Ann McCutchan
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
copyright 2015 Ann McCutchan
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
copyright 2015 Ann McCutchan