BOSTON — Marti Epstein cares more about music than music theory. That’s because music is audible, and theories about it are not.
As a composer, and in her job as professor of composition at Berklee College of Music, Epstein’s primary interest is in the way music sounds. Her piece for violin, oboe, and clarinet, “Komorebi,” is what she imagines we would hear if we could experience, as sound, sunlight filtered through leaves on trees. Epstein introduces the piece on camera at the end of the first episode of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s “Pathways to Romanticism” series, streaming here through May 15 (BSO login required to view).
Unlike many academic composers, Epstein is all in with the “if it sounds good, it is good” ethos made famous by Duke Ellington. But rules and numbers? Not so much.
“I’m teaching music,” she said on a video for Berklee College of Music. “I’m not teaching anything about numbers or anything that doesn’t have to do with something you would hear.” And as she speaks, she touches her ears, as if assisting Boston’s graybeards in remembering the location of music’s ultimate destination.
“I am not interested in teaching counterpoint, for example, by teaching all the rules,” she continued. “Memorize the rules, and now go do your exercises? That’s not interesting to me, and it’s not how the composers we study composed.”
New orchestral concert music has a way of leaving audiences feeling unmoored from their own conceptions of what music actually is — or ought to be. Contemporary music festivals seek to remedy this by putting new music in the spotlight, accompanied by copious program notes. Listeners connect more easily with new pieces when provided with a few words of introduction. That’s why on-camera introductions like the one Epstein gave to “Komorebi” ought to be commonplace.
Composers of contemporary concert music aim to replace worn out musical conceptions with fresh ones. But it doesn’t always work, especially if a piece is so repellent to human ears that hapless listeners need to flee the room — like certain pieces by Aaron Copland.
Huh? Didn’t Copland compose music that people, to this day, actually enjoy listening to?
Yes, he did. But he also wrote music that Leonard Bernstein delighted in as a means of reliably emptying a room of listeners — piano pieces that were as painful to hear as they were difficult to play. The point is that difficult music tends to get easier over time. Today’s kindergarteners have been well prepared by film music to get more fun out of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” than many of the esteemed critics present at the piece’s premier.
Efforts to promulgate new musical concepts through new music performances often succeed, but usually only in the case of composers having musical talent (as opposed to merely theoretical or mathematical skills). Tone-deaf theoreticians do compose music, but it’s mainly for the enjoyment of other tone-deaf theoreticians.
Marti Epstein composes music for the pleasure of hearing it. And that, ultimately, is what makes it worth listening to.
