Is composition in the traditional sense an abandoned art form?

Is composition in the traditional sense an abandoned art form? The concept of a masterwork seems to have already been embalmed before I was even born. The only people who even bother with it anymore these days are film score composers, musical composers, and dreaming, private hacks in the ignominity of their own garage.

But there are those exceedingly rare, highly canonized exponents who already have their own name and can demand a fortune for each five minute commission. The ideal of a Mozart or a Beethoven composing day and night, scribbling out countless pages of manuscript seems to be gone from our culture. Ellington, an American, but also someone beyond the classical realm wrote master works in ostensibly art-for-art's-sake experiments, but composition doesn't seem to have gotten any salutary attention aside from his tributary works.

Of course in so many implicit, subconscious ways American culture is just the annex of lichen-overgrown European idioms. Europe got too overcrowded for its own art and history, so we were bumped out here. The Fates and the Muses wanted us to seize the opportunity to find a new expression of ourselves, to cut and tear away from the new earth a new art, a new thought. We were to declare a new philosophy of creativity, but what have we got?

Sonny Rollins knows what we got. The one class of people who came into America, carrying in their bosom the new, bright expression the gods demanded Americans to place on the altar of music as a condition for coinheriting the New World were invidiously punished, because they weren't made in the tired old European design.

When we Americans think art, it is in the European context. When we think travel, we think Europe, or those places worldwide that our father Europeans have already established a cultural base for us.

And when we think music, we think fine music halls with precision acoustics. We think of all those thousands of highly skilled and talented musicians we trained on traditional instruments to play masterworks from the canon for us as we listen to them in ceremonial attire. It is an complex religious affair, with seating rules for each type of ensemble, and a comprehensive etiquette. We do not sigh, rapture, or otherwise participate. We expect them to play the masterworks flawlessly and with the precise amount of conviction. They are interchangeable, our players, in their black, formal robes. Occasionally one great musician will stand or sit out in front of the rest, piercing our hearts with fiery passion. Every decade or so the man standing backwards in tails whisking the stick around in dizzying, calligraphic artistry gets replaced, but we don't care too much about that, the perfect music will stay the same, just like it came from Beethoven's pen; authenticated, authorized, scholarly reproduction. Beautiful music performed in a gilded hall. This we call art. That is what Beethoven wanted, isn't it?

(Justin)