"now " and "then"

last night was a great example of what i find frustrating in undergraduate comp forums. i know that composition is one of the "black arts" of teaching, so i am really not here to throw stones at students our students. all of the pieces were very well prepared and performed (except for one piece that was so bad i thought was performance art), but it always frustrates me hearing pieces from young composers that sound 100-200 years old. may i strongly suggest that they you spend more time listening the "now" instead of the "then". you can reject it all of it if you want, but you should have a good idea of a majority of the art music composed in the last 30 years.

when i was in kansas, my first teacher, walter mays, did me the biggest favor by forcing upon me long listening lists in place of any actually writing. by keeping my away from the pencil he did me the best teaching possible for a very young and naive student and i was quite happy when i found a group of living composers that excited me. he started me in the 1970's and pushed forward, and then we jumped back starting with pierrot lunaire and filled in the gaps through the 60's. overall it gave me a sense of place and i have had many years to think about how i fit in to it.

we can evaluate our compositions in many ways; is it idiomatic and well orchestrated? does it have a consistent logic or musical universe that it resides? even if all those things are in place i'm not sure how writing in the "ars antiqua" style is a useful artistic exercise unless it is somehow connected to the now. i think it is one thing to write music that sounds like chopin and quite another to distill what makes chopin's music interesting and apply that to your own art. the journey to figure out how we fit the "now" and "then" into our own personal narrative is just as important as any pen and paper "technique" we can acquire.