I was once asked to give a paper on a panel the topic of which was Contextualism. I quite deliberately interpreted context as the larger than individual current events that impinge on our lives, having had to inquire as to just what this latest academic ism was. It was ( I might have known ) history—in this case music history. By one of those startling coincidences this panel was scheduled for the day on which Martin Luther King was assassinated. My paper taking the word context in its immediate social and political context happened to be the only paper actually read, as we were made by police to leave the university premises for security reasons.
Looking back on that time now, after major traumas in my life have demanded my facing and surmounting fear- and anger-induced compulsions. I can now see that I then felt and responded to an abnormal degree of tension in Philadelphia, especially at the largely black university where the American Society of University Commposers had scheduled its meetings. I am able to see that i could now deal positively with those tense intuitions. At that time I could not, and so I responded aggressively.
My tenth string quartet deals with the very academic meaning of context which that panel had planned to look at. Bob Gilmore has described my composing of music stylistically like that of various periods of history as revisionist: exploring what European music’s development might have been if compromises in tuning had not been made.
If I take as my context—not contest— the whole planet in all its regional, racial and civilizational diversity, and at the same time refuse to identify with my own conditioning, then what meaning, what value my music will reveal is symbolized as a new and much clarified relation of consonance to dissonance.
A musician of a culture vastly different from mine may possibly be pleased but objectively does not benefit much if I imitate his musical style, and his own reasons for using American or European ways of making music, aside from commercial aims, are apt to be similarly shallow. But to the extent that either or both of us employ mathematical results of basic acoustics we will be speaking a common language.
The times when discovering this kind of common ground has happened to me stand out in my memory. I am still moving in that direction. It has become my personal signature.