If I had Beeri Moalem’s talent and vision as a composer and player, I wouldn’t even bother to write about music. But when you’re expressing ideas, you must accept a certain amount of responsibility for facts.

Composing music vs. writing about it:
A critic replies (again) to Beeri Moalem

Fourth in a series of exchanges about composing music between Dan Coren and Beeri Moalem. This column specifically replies to “The young composer’s struggle:
 A reply to Dan Coren,” by Moalem.

Beeri, you certainly satisfied my desire to learn what you’re really like as a composer and musician. If I could play the piano as well as you play your instrument, if I had the vision and talent to compose as you do, and if I had the opportunity to have my music performed and recorded, I don’t know if I would even bother writing about music.

I certainly wouldn’t take the time to get into a debate with an old fart like me over “assorted nitpicks.” Thank you for sharing your creations; I regard them with a mixture of respect, pleasure and, to be honest, a certain amount of envy. I may even be inspired to resume my own long-abandoned efforts at composing electronic music.

Nevertheless, since you’ve chosen this arena, and since, rightly or wrongly, I do feel supremely (and perhaps annoyingly) confident of my musical opinions and my ability to write, I must answer at least a few points. To wit:

Brahms wasn’t first

• I don’t think anything I bashed in your first article (“So you want to compose serious music?”) was taken out of context. My problem was that I couldn’t find your context in the first place. And I still can’t.

• Not to take anything away from Brahms’s densely complex sonata-forms, but the rules that you claim Brahms was breaking were in fact broken by Beethoven and, to some extent, by Schubert two generations earlier. It was Beethoven who began using third-related keys instead of the dominant in sonata-form expositions; it was Schubert who began blurring the boundaries of the form.

• Wagner’s harmonic language, as lush as it is and as much as it avoids cadences, really isn’t all that unusual. Brahms is, I believe, far more complicated and adventurous. (A minority opinion, I admit.)

Racially charged dismissal

• Finally, it’s one thing to write down stream-of-consciousness opinions, but when you’re dealing with ideas and expressing them verbally, if you want to command any respect you must accept a certain amount of responsibility for facts.

Your somewhat racially charged dismissal of Bill Evans’s “white-jazz cocktail-hour improvisations” is a case in point. What, I wonder, would Miles Davis have said about that evaluation?

You do know, I hope, that Evans was the pianist on Davis’s revolutionary “Kind of Blue” and also on Oliver Nelson’s “Blues and the Abstract Truth.” Evans’s solo at the end of “Stolen Moments” from that album is one of jazz’s greatest creations. Hardly “cocktail music"— although, now that I think of it, what’s wrong with that cocktail music, anyway?

Again, thank you for sharing your compositions. The making of music, rather than talking about it, is really all that matters in the end, don’t you think?◆


To read Beeri Moalem’s reply and Dan Coren’s rejoinder, click here.
To read the full exchange, begin here.