# Fetishising the past...



## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

...or the Classical music industry's obsession with it. & cults, and groupies, "the singer not the song," all that.

For fear of this turning into another one of those tedious debates, if you want to push your old worn out barrow (eg. the "atonal" vs. "tonal" debate, or the "objective" vs. "subjective" debate) basically p*ss off. Make your own thread on that.

Anyway, I was reading THIS interview with veteran American composer Ned Rorem, from the 1980's. I didn't agree (or understand ) with everything the man said, but this quote leapt out at me from the page -

*Interviewer, Rich Grzesiak:* 
Sibelius and Mozart seem to be enjoying another revival, and the Shostakovich symphonies seem to be recorded with greater frequency. Are there other composers being neglected that you would like to see revived?

*Ned Rorem:* 
The composers that are being neglected are the composers that are living and breathing today.

Shostakovich, Sibelius and Mozart are hardly neglected by purveyors of classical music. Every time there's a new gimmick like CD's, all of these composers are re-recorded for the hundredth time. Ours is the only society ever that is primarily concerned with the past. Your questions to me have been mainly about the past. It's inconceivable that 100 years or more ago that Debussy or Chopin or Haydn would be so concerned about their past.

Serious music had a function in the milieu of Bach. Today, no more. People today are aware of music more through performance than through what is performed. They want to get Sutherland's record of this or Karajan's record of that or Bernstein's record of this and that. They compare the performers with each other but the music itself is simply a matter of pyrotechnics, whereas I am necessarily concerned with what is performed. {End Quote}

*So I'd like to open up a discussion about the things Mr. Rorem raises in this answer. Especially in terms of the fetishising and canonisation of composers of the past and comparative neglect of music of more recent times (eg. after 1945?).

Also about what he feels is some classical listener's inordinate focus on recordings rather than the music or work at hand (which is linked to his earlier point, eg. I'd extrapolate - if a "star" like Bernstein did not record it, it's not worth listening to, it's too fringe, etc. judgements of the sort)...*


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

I think that the composers that are alive today are being neglected too. I don't see fifty billion different recordings of the Carl Vine symphonies. I _do_ see fifty billion different recordings of the Beethoven symphonies. I think part if this problem is that the public doesn't know what to expect with these living, breathing composers that they even may never have heard of before. But with Beethoven, since his symphonies are re-recorded six times a day (five on public holidays) the listeners get to hear them more often, thus growing familiar with that sound world of the early 1800s rather than the early 2000s.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

^^I would agree but I'd bet that people who are scared of the newer things, they may well be also scared of older things (eg. Beethoven's _Grosse Fuge_). Not literally scared, just maybe not interested or not valuing that for whatever reason. Or maybe as you say, not knowing it as well as his other things, so kind of daunted.

Even I was once. Reading things like his late quartets where the Everest of the genre did not help much. It's when people share what they get out of these more complex works - whether old or new - that's when it gets interesting, that's when they have potential to "win people over" to liking these musics just like they do.

Not speaking of the "divine" and "unnatainable" or "Heavenly" qualities or some such. Just get real, people, this is just music, is what I think when I read that kind of jargon...


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

Obviously people like music that sounds "nice" and "familiar" and (I hate this word) "_accessible_."


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

It's the same with all music genres. 95 percent of the public is content to listen to the same old stuff for their entire life.

Just turn on your radio and go through the dial. Rock, Jazz, Classical stations playing the same old **** over and over.


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## Crudblud (Dec 29, 2011)

First; I think it's great that someone had the balls to say that about Mozart and Sibelius.

Second; I think he makes a good point about the music vs. the performer, but for music around the turn of the 20th century onward you can pick up three recordings of the same thing and have them all sound different. To say that the performer doesn't have a stake in the situation is ludicrous. In something like Mozart or Haydn, I'd say that they only need re-recording when a significant technological advancement comes along that improves the sound quality immensely, until then we don't need another Große Messe or Sieben letzte Worte. I suppose in response to that some might say that HIP is relatively new and in fact still only in its infancy, which qualifies as new (old) technology that improves the sound by making it more authentic, but what else can they do with it; wear powder wigs and hideous uncomfortable clothes while playing it?

Post-war music is in a relative state of neglect, yes, and some would say that's for the best. I think that in the coming generation (generation XYZ?) there will be more attention paid to it as a whole, much more than just the "four 'E's" (well, I had to make a stupid joke at some point!), and probably quite a few people even the most OUTRAGEOUSLY AVANT among us have never heard of. I think that we'll also see greater appreciation for the pre-war avant garde; you know, because it doesn't sound anywhere near as bad as that other **** (stupid joke no. 2). In other words, the people writing today can feel safe in the knowledge that 200 years from now the conservatives will just love 'em!


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Crudblud said:


> ... To say that the performer doesn't have a stake in the situation is ludicrous...


I don't read Rorem is saying that the performer of the music isn't important. What I read him as saying is that there has developed a kind of deification and obsession with certain stars of the classical music recording industry. Correspondingly, a focus on the repertoire they record to the possible exclusion of other potentially interesting things.

Or maybe I'm complicating it. Just thinking out aloud. I think basically what he's saying is that to him the music is more important than the performer. Which is just his opinion, of course. For him, it's not a case of "the singer, not the song" being important, but the other way round.

At least he's admitting his bias or preference. That's what I respect, although I don't agree with everything he said in the whole interview that I gave the link to.

Of course, this is not set in stone, Mr. Rorem being an active critics (still?), has probably changed tack on some things since then.

But having come across other things written by him, he's always a man of the present, a man of the moment. He doesn't seem to be stuck in a sort of ivory tower or hermenutically sealed bubble. & that's what informs his attitude, he obviously doesn't like this view of classical music being attached to things like fetishes and building monuments to the exclusion of simple reasoning and common sense. Well that's my impression of the man, anyhow...


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## HarpsichordConcerto (Jan 1, 2010)

Sid James said:


> ... People today are aware of music more through performance than through what is performed. They want to get Sutherland's record of this or Karajan's record of that or Bernstein's record of this and that. They compare the performers with each other but the music itself is simply a matter of pyrotechnics, whereas I am necessarily concerned with what is performed. {End Quote}


I'm not going to address "everything" because I feel much has been discussed in similar threads before. Two points raised interested me, which I quoted above.

The first was about star performers and the recording industry. This has as much to do with our love affair with music of the past as the music itself. Star pianists, star singers, star conductors, star violinists; you name them, we all want Glen Gould playing Bach or Bernstein conducting Beethoven or Boulez directing Cage  . Recording companies are there to make money, there is no doubt about that, and multiple star performers signing company contracts are their most priced assets; they are the ones making the record companies the required dollars. If there is an upcoming young conductor, then we want him/her conducting Beethoven and Mahler. It's become our modern consumerism that star performers and recordings go together without question. I think this is going to stay for a long time. Music from this perspective is a product; it might well be meticulously produced by the best, but the economics apply to it like any manufactured product for me to purchase.

As for feitishsing with the past, there are many relatively successful active composers, too. It's not easy "business" for them; their competition is hard: dead contemporary composers, dead classical composers and of course popular music all competing for our ears. From that perspective, I can sympathise with the challenges an active composer faces. But equally, I'm not necessarily into newly composed music per se for the sake of it. If something composed today sounds like a chainsaw, the artist who presumably composed it for some reason that might appeal to a minority of listeners, then is it that unreasonable for HarpsichordConcerto or my neighbour to not have that as his/her favour track played over and over? Likewise, there are some very fine operas composed within the last decade that I would love to see staged by Opera Australia, and that I think have much potential to become future "canon" pieces. Even so, the latter still faces a mountain of tough competition - folks are not going to attend an opera for a stylised story when they can instead attend the movies for a fraction of the ticket price, and enjoy visually stunning movies. The analogy is almost identical with movies - the industry is not that fascinated with older movies, new movies are constantly churned out by the movie industry every month of the year. Entertainment and some artistic values have changed.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

starthrower said:


> ...
> Just turn on your radio and go through the dial. Rock, Jazz, Classical stations playing the same old **** over and over.


Well I haven't listened to classical radio for well over a year now. WHen I'm not listening to my cd's or going to live gigs, I listen to non classical radio. The youth station, which has a variety of things, not just mainstream. & no boy or girl bands, mass produced stuff like that. "Real" stuff, but just non-classical. Different things. They promote & play new & upcoming bands, and also more established alternative things.

ANyway, that's more interesting, far more interesting, than what the classical stations here are playing in terms of new music. What it was then was on one station it was like very experimental stuff. The other one was mainly same stuff all the time. Eg. I was getting sick of hearing mainly Arvo Part and Penderecki. They may have changed but I didn't stay to find out. About 2 hours of contemporary/new classical programming per week on the classical stations here, 2 hours for each of their broadcasting. Pretty woeful I'd say. & one giving the extreme avant-garde things, the other much more conservative. See, these ideological extremes/bubbles.

So I "left" and am more happy with the latest things in non-classical. As far as radio is concerned anyway. I've kind of voted with my feet...


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## Igneous01 (Jan 27, 2011)

I think we have always had a fetish with the past as people of today. I mean how many times a day do people associate smart with a funny looking guy with spoofy white hair? 

I think its because these people are immortal, that we keep coming back to them: no one wants to really hear the words of a living man or his art. We look back because theres a sense of ambiguity and uncertainty in what these people would have said to this, or done to that. Sometimes I like to imagine having a conversation with Beethoven, and just imagining his responses, or talking with Einstein. The truth is I dont know either of them personally or can even accurately predict what they would say or respond to me, but in that lies the beauty, because your free to make them say whatever you want to say. 

a dead man is alot like art, the mystery/obscurity/uncertainty/magnitude of work is what keeps us at bay and clinging to our past alot.


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## Crudblud (Dec 29, 2011)

Sid James said:


> I don't read Rorem is saying that the performer of the music isn't important. What I read him as saying is that there has developed a kind of deification and obsession with certain stars of the classical music recording industry. Correspondingly, a focus on the repertoire they record to the possible exclusion of other potentially interesting things.


Your take on what he meant makes more sense than my initial understanding, so I'll concede on that point.

A new step in the development of performance that could legitimately warrant re-recording the classics yet again is if people started to conduct in opposites, parts marked allegro or presto would be played adagio or largo, cellos playing the oboe parts, 4/4 is conducted as though it were 7/8... Uh... Ahem. Carry on.


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

It's interesting to note that many of the most successful living composers are minimalists. And the most successful artists in the jazz world are vocalists doing tin pan alley material. The comfort zone is good economics for the music biz.


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

I don't think it is quite possible to compare the experience of the present with the distant past in terms of how art is appreciated. I'll come at this from the angle of the visual arts where I am far more versed. Michelangelo is recognized as perhaps the single most towering figure of Western art... art's Bach, if you will. He is looked at within the scope of the whole of Western art. We recognize how he seemingly builds off the Greco-Roman tradition as well as the art of his immediate predecessors: Donatello and Masaccio. He is clearly the model for many who followed: Raphael, Rubens, Bernini, Caravaggio, William Blake, ... on through to Lucian Freud. But what was Michelangelo's experience of art? He was among one of the most privileged, apprenticed to a major Florentine painter early on, accepted into the Medici art school, acquainted with many of the greatest and most influential figures in art of his day: Leonardo, the de Medicis, Raphael, the chief architect of St. Peter's, Bramante, Pope Julius, etc... yet it is almost certain that Michelangelo's grasp of the art of the classical world was limited to a few Roman fragments (and almost certainly no true Greek work). He would have had no idea what was transpiring in Germany, France, the Netherlands, or Spain... let alone China, Japan, India, or the Americas. Indeed, his grasp of "art history" would have largely centered upon the art of Florence of the last couple hundred years at best. Art History as we think of it was non-existent.

So what was the experience of the composer and the audience of Bach's time? Bach knew of his immediate predecessors and his immediate peers in the area of Germany in which he was employed. He sought out Buxtehude and Hasse and was surely one to keep out an eye and ear for the latest music coming out of Italy... and upon this he built his music. And his audience? They had no radio, no stereo, no LPs, no CDs, and no i-pods. Perhaps the more educated would be able to read music and would likely seek out the latest popular scores... but surely neither the composers nor the audience lived in a world such as that in which we live in which we have such immediate access to a vast array of music from across time and space. Driving in my car on a modern American highway I can listen to Johnny Cash, flip the station to hip-hop or "classic rock" or pop in my i-pod and glide down the interstate to the sounds of a Gregorian chant, an Indian raga, a bel-canto opera, or Duke Ellington. The notion of the "music of my time" is an absurdity... a true anachronism... for the simple reason that all music is "of my time". 

The central artist of the 20th century... the key player of Modernism in art... Pablo Picasso was the first artist whose work was wholly dependent upon the modern art museum. While Picasso was unmistakably "modern", his art was built upon the whole of art history, drawing from the Greeks, the Romans, the Etruscans, the Egyptians, the medieval Spaniards, the French post-Impressionists, the Expressionists, the Africans, etc... Rembrandt, Degas, Ingres, Raphael, the Greeks, Velasquez, etc... were more important to Picasso than the efforts of his peers, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollack. 

Should we then be surprised that Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Wagner hold more value to many music lovers than living figures like Ned Rorem... who I actually quite like?


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

I don't read Rorem is saying that the performer of the music isn't important. What I read him as saying is that there has developed a kind of deification and obsession with certain stars of the classical music recording industry. Correspondingly, a focus on the repertoire they record to the possible exclusion of other potentially interesting things.

Or maybe I'm complicating it. Just thinking out aloud. I think basically what he's saying is that to him the music is more important than the performer.

But has this really changed? If you look at the history of music you will find, for example, that the Baroque composers were often stuck pandering to the whims of star singers... especially castrati. Bach, Mozart, Brahms... and many more... all wrote works specifically in response to the abilities of instrumentalists and soloists that they had on hand. Composers like Chopin, Liszt, and Paganini were far more recognized initially as virtuoso performers... virtually the rock stars of their time... than they were as composers. Even Beethoven and Bach were revered as brilliant improvisational performers, as was Bruckner... who unfortunately never wrote down any of his organ compositions.

Don't we face the same issue in film? How many people recognize Marilyn Monroe or Humphrey Bogart or James Dean vs David Lean, John Huston or even Stanley Kubrick?


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

Rorem stated, "Ours is the only society ever that is primarily concerned with the past."

I find this statement a bit odd. I think our society does not have a good historical sense. Certainly in movies and popular music the present is the focus. New technology is greatly valued probably more than earlier in the past century. I do not believe this society has more of a focus on the past, but perhaps Rorem was speaking specifically about classical music. I do believe there is much more emphasis placed on older classical music, but I think that has been true for some time.



Sid James said:


> So I'd like to open up a discussion about the things Mr. Rorem raises in this answer. Especially in terms of the fetishising and canonisation of composers of the past and comparative neglect of music of more recent times (eg. after 1945?).


I would not say classical music listeners have a fetish for composers of the past. I think they simply prefer their music. Certainly people listen to and purchase contemporary popular music more than older popular music so the desire for "older" music seems localized to classical. There have been many threads discussing why listeners have this preference (they don't understand modern music, they have not been appropriately exposed to modern music, modern music is too difficult for the average listener to appreciate, etc.), but I think non of us really understand the phenomenon well.

While the vast majority of us on TC probably want more contemporary music performed and recorded, I believe we are a small minority of the classical music audience. There do not appear to be enough of "us" to change the perceived economics of major orchestras and recording labels.


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## bigshot (Nov 22, 2011)

The past is the foundation that the modern world is built upon. Dispose of the past and you're building on sand. Classical music is a living art that depends on performance. It shouldn't be standardized and canned. If dozens of performances are exactly the same, the performers aren't doing their job. There is.no such thing as one proper kind of performance.


