession.
Now, I have to tread carefully: I don’t want to suggest that universal access to music is a corrupt aspiration. The benefits of amateur music-making don’t need to be expanded on here, but they are many. It’s important, however, to make a distiction between amateur and professional work. Otherwise the former is in danger of superceding the latter. Far from serving just to protect the livelihoods and egos of members of the profession, this distinction serves the music itself. Architecture is, in fact, an important element of house-building; typographers can produce text more legibly than an untrained person armed with just software; the trained photographer will consistently take better photographs. In other words, without professionalism – dedicated specialism, quality suffers.
Quality has become something of a dirty word lately. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, goes the maxim. But what this attitude overlooks, is that, as humans, we all have at least one eye, and so there are certain physiological features which would suggest that there is a common ground to our aesthetic expectations. This is reinforced then, to varying degrees, by shared experiences, which we can call culture. Though the subtleties of human difference are too pervading to allow for aesthetic absolutes with this logic, there is enough common ground for us to speak meaningfully about quality within a band of tolerance. Few people would suggest that the bookseller’s shelves were better made than the craftsman’s.
Cage’s student, James Tenney, a consumate craftsman, was quoted in this journal as saying that the key to musicial genius is ‘feeling more deeply’. Though he wasn’t referring to himself, Tenney was the model of craft and ‘feeling’ combined. Craft is the key to professionalism: feeling is something inherent that anyone could have; craft is something learnt and developed over time by a commited apprentice. (The bookshop shelves, by the way, made up in feeling what they lacked in craft – when the bookshop finally closed, customers flocked to try and buy them as souvenirs.)
But what is this thing called ‘craft’, and how do we find it? With the increasing multiplicity of compositional approaches – especially among professionals – it would seem futile, damaging even, to attempt to define it in concrete terms. Our traditional conception of craft looks only at its manifestation as a set of specific techniques, rather than its more general principles. Once upon a time we could – in Western culture, at least – speak fluently about the elements of craft because there was a relatively common consensus about its constituents. For example, for a long period in Western music, most professionals would have avoided movement in parallel octaves. But when we lack a common language as we do now, we need a radical way of looking at the craft of composition.
Firstly, we can understand craft through an understanding of function. As a child, my school textbook taught that there were two kinds of music: functional music, which was for dancing, and non-functional music, which was not. Though this was an extreme simplification, the categorisation is telling about our attitude to music as something for either very specific utilitarian use or as something to hover in the aether. In truth, all music is in some way functional. The functions of music may be subtle and various, faint and in constant flux, but they are always present, even when the intention is specifically to avoid function. Generally, music might move quickly in order to feel energetic; or, more specifically, a musical phrase may stop abruptly in order to elicit surprise.
When we consider music through a functional lens, we see every technique as a response to a functional need. Craft in action, then, becomes a web of problems and solutions. Only through a functional understanding can we assess which technique is appropriate to the situation.
Craft also involves tradition. More than a set of techniques in isolation, craft is a set of techniques in continuity – a tool box handed down through generations. Continuity of craft exists on many concurrent levels: within the work of one composer or across centuries of composition. A sense of tradition enables us to position one craft within the context of another. The tradition will necessaily change to adapt to the music’s changing functional criteria, and in this sense craft and function may follow two largely parallel lines.
Craft in this regard is a form of ancestor worship, a homage to one’s heritage. To escape craft is to deny continuity, and to do so is to orphan oneself. ‘Be careful of the mark you make,’ said the improvising pianist Paul G. Smyth when I interviewed him in these pages last year. It’s a principle to live by.
Smyth, if I may revisit his playing here, as if in annual celebration, simultaneously continues elements of his ancestors’ craft as well as continually, but gradually, expanding his own – a quintessential traditional musician. As an improviser, he’s an important example of how craft can flourish through intuition as well as through rational thought. Even the composer with pencil and paper executes the majority of his craft with intuitive thought, using quantities of techniques automatically.
Craft is then technique applied to function in continuity. This would seem to suggest, however, a fairly limited proscription for music: ‘thou shalt not diverge from tradition, except in baby steps; thou shalt conform to the common language.’ The reality, however, is quite different.
Let’s go back to John Cage. For a composer whose music does not significantly betray any significant recurring aural characteristics, and who seemed to so obviously break radically with the music of the past, his music is all about continuity. For Cage, this continuity manifested itself beneath the surface and was carefully selective and defined. We see continuity of technique – ways to structure music, and ways to generate material, for example, and we also see continuity of function. At various stages, Cage made explicit the intended function of his music, whether it was ‘to sober and quiet the mind’ or ‘to imitate nature in its manner of operation’. Historically, Cage may have severed the German line inherited from Schoenberg (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms), but he chose his own foster parents, not all of whom were musicians, but just as influential on the continuities of his music (Satie, Thoreau, Meister Eckhart). Cage’s craft was a perfect correspondence of function and tradition, despite appearances.
Find function, find continuity, and you can find craft. It could be that simple, but for the scarcity of our only resource: time. The problem with craft is that it takes a lifetime to receive, develop and transmit, and this is why we need to entrust its guardianship to professionals, specialists who have dedicated their lives to its care.
We all make do with daily compromises, dabbling in foreign crafts because we have no other resources available – after all, the shelves needed building or the bookshop wouldn’t open. But at least in our own profession, we can aspire to avoid such compromises. Those who would call themselves professional composers, therefore, need to understand that the minimum qualification is to accept the seriousness of the task and dedicate themselves wholly to finding their place in that continuity. They must safeguard the passage, if fleetingly, of something much larger than themselves. The alternative, simply put, is an amnesiac musical culture led by amateurs producing works of inferior quality.
