What’s expected from a composer in residence
NewsHuddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2024 has engaged Lithuanian performance-based artist Lina Lapelytė as Composer in Residence.
Her duties?
Born in Kaunas, Lapelytė is known for a performance-based practice rooted in music, flirting with pop culture, gender stereotypes and nostalgia. Her works engage trained and untrained performers, often in an act of singing through a wide range of genres such as mainstream music and opera. Singing takes the form of a collective and affective event, questioning vulnerability and acts of silencing.
ohoto: HCMH/Andrej Vasilenko
While the (post-)modern networks of the ancient modern music ideas are gradually dying, some type of desperate young people cling to the faded ideas of the forefathers, in the hope to squeeze some life out of juvenile thin gestures so that serious issues can still be postponed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44EUdUpQVzM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzRMdPbALIc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAL_KWbTNrg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZzcXiaC6Tw
This stuff is always presented as ‘contemporary’ but nobody seems to be aware that it is all more than half a century old. Have people forgotten? Yes, these ideas are demented, so people forget about them, so that when they pop-up they seem to be new.
True that. In the 1960s it was called “multimedia,” i.e. Gesamtkunstwerk without the Kunst. Kunst was replaced with novelty. Novelty was the only thing mediocre talents could aspire to.
I am awaiting Borstlap’s comment just so I can downvote it without really reading it…..
No really, try reading. This kind of drivel goes on year after year at HCMF and the money keeps rolling in.
Thanks Jeff, I thought I was the only one to do so.
Wholeheartedly recommended, these oldtestament sermons get on my nerves when I’ve to type them here. So unfair! Huddersfield is one of the enlightened beacons of progress, every year I hear entirely new things that I could never have imagined. And that is the excitement it brings, you never know what you’re gonna hear.
I am thrilled to attend again this year!
Sally
This of course, tells more about you than about Mr. Borstlap.
Sounds excruciating. More recycled Poundshop Boulez and that Wuppertal woman from the 1970s. Why do people insist on falling for it time and time again?
Because it promises being modern. That it is in fact very old, people don’t notice: these centres like Huddersfield go on safe, for that what they have found modern half a century ago, so they know what it is, no thinking needed. The level of thinking is: oh, it’s the new that I knew already long ago. So, it is very conventional, and not modern at all. And this apart from any possible artistic qualities.
An example of the real modern – and it also sounds terribly good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4avDHIy8qM
That is really a marvelous work, indeed! I shall have to listen to more of M. Connesson’s music. The first 90 seconds or so sound very much like Philip Glass, but thankfully the movement develops in an individual manner; likewise, one easily hears influences in the other two movements, yet in the context of an individual and memorable compositional voice. Thank you for the link!
Was that AI generated? Such words put together with no real meaning, but people will think it means something deep and new and not to be criticized.
When I read something I don’t get, I know it’s meaningful and deep, because I know my limitations. This virtue helped me greatly throughout my life! There’s so much that remains mysterious.
Sally
Definitely generated by the Contemporary Classical Composer’s Bullshit Generator: https://www.dominicirving.com/cccbsg/
This is a far cry from Joseph Haydn’s job duties as a composer-in-residence at the Esterhazy Palace. His music I actually like.
If I were fabulously rich I would hire a resident composer and a private Cantonese chef in my mansion. The latter is easier to find than the former.
No, there are thousands out there who would be too willing to be paid. They are being produced in the thousands by the universities and conservatories all over the place. But their products would be more difficult to digest than Cantonese dishes because they did not learn how to taste meals.
I smell a grant.
I remember when Huddersfield was a serious music festival. It’s become woke joke