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> Obviously people like music that sounds "nice" and "familiar" and (I hate this word) "_accessible_."





starthrower said:


> It's the same with all music genres. 95 percent of the public is content to listen to the same old stuff for their entire life.
> 
> Just turn on your radio and go through the dial. Rock, Jazz, Classical stations playing the same old **** over and over.


I haven't read the whole thread yet, but as a quick response, I would say that I agree the above is true, _but_ I don't think those are bad things. If that is what most people want music to be to them, so what? Who am I to judge? Who am I to say that my interest in contemporary art culture is better than others' fondness for the past, and so they should stop feeding themselves the familiarity they crave? I don't think we have the right to be all intellectual haughty and say what the music industry ought to be doing. The fact is that, even among classical music listeners, we are a very small minority and the industry can't and shouldn't be overhauled for the sake of our self-perceived superior taste.


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

I would also add to my above point that people creating new music should not be hoping to rely on the power of old labels. If you want to get your new music heard, then you've got to engage with an audience more directly and not whinge when a big publisher says you're not a reliable commercial investment. With the internet, you can blog about your music, you can put it on YouTube or SoundCloud yourself, you can keep in touch with social media sites, and, _as I have already seen_, people are using a special feature on Google+ to host live streams of rehearsals, improvisations, and concerts, all of new music.

As much as we can complain that listeners are stuck in the past, the composers of today have to acknowledge the tools available to them via modern technology and take advantage of those tools before they can complain about being side-lined.


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## clavichorder (May 2, 2011)

I really think it would be fair to say that the living, breathing, pulse of music is not to be felt in modern "art music," but more in popular music. Not to say I'm a detractor of modern art music, not in the least, but I'm sorry to say that songs that have evolved past the point of even using electric guitars dominate the mainstream niche, songs that are structured with a basic formula and utilize a lot of different electronic modification and sound effects. That's where we put of finger to the metaphorical wrist or neck and feel the pulse most reliably.


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

Polednice said:


> I haven't read the whole thread yet, but as a quick response, I would say that I agree the above is true, _but_ I don't think those are bad things. If that is what most people want music to be to them, so what? Who am I to judge? Who am I to say that my interest in contemporary art culture is better than others' fondness for the past, and so they should stop feeding themselves the familiarity they crave? I don't think we have the right to be all intellectual haughty and say what the music industry ought to be doing. The fact is that, even among classical music listeners, we are a very small minority and the industry can't and shouldn't be overhauled for the sake of our self-perceived superior taste.


But this is not really the case. Here in America, media has been vastly deregulated to the point of a handful of companies controlling most of the radio/TV markets. The radio stations have shut out all independent artists, so you get Led Zeppelin, Boston, The Who, and ZZ Top played everyday for the past 20 years. Nothing else gets heard. I don't know about other cities or countries, but in my city it is impossible to hear anything interesting on commercial radio. The problem as I see it is government sanctioned monopolies serving the wealthy business moguls at the expense of the public at large. After all, the airwaves are public property.

Even more discouraging is the shape of public radio. The jazz station plays nothing but ultra conservative straight ahead jazz and loungy vocal music. This station is run by lazy, unimaginative academic types who got rid of all of the interesting DJ's in favor of boring, homogenized syndication. The classical station rarely programs 20th century music. Where did the public have a say in this? I choose not to contribute to these stations any longer, but they've got plenty of corporate underwriting.

How can an open minded listening audience be cultivated with MBA types doing all of the programming? The internet is great if you know what you're looking for, but I miss the days of the music loving DJ's programming diversity.


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## Vaneyes (May 11, 2010)

"In other words, the people writing today can feel safe in the knowledge that 200 years from now the conservatives will just love 'em!" - Crudblud

I agree, and I realize that doesn't put bread on the table for now, but it'll have to do. Legacy versus riches. Or, Their Time Will Come.

If new music composers were waiting for my support, they'd starve on the spot. Not that I wouldn't like them. It's just that I've paid my dues with exploration. I and anyone only has so much time. 

I've hunkered down now, with approximately 130 composers from Sweelinck to Schnittke.


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## Glissando (Nov 25, 2011)

The problem is probably caused by a confluence of factors:

-- There is so much more recorded music available, in a long list of formats, than there ever was 50 or 75 years ago. Mahler complained, at the turn of the 20th century, about being forgotten and overlooked, but his world was much different than ours. Today's classical music enthusiast has so much more to spend his or her disposable income on.

-- Unlike in the fields of rock, pop, hip-hop, etc., new classical pieces do not hit the record stores with big promotional pushes, national tours, write-ups in hip places like Pitchfork, etc. 

-- No composer should ignore the fact that, starting after World War II, much contemporary classical music was created with the intent of pushing boundaries farther than most audiences are willing to go. The effect of that was to create fear in modern audiences that contemporary pieces would not appeal to them. (I'm not saying this wasn't an aesthetically justifiable move, BTW -- just pointing it out as a factor).

With all that said, I do wish more opportunities were given to new composers. (I myself feel guilty for not exploring their music as intently as I could do).


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## Argus (Oct 16, 2009)

starthrower said:


> How can an open minded listening audience be cultivated with MBA types doing all of the programming? The internet is great if you know what you're looking for, but I miss the days of the music loving DJ's programming diversity.


3 letters: BBC.

That is unless you're in one of those parts of the world that can't acces the i-player.


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

starthrower said:


> But this is not really the case. Here in America, media has been vastly deregulated to the point of a handful of companies controlling most of the radio/TV markets. The radio stations have shut out all independent artists, so you get Led Zeppelin, Boston, The Who, and ZZ Top played everyday for the past 20 years. Nothing else gets heard. I don't know about other cities or countries, but in my city it is impossible to hear anything interesting on commercial radio. The problem as I see it is government sanctioned monopolies serving the wealthy business moguls at the expense of the public at large. After all, the airwaves are public property.
> 
> Even more discouraging is the shape of public radio. The jazz station plays nothing but ultra conservative straight ahead jazz and loungy vocal music. This station is run by lazy, unimaginative academic types who got rid of all of the interesting DJ's in favor of boring, homogenized syndication. The classical station rarely programs 20th century music. Where did the public have a say in this? I choose not to contribute to these stations any longer, but they've got plenty of corporate underwriting.
> 
> How can an open minded listening audience be cultivated with MBA types doing all of the programming? The internet is great if you know what you're looking for, but I miss the days of the music loving DJ's programming diversity.


The fundamental problem I have with this view is the idea that an open-minded listening audience can or should be cultivated by this particular means. The reason these commercial stations are successful is because they give people what they want. And what most people want is to _not_ be open-minded about new stuff. As much as it feels a natural part of our listening habits on this forum to be exploratory, that is not what most people are interested in. Just like I don't go out every day seeking gastronomic novelty, instead sticking with the same standard meals I know and like just to serve the most basic purpose of food, so many other people aren't interested in ferreting out good new music. They just want to be fed reliably, consistently, and repetitively.

The assumption that underlies a desire for change is that if you start programming things to reflect how we listen, then more people might like to start listening like we do - if you give the audience a little nudge out of its comfort chair, then people will start getting more engaged. I don't think this is true. I think the vast majority of people _want_ to be closed minded and _want_ their comfort music. Those who want more than that will get off their backsides and seek it, usually through the internet whether via personalised radio; non-big-name stations; internet fora or whatever. What these more active listeners can't and shouldn't do is hope to commandeer commercial radio for the purposes of modern art, which, whether we like it or not, will always be an esoteric endeavour regardless of how much exposure it gets.


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## Guest (Jan 16, 2012)

First, let me apologize for my ignorance - I haven't listened to enough modern music to be qualified to judge. What follows is my opinion based on what very little I do know.

With that caveat, here goes....

I like new music as much as anyone - I just don't usually turn to classical composers for new music, since there is much more and better stuff coming from other sources.

I think the classical music establishment has marginalized itself. First by taking a huge wrong turn in the early 20th century, and second by failing to keep up with the expanding breadth of musical expression.

The huge wrong turn involves fetishizing the "avant garde" - as if the fact that only 20 people are in your audience and half of them leave is a good thing. It's not - it's a sign that the composer has become preoccupied with being clever as he/she sees it and has lost sight of what the audience wants. A good bit of the most respected 20th century modern music is painful to listen to - what's up with that?

Sure, with a good attitude and determination you can condition yourself to like it, but most people don't bother. And the argument that all great music was initially unpopular is just silly.

I always compare music to cooking. If you had a modern cook who made helicopter soup - maybe a shower of oil droplets all over the customer, accompanied to the loud noise of a helicopter - how many customers would his restaurant have? A few probably, but not many. Or how about the 4'33" all-you-can-eat buffett? Clever stuff, to be sure, but guaranteed to repulse the general public.

To be fair, some of this wrong turn can be ascribed to political events in Europe, and art expression subverted to a form of protest - produce ugly art to **** off the authorities. Even better, produce ugly art with traces of beauty to both **** off the authorities and discretely declare your ability to transcend the awful daily reality. Clever stuff to be sure, expressing some important truths. But now that the repression is over, do we really need to continue repressing ourselves by playing and replaying the same old dreck - which was intended to kill flies in mid-flight?

Music is no different from running a restaurant - if you don't offer what people want to eat/hear, expect short lines. That doesn't mean you have to serve pop (McDonalds?) - there is a place for quality. Just make sure it is enjoyable to your audience.

The second major mistake - and this I think is limited to some rather than all composers - is to fail to embrace major new forms of musical expression which fall outside of the classical canon. I'm thinking jazz and world music. Both of these are nearly bottomless gold mines of material to work with. Gershwin and a few others did some great stuff fusing jazz into the classical idiom, but this represents a side-stream rather than the mainstream of 20th century classical music - modernism, atonality, minimalism, etc.

Where are the composers who are taking advantage today of the gold mine of world music? Not getting much attention around here, as far as I can tell.

If you want to see how modern classical music can regain its cultural relevance, I offer two stepping stones in the right direction:

Further integration with jazz:









And embracing world music:








The kora is an incredible instrument, by the way. Where are the Liszts and Chopins of today to explore its potential?

Ditto electronic music - the real pioneers here don't usually call themselves classical composers. I probably should have expanded on this point further, as this provides another huge opportunity for quality music-making.

But above all, make music that is a pleasure to listen to. Please. Then play it on a street corner or in a bar so people get a chance to hear it. If they like it, they will let you know you are on the right path.


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

I'm not buying the wrong turn analogy. Music evolves the way it evolves. The same with jazz. The reactionaries will always cry foul, but I like Schoenberg, and I like electric Miles. Anyway, there's plenty of all kinds of music to go around. How has serial or atonal music killed the classical music industry? The stuff rarely gets programmed anyway, so it's a moot point.


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## bigshot (Nov 22, 2011)

clavichorder said:


> I really think it would be fair to say that the living, breathing, pulse of music is not to be felt in modern "art music," but more in popular music.


Music is communication between a creator and an audience, and as much as we like to think that the creator is directing the conversation, that isn't necessarily the case. Music needs to be relevant.


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## bigshot (Nov 22, 2011)

starthrower said:


> I'm not buying the wrong turn analogy. Music evolves the way it evolves. The same with jazz. The reactionaries will always cry foul, but I like Schoenberg, and I like electric Miles.


Both of those are at least a half century old. The wrong turn was being taken in the late fifties. We reap the "rewards" of it today. Both jazz and classical music turned from addressing audiences to giving critics complicated manifestos to write about. That is the death of any art form. But creativity doesn't disappear. It just moves on to greener pastures.


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

I would also add that, as frustrating as it is, and as much as we would like it to _not_ be a reason for this disengagement, I think a huge problem is that modern music is so difficult to navigate. If you give yourself a century of music to listen to before 1900, you can be fairly safe in sticking within a narrow band of style. Now, there are so many styles, each competing for your attention, that if you hear one or a few styles that put you off, you may write off the rest. You shouldn't write them off, but I can understand people who do - how far do you search for something pleasant before you give in?

I would agree with BPS about the "wrong turn", though I'd be careful and make sure people don't think I'm saying that _all_ music after a certain period represents this wrong turn. Great music has been written in all eras and still is, but much of it suffers by contemporary association.

Finally, I think we really have to consider more closely what is meant by "fetishising the past". What is meant by the word "past"? Old music? Tonal music? Common practice period music? Standard orchestral instruments music? Because I'd bet that it's not because the music is intrinsically old that people turn to it. It's not because there's something magical about the number 1800 and therefore people want to listen to music from the 19th century. It's because there is something fundamentally more appealing about music from that period, which is why disengagement from later music has been so widespread and systematic. I'm not saying that we should therefore marginalise new music; I'm saying that you simply can't foreground new music _and_ retain a large audience. If we marginalised Romantic music, what do you think people would do? They wouldn't sit passively and listen to avant-garde works; they'd be the ones getting off their backside finding the music they like, and radio stations would be left with very slim listening numbers.

I'm not taking sides here, I'm just saying that this is a very complex cultural phenomenon that simply cannot be reduced to listener laziness or commercialisation. I really think that there is something more fundamental about the difference between pre- and post-20th century music. Nothing "right" or "wrong", just different and it turns a lot of people off.


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

Well if you think you like jazz and you want to party/dance you can listen to groups like the Big Bad Voodoo Daddies, or Brian Setzer Orchestra. I'd rather listen to Henry Threadgill, Paul Motian, Bill Frisell, and others making creative music. 

In the classical world there is plenty of accessible post war music to enjoy. I do agree with BPS that the high culture pretensions should be dropped. And they pretty much have been in the area of avant garde music. Most of these concerts take place in rather relaxed surroundings of small venues and libraries. It's the purveyors of old music still wearing the tuxedos.


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## Oskaar (Mar 17, 2011)

There may be a lot of music, made the last fifty years that are neglected. It is a struggle to discover everything, and most people that classical music is ok, starts with the classics, and discover from there. Then it is a long way to go to current classical composers. I am open to the new, but it often IS difficult, and then it is easy to go back to easier music. It is absolutely no fetishism, I think.... only about what people like, and feel comfortable to.


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## Oskaar (Mar 17, 2011)

But I think it is a point that modern classical music have to struggle much more with the "ghosts and geniouses" of the past, compared with music styles like jazz, and pop/rock. But if they in the name of art, are making their music unaccessible for people...then dont blame the listener.


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## AlexD (Nov 6, 2011)

The classical music we listen to now, has got more to do with the present that the past. I don't listen to classical music to recreate a sense of the past, but because it gives me something I need in the present. 

Much like Shakespeare - the work is so complex and rich that different audiences and performers can make their own interpretations. A Victorian audience would see Shakespeare differently than a 21 century audience would - in fact the Victorians changed the plays to suit the morals of the time - something many would probably think of as unacceptable today. A recent version of Much Ado About Nothing included nods to the Falkland War. 

I can't help thinking that classical music is similar - we listen to it because of today, not yesterday.

Post 45 music may struggle in the concert halls but can be found in the cinemas around the world. John William's score for War Horse is being heard around the world. I don't want to say that there could be more modern classical music on the radio, but there are reasons for optimism.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Interesting reading, I don't have time to respond to you all individually, just the gist.

It's funny how people think Ned Rorem is kind of attacking the past with his remarks. I don't think he was doing that, to be honest. I think he's just saying music is a living art, it's not a graveyard of the past only.

People say "comfort music," but are you forgetting how in their own day, many of the significant figures of music in the past did go to some effort to play and promote new music of their day. Or even resurrect old music that had been neglected. I'm sure Wanda Landowska, at first when she played many of Bach's pieces for the first time in public on harpsichords, I'm sure she didn't have a huge audience then where she was in Paris. But in time, the trends she and others set with the "back to Bach" movement grew.

