A letter to young composers

As you engage yourselves in the laborious process of learning the mechanics and structure of music, it is important that you ask yourself the following questions:  For whom are you composing?  To what end?

It's easy to get caught up in whatever the current style of music is being prompted by your teachers and your classmates.  It's easy to begin writing music that will impress your peers and be approved by your teachers.  A certain competitive element can creep in to your composition, emphasizing your desire to be known as "an original" composer.  Your audience becomes very local, and as is the case with all music written for a local and limited audience, parochial. Music in such a setting becomes more of an intellectual exercise than a creative one.  Music can become based on non-musical ideas, and as such is more self-congratulatory than satisfying. It may have been an exercise in originality but that is not enough to make it worthwhile or memorable  music.

The second question follows from your honest answer to the first:  What do you want to express in your composition?  Clearly any event and any emotion can form the basis for a piece of music. Richard Strauss is quoted as stating he could set a laundry list to muic.  But he didn't. Are all emotions worthy of expression?  Why do you think people listen to "serious" music?  Do they want to hear the chaos and wickedness and violence of our world brought into the concert hall or the living room?

Or is music ideally a reminder of a more beautiful and perfect world?  Some of the best music, modern as well as 100 years old, is based on the following elements:  melody, harmony, couterpoint, rhythm and to some degree repetition.  We like to hold it in our heads and hearts as we travel through an imperfect and frightening world.  It gives us a sense of order and beauty, words which many young composers don't seem to understand.  To be beautiful, music does not have to be happy.  It can express sorrow, grief, rage and a host of less pleasant emotions.  But for those emotions to move us as an audience, they must have the basic elements.  There must be a structure we can feel, not just understand intellectually.

Probably in modern times film and television musical scores are closer to the musical ideal.  While they can be chaotic and without apparent structure, the visual images accompanying them provide a background against which they can be at least understood.  Some of this music stays with us, and deservedly so.  Some that is more purely expressive of the visual  events (the "laundry list") disappears forever when the images are turned off.  They served a purpose, of course, but not a musical one.

If I can't hear it in my head and heart it disappears into the chaos of everyday existence.  It might as well never have been.

Bad statistics make a bad situation worse

The shootings of white police officers in Dallas is horrific and unacceptable.  It is also horrific that blacks have been treated with such violence and disrespect that many feel impelled toward violence as the only appropriate response to law enforcement.  I don't know the solution to this appalling set of events.  But I do have some understanding of the kinds of thinking that make this terrible situation worse and make resolution even more difficult.

In the aftermath of the Dallas shootings, lots of articles are popping up that cite statistical differences between blacks and whites in a variety of areas, including socio-economic levels, employment/income, and death rate.  So far every article I have seen indicates a serious lack of understanding about statistical differences.

I just read a "fact" of this kind published today. Marc Ambinder, in The Week today, said "There's overwhelming evidence that, in the heat of the moment, police officers are more likely to shoot black people simply because they are black. (If you're a black teenager, you are 21 times more likely to be the victim of a police shooting than you would be if you were white)". That's a horrific disparity, and undoubtedly, at least to a degree, reflects genuinely biased use of force against blacks.

BUT:  The ONLY way such a statistical fact can be valid is if EVERY other factor besides race were equivalent between groups.  To assume that it is entirely and only because of racial difference is to fall prey to the kinds of exaggerations that promote racial anger and bigotry.

Are we comparing, for instance, white teenagers in Minneapolis with black teenagers in Atlanta?  What about all the other differences?  Are the groups matched for education?  Socio-economic status?  Gang memberships?  Who kills the teenagers, white or black police? Other teenagers?  Are the groups equally engaged in lawful or unlawful behavior prior to the shootings?

Actually they are not matched for ANYTHING except race, which means the person quoting these "statistics" is finding what he was already looking for, racial bias by police.  We don't need to stir up the pot with misleading and misunderstood statistics.  It's bad enough, and responsible reporters and writers of articles should accept an obligation to be careful and accurate in their use of statistics.

I don't anticipate much interest in the above notes, though I think they are in fact important to understand.  But they are not exciting and they reveal that much of the statistical "evidence" cited to account for or explain or justify the shootings in Dallas is primarily emotional and a dramatic interpretation of statistics to exaggerate and justify the shootings.