Monday, August 16, 2010

Blogger says Leo Brouwer is right in seeing 'fusion as a legitimate approach to composition.'


[Leo Brouwer]

The Afro-Cuban classical guitarist, conductor and composer Leo Brouwer (b. 1939) is profiled at AfriClassical.com. His view of fusion in composition is the subject of this excerpt from a post by a composer who is working on a string quartet:

Ten years of obsessing about music, musical form, and theology by way of not finishing a string quartet (yet)
August 12, 2010
“It is in this string quartet that I feel most able to articulate what have been the theological convictions that have driven my creative process. Most of my adult life I have wanted to find a way to obliterate the structural and conceptual boundaries between art music and popular music. I have wanted to immerse myself in both streams of Western music fully enough so as to cross back and forth amongst these two great traditions without compromising my ability to compose persuasively in both styles and, at length, to hybridize and synthesize these styles in a way that is convincing.

“I believe Leo Brouwer has been right to point out that one of the great mistakes academic musicologists and theorists have made in the last half century has been to underestimate, sideline, or ignore fusion as a legitimate approach to composition. This attempt at fusion or eclecticism is easy to dismiss.”

1 comment:

  1. now that geocities is defunct it takes The Wayback Machine to link to the original interview with Brouwer

    https://web.archive.org/web/20000129103006/http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/Strasse/8309/brouwer.html#guitarworld

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