So too with conductors of the ages who worked with new music of their time. Eg. Beecham, who was a big promoter of Delius' music, which was in between the wars viewed with some suspicion by the UK musical establishment for various reasons. They were basically still stuck in the world of Brahms, maybe some of Stanford's and Parry's music was acceptable (but critics thought Stanford's _Clarinet Concerto_, the finale was too kind of racy and brash), but even Elgar's late chamber works drew their ire for being too angry, loud and disjointed. So Delius was beyond the pale, so was Holst - his _The Planets _(premiered by Boult) was probably okay for the dinosaurs, but not his later works in Sanskrit (eg. _Savitri_), that must have been viewed as oddball and wierd.

Get what I mean? The pioneering work of conductors like Boult and Beecham, and many others, bought new music to the fore. Beecham also unearthed things like Bizet's _Symphony in C_, for which I'm really glad. As well as performing light classics, his "lollipops," I also like that, I don't believe in the old highbrow-lowbrow distinctions. He didn't either, so people should maybe get with it.

Of course, more recent musicians have commissioned new works. Rostropovich commissioned almost 200, or thereabouts. A number of these, like cello concertos of Shostakovich, Lutoslawski, Dutilleux, Penderecki, would be known and liked by many here. So too people like Anne-Sophie Mutter, commissioning a number of works from living composers.

It doesn't prevent them from performing old music, far from it. It just means they are doing what they can for history and posterity. & also importantly, the present, they are musicians of their time, not the graveyard.

Of those that Mr. Rorem mentions, I do respect Bernstein for really being a man of his time in many ways. He was to the 20th century to what Liszt was to the 19th century. They were both polymaths and fully men of their time.

Even younger people, born after when he died, would know his _West Side Story_. & his conducting of Beethoven's 9th symphony under the Brandenburg Gate when the Berlin Wall came down in 1990 was one of the mega classical events of it's time. Much like the three tenors concert in Rome that year, as part of the World Cup.

That's what it's about, classical music now is of it's time. I'd say the same for those unearthing music that's been unheard but is old. They are doing valuable work, they are leaving a solid legacy. They are not just doing yet another Beethoven or Mahler or Wagner cycle or whatever. These might be interesting to some or even many, but I think that the "real action" is in things that are new, either of today or things that are coming out from the past (like Beecham's Bizet or Bernstein's Ives or Mahler, or the first Ring cycle done in stereo by Solti, I believe, bringing those to disc for the first time in their day). Recording Mahler and Wagner cycles in the 1960's was a huge financial undertaking, a risk for the recording companies. & guys like Bernstein and Solti had to do a fair bit of persuading of the record exectutives for it to happen. & it did, and that is a good thing.

Would you want to be listening to the same music as in 1950? Before guys like Bernstein and Solti broke the mould and reinvigorated the industry? What if Rostropovich hadn't commissioned those 200 or so works? Wouldn't we be the poorer for that?

This is the type of thing I get, the message, from Mr. Rorem's comments I posted in my OP...


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## bigshot (Nov 22, 2011)

_Would you want to be listening to the same music as in 1950?_

I sure would like to go back in time to attend a few concerts!


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

I think there is a great deal to be said for engaging with the art being created in your own time. But just as we are fully aware that not everyone can like everything, what if it happens that someone dislikes the music of their time after putting some effort into listening? Does that make them a reactionary conservative all of a sudden? What if a _lot_ of people dislike the music of their time? Does that mean they're all dumb?

Just as there's nothing magical about the number 1800 that draws them to old music, there's nothing magical about the number 2012 either. Unlike literature which addresses issues and morals of its own age, music exists outside those parameters because it refers to nothing external to itself. Time is less important. Being "with it" is less important if being with it means listening to stuff you don't like.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Polednice said:


> I think there is a great deal to be said for engaging with the art being created in your own time. But just as we are fully aware that not everyone can like everything, what if it happens that someone dislikes the music of their time after putting some effort into listening? Does that make them a reactionary conservative all of a sudden? What if a _lot_ of people dislike the music of their time? Does that mean they're all dumb?
> 
> Just as there's nothing magical about the number 1800 that draws them to old music, there's nothing magical about the number 2012 either. Unlike literature which addresses issues and morals of its own age, music exists outside those parameters because it refers to nothing external to itself. Time is less important. Being "with it" is less important if being with it means listening to stuff you don't like.


There is a lot there, in what you say. I would just kind of reply that I like music of now going right back through the ages. I don't like everything, I don't suspend my critical faculties with any composer, be they from now or hundreds of years ago. Why is there an assumption that anybody has to do that? Esp. with newer musics?

I will try to unpack how I see what Ned Rorem said in my quote of him in my OP -



> *Ned Rorem:*
> The composers that are being neglected are the composers that are living and breathing today...


^^Well, that's basically a fact. I think it's hard to deny that. It's not a false dichotomy, I think. It's just stating the obvious.



> ... * (Ned Rorem) :*
> ...Shostakovich, Sibelius and Mozart are hardly neglected by purveyors of classical music. Every time there's a new gimmick like CD's, all of these composers are re-recorded for the hundredth time. Ours is the only society ever that is primarily concerned with the past. Your questions to me have been mainly about the past. It's inconceivable that 100 years or more ago that Debussy or Chopin or Haydn would be so concerned about their past...


^^Which is again true. Even the term "classical music" may well bring to some people's minds things like Ancient Roman and Greek civilisations, what were called the "classical civilisations."

Eg. in terms of Debussy who Rorem mentions here, he was interested in all sorts of things during his time. He was a Wagnerian for a while. He also was interested in Asian music, like the Balinese gamelan, which he heard at the Paris World Fair, late 19th century. He read poetry by poets of his own time, and used them as basis for his songs, their words set to his music. He was in touch with what other French composers were doing, like Satie. It's really towards the very end of his life that Debussy began to look back more and more. Eg. his neo-classical type works, like the violin and cello sonatas respectively.

I won't compare Debussy to composers of today, but in comparing to a good deal of listeners of classical music of today, are they up on the trends of their own time as Debussy clearly was? Maybe it's not a direct comparison, but I think it is good enough to extend Mr. Rorem's point.

Debussy wasn't interested in a musical graveyard, he was interested in the "here and now" of his time.



> ... *(Ned Rorem) :*
> ...Serious music had a function in the milieu of Bach. Today, no more. People today are aware of music more through performance than through what is performed. They want to get Sutherland's record of this or Karajan's record of that or Bernstein's record of this and that. They compare the performers with each other but the music itself is simply a matter of pyrotechnics, whereas I am necessarily concerned with what is performed. {End Quote}


^^Another classical forum I left, Mr. Rorem's comments above EXACTLY mirror what happened on that site. Most of it's members were mainly interested in the umpteenth new cycle to come out of the big names. Or new recordings of music they'd heard before. Or obscure composers from the past that didn't really add anything much to the sweep of music history or development. That's not a problem, but I find it wierd to do that and not be interested, not know what's going on in music world of today, the major trends. I'm not expecting fanaticism, but if they had just a fraction of the interest of music going on today - and I don't mean composers today who've been like rehashing themselves for decades, I mean mainly composers with some individual voice or doing newer developments - then that would be more balanced, imo.

As for this forum, talkclassical, what Ned Rorem says I think doesn't apply to it. That's why I'm a member here. I was bored of all the "comparing" of various recordings on the other forum. It went like "conductor x doesn't know how to do Beethoven, but conductor y does." I think that's basically a waste of time, a false dichotomy, etc.

No wonder many of those people were in the graveyard of the past. & that site was not to my liking for other reasons, anyway. I would have been censored there, virtually, or had to self-censor, from saying the things that I'm saying here now, that I feel okay and free to say here...


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

Sid James said:


> Another classical forum I left, Mr. Rorem's comments above EXACTLY mirror what happened on that site. Most of it's members were mainly interested in the umpteenth new cycle to come out of the big names. Or new recordings of music they'd heard before. Or obscure composers from the past that didn't really add anything much to the sweep of music history or development. That's not a problem, but I find it wierd to do that and not be interested, not know what's going on in music world of today, the major trends. I'm not expecting fanaticism, but if they had just a fraction of the interest of music going on today - and I don't mean composers today who've been like rehashing themselves for decades, I mean mainly composers with some individual voice or doing newer developments - then that would be more balanced, imo.


Perhaps people feel the need to obsessively identify with a conductor or performer because the composer whose music they're listening to is dead!


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## bigshot (Nov 22, 2011)

It isn't neglecting modern composers if they dump randomness and noise on their audience. It's a conscious choice to ignore.


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

bigshot said:


> It isn't neglecting modern composers if they dump randomness and noise on their audience. It's a conscious choice to ignore.


This is just as unenlightening as comments that tell us that all listeners are lazy and all modern composers are great.


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## Oskaar (Mar 17, 2011)

Young peoples dorstep into more "seriouse" music is to mozart and beethoven, and start from there. They have made a choice. Modern classical music is much closer to jazz in fellow avantgarde than to most classical music up to 1950. You cant say: "come listen to classical music" to young people,lure them with Bethoven and Mozart, and show them the most avant garde, and say "this is what we really want you to listen to, cause this is TODAY"
That sayed...I love to explore...also newer music. But I have to take steps towards it. Jazz, rock, pop, "fetish" classical(sorry) has an exploring window. Modern music..(you can not call it classical anymore) dont have that window.
A lot of modern music dont get the attention that it deserves, I am sure. But how to get that attention? I dont know really. But dont blame the mozart and bethoven listenes! Maybe new medias, digital worlds/gaming is an area, like film music is for some.
But that said.... media has a responsibility to promote all art. After that.... there are other mecanisms


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## Oskaar (Mar 17, 2011)

bigshot said:


> It's a conscious choice to ignore.


Then you get the attention you deserve!


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## Guest (Jan 17, 2012)

I think there's also a dynamic in the way culture accumulates that works against new composers. People get cues about what music to listen to from other people, and there is a feedback between how popular a composer is and how inclined new listeners are to listen to that composer (or performer). The big get bigger and the small stay hungry, if you will. 

Put differently, there is definitely a first mover advantage - if you are one of the first to get established, you will reap disproportionate rewards. To some extent, you can also see this dynamic at work in Rock and Pop - bands like the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and the Beatles continue to sell well while newer bands struggle for attention.

When I started building my classical collection, I wanted to buck the trend. I made a point of buying almost exclusively newer versions by younger artists, rather than adding more to the estates of Berstein, Callas, and other established names. I decided that every generation has an obligation to support its own generation of artists. More pragmatically, by focusing on newer recordings, I wouldn't have to worry about sound quality so much.

I once was appropriately criticized however for not extending this logic to supporting new composers. At the time, I did not extend this logic to modern composers because I genuinely wanted to explore the classics. 

However, as my knowledge of classical music reaches some level of maturity, I am willing to revisit that decision, and explore newer music a little more actively. Notwithstanding the above criticism, no doubt there is some great new classical music being written now - and I hope I can find it some day.


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## Oskaar (Mar 17, 2011)

You put it well, Bps. it is all about exploring. And for me it is a lot about listening moods.
But to make a picture: You cant force a dedicated Rembrant lover to love modern painting with a dead hand, or enjoy the "art" of a man having sex with a dead corps.


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## Vaneyes (May 11, 2010)

oskaar said:


> You put it well, Bps. it is all about exploring. And for me it is a lot about listening moods.
> But to make a picture: You cant force a dedicated Rembrant lover to love modern painting with a dead hand, or enjoy the "art" of a man having sex with a dead corps.


Re an army corps, oskaar, you could be talking about 10,000 to 15,000 men.


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## bigshot (Nov 22, 2011)

BPS said:


> People get cues about what music to listen to from other people, and there is a feedback between how popular a composer is and how inclined new listeners are to listen to that composer (or performer).


That's precisely how Jazz exploded in the late twenties, becoming the preeminent American musical form of the 20th century. It spread from listener to listener and musician to musician. Soon it was being played in every nightclub, movie theater and street corner. In 1939, Coleman Hawkins recorded a solo of "Body and Soul" within a few weeks, musicians all over the country were analyzing his performance and learning from it. It inspired dozens of performers who were to go on and expand those ideas into Bop. Word of mouth was what made jazz grow and flourish so quickly.

But this kind of communication requires a living musical culture. It can't exist in places where composers make music for critics and refuse to engage the general public. Classical music fans can deride the unwashed masses who listen to warhorses, but that is the last gasps of a dying culture. It died because composers turned their backs on their public.


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

Another classical forum I left, Mr. Rorem's comments above EXACTLY mirror what happened on that site. Most of it's members were mainly interested in the umpteenth new cycle to come out of the big names. Or new recordings of music they'd heard before. Or obscure composers from the past that didn't really add anything much to the sweep of music history or development. That's not a problem, but I find it wierd to do that and not be interested, not know what's going on in music world of today...

Yet you have completely skipped over the suggestion that I made earlier with regard to the notion that the "music world of today"... the "artistic culture of today" is no longer constructed solely of the latest artistic creations (as it was to a far greater degree in the past), but rather our culture is a collage or montage of disparate cultures, eras, styles, etc... Hermann Hesse recognized this development toward the end of WWII in his most important novel, _The Glassbead Game_.

Let us look at the music of today. Considering the developments of composers ranging from Gorecki to Veljo Tormis to Peteris Vasks, to Arvo Pärt, to Giacinto Scelsi, to Steve Reich, to Philip Glass to Osvaldo Golijov can we honestly say that the development of post-war Modernism was clearly more important than the revival of Renaissance and Medieval music wrought by the Historically Informed Performance movement or the discovery of the microtonalities of non-Western music (Arabic, Indian, Persian, Byzantine)? And what of the impact of jazz and rock and other "popular" forms? Indeed... why is it that we assume that the devlopment of post-WWII music is best represented by the likes of Xenakis, Ligeti, Penderecki, Boulez, Stockhausen, etc... and not by Ellington, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Bernstein, Lennon-McCartney, etc...?

Lucian Freud, one of the greatest artists of the second half of the 20th century, died last year. Looking at Freud's paintings...










it becomes clear that Freud owed far more to such 17th century Baroque predecessors as Velasquez:










Rembrandt:










and Frans Hals:










than he does to any of his Modernist precursors, be it Picasso, Matisse, Rothko, Motherwell, etc... Indeed, the only Modernist who may have been seen to have had a major impact on his work was his close friend, Francis Bacon:










And in all actuality, it was only in terms of his rich handling of impasto that Bacon impacted Freud.

For better or worse we are living in the Post-Modern era in which the whole of the past is recognized as one vast palette from which to pick and choose in constructing one's art. This is just as true of music as it is of art. I find myself laughing at the earnest defenders of avant garde Modernism who imagine themselves as being the great champions of the art of our time when in actuality it is they who are the relics of the past. Like art, music is just as open to a vast array of influences... past and present. Osvaldo Golijov shows influences ranging from Latin American music to Israeli/Hebrew/Arabic chant, Spanish/Islamic music, Klezmer, as well as the tradition of Western Classical Music. Philip Glass has drawn inspiration from Latin-American and African rhythms, Indian and Chinese and other Eastern music, rock music, jazz, etc...


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## bigshot (Nov 22, 2011)

Classical music is dead. Long live classical music.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

BPS said:


> ...
> Put differently, there is definitely a first mover advantage - if you are one of the first to get established, you will reap disproportionate rewards. To some extent, you can also see this dynamic at work in Rock and Pop - bands like the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and the Beatles continue to sell well while newer bands struggle for attention...


It's true, if you are first cab off the rank so to speak, as you say in the post-war Britpop thing, then your name may well stay in the spotlight. Of course, those bands did some great music, it mustn't be denied.

