BY SCOTT MCINTYRE
Originality has been an obsession of mine.
As a young composer studying at the University of Melbourne in the early 1990s, I felt it was my duty to be as original as possible and to write music no one had heard (or understood) before. It would take a crisis of confidence, many years of not writing concert music, and a PhD to help me realise the fallacy of my early endeavours.
My mother, who had a great appreciation for ‘classical’ music, heavily influenced my early musical upbringing. I remember clearly the themes from all of the Beethoven piano concerti and symphonies. The Violin Concerto was a particular favourite but going to see Star Wars in 1978 pretty much changed the way I listened to music. As a nine year old hearing the magnificent fanfare and watching those words track up the screen, I had been set upon the path of music forever. My stepfather several years later played the Sir Adrian Boult recording of Holst’s Planets suite and again, there was no doubt as to what I wished to do when I was older. The early years of musical creation were, of course, naïve and almost entirely comprised of unoriginal borrowings from other composers. In 1986, I had a chance encounter with Mahler and this inevitably influenced my musical style. It would remain a large factor in my development until the early 1990s, when I was enrolled at the Conservatorium at the University of Melbourne.
I must point out that during this time I was not the least concerned with originality. My endeavours were directed to writing music I thought was ‘cool’. At this time in my development as a student composer, I experienced an exciting few moments in which I was able to gather a bunch of musicians together and hear what I had written. It wouldn’t be until the shockwave of the ‘new complexity’ movement swept through Melbourne (emerging from the polemic discourse occupying the then-Sounds Australian magazine), and the division between original music versus the post-modern. I remember the phrase ‘post-modern’ being used as a weapon of derision and sarcasm toward those who practised it and, as a result, I tried in vain to discard my influences and forge ahead anew in a daring new world of original modernity.
What I hadn’t actually realised at the time, and would take many decades to figure out, is that by trying hard to do something new and not to recreate the past, I was conforming to an even more limited creativity that had less to do with originality but was akin to a doctrine. I was producing music I didn’t actually like. This led to a period of well over a decade in which I abandoned the world of writing concert music. This period of time allowed me to heavily reflect on questions of musical composition, and the notion of originality was addressed.
Since I started to write concert music again in 2005, I have concerned myself less and less with trying to be original. Instead, I have focused on trying to make my musical voice ‘authentic’. That is to say, an authenticity I try to reflect in the aesthetic and formal design of each piece I write. A good friend of mine recently described his own musical style as being ‘conservative modernism’ and I immediately understood from this what he was saying. His approach to modernity makes the piece new and modern but it is not strictly original. As I mentioned earlier, the opposing camps in the early ’90s ‘Complexity Wars’ were reduced to ‘modernist’ and ‘post-modernist’. The ‘modernists’ see themselves as forging ahead in lonely territory, unconcerned with the world’s critiques or view of what they produce. Although I was heavily entrenched in this view at this time, I see the danger of thinking this is the only way to write music. After a decade like the 1960s, where does one go after the burning of pianos, the smashing of violins or pieces that are entirely silent? Penderecki himself wrestled with this after producing many of the 20th Century’s most challengingly and modernist works. His later works are gigantic, post-tonal symphonies that at times sound like Mahler on LSD but their originality lies in their authenticity to Penderecki’s current vision.
This is how I now view my own work. I write many varied pieces, depending on whom and what they are for. I do not approach the intimacy of the string quartet in the same way that I write for an orchestra. If the piece I am writing requires the use of quartertones, then I use them. Not for the sake of defining my music as part of an aesthetic camp of in direct opposition to another’s style, but for the simple fact that it is what I require at the point in time. If I need to use a triad, then likewise, I will use it. Now (this is my approach and I am not casting dispersions on anyone else’s writing style), some composers like to include a variety of styles and influences during the course of their music. But I like to try and follow a central idea and aesthetic in my music and subsequently try to explore that idea as thoroughly as possible. For me, that is my version of originality, not the use of chords or sonata form or ensembles with hundreds of years of history and tradition. This is the authenticity I try to bring to my music. This is my version of originality.
Cover image credit Stu Rosner via Flickr, CC 2.0. Image of Scott McIntyre supplied.
