For Just Plain ol' Composers, Part XLII

The Credential That Isn't

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There is a pressure felt by many composers working today that goes largely unnamed because naming it requires admitting vulnerability. It is the suspicion that one is not a real composer — not fully, not in the contemporary sense — because one cannot program, cannot code generative algorithms, cannot produce direct digital synthesis from first principles, cannot navigate the software environments that the academy and the new-music infrastructure have quietly declared the baseline of serious practice.

This suspicion is false. But it is not irrational, because the pressure that produces it is real.

The history of twentieth-century composition is full of figures whose mathematical and technological limitations, by current institutional standards, should have disqualified them. Ben Johnston — who extended Harry Partch's just intonation system into some of the most harmonically complex string quartet writing ever produced — was not a programmer. His notation was so demanding that ensembles approached his scores with something close to dread. The mathematical depth was total and uncompromising. The digital fluency was beside the point. Nobody examines his ten string quartets and finds a deficit.

Morton Feldman worked with graph paper and a sensibility so refined it could not be systematized. Olivier Messiaen derived his modes of limited transposition by ear and by theological instinct, not by formula. Conlon Nancarrow punched piano rolls by hand with a drill press, producing polyrhythmic structures of extraordinary complexity through physical obsession rather than algorithmic process. Harry Partch built his own instruments because no existing instrument would play his tunings — he was a theorist, a carpenter, a wanderer, and not a programmer. Giacinto Scelsi composed by improvising on a monochord and had others transcribe and orchestrate the results. The mechanism in each case was irreplaceable, idiosyncratic, and had nothing to do with code.

The institutional pressure being described here has a specific history. In the 1980s and 1990s, the academy began to conflate compositional seriousness with technological fluency. Centers like IRCAM became prestige machines. Environments like MAX/MSP became credentials. Composers who worked with traditional forces, analog means, or unfashionable notational systems were quietly assigned to a secondary category — not sufficiently research-active, not networked into the technology infrastructure, not avant-garde in the currently approved direction.

What this filtering system actually selected for was access and institutional affiliation. It rewarded composers who had residencies at well-funded centers, who could write grant applications in the approved language, who had the time and resources to learn environments that required significant technical investment to enter. It did not select for musical depth, compositional necessity, or originality of thought. These qualities were present in some of the work produced within the system. They were not what the system measured.

The composers who feel this pressure — and there are many, working seriously and in relative isolation — are not failing to meet a legitimate standard. They are being evaluated by a criterion designed to serve institutional and funding structures rather than music. This is not a new dynamic. In the postwar decades, serialism performed the same function: composers who couldn't or wouldn't produce twelve-tone rows on demand were made to feel insufficiently rigorous, behind the times, naïve. Most of the music that survived that period did so because it had something urgent to say. The methodology mostly produced tenure.

Programming is a tool. It is a powerful tool, and composers who wield it with genuine musical imagination produce work that could not exist otherwise. The tool is not the art. The question that matters is never whether a composer can operate the current instrument of institutional approval. It is whether the composer has something that needs to be made and the means — whatever means — to make it.

A compositional system that generates @300 works over four decades, that arrives at structural conclusions no one else has reached (polytempic polymicrotonality), that requires no computer to exist for its existence (except for realizations), because it is founded on the independence of simultaneous systems of time and tuning — this is not a workaround for lacking technical skills. It is a description of what composition actually is, underneath all the tools and all the credentials.

The composers who feel inadequate for not programming are not behind. They are outside a particular institutional consensus that mistook its own preferred tools for the definition of the art. That consensus is not music history. It is an administration.