# A useful and interesting defense of Modernism in one page



## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

It's interesting that at least as of 1949, Copland was pessimistic about anyone but a small minority ever listening to his music, though he wrote for Hollywood and Broadway, and routinely conducted his concert music with major orchestras.

https://www.nytimes.com/books/99/03/14/specials/copland-modernist.html


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

An excellent summary of his position. He writes the music that he must, and hopes the audience will put aside their infatuation with earlier musics, which he finds constantly reinforced by their hearing over and over the music they are accustomed to and want to hear, merely as a soporific, it would appear. A well-written and reasonable-sounding version of Blame the Audience. He's selling a product, and finds few buying it. It's clearly, in his mind, not the product at fault. I get that.


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## Logos (Nov 3, 2012)

Contemporary composers or artists of any kind will never have the central position that a Beethoven or Wagner have enjoyed in German culture, or that Tolstoy enjoys in Russia. Modern societies are too fractured for any particular cultural figure to predominate, and too adoring of novelty to remain faithful to any that could predominate.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Strange Magic said:


> An excellent summary of his position. He writes the music that he must, and hopes the audience will put aside their infatuation with earlier musics, which he finds constantly reinforced by their hearing over and over the music they are accustomed to and want to hear, merely as a soporific, it would appear. A well-written and reasonable-sounding version of Blame the Audience. He's selling a product, and finds few buying it. It's clearly, in his mind, not the product at fault. I get that.


Why should Copland be accused of blaming the audience for not liking something in 1949? He had already hit it big with Billy the Kid and especially Appalachian Spring, which won widespread acceptance, both popular and critical (it won the 1945 Pulitzer, for example). He was hugely successful and, at this time, writing primarily in a populist style.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Mahlerian said:


> Why should Copland be accused of blaming the audience for not liking something in 1949? He had already hit it big with Billy the Kid and especially Appalachian Spring, which won widespread acceptance, both popular and critical (it won the 1945 Pulitzer, for example). He was hugely successful and, at this time, writing primarily in a populist style.


Indeed. You would think, by this time, that Copland would have known better. BTW, our old friend Milton Babbitt made the same argument. That darned audience!


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Strange Magic said:


> Indeed. You would think, by this time, that Copland would have known better. BTW, our old friend Milton Babbitt made the same argument. That darned audience!


Huh?

Copland wasn't "blaming" the audience, and neither did Babbitt, despite the efforts of those who want to re-frame what he wrote in his essay "The Composer as Specialist."

The audience isn't monolithic. Some people love modernist music. Some don't. Some people enjoy Telemann, others prefer Bach. It's not "blaming the audience" to speculate about the musical reasons why some parts of some audiences don't like any modernist music.

The audience isn't immutable either. Audiences today are much more open to the music Copland lists as extremely difficult, and I doubt many would find the music in the first two tiers particularly foreign at all unless they shunned the music of the century completely.


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

I think I've read this article before. Speaking as a listener who straddles both sides of the imaginary boundary between classic and contemporary /modern, I can say I both agree and disagree with him. 

It's interesting that he compares music to literature. In my early posts on this forum I innocently did the same thing, but I went so far as to say non-common practice techniques are an entirely new language, or rather several languages with seemingly no grammatical rules, and who has time or inclination to learn them? Literature will almost always express more feeling and have more idiomatic meaning in one's native tongue, common practice being the native tongue in this metaphor.

But having said all that, I did manage within the last couple of years to immerse myself in some of the "languages" of contemporary music (if you can call fifty to a hundred year old music contemporary) and I can testify that, as with Copland, it now sounds kind of normal to me. I can hear melodies, motifs, repeating phrases, rephrased phrases when those things are present just as I do in common practice music. Not always but often. 

I would never ever fault anyone for shunning non-common practice music. It may never quite have the emotional impact for me as more traditional approaches (my native language so to speak), but the effort has been worthwhile for me and took a lot less time than I might have expected. Now I have so much more to enjoy than ever before.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Mahlerian said:


> Copland wasn't "blaming" the audience, and neither did Babbitt, despite the efforts of those who want to re-frame what he wrote in his essay "The Composer as Specialist."


