With my top-secret summer project looming like some sort of massive glacier or lava flow, I regretfully took my leave of the lively and stimulating exchange of ideas at ArtsJournal's Critical Conversation on the Future of Music. In my last post, I quoted at length from some e-mails I'd received in response to the discussion: “I think the most beautiful thing about composing now, as opposed to then, is that there is the option to ‘hang out’ in the crazy network of music that is available. Writing music feels like I'm having a conversation or writing an e-mail or making a phone call rather than writing an essay. It has to do with the way people talk with their friends – a little language begins to develop, little nuances and half-truths and leitmotifs. … Wise young composers are eating everything up in their path, devouring all the available musics and building a family made up of Conversants, rather than Inductees....The Future, which I'll define here as representing a movement from Bad Attitude to Good Attitude, operates, like evolution, on the level of the individual, not on the level of the institution. If you see writing as a form of social engagement, you soon realize that it doesn't make any sense to be undiplomatic, ever....”
