COMPOSITION AND CULTURE:
A DISCOURSE WITH COMPOSER JONATHAN FEBLAND
Written by Maria S. Rice
How did you first start composing?
My first ever composition was a flute duet written for a friend
at school. The opening melody just came to me and I sat down to write it out
at the piano.
The piece actually received a couple of performances while I was still at school – before I was offered a place at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
After my first finished piece, it seemed logical to try and write another and
so I wrote a piece for the school’s brass ensemble simply entitled ‘Sketch’
for brass – once again, it was very rewarding to be able to hear the
composition performed by musicians. After the success of these two compositions,
I began
to compose literally one piece after another without stopping, writing for
everything from unaccompanied Viola or Vibraphone to Full Symphony Orchestra.
Less than
a year after my first composition, I was offered a place at the Academy and
I treated it as a 4-year government commission to compose as much as humanly
possible! I met up with some hugely talented soloists (the most gifted of these
arguably being Pianist Louis Demetrius Alvanis) while studying and organised
more than 50 performances of my compositions while still a student.
Tell me about the importance and purpose of music--both
in your own life, and universally.
Music is the most beautiful contrast to silence. Of course,
I think silence is incredibly important as well in modern life. Most people
are surrounded by
noise and stress and listen to music that reflects that level of stress! I
mainly listen to Great works of Classical Music – usually on CD, I am not a big
concert-goer, I actually prefer going to straight theatre for an evening’s
entertainment. By now, I have listened to virtually every major composition
by the Great Composers many times over and need to hear particularly outstanding
performances to entertain my ears. I see Music as one of the arts, perhaps the
one that needs the most training to understand. Of course people manage to live
without literature, painting and music, but their lives must be found to be
lacking. It is rare to sit down and have a worthwhile conversation with anyone
about the arts – or maybe I am just isolated! The purpose of music as
with all of the arts is to delight or enlighten – to make us smile or
inspire our hidden depths to want to achieve great things. Music is important
even though some people will tell you it is frivolous.
What do you feel distinguishes your compositions from
the work of your contemporaries?
Since I stopped listening to ‘bad music’ about fifteen years ago,
I cannot make a fair comment about my so-called contemporaries. All I know is
that I don’t wish to be compared to any other living composer. I intend
not to name any other composer should I write my own biography, as I wouldn’t
wish to give publicity to some of the -asters posing as musicians. Indeed, I
would like to go further. Most people hate contemporary serious music –
and I don’t blame them. I myself have heard one atonal piece too many
although I do still occasionally like to listen to a serious piece by say Lutoslawski
or Penderecki – but you have to be in the mood for it.
What entails "bad music”?
That was a FeBland witticism.
However, there is a good point you make here. There are so many ways of writing
bad music and only a few of writing great. A composition that by definition
is great needs to have a musical logic to it that only musicians understand.
Bad music doesn’t have that logic! When we look at a painting, we can
immediately see whether we like it or not – with music, you have to listen
to it for a few minutes at least to come to some sort of judgment – but
with literature, you may need to devote hours to something before deciding whether
to continue reading the work. In my opinion, there are somewhat fewer than fifty
composers who are worth listening to – I have made a list of them at one
of my websites. Finally, bad music can be written in any style – there
are just as many worthless tonal pieces as atonal.
What musical styles have influenced your compositions?
That is a very tricky question to answer. There are certainly traces of say,
Beethoven, Prokofiev and Stravinsky here and there in my compositions, but this
is really one for the musicologists to look into in fifty years time!
I am slightly unusual as a composer as I write in approximately five different
styles: Contemporary Serious/Concert Hall Music, Light Classical/Educational
Music, Jazz, New Age Music and Film Music. To make things even more complicated,
I sometimes write pieces that blend more than one of those styles together in
the same composition. My latest work for example, entitled Jazz Symphony in
33 grooves, is a crossover work combining Classical and Jazz styles.
So what do you think is in store for the future of composed
music?
More than 99% of Great Music has been composed by fewer than fifty Internationally
acclaimed Composers working in isolation. All I can do as a serious composer,
is to write the last 1% !
We are most definitely at a crisis point in all of the creative arts (although
at a time of great achievement in the ‘re-creative’ arts, such as
music performance). Painting seems to have reached its limit, resulting in paint
thrown at canvas/action painting or monochrome paintings as I like to call them;
Atonal music; ‘weird’ poetry; Novel and Play writing still seem
to go on well although we had great experimentation with these genres earlier
in the 20th century.
Does this mean that human creativity is approaching
an absolute limit?
