We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
I've got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.
I kept thinking, 'How do you make a modern musical?' Then it became clear that I could do it just like a small indie art-house movie, very naturalistically. I could create a world where it's o.k. to break into song, without an orchestra coming up out of nowhere.
First, it doesn't surprise me that traditional music has experienced a kind of exhaustion in the 20th century - not forgetting that many musicians started to look outside the traditional structures of tonality.
But still as compared to many, many orchestras in the world, I think you find a lot more new music and living composers on our programs than many other places.
There are so many people from many different classes and ways of life who converge in one space to make a musical.
I run around so much that I finally reasoned that composing is the one musical endeavour which you can do anywhere, anytime.
So many of the sounds that contemporary composers were trying to create were to be found in the traditional musics of the world. That was encouraging but also little daunting to think that you had to work so hard to be new and yet it was old.
The conception of background music is changing. You use less and less of it these days.
It really surprises me that people in this day and age still write such busy music and fill up every space with layer upon layer of sound... it's like musical landfill.