Greetings, all two of you who read my embryonic beginnings of a blog. Now that I finally have internet up and running, it occurred to me that I haven't posted anything here since December.
My original concept of this blog was way too formal, potentially pretentious, and unnecessarily stress-inducing. I intended to write perfectly-constructed, near-irrefutable essays about the state of things in modern music, the role of the Artist in society, and other such topics about which I do, genuinely, care. But that neither makes for entertaining reading nor fun writing. And besides that, the concept kept me from writing anything at all, because I would worry either that someone, somewhere, would poke giant holes in my argument and expose me as an intellectual fraud, or that I would just come across as a pompous know-it-all. I AM just a fiddler, after all, and one still lacking a degree in anything. (Pass more quickly, O Time.)
So basically...the new rules here are that there are no rules. I hope to be writing more frequently, often about music of various sorts, and usually opining about something or another, but sometimes I'm just gonna go off topic and write about something goofy I saw in the metro yesterday, or bizarre tales I've heard from my old violin teacher. Or anything I feel like, really. My subject matter will vary wildly. So might my writing style. It's anyone's guess, really, and my only hope is that not only will it be an enjoyable pastime for me, but that whoever you are reading this might get some entertainment or even enlightenment from my curious musings. At the moment, it's late one Saturday night and I'm relaxing halfway through a bottle of decent wine, so the ideas are coming a little more easily tonight.
If I may free-associate, speaking of rapid changing of styles according to mood. Just today I downloaded (legally) the second-most recent album from a Czech rock band I like a lot, Traband. I liked it a lot...and yet...it was COMPLETELY different from the next-most-recent album of theirs I have, which in turn is notably different from the earliest one I know. I might almost think they were two or three different bands if I didn't know any better. The most recent album is very laid-back and low-key, folky, melancholy, with a sort of indie-rock overcast that reminds me a little unsettlingly of the stuff we would blast soulfully over our iPod speakers all summer at music camp back in the high school days. (So far my favorite song on the album is "Vlaštovky".) But compare that to the high-energy, classic-rock, "Katarina" from an album from just a few years earlier. (Side-note--why did it take me this long to realize that song is in Slovak?) Which in turn is quite different from...whatever this is...from some years earlier. I like it all. But can it all really be the same band!?
I have to say...because it's 12:30 AM and wine is making its way into my bloodstream, and I can make grand pronouncements without either hypertension or irony...as a classically trained musician, I have MAJOR envy of this ability to switch styles, re-invent, goof around and try new sounds at will. I mean, I like to think I try more of that than the average conservatory denizen (some times this past year I played so much folk music that I almost died of hruskovica poisoning and insomnia) but we're still a pretty straight-laced, unadventurous bunch. When every last one of us does the EXACT SAME goddamn "slide" from the A to F-sharp in the opening theme of the Tchaikovsky concerto because that's how Heifetz did it...well.
Can't we all be a little more radical, or at least adventurous? There's a place, and an honored one, for tradition and following in the footsteps of the great masters, but--they weren't copying anybody. They were THEMSELVES. And a lot of the time I feel like our generation of musicians--I'm speaking specifically about classical ones--has become so preoccupied with "living up to the standard" of the great greats of past years that we've forgotten how to BECOME new greats ourselves.
There's always great risk in creating the new, whether you're composing an opera or just trying to pull together a fresh and alive-sounding interpretation of a Beethoven sonata that everyone in the audience has heard ninety kajillion times. Probably, for every success, you're going to have ten bombs. The more I get involved in playing very new music, the more I realize this is true. I have discovered modern masterworks, and to get to those few gems I have had to play a lot of crap. The same, though, was probably true for Joachim and Schuppanzigh too, we just never hear about the awful stuff they premiered because it's been long enough for the flops to completely fade from memory. (I'm convinced that it's entirely Milos Forman's fault that any of us have heard of Salieri, but that may be a gratuitous bit of snark for tonight.)
Fellows, we'll always have our Bach and Beethoven and Brahms. They've been loyal and unceasingly wonderful for centuries, and they aren't going anywhere. We can always turn to them whenever we need or want to. So...how about a little more risk-taking here? A little daring? Dare to play something your own way...composers, write the music you want to even if the critics think it's stupid...violinists, please start writing music for yourselves to play again, seriously, the fashion of the virtuoso-composer REALLY needs to come back in style...
Undoubtedly some of our new stuff is going to suck. But some of it will be good. And we'll have fun along the way. It could be the revitalization of our art, it could end up just turning into a whole movement of undergraduates jamming in low-rent recording studios and hammering out incoherent manifestos on Saturday nights while getting increasingly loopy on French wine and sleep deprivation. But let's just TRY, people.
(Vínečko bílé,
jsi od mej milej,
budu ta pít,
co budu žít,
vínečko bílé.)
Bottoms up, fellow artists...cheers...maybe this post will look silly in the morning. :-))))