The essay was published as "Who Cares if You Listen?" Not Babbitt's title.* Here's a direct quote, not a re-frame:

"The time has passed when the normally well-educated man without special preparation could understand the most advanced work in, for example, mathematics, philosophy, and physics. Advanced music, to the extent that it reflects the knowledge and originality of the informed composer, scarcely can be expected to appear more intelligible... It often has been remarked that only in politics and the 'arts' does the layman regard himself as an expert, with the right to have his opinion heard."

*The very first sentence of the article is, "This article might have been entitled 'The Composer as Specialist' or, alternatively, and perhaps less contentiously, 'The Composer as Anachronism.' " If Babbitt had intended the essay to be titled "The Composer as Specialist," that would be an exceedingly odd first sentence.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Weston said:


> I think I've read this article before. Speaking as a listener who straddles both sides of the imaginary boundary between classic and contemporary /modern, I can say I both agree and disagree with him.


I had posted it a while back, although the topic never managed to really move very far in the direction I was hoping it would. My question then was "How do your personal rankings match with those he provides?" Or something to that effect.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

KenOC said:


> The essay was published as "Who Cares if You Listen?" Not Babbitt's title. Here's a direct quote, not a re-frame:
> 
> "The time has passed when the normally well-educated man without special preparation could understand the most advanced work in, for example, mathematics, philosophy, and physics. Advanced music, to the extent that it reflects the knowledge and originality of the informed composer, scarcely can be expected to appear more intelligible... It often has been remarked that only in politics and the 'arts' does the layman regard himself as an expert, with the right to have his opinion heard."


And how is that blaming the audience for anything? It's a fact that the average listener, _without special preparation_, doesn't understand Babbitt's music. He's not saying that they would be unable to.

Reframing, by the way, encompasses the willful abuse of the title foisted on the essay as if it had anything to do with the content therein. Babbitt abhorred and repudiated that title.


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## Truckload (Feb 15, 2012)

While this is the kind of thread that fascinates me, I can't let myself get sucked into spending the next two or three days on this thread (at which point it will inevitably be shut down), as I just don't have the time.

Copland was a very erudite and thoughtful author of books as well as a composer. I don't know how many books he wrote, but I have his "What to listen for in Music" and "Copland on Music". While the arguments about "modern" music will not be anything new to the experienced TC member, his books cover a wide range of topics and are worth a read by any music lover.


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## Logos (Nov 3, 2012)

KenOC said:


> "The time has passed when the normally well-educated man without special preparation could understand the most advanced work in, for example, mathematics, philosophy, and physics. Advanced music, to the extent that it reflects the knowledge and originality of the informed composer, scarcely can be expected to appear more intelligible... It often has been remarked that only in politics and the 'arts' does the layman regard himself as an expert, with the right to have his opinion heard."


The difference he missed is that mathematics and the natural sciences are seldom or never conceived as pleasureful entertainment but as intellectual tools. However, I think even composers of "advanced music" sometimes aim to please, and when they fail to please, they claim it was never their aim. Fox and the Grapes.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Mahlerian said:


> ...Reframing, by the way, encompasses the willful abuse of the title foisted on the essay as if it had anything to do with the content therein. Babbitt abhorred and repudiated that title.


See the footnote to my post, thanks.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Here's one of my favorite parts of Copland's essay:

"But whether the style of a contemporary composer is easy or hard to comprehend, it would be wise for the lay listener to keep the composer's objective well in mind. The objective is not necessarily to make beautiful sounds like Chopin or Mozart. Much as one should like to do just that, it isn't possible, because one doesn't write the music of one's choice but a necessity."

It is clear, to me anyway, that Copland wrote this essay, not to tempt the last few holdouts into his Modernist Music fold--the seekers of soporifics, the lay listeners, the uninitiated, the incurious--but because he sensed that the concert hall had large numbers of empty seats. Not for Billy the Kid, or Appalachian Spring, or Rodeo, to be sure--there the house was packed. He and Babbitt must have worked out of the same playbook, because Babbitt was forever scratching his head as to why nobody came to the New Music concerts, even when they were free, but people ate up his show and Broadway tunes.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

Copland's essay seems written to be informative especially to those who find (found) the new music unpleasant. He seems simply to be explaining why people might have the response they do. For s short essay it seems reasonable and useful. I was surprised to see this sentence:



> Nowadays the situation has radically changed; the press is more open-minded, and anybody casually twisting a radio dial is in danger of getting an earful of it.


