John Adams on composing and creative freedom
conversationswithtyler.com
conversationswithtyler.com
18th century laboratory of J.S. Bach:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V7aJVVdJxw&t=261s
The whole fugue is just an excuse for him to create "cross relations"-- little dissonant accidents that happen when simple melodies combine to create unexpected harmonic collisions. Composers typically tried to minimize or hide such things. But by page two of this example Bach is hammering away at them-- like the b-natural in the bass directly against the c a that sounds a minor ninth above it. Since the cross relations are embedded in the melody, and given that the that melody is sequential, the listener hears them clanging again and again as the music progresses.
Haydn had his own musical experiments. Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler, as well.
It is unfortunate that there was a cadre of mid-20th century serialists who apparently acted as the mean girls of the compositional world. Now that they're all dead, let's discard their bullying ways (gross) and retain the urge to do musical experiments (fun).
The serialists by and large were experimentalists. And there was a subset of those serialist experimenters who acted like "mean girls" to non-serialist composers and tried to exclude them from concert series, university positions, etc.
Adams here is almost certainly reacting to that "mean girls" aspect of the mid-20th century serialists. It's hard not to see him calling music "communication" as a way of getting as far away as he can from the "laboratory" ethos of serialism.
Part of that laboratory ethos came from the pragmatic (and IMO understandable) push by composers like Babbitt and Boulez to reframe composition as a form of academic research. AFAICT this was done to streamline a way of getting grants for high modernist music composition and performance in the postwar period. IIRC Babbitt even talked about securing funds by appealing to the cold war anxieties-- something like "beating the Russians" at serialism. :)
I think Adams is reacting to all of the problems that flowed downstream as a consequence of hard coupling music with research in order to fund it. E.g., perhaps this made it easier to fund for the piece that iterates through an array of pitch class sets in a novel way-- iteration is "mathy" and math is research. Meanwhile, how do you write a grant proposal for a piece where the performer throws twenty electric toothbrushes inside a piano and then depresses the damper pedal to hear the result?
In fact, I think Adams himself was part of the solution to this problem-- by becoming part of a nice, diverse set of composers who worked across the most prestigious institutions to help select a diverse set of younger composers for funding. In this way, "research" just ends up being a placeholder for "the time and money that composers need to write music," spot-checked by the established composers who can vouch that, yes, throwing electric toothbrushes into a piano is indeed a musical endeavor. So toothbrush guy is in, and-- since there's nearly no money in any of this-- nobody gets outraged on social media that these socialist antifa composers are stealing tax dollars to game the system. :)