If Music Be the Food of Love: A Conversation With Composer Michael Kurek

Apart from Arvo Pärt, the grand old man of contemporary classical music, whose work I have admired greatly ever since I first heard Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten many years ago, Michael Kurek is the living composer whose works I especially enjoy. An American residing in Nashville, Dr. Kurek has almost single-handedly flown the flag or wielded the baton in defence of musical tradition in an age characterized by atonality, discordance, and other manifestations of iconoclastic ugliness. His work has already attained a place of international prominence in the canon of contemporary classical music and I have little doubt that it will retain a place in the canon long after the works of his contemporaries are long forgotten. It was, therefore, a veritable pleasure and honour to be able to enjoy a convivial conversation with him recently which I’m keen to share with readers of The Imaginative Conservative.

I began by suggesting that, in his early days as a composer, he had succumbed to the compositional fads of the time and I wondered what he now felt about the works that he had composed during this phase of his creative development.

He responded that styles, such as atonality, serialism, indeterminacy, postmodern collage, and minimalism, were not regarded “as mere fads” but as a “natural evolutionary progress”: “Therefore, these techniques were assumed to be compulsory for any thinking artist, and required of students. These supposed evolutionary movements in music, as in art, were believed to reflect the most state-of-the-art (pun intended) ‘progress’ of humankind. However, we can see now that while one can trace influences that one generation of artists or composers did have upon the next, it is clear that changes in the arts are not necessarily improvements, as I was so dogmatically taught and required to emulate, but were merely different choices, sometimes representing greater beauty but often what I regarded as a degeneration rather than an improvement of culture.”

Apart from such degeneracy, I suggested that the new stylistic movements in music were elitist, representing an often supercilious clique of cognoscenti who spurned popular taste. Although he might shy away from the stridency of my phrasing, Dr. Kurek concurred that the music of the self-styled avant-garde “only appealed to a relatively isolated and inbred intelligentsia and not even to the average educated classical music lover”. The consequences of such elitism were obvious enough. New compositions in the elitist mode were seldom performed a second time. It was as though they were meant to be disposable; having served their purpose, they were set aside and soon forgotten. Dr. Kurek likens the process to “the reading of a paper at an academic conference”. The paper might find its way into an obscure journal that almost no one actually reads. Similarly, new compositions might make their way onto a recording that no one buys or listens to again.

Dr. Kurek says the same process of decay can be seen in musical genres beyond the world of classical music: “Lovers of popular music can, likewise, see the degeneration of melody, harmonic skill, and edifying lyrics.” He compares the composers of “the great American songbook”, such as Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, and Rodgers and Hammerstein, and “much that is still fairly good-quality popular music in the 1960’s”, with contemporary popular music, which “with some exceptions, is mindless and melody-deprived; two chord ditties with immoral or vacuous lyrics”.

Alluding presumably to my interest in what he now thought of his early compositions, those which were influenced by musical modernism and postmodernism, Dr. Kurek spoke of the “elements of craft to be learned with skill and diligence, which I was required to learn and compose as a student (and even later as a professor, in order to successfully gain tenure).” Having mastered the craft dutifully, he began to see and realize that it was “a misguided craft, the pursuit of which, for its own sake and as an end in itself, only evinced an arcane musical alchemy of techniques that did not edify or uplift humanity”. The realization came as a revelation, an epiphany, which led to a rejection of the techniques he had learned. Feeling creatively revitalized, he began anew. “I started over from scratch, learning the old techniques, not from living teachers (there were no longer any) but from studying the musical scores of the great composers of the past, who became my teachers.”

Driven by a new enthusiasm, he now sought to write music that he would himself enjoy were he a member of the audience. Added to this unabashed populism, he also sought permanence or at least durability for his musical compositions, seeking to write music that people would want to hear more than once, “preferably many times over, even falling in love with its beauty”. There was also a sense of responsibility to the wider world and the living culture. “I wanted to write music that I hoped would mean that, after I die, I would be leaving the world a little more beautiful because of my creative contribution.” Last but indubitably not least, he sought to offer his gifts in thanksgiving to the Giver of the gift, “to honor God with a teleological narrative”, in which the music is seen to be working its way toward a climax or musical goal. “This, for me, reflects a goal of hope and ultimate salvation, unlike music that sounds random, aimless, purposeless, and Nihilistic or like Dada.”

This concludes the first part of my conversation with Michael Kurek. The second and final part of the conversation will be published next week. In the interim, please feel free, indeed positively encouraged, to discover Dr. Kurek’s latest projects and to support him in his work.

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The featured image is courtesy of Michael Kurek’s website.