How easy was it to hear new music on the radio in 1949? Today I can twist the dials of my radio and never hear what I consider truly modern music. Maybe he was referring to Shostakovich, Prokofiev, or Vaughan Williams.

I think this question is very interesting:



> Why is it that the musical public is seemingly so reluctant to consider a musical composition as, possibly, a challenging experience?


People at TC have asked this of those who dislike modern music. Many here do listen to music as a challenge or something to be "learned". Something like - "I don't like or understand this, but let me continue to listen and eventually "learn" it and appreciate it." That's, of course, great, and I have done that for years. But many simply wish to enjoy music. In fact I assume the vast majority of people in society just want to hear music they like. They don't want to work at it (i.e. spend much time listening without immediate reward). Obviously there's nothing wrong with that. Most people don't want challenges in the vast majority of things they do, and music is one of those things.

So _if it's true_ that modern music contains challenges for the average listener, one should expect that most people will not push themselves to listen repeatedly until they appreciate the new languages. And that is simply perfectly OK.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

KenOC said:


> See the footnote to my post, thanks.


According to Babbitt, the original was adapted from a spoken lecture he gave, after which he was approached by someone from the magazine High Fidelity to have it printed. Unless you think he was lying, it seems like a reasonable assumption that the first sentence was more or less taken from a spoken version that would have been given without a printed title.


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## Logos (Nov 3, 2012)

The base audience for classical music is by its very nature aesthetically conservative. They pay a great deal of money to hear music written by white men that died 150+ years ago who lived within a patriarchal civilization governed by king and clergy, often working as servants for such eminent persons. Are these ideal patrons of modern art given that the very nature of what brings them together is so _un_modern?


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

mmsbls said:


> So _if it's true_ that modern music contains challenges for the average listener, one should expect that most people will not push themselves to listen repeatedly until they appreciate the new languages. And that is simply perfectly OK.


Of course it is. But no one is disagreeing with that. These debates aren't primarily over personal taste, they're over views about the music itself.

If someone doesn't like modernist music, that's fine with me, and I don't mind if they express their opinion.

If someone thinks that there is something inherently wrong with modernist music, this is not a position about taste, it is about other things entirely, and I think that misconceptions about lack of melody, lack of form, etc. in this regard should be countered whenever possible. It does not have to be about taste or opinion at all.


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## Richannes Wrahms (Jan 6, 2014)

Große Fuge is disconcerting in effect, the idea being apparently to upset and disturb one's equanimity of soul. Otherwise, how is one to explain the cacophonous harmonies, the tuneless melodies, the head-spitting sonorities, the confusing rhythms and cerebral forms?


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

I find the _Große Fuge_ to be wonderfully complex, beautiful, rhythmically daring, intensely expressive, full of out-of-this-world sonorities and harmonies. And the melodies are 100% gorgeous and even hummable (I hum them sometimes). It may be Beethoven's most rewarding piece of music.


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## Hildadam Bingor (May 7, 2016)

Logos said:


> Contemporary composers or artists of any kind will never have the central position that a Beethoven or Wagner have enjoyed in German culture, or that Tolstoy enjoys in Russia. Modern societies are too fractured for any particular cultural figure to predominate, and too adoring of novelty to remain faithful to any that could predominate.


The Beatles prove that's not so though.

And I guess contemporary includes Copland, because this thread is about his article, so then maybe it also includes Stravinsky, Picasso, and Joyce, who're probably as central as Wagner or Tolstoy.


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## Richannes Wrahms (Jan 6, 2014)

I find the _Le marteau sans maître_ to be wonderfully complex, beautiful, rhythmically daring, intensely expressive, full of out-of-this-world sonorities and harmonies. And the melodies are 100% gorgeous and even hummable (I hum them sometimes). It may be Boulez's most rewarding piece of music.


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

Richtanis Ving Ramis said:


> I find the _Le marteau sans maître_ to be wonderfully complex, beautiful, rhythmically daring, intensely expressive, full of out-of-this-world sonorities and harmonies. And the melodies are 100% gorgeous and even hummable (I hum them sometimes). It may be Boulez's most rewarding piece of music.


I realize you're doing one of those Richannes Wrahms funny things, and I apologize if I missed the underlying point of your first post.

