Writing About Contemporary Composers: Memory and Irony in The Apollonian Clockwork

Abstract

With increasing demands for writers’ subjects to be as ‘relevant’ to as wide an audience as possible, and with the proliferation of technologically mediated marketing and opinion, contemporary composers are being uncritically sensationalised and deified more than ever. By continually seeing personalities in the light of their most popular works, skewed and narrow profiles of artists are formed, perpetuated by commercially minded promoters, evangelistic reviewers and academic echo-chambers. The resulting broad-brush hagiographies do not address adequately the wider musical, cultural, political, philosophical and personal circumstances surrounding today’s composers. If we fail to address these aspects of contemporary music in a more nuanced way, we will fail accurately to archive for future generations the uniqueness of individual composers’ personal artistic development and their wider influences on society. This chapter explores ways in which writers can present research on living and recently deceased composers by avoiding hagiographic tendencies and the pretence of overarching objectivity. It makes the case for purposeful demythologisation and a more nuanced approach to writing on contemporary subjects in general—one that retains academic rigour and analytical depth, yet is more open to interpretation and the possibility of future revision as new sources are revealed (post mortem) and as the critical distance of hindsight unfolds. Using Louis Andriessen’s and Elmer Schönberger’s monograph on Stravinsky, The Apollonian Clockwork, as a case study, and by looking at Louis Andriessen’s tone towards Stravinsky in both his music and his writing, I explore how writers and practitioners can potentially cut through established public opinion, personality cults and narrowly defined associations, to reveal a more honest, albeit more subjective, picture of contemporary composers.