Me and 20th cent

Béla Bartók
March 25, 1881 – September 26, 1945

Twentieth century composers are the bad boys in my life. As a Theory 1 student, I really should just focus on Baroque composers right now as I clearly am not ready to handle 20th cent anything if all I can say about a Bartók chamber piece is that it's dissonant. (Oh I mean... it's built off Hungarian folk and stuff. Based in a harmonic minor key, maybe even a double harmonic minor key. Get a little gypsy in there and I sound supposedly more suitable for 20th cent.) My IB Extended Essay is on Ravel's orchestration techniques, too. I don't know what I was thinking, but I can't change the topic, plus I'm pretty psyched to be working on it with our school's choir director (who has a doctorate in orchestral conducting), but anyway...

Maurice Ravel
March 7, 1875 – December 28, 1937

My interest in 20th cent started with the French, from Saint-Saëns, to Debussy, to Ravel, and I guess to an extent Fauré. And since the District Honors Orchestra event I took part in this January -- when we played Dances of Transylvania -- I've taken interest to more Eastern composers from Bartók to Khachaturian and now to Stravinsky. I also keep Vivaldi, Handel and Bach close to my heart, but they're like the best friends who will never leave me, (as I violinist I go through the Suzuki books and they all reek of Baroque) whereas I feel as though I lack a concrete connection to 20th cent composers. Once I listen to the first few measures of, say, Stravinsky's Petroushka or Khachaturian's Fantastic Waltz (piano duet), it's like seeing a live jazz performance, being glued to an outstanding performer and later thinking about him the rest of the night. I end up dreaming of one day being as impressive a bassist like him and spend hours at home just working through scales on the fretboard (or just fingerboard on double) because my motivation is just to be as good.

I want to be an impressive performer, but I think even more so, I want to be a composer.

I look up to these Eastern composers and think to myself "Holy crap, when do you think you're competent enough to write something like this?" Am I supposed to be submerged in the Eastern culture or is getting an excellent music education enough? Should I treat composing as a hobby like drawing and then hope that one day all the practice takes me where I want to be? At this point, I'm seventeen and am going to go to college in-state, at home. I really don't know what's going on in my life, and I don't know if it's God's will that I end up being a composer/arranger -- of if it is, that I end up doing it for purely art music or for something else. I mean, it is incredibly hard to make it as an art music composer in 21st cent United States. I'm no Aaron Copland. I'm Vietnamese, I work in a pentatonic setting, and almost always in A harmonic minor (these are things I notice as I play music with my church choir); maybe it isn't radical to assume that 20th cent Eastern European is just not for me. I'm also pretty darn dramatic and end up sounding like fatalist (haha!)

That's enough blogging, I'll just turn on the Firebird Suite and start going through the Bartok 44 Duets book I got last week and see what happens ten years from now.