eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman) (03/23/90)
In article <14686@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> roger@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Roger Lustig) writes:
;Universities "require" you to do things in historically delineated ways
;for several reasons. One is to allow you to develop your own
;relationship to tradition; another is to foster dialectic thinking: to
;get you to rebel and do something that is specifically NOT in the
;tradition. A surprisingly large number of musical advances has come
;about through just this sort of rebellion.
This I doubt. My own experience was either that the training is shallow,
or that the involvement can be dangerously distracting. I was once
going through one of my tonal music crises, and Isang Yun
said, "why don't you just stay away from that stuff." The longer
you hang around 19th century music, the tougher it is to get away from
it -- it's powerful stuff. And no one in the late 20th C has
ever demonstrated that the way to free your imagination is to live in
the older music. Quite the contrary, it can be debilitating. Notice that
very very few if any of the big shot conductors and virtuosi in our day
amount to much compositionally, though many of them do compose (Kubelick
comes to mind), and these people do live in that music.