Paper 3 --- Editorial or Opinion Piece

The purpose of this assignment is to give you an opportunity to write an argumentative essay.

The best approach is to look at good opinion or editorial writing that appears in newspapers and magazines. Also important is a "lead" or opening that engages the reader.

Here's two things to give you an idea.

The first is an "opinion piece" that appeared in the New York Times. The second is a response written by someone who wanted to challenge the argument of the original.

July 12, 1998

A Composer's Lament: The Music Goes Soft

By MATTHIAS KRIESBERG

The New York Times

ne morning some 25 years ago, the composer Chou Wen-Chung regaled those of us in his music analysis class with reports of musical life in China. So pervasive was the application of Maoist doctrine, we were told, that music was written by committee. When a piece was completed, it was presented to the farmers' collective for criticism. We all had a good laugh.

Now consider this sentence from an article by a composer formerly in residence at a top American orchestra, describing a response to a commission: "I walked through my community, knocking on doors, and asked people what sort of piece they would like." (Good thinking: this composer went to the farmers before writing the piece.)

I have often imagined my response if I had received that knock at my door: "You know, I've always been fond of intricate relationships involving E flat, F sharp and C sharp." Or: "You're the composer. You got the commission. Now go home and write the piece you believe in, and don't worry about what I expect."

But to suggest today that writing music is about more than pleasing an audience is to commit the most horrific cultural crime of the late, late 20th century: "elitism." There is broad agreement across the political spectrum: wisdom resides in the will of the people. Granted, our embrace of the collective philosophy we used to mock has a new twist; yesterday's masses are today's marketplace. And since the power of the market is the flip side of democracy, you can't challenge one without ostensibly opposing the other. So even contemporary classical composition -- not exactly in the mainstream of everyday life -- becomes validated in proportion to the number of people served.

Responsiveness to audience demand has become an obsession. Some months ago, a successful composer described his compositional process in a radio interview: "When I write, I imagine being in the audience and ask myself what it would feel like to hear this passage." Another composer, quoted in The New York Times, stated that his highest ambition was to make new music "accessible."

Partisans of accessibility flaunt their righteous anger. Some weeks ago in these pages, Peter Gelb, the president of Sony Classical, made the perfectly reasonable case that he has a fiduciary obligation to his company to issue recordings that are likely to make a profit, and that he is entitled to advocate the music he believes in. Then he declared, "Serialism will have to start sharing space on concert hall programs with new music of broader appeal." When he delivered the same message to those of us attending the Salzburg Seminar in Austria, last December, he was asked incredulously which composers were supposed to step aside.

After all, the most frequently performed American composers today seem comfortable with the notion that audience response is a legitimate indicator of musical value. Yet for the last 15 years -- at least since the New York Philharmonic's 1983 new-music festival, "A New Romanticism?" -- we have been tirelessly informed that a cabal of composers continues to dominate concert programming and that the public has yet to be liberated by composers daring enough to write music people love. Even now, a generation after the routing of the Gang of Serialists, the battles are recited breathlessly, as if at this very moment we are in mortal danger of succumbing to the forces of elitism. Why keep pumping bullets into the dead?

It is telling that this "liberating" musical style is defined by audience response rather than in musical terms. The old new music, we are told, disdained the audience; the new new music does not. (For the record, the opposite is closer to the truth. The bad-old composers naïvely believed that audiences would eventually hear what the composer heard; the good-new accessibilists assume that audiences are unimaginative and impatient.)

What no one wants to acknowledge publicly is that the current stylistic evolution in contemporary classical music may have more to do with economic forces than with purely musical considerations. Here is part of a letter I received from someone in a position to know the state of mind of one of our prominent New Romantic composers: "His experience as composer-in-residence was an important matter. Once he found that if the conductor, the orchestra, the critics and the audience liked a piece, it was worth 30 or 40 thousand dollars a crack; he and his wife drove better cars. Isn't the long-term problem of every serious composer how to write music that satisfies oneself while making a living doing so?"

