Sternfeld-Dunn: Admitting your music is boring!

As an active composer I find I spend a lot of time going to hear contemporary music concerts either put on by new music ensembles or composer conferences. Today I will say what many will not...the majority of these concerts are boring. They just are, it's a fact of life. I would say at a typical conference with three days of music with 8 or more concerts there may be one piece (if you are lucky) that is truly memorable. There are certainly quite a few pieces that are good (maybe competent is a better description) but that you won't remember the next week, and then there are a handful of truly bad pieces.

So why am I bringing this up? Because one of the pieces I am working on for this project is a piece for English Horn and Cello and right now it is boring. That's right I said it. I feel comfortable saying that it is a competent piece, perhaps even a good piece, but it is certainly not memorable.

The impetus for the piece was taken from a line of poetry by Edna St. Vincent Sinclair titled Savage Beauty. The line is "...and I will love the silence...", this is also the title of the work. To me this line was simply stunning and lent itself to some beautiful musical ideas. So I set to work trying to write a piece that explored movement from moment to moment, silence (of course), beauty and timbre.

The piece was premiered by two wonderful  musicians Keri McCarthy on English Horn and Ruth Boden on Cello. I think the performance was fantastic and they lent a ton of musicality to the piece, and I was still left a little...well...bored. I know it was not them, it was me.

Ultimately I think the piece is just not beautiful enough, specifically the opening. It's a good opening but not great. It's a pretty opening but not beautiful! It explores color but not as deeply as it could. Perhaps this is the problem I see with much of the new music out there it does what it needs to but only half way, it doesn't go far enough.

I know I haven't sold the piece to you yet, but give it a listen and see what you think. My thoughts are that as it stands it's a good piece but not a great piece. I think the world has enough good pieces.