Another Reflection on 2016

As we all know, 2016 was not an easy year for a multitude of reasons. I always spend the last couple weeks of December reflecting on the year (as I imagine a lot of people do), and I thought back to my first KLANG post of 2016 (posted on this day one year ago). I couldn’t remember what it was, so I opened up my computer and checked the website. Sadly, it was my “Remembering Boulez” post, which was not a stellar way to start the year, but it was a post that needed to happen in the immediate aftermath of learning of Boulez’s passing.

The problem was that it did not stop there. Over and over again 2016 took from the world one musician after another. Concert music, electronic music, experimental music, popular music, jazz, folk music, nobody seemed off-limits in 2016, and it was definitely a year that took a lot of important musicians and composers who helped shape the musical landscape of 2016. Here is (very) short list of some of the composers lost in 2016:

Pierre Boulez (Jan 5, 90)
Leslie Bassett (Feb 4, 93)
Steven Stucky (Feb 14, 66)
George Martin (March 8, 90)
Peter Maxwell Davis (March 14, 81)
Tony Conrad (April 9, 76)
Jean-Claude Risset (Nov 22, 78)
Pauline Oliveros (Nov 25, 84)
​Karel Husa (Dec 14, 95)

On a more personal note, I felt directly impacted by the passing of so many of the composers on this list. While I did not know any of these composers personally on a personal level (I had met and spoken with Steven Stucky on multiple occasions, but always under professional circumstances), their music, writings and lectures were a huge influence on me as a young composer searching for my own artistic voice.

Karel Husa was a composer who sparked in me a new interest in the wind ensemble within the last couple of years, and while I’ve never been incredibly interested in the ensemble or literature I always found his music wonderfully imaginative in substance and orchestration. Pauline Oliveros and Jean-Claude Risset, who died only a few days apart, were massive influences on me in my early studies of electronic music at Ohio University. Rissets Songes for instruments and electronics is still one of my favorite early works for instruments and electronic sound and Oliveros experiments with electronics are still of particular interest for me. Additionally, Oliveros’ philosophy and method of deep listening had a huge impact on how I listen to the world around me.

Tony Conrad ignited in me a new interst in minimalism around 2008/09. While there was a time in my early studies when I appreciated Glass, Reich and, to the greatest extent, Terry Riley, I was never really taken by minimalism. That is until I heard Conrad's album Slapping Pythagoras with all of its beatiful and noisy repetition of cells and drones. This album would later get me interested in more gritty and abrasive (at least in comparison to "classic" minimalism) forms of minimalist music that I didn’t find in the works of Glass, Reich, Riley or even La Mont Yonge (nothing against those guys, though). These included Julius Eastman, Louis Andriessen, Julia Wolfe and Frederic Rzewski.

Peter Maxwell Davies was one of the most influential composers on my musical thinking as an undergraduate at Ohio University. I first found his Eight Songs for a Mad King when I was a sophomore and I listened to the Unicorn recording with Julius Eastman while following along with the score more times than I could possibly even remember. I even attempted to model my undergraduate thesis after Davies’ work by writing a monodrama for baritone voice and Pierrot ensemble. Though I fell far short of the mark with my own composition, I will never forget the massive influence that Davie’s piece had on me, as well as Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot, in forging my interests in the intersections of music and theater.

George Martin almost goes without saying. I was never a huge fan of The Beatles (I know, blasphemy, right?), but I did like the later more experimental records. It was years later that I found out about the influence of George Martin and the recording and studio techniques he employed that made those records so special. Not to take anything away from The Beatles, but for me it was the studio experimentation that makes some of those songs so special and interesting. Additionally, Martin brought the idea of the studio as an instrument (an idea that had been in practice in Europe and American universities for years) to the world of popular music. His genius as a recording engineer was not limited to polished recordings, and he is someone I’ve always looked up to in term of creative recording technologies.

Steven Stucky and Leslie Bassett are two composers who I don’t really align with aesthetically, but as an undergraduate I loved studying their music, specifically for the orchestral color. I was all about drawing aesthetic lines in those days of my studies - “I’ll listen to this because it’s atonal, but that’s not thorny enough, yada yada yada….”. But Bassett and Stucky were different. I would listen to Stucky’s Ad Parnassum over and over again. Bassett’s Variations for Orchestra was one of my favorite pieces at a time when all I wanted to listen to was Babbitt and Stockhausen. It was also through Bassett that I became familiar with the work of Robert Morris, who would later be very influential on me during my graduate studies.

When I was working toward my master’s at Bowling Green State University I had the opportunity of meeting Steven Stucky. Though I saw him around the building numerous time, I only had one opportunity to spend any quality time speaking with him - the 2010 BGSU New Music Festival. During that festival we met and talked 3-4 times over the course of 3 days. My favorite moment was at an after-party following the last concert of the festival in which everyone gathered at a small bar in downtown Bowling Green called DiBenedetto’s for drinks and festival talk. I went up to the bar to get a refill on my whiskey and I saw Stucky standing, also waiting patiently for a refill. I walked up to him and congratulated him on the performance of his new piece Isabelle Dances and told him it was nice having met him (we had already talked 2-3 times at this point during the festival). He reached over and patted me on the back and said “It was nice meeting you too, Jon. You’re a good kid. Hopefully we’ll see each other again the next time I’m here.” Then we clinked our glasses together, took a drink and parted ways into the crowd. 

That brings us to Pierre Boulez, definitely the hardest hit for me on this list. I won’t spend much time talking about that here, since I dedicated an entire post to reflecting on Boulez a year ago on the day of his passing. I can say that Boulez’s music is still a primary influence on my own work, his writings (yes, even the early polemical ones) have been important in the shaping of my own musical thinking, and I feel that he has written some of the richest and most emotionally moving music I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing. He will also be dearly missed, and I cannot emphasize enough the impact that he had on 20th century music. Whether you love him or hate him, you cannot deny his importance on new developments in musical thinking, composition, discourse and performance. 

And with that I think I’ll stop. I apologize for starting both 2016 and 2017 with downer posts, but I felt it necessary to do a reflection on the impact of those that were lost in 2016, both for the music world at-large and for me personally. Let’s hope that 2017 is a little more forgiving. Below is a list of performers and composers in the popular music world I also felt were major losses, at least for me personally. You will all be missed, and thank you for your contributions to the developments of music in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Leonard Cohen
David Bowie
Prince
Merle Haggard
Maurice White
Glenn Frey
Paul Kantner
Greg Lake
Keith Emmerson
George Michael
Pete Burns
James Woolley
John Berry
Phife Dawg