Of course, yesterday's "white hope" can become tommorrow's dinosaur or yesterday's man. It's what happened to William Walton. He was the pin up boy for new music in the UK between the wars, but after 1945 for various reasons his star faded. No matter, he's still a favourite composer of mine. I don't really care about these things, but they are good to consider for the big picture of more recent music.



> ...I decided that every generation has an obligation to support its own generation of artists...


Which is why it's good to support new music, and musicians alive today as you say. They have to put food on the table. I think Ned Rorem is alluding to this in what he says. It's not a matter of charity, though, but it is one of the reasons among many that it's good to do this.



> ...
> However, as my knowledge of classical music reaches some level of maturity, I am willing to revisit that decision, and explore newer music a little more actively. Notwithstanding the above criticism, no doubt there is some great new classical music being written now - and I hope I can find it some day.


I also came to a lot of new music I know now quite late in the piece, it hasn't stopped me from accessing and enjoying it. It's all about passion and attitude for me. & it's a continuing journey...


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

oskaar said:


> You put it well, Bps. it is all about exploring. And for me it is a lot about listening moods...


I agree, which is why I try to avoid absolutes about music. My engagement with it can be ephemeral and changing as you suggest. What I thought was the "bee's knees" maybe 10 years ago or even less I hardly care about anymore. Or I may come back to it later, put it on the backburner. It's all flexible and fluid, imo...


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

StlukesguildOhio said:


> ...
> 
> For better or worse we are living in the Post-Modern era in which the whole of the past is recognized as one vast palette from which to pick and choose in constructing one's art. This is just as true of music as it is of art...




I would not argue with that, overall.

I don't know a great deal about L. Freud apart from the basics. Having an interest in visual arts and studied it's history, I know he was a major figure. I would not really think he has much to do with Rembrandt, etc. apart from things like doing portraits and nudes, etc. But earlier British painters like Stanley Spencer pioneered that kind of realist style that doesn't hold back on any detail. Freud would have also been influenced to some degree by surrealist type painters like Balthus and Delvaux, maybe (as would have Francis Bacon, combining the surreal with as you say tradition in his_ Screaming Popes_ series). Stuff like that. I'd argue that he would draw on modernist influences to a good degree. Of course, I don't deny he would not have studied the old masters as well, they all do.



> ...
> I find myself laughing at the earnest defenders of avant garde Modernism who imagine themselves as being the great champions of the art of our time when in actuality it is they who are the relics of the past....


I don't see many of those people here. There are on the other classical forum I'm talking of. People with various restrictive ideologies that they don't admit.

You must admit though, that "hard" conservatives are also "relics of the past." The types of people who think music stopped with say STravinsky or something like that. To me, these are the equivalents of the conservatives in Australia in the 1950's who thought Stravinsky was beyond the pale, music for them stopped with Beethoven's middle period.

So it's just the two extremes, the hard modernists or hard conservatives.

What Ned Rorem is saying pitches for the middle ground, and that's why I'm a bit baffled why some people are on their high horses saying it's the end of the world if we do what he says, eg. engage a bit in the music of today.

But I think overall the members on this forum are literate in modern music, and also contemporary classical music, to some degree. So again, why are people so hot under the collar? I think what Ned Rorem says is pretty obvious to me, he's talking sense, or he was back then in the 1980's.

& he isn't an "avant-garde" composer. I don't think he cares much for that, judging from his music. But that doesn't mean he isn't interested in new music, and with his comments is maybe trying to encourage others to experience sounds and composers new to them, whatever new music they listen to...


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

I don't know a great deal about L. Freud apart from the basics. Having an interest in visual arts and studied it's history, I know he was a major figure. I would not really think he has much to do with Rembrandt, etc. apart from things like doing portraits and nudes, etc. But earlier British painters like Stanley Spencer pioneered that kind of realist style that doesn't hold back on any detail. Freud would have also been influenced to some degree by surrealist type painters like Balthus and Delvaux, maybe. Stuff like that. I'd argue that he would draw on modernist influences to a good degree. Of course, I don't deny he would not have studied the old masters as well, they all do.

Freud drew from Rembrandt the manner of building up the flesh through layers of impasto. He also owes to Rembrandt the sense in which every individual he paints conveys a sense of character... of individuality. Freud discovers this in the body as a whole as opposed to the merely the face. Unlike Rembrandt... his individuals are merely human/corporal/animal flesh that is slowly dying. They lack any of Rembrandt's sense of spiritual transcendence. Like Rembrandt, Velasquez and Hals, he doesn't hold back on showing the physical "flaws" or the less attractive aspects of his sitters.

I agree that Freud was undoubtedly influenced by Stanley Spencer... and possibly Balthus (and perhaps even Van Gogh and Soutine). I would not suggest that Freud was ignorant of his immediate peers or wholly dismissive of them. I am deeply respectful of Picasso myself and love the incredibly inventive work of Joseph Cornell... in spite of the fact that they have little impact upon my own work. I suspect that Dali may have right when he suggested that the artist must be of his time... but shouldn't worry about this too much as it is almost impossible to not be of one's time.

About the only art that truly fails to be "of its time" is that which is essentialy nothing more than a pastiche:



















The works above are undoubtedly skillful... brilliantly crafted... but there is nothing that suggests today... nothing that one might not find in the skillful academic work of hundreds of artists of the French Academy. This artist undoubtedly lives under electric light... with incandescent and florescent lights, the light of the TV and the computer... but the painting looks as if it might have been painted in a studio of the Baroque era with light falling from a single window. The colors equally suggest an attempt to imitate the look of the somber palette of the Dutch Baroque and French Academic realists. Even the subject matter is chosen in such a manner so as to avoid any hint that what we are looking at is an image painted today.

A painting like this is no less skillful... no less reverent of the classical realist tradition... but clearly represents a contemporary take on the nude:










The pastiches, on the other hand, present nothing that makes them stand out from the art of the past. They are so reverent of the artist's heroes that they are but imitations of the past (and ultimately imitations of art). Neither do they offer anything unique that might make them stand out from the work of thousands of other equally skillful latent academics.

_SLG (quoted)-I find myself laughing at the earnest defenders of avant garde Modernism who imagine themselves as being the great champions of the art of our time when in actuality it is they who are the relics of the past...._

*People with various restrictive ideologies that they don't admit.*

You must admit though, that "hard" conservatives are also "relics of the past." The types of people who think music stopped with say Stravinsky or something like that.

I think the difference is that many of the hard conservatives simply admit that they don't like a given body of music... music after a given period in history. This seems no different than your admitting you don't like Wagner or opera, me admitting I don't like Xenakis, Schoenberg, and Chinese opera, and still another admitting a dislike for medieval music. We all have our limitations. Whether you like Wagner or someone else dislikes Tristan Murail and Takemitsu is not going to stop me from listening to them and enjoying them. What I bristle at are the extremists of any camp who act as if they alone are able to discern what music is of real merit: the Romantics who dismiss Mozart as a lightweight and the whole of the Baroque as all sounding alike... without having really listened to either. They are no different from the conservative listener who dismisses the whole of Modern and Contemporary music or the Avant-Garde extremist who would have you believe that only he or she knows what the 'real" music of today is and where it's coming from. There is a real difference between suggesting, "I don't like (or get) medieval music, Renaissance madrigals, Bach, Mozart, Wagner, Shostakovitch, Bartok, Xenakis, Stockhausen... and assuming that one's opinion is supported by fact.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

StlukesguildOhio said:


> ...
> *People with various restrictive ideologies that they don't admit.*
> 
> You must admit though, that "hard" conservatives are also "relics of the past." The types of people who think music stopped with say Stravinsky or something like that.
> ...


I really would be insulted to be compared to the "hard cores" of any type. I mean, do I come across as thinking as, on the one hand, like those who would walk out on (or avoiding) Mahler or R. Strauss? Or, on the other hand, do I worship "progress" and this Marxist post-1945 dogma of composers being needed to be locked in ivory towers?

None of the hard cores, from whatever extreme polarity, do good for their respective "causes" or the cause of classical music as a whole. They are limited by their ideology. That's what I'm always getting at, and I think that most classical listeners - given my examples, the two thirds of people who remained at the concert I saw of R. Strauss' _Metamorphosen_ in second half - would agree.

As I said earlier, I admire the guy who said to his wife at the end of _Metamorphosen_ that "it had no point," although I disagree with his assesment of that work. But at least he stayed to listen to it, he didn't flee.

I have listened to a fair amount of opera, through my parents early on, who listened to it. I'm not an expert in it but over the decades I've heard about say 4 or so Wagner operas in full, 2 in the last few years. How many of the "hard cores" have done that kind of thing with the music they don't like? I do like some opera, but not Wagner, so of course automatically I'm a moron.

Ned Rorem is not an ideologue, as far as I can tell. He speaks with direct English and what he's saying makes sense to me. That's why I made this thread. What he's saying does not negate an understanding or focus, preference by listeners on music they favour or like best. But what he's saying is simple. It's good to have at least a basic understanding of the music of your own time. As I said, this doesn't mean you have to have hundreds of cd's of new music - I don't - it simply means a level of enquiry with things going on now. I think Mr. Rorem is fine with any level of enquiry, basically. He's not one size fits all, like those inflexible "hard cores."

He would most likely be "preaching to the choir" as regards most people on this forum. I mean I know people in real life who haven't heard of say much beyond the music of 100 years ago, eg. beyond _The Rite of Spring_. That's not a problem. My parents went up to about 1945 with their knowledge. But their attitude was sound and receptive to new things. AS I got into it into my teens, they didn't mind things like the Viennese atonalists. It's just a little extension from Stravinsky or Bartok (who themselves used modified forms of the serial technique, Stravinsky of course had a whole period devoted to it).

So what's the big deal? Most people here don't only go up to _The Rite of Spring_. So why are many of you all thinking that what Ned Rorem says is like anti the old musics? All he's saying that the old masters have enough people rooting for them, barracking for them and cheering them on (although they're dead), the composers of today don't have half as much...


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

The recording / stars thing is an issue I really do wrestle with. I know that one recording is about as good as another, and that I should just take the $8 one and be satisfied, but I also know that if I do that, I'll probably be coming back someday to lay down the $16 for the Karajan/Kleiber/Bernstein/Gardiner/Boulez/Gould/Argerich/Rubinstein or whatever. It's not so much that I worship at their altars, but that I want to hear what other people love, to be able to participate in their conversations. 

So my current practice is just to start out with the most famous recordings. I turned this direction about 3 years ago, and I think it was a good choice.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

^^ Well, in the context of Rorem's quote from the mid-1980's, what he seems to be against is people duplicating what they already have on vinyl onto the newly emerging CD technology (which reading between the lines, he doesn't seem to be a huge fan of?). Eg. getting like half a dozen or a dozen, or maybe even 2 dozen (24!!!) Beethoven cycles with different condctors/orchestras, all that. Now I think people would agree that's kind of excessive. Rather than do that, why not buy a few discs of newer or new music (which I know you do, as do others here, as I said, he's preaching to the converted on this forum, it's just that people won't accept what he's saying as being basically common sense).

I don't think common sense is against what you're doing, eg. buying the "big name" performers, going to them first. I think it's just not common sense to focus on say one thing - eg. heaps of Beethoven cycles - to the possible detriment of expanding one's horizons. & I'd add to what Mr. Rorem was saying there, not only with 20th century music, but any area of music that's less familiar or unfamiliar to you as a listener. There are many riches out there, it's good to delve in and enjoy what you can with the money/budget you have, etc.

Of course there's no right or wrong here, but I have heard say Beethoven's symphonies, all of them, over the years, both on radio and live in concert, had some of his symphonies on tape and my parents had their LP's, I also now have a few on disc (but never owned a cycle, don't really want to), and now there's youtube, some people have spotify, etc. So it's even better than it was in the mid 1980's, we can access music more than when Ned Rorem was saying those things in my OP...


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## brianwalker (Dec 9, 2011)

Sid James said:


> So what's the big deal? Most people here don't only go up to _The Rite of Spring_. .


I dispute this. I'm sure most of the people in this forum, by the time they're 25, will have at least listened to the Rite in full at least once.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

brianwalker said:


> I dispute this. I'm sure most of the people in this forum, by the time they're 25, will have at least listened to the Rite in full at least once.


What I was trying to say in that sentence/paragraph is that most people on this forum would know way more 20th century music than just the "warhorses" of the era, like _The Rite of Spring_.

So the majority here should by that logic in some way agree with what Ned Rorem said. Eg. that it's good to be up with music closer to our own time and of our own time, etc.

Some people put words into his mouth. Eg. that "new music" all means threatening atonal music or something. Or John CAge. He didn't mention neither. He was neutral. He's okay with & happy for people to access any music that's new or newer, closer to our time than say Sibelius, who he says doesn't need any more support, he gets enough. In any case, he died in 1950's.

Many of our members here have listened to a fair deal of music, many types of it, done since the 1950's...


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

Sid James said:


> Many of our members here have listened to a fair deal of music, many types of it, done since the 1950's...


What a daring bunch we are! :tiphat:


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

Sid James said:


> I really would be insulted to be compared to the "hard cores" of any type. I mean, do I come across as thinking as, on the one hand, like those who would walk out on (or avoiding) Mahler or R. Strauss? Or, on the other hand, do I worship "progress" and this Marxist post-1945 dogma of composers being needed to be locked in ivory towers?
> 
> None of the hard cores, from whatever extreme polarity, do good for their respective "causes" or the cause of classical music as a whole. They are limited by their ideology. That's what I'm always getting at, and I think that most classical listeners - given my examples, the two thirds of people who remained at the concert I saw of R. Strauss' _Metamorphosen_ in second half - would agree.


Actually I think you are sort-of hard-core, if "hard-core open-minded" makes any sense. I think you're one of the least judgmental people I've ever encountered on the internet, and you're constantly insisting that other people not be closed-minded.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

science said:


> Actually I think you are sort-of hard-core, if "hard-core open-minded" makes any sense. I think you're one of the least judgmental people I've ever encountered on the internet, and you're constantly insisting that other people not be closed-minded.


Well, thanks for the compliment. I am not unusual, I think, just more vocal than others who are kind of similar.

Of course, I have my limitations. In a way, this forum broke those down a bit. I was anti some things before that I've grown to like, mainly just from reading others opinions on them. Or on music that I thought I didn't like in general. Eg. I'm more in favour of things like modern tonal, neo-classical, neo-romantic, and also composers who are more polyglots or eclectic, hard to pin down (eg. I've come to really like Tippett, who I thought to be too technical before, whatever).

But I try to do it through experience, not just theory or ideology, etc. I do not like people who say they're promoting eg. "new music," and then acting like some arbiter of taste. I am more open, I say what I don't like openly, people can take it or leave it or think about it, etc. Eg. my hobby horse is rehash, but I admit I would be hard pressed to concretely define what I mean by that...


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

starthrower said:


> What a daring bunch we are! :tiphat:


Well, I personally don't feel a need to push people to be more daring.

All I ask is that they don't condemn me for my own tastes. Instead what I get is one side condemning me for not listening to enough modern music, another side condemning me for listening to too much of it.

If I ever figure out how to use a virtual baseball bat...

I'm agreeing that Rorem seemed to be taking a reasonable stance. Good music didn't stop in 1950.


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

I say live and let live. I don't care what anybody else listens to. It's the people calling the music they don't like, crap, that is pretty dumb.


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## brianwalker (Dec 9, 2011)

Sid James said:


> What I was trying to say in that sentence/paragraph is that most people on this forum would know way more 20th century music than just the "warhorses" of the era, like _The Rite of Spring_.
> 
> So the majority here should by that logic in some way agree with what Ned Rorem said. Eg. that it's good to be up with music closer to our own time and of our own time, etc.
> 
> ...