For the record, I agree about _Le marteau sans maître_. Funny how more than one piece of music can fit that description, huh? Wild and wacky stuff it is, I tell ya.


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

Logos said:


> The base audience for classical music is by its very nature aesthetically conservative. They pay a great deal of money to hear music written by white men that died 150+ years ago who lived within a patriarchal civilization governed by king and clergy, often working as servants for such eminent persons. Are these ideal patrons of modern art given that the very nature of what brings them together is so _un_modern?


Yet this same conservative audience may revel in the fact that those servants of eminent personages were writing cutting edge music too for its time It's what makes Beethoven, Schubert and the like stand out from the crowd.

But this apologetic has been used over and over with little effect, so I'm not likely to change anyone's mind with it. I'm not really trying to of course. I'm happy to discuss Mozart with one person and Boulez with another.

(On a side note, I do actually _love_ the discussion when these threads pop up. I'm off to make some popcorn.)


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

Strange Magic said:


> An excellent summary of his position. He writes the music that he must, and hopes the audience will put aside their infatuation with earlier musics, which he finds constantly reinforced by their hearing over and over the music they are accustomed to and want to hear, merely as a soporific, it would appear. A well-written and reasonable-sounding version of Blame the Audience. He's selling a product, and finds few buying it. It's clearly, in his mind, not the product at fault. I get that.


Copland was a genuinely modest man, and his music was probably as successful in his own lifetime from the standpoint of popularity as that of any American classical music composer ever, depending of course on how one defines "popularity" and "classical music". He had no reason to blame the audience, and didn't. 
Copland's close friend and younger protege, Leonard Bernstein, did become bitter and disillusioned in his last years, partly due to his resentment at having to live most of his life as a closeted homosexual (or bisexual) but also due to his resentment at being pigeonholed as a popular or light classical music composer (and therefore a minor composer), due (he thought) to spending so much of his time and energy on Broadway musicals and his conducting career. He arguably did "blame the audience" -- ironically, for being too much of a popular success.


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## Logos (Nov 3, 2012)

Hildadam Bingor said:


> The Beatles prove that's not so though.


I know young people who don't even understand the phrase "hang up the phone", let alone know 60s pop groups. I think you underestimate how rapidly the 'legends' and other assorted pet rocks from that generation are already being forgotten. Young people today are deep in their own fads. Once the baby boomers have died off, the Beatles have roughly the same interest as Al Jolson and Mary Pickford. They were the most famous people in the world, too. Such is the duration of the 'centrality' of time-life magazine subject matter. Coming to an oldies station near you. Next and last stop, the dustbin of history.

I was thinking of contemporary (today) artists attaining centrality and I don't think James Joyce, born in 1882, fits the bill.


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## Logos (Nov 3, 2012)

Weston said:


> Yet this same conservative audience may revel in the fact that those servants of eminent personages were writing cutting edge music too for its time It's what makes Beethoven, Schubart and the like stand out from the crowd.


And revel, if that is the word, in Bach's _stile antico_ counterpoint, 100 years out of date in his time, 300 or more in ours.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

After reading Copland's essay several times, I thank fluteman for posting it here. It is really an excellent, nay irrefutable, argument by Copland for classical music listeners to literally replace their old heads with new ones, if they want to stay fresh and current, and to understand the New Music. The music is constructed in such a manner as to require that new head in order to fully enjoy much of it and its new possibilities. The relentless, irreversible workings of time will determine, X decades and centuries from now, what proportion of the classical music audience felt sufficiently motivated--challenged--to get those new heads. Whether one takes the position that there is a gulf, a gap, between the older music and the new, or instead that there is a seamless evolution from the one to the other, nevertheless most recognize that for a large segment of the classical audience, there comes a point beyond which music becomes too unintelligible and too unrewarding for them personally to explore further. For me, the better-known works of Bartok represent that point along the spectrum where I call a halt; it's as far as I go. Others will make other choices. Something for everyone, but, again, time will tell how many prefer what. Let there be no hand-wringing about conspiracies, or complaints about the conservatism of the larger public-- it is what it is.