Actually, no. These are separate problems, and they should not be confused. A surgeon has an obligation to perform surgery only when it is appropriate. That he or she may also need to pay off the mortgage on a fine home does not mean that the doctor's "long-term problem" is how to get patients to require expensive surgery. (Such a distinction is especially important if the doctor in question is yours.)

The trouble is, we are in love with two contradictory principles. One is that a composer should write music that flows unimpeded from his or her imagination. The other is that "user-friendly" products are superior. It is no accident that the last 20 years have seen an ever stronger demand that composers make their music more directly useful to the needs of the "community." In America today, authority and wealth are won by the endorsement or purchasing power of vast numbers of people. Our decision makers, even in the arts, increasingly come from the ranks of those who find popular success and intrinsic value indistinguishable, who consider successful marketing synonymous with freedom of expression. Uncomfortable with the uneasy fit of serious music into contemporary culture, they proclaim the need to redefine classical music.

You can't have it both ways. Remember the official in the Reagan Administration who, seeking to cut school lunch subsidies but confronting the requirement that lunches include two vegetables, proposed redefining ketchup as a vegetable? Markets generate great wealth, but that doesn't mean that artistic principles can be rewritten to accommodate them. (Granted, the urge to try can be irresistible. Nowadays a composer practically has to be world-famous just to pay the rent.)

A few years ago, I was in an airplane awaiting takeoff, idly looking at one of those "calm-the-mind" videos. It was a meandering sequence of nature images with a soundtrack of watered-down Minimalism. As it turned out, the flight was held on the ground so long that the film ran right through to the credits, and I learned that the parties responsible were Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass.

In the early 80's this filmmaker and composer created "Koyanisqaatsi." That memorable and original work inspired Francis Ford Coppola to produce a sequel, "Powaqaatsi." Geared to wider appeal, it lacked the imagination and emotional weight of its predecessor. Now comes "Anima Mundi," commissioned by a company that markets videos to the airline industry.

It is an evolution worth pondering. Because Mr. Glass's Minimalist style imparted cohesion to whatever medium it was attached to, his music became eminently desirable to choreographers, theater directors, filmmakers and producers of television advertising. This statement implies no lack of integrity on the part of the composer. It is simply a characteristic of his music that it is an ideal passenger on other creators' vehicles. Ten minutes of largely redundant gestures in the medium of sound make what you see in another medium appear very convincing.

Mr. Glass's music is now a useful commodity. Its capacity to flatter has brought it to the attention of a much larger audience than would otherwise have encountered it. Since audience size is vital to the media and music industries (both consumed by the task of capturing a market), Mr. Glass is celebrated as a composer who "broke out of the box."

Such a successful career obscures the fact that American composers no longer control the direction of contemporary music with an authority comparable to that exercised by creators in other art forms. True, composition is a relatively dependent art form to begin with. The serious money in music is generated by performance, not composition. Writers produce manuscripts, painters produce canvases, but composers typically respond to commissions. Most of our contemporary music is either neo-conservative or neo-populist. It almost begs for acceptance.

Let's recall what drove a century of glorious achievement in painting and sculpture. A relatively small number of collectors followed their own taste and convictions and bought work they believed in. Painting and sculpture are tangible commodities, but the essential point is that artistic success was not achieved because millions of people purchased reproductions. Individuals with the ability to make a difference exercised creative artistic judgment.

The same could happen with contemporary composition if even a few people of wealth, appreciating what was at stake, dedicated themselves to the future of serious music. The Los Angeles music patron Betty Freeman should serve as an inspiration to those able to wield the powerful combination of conviction and money. The key is engaging actively in the direct support of creative choices: not leaving to others the selection of composers to support. Only direct involvement will empower composers to resume a position of leadership in their profession.

And that's exactly what is going to happen. The triumph of popular judgment over the power of artistic worth cannot be sustained forever. Sooner or later, individuals of financial means will step forward out of profound dissatisfaction with our parade of new music and its split agenda: to be art and to be nice. The market economy that has obliged new music to conform to popular protocols has also generated nearly unimaginable wealth. It's a safe bet that some of that is in the hands of people who don't want all their music soft.__

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