from the dance floor to a new developmental art music discourse.

I am proposing to take the dance music of today as a starting point and develop it into a rich, multilayered and complex form, leading into a musical adventure radically different from that of popular music, and yet intimately related to it. I wish to conceive structures and create musical compositions that starting from the rhythmic sound world of our time (be it hip hop, techno, tango, salsa, etc) explore new developmental musical discourses.  The emphasis in this project would be in the word 'developmental'.

I propose a revolution in the way we think about serious art music today.

I ask myself these questions: what is it in hip-hop or in any other modern groove that attracts an audience and what is it that the practitioner of serious European art music can bring into this equation that is significantly meaningful and new?
What is the difference between popular and art music in an increasingly globalised western culture?
Popular music is not developmental. One can 'enter' a piece of popular music, start listening to a sound track from more or less any point in the piece. One can hear popular music in the background or foreground, drift away from it and later re-enter its listening space without getting lost. This is mostly because popular dance music is not developing its discourse into a new direction over time. Once the piece is 'established’ its song-like structure remains the same even for those pieces which are not songs. Its strength is in the emotional power of its sound world. Its limitation is that it cannot explore a narrative beyond the sound world it conjures. This limitation is natural and 'true' in that it is consistent with its function. Serious art music does  -more often than not- just the opposite: it develops an idea radically transforming it over the length of a composition, demanding our unconditional attention from beginning to end. If you miss the beginning you cannot 'hop in' at any arbitrary point of the discourse. The strength of this music is in the processes it unfolds which often start with a simple idea and develop complex narratives over extended periods of time. Its fundamental nature is developmental. It is more concerned with developing a narrative than with projecting a sound world. Its weakness can often stem from its difficulty in establishing a powerful and immediate sound world early on in its discourse or even at all. Yet, the fundamental requirement of any narrative is that we understand the 'characters' of the story. Contemporary art music finds it so hard to connect with an audience, because what happens in its discourse, happens to characters our audiences can no longer recognize. At this point, the ability to communicate is lost. Throughout much of its successful history, art music was about what happened to musical ideas derived from popular dance. In this way, an audience always had an entry point into a complex discourse. What developed over time were dance patterns, rhythms and melodic cells that most people were familiar with. At that time it was possible to move from the dance floor to the concert hall following a continuous path. We have lost this state of grace. We have-by and large- no path connecting the dance music of today to our contemporary music concert hall.

I want to bring about a radical change in art music today, to recover the 'state of grace' where popular music and art music shared a common surface while keeping very different objectives and aims.

I call this new type of music Developmental Dance Music. This is music that will transform the inner structure of today's dance forms into a developmental syntax that result in a large scale form.

It will -by necessity- use the technology of our time. Music has never succeeded in communicating when it has used the technology of a time other than its own.  Electroacoustic technology can bridge the gap between the sound of our time –so to speak- and the purely acoustic sound world of the past.

Contemporary music today is still discussed in terms of its local syntax. Yet, the only thing in music as 'art' that is fundamentally different from 'music as entertainment' is its ability to arrive -after a long journey- to a very different place from where it started. The superficial complexity of its local syntax -its surface- should not be the issue. As long as it remains so, art music will not communicate.

We need to explore and create music that uses popular dance as a means to bypass the problem of surface and makes it once again possible for an audience to participate in the adventure of large scale form. In the context of this strategy, one of the main aims should be to create an art music that speaks to participants in contemporary dance music culture. There is already a new level of abstraction that has been introduced in today's dance culture as a result of the sound manipulations that computer technology has made possible. We should build on this practice extending it to incorporate developmental techniques that are typical of the art music discourse such as multi-temporal rhythmic structures, processes involving extended sound interpolations, juxtaposition and/or discontinuity of form and in general ideas that unfold a clear, immediate and yet non repetitive narrative.

I composed The World We Know as an essay in developmental dance.

A.V.