Media Report
Playing To Your Audience
On 06, Dec 2016 | In Media Report | By Todd Stanton
Classical music for the pop up age.
Battling the ADD that drives today’s hyper-cyber “consumer” isn’t just the sport of advertisers. Especially for one young composer looking to make a very lasting impression.
From Vine to Flash Fiction, bite-sized online content trimmed to the size of an iPhone and the length of a traffic light is the new now. So what is a composer schooled in the classics to do?
The answer, or at least one of them, came to us in a performance last month of a work by Charlie Martin, the winner of the 2013 Exponential Ensemble/Fordham Young Composers’ Competition. His piece, a thoroughly modern trio entitled “The Height of Spring,” included one movement (of four) that took a mere 90 seconds to play.
Now, whatever you may know about the art form, you know it takes it’s time. And for pretty good reason. Among other things, length gives a composer time to shift the pace, tone and mood–something Martin has collaspsed in the movement to fit the interactive attention span. The result is an intense interplay between clarinet, violin and bass.
“As a composer in the 21st century, ” Martin told me, “my challenge is to move an audience that doesn’t have any time or patience to spare.” He added that, “the 90-second movement packs in a lot of different musical material.” In other words, fasten your seat belts.
Did anyone ask for this? “They didn’t have to,” says Martin, “I don’t have any time to spare either. Still, he believes he has “created a rhythmic, tonal, and timbral experience that holds the listeners’ attention for the entire duration.”
How many agency creatives can say that?