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I do not belong to your organization. I know nothing about it.
I'm not even interested in it - and yet, a request has been made
for me to give what purports to be a keynote speech .
Before I go on, let me warn you that I talk dirty , and
that I will say things you will neither enjoy nor agree with.
You shouldn't feel threatened, though, because I am a mere
buffoon , and you are all Serious American Composers .
For those of you who don't know, I am also a composer. I taught
myself how to do it by going to the library and listening to
records. I started when I was fourteen and I've been doing it
for thirty years. I don't like schools. I don't like teachers.
I don't like most of the things that you believe in - and if
that weren't bad enough, I earn a living by playing the
electric guitar .
For convenience, without wishing to offend your membership, I
will use the word `` WE '' when discussing matters
pertaining to composers. Some of the `` WE '' references
will apply generally, some will not. And now: The Speech ...
Is `New Music' relevant in an industrial society?
The most baffling aspect of the industrial-American-relevance
question is: `` Why do people continue to compose music,
and even pretend to teach others how to do it, when they already
know the answer? Nobody gives a fuck.''
It is really worth the trouble to write a new piece of music
for an audience that doesn't care?
The general consensus seems to be that music by living composers
is not only irrelevant but also genuinely obnoxious to a society
which concerns itself primarily with the consumption of disponsable
merchandise.
Surely `` WE '' must be punished for wasting everyone's
precious time with an art form so unrequired and
trivial in the general scheme of things. Ask your
banker - ask your loan officer at the bank, he'll tell you:
`` WE '' are scum . `` WE '' are the
scum of the earth . `` WE '' are bad
people . `` WE '' are useless bums . No
matter how much tenure `` WE '' manage to weasel out
of the universities where `` WE '' manufacture our
baffling, insipid packages of inconsequential poot ,
`` WE '' know deep down that `` WE '' are
worthless .
Some of us smoke a pipe. Other have tweed sports coats with
leather patches on the elbows. Some of us have mad scientists'
eyebrows. Some of us engage in the shameless display of incredibly
dramatic mufflers , dangling in the vicinity of a
turtleneck sweater. These are only a few of the reasons why
`` WE '' must be punished.
Today, just as in the glorious past, the composer has to
accommodate the specific taste ( no matter how
bad ) of THE KING - reincarnated as a movie or TV producer,
the head of the opera company, the lady with the frightening
hair on the special committee
or her niece, Debbie .
Some of you don't know about Debbie, since you don't have to
deal with radio stations and record companies the way the people
from The Real World do, but you ought to find out
about her, just in case you decide to visit later.
Debbie is thirteen years old. Her parents like to think of
themselves as Average, God-Fearing American White Folk .
Her Dad belongs to a corrupt union of some sort and is, as we
might suspect, a lazy, incompetent, overpaid, ignorant
son-of-a-bitch.
Her mother is a sexually maladjusted mercenary shrew who
lives to spend her husband's paycheck on ridiculous clothes
- to make her look younger .
Debbie is incredibly stupid . She has been raised to
respect the values and traditions which her parents hold sacred.
Sometimes she dreams about being kissed by a lifeguard.
When the people in the Secret Office Where They Run Everything
From found out about Debbie, they were thrilled. She was
perfect . She was hopeless . She was their
kind of girl .
She was immediately chosen to become the Archetypical
Imaginary Pop Music Consumer & Ultimate Arbiter of Musical
Taste for the Entire Nation - from that moment on, everything
musical in this country would have to be modified to conform
to what they computed to be her needs and desires
.
Debbie's `taste' determined the size, shape and color of
all music broadcast and sold in the United States during the
latter part of the twentieth century . Eventually she grew
up to be just like her mother, and married a guy just like
her Dad. She has somehow managed to reproduce herself. The
people in The Secret Office have their eye on her
daughter at this very moment.
Now, as a serious American composer, should Debbie really
concern you? I think so.
Since Debbie prefers only short songs with lyrics about
boy-girl relationships, sung by persons of indetermined sex,
wearing S&M clothing, and because there is Large Money
involved, the major record companies (which a few years ago
occasionally risked investment in recordings of new works) have
all but shut down their classical divisions, seldom recording
new music .
The small labels that do , have wretched distribution.
(Some have wretched accounting procedures - they
might release your recording, but you won't get paid.)
This underscores a major problem with living composers:
they like to eat . (Mostly what they eat is brown and
lumpy - and there is no question that this diet has had an
effect on their collective output.)
A composer's job involves the decoration of fragments of
time . Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch
of boring production deadlines or dates by which
bills must be paid . Living composers are entitled to
proper compensation for the use of their works. (Dead guys
don't collect - one reason their music is chosen for
performance.)
There is another reason for the popularity of Dead Person
Music . Conductors prefer it because they need more
than anything else to look good .
By performing pieces that the orchestra members have hacked
their way through since conservatory days, the rehearsal costs
are minimized - players go into juke-box mode, and spew off
`` the classics '' with ease - and the expensive
guest conductor, unencumbered by a score with ` problems
Ô in it, gets to thrash around in mock ecstasy for the
benefit of the committee ladies (who wish he didn't have
any pants on).
`` Hey, buddy, when was the last time you thwarted
a norm ? Can't risk it, eh? Too much at stake over at the
old Alma Mater? Nowhere else to go? Unqualified for `janitorial
deployment'? Look out! Here they come again! It's that bunch
of guys who live in the old joke: it's YOU and two billion of
your closest friends standing in shit up to your chins, chanting,
`DON'T MAKE A WAVE!' ''
It's the terror of a bad review from one of those
tone-deaf elitists who use the premiere performance of every new
work as an excuse to sharpen their word skills.
It's settling for rotten performances by musicians and conductors
who prefer the sound of Death Warmed Over to anything
scribbled in recent memory (making them ` assistant music
critics ', but somehow more glamorous .
It's clutching the ol' Serial Pedigree , secure in the
knowledge that no one checks anymore .
Beat them to the punch, ladies and gentlemen! Punish
yourselves before they do it for you. (If you
do it as a group , the TV rights may be worth something.)
Start planning now, so that everything will be ready in time
for the next convention. Change the name of your organization
from ASUC to `` WE ''-SUCK, get some cyanide
and swizzle it into the punch bowl with some of that
white wine `artistic' people really go for, and Bite
The Big One!
If the current level of ignorance and illiteracy persists, in
about two or three hundred years a merchandising nostalgia
for this era will occur - and guess what music
they'll play! (They'll still play it wrong, of course, and
you won't get any money for having written it, but what the
hey? At least you didn't die of syphilis in a whorehouse
opium stupor with a white curly wig on.)
It's all over, folks. Get smart - take out a real state license.
The least you can do is tell your students: ``DON'T DO IT!
STOP THIS MADNESS! DON'T WRITE ANY MORE MODERN MUSIC!
'' (If you don't, the little stinker might grow up to
kiss more ass than you, have a longer, more dramatic neck-scarf,
write music more baffling and insipid than your own, and
Bingo! there goes your tenure. )
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