The conductor was Oliver Knussen, and the programme also included works by Mark-Anthony Turnage, Gary Kulesha and Simon Bainbridge, all present at the concert, and at the dinner afterwards, in a fancy Italian restaurant by the telling nome of Grano (wheat). Grano is much more than just a restaurant, it is a stage for the Toronto artistic and cultural scene, under the amiable supervision of the owner Roberto.

The concert programme was quite peculiar: apart from Gary Kulesha, who is Canadian, the conductor and the other three composers were British. They also had in common the same composition teacher, John Lambert. When Olly described the qualities of his teacher I was immediately reminded of my own composition teacher, Azio Corghi. Both Corghi and Lambert’s students have vastly different musical styles, and they have all been able to develop their own original voice. Far from promoting a school or a house style, Lambert and Corghi seem to have been more keen on perfecting their own type of musical maieutics. They help (or helped, in the case of Lambert, who died in 1995) the students to find their own voice, without trying to impose any aesthetic or artistic rule. It is not an easy way of teaching, because, in true Socratic spirit, it forces the teacher to look at things from the pupil’s perspective.

Gifted artists like them have devoted a great part of their life to teach the younger, limiting their own creative output in order to pass on their knowledge to the next generation. From them we learn a profound moral lesson, not just an artistic one.

The majority of contemporary composers have chosen not to sever the cord with the past, believing in a sense of continuity with, and belonging to the great tradition of Western classical music. But doing so, they blindly adopted the whole apparatus of classical music concerts, from the stiff ritual to the ageing and dwindling audiences. The higher cultural status granted to their music turned out to be the kiss of death for their creations.

Many words have been spent in the past (and sadly sometimes are still spent, as I realised yesterday at a pre-concert talk given by a young Canadian composer in Toronto) to justify this state of affairs: the need for composers to explore new territories, the reluctance of musical institutions to embark on more adventurous programming, the need for the audiences to be “educated” or the schools’ failings in teaching music, and so on.

The reality is very different: we have to accept that each different music has its audience, and ‘contemporary music’ is no exception. Expecting classical music audiences to love and understand new music is like pretending that jazz fans should also automatically become hip-hop fans.

So, let’s recognise the situation, and stop trying to spoon-feed contemporary music to classical music lovers. Let’s rebadge orchestras as museums of classical music, and limit their repertoire to the great tradition. And let’s free up the energies of those musicians that want to perform new music so that they can really concentrate on their passion, but outside the current classical music circles. Interested audiences will follow, and new ones will be created. They won’t be huge, but they will be committed.

Throughout the history of music, the most successful composers have been the ones that have managed to tune their creative impulse to the needs of the outside world. As far as creative output is concerned the outside world is a strange mixture of elements, where the expectations of patrons, commissioning bodies, influential friends and colleagues coexist with an imagined audience and the public projection of a composer’s self-created artistic image. All these elements come to play in the mind of composers as potential influencing factors, and affect their work more than they would like to admit.

We should then rephrase the first sentence like this: we write music because we want to communicate with the world. What is the chosen channel for this communication? If you are a smart composer, alert to the changing world around you, you will know already that the zeitgeist doesn’t inhabit concert venues programming ‘contemporary music’ works. It is to be found instead in some sort of team endeavour – a movie, a theatre production, a multimedia installation, a site-specific event, where your music becomes part of a wider artistic venture, a complex cultural product of our time, reflecting the interconnecting nature and the infinite resonances of our mostly mediated experience of reality.

You have then become a content provider, a sharp operator in a increasingly undecipherable world, carving small slices of meaning by interacting with other media, other forms, and with the unavoidable, ubiquitous technology we try so hard, often so helplessly, to keep under control.

Soon, though, a number of issues with Max started to emerge, and in various ways, they are still unresolved ten years later. To be fair, many of the issues depend on the way Max, now MaxMSP, is used, but I still find it surprising that David Zicarelli and his company have not acted more energetically to adapt the software to the needs of the growing Max community. I will look at MaxMSP from the two angles that interest me most, usability and sustainability, but first I will try to answer the question of whom this software is written for.

