Beautiful is exciting - melody is avant-garde

Traditional European classical music embodies a fundamental way of bringing together music and meaning. Since I was a young child in Edinburgh, this music had an ability to speak to me about the most important spiritual undercurrents of my life. As I have grown, my cultural and musical experiences have greatly expanded and diversified. I sense now that Western classical music, including ‘new music’, may be incomplete or limited in its expression so long as it remains inherently isolated from how music is felt and understood in the rest of the world.

The music I create is based on the deep respect I have for the power that traditional forms of music have to preserve and enhance our humanity. Today these traditions live within the context of rapid and possibly disintegrating change. Many of these traditions, including our own, may be in some jeopardy. Such traditions can live on and enhance our lives through new creative contributions of diverse people working together in many parts of the world. 

Fortunately we are living in an extraordinary time, one in which a perhaps overlooked, but altogether profound evolution is taking place in Western culture. We have developed, to a far greater extent than before, an ability to see beauty in the artistic musical production of many people across a very broad range of time. We are learning new codes that allow us to appreciate and incorporate into our own consciousness the sounds and rhythms of music that in the past was often rejected as incomprehensibly foreign or exotic. We have also rediscovered a much broader, less ideologically manipulated view of our own music history, and started to redefine the meaning we take from the past. And because of a new awareness of numerous scales, modes, and extraordinary dance rhythms found in music all over the planet, the potential for beautiful melodic invention is greater now than have ever existed in the history of western music. This makes possible, for the first time in perhaps 100 years, the creation of a new performing repertoire for classical musicians that is compelling, dynamic, and original, yet is written in a musical language that is very meaningful and accessible to contemporary audiences.

The sensitive, melodic, rhythmically exciting language I am seeking to articulate in my music is an expression of these evolving undercurrents. Today, when I create music, beautiful is exciting - melody is avant-garde.

Paul Alexander