What Does Coates' music look like?
Before I wrap up this tour through Gloria Coates' musical Career, I would like to leave you with a short interview featuring the composer herself and some video footage of her pieces being performed live.
This interview, hosted by New Music USA in 2008, provides viewers with a valuable perspective of Coates' music from Coates herself. Namely, how she analyzes, or avoids analyzing her own music in comparison to how a musicologist may analyze her music. Coates goes on to say that she did not know how to classify her music until said musicologists had reached out and asked in order to write accurate program notes for a concert. Until her seventh symphony, Coates had not even considered or known that she had written six others previously, and was hesitant to call these works symphonies. In her own words, she "simply expresses [her]self" and does not feel the need to analyze her own music, even if it facilitates the inclusion and 'proper' categorization of her music alongside her contemporaries' music.
Also included in this interview are a couple of short performance clips of Coates' Entering The Unknown (2004) and Lunar Loops (1987), which greatly illustrate this point. It is clear that Coates' music does not need to be labeled as distinctly 'American' or 'German' as she puts it, but as her own.
This video performance of In the Fifth Dimension, the third movement of String Quartet no. 5 (1988), furthers the notion that Coates' music is in a realm of its own. This performance took place in 2010 by the Kreutzer Quartet, which has also recorded Coates' string quartets. It does not take a seasoned veteran of chamber music to recognize that Coates effectively repurposes what is an ornamental gesture into the central device of a piece while simultaneously tossing out other musical elements which are typically foundational. No true pitches, no true rhythm or meter, and yet each member of the quartet is bringing the piece to life in a manner which would have surely been obscene or at least objectionable during the 18th and 19th centuries, let alone any time before then. Even today, this music defies being labeled beyond its instrument grouping.
It would be fascinating to see music such as Coates' being taught regularly in schools and given to young performers. I cannot imagine that any ensembles younger than high school age would want to perform it, whether out of a technical deficiency or sheer boredom, but I would love to see it someday.