I think that the main problem with MaxMSP is the fact that it sits in a sort of no man’s land between programming languages and software applications. It is too cumbersome and prescriptive as a programming language, but it lacks the user interface and a consistent set of tools that we usually associate with commercial software packages. It may be retorted that this perceived weakness is in fact the main strength of MaxMSP: to give total freedom to artists and musicians so that they can develop their own interactive set-ups without the rigid constraints of commercial software but also without the need to become programmers. My opinion is that in the long term, and looking at the way MaxMSP is now the de facto standard in performing music with live electronics, the problem has become more acute.

Composers that go past MaxMSP’s rather steep learning curve greedily embrace the programme, and start developing their patches, either from scratch, or using existing objects or libraries by members of the community. In the first case they often end up with very inefficient and buggy patches, in the second they create many dependencies, limiting portability and sustainability of their work. Max is great at two things – experimenting with your ideas and prototyping virtual set-ups – but as soon as you enter production mode, it becomes quite unfriendly. There is a historical reason for this; Max was first developed at IRCAM, an institution characterised by a rather rigid separation between composers and music technology assistants. The idea was that composers dealt with the creative part, while the assistants provided a human interface to the technology tools. This meant that the code was looked after by the technologists, and composers didn’t need to engage directly with it. Also, a big institution like IRCAM ensured the long-term preservation of the works, by employing assistants to maintain and upgrade the patches as needed.

Dark mess, from MaxMSP startup screen

This initial dichotomy is part of MaxMSP’s genetic code: the software is used mainly by composers and artists, but is written for programmers. This is why I find difficult to identify the target audience of the software: it is too complex and difficult to learn to be mastered fully by artists, but its true potential is wasted in the hands of programmers, who will also complain that as a development platform MaxMSP lacks many important features. In fact, I haven’t found yet a good application built with MaxMSP. So it looks like the MaxMSP target user is either a highly talented composer-technologist, equally versed in computer programming and music composition, or a creative team supplying the required skills. Not surprisingly, MaxMSP is frequently found in higher education.

Let’s look now at MaxMSP from the usability perspective. MaxMSP provides out-of-the-box quite a number of graphic objects, and has recently added powerful new functions, like Java support, the ability to encapsulate/de-encapsulate patches and create/save prototypes [template patches that can be used everywhere]. Nevertheless, the actual user interface is entirely the responsibility of the user – there are no standard Graphic User Interface models or templates. The result is that a given patch – say a sound spatializer – can be realised in many different ways, each one providing a very different user experience. Testing and comparing of patches is thus made very difficult, as the same spatializer engine can be visualised omitting certain parameters altogether or hiding them in remote subpatches. Sharing of patches, or having your live electronics performed by someone else, is also compromised, since every user builds their patches according to their personal needs and taste. If you add the fact that MaxMSP has no easy way for commenting or documenting patches, you see how hard it can be sometimes to reconstruct signal and control flow in a complex patch, even for the person that wrote it!

Probably it is from the sustainability point of view that MaxMSP fares worse. The software gives artists and musicians the impression to be in control, but in fact locks them into a closed system, difficult to scale, adapt or maintain over time. I’m talking here mainly from the perspective of live electronics concert performance, the kind of mission-critical application where everything has to work as planned. My experience over the years is that in order to work properly a MaxMSP patch has to be tweaked or rewritten every year or so, especially if external dependencies are included in the patch. In some cases, objects and libraries are not upgraded when the software is, and an alternative must be found or developed from scratch. Conflicts between objects with the same name can also prevent patches from functioning properly.

As I said, MaxMSP is an invaluable tool for trying out ideas, experimenting and prototyping, but falls short of usability and sustainability requirements, the two areas that matter most for a creative, musical use of the software and for the long-term preservation and maintenance of patches and the artistic works that depend on them. MaxMSP remains the first choice for musicians working with live electronics, but I think I have identified a gap that needs to be filled if we really want to empower musicians and offer them more accessible tools for interacting with technology.

Throughout the history of music there have been composers wishing to give their art a cultural status comparable to literature, or philosophy. In more recent times composers as diverse as Luciano Berio and Pierre Boulez have made a considerable effort to raise the profile of musical thought, and bring it into the mainstream cultural debate.

