I have nothing against musical complexity, in fact I embrace it in my own work, using complex textures, rhythms, and harmonic structures. But I often sense a sort of 'forced complexity' in the works of many living composers whose pieces are complex in every musical facet from beginning to end. It's as though they think their audience will believe they're simple minded if they thin the texture for too long, use simple pulse-based rhythmical structures, employ two or three note chords, or invent melodies that are modal or only use a few pitches. It got me to wondering, are living composers afraid of simplicity? I ask the question, because it has taken me a long time to sort of unwind an inner voice that told me something was too simple, that there must be a more ‘innovative’ way to express the idea musically. In fact, in graduate school, I used to make 7 or 8 versions of an initial idea, slowly transfiguring a simple idea into something more ‘learned’. As you can imagine, with all of these revisions, at a certain point, I began to lose the essence of the original idea, and got bogged down in the minutia of small ideas, rather than concentrating on the formal development of the ideas. Even today, roughly seven years after thinking I’d conquered the demons of complexity, these old habits can creep in with questions like, “Do you really want to repeat that idea literally?  Shouldn’t you vary it to show your craft?”  Or “a seventeen year old could have come up with that melody, don’t you want to spice it up a little?” I enjoy complex and dense textures in the music of Ligeti, Lutoslawski, Messiaen, and Schnittke. I believe though, that in most cases, a long work that is utterly ‘complex’ from beginning to end will not be a successful one. Listeners need moments to catch their breath, they need some music that is predictable now and again, so they can delight in being truly surprised (as opposed to being surprised all of the time because they never feel as though they know what is coming next). A simple texture, a simple accompaniment, a simple rhythm or melody can provide a great deal of needed contrast in a long work. It can help provide a sense of depth to the listener’s world, a new perspective, as though we are focusing on one color in the rainbow now, rather than on all of them. And that is why, in my own composing, I look for opportunities to provide a scaled down texture, where I can focus on things like getting the melody just right, or on holding that note for the perfect length. To demonstrate this, check out Summer Breeze, a simple, contrasting movement in the middle of my solo clarinet piece Three Turns of the Wind (beautifully performed here by Christine Bellomy). Listen to Summer Breeze

You probably noticed the painting above by the great artist Pablo Picasso. I believe it perfectly demonstrates his state of mind when he said, "It took me four years to learn to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to learn to paint like a child."  He shows us in paintings like these that simplicity is not simple, or any evidence whatsoever of being simple-minded.

Similarly, composers can demonstrate their compositional ‘smarts’ by doing things like writing a simple and beautiful melody that is truly memorable – a task achieved by so few over the great span of history. Or by taking a simple theme and developing it in creative ways as Beethoven did with the opening to his 5th symphony, stretching it into more than forty minutes of glorious material.

There are so many great examples of simple genius over time – Gregorian Chant, Chopin’s E minor piano prelude, the 'cello line in the slow movement of Brahms 3rd symphony, and Bartok’s entire Mikrokosmos.

Will you add your work of simple genius to the mix?

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