John Zorn
I didn’t know who John Zorn was before coming to class, but
people had told me to expect great things. I listened to his music, and it
didn’t seem appealing to me, but I was eager to hear what he had to say. When
going to class I couldn’t help but feel the excitement in the classroom from my
fellow students. My first impressions were this man that seemed really excited
about life, interested in music and what it means to be a musician. The first
sentence I remember stuck out to me was “write for the people around you”. With
this I agree. I love when someone writes for me to perform and I love writing
for my friends. I think in music, we want to give our friends the best
performance, so although they might not be the best, they are at least going to
put their heart into the performance. But then I got confused later in the
visit when he said, “I only write for the best”. Well, okay, that could be true
if one only surrounds oneself with the best. But there is a lot of privilege
that comes with writing for the best. This contradiction probably struck
another student, when they asked him about his privilege. He replies that he
didn’t feel privileged, because once he lived in a small tenement and lived off
of $1,600 a year, which he inherited from his grandmother. Yet, he gets to tour
the world with a band of his, gets to say choose amongst the best players in
the world, and not only that, he get’s to choose from many saxophonists when he
is looking for something specific and gets that same saxophonist to perfume the
same piece every time it’s performed. Here am I, thinking I’m privileged to
just be able to go to school and learn what I’m passionate about, and get
someone to play the music I write. There are two things that irritate me, one
is contradiction and the other is failure to see ones own privilege.
I was
slightly surprised about his view on people who prefers to write for big
orchestras, or writing down music in general. He did not think it was “not his
thing” or “not his way of working”, but he seemed to passionately hate it. I
don’t think that was a particularly good message to us concert composers who
are trying to write our music.
I’m positive John Zorn has had to
face a lot of difficulties in his life, and the life he lives now is completely
different from what it was when he was starting his career. But boy, I wish we
got to hear about that as well, because it sounded to me as if he was a
narcissist psychopath.
I want to end this on a good note,
because not everything he said was confusing to me. The greatest thing he said
though, which I hope will follow me through my professional life was something
about when writing music for other medium, the people who hire me are not doing
me a favor, rather I’m doing them a favor.
His reluctance to admit his privilege was pretty strange and sometimes it is difficult to place ourselves into someone else's shoes. His comment about only writing for the best is so extremely full of privilege, I definitely wish I had the best performers for all my performances! Sometimes the challenge of composing good music isn't writing to the highest level (the best) but writing to a more accessible level (which ultimately gets performed more).
ReplyDeleteI agree that his talk was wildly contradictory at points, and I honestly felt like his advice was often not applicable to people (like myself and most students) who don't have the best ever players constantly at their disposal, and who can't just refuse to write commissioned work because they only want to write what they feel like writing. Thanks for your honest take on Zorn's talk!
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