There are inherent difficulties with these commendable attempts: intellectuals the world over are not, in general, well versed in music and compositional theory. This is obviously the result of a formative problem – music is not part of the standard education curriculum. More problems are posed by the special language – notation – that music uses, and its tenacious resistance to be apprehended and described by words alone. A good indicator of this situation is the negligible amount of citations and references to ‘contemporary music’ sources (the actual scores) and composers’ writings in essays on modern culture.

Lively, alert and informed people, interested in contemporary arts the world over, will know a lot about the latest movies, the latest books and essays, the latest exhibitions and even the latest plays, but very seldom they will know about or attend ‘contemporary music’ concerts. For them, music is a form of pleasure rather than an intellectual activity. In their experience the music space is already well stocked with the various declinations of pop, rock, jazz, world and urban music, or even with the museum of classical music.

In our eye-dominated world, where visual media condition to a large extent our perception of reality, music becomes naturally the soundtrack of our own existence – the constant background to other, more prepotent eye-driven events. This ancillary role is exactly what so-called contemporary music tries to fight against, advocating for music an autonomous status. In his 1995 article, Dei suoni e delle immagini (“Of Sounds and Images”), first read when the University of Siena awarded him the degree honoris causa, and later reworked as one of the Six Norton Lectures on Poetry ( Remembering the Future, Cambridge, Harvard University), Berio tries to defend the autonomy of the ear and its predominance on the eye.

It is telling that Berio identifies music theatre – opera – as the one area where music still has the power to be in control, generate the dramatic structure and influence all visual and narrative elements. Music theatre is inherently a ‘dirty’ playing field, where visual and musical elements merge and interact in unpredictable ways. As much as composers wish for music to be in control, planning carefully every element of the show, it will be almost impossible to avoid the predominance of the visual element. Berio’s wishful thinking is shattered against the hard facts of human perception and cultural conditioning. Moreover, opera is a team enterprise, where the composer is but one of the authors. Berio’s quarrels with directors and stage designers became proverbial, showing the difficulty of maintaining control – à la Wagner – over everything. Role specialisation in today’s theatre and the refinement of available technologies make it altogether impossible. It is also presumptuous to think that one person – the composer – can be at the same time the librettist, director and stage designer of his/her operas. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s own unsatisfactory results should rest my case.

But then, if even music theatre cannot be the vehicle of musical thought, what is left to us? Precious little, I’m afraid. We have to accept that the incomparable depth and richness found in contemporary musical thought is lost to the cultural debate, and belongs to the kind of esoteric endeavours that never go past the narrow confines of ‘contemporary music’ circles.

As a musician, I’m principally interested in live performance. The magic dimensions of a public concert is what we should care about: the ritual offering, the virtuoso display, the theatre happening on stage and the risky, adventurous nature of a live concert performance are a precious gift to all of us. But without an audience, live performance cannot survive. We already experience live performance without having to attend a ‘contemporary music’ concert: how do we convince our potential audiences that they are missing something that can’t be found elsewhere? Or, reversing the question, when was the last time you cried at a ‘contemporary music’ concert?

One obstacle, first brought to my attention by Peter Johnson, Head of Research at Birmingham Conservatoire, is the lack of a performance tradition for the vast majority of contemporary works. They are performed a few times and almost never recorded to the standards of a commercial release. They often include specific parts for specific performers, making it impossible or very difficult for other interpreters to tackle the works. A second related problem is the performers’ knowledge of the piece. How deep can your interpretation go if you are learning the piece for the first time and perform it only a few times? Compare this with the intimate relationship over the years, indeed over a lifetime, that most performers build with the classical music repertoire. A third problem is the nature of ‘contemporary music’ micro-market: the ratio between sellers (the composers) and buyers (the performers and the audiences) is incredibly skewed towards the former. The late Stephen Jay Gould had a very original interpretation for justifying this state of affairs, what he called the right wall of human achievement: in a society that favours innovation at all costs, there comes a time when the relative advancement of an art form, say music, becomes smaller and smaller, until it is imperceptible.

