Now I'm thinking "oh dear God. Not another year of comp."
Quite literally, I'm only doing it for the scholarship money.
Mom says "James, you can be the guy that makes Classical music popular again." My response: "why in the hell would I want to do that?"
You know, I don't think "Gee willikers, I love Mozart!" I think he was a cool guy, but I have never felt compelled to listen to him. There will never be another Mozart.
I actually like Beethoven's music, but he's dead too. There will never be another Beethoven.
Nobody's listening to modern classical music, and why should they? Most of it sucks ass. There are film composers, but nowadays, with music production getting cheaper and cheaper, it's becoming easier to score films and video games, and there's less demand and less money.
Zappa once said "Jazz is not dead. It just smells funny" and I have to say the same thing about Classical music. Beethoven will always be fresh, but all there is now is revivalism and tuneless academic/scientific noisemaking.
I am not saying that classical music should be ignored, but in the academic world, it is everything you study. You follow their rules, and that's what you do. There's now jazz studies here at LSU, but there they put the same sort of rules in there too. I'm not really sure if music-writing is something that can be taught, and it certainly isn't something that can be governed either. Besides, almost all music-comp guys eventually become either a. unemployed at 35, b. stuck at college, working on their doctorals, or c. becoming music students themselves.
One thing I have learned is I've got to please myself with my music. You can't aim to please the crowd, because the crowd always changes, and eventually, you'll get abandoned and you never made anything you really wanted to make.
Here are a few reasons why I don't want to do comp anymore:
1. I'm not interested in classical music.
2. I don't want to be known as a composer. It's such a disgusting term. People should only be referred to as composers if they're dead.
3. I don't want to make anything good, because if I make something good, then everyone will want more. I don't want to be good at something I don't want to.
Seriously, if I was the world's best toilet cleaner, everyone would want me to be a janitor.
