Mitra Muijen
A reaction to Martijn Padding’s lecture
A moment of honesty: I reject Martijn Padding’s modernistic, experimental, atonal music. A ‘hot take’ perhaps. But allow me to explain.
For starters, the music I am talking about doesn’t comprise Padding’s entire oeuvre. Only those works that are of the extremely dissonant kind, wherein randomness seems to have been a guiding principle.
The positive side of composing like that, is that it breaks with tradition. Padding is in that sense aligned with the great seventeenth century innovators, like Monteverdi, who famously dismissed Zarlino’s rules in their so-called seconda practica.
There is a major difference, however. Monteverdi and his colleagues turned away from the old compositional rules in order to enhance their affective apparatuses. Early church music might have been pleasant to the ear; but emotionally speaking, it had its limits. Dissonances, for example, were employed only in cadences; where they’d be resolved almost instantly. The Monteverdian crowd introduced a plethora of previously unheard musical patterns, specifically meant to emphasize the meaning of song texts.
Padding’s break from the established rules, however, is underpinned by other merits.
Rather than emotional depth in music, it is a desire for originality that drives his compositional style. “Is my piece harder to perform than the one by my colleague?,” he might wonder. Or, “Am I the first composer to combine a g-sharp and an a-flat (in some non-equal temperament) in a single piece?”.
Wanting to be original isn’t anything bad per se — were it not that that desire ultimately takes away from affective variation. The atonal harmonies might well induce feelings of despair or fear. But they clearly fail to touch on such emotions as joy, grief or love (to name just a few). Those affects simply require more subtle harmonies and rhythms. Yet it is precisely this that Padding seeks to avoid.
So it isn’t innovation as such that I find problematic. Just the fact that it’s at the expense of the expressive power of music.