Current literature on audience numbers for ‘contemporary music’ concerts and audience development strategies are often enthusiastic, but, I’m afraid. always misleading. I’m referring here to the UK state of affairs, but the main argument could be applied equally well to French or Italian audiences. I would like to correlate the number of composers writing music today with the amount of people listening to their music. My impression is that the composer/audience ratio is dwindling ferociously, rather than expanding. The reason for this is probably a steeper pyramid, with few composers getting a lot of attention from the niche audiences of “contemporary music”, and a plethora of less well-known composers that remain virtually ignored.

This is what strikes me so much about so-called contemporary music: it has no name. Contemporary is a neutral adjective, merely stating the obvious fact that we are referring to music written in our time. It doesn’t qualify the word ‘music’ in any useful way. This is why time and again other names have been used to define this unwieldy object: art music, modern music, neue Musik [new music], musica colta [cultured music], musica seria [serious music], to name a few in English, German and Italian. None of these definitions have stuck, nor are they particularly helpful, the reason being that the segmentation of this particular bit of reality is completely artificial. It is not borne out of any historical, social, artistic or aesthetical necessity.

If we wished to define in the most concise form the conceptual field that ‘contemporary music’ and these other unhelpful names attempt to encircle, we would arrive at something like “music written by an academically trained living composer”. Although this is already quite a long definition, it needs to be further qualified: composers that are not with us anymore, mostly from the second half of the 20th century, are also labelled as “contemporary”, and “academically trained” is too narrow, as composers may have very diverse backgrounds and still be considered as belonging to the “contemporary music” field.

This is exactly the problem: the artificial definition of a “contemporary music” field is the consequence of a historical aberration: the desire to maintain a link with the tradition of classical music and to keep the distance from popular music or other music genres. But both the link with tradition and the distance from other musics are partly fictitious, and cannot be safely encoded in a name.

The conclusion is that the “contemporary music” object is not an object at all. Critical apprehension of “contemporary music” bangs all the time against this conceptual wall. We need to accept the artificiality of the “contemporary music” construct, and deal with a fragmented reality that cannot be labelled easily, if at all.

In Colombia time has a different meaning, a different structure. This has been noted already by writers and travellers, but for a composer it is particularly exciting, since it opens up a whole new perspective on time perception and manipulation.

Colombians do not have a linear perception of time – one event after the other – as we usually have in Europe. Time in Colombia is more like a sort of fabric, where each interweaving thread represents a single event. Instead of building time as a series of events following each other, Colombians maintain a parallel perception where many events are kept together. Delay and multithreading are the key concepts here; events are kept in a sort of memory buffer and dealt with according to external requirements, all at the same time. Instead of completing one event and going on to the next, Colombians advance by small or big leaps through many events at the same time.

This attitude towards time is puzzling at first, but once you get used to it, it is utterly fascinating. A group of friends might decide to visit the family of one of them living in a finca, a house in the country. The plan is to leave on Tuesday afternoon. They duly meet on Tuesday to leave, but they eventually leave only on Friday morning. A number of parallel events have been unfolding, and the trip to the finca has been delayed by three days, but for all of them it is only a bit ‘later’. They, or their expecting host, have no concept of a missed appointment nor they feel the need to reschedule the trip. Time, simply, has stretched and the ‘visit to the finca’ event with it, like some sort of elastic entity.

The continuous shifting and rearranging of events in time and the ability to deal with it, the ability to maintain a parallel perception of many crisscrossing events – is, I believe, one of the main reasons for the amazing creativity, emotional intelligence and adaptation skills of the Colombian people, especially those living in rural areas.

It is easy to see a musical parallel: instead of one or more fixed timelines governing a sequence of musical events or objects, each event has its own timeline, expanding and contracting according to the behaviour of other concurrent timelines.

The most interesting pieces in the programme were by Victoriano Valencia, considered the best Colombian composer of music for “banda sinfónica’. Victoriano’s arrangements thread a fine line between traditional roots and innovation – especially formal and harmonic – without falling in the easy trap of emulating the jazz-derived idiom and sounds of North American big bands. I found his music highly original and very well scored.