[NewMusic] breathtakingly bad

[David Slusser]

On Jun 26, 2007, at 10:07 PM, Tom Duff wrote:
>
> It's pretty obvious that Hadju and Zorn differ fundamentally on the  
> nature
> of music and the composer's role in it.  My experience is that when  
> people
> have aesthetic disagreements and one of them gets angry (I think  
> accusing
> an artist of being "elementally corrupt" entails anger) it's usually
> because his inability to understand the other's point of view leads  
> him to
> believe that his opponent cannot really hold his stated position  
> and so
> must be insincere.

Wow.  Thanks, Tom, and the ensuing thread.
David Hajdu's biography of Strayhorn, "Lush
Life", is incredibly great, on all levels, so it
was amazing to read him tear into someone
else I'm familiar with.

Tom's post really addressed the hostility we
all face being out of the mainstream, rather
than it being a referendum on Zorn.  (If there
were fans of irony on this list, I would point
out that zorn translates as anger in German.)
I'm really disappointed that such a good writer
won't equate conceptual art with the more
conventional musical forms he reveres.  Can
he not understand that it's fairly impossible
to create any more in the narrow field of forms
he recognizes?

One of Zorn's accomplishments was the successful
removal of the composer in his game pieces - some-
thing Cage himself would surely approve of.  Hajdu
misses the boat entirely on this - going so far as to
state a totally false conjecture:  that he was cavalier
about the musical results of the games, that he was
indifferent and that it scarcely mattered.  Many of us
in the Bay Area have done these pieces with Zorn, and
the first thing any of us would tell you, is that the
musical result means everything to him.  We could
execute the rules, but it was totally unacceptable if
it didn't produce compelling music.  That's probably
the over-riding rule of all his game pieces, and I've
heard him say it countless times, so Hajdu is totally
full of shit on this.

This was really a hit piece, and when one of the better
music writers around can get so much wrong, you can
understand how younger musicians have written Zorn off
as an arrogant asshole.  Carping on Zorn's uniform dress
and demeanor were equally off base as well.  As a good
conceptual artist, he's trying to remove himself from the
proceedings on all levels.  Our hideously (commercially)
stunted culture obsesses about personality, and expects
it as part of the package.  I think Zorn's efforts to extricate
himself have backfired into opinions like David Hajdu's.

Because he really is a good music writer, Hadju has a lot
of accurate insights (and compliments) here and there.  Still
the hostility (anger par Duff) and general down-nose
attitude towards the same scene we have here, have me
perplexed.  The music biz as he's known it is crumbling
around him, while we're in the camp that has moved on
and could care less.  At least Zorn was finally trashed by a
good writer.  Ultimately, he would've leveled the same
criticism against any of us.

So what is elementally corrupt about what we're doing?
Hadju implies that Zorn is just trying to be exceptional;
that is, getting over by just being the exception to the
rule.   The author doesn't get that there are legions of us
who chose to work outside of convention, and Zorn is just
the obvious one the blind-idiot-god media seized on.

Some of you have said it - You're trying to make the music
you want/need to hear because no one else is doing it.