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Home > ATLarts > Archives > 2007 > November > 19 > Entry
‘Keep Music Evil’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The links on the left side of this page include a blog run by and for Atlanta area composers. It’s a chance to eavesdrop on the music makers as they talk amongst themselves. It’s also a great place to find out what’s being performed when and where.
Our lovable composers, you see, are often hapless when it comes to promoting their shows. (The newspaper can help on this front, sometimes a lot.)
But reading their site, you also come away with what’s been the defining attitude among modern-music composers for most of the 20th and now 21st centuries. It’s a mild sense of Who Cares If You Listen? It’s the sense that music’s theoretical value trumps its popular or populist appeal. It’s what a new-music crazed listener might call the soft bigotry of low expectations. The sense that a composer would invite his colleagues to his or her concert, and that’s good enough. (Perhaps that’s why so few Atlanta composers have jumped clear of the new-music corral.)
Still, there’s abundant talent on the scene and plenty of charm, even as they take a proud stance in pushing away their potential public.
Composer Adam Scott Neal has created a line of t-shirts with this cheeky message. One says “Keep Music Evil.” (If you have to be explained the joke, the t-shirt is probably not for you.)
Another says: “RIP Tonality 1682-1911.”
Then again, in a culture where everything is a niche product, can modern classical composers win fans by emphasizing their outsider status? Is the true path to success in America not composing abstact, atonal music but in the commerce associated with composing abstract, atonal music? If so, Mr. Neal’s got a winner. (I’ll pick up an XL.)
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