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## Hildadam Bingor (May 7, 2016)

Logos said:


> I know young people who don't even understand the phrase "hang up the phone", let alone know 60s pop groups. I think you underestimate how rapidly the 'legends' and other assorted pet rocks from that generation are already being forgotten. Young people today are deep in their own fads. Once the baby boomers have died off, the Beatles have roughly the same interest as Al Jolson and Mary Pickford. They were the most famous people in the world, too. Such is the duration of the 'centrality' of time-life magazine subject matter. Coming to an oldies station near you. Next and last stop, the dustbin of history.
> 
> I was thinking of contemporary (today) artists attaining centrality and I don't think James Joyce, born in 1882, fits the bill.


Okay, I say young people listen to the Beatles today, you say they don't, but do you actually have any objective evidence that they don't? Because there's evidence that they do: http://www.examiner.com/article/spotify-breaks-it-down-young-people-love-their-streaming-beatles

Also, you know if you're younger than the baby boomers then you'll actually be there to see if your prediction comes true.

Anyway the Beatles aren't pet rocks.


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

Logos said:


> The difference he missed is that mathematics and the natural sciences are seldom or never conceived as pleasureful entertainment but as intellectual tools. However, I think even composers of "advanced music" sometimes aim to please, and when they fail to please, they claim it was never their aim. Fox and the Grapes.


But most would say there is a difference between art and entertainment, or high art and popular art. And this distinction has existed for centuries, and in arts other than music -- literature, poetry, theater, painting, etc. The only difference is, in this supposedly democratic era, anyone who wants to become part of the well-educated, sophisticated audience can supposedly do so, rather than just the wealthy elite.


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## Logos (Nov 3, 2012)

Hildadam Bingor said:


> Okay, I say young people listen to the Beatles today, you say they don't, but do you actually have any objective evidence that they don't? Because there's evidence that they do: http://www.examiner.com/article/spotify-breaks-it-down-young-people-love-their-streaming-beatles


An anecdote for an anecdote: http://www.avclub.com/article/new-york-teenagers-have-no-idea-who-the-beatles-ar-55682

In any case, is cultural centrality nothing more than being remembered by a dying generation and a niche within a niche of their 'retro-cool' children? Mere popularity (always precarious) and being part of the life-blood of a nation's greatness--very different things.


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## Hildadam Bingor (May 7, 2016)

This makes me realize that Copland's talking about a very new problem! Bach maybe wasn't all that popular in his time - or maybe he was, hard to say - but that was because people were listening to more popular composers FROM THAT TIME, not because everybody just wanted them some more Orlando Lassus.

Though I guess it was kind of that way in church music, where Palestrina was the gr8test ever and everybody after was doing it wrong somehow. So I guess that means going to symphony hall is like going to church. Which I guess we already kind of knew!


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## Hildadam Bingor (May 7, 2016)

Logos said:


> An anecdote for an anecdote:


Mine wasn't an anecdote though. The Beatles are one of the most downloaded artists by young people on Spotify - that's not a TV crew interviewing a non-scientific sample on the street, that's objective data.



Logos said:


> In any case, is cultural centrality nothing more than being remembered by a dying generation and a niche within a niche of their 'retro-cool' children? Mere popularity (always precarious) and being part of the life-blood of a nation's greatness--very different things.


I dunno, _you're_ the one who brought up popularity. I just said the Beatles are central, especially to Englanf, obviously, but also to everybody. It's like saying Verdi is central - proving it is boring, but you know it's TRUE.


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## Logos (Nov 3, 2012)

fluteman said:


> But most would say there is a difference between art and entertainment, or high art and popular art. And this distinction has existed for centuries, and in arts other than music -- literature, poetry, theater, painting, etc. The only difference is, in this supposedly democratic era, anyone who wants to become part of the well-educated, sophisticated audience can supposedly do so, rather than just the wealthy elite.


Of course, there are a thousand degrees of artistic solemnity--from the merriest farce to the most austere religious iconography. In the case of Parsifal--high art I think you will agree--Wagner was uneasy when the crowd failed to clap. Even in the case of that solemn work, he still wanted the to know if the audience was pleased. These words "entertained", "pleased", "enjoyed" should not be taken in the narrow frivolous sense only. My point is only that it is not beneath a great artist to desire that the audience like his work, or to be concerned when they do not and pretending a total lack of concern is rather suspect.


