Stilkopie, Originality and Contemporary Tonality
Stilkopie. This is the name german scholars give when you compose something like a string quartet in the style of Beethoveen…. You know what I mean? I hated to hear it at the university. It was like: this is a Stilkopie, therefore it is not music! Later I realised there is a reason to think so… But also a reason to reconceptualize the idea of Stilkopie, a practice that at least has a strong pedagogical legitimacy since the ancient masters: you imitate in order to emulate.
I see that more and more composer are improving a lot in this genre of composition and perhaps I should say it is almost “popular” thanks to youtube. However… this deserves some remarks.
Unlike soundtracks, the “Stilkopie” is not a “music for”: it is most of the time a pretension to be “fine art concert music”. These are scores made for a concert. The music should stand on its own and impress the listener without help of another element.
Exactly for this reason I see a problem in this trend: even the best and most impressive display of skill – and even sensibility – starts to negate its own purpose as concert music for the reason I gonna show to you:
When we hear these tings, we hear in a “relative mode”; it is not absolute. What we apreciate is the “how good the composer is based on the emulation of this or that master”. The closer he gets, the better ; and EXACTLY the moments where he differs from his Bach, Beethoven or Debussy model, here it sounds “off”. This means, listening to this music we get distracted by extrinsic elements in order to judge and apreciate it; but this will automatically put the imitation below the model.
Because a sonata with tonic dominant today is not the sonata of yesterday of same kind. When this sonata was composed, it was a fresh innovative mechanism of compositional technology: present two themes, bring them later in conflict, solve the conflict. Things like this. It was the expression of its own time.
This is the main problem of the Stilkopie: how is this related to its own time?
My way of solving this problem was to understand the instrinsic ecleticism of the incidental music: here the story will recontextualize and profit from your pastiche, exactly because the frame in which we hear imitations is the “relative mode”.
Beyond the categories of Stilkopie and soundtrack pastiche, there is however the category of “neoclassic synthesis”. Here it is hard to tell where this end and that begins. What I can tell, is that a experienced listener can tell the difference between a composition that relies on the charicature of a previous composer, and a composition that is literally born from the language the composer speaks everyday (even when this language might look anachronic).
The composer creates beauty only when imerse on reality ; but precisely the historic time and his relation to history is an essential component that determines if he is expression of his Zeitgeist, instead of a simulacrum of a historic ghost. In this sense, despite any necessity of integrate and recover musical traditions in our usual daily musical decadence, it is important that the today’s composer also care to be fashion . And by fashion i mean a music that years later will be indistinguishbly be recognised as todays music, even when its source of inspiration remains the one of the classic styles of composition.
Another reason to see Stilkopie critically is this: some musical styles just died, others however, got literally canceled. This means, if History went another way than the french revolution for example, we would have another kind of harpschord music. And if the II world wars did not exist, or the russian revolution, our atonal-tonal dichotomy would also be different. Impressionism would probably stay longer in the concert halls as a florishing school of composition, if the Frankfurt School did not overtake the institutions of musical education, for example?
All this gives a reason to not only criticize the Stilkopie, but go beyond it. This means, to aknowledge that a lot of potential still remains in the tonal material. In one hand because of immanent reasons ( the interruption of an immanent development due to extrinsic politic reasons for example) but in other hand because of the potential of semantic resignification, this means, how the hermeneutic relationship between creation and expectator is affected by reciprocal changes of meaning in the musical material along history.
