8 June 2024
Oakland, CA, USA

Last year around this time, I was in the most distant place imaginable – Easter Island in the middle of the South Pacific, nominally part of Chile. It rained constantly, the electricity would go out, there wasn’t any mobile phone signal, and the heads all pretty much looked the same. But it was utterly magical, too, especially being out in the middle of the ocean, in the midst of a culture seldom known or visited, as if barely on the same planet. Unfamiliarity is such an interesting variable in life, as it splits humanity into those who crave it and those who run away from it. But it is actually rarely so binary, because, as the ‘grass is greener on the other side’ principle often suggests, unfamiliarity is maybe best suited for us when we are perhaps running from something else that we should be addressing instead. These last couple of weeks spent at home, in the most familiar environment have been diametrically (and, perhaps one can laughingly say, ‘polar’) opposite to those a year ago, but then I am also grateful that life allows the one and the other. We need both to find a centre, to be challenged but also to be embraced, and hopefully, one day, if not today- understood.

I think this has a lot to do with my music even if it’s not always clear to me in the process of writing it, how. The notion that as composers we must march into an abyss of complete unfamiliarity and destruction (of the past), and if not destruction, we could call it- deconstruction, this is a rather naive idea mainly because, even in the dark, we are still within the frames of our minds, which may (or, very often, may not) be quite closed and facile. Likewise, I have seen and heard enough music that doesn’t even ask the question of ‘what next’ and simply is pleased to fulfil a day’s, or a commission’s work, and this is music that neither challenges nor even really properly exists as anything other than just some notes on a page and a double bar. So familiar that its meaning is elusive and perhaps, simply nonexistent. The question of modernity and the ‘new’ in music is actually a really nuance and highly personal one. What I can say, coming from the perspective of technology and multidisciplinary, is that genuine novelty in composition is expressed through novelty for the audience- what have they never heard or, also very importantly, experienced before? Just by being written today, it does not count as new music. ‘New’ must be earned.

Not to forever persist in the philosophical realm, or complain about anything or anyone in particular, though it has always proven interesting to me how little genuine fellowship there is among composers, probably because of the mistaken belief that ‘new’ is a zero-sum game rather than something that would require a critical and collaborative mass. Instead, I have found far more interesting conversations with people who are actually confronted with all this new stuff- the performers. Having ‘been there, seen that, done that’, new music for them comes with a healthy reality check. And on that note, it was a particular pleasure to workshop a piece very much straddling new and not-so-new, my new String Quartet no. 2 (2024) with the Quatuor Arod, the world premiere of which has finally been penciled in for 22 August 2024 at the Festival International de Musique de Wissembourg in France. The string quartet has traditionally been an idiom that invites the new but then again, the concept of chamber music is inescapably a highly traditional one. And, beyond that, all new string quartets pretty much sound the same. Wonder if mine will?