More wisdom from Elliott Carter (see posting below for more). This is from an article in the Wall Street Journal and came to me by way of friend and artist George Wingate (thanks George):
If the public doesn’t respond, it matters very little. Think of other complex works that had difficulty finding an audience, he explains, like those of James Joyce. “‘Finnegan’s Wake’ is hard for anybody, I think,” he states. “But if you make an effort you can find places in it that are quite wonderful.” Another factor that shaped his decisions is that the monetary rewards of art music are negligible, whether one finds an audience or not.
‘It’s important to remember that this profession, unlike painting, doesn’t pay very much (although I do get some commissions these days),” he says. “As a result, you’re not encouraged to write for an audience — there’s no financial benefit. So you have to stick to what you believe in. Of course, I’ve written with the idea that there would be people who would want to play my music. Many are friends of mine — Charles Rosen, Ursula Oppens, Daniel Barenboim — musicians who are willing to spend the money to have extra rehearsals because of the level of difficulty.”
Still, I ask, doesn’t a composer have some responsibility, as Mozart seemed to believe, to reach an audience? Consider the case of the late Jacob Druckman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his orchestral composition, “Windows.” He ultimately reached the conclusion that the work had been a failure because there was so much going on in it at one time that listeners couldn’t possibly hear it all.
“There are parts in my pieces where you can’t tell what’s going on,” he says with a glint in his eye. “You also can’t tell what’s going on when a painter makes a big splash on a canvas. It’s just a sound.” One is reminded of a response given by the maverick early-20th-century composer Charles Ives — a mentor to the young Elliott Carter — when someone complained about the cacophony in his work: “What does sound have to do with music?” he asked.
Stuart Isacoff
Wall Street Journal
Not trying to write for an audience is the hardest thing for any type of artist, because trying to write/paint for an audience is such a set-up. If they don’t like it or understand it, it’s like looking in the mirror and feeling like a failure. It gives the audience so much power. Yes, you have to sell to make a living and there is the paradox. To be true to yourself you have to ignore the audience. To sell, you either have to be lucky enough for your talents to coincide with their tastes, or you have to sell out. But the best of the audience knows when you are selling out. It’s such a conundrum. Aren’t there countries that just pay their artists to live and create what they want? Is it Scandinavia? That seems ideal. It’s when making a living coincides with making art that the problems clash. But then again, if you are earning a living doing something else, it’s hard not to feel like a dilettante. It’s an impossible conundrum.
I love this idea of “just a sound.” It’s got something to do with the way I think of poems…what I have at first is just a sound, just an emotion, just a piece of tension. And then later there’s a kind of stringing up that happens, some sort of inarticulate process that leads to a series of sounds, of narratives or arguments, that suggestive place that is no more than the sum of its parts and yet invites a reader to reach beyond them.
And now back to INA ยง 212(a)(6)(A). Ugh. The horror, the horror.
QS, you have articulated so many of my operative principles and done so succinctly. Thanks for adding this perspective.
VV, I agree, just a sound does sound like poetry seed crystal. So keep that protected in spite of law school.