WMV Music Web Log

From composer Michael Strand:

"As for your April 29 blog -- I agree with your perceptions. I, too, often get the feeling that a painting or a piece of music is often a mere reflection or shadow of a beautiful object or feeling or thought that has its full expression in a larger, multi-dimensional reality: The artist manages to capture just enough of its aspects or facets to give the rest of us insight into the larger, amazing reality. In the case of music, the performer plays the important role of interpretation for the listener. If the composer includes too much specification concerning dynamics, phrasing, etc. in an attempt to control the performers, the opportunity for discovering more of the beauty of the "real thing" reflected by the music might be lost. I think of the many variations written for tunes like "Blue Moon" and tangos like "La cumparsita, and the many different ways I've heard Bach pieces performed. I hope you take my own lack of specifications for phrasing and dynamics in my compositions, not as a sign of laziness, but as an invitation to the performers to make the most of what I've written down in cold black and white, based on their own perceptions and feelings and experience. I also don’t mind improvisations on what I write - the notes I put down are often improvisations on whatever I'm trying to capture in sound. Someone else's improvisation may be more successful."

Also from Mike Strand:
"We talked about art economy, and I'll try another wording of my thought: A performance of chamber music for a small audience in a modest-sized hall offers the opportunity for emotional, intellectual, and spiritual exchanges among the audience and the performers that cannot be matched in a large concert hall."

I think this is an important point. We were talking with Mike the other night about a spiritual economy which is parallel and unconnected to the material economy. This is why it is so hard to buy and sell art - it is a transaction between two worlds that have no real connection. And so hard to measure success in the arts. It is easy to see that the degree of financial success and even public acclaim in art have nothing whatsoever to do with values as measured in the universe of "spiritual economics". Small and humble sometimes looks big and significant in this other world, and vice versa. The challenge is to survive materially as artists and at the same time be not at all confused about the very real transactions in the spiritual economy. Because this is the only world in which what we do makes sense, and it is invisible to most people most of the time.