The Muse That Sings:
Composers Speak About the Creative Process
Publisher: Oxford University
Press, 1999, 2003 Order from Amazon,Barnes and Noble, or your local independent bookstore.
The Muse That Sings is a unique behind-the-scenes looks at both
twentieth-century music and the nuts and bolts of creative work. Here,
twenty-five of America's leading composers -- from Adams to Zorn -- talk candidly
about their craft, their motivations, their difficulties, and how they proceed
from musical idea to finished composition.
While focusing on
the process and the stories behind specific works, the composers also touch on
topics that will interest anyone involved in creative work. They discuss
teachers and mentors, the task of revision, relationships with performers, and
the ongoing struggle for a balance between freedom and discipline.
They reveal sources
of inspiration, artistic goals, and the often unexpected ways musical ideas
develop. Some describe personal tonal systems; others discuss the impact of
technology on their work; still others reflect philosophically on the inner
impulses and outer influences that continue to drive them.
Serious music
has a reputation for being difficult and inaccessible, and The Muse That Sings provides a powerful antidote. The composers in this book speak
clearly and thoughtfully in response to key questions of concern to all readers
interested in contemporary music.
Each interview has
been edited to stand alone as a concise meditation on inspiration and technique. The book includes selected
discographies and biographical sketches. Anyone interested in new music or the
creative process will find this lively collection a valuable resource of
inspiration and insight.
REVIEWS
These interviews with 25
composers are distilled to short, informal yet highly focused discussions in
which almost all of the composers refer in some way to the academic serialist
movement that has been scaring off audiences for 50 years. McCutchan (Marcel
Moyse: Voice of the Flute), who conducted the interviews between 1995 and 1998,
allows the voices of the composers -- most of whom live and work in the U.S.
and were born between 1930 and 1960 -- to come through with candor. John
Corigliano explains that he composed his opera Ghosts of Versailles in colored crayons because he "wanted the color
of the sound to change as a single line moved." On the relative importance
of self-doubt, Bruce Adolphe, education adviser to New York's Chamber Music
Society of Lincoln Center, says, "Doubt is a waste of energy when you're
trying to be creative, but it's useful when you're editing the piece."
About his work habits, Steve Reich says, "What happens in 95 percent of
the pieces is that I work a lot, I trash a lot, I revise a lot" and John
Zorn, who has influenced the downtown avant-garde music scene, explains,
"The sensibility of the generation that I belong to, which is interested
in world music, jazz, funk, hard-core punk, classical music . . . is the same one
Mozart had. He made use of everything around him." Rounding out each
interview is a selected list of the composer's work. These intimate snapshots
of creative artists contemplating their role and function at the end of the
20th century succeed not only in shedding light on the creative process, but in
dispelling many of the negative stereotypes attached to contemporary music. --
Publisher's Weekly
It would be easy to
underestimate the credit due to McCutchan for this fascinating and readable
book. She simply turned on the
mike, one might suggest, and let the composers speak. But a less skillful editor, a more ham-fisted interviewer or
less insightful musician could have fumbled this process at several points,
compromising clarity, continuity, balance or accessibility of the prose. The fact that she both controlled the
process so well and so thoroughly hid the means by which she did so constitutes
the greatest strength of a very strong piece of work . . . The effect on the
reader is astonishing as one after another of these composers is revealed,
warts and all, to be desperately and wonderfully human. -- American Music Teacher
McCutchan has edited
the conversations into a series of soliloquies, with the intention not to
illuminate the composers' general biographies or underlying aesthetic
principles, but to unlock the specifics of the "creative process" in
contemporary music. The result is that each composer's testimony reads like a
personal fantasia on how and why they wrote concert music at the end of the
20th century.
For all their
variety, it's possible to discern uniform themes in the composers'
responses. Christopher Rouse is
typical in lamenting the influence of "highly intellectualized forms of music
theory" on 20th-century music, putting his faith instead in music that says "something meaningful about the human experience." Translated into a resolute
anti-modernism, this stances is indicative of the way that many of McCutchan's
chosen composers seem concerned to continue essentially Romantic traditions and
conceptions of orchestral music, apparently much more so than the majority of
their European contemporaries.
McCutchan's
approachable, non-specialist book provides necessarily open-ended and ambiguous
glimpses into the ineffable mysteries of musical composition. John Zorn neatly
sums up the impossibility of finding any universally true features of the
creative act: "In the end, I'm the only one who knows [which musical ideas
belong where], and if I don't know that, I'm bullshitting." --
BBC Music Magazine
...The Muse That
Sings [is] a book which will prove fascinating to those with an interest
in contemporary musical composition, and in the creative process in general . . . Every decade needs a book like this, for ideas and tastes will always change
and it will always require the work of scholars to document how the creative
minds of an age think about their art. Ann McCutchan has provided such a
work. -- The Ithaca Times
McCutchan has welded
her talents as a performing musician and writer to produce a highly readable
assessment of serious music currently being written. In The Muse That Sings, she has avoided the temptation of letting her subjects overwhelm
readers with complex theoretical material and overstate their cases with
daunting language. . . The Muse That Sings should be in public and academic
music libraries, accessible to the serious layman, music student, and
professional musician. It is recommended for those eager to explore the music
pouring out of out American composers and should inspire performances of their
music. -- Notes: Journal
of the Music Library Association