“Today everything is available at all times. All you have to do is have a subscription to Spotify…Nothing is special anymore. So one has to actually make some kind of pact with oneself to get back to that very very personal relationship with one work, or with just a group of very valuable pieces. Because otherwise we’re just so flooded with information that we end up with very short concentration spans and we end up with a problem of, What do we really value?”
“Sometime in the early part of the 20th century a lot of very brilliant composers starting writing music that was essentially inaccessible to average listeners–whether it was Schoenberg, or Varese […] Later on composers got interested in fracturing rhythms to the point where you had a composer like John Cage who essentially devoted his life to atomizing, deconstructing all of the aspects of the musical language, both acoustically and culturally. That ran its course. The bad part about it was that it made audiences very wary of anything that was new. […]
At the same time that was happening, there was this fantastic explosion of wonderful music in the pop realm. And I had this crisis in my life where I said to myself: Why should I surrender the influence that great music can have to a pop artist, and have to go and write serial or 12-tone music because that’s what’s required of a contemporary composer? I basically walked away from that.”
brettworks 
Leave a comment