You do yourself and your colleagues a disservice by descending to insults. Take a few deep breaths and try to relax a little! There have been some really good points made in this thread but also a lot of very childish ones as well. Why not leave the pissing contest out of it?
To Bloke's point of writing in someone else's style, yes - a good composer can actually do it, and sometimes has to (to some degree) in order to fulfill the requirements of a commission. Actually, a film composer's skill at stylistic copying and reinterpreting is what makes him effective and successful. Copying is how we learn. But it will always lack the authenticity of the original because it is attempting to capture someone else's perspective, environment, and idiosyncrasies, all of which are intensely personal and contribute to an artist's aesthetic choices. In short, it is a good exercise for composition students but a bad platform for making art. Chopin would have written a really crappy Liszt piece, had he tried.
As to Rick's point that academics should know better... don't we all wish!!! Sadly, some of the most petty people you will ever meet seem to thrive in academia. Also some of the most brilliant, wise, gentle, and inquisitive.
YES!!!Rick Denney wrote:Whether one likes Williams's work should not enter into that discussion, but it has colored it deeply. We should be able to separate these issues and deal with them independently. To me, not doing so is a failure of proper criticism, and it impedes rather than promotes understanding.
All art is derivative. No piece exists in a vacuum.
When I have a particularly cocky composition student, convinced that everything pre-Schonberg is a collection of outdated museum pieces, I assign him to spend four or five hours with Mozart, deep into a score, perhaps Symphony 40 (or the A major piano concerto). Our next meeting is generally sans cockiness. I don't write like Mozart, nor do I want to. But damn can that man compose.
The real danger with people convinced of the absolute validity of their own opinions is the tendency to try to spread it to open minds and close them. This is an attempt to surround oneself with people who share views and validate them by numbers. There are certain composers and performers teaching today who, instead of seeking to explore the infinite world of art, have ossified into preachers of absolutism. They seek to clone themselves in their students and are often quite successful. I have found that when great artists really reach (what others consider) the top of their game, they tend to realize how much further they have to go and become humble. They stop worrying about agendas and recognize everything in the field as a possibility. Their criticisms also tend to become more thoughtful. I, myself, am not a great artist by the way... but I'm practicing just in case it happens.
Sloan's "Art = Craft + Choice" is the most profound thing I've seen in this discussion. Bravo.