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## Hildadam Bingor (May 7, 2016)

Here's something about the life-blood of a nation's greatness? My brother's girlfriend is from Minnesota and I was asking her what artists they're proud of there. Fitzgerald? No, all he did was run off to New York and get drunk. So who, then? Well obviously: Bob Dylan. (No so big on Prince. She's, like, 26 years old, by the way.)


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## Logos (Nov 3, 2012)

Hildadam Bingor said:


> It's like saying Verdi is central - proving it is boring, but you know it's TRUE.


I really don't know what that means. Proving it is boring? What? I only brought up popularity to indicate that I wasn't talking about popularity.


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## Hildadam Bingor (May 7, 2016)

Uh... you brought up popularity here, and I don't think that's what you were doing then:



Logos said:


> I know young people who don't even understand the phrase "hang up the phone", let alone know 60s pop groups. I think you underestimate how rapidly the 'legends' and other assorted pet rocks from that generation are already being forgotten. Young people today are deep in their own fads. Once the baby boomers have died off, the Beatles have roughly the same interest as Al Jolson and Mary Pickford. They were the most famous people in the world, too. Such is the duration of the 'centrality' of time-life magazine subject matter. Coming to an oldies station near you. Next and last stop, the dustbin of history.


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## arpeggio (Oct 4, 2012)

I think it is a great essay.

What is sad is that sixty years later we are still reading the exact same BS here, pro and con.


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## Hildadam Bingor (May 7, 2016)

I wonder how Copland felt when people DID start using HIS music as a couch. The nationalist period, obviously, not Connotations. Come to think of it, maybe that's why he wrote Connotations.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

arpeggio said:


> I think it is a great essay.
> 
> What is sad is that sixty years later we are still reading the exact same BS here, pro and con.


It's not sad. It's just the way that it is.


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

Logos said:


> My point is only that it is not beneath a great artist to desire that the audience like his work, or to be concerned when they do not and pretending a total lack of concern is rather suspect.


And you can be sure that when Aaron Copland conducted a concert of his own music, he wanted people to buy tickets and show up, which they did. He was not a charismatic public figure, but he did write some very readable books to help his cause.

His protege Leonard Bernstein was a very charismatic public figure and went even further, not only writing very readable books, but starring on radio and TV, doing his famous Young Peoples' Concerts, and conducting to packed houses all over the world with programs that included music by the composers discussed by Copland, Copland himself, and of course Bernstein himself. You can't accuse either of them of not caring or pretending not to care about their audience.


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

Strange Magic said:


> An excellent summary of his position. He writes the music that he must, and hopes the audience will put aside their infatuation with earlier musics, which he finds constantly reinforced by their hearing over and over the music they are accustomed to and want to hear, merely as a soporific, it would appear. A well-written and reasonable-sounding version of Blame the Audience. He's selling a product, and finds few buying it. It's clearly, in his mind, not the product at fault. I get that.


I guess the opposite argument should be called "enslaving the composer"? Hm?


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

Strange Magic said:


> After reading Copland's essay several times, I thank fluteman for posting it here. It is really an excellent, nay irrefutable, argument by Copland for classical music listeners to literally replace their old heads with new ones, if they want to stay fresh and current, and to understand the New Music. The music is constructed in such a manner as to require that new head in order to fully enjoy much of it and its new possibilities. The relentless, irreversible workings of time will determine, X decades and centuries from now, what proportion of the classical music audience felt sufficiently motivated--challenged--to get those new heads. Whether one takes the position that there is a gulf, a gap, between the older music and the new, or instead that there is a seamless evolution from the one to the other, nevertheless most recognize that for a large segment of the classical audience, there comes a point beyond which music becomes too unintelligible and too unrewarding for them personally to explore further. For me, the better-known works of Bartok represent that point along the spectrum where I call a halt; it's as far as I go. Others will make other choices. Something for everyone, but, again, time will tell how many prefer what. Let there be no hand-wringing about conspiracies, or complaints about the conservatism of the larger public-- it is what it is.


You're writing this as if learning to appreciate new things is bad.

Whatever, I don't really want to get sucked into this debate again. But it just makes absolutely no sense to me for classical music lovers to be advocating a "1st impressions are always right" attitude. That seems like a bad approach for any type of musical style.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

violadude said:


> You're writing this as if learning to appreciate new things is bad.
> 
> Whatever, I don't really want to get sucked into this debate again. But it just makes absolutely no sense to me for classical music lovers to be advocating a "1st impressions are always right" attitude. That seems like a bad approach for any type of musical style.


