I felt Milton Babbitt's settings of August Stramm were less authentic than his John Hollander settings. He did his onshoring, not without some youthful mimesis early in his career.
Exspressionism came naturally out of Europe's primal scene -- 1000 years of feudalism ending in police states, authoritarian states, and fascism.
We cannot simply graft that onto our culture. And yet that crisis came to us and artists from that primal scene came here and taught us -- Hindemith, Schoenberg, Krenek, Milhaud. And our familiies shed blood to put an end to fascism.
Our primal scene is 500 years of slavery. Sensible 18th Century shopkeepers helped show a way toward a sustainable system that found a way to reality through empiricism, science and pragmatism. Shopkeeper pragmatism, turned toward advertising became the science of manipulation. This extended from selling us things we don't need to getting us to elect people who harm us. And now business leaders have teamed up with some authoritarian usurpers of our government. This must end.
Onshoring keeps the focus on American primal scenes. "Whistle" is Kevin Young's peach -- his son. "An Hymn to Morning" turns Phyllys Wheatley's Hynm to Evening upside down.
Bildung, individuation, spring from a poison oasis.
I compose, play plucked instruments, run ensembles, produce concerts, and advocate for new music, I soaked up contemporary American music for 30 years, working directly with composers from all over the map. In the last 20 years I began composing works that draw on that experience, with a particular concern for finding a coherent way to make reconciling musics that were sealed off from one another. How to make embarrassingly simple and charming music work with the most complex musical modalities? Tipping in this direction has made me aware of the dangers of grasping too firmly onto any one notion.
I've come to Macherey's vision that our shadow (what we're *not*) is radiantly present in our work. So it's perfectly reasonable to *love everything*. We're imbricated. --
**The true necessity of the text manifests itself in the fact that not a word of it can be changed and nothing can be added, even though it appears at each moment as though a new topic could be chosen, an alternative narrative selected. But it is precisely this ceaseless shadowy presence of other possible phrases which could be pronounced, this ineradicable sense that things could have been other than they are, which enforces the constraining necessity of the text we actually have before us.**--Macherey