"Music is a community, is trust" with John Zorn
Our guest speaker today, John Zorn, is a composer, arranger, record producer and a saxophonist. He pointed out in the beginning of the lecture that some new music nowadays have become “thorny.” As someone coming from an avant-garde focused music school such as Eastman School of Music, I could strongly relate to that the day I turned to screen scoring. I remember when I was back at Eastman doing my bachelor’s degree in composition, I have seen a great number of colleagues of mine wrote complicated music consisted of complex rows, twelve-tones, microtones and other academic methods. Their music requires pages of pages of program note to explain how intellectual and carefully designed their music is. I used to fall into that category, blindly follow the mainstream in academia.
After turning to screen scoring a few years after I graduated, I naively thought I would officially break free from the curse but have come to a realization that music written for any types of multimedia such as films, is served to soothe either the audience or the director. This loop has trapped myself in a cocoon I made for myself and sometimes I get lost in the pursuit of false purposes that music should not exist for. However, I later found out that music as a broader meaning and purpose than just markings on the paper based on an intricate mathematical formula.
“Music is a community,” as John Zorn said. The message he brought behind those seemingly simple words was powerful. Throughout his career as a concert music composer as well as a film music composer, he explained that music is more about the relationship you build with the performers instead of a form of art that is created to the audience’s liking. Furthermore, music is built upon trust. John made a light-hearted joke about how terrible a specific orchestra can be so unlike a lot of us who are eager to work with an orchestra, John prefers writing for friends. This is an interesting point because it reminded my time at Eastman once more. Because of his close relationship with musicians, he knows where this specific player’s strength lies and finds a way to engage the musician in the most economical way. Slowly, the composer will build trust with the musician. “Limitation is liberation,” we all giggled as he threw a sophisticated statement like that at us. His insights or wisdom coatest with a sense of humor makes the lecture a little easier to digest, and the way he looks at things has been extremely inspiring.
Lastly, he drew to an important conclusion - Music is the people. The real journey a piece of music brings often happens after the piece is finished. The statement hooks back to the topic he brought up in the very beginning of the lecture and I entirely resonant with his point of view. On top of my experience working with musicians I trust, the same principle also applies to film productions. Film is a much more complicated community and trust, and I’m certainly still in the stage of learning the industry, but the lecture today has been extremely informative and I believe that I will certainly benefit from the experiences he shared with us today down the road with my career as a concert music and film composer.
I appreciated his emphasis on music being about the people. Because music - writing and performing it, becomes such a personal and emotional experience for most people you are not only dealing with people's talents/styles/ skills but also just with their personalities! Although I would like to stay flexible with who I work, I do understand his feeling of finding the right group of people and sticking to them. There is so much involved in the process of making music, and finding the right 'chemistry' and balance with fellow collaborators is indeed quite a magical fit which is why I imagine so many people find collaborators and stick to them.
ReplyDeleteStrong community building seems to be a running theme among successful bandleaders. Frank Zappa also catered to his performers, often writing music in tribute to or meant to show off the talents of his band members. This approach, also employed by Zorn, made performers respect his music and kept it alive through them. Zorn's community seems like another successful realization of this approach. As you said, there is definitely much to learn from his approach to musical community.
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ReplyDeleteThank you for your post, Ching-Shan. I think you highlighted a few things that stood out for me as well and I appreciate your thoughts. It was an interesting talk. There were, however, a few remarks he made that caught me off guard and perhaps made me uncomfortable, but there were others that were definitely intriguing in their own way.
ReplyDeleteI also need to say how much I relate to your experiences and feelings during your undergrad as a composition major!