If I had believed in my first impressions, I would never have come to enjoy Mahler at all, or much of the other music I love.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

Mahlerian said:


> If I had believed in my first impressions, I would never have come to enjoy Mahler at all, or much of the other music I love.


I agree completely. I think the trick is somehow learning how to listen differently and not necessarily expect what one's heard before. For me, that process seemed to take awhile even though others told me I shouldn't expect to hear what I had come to love.

I remember some guy often saying how listening to new music should be fun even if one doesn't enjoy the music. The process of coming to understand the new language can be enjoyable itself. Years ago hearing music that sounded harsh, opaque, and completely unintelligible made me want to turn the music off and not listen again. Now I may ultimately decide to turn the piece off, but I will listen until I can hear something that I take from the work. Many times my first sense is unpleasant, but after listening for awhile, I hear interesting things. After further listening I hear more and more I like. It's a fascinating process.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

violadude said:


> You're writing this as if learning to appreciate new things is bad.
> 
> Whatever, I don't really want to get sucked into this debate again. But it just makes absolutely no sense to me for classical music lovers to be advocating a "1st impressions are always right" attitude. That seems like a bad approach for any type of musical style.


Straw men. The March of the Straw Men. Might be a great piece of music. This particular straw man, a ventriloquist's dummy cradled in violadude's arms, says "Learning to appreciate new things is bad." The Real Man said no such thing. Unless I am sadly mistaken, I believe everybody has heard some piece of music they never learned to like. That's all I'm saying--I (most people) reach a point somewhere in their listening wherein, after trying some composer or genre or whatever, they go off and try something else; listen to something else. My zone of rapidly diminishing enjoyment is reached just over the border from Bartok, and I got to really appreciate Bartok by repeated listening. There is No Inherent Contradiction here, so let's set fire to the Straw Men once and for all.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

I'll just reiterate something I said here some other time this "you need to make more effort" argument came up - it sounds like some creepy guy trying to get his reluctant girlfriend to try something different in the bedroom. "Sure, you don't like it _now_, but eventually you'll love it, so let's keep doing it until you agree with me."

I mean, every single one of us has a story about that one time we didn't like something and then later we changed our mind. But we should all reserve the right to say _the hell with it, I'm not interested_ whenever we damn well please without being accused of being conservative, or close-minded, or lazy, or cowardly, or whatever.

And who said anything about _first_ impressions, anyway?


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Strange Magic said:


> Straw men. The March of the Straw Men. Might be a great piece of music. This particular straw man, a ventriloquist's dummy cradled in violadude's arms, says "Learning to appreciate new things is bad." The Real Man said no such thing. Unless I am sadly mistaken, I believe everybody has heard some piece of music they never learned to like. That's all I'm saying--I (most people) reach a point somewhere in their listening wherein, after trying some composer or genre or whatever, they go off and try something else; listen to something else. My zone of rapidly diminishing enjoyment is reached just over the border from Bartok, and I got to really appreciate Bartok by repeated listening. There is No Inherent Contradiction here, so let's set fire to the Straw Men once and for all.


But there is no border. Bartok is not specifically positioned in some fixed way such that his works are such and such in terms of difficulty.

The border only exists within your own mind. For others, Bartok may be more distant than some you consider over the border.


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## isorhythm (Jan 2, 2015)

Nereffid said:


> But we should all reserve the right to say _the hell with it, I'm not interested_ whenever we damn well please without being accused of being conservative, or close-minded, or lazy, or cowardly, or whatever.


I'm comfortable saying that someone who doesn't like _any_ 20th century style of classical music is closed-minded about music. There's so much to choose from! If you don't like any of it, the problem isn't that composers all stopped coming up with any good new ideas around 1911; the problem - if you even think it's a problem, which you certainly don't have to - is with you.

Being closed-minded about music is not the worst thing to be and it's not any kind of moral judgment at all. I'm closed-minded about plenty of things in life.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

What's the end game here, anyway?

