The Composer As Physicist

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 2:52 AM Eastern on 22 Jan. See below.]

If you want to understand why such a large measure of postmodern classical music is so dreadfully wrong — so anti-music, as I've elsewhere called it — you've only to read the following from French (surprise!) composer Tristan Murail:

Only now have I begun to feel as if I have obtained the technical means to achieve my dreams of adolescence: I imagined certain ambitious works, but lacked the capacity to realize them. With a piece like L'Esprit des dunes (1994), for ensemble and electronics, I feel that I have succeeded in doing something that I could have easily dreamed of doing when I was twenty or even younger. In a piece like that, there is a clear research on the level of pure technology but there is also a musical research into the combination of sounds; this may not be immediately apparent, but so much the better. And while the "poetic" side of the piece probably has an even greater impact than the spectral contents,* the "poetry" depends utterly on their careful construction. Creating this sense of research, newness and "avant-garde" while still maintaining a coherent and comprehensible musical discourse is my real goal. [Quote taken from a post on the theater blog, Superfluities.]

No further comment required.

* See here for an explanation of so-called Spectral Music.

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Update (2:52 AM Eastern on 22 Jan): I remarked above that no further comment by me was required. Apparently, however, it is if the discussion of this post on Sequenza21 is any measure. And so let me here merely add that beyond my objection to the ill-considered reductionism contained in Murail's above quoted quasi-apologia-cum-manifesto, his words betray his unconscious addiction to perhaps the most musically damaging concern and conspicuous trait of a goodly number of postmodern classical music composers and the music they produce: a preoccupation — an almost obsession — with process; a preoccupation that results ineluctably in process becoming a thing unto itself; process not as means, but as end. It's this even more than Murail's reductionism to which I most strongly object, and which I most heartily loathe.

I trust the above will make clear what I thought would be prima facie clear, and was therefore in no need of my having to resort to this superfluous and tautologic spelling out.