How much effort would you "deem" sufficient before the listener decides that Atonal is just not for them, as Wagner is not for you? Two Wagner operas is eight hours, and I have spent more than that in the pool of Atonal (proxy for modern) music. I've come to love Berg (this is common) and have moderated appreciation of Schoenberg and Webern, but any venture outside of the big three have been pure catastrophes.

For whatever reason(s) (I'm sure you know all the common ones, I need not go into detail), Atonal music just hasn't picked up. They've been performed by top-notch orchestras over and over again, riding on the coattails of more popular pieces, and they're just not in demand.

The main problem I have with your thesis is that the average listener, even the average passionate classical music lover, should have to cross a certain threshold of effort before he can dismiss modern music. I find the notion that one needs to dive into a piece of music for a long period of music to appreciate it dubious, for almost all of my passions have been love at first sight; Mahler's Fifth, Wagner's Overtures, the WTC, etc. The real prizes came later of course, Das Lied, the Transformation Music from Parsifal, Cello Suite no. 6 Prelude, in the same way that once you discover a beautiful soul inside that beautiful body you fall in love even more.

My humble opinion is that we fetishize a notion of egalitarianism where each epoch "must have" something good produced out of it. This is just patently absurd. Why must "modernist music" be on par with Bach and Wagner? Because music pre-Bach was certainly not on par with music beginning with Bach. There have been long periods in history where no "great art", at least monumental art, has been produced. The Greeks had Homer, and Hellenism, and then there was none (indeed, in I, Claudius, a Roman general made it clear the the Greeks the Romans ruled were NOT the same Greeks of Sophocles).

Saul Bellow ignited a brouhaha over the comment that there was no "Tolstoy of the Zulus", but why should there be? There's not even a Tolstoy of Italy, nor is there a Michelangelo of Russia, or a Mozart of East Asia.

Likewise, why should there be a Schumann of the 20th century (obviously I'm talking post-Ravel here), much less a Bach or a Wagner?

I sincerely doubt that even with an infinite amount of time allotted to its performances Stockhausen or Boulez or whatever (why just this is incredibly dismissive and generalizing) will never, ever, ever get a grab on his coattails. Allan Bloom once mused that the proverb "standing on shoulders of giants" was silly because why would giants let themselves be climbed so easily?

I often wonder what Berg what've been if he stayed tonal. I'm not sure I would care if Boulez did the same.

This is not a tonal vs. atonal debate, but a question of genius. I'm not hot for John Adams at all.

What if the period of Bach to Wagner, Mahler, and Berg is the Hellenism of Europe? The Greeks never recovered, their most prominent achievements are still the OLD, OLD, tomes of yore immemorial.


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## brianwalker (Dec 9, 2011)

starthrower said:


> I say live and let live. I don't care what anybody else listens to. It's the people calling the music they don't like, crap, that is pretty dumb.


So I can't criticize dumb music but you can call me dumb?


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

starthrower said:


> What a daring bunch we are!


I know you're being sarcastic, but in fact TC members are quite a daring bunch compared to all classical listeners. I can't speak for all TC members, but the ones who post in any way about modern music seem to have listened to vastly more than what I believe the average classical listener has. We all believe our listening habits are natural, but I think we, in general, are clear outliers in the overall classical listening community.



Sid James said:


> So the majority here should by that logic in some way agree with what Ned Rorem said. Eg. that it's good to be up with music closer to our own time and of our own time, etc.


From the many threads that discuss modern music on TC there appear to be few people that actively disagree with that statement. Clearly some do not appreciate modern music, but as far as I can tell the overwhelming majority do actively try to sample modern and contemporary classical music. I believe _we_ do agree with Rorem on that point.

I do, however, feel that expecting most listeners to push themselves outside their comfort zone is unreasonable. Humans just don't do that. Contemporary music is not really outside most TC members comfort zone so we explore and enjoy it. On the other hand, TC members probably don't go outside their comfort zone in many other areas.


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

brianwalker said:


> The Greeks never recovered, their most prominent achievements are still the OLD, OLD, tomes of yore immemorial.


Relevant to your point: a lot of the Hellenistic stuff that we think of as the height of their civilization, was actually done in times that the Greeks thought of as decline. Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, all of that.

So by your analogy, perhaps 2000 years from now Haydn ~ Heraclitus, and Ades ~ Aristotle.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

brianwalker said:


> How much effort would you "deem" sufficient before the listener decides that Atonal is just not for them, as Wagner is not for you? Two Wagner operas is eight hours, and I have spent more than that in the pool of *Atonal (proxy for modern) music*...


I said clearly above that new or newer, or modern or contemporary musics (whatever labels we use) doesn't necessarily equate to being "atonal." In any case, I don't know if there's 'pure' atonality just as there's no 'pure' tonality or whatever.

Then there's progressive tonality, "ambi" (ambigious) tonality, serialism (& not only using 12 notes, rows can be any number of notes virtually, and not every "serial" composer plays by the rules), microtonality.

& probably many more, and in any case, many composers like Dutilleux and Thomas Ades have said that they don't care for the distinctions between the various techniques or approaches to tonality, these are just like tools in a carpenter's box, his skill and knowledge build whatever he's making. Similar with music.

Anyway, bottom line is that nobody said what I bolded in your quote, eg. that modern music is (just or even mostly atonality). There's HEAPS more stuff out there.

So what you say here may well be more to my way of thinking, although there are many definitions of "genius" too -



> ...
> This is not a tonal vs. atonal debate, but a question of genius...


As for this -



> ...
> I often wonder what Berg what've been if he stayed tonal...


The Wagner opera that I like most from those I've heard is_ Tannhauser_. Yet I see no use in saying he should have stayed there. Even though I think that _The Ring_ is not to my taste at all (overblown compared to_ Tannhauser_, too much there, too heavy, etc.). This is just my view. Wagner developed his art the way he liked and wanted, not how I want it, which is not really relevant in the general scheme of things.

But you can speculate on Berg, but like Wagner, he did what he did, that's it, basically...



> ...I've come to love Berg (this is common) and have moderated appreciation of Schoenberg and Webern, but any venture outside of the big three have been pure catastrophes...


That's where quite a few people I know stand. The big three is as far as they go. & not all their works, just the works that individuals connect with.

I don't mind that, I don't judge that, but they died a long time ago, music has changed since them, lots of things have happened quite apart from them. Not all composers coming after them even cared much for them. Not all composers today or in history cared about the three B's for example. There are no rules as to what to do as a composer or listener. Just do your own thing, develop your own ways.

But not restrict, I think that's not much use to me at least, and it appears not according to Mr. Rorem either (& as I said, he didn't mention atonal, he isn't an atonal composer)...


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## brianwalker (Dec 9, 2011)

science said:


> Relevant to your point: a lot of the Hellenistic stuff that we think of as the height of their civilization, was actually done in times that the Greeks thought of as decline. Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, all of that.
> 
> So by your analogy, perhaps 2000 years from now Haydn ~ Heraclitus, and Ades ~ Aristotle.


Philosophy is much harder to evaluate relative to each other than music. Aristotle was considered hot (censored), nay, the hottest (wow, this forum is censored), for over a thousand years, more than Plato, more than anyone secular.

It wasn't until Heidegger did his weird presocratic revival in the 30s and 40s that people started really paying attention to Heraclitus and Parmenides, etc, as really serious Thinkers that should be attended to, but Aristotle's reputation has no way suffered, as long as the Straussians have anything to say about it.

I think Berg ~ Aristotle is a much better fit, despite the lack of alliteration.


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

The recording / stars thing is an issue I really do wrestle with. I know that one recording is about as good as another, and that I should just take the $8 one and be satisfied, but I also know that if I do that, I'll probably be coming back someday to lay down the $16 for the Karajan/Kleiber/Bernstein/Gardiner/Boulez/Gould/Argerich/Rubinstein or whatever.

Are all performances essentially equal? I certainly don't believe so. I doubt that even Ned Rorem would believe as much. Certainly the recording of his songs by a singer as marvelous as Susan Graham brought something to these works that most previous recordings fell short of. Isn't this why many contemporary performers take yet another stab at that well-known Beethoven or Bach piece? They love a particular work believe they can bring something new to it. I don't believe that any performers has a responsibility to perform contemporary music. They have a responsibility to perform what they truly love and admire. I wonder how Rorem would feel about performers and orchestras merely going through the motions because they feel some obligation to record contemporary music>


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

mmsbls said:


> ...Clearly some do not appreciate modern music, but as far as I can tell the overwhelming majority do actively try to sample modern and contemporary classical music. I believe _we_ do agree with Rorem on that point...


You've summarised what I was trying to say long-windedly. Thanks.



> ...
> I do, however, feel that expecting most listeners to push themselves outside their comfort zone is unreasonable. Humans just don't do that. Contemporary music is not really outside most TC members comfort zone so we explore and enjoy it. On the other hand, TC members probably don't go outside their comfort zone in many other areas.


I think if people try, they can enjoy any type of music. Doesn't mean you have to be a fanatic of it though, or an "expert." I think sometimes we classical lovers set the bar too high.

If I found some Wagner and R. Strauss that I liked, there's hope for people looking for some music to like say after 1945. There's lots out there. You don't have to like it all. It doesn't have to be all "atonal" or experimental or whatever.

As I said, Rorem's quote is emphasising the inclusive and practical, and not the dogma or negativity. That's how I see what he's saying. He's saying it's good to expand one's horizons and be in touch with things of today, although it doesn't exclude your other passions in other areas, eg. of older musics...


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## bigshot (Nov 22, 2011)

Sid James said:


> So the majority here should by that logic in some way agree with what Ned Rorem said. Eg. that it's good to be up with music closer to our own time and of our own time, etc.


I listen to plenty of modern music... Just not modern classical music. Other forms of music are much more relavent to me after a certain point. Classical music abandoned me, I didn't abandon it.


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

How much effort would you "deem" sufficient before the listener decides that Atonal is just not for them, as Wagner is not for you? Two Wagner operas is eight hours, and I have spent more than that in the pool of Atonal music.

This seems a valid question. I know that HC and myself among others have taken flack for our daring to admit that we found this or that work of contemporary music to be crap... but we both have taken the time to listen to it before making such judgments. I now own some 12 or more discs by Schoenberg which must be more than many others own by composers they truly admire. There are moments that catch my interest... but as a whole he leaves me cold.

For whatever reason(s) (I'm sure you know all the common ones, I need not go into detail), Atonal music just hasn't picked up. They've been performed by top-notch orchestras over and over again, riding on the coattails of more popular pieces, and they're just not in demand.

Again, I agree. Atonality has never gained an audience anywhere near that that one might find for Mozart or Beethoven's orchestral works. This is not necessarily a value judgment. I doubt that the lieder of Wolf or the songs of Hahn, Faure, and Debussy, or the madrigals of Monteverdi have a much larger audience. Yet we don't find Monteverdi's madrigals wedded to an evening of Mozart and Brahms in a vain attempt to get the audience to like it.

The main problem I have with your thesis is that the average listener, even the average passionate classical music lover, should have to cross a certain threshold of effort before he can dismiss modern music. I find the notion that one needs to dive into a piece of music for a long period of music to appreciate it dubious, for almost all of my passions have been love at first sight; Mahler's Fifth, Wagner's Overtures, the WTC, etc. The real prizes came later of course, Das Lied, the Transformation Music from Parsifal, Cello Suite no. 6 Prelude, in the same way that once you discover a beautiful soul inside that beautiful body you fall in love even more.

But is this always true? There have been composers and works that initially left me indifferent... and yet grew slowly upon me until they have with time become among my favorite works.

My humble opinion is that we fetishize a notion of egalitarianism where each epoch "must have" something good produced out of it. This is just patently absurd. Why must "modernist music" be on par with Bach and Wagner? Because music pre-Bach was certainly not on par with music beginning with Bach.

OK... the problem with this analogy lies in the fact that there are few composers of any era who can compare with Bach. It's like dismissing the whole of Modernist literature... or even the incredibly rich period of Romanticism by pointing out that they had no Shakespeare or Dante. As a whole, the music pre-Bach is laden with a wealth of music and composers that might rival nearly any era: Monteverdi, Gesualdo, Dufay, Palestrina, Buxtehude, Praetorius, Schutz, Biber, Hildegard of Bingen, Tallis, josquin, etc... are all masterful composers.

There have been long periods in history where no "great art", at least monumental art, has been produced.

I would question this. There have been periods that were certainly far more prolific in terms of masterpieces and major artists... but almost no period was devoid of art of real merit.

The Greeks had Homer, and Hellenism, and then there was none (indeed, in I, Claudius, a Roman general made it clear the the Greeks the Romans ruled were NOT the same Greeks of Sophocles).

The Greeks from Homer until their fall to the Romans were among one of the most prolific cultures in terms of art. But the fall of Greece did not result in some "dark age". The Romans, the Persians, the Celts, the Chinese, etc... continued to produce art of real genius.

Saul Bellow ignited a brouhaha over the comment that there was no "Tolstoy of the Zulus", but why should there be? There's not even a Tolstoy of Italy, nor is there a Michelangelo of Russia, or a Mozart of East Asia.

Art follows money... and cultures in which the majority of the resources are spent in struggling to feed and shelter the population have little time or inclination left for art. On the other hand, while there is no Tolstoy of Italy, Dante might assuredly sweep the Russian under the rug in terms of aesthetic merit and innovation. The problem with your analogy is that you cannot make such a simplistic comparison as proof of the failings or short-comings of a given culture. You must consider their artistic traditions and values. The Chinese have traditionally valued poetry above all other art forms. There are few poets in any culture that might rival Tu Fu, Li Bai, or Wang Wei. Like the Arabs, they place great value upon calligraphy and the calligraphic brush-stroke which has virtually no Western equivalent. Nearly every major culture has had its share of masterful artists and artistic creations... but these are not necessarily the same from one culture to the next.

Likewise, why should there be a Schumann of the 20th century (obviously I'm talking post-Ravel here), much less a Bach or a Wagner?

Yes... but there's no 19th century Duke Ellington or Miles Davis. With the advent of sound recording technology the entire concept of music was revolutionized. The popular musical forms might now be preserved and the focus might move away from the composer to the performer... to improvisation, etc... And is music even the major art of our time? What of photography and film? Again, every culture has its masterful artists (although perhaps not in equal numbers) but these vary from culture to culture.

I often wonder what Berg what've been if he stayed tonal. I'm not sure I would care if Boulez did the same.

:lol:

What if the period of Bach to Wagner, Mahler, and Berg is the Hellenism of Europe? The Greeks never recovered, their most prominent achievements are still the OLD, OLD, tomes of yore immemorial.

Actually the Greeks did recover under the Byzantine Empire... although the result was an art of a wholly different nature. I don't buy into a decline of Modern art as a whole... although I do recognize that there may have been a decline in amount of artistic genius to be found in one country from one era to the next. France is no longer what it once was when it could lay claim to artists ranging from Monet, Manet, Degas, Van Gogh, Matisse, etc... But other cultures have taken up the torch. The "Decline of Modernism?" Richard Strauss, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bartok, Berg and Shostakovitch were by no means or measures "dwarfs". Ives, Barber, Copland, Bernstein, etc... were by no means without merit. By the same token, I suspect Ellington, MIles David, Thelonius Monk, photography and film-making may be far more the central arts of the last century than Pollock, DeKooning, Boulez, and Stockhausen. Shakespeare, one might do well to remember, was not recognized as the genius of his time for the simple reason that he created within a relatively "new" art form... the "modern" English theater... which was virtually as respected as an art form as TV is today... or rather was 60 years ago.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Okay, you who just can't accept a simple matter of principle, forget it.