If we're trying to find fault when someone says "For me, the better-known works of Bartok represent that point along the spectrum where I call a halt; it's as far as I go", what is the situation that we want to achieve with this person? Do we want to make them go further, and if so, to what end? To get them to like everything they listen to? To acknowledge a mistake on their part? What do we get out of it if they go further? What do we lose if they refuse? Or is it simply that we don't want them to say such things out loud in public?


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Nereffid said:


> What's the end game here, anyway?
> 
> If we're trying to find fault when someone says "For me, the better-known works of Bartok represent that point along the spectrum where I call a halt; it's as far as I go", what is the situation that we want to achieve with this person? Do we want to make them go further, and if so, to what end? To get them to like everything they listen to? To acknowledge a mistake on their part? What do we get out of it if they go further? What do we lose if they refuse? Or is it simply that we don't want them to say such things out loud in public?


Not at all. That's their opinion, and they have a right both to hold and express it.

As I've said before, where I have a problem is people generalizing their experience as if it has universal validity. To say that Bartok wrote natural, true music while Berg's is a horrific intellectualized aberration or to make claims about the true nature of serialism as if the second you place that twelfth note on, the audience will revolt, that's where I feel that people are overstepping the bounds of opinion and making claims that can be disputed.

To say that Bartok represents a point on a spectrum is to make a claim about his music as compared to others' that will not always hold for the experiences of other people. Difficulty as related to music is entirely relative to personal experience, and cannot be so easily generalized.


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## isorhythm (Jan 2, 2015)

Nereffid said:


> What's the end game here, anyway?
> 
> If we're trying to find fault when someone says "For me, the better-known works of Bartok represent that point along the spectrum where I call a halt; it's as far as I go", what is the situation that we want to achieve with this person? Do we want to make them go further, and if so, to what end? To get them to like everything they listen to? To acknowledge a mistake on their part? What do we get out of it if they go further? What do we lose if they refuse? Or is it simply that we don't want them to say such things out loud in public?


I have no endgame. People like what they like. And my hypothetical closed-minded person was an extreme case, not any actual person on this forum.

I don't see any problem with the Bartok on a spectrum thing, either. In jazz people used to talk about "in" and "out," and there was a spectrum. (They used to say Andrew Hill was "too in to be out and too out to be in," for example.) It's a recognizable thing about how people hear music.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Mahlerian said:


> The border only exists within your own mind. For others, Bartok may be more distant than some you consider over the border.


Of course it only exists in my own mind. Jeez.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

isorhythm said:


> The problem - if you even think it's a problem, which you certainly don't have to - is with you.


Actually, for me anyway, there is no problem. I'm glad we all agree that it's not a problem. It just is what it is.


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## isorhythm (Jan 2, 2015)

Strange Magic said:


> Actually, for me anyway, there is no problem. I'm glad we all agree that it's not a problem. It just is what it is.


I wasn't thinking of you, to be clear; I'm talking about an extreme sort of view that there is _no_ worthwhile music after Romanticism.

I agree it's not a problem unless someone wants to make it a problem. It is generally the closed-minded listeners who want to make it a problem, unfortunately.


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## arpeggio (Oct 4, 2012)

isorhythm said:


> I wasn't thinking of you, to be clear; I'm talking about an extreme sort of view that there is _no_ worthwhile music after Romanticism.
> 
> I agree it's not a problem unless someone wants to make it a problem. It is generally the closed-minded listeners who want to make it a problem, unfortunately.


Actually the "no worthwhile" crowd is a small minority here. There are a few. I run into many like this in the music world I am active in, particularly with one of the community bands that I play with. A faction composed of mostly members of the trumpet and euphonium sections have successfully lobbied to stop performing contemporary band music. We still do some but not as much as we used to. We never perform Persichetti anymore. Things are getting tense there and I am concerned that we may see a serious dispute break our among the members. Another group torn apart by the great atonal/tonal debate? I hope not. Over the past few years some of out best players have left because of it.

This is one of the end games I have had real life experiences with. I realize that it has tainted many of my contributions.


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

arpeggio said:


> A faction composed of mostly members of the trumpet and euphonium sections have successfully lobbied to stop performing contemporary band music.


I think that after a number of lengthy and contentious threads, we have finally located the true villains: those evil, scheming, slimy brass players. I say, collect the foul liquids they empty from their spit valves and wipe them all out with a single, biblical-magnitude flood.


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## Richannes Wrahms (Jan 6, 2014)

YT suggested


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