if it's all been done already, go do something else.

Perhaps one of my most ardent intellectual and artistic pet-peeves is the statement “everything that could possibly be done has been done.” It may surprise you to know that at one time I held court with this thought as an avid worshipper of the sentiment and its relatively shallow meanings on a daily basis. I called that the first year of graduate study, the daunting, rigorous clanging of hitherto unknown (or only in passing) innovations of the 20th Century reverberating in my ear, creating an inferiority complex that has taken a decade to mitigate, an inferiority complex rampant among many of the most talented – and perhaps least-“accomplished” – composers.

The initial reaction I have to the statement now is, “so, what?” What of it? Is there a quantifiable measure of techniques and harmonic styles and technical details and tedium down to the last sixteenth rest and string voicing that definitively proves that every single thing possible has been composed? And if, by some fiat of magic, we were to unequivocally receive an affirmative response to the query, what would that fundamentally change? Would that prevent artists from creating art, from attempting new techniques and finding new ways to connect – intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually – with themselves, their performers, and their audiences? Would ultimate intellectual knowledge that there can be, essentially, “nothing new under the sun,” preclude any sort of artistic work in any field?

In a sense, it did, as far as I was concerned. When I began graduate study, I would compose religiously and steadily, and in seminars and through peers I was quickly introduced to worlds of innovation and compositional techniques and abstractions of the sonic realm that initially supercharged me but rapidly made me shrink back into an intellectual corner. I would compose a piece or set out with some new ideas, thinking they were peerless (I blame this primarily on naïveté and lack of book-learnin’), and then be, for example, introduced to Giacinto Scelsi’s works of ultra-Klangfarbenmelodie, or to Berio’s collage works, or Lachenmann’s or Pape’s bizarre and successful takes on extended technical writing for strings. I would abandon the ideas I formulated, as – truthful or not, verifiable or not – I would see them not as personal innovations or simply additional techniques I could use, but as tawdry, juvenile carbon copies of the Masters. While I was in college, I had the opposite problem: when first exposed to Messiaen’s early period, all of my music took on an 8 pr 9-pitch modal harmonic language populated by tritones; when introduced to Sessions’s symphonies (and when I finally understood them) I wrote loosely dodecaphonic and unapologetically dissonant work; when studying Bartók’s middle period, all of my music appeared to have Hungarian and Romanian rhythmic elements for no apparent reason. And, clearly, I reveled in this – I relished the idea that I could write things approximating my idols, and, brazenly, thought I could improve on their techniques. Getting my hands on a copy of Messiaen’s Technique of My Musical Language one Christmas, for a hot minute, made me think I’d absorb all of Olivier’s secrets and become the next, better Messiaen. A fundamental shift occurred when I realized that the music I needed to be composing was supposed to be mine and not the legacy of others – the anecdote of when Roger Sessions was playing a student work of his on the piano for Ernest Bloch with the latter screaming at Sessions each of the influences heard is a constructed scene that started on an endless loop once I was thrown into the much larger, much more competitive world of actual professional composition. In order to compete, in order to thrive, in order to succeed and be above the fray, I would have to innovate and unleash my own voice.

The only problem, though, is that I had no idea what that was, no idea how to attain it through the current methods of loving mimicry, no external impetus to hunt for it. As a means to justify writing whatever I wanted as a student, which oddly enough centered around a relatively developed and mature rhythmic-harmonic language, I decided to make “everything has already been done” as a sort of mantra, and I’m sorry I ever did. Rather than allow knowledge of trends and ideas and styles inculcate my musical vernacular and inspire and challenge me, I allowed it to have dominion over me, to intimidate me. The end result was a young, tenuous composer purposefully trying to innovate, making a concerted effort to pioneer new sonic realms. What I had long feared, retrospectively, came true: with increased knowledge came increased sorrow, when, rather, the truth should have set me free.

Innovation rarely happens purposefully in the arts. Innovation seems to arise spontaneously in collective leaps forward while artists are merely attempting to solve critical problems through methods other than ones they have been taught or know very well. I will go so far that innovation in artistic technique is accidental, with intellectual leaps being more like sudden lurches after all the happy accidents. (Not to say none of us knows what we're doing - quite the contrary - rather, change comes like a snowfall, not lightning: gradual, silently, sometimes violently) Picasso, Mies van der Rohe, Klee, Mondrian. Debussy, Stravinsky, George Antheil, Erik Satie. (Well, to an extent, Debussy purposefully attempted to be an innovator, but he had been composing for more than 25 years before he started to seriously refer to himself such) Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henri. La Monte Young. They did not – so far as the historical record and their biographies show – wake up each morning with the words “I will change music and/or art today.” Their to-do lists did not include, after a light lunch and before afternoon tea, “Shake Up World With Groundbreaking New Timbres/Forms/Etc.” As a quietly terrified student, this was all to which I could cling. I did not realize – and only within the past few years have I finally accepted – that innovation of any sort in the arts comes slowly, unwittingly, and after much trial and error. Often, failures themselves become innovations long after the fact of their creation, long after their inception. Le Sacre flopped as a ballet, as a staged work; nearly 100 years later, both the choreographic and musical aspects are seen as hugely pivotal artistic developments, the disastrous premiere itself seen as the fulcrum upon which the weight of 20th Century art shifted away from the Weltschmerz and Wagnerian/Mahlerian ultra-Romanticism of the 19th Century.

Indeed, I was slow to realize this - a charade used to distance myself from questions of worth as I was coming of age. I abstractly knew this, certainly - but it was not a prevalence or truth that I breathed every morning.

For a growing number of currently-working and often largely successful composers, the standard of “there is nothing new under the sun” seems to be the words exhaled through a yawn both when they rise from slumber and when they end their day with drowsiness. This population believes this sentiment, if not reifies it as a daily maxim actively and nonchalantly brandished. My question to this is: why? Why do these composers continue composing? Why continue working? Why create art or attempt to create it if what one writes is nothing but mere, sheer mimeograph? Why, especially, are so many of these people engaged in teaching - and maintain these teaching positions in earnest? Patronage, but for what reason? Educating new composers and musicians, but to what end? The ramifications here are wide ranging: why perpetuate any artform of any sort? Why train performers? Why simply sit stationary? This thinking, this very insistence that Everything Is Done, is the primary intellectual rationale those suspicious of the Arts point to as a means of decrying art and support for its creation and performance; the tenet of Nothing New Can Happen is the very thinking that keeps young people and tenuous musicians and critics viewing the symphony hall as nothing more than a museum, a concertmaster or conductor nothing more than a docent. The statement is monochromatic and incontrovertible; those who adhere to it should, frankly, either eradicate adherence to the mantra and grudgingly create passionately and earnestly, or leave the business of art and music, the institutions to teach art and music, and the life of a creative artist and find a new profession immediately, else those persons who stay entrenched be labeled frauds, or worse. I cannot, honestly, see how one can entertain this notion that their art is, essentially, without intellectual and by extension artistic justification, while composing daily and honestly, thoroughly encouraging young composers and musicians. They are mutually exclusive. One can deride innovation, or be suspicious of artistic intent, in their own music, or in the music of others - but to outrightly deny that innovation can ever occur again and to imply that all music is dead is shortsighted and laughable.