Creativity is of various sorts. For example, in societies not
as fully cultivated as Western society, ‘craft’ which is highly artistic i.e. African
and Aboriginal Art is still practised today with great enthusiasm. I should
really speak more for Western Art as that is the tradition from which I come,
and it is Western Art which seems to be coming close to an end (of one sort
or another). I wouldn’t talk in terms of absolute limits, as a True Artist
can always invent new challenges for himself. But I can think of at least one
example in literature and that is the novel Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. This
is the limit in ultra-modernism among novels and completely obscure to most
members of the public. You have to read study guides on the work to even begin
to be able to appreciate Joyce’s vision. However the creation of this
complex work did not mean the end of the novel, on the contrary, novel-writing
is still practised today and many novelists pride themselves on an almost poetical
turn of phrase as they cultivate a work of literature that can run to over
300
pages.
There are those--myself in particular--who would argue that art will continue
to evolve as long as civilization itself continues to exist and evolve. Do
you think the creative arts follow and change with cultural phenomena?
My argument would be that Art can only be produced by Artists. Traditionally
gifted men working in (complete) isolation from society although often trying
to reflect the society from which they are cut off. The problem today (and
quite possibly historically as well) is that there are too many charlatans
posing as Artists who are being paid to create inferior work.
What about the advances in technology and worldwide communication that characterize our era? Do you believe that nothing original could be born out of these?
I think there are Art Forms that are more stable than others – or
at least more conducive to creative work than others. The 20th Century for
example
was
the Century where Film was the predominant Art Form. I am sure that creative
people in the right time at the right place (a comment often made about Beethoven)
will be able to exploit artistic opportunities as and when they arise.
How important is the concept of genre and how much restriction
should it impose on your creativity (if any)?
A work of art is generally going to be more successful if it
is presented in a clear setting. As someone who composes music in different
styles I still think
it best to stick to one style per composition (except perhaps where you are
trying to create a fusion piece such as one which has elements of jazz and
classical
styles – of course the more styles you try to fuse, the more chaotic the
piece is going to sound). I think the same is true of other art forms as well
i.e. we expect a certain continuity in the writing style of a novel, the make-up
of a painting, the forward momentum of the ‘idea’ behind a film
(and of its dialogue and cinematography) and say, the orchestration used in
a Symphony.
For the musician working today, the first challenge is which genre to write
in and secondly whether his work is simply going to sound like a pastiche of
something that has already been done. I am very versatile with my compositions
and have tried my hand at many styles ranging from Jazz to Classical but each
new piece presents a challenge in both the choice of genre as well as the gathering
of ideas suitable for the project. This is a problem not faced by composers
prior to about 1960. Before that time, at least the ‘style’ of
music was fairly fixed and the composer could focus on writing music that fitted
the
style of the day rather than have to worry that the genre was falling to pieces
at his feet.
Would you argue that, say, Schoenberg and Barber composed
within the same "fixed" style of music?
All I am saying is that (for example) during the 19th Century,
it was the general idea to write (according to certain rules of harmony etc.)
attractive-sounding
music (so-called 'Romanticism'). Composers during this Century didn’t
need to spend months or years worrying about the ‘style’ in which
they would compose, they just got on with it. There was a ‘sound’
that was accepted by members of the public and professional Composers could
conjure up this sound and write Operas, Symphonies or Violin Concertos which
were serious yet entertaining and enjoyable at a first hearing. I am not qualified
to talk about Barber as I only know (and greatly enjoy) a handful of his works.
Schoenberg composed in (at least) 3 different styles: Late Romantic, Freely
atonal and 12-note – so it is perhaps true to say that he struggled with
his choice of musical style prior to the composition of any music. Once he had
established his 12-note method, he used it pretty much exclusively to any of
his other styles – writing, might I add, some of the ugliest and most
detestable compositions in the whole of the repertoire such as his quite terrible
Wind Quintet.
How do you feel about any of the various genres of modern
pop music and their effect on our culture?
Generally speaking, I do not listen to that type of music at
all – although
I still come into contact with it via TV and film. It seems to me that whenever
names from the pop music world come in to the News it is for the wrong reasons
and that they are setting a poor example of how to live. It cannot be denied
that the worlds of pop music, fashion and advertising all try their hardest
to part us from our hard-earnt buck, but I for one can live quite happily without
any of it.
Do you think pop culture and mass media will have an
effect on formal composition and the evolution of new genres?
I think there is a big difference between popular culture and
serious Art with a capital A. However there are interesting crossover compositions
which will
combine Jazz (or similar) with more serious styles – something which I
am attempting myself. Pop culture by its definition has a huge influence on
many people – I avoid it myself as much as possible, but that is my choice.
Maria S. Rice