Reflections On Jason Treuting

Jason Treuting's presentation brought about a variety of interesting questions. While I would say our compositional strategies are actually quite different, there are certainly things that I find very engaging about his process, even if I don't always enjoy the aesthetic result. There are many pieces of his that I do enjoy though, but in his compositional strategy they can sometimes be a hit or miss for me. Let me elaborate:

One quality that I find fascinating is how he removes himself from his work. It's no surprise he takes his cues from John Cage, the master of that kind of objectivity. Beginning from the Sonata and Interludes, moving to Music of Changes and Imaginary Landscape no. 4, and culminating in 4'33'', there is this gradual insistence that his presence in his music be meaningless, that for sound to really be just sound he himself must not filter it through his own aesthetic hierarchies. As a result, John Cage produces work that is paradoxically very separate from himself as it is inalienably him, setting up this wall that makes it hard to critique the music itself but rather the rules that set it in place. I see a similar paradox (to perhaps a slightly lesser degree) in the work of Treuting, and one that poses some concerns to his own conceptions of his music.

Towards the end of his lecture, Treuting said that he doesn't think it's important for audiences to know the system that warrants the musical result, and that one can enjoy the aesthetic output without knowledge of the rules that made it so. However the sound is never consistently his own, but the rules are. And perhaps this could be a side-effect of being a composition student hard-wired for criticism, but evaluating the piece and critiquing the structure and the musical material can only really be based on the rules that set it in place, rules of which the audience may not be aware of. The effect becomes this weird separation between audience member and composer, which has its own pros and cons naturally. This isn't to say though that all music must have audible process, but I think (and this could just be my musical bias) that an acknowledgement of the audience/listener experience is important in making pieces that glue to them. It's not manipulation so much as it is cuing into one's bolder musical objects in one's piece, not conceptual. 

As I write this, I realize the paradoxes in my own thinking on this subject. I would never want music to be one thing, especially the things that I only like. But it becomes hard to me to enjoy some of Treuting's music without understanding the mechanisms that birthed it, since I cannot hear them. And the only reason why I can say that is because Treuting's pieces at the CME performance did not strike me as engaging on their own, but when the context was made aware, they did. That's not to say that I don't like his other work that invokes this enigmatic process and produces similar aesthetically results. Some of his pieces, in their somewhat static arc, offer a totally different listening experience for me that I do enjoy. However I found the musical material in Homage to the Triad to not justify the duration, and for me the piece, while it had cool moments, didn't satiate my auditory desire.