Some thoughts from Mr. Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Modern Architecture, a book that compiles a series of lectures given by the architectural magnate at Princeton University in 1930, contains an interesting passage that seems to be as readily applicable to ideas on modern music as it is to ideas on modern architecture.
In the lecture “Machinery, Materials and Men” from Modern Architecture, FLlW criticizes the tendency of his contemporaries to create new buildings from old designs. He condemns the idea of using the awesome potential of modern machinery to merely mimic the structures designed by artists of a by-gone era. In this passage, he singles out academic institutions:
…why should an American University in a land of Democratic ideals in a Machine Age be characterized by second-hand adaptations of Gothic forms?
In addition to universities, Wright singles out museums, banks, office buildings, post offices, and a number of other architectural landmarks with a slavish devotion to the past.
It takes little or no effort to extrapolate this idea to modern music. The “machinery” available to today’s performers and composers should not be ignored or used to recreate a stylistic facade better relegated to a by-gone era. This machinery, both the “hardware” of new technology available to performers and composers and the “software” of new and innovative compositional and aesthetic ideas, is capable of so much more.
Perhaps we could ask ourselves: Should an American (or any other Modern) Musician in a world of Democratic (or otherwise Modern) ideals in a Machine (or perhaps more appropriately, Digital) Age be characterized by second-hand adaptations of Outdated forms?
It an art form with a now infamous obsession with its purportedly dwindling audience, striking a balance between a healthy respect for past masters and an unhealthy obsession with the materials, forms, and performance practices of those past masters is the challenge all classical musicians seem to face.
This is an exciting time to be a classical musician. Musical institutions great and small seem to be embracing the enormous potential of wedding the thoughtfulness of the classical music tradition to the technical wizardry at our fingertips (I’m betting this new piece by Nathan Davis will be an excellent example). Other groups like Newspeak (led by composer David T. Little, who has written a new piece for TCP to be premiered December 13) play music that one would be hard-pressed to define as either classical or rock, probably because it is both…or maybe neither, but some wonderful combination of the two. And groups like our friends the Jack Quartet manage to make that fortress of classical convention, the string quartet, both relevant and exciting by bringing the extraordinary musical potential of their tried and true instrumentation to bear on the most original and iconoclastic compositional minds of our time.
TCP is excited to be part of a generation of musicians striving to negotiate the balance between convention and innovation that Mr. Wright spent his career realizing in his work and promoting in his lectures and writing.
