"I strongly suggest that we play down basics like who influenced whom, and instead study the way the influence is transformed, in other words: how the artist made it his own"
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Stop treating art like a genealogy chart. Foss is pushing back against the music-history reflex to pin every composer to a neat lineage - who borrowed from whom, who “invented” what first - as if creativity were a court case with footnotes as evidence. His target isn’t influence itself, but the flattening way we talk about it: influence as a scorecard, a policing tool, a way to reduce a living piece of music to an academic receipt.
As a 20th-century composer moving through modernism, neoclassicism, and an increasingly pluralistic postwar soundscape, Foss knew how unavoidable influence is when the entire past is suddenly available at once. In that context, “play down basics” reads like a jab at pedagogy that prizes provenance over perception. He’s asking for criticism that can hear process: what gets distorted, re-timed, re-harmonized, re-framed; what survives intact; what is rejected; what becomes a signature.
The key move is his emphasis on transformation. Foss smuggles a value judgment into a seemingly neutral method: originality isn’t the absence of sources, it’s the quality of the conversion. “How the artist made it his own” centers agency, not purity. It also quietly dignifies theft’s more interesting cousin - assimilation - where the ethical and aesthetic questions shift from “did you take it?” to “what did you do with it?” In an era still anxious about authenticity, Foss offers a more adult standard: not un-influenced, but unmistakably authored.
As a 20th-century composer moving through modernism, neoclassicism, and an increasingly pluralistic postwar soundscape, Foss knew how unavoidable influence is when the entire past is suddenly available at once. In that context, “play down basics” reads like a jab at pedagogy that prizes provenance over perception. He’s asking for criticism that can hear process: what gets distorted, re-timed, re-harmonized, re-framed; what survives intact; what is rejected; what becomes a signature.
The key move is his emphasis on transformation. Foss smuggles a value judgment into a seemingly neutral method: originality isn’t the absence of sources, it’s the quality of the conversion. “How the artist made it his own” centers agency, not purity. It also quietly dignifies theft’s more interesting cousin - assimilation - where the ethical and aesthetic questions shift from “did you take it?” to “what did you do with it?” In an era still anxious about authenticity, Foss offers a more adult standard: not un-influenced, but unmistakably authored.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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