Said, as I've pointed out, by a composer - Ned Rorem - who is far from experimental or overly (or at all?) atonal or whatever. I've heard some of his songs, and they were like modern tonal. Feel free to drag him down because he's not Beethoven tonal, Mozart tonal or BAch tonal.

Build your canons, eat them, sleep with them, marry them. Build a web of complex explanations avoiding the simple issue - that a number of people responding here have said they agree in one way or another with Mr. Rorem's statements.

It's easy. If I'm a fan today of cricket, or gridiron for you Americans, or football for the Europeans, I naturally would not only be interested in the teams that played in say 1950. I would be interested in what's going on in the sport TODAY, the HERE and NOW.

THere's no problem with being interested in history, I'm a pretty big history "nerd," but when it boils down to it, what's going on now is very important to know as well. Otherwise, we are walking only with the ghosts of the past, for what reason?

If I said here that I follow cricket, but only or mainly the teams of 1950, I'd be seen as out of touch with the sport today, big time. Not the best analogy perhaps, but better than history lessons and boring canons, real or imagined...


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

StlukesguildOhio said:


> This seems a valid question. I know that HC and myself among others have taken flack for our daring to admit that we found this or that work of contemporary music to be crap... but we both have taken the time to listen to it before making such judgments. I now own some 12 or more discs by Schoenberg which must be more than many others own by composers they truly admire. There are moments that catch my interest... but as a whole he leaves me cold...


It's not only about owning discs as I said, it's about attitude mainly.

I think it's better if you think about what you're saying. Pulling down major composers of post-war period doesn't come across to me as something to brag about. I went to a quite successful performance of Xenakis percussion music last year. The hall was two thirds full, quite a good turnout, and not just all mainly over 65s that you get in these period instrument wig things. There were all ages. Even a major composer who is modern tonal, one of our major composers, he was in the audience, and he wasn't being judging of Xenakis for being totally different from his own music. The performance got virtually a standing ovation.

Anyway, forget it as I said, it's okay what you say, but I've gone down this path with you before. My attitude reflects those here who just accept common sense, without the deflections...


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## moody (Nov 5, 2011)

ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> I think that the composers that are alive today are being neglected too. I don't see fifty billion different recordings of the Carl Vine symphonies. I _do_ see fifty billion different recordings of the Beethoven symphonies. I think part if this problem is that the public doesn't know what to expect with these living, breathing composers that they even may never have heard of before. But with Beethoven, since his symphonies are re-recorded six times a day (five on public holidays) the listeners get to hear them more often, thus growing familiar with that sound world of the early 1800s rather than the early 2000s.


 The problem with making fifty billion recordings of modern composers is this, who is going to pay for it? For good or bad the public don't really want these composers and therefore even if someone does record them once a week they won't sell--it's all in the economics. The public will not get to hear them more often, it has to start in the concert hall, recital room or possibly on the radio or word of mouth..


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## moody (Nov 5, 2011)

Sid James said:


> It's not only about owning discs as I said, it's about attitude mainly.
> 
> I think it's better if you think about what you're saying. Pulling down major composers of post-war period doesn't come across to me as something to brag about. I went to a quite successful performance of Xenakis percussion music last year. The hall was two thirds full, quite a good turnout, and not just all mainly over 65s that you get in these period instrument wig things. There were all ages. Even a major composer who is modern tonal, one of our major composers, he was in the audience, and he wasn't being judging of Xenakis for being totally different from his own music. The performance got virtually a standing ovation.
> 
> Anyway, forget it as I said, it's okay what you say, but I've gone down this path with you before. My attitude reflects those here who just accept common sense, without the deflections...


 So we're back to the common sense thng again are we ?!


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

I don't have the energy (or time  ) to read through the pages of this thread that I have skipped over, but I just wanted to say a brief something on this strange question of how much of something we have to listen to before we can 'dismiss' it (I think using the word 'dismiss' here sounds rather too judgemental, but it was used earlier so I'll repeat it here).

Of a single composer (of any period): who knows? It's not an exact science. Listen to a few famous pieces to get a feel for them, and if you don't like those, you're probably unlikely to like others, so feel free to dismiss.

Of a stylistic movement: again, there are no exact answers. But if you take a fairly solid movement like Romanticism, you can see that it's very broad and requires you to do the above approach to a fair number of individual composers spanning a reasonable length of time. Perhaps, say, 2-3 composers from each of early, mid, late (as if the specifics even matter).

Now, of _an entire period of history_, such as post-1950: wtf are you talking about?! The question of dismissal doesn't make sense here! There is such an abundance of style that you cannot take any sample and use it to judge other composers because the variation is so huge. You should only be dismissing those works and composers _you have heard_. You cannot extrapolate that dismissal to composers you haven't heard just because they are contemporary.


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## Oskaar (Mar 17, 2011)

Vaneyes said:


> Re an army corps, oskaar, you could be talking about 10,000 to 15,000 men.


That would not be art, but very artistic! ;-)


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

It's not only about owning discs as I said, it's about attitude mainly.

My attitude is that I give nearly every composer a chance. In the case of Schoenberg I suspect I have given more effort to him than I suspect many have given to the Baroque (or any other period or composer of choice) before giving up on him/them for the simple reason that I recognize his historical importance. Ultimately, however, we like what we like.

I think it's better if you think about what you're saying. Pulling down major composers of post-war period doesn't come across to me as something to brag about.

Modern and Contemporary music is so broad and so diverse that none of us can be expected to like it all. You yourself have dismissed Arvo Pärt and Einojuhani Rautavaara and the rest of the so-called "Holy Minimalists" of the Eastern European school as doing little more than repeating themselves. Some Guy, patron saint of the contemporary avant garde, is quick to make it clear that the real music of merit today is not to be found in the work of most the "big name" composers. Contemporary art will always be open to heated debate. One cannot expect otherwise... unless it amounted to little more the a pastiche of the past... and even then...

I went to a quite successful performance of Xenakis percussion music last year. The hall was two thirds full, quite a good turnout, and not just all mainly over 65s that you get in these period instrument wig things.

Are we to assume that the over-65 audience is somehow irrelevant? Just asking. Honestly none of the performances (outside popular music) that I have attended were dominated by a single age group. Attending a major orchestra here somewhat frequently I come across an audience that crosses the age spectrum. There are many college kids, there are 20-somethings that are almost groupies of given performers, there are young families with children, there are the middle-aged and there are the seniors. I didn't see much difference when I attended a period performance of Bach or a concert of David Lang. The classical music audience is already rather limited in scale. The audience for opera and chamber music and other genres are even more so. While there are certainly those who attend major concerts as little more than social events to be seen at, I suspect the majority of those who listen regularly to classical music of any form cannot be dismissed as closed-minded conservatives. I think this is what many who dislike this or that contemporary composer or aspect of contemporary music take offence at. Polednice can admit that he doesn't like Bach nor the Baroque as a whole, and while those who are passionate about Bach and the Baroque may feel that he is missing out on something, one doesn't see a need to paint him as a close-minded conservative. I don't like what I have heard by Xenakis. Only one work by Stockhausen has really grabbed me; and most of the electronic turntable music that some guy champions strikes me as merely ridiculous. But there are any number of other living and recently deceased composers that I greatly admire, including Ned Rorem, Osvaldo Golijov, Valentin Silvestrov, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Tristan Murail, Daniel Catan, Peter Lieberson, Kaija Saariaho, David Lang, Michael Daugherty, Joseph Schwantner, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, etc... and I am always looking and listening for more. Does this make me a close-minded conservative?


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## Guest (Jan 19, 2012)

StlukesguildOhio said:


> Some Guy, patron saint of the contemporary avant garde, is quick to make it clear that the real music of merit today is not to be found in the work of most the "big name" composers.


Is it even worth repeating that I do not in fact do this, slowly or quickly? Is it even worth repeating that the only quickness in this regard is St's quickness to attack this straw man of his.

Hmmm. Probably not worth it.

There is some very nice music out there that's by composers that St has never heard of, that is true. As to whether or not they represent "the real music of merit today" is as may be. Their music is very enjoyable. That's part of what we're here for, to talk about the musics we enjoy.

If we like certain musics, however, we cannot talk about them without someone farting, or someone else expressing moral disgust, or someone else attacking us rather than what we say. That's extremely tedious. Fortunately, none of us has to be here. Unfortunately, since I've met some very nice people here, I'd like to continue hanging out with them. I'd like to be able to converse with them without all the flatulence. I don't see that happening any time soon, though. Too bad.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

Sid James said:


> If I said here that I follow cricket, but only or mainly the teams of 1950, I'd be seen as out of touch with the sport today, big time. Not the best analogy perhaps, but better than history lessons and boring canons, real or imagined...


I agree with your statement, and I think the analogy does hold. Anyone who only follows classical music of prior centuries _is out of touch with today's classical music. I think the difference is that the changes in sports are minor compared to the changes in classical music (actually any music). Of all sports I know, I think American football has changed the most over say 60 years, but those changes seem on the order of the changes between early and late Romantic works.

Modern classical music has changed remarkably from 19th century music. I think for many people some (much?) of post Romantic music is no longer the same thing that they listen to and enjoy. It simply has changed too much for them. I love sports, but there are some I have no interest in watching (polo and curling, for example). many would say they love classical music but have no interest in listening to modern music.

It's true that perhaps many of these people have not really listened to the full spectrum of modern music to make a blanket assessment, but from what they have heard, they are not interested._


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

Is it even worth repeating that I do not in fact do this, slowly or quickly? Is it even worth repeating that the only quickness in this regard is St's quickness to attack this straw man of his.

Hmmm. Probably not worth it.

Let's forget the fake politesse of your denial and your usual claims to strawmen or some other aspect of your junior high debate team rules. Your denial here is nothing more than a bold-faced lie. You have repeatedly stated that the real music... the avant garde of today is no longer found in the symphonic halls or other institutions where we might find any of the composers that I have mentioned.

There is some very nice music out there that's by composers that St has never heard of, that is true. As to whether or not they represent "the real music of merit today" is as may be. Their music is very enjoyable. That's part of what we're here for, to talk about the musics we enjoy.

That is undoubtedly well and true. I have little doubt that there are many composers out there of real merit of which I am unaware. I stumble across one or another quite frequently... both from the "ancient" past and the present. I usually give a listen to any recommendation made here because I have found at times that the result has been a composer I quite enjoy. I can't say your track record has been all that successful, but I have even given many of your recommendations or suggestion the benefit of the doubt. You may find all of their work enjoyable... but then again you may be just something of an anomaly.

I can't say too many others here have been running to the defense of your favorite avant garde noise-makers.

:tiphat:


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## bigshot (Nov 22, 2011)

It's amazing how many words are being expelled and how few concrete examples in the form of YouTube links. It may not be particularly effective to hammer away in chat forums with unsupported statements of how great modern classical music is, but I guess it's probably more effective at gaining converts than actually linking to the music itself.

Quite frankly, when a poster goes to the mat to defend 4'33", comes up with terms like "animal made music", and pontificates about how all noise is music, I tend to be distrustful of any recommendation they're going to make. Is that me being closeminded, or is it someone overstating their argument to the point of absurdity? I know that it isn't hard for me to decide which!


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

bigshot said:


> It's amazing how many words are being expelled and how few concrete examples in the form of YouTube links. It may not be particularly effective to hammer away in chat forums with unsupported statements of how great modern classical music is, but I guess it's probably more effective at gaining converts than actually linking to the music itself.
> 
> Quite frankly, when a poster goes to the mat to defend 4'33", comes up with terms like "animal made music", and pontificates about how all noise is music, I tend to be distrustful of any recommendation they're going to make. Is that me being closeminded, or is it someone overstating their argument to the point of absurdity? I know that it isn't hard for me to decide which!


Exploring Modern and Contemporary Music


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## Guest (Jan 19, 2012)

StlukesguildOhio said:


> You have repeatedly stated that the real music... the avant garde of today is no longer found in the symphonic halls or other institutions where we might find any of the composers that I have mentioned.


And you have repeatedly stated that the composers I mention are marginal and unimportant. Less important than the ones you fancy. Is that all this is about? You want to be the contemporary music sage, so you have to attack anyone who knows something about it other than what you know, or who has opinions about it other than your opinions?

You have repeatedly distorted my statements, that is true. I've never called you a liar, though. Perhaps I should start.

As soon as you stop making straw men, I'll stop pointing out that that's your argumentative tactic of choice.

As for the music that has indeed moved out of the concert halls and into coffee shops and abandoned factories, that music is certainly real enough. Whether it's more real than the music that stayed in the concert halls, I've never said. It's no _less_ real; I have said that, in response to imputations by your own dear self.

It is more avant garde. I have no problem stating that. Perhaps that's what you meant to say that I said? That the real avant garde is not so frequently found in the concert hall than it is in abandoned factories? I think that that's certainly true. Though I would also hasten to add that that's US concert halls, only. European concert halls still host a variety of new and interesting work. More factory action there, too, though.

In any event, symphony concert halls are best suited for symphonic music. Chamber music (and much new music is for smaller ensembles), after a brief stint in large halls, has slowly begun to go back to smaller ones; even fairly traditional chamber music has done so. Again, that's more common in Europe than in the US. Perhaps we just like packing the huge halls here, even if the music is for intimate-sized ensembles. Dunno. It's a possibility.


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## bigshot (Nov 22, 2011)

Polednice said:


> Exploring Modern and Contemporary Music


Hit the ball over the outfield fence. Pick one YouTube video of music composed in the past forty or fifty years that is self evidently as great as the "warhorses". Better yet, pick one from the past decade or two. It's easy, right?


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## Oskaar (Mar 17, 2011)

bigshot said:


> Hit the ball over the outfield fence. Pick one YouTube video of music composed in the past forty or fifty years that is self evidently as great as the "warhorses". Better yet, pick one from the past decade or two. It's easy, right?


Well, it is not that easy. Music of today will be worshiped in the future... It is only so difficult to find them in true time. History shows that that has always been a matter.


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## moody (Nov 5, 2011)

oskaar said:


> Well, it is not that easy. Music of today will be worshiped in the future... It is only so difficult to find them in true time. History shows that that has always been a matter.


Not very many come through. Look how many other composers were around when Beethoven and Mozart were alive.


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## Guest (Jan 19, 2012)

bigshot said:


> Hit the ball over the outfield fence. Pick one YouTube video of music composed in the past forty or fifty years that is self evidently as great as the "warhorses". Better yet, pick one from the past decade or two. It's easy, right?


By "self evidently," you mean evident to _your_ self, right? Your steeped in the 18th and 19th centuries but deeply suspicious of the 20th and 21st centuries self.

Yeah. That would be difficult, as you imply.

Evident to _my_ self, though? Yeah, that really would be easy. Difficult to pick just one, though, in either category.


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## HarpsichordConcerto (Jan 1, 2010)

some guy said:


> And you have repeatedly stated that the composers I mention are marginal and unimportant...


They _are_ mariginal - fringe composers today. That's a fact. Specifically, I'm referring to the artists today who make electronic noises.

But even I listen to fringe composers of the Baroque. And that these folks were completely unimportant as far as the development of Baroque music was concerned. Though I certainly don't suffer from inferiority complexities acknowledging that I do listen to fringe and unimportant composers from the Baroque.


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## brianwalker (Dec 9, 2011)

some guy said:


> By "self evidently," you mean evident to _your_ self, right? Your steeped in the 18th and 19th centuries but deeply suspicious of the 20th and 21st centuries self.
> 
> Yeah. That would be difficult, as you imply.
> 
> Evident to _my_ self, though? Yeah, that really would be easy. Difficult to pick just one, though, in either category.


Why don't you try it and see what happens. No one will pounce on you for choosing choices that are self evident for you.


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## brianwalker (Dec 9, 2011)

But is this always true? There have been composers and works that initially left me indifferent... and yet grew slowly upon me until they have with time become among my favorite works. 

No, there are always exceptions. It look more than 3 listens for me to appreciate Berg's Violin Concerto. I'm not sure about the Rite of Spring, I was indifferent the first time, but loved it the second time. There was a period of 2-3 months in between though, so I'm not sure if I sneaked a few listens. There are certain nuts, however, that I have tried to crack in vain, and at a certain point I'm more worried about my teeth than the fruit beneath the shell. I have tackled Boulez' Second Sonata in its entirety 6 times. While by absolute measure that is not long, remember that Boulez' music (and this was stated in an academic paper) "feels" really long. The Marteau and his other works never rise above the level of "cool" ambient music. They're not actively unpleasant such as death metal, but all the same.

Henry James said that the primary duty of the novel is to be interesting, and Dr. Johnson said that the first task of the novelist is to make the reader want to get to the last page.

It is true that I'm probably missing out on a decent quantity of adequate, not-terrible modernist music, but why should the entirety of my life be devoted to music? I have not even listened to half of Mozart's symphonies. This was Solti's retort to the modernists. It went something along the lines of "I haven't yet conducted all the Haydn symphonies, and you want me to conduct whoever?" There are many things to do, such as learning Greek to read Sophocles, Sebald novels I haven't gotten my hands on, different versions of Parsifal I have yet to explore, and we're just scratching the surface on music and literature. What about the other arts and then there's life itself! The implicit attitude is that we are all a throng of monastic music devotees, that we should unconditionally and patiently try to squeeze out as much joy as possible out of the rather dismal landscape that I've set my eyes upon.

The prioritizaton of the present over the past i.e. treating them as equals has wrecked inexorable havoc on the multitudes. How many of our youth turn away from literature because of the mediocrity shoved down their throats? Each inclusion is an exclusion because our time and energy is finite. Every novel by Toni Morrison or Maxine Hong Kingston means that one less teenager has the opportunity to read Stendhal or Henry James or Flaubert.

I would question this. There have been periods that were certainly far more prolific in terms of masterpieces and major artists... but almost no period was devoid of art of real merit.

I never said there were periods absolutely bereft of talent, but that geniuses are rare, and not a given. Nabokov talks about how there is a fine distinction in Russian between "talant" and genius, and went on to praise the genius James Joyce at the expense of the "talented Henry James".

I think our main disagreement is that I might have painted myself as perhaps too pessimistic. The 19th century had no Miles Davis but it has something else. They're part of a totally different tradition, and are in some sense incommensurable, but the musicians that Sir James is championing are touted as part of the tradition.

I think the Bach example was a bit extreme, yes, that would be similar to denigrating Keats and Shelley because they weren't Shakespeare. The thing is, even though there was no Shakespare of the 19th century, or a Russian Dante, during those periods of flourishing the artists explored new terrain and set up superlative posts there that were in their own way incomparable.

The subject matter dealt in Shakespeare's tragedies are more "grand", with his Kings and Princesses and Dukes and Romans, than the matters covered in Henry James or Joseph Conrad, and are more popular, but there are things in James' novels that cannot be found in all of Shakespeare. The most apt simile I can conjure up at this instance would be comparing Michelangelo against Turner and Sargent (are these painters too trivial? I am clueless to their "rank" really, all I know is that I love them). In its own way the arts of the 19th century were of the highest flourishing, and "axiomatic" in its own way.

We all set different bars for what constitutes genius, but I consider the last geniuses in music Ravel, Berg, and Stravinsky. I wouldn't consider them rivals to Bach or Mozart, but I can envisage them comfortably dining at the same table.

I'm not looking for a contemporary Wagner, nor a Berg, but maybe, just maybe, an Alkan.

Regarding pre-Bach composers. Never did I imply that they were in any way impoverished, but that with Bach there was a new "standard", as it were. When conductors are interviewed and asked whether, for example, whether "Mahler's music explored 'new' emotions hitherto unmapped in music", the response will range from "yes, absolutely", to "no, they were already present in...." and the answer is almost ways Bach.

http://mahler.universaledition.com/daniel-barenboim-on-gustav-mahler/

Did Mahler discover new dimensions in terms of orchestral power?

Barenboim: No. But in the harmonic world, in the use of the compositional techniques and dynamics, in the orchestration, in the complexity of it all, here he discovered new worlds. But in what you would call the emotional content of the music: no. I think the emotional content of the music, the relation of the music to the human being, with the condition of being human, is already in Bach.

http://mahler.universaledition.com/lorin-maazel-on-mahler/

Maybe the Mahler renaissance has to do with the way he expresses the feelings of modern human beings?

Maazel: Well maybe, and also the musical language that he found is, in a sense, timeless - I hate to use that word, I swore I would never use it, but there it is - very much like Beethoven or Bach, and to a lesser degree Mozart. Mozart is always incredible, fantastic, genius, but you can still see the wig, the clothes, the livery and buckles, and so on and so forth, whereas these spaces in Bach preludes are just cosmic.

The main point of contention is that somehow concert audiences are inferior because they have by and large rejected the music that they have rejected. I find this attitude intolerable.


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## brianwalker (Dec 9, 2011)

THere's no problem with being interested in history, I'm a pretty big history "nerd," but when it boils down to it, what's going on now is very important to know as well. Otherwise, we are walking only with the ghosts of the past, for what reason?


History and art are two completely different things. It's commonly accepted by historians that not all eras in history are equally important. Certain key years and events occurring in key locations are heavily mined and explored, debated over and hairs split. The Peloponnesian War is one such example. Hellenistic Greece in general, actually.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Polednice said:


> ...
> Now, of _an entire period of history_, such as post-1950: wtf are you talking about?! The question of dismissal doesn't make sense here! There is such an abundance of style that you cannot take any sample and use it to judge other composers because the variation is so huge. You should only be dismissing those works and composers _you have heard_. You cannot extrapolate that dismissal to composers you haven't heard just because they are contemporary.


Agreed, the rate of change since about 1945 has been huge. The "turnover" of styles I mean. & of course, they coexist, and there isn't always strict boundaries between them. Even the one composer goes through several changes. I think change is healthy, but yes too much change, too much diversity is hard to grapple with and make sense of. Well, I guess that's just the reality, that's life in 2012.

As I said a million times here, Ned Rorem doesn't seem to care for Schoenberg, really. He says that Sibelius doesn't need extra support, composers living now do. Sibelius died some years after Schoenberg, both died in the 1950's. They kind of represented an end of an era in some ways. In 1952, the year after Schoenberg's death, one of the other major composers of the time, Stravinsky, started playing around with serialism. So with that, he united many strands in his own work that had happened up till then. Some writers on music say he kind of neutralised the mudslinging between those against serialism and those for it. The extremes I mean. Neither could pull him down for doing what he did, he had respect, authority, the chops, the balls, the works.

In going "serial" in his own way, Stravinsky moved with the times. But it wasn't the only way to update and change, it was one of several ways. There were heaps of things going on in music in 1952, and even more now in 2012, 60 years later.

But getting back to Rorem, I don't think he cares for Schoenberg, really. I have a friend who virtually hates Schoenberg but she introduced me to Harry Partch. Then I did a thread on Partch here and it got some people into him as well. If someone says common sense to me, or gives good advice, I take it. Doesn't mean what they like or dislike, etc. What they're saying has to come from experience, not ideological gibberish. Not imposing but freeing, giving options. Basically, that's what Ned Rorem was saying all those years ago in the 1980's...


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

StlukesguildOhio said:


> It's not only about owning discs as I said, it's about attitude mainly.
> 
> My attitude is that I give nearly every composer a chance. In the case of Schoenberg I suspect I have given more effort to him than I suspect many have given to the Baroque (or any other period or composer of choice) before giving up on him/them for the simple reason that I recognize his historical importance. Ultimately, however, we like what we like...


I'm not saying you didn't give Schoenberg a chance. I commend people trying out things, even difficult things like that. I was talking in general of attitude, which I know sometimes here I go overboard and get very emotional, but I try hard to put words to my criticism not just say something is "cr*p" or "****." I mean for one thing, it's better use of English language to say things properly, be specific of how we criticise, talk of music, etc. Note that here I'm talking of what I aim to do, that's it.



> I think it's better if you think about what you're saying. Pulling down major composers of post-war period doesn't come across to me as something to brag about.
> 
> Modern and Contemporary music is so broad and so diverse that none of us can be expected to like it all. You yourself have dismissed Arvo Pärt and Einojuhani Rautavaara and the rest of the so-called "Holy Minimalists" of the Eastern European school as doing little more than repeating themselves.


I don't remember calling them cr*p, I just say they are rehash, which is what I find them to be. Esp. in the last 20 years, Arvo Part in early 1990's and before was doing interesting things. After that, he's been using too much of the carbon paper. I've heard several works by him here on radio, when I did listen for years, and I have experience to back up what I say. Rautvaara it's similar for me.

BTW, I don't hold back from criticising even my favourite composers. Eg. Beethoven's cello sonatas really bore me, big time. I might get back to them and give them a chance, but surely I can say what I am thinking? This is what a forum is there for. But doesn't mean I call him cr*p.

If you say you don't like a composer like Schoenberg and just say naturally way, eg. not use the word cr*p, etc., just even say it's grey or boring or whatever, well that's okay. It's not about liking everything, I don't know why people think one has to suspend critical faculties when listening to post-1945 musics? I listen to any music as balanced as I can. Sometime I give it another listen straight away if I need to do that. With Bach, his middle two cello suites grab me the most now, I'm still "working" on the other 4, esp. the first two which I find similarly "minimalist" and pared down, like the Beethoven cello sonatas.

It's all a work in progress. But if I've heard like half a dozen or more recent works on radio by say Arvo Part and they all sound the same, well then I'll just say they sound rehash to me, it's that simple.



> I went to a quite successful performance of Xenakis percussion music last year. The hall was two thirds full, quite a good turnout, and not just all mainly over 65s that you get in these period instrument wig things.
> 
> Are we to assume that the over-65 audience is somehow irrelevant? Just asking. Honestly none of the performances (outside popular music) that I have attended were dominated by a single age group. Attending a major orchestra here somewhat frequently I come across an audience that crosses the age spectrum...


Well it may well be different here. But I'm not equating conservatism with age, necessarily. But it's not even really a matter of conservatism, just logical thinking. I know people in their senior years who can think clearly and in a balanced way about music. Some of them were movers and shakers here in the 1950's when a lot of things that were "old" in Europe - eg. Schoenberg's things from early in the century - were being premiered here. Also stuff by Cage, etc. They don't necessarily put these composers over others. One of them is similar with Cage as I, some of his things grab him, others don't. But they don't dismiss things holus bolus, or tend not to...


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

mmsbls said:


> I agree with your statement, and I think the analogy does hold. Anyone who only follows classical music of prior centuries _is out of touch with today's classical music. I think the difference is that the changes in sports are minor compared to the changes in classical music (actually any music). Of all sports I know, I think American football has changed the most over say 60 years, but those changes seem on the order of the changes between early and late Romantic works..._


_

Well good to hear that my sports analogy holds some water. I actually stole it from a friend I was talking about regarding some issues on this thread. Yes, Don Bradman was our greatest cricketer, but he died 10 or so years ago in his nineties, long retired, and others, many other great cricketers here, have come after him. They all respect his legacy, he was a great Australian.

As per what you say about the rate of change in post-1950's music, my reply to Polednice above covers some of those points.




Modern classical music has changed remarkably from 19th century music. I think for many people some (much?) of post Romantic music is no longer the same thing that they listen to and enjoy. It simply has changed too much for them. I love sports, but there are some I have no interest in watching (polo and curling, for example). many would say they love classical music but have no interest in listening to modern music.

It's true that perhaps many of these people have not really listened to the full spectrum of modern music to make a blanket assessment, but from what they have heard, they are not interested.

Click to expand...

Well I think it's okay for people to listen to the amount, types, composers of more recent times or today in a way that's right and good for them. We are all unique, we have different tastes, etc.

I'm not going to dictate what people have to do. Ned Rorem isn't either, I think. He just says it's good to know what going on in music today. Have a healthy curiosity.

Maybe my title of this thread, "fetishising the past" is a bit provocative, but I actually read that term, about fetishising music of the past and walking in the graveyards of the past, I read it in a recent book on music. So again, I kind of "stole" it! ..._


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

_SLG (quoted)-But is this always true? There have been composers and works that initially left me indifferent... and yet grew slowly upon me until they have with time become among my favorite works. _

No, there are always exceptions. It look more than 3 listens for me to appreciate Berg's Violin Concerto. I'm not sure about the Rite of Spring, I was indifferent the first time, but loved it the second time. There was a period of 2-3 months in between though, so I'm not sure if I sneaked a few listens. There are certain nuts, however, that I have tried to crack in vain, and at a certain point I'm more worried about my teeth than the fruit beneath the shell. I have tackled Boulez' Second Sonata in its entirety 6 times. While by absolute measure that is not long, remember that Boulez' music (and this was stated in an academic paper) "feels" really long. The Marteau and his other works never rise above the level of "cool" ambient music. They're not actively unpleasant such as death metal, but all the same.

Henry James said that the primary duty of the novel is to be interesting, and Dr. Johnson said that the first task of the novelist is to make the reader want to get to the last page. 

It is true that I'm probably missing out on a decent quantity of adequate, not-terrible modernist music, but why should the entirety of my life be devoted to music? I have not even listened to half of Mozart's symphonies. This was Solti's retort to the modernists.. There are many things to do, such as learning Greek to read Sophocles, Sebald novels I haven't gotten my hands on, different versions of Parsifal I have yet to explore, and we're just scratching the surface on music and literature. What about the other arts and then there's life itself!

This is a valid point. I certainly agree that my goal in exploring art is to garner a degree of pleasure. As Walter Pater put it:

_While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch...

Well! we are all condamnes, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve-les hommes sont tous condamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion-that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake._

I am certainly not one of those aesthetic Puritans who would have us believe that a work of art is better than it looks or sounds (or reads) because it is somehow good for us. I look to art for aesthetic pleasure and if it looks like sh** or sounds like fingers being dragged across the blackboard I'm not likely to spend a lot of time trying to force myself to like it. Still there are any number of artistic works that initially left me baffled or merely indifferent which I have found have grown upon me with the passage of time and these are enough to convince me to give works more than a single change.

The prioritizaton of the present over the past i.e. treating them as equals has wrecked inexorable havoc on the multitudes. How many of our youth turn away from literature because of the mediocrity shoved down their throats? Each inclusion is an exclusion because our time and energy is finite. Every novel by Toni Morrison or Maxine Hong Kingston means that one less teenager has the opportunity to read Stendhal or Henry James or Flaubert.

The fetishism of the present vs that of the past. Indeed, that might be an equally intriguing argument. In some ways I think this is due to a self-centered or ego-centric view of the arts... the notion that the role of the arts is to reinforce our own biases, prejudices, experiences, beliefs, etc... According to this approach to the arts, Toni Morrison's portrayal of the contemporary African-American experience should be more "relevant" to the contemporary American reader than Shakespeare's narratives concerning ancient European aristocrats. Anna Quindlen, speaking on books... but certainly this could apply to the whole of the arts... wrote _"Through them (the Arts) we experience other times, other places, other lives. We manage to become much more than our own selves. The only dead (some might call then "dullards") are those who grow sere and shriveled within, unable to step outside their own lives and into those of others. Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque."_

In a sense, if the arts have a practical or social value, I suspect it lies here... in its ability to spur on a sense of empathy... of value, respect and appreciation for those different from ourselves. The danger of the self-obsessed approach to the arts, is the loss of this.

I never said there were periods absolutely bereft of talent, but that geniuses are rare, and not a given. Nabokov talks about how there is a fine distinction in Russian between "talant" and genius, and went on to praise the genius James Joyce at the expense of the "talented Henry James". 

Nabokov was a questionable critic at best. Remember he also largely dismissed Dostoevsky. Still I do agree with your premise that there are certain towering geniuses: Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Homer, Firdowsi, Michelangelo, Rubens, Picasso, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, etc... I have little doubt that Picasso, Matisse, Marcel Proust, J.L Borges, Prokofiev, Richard Strauss, and a number of others are worthy of consideration in such a context. Recognizing the "genius" of our own time, however, is always a difficult proposition. How many English during the heyday of Shakespeare's Globe Theater recognized what a genius was walking among them? How many of J.S. Bach's peers, patrons, parishioners, or even his own family members recognized him as one of the towering musical geniuses of all time?

I think our main disagreement is that I might have painted myself as perhaps too pessimistic. The 19th century had no Miles Davis but it has something else. They're part of a totally different tradition, and are in some sense incommensurable, but the musicians that Sir James is championing are touted as part of the tradition.

See, I question the very notion of the tradition of "classical music". I cannot look at the variety of music and its wealth of genre, styles, and intentions... everything ranging from Byzantine chant and Sephardic dance to medieval polyphony and chanson, Renaissance madrigals, Baroque opera, symphonies, chamber music, operettas, ballets, tone poems, lieder, melodies, etc... as a single tradition which is easily defined and clearly separate from other traditions of jazz, American pop standards, blues, rock, etc... Ultimately, the term "classical" seems to have been employed to differentiate the "serious" music of a elite class in decline from the popular music of a lower class. In literature it is clearly recognized that forms of writing initially seen as outside the tradition (and of "low" heritage)... the theater, the novel, the autobiography, even the comic book, may indeed rise to the level of the "classic". By the same token, there are art forms (photography, comic books, posters, illustration...) that were once deemed as being beneath recognition with the realm of the "fine arts" that are now recognized as "classics" of art. If this is recognized as part of the classical tradition:











Then why shouldn't these be equally recognized as "classics" of Western music...
















...and not hold tight some vaugue notion of "classical music" as separate from other musical forms, but rather as representing the finest music from all genre and eras?

I think the Bach example was a bit extreme, yes, that would be similar to denigrating Keats and Shelley because they weren't Shakespeare. The thing is, even though there was no Shakespare of the 19th century, or a Russian Dante, during those periods of flourishing the artists explored new terrain and set up superlative posts there that were in their own way incomparable.

And I think the same is true of Modernism. Richard Strauss, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Debussy, Shostakovitch, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Picasso, Serge Eisenstein, F.W. Murnau, Matisse, Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick, T.S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, etc... these are all names that will last.

The subject matter dealt in Shakespeare's tragedies are more "grand", with his Kings and Princesses and Dukes and Romans, than the matters covered in Henry James or Joseph Conrad, and are more popular, but there are things in James' novels that cannot be found in all of Shakespeare. The most apt simile I can conjure up at this instance would be comparing Michelangelo against Turner and Sargent (are these painters too trivial? I am clueless to their "rank" really, all I know is that I love them). In its own way the arts of the 19th century were of the highest flourishing, and "axiomatic" in its own way.

We all set different bars for what constitutes genius, but I consider the last geniuses in music Ravel, Berg, and Stravinsky. I wouldn't consider them rivals to Bach or Mozart, but I can envisage them comfortably dining at the same table.

The thing is... I think I think a dinner party with Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart could only be enhanced by the inclusion of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Muddy Waters, Johnny Cash, and the Beatles. I can just picture Miles dropping the f-bomb at every turn in the conversation and can you imagine the improvisational jam session? :lol: Indeed, the is a lovely little novella by the great Cuban novelist, Alejo Carpentier entitled _Baroque Concerto_, in which the author imagines a meeting of Antonio Vivaldi, Domenico Scarlatti, G.F. Handel and Stravinsky who makes the snide comment about Vivaldi writing the same concerto 100 times, to which the Red Priest replies that at least he's never stooped to composer music for children's puppet shows.

I'm not looking for a contemporary Wagner, nor a Berg, but maybe, just maybe, an Alkan.

The thing is that I have discovered several works that I find as moving an many of the greatest pieces of music from the past.

The main point of contention is that somehow concert audiences are inferior because they have by and large rejected the music that they have rejected. I find this attitude intolerable.

I agree with this with qualifications. I recognize that not all truly innovative art is immediately appreciated by the audience... but I find that I do question the notion that it is all the fault of the audience and the close-minded conservative listeners for the fact that some music... in spite of having access to far more support in the form of recordings than almost any of the composers of the past... has yet to catch on after 50... or 100 years.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

I think what Ned Rorem says is basically in line with my experience. 

As I said, he's not saying anything radical, imo.

Music appreciation for most people I know is just about listening to music and getting from it what you can. Nobody I know compares the three B's for example for "greatness." I have mentioned these comparisons to them as threads of the sort come up on this forum. One said simply "I don't have to say or choose which one is greatest, I like them all."

The arguments that you have to suspend your critical faculties while listening to new music, that it's impossible to program new works alongside older works, that new music equates with "difficult" music, that it's a false dichotomy - eg. you have to choose between older musics and newer musics. None of these fit with my actual experience.

I know classical listeners, a number of them, who are maybe 50 years behind 2012. Sometimes they admit it, I never push this because it's not my business. By the same token, I know quite a few eclectic listeners as well. I have actually learnt some things from many types of listeners, musicians, both in reality and online or in books. I pick up what I can from anyone.

It is worrying if something that is inclusive and open like Mr. Rorem's opinions, that would make sense to the average person, does not register here, maybe because some people are complicating it.

I'm glad people have listened to some new or newer music, on this forum there is discussion of it esp. by some people with a higher level of interest in it. Not everything by Schoenberg, Cage, Boulez grabs me. By the same token, as I said before, not everything of say the three B's grabs me either. But I don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, as they say. I just grab what I like, or at least what I'm middling with to work on it in future. I agree with what people say, it's about enjoyment in the end.

Of course, to be up with the times is a good thing, pure and simple. Just as it is good to be up with the major movers and shakers of all classical music history. Not to say you need to have hundreds of cd's of them. But just know what they're about, according to your needs.

I'm preaching to the converted (if "the converted" are honest?) & so was Ned Rorem. Pity that it's so hard to get a simple message across, people take it as a threat, when it's clearly not...


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

* To be more positive though, this has been a better discussion than previous ones about these kinds of issues (eg. surrounding new or newer musics). But that's probably because I wisely left out the word "contemporary music" or even worse "atonal music" form my thread title. 

But my opening post, Ned Rorem's excerpted quote, doesn't have the word "atonal." There is some mention of Shostakovich and Sibelius, but they were not of that kind of style or whatever. So as I said, it is devoid of "atonal" yet that's what people immediately think when one mentions say modern or contemporary classical music. 

Given the diversity of music today, and that even post-1945 guys like with Lutoslawski or Ligeti or Dutilleux or Xenakis, I've never read in books described them as "atonal," it's hard to understand why people are hooked on atonality, when after 1945 it was largely taken as historical fact by composers, who took from it what they did, they moved on. & Schoenberg himself was not a dogmatist, it's only some critics like Adorno & Boulez in his younger years that where.

Anyway, it looks like things like atonality and serialism are a bit of a fetish for some people as well? ...


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## bigshot (Nov 22, 2011)

some guy said:


> By "self evidently," you mean evident to _your_ self, right?


No. Not just you and me, but the average person. Here is an example of a video of a performance of music that I think is self evidently great...










Is it the best music ever made? Maybe not. Will everyone instantly love it? Perhaps not, tastes vary. But just about anyone that you show this to- even moms- will instantly understand what it is and be impressed by its quality, regardless of whether they plan to run out and buy the record or not.

I can easily sit down and think of dozens of examples like this in just about any musical style that illustrate the greatness inherent in the genre... jazz, folk music, clasical, rock, ethnic... I can think of quite a few that were made in the past forty years too. Just not in recent classical music. That's why I ask.

My theory is that greatness in music moved out of the classical field and into popular music in the 20th century. I think that the classical music of our time is popular music. I'm actually interested to see if there is something... anything that compares in recent classical music.

Open mindedness is great. I'm all for it. But I see the application of open mindedness here as moving out of the "classical" label and into music that still connects with its culture.


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## bigshot (Nov 22, 2011)

StlukesguildOhio said:


> If this is recognized as part of the classical tradition:
> Then why shouldn't these be equally recognized as "classics" of Western music...
> ...and not hold tight some vaugue notion of "classical music" as separate from other musical forms, but rather as representing the finest music from all genre and eras?


That is exactly how I see it. Today, music that identifies itself as "contemporary classical music" seems to be considerably less qualified to hold that title than the best of popular music. With the technological push of mass media, popular culture in America flowered in the first half of the 20th century like no other time in the history of music, performance and art. What used to be reserved for drawing rooms and concert halls suddenly exploded into every street corner and living room.

Instead of clinging to outdated concepts of what classical music is the way poe faced composers of noise do with their manifestos and desperate attempts to shock, it is far more progressive to redefine what classical music is to encompass the greatest our culture has to offer.



StlukesguildOhio said:


> The thing is... I think I think a dinner party with Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart could only be enhanced by the inclusion of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Muddy Waters, Johnny Cash, and the Beatles. I can just picture Miles dropping the f-bomb at every turn in the conversation and can you imagine the improvisational jam session?


How about Miro and Ellington...


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## Guest (Jan 20, 2012)

bigshot said:


> No. Not just you and me, but the average person.


Ah, the almighty and chimerical "average person." Indeed. And why does this illusory non-person get to be the one who decides things.? I think I should get to decide for myself. And you should get to decide for yourself. Personal responsibility, you know. Not passing it off on to someone else, particularly to a whole group of "average" someones, but assuming responsibility for one's own tastes, for one's own experiences.


bigshot said:


> But just about anyone that you show this to- even moms- will instantly understand what it is and be impressed by its quality....


_Even_ moms, eh? Sexist.

Anyway, I'd like to see you try this out yourself. I doubt you'd get the results you think you'd get. But since neither of us is likely to actually do this, I guess we can each think whatever we want about it!



bigshot said:


> I can easily sit down and think of dozens of examples like this in just about any musical style that illustrate the greatness inherent in the genre... jazz, folk music, clasical, rock, ethnic... I can think of quite a few that were made in the past forty years too. Just not in recent classical music. That's why I ask.


You cannot. I can. And judging from past performances, I doubt you'd be able to see their self-evidence-ness.

Not to mention that I myself do not even think there is anything that is self-evident. Even to moms.



bigshot said:


> My theory is that greatness in music moved out of the classical field and into popular music in the 20th century. I think that the classical music of our time is popular music.


How likely is it, really, that anything I or anyone else will say will convince you otherwise?

I have a theory, too. And that is that classical music moved out of the concert halls and into abandoned factories.

It's the battle of the rival theories!!

(I do not find "greatness" to be a useful idea. See "personal responsibility," above.)


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## bigshot (Nov 22, 2011)

Can you address my points directly without dodging and resorting to ad hominem attacks, or does your position offer you no other options? Because that last post of yours really doesn't really encourage engaging you in discussion. I'm sure you're here to talk with others, and not just hear yourself speak, right? Just a friendly heads up.


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## Vaneyes (May 11, 2010)

science said:


> The recording / stars thing is an issue I really do wrestle with. I know that one recording is about as good as another, and that I should just take the $8 one and be satisfied, but I also know that if I do that, I'll probably be coming back someday to lay down the $16 for the Karajan/Kleiber/Bernstein/Gardiner/Boulez/Gould/Argerich/Rubinstein or whatever. It's not so much that I worship at their altars, but that I want to hear what other people love, to be able to participate in their conversations.
> 
> So my current practice is just to start out with the most famous recordings. I turned this direction about 3 years ago, and I think it was a good choice.


If I started here and now, I'd probably do something similar.

I think back to when I started classical music collecting seriously/heavily. CD pricing for the most part was high, and since I didn't know what the hell I was doing, I bought cheap for the most part. But, initially it wasn't as easy to buy cheap, as it is now. Geezers will remember.

Recording companies knew they had many many collectors by the short hairs, making the LP to CD change. No doubt, there was some collusion on keeping prices high for as long as possible. We'd soon have Naxos to thank for being one of the "deal breakers".

This was c1985, when I was still buying LPs and cassette tapes. I didn't jump on the CD bandwagon immediately. My first CD player may have been third generation. By that time, a considerable amount of bugs had been exterminated. I paid 'tween $300 and $400 for a Philips (Sidenote - In 1983, I paid around $1400 for a Magnavox VHS recorder).

Maybe around 1987 or 1988 prices showed some signs of weakening. I bought Naxos, but even my tin ear could tell the difference in core product between Bruno Walter and some Naxos house conductors. They were reserved for composers Spohr, Benda, and the like.

Thankfully, Columbia and EMI plied the market with their cheapo Maestro and Studio labels. Performances were very good to exceptional in most cases. I bought cheapo for value and to learn the works.

Now, with Amazon Marketplace, one can often dive right into the best, without paying too much. It's a great time to collect.


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## bigshot (Nov 22, 2011)

Boy, you can say that again!

I remember when I was first getting interested in music back in the mid 1970s how difficult it was to decode classical music enough to dive into it. The Wherehouse had its classical LPs organized by Schwann catalog number! Try to figure that out! I learned to depend on knowledgable friends for recommendations, but it was often a game of go fish, because the record I was looking for wasn't in the stacks. I'd make a monthly pilgimage to Tower in Westwood or on Sunset with a list to search out.

Today, with low prices, one click availability, and the wealth of information on the internet it's easy. Add to that the incredible advances made with digital technology for organizing and storing your collection, it's beyond what I ever dreamed of when I was in high school. It amazes me when I see kids with very limited musical frames of reference. There was a good reason for that when I was a kid, but there's no excuse for it today.


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## Guest (Jan 20, 2012)

OK, how's this then?



bigshot said:


> No. Not just you and me, but the average person.


I do not think that there is such a person. But even if there were, I would not think that "self-evident" is equivalent to "evident to the average person."

We disagree, that's all.



bigshot said:


> Here is an example of a video of a performance of music that I think is self evidently great...


I do not.



bigshot said:


> But just about anyone that you show this to- even moms- will instantly understand what it is and be impressed by its quality


Sexism: judging a person's worth or lack thereof according to their gender.



bigshot said:


> I can easily sit down and think of dozens of examples like this in just about any musical style that illustrate the greatness inherent in the genre... jazz, folk music, clasical, rock, ethnic... I can think of quite a few that were made in the past forty years too. Just not in recent classical music. That's why I ask.


I do not think that there is any such thing as "greatness inherent in the genre," so I cannot answer your question. Perhaps we should not be talking to each other at all.

I can think of lots of things in lots of genre that I find valuable to me. If those would interest you, I could share some of those with you. But I would not be illustrating greatness. I don't find that concept to be useful. Sorry, that's just how I think. I won't be able to play this game on your terms as I reject your terms.



bigshot said:


> My theory is that greatness in music moved out of the classical field and into popular music in the 20th century. I think that the classical music of our time is popular music. I'm actually interested to see if there is something... anything that compares in recent classical music.


I have found that listening to recent "classical music" affords me equal or greater pleasure to that that I experience listening to older classical music. Different pleasures but equally pleasurable. I can (and already have, elsewhere) identify things that give me pleasure.

They may not give you pleasure, though. Which is fine. They also may not seem to you to be comparable in greatness with the great musics of the past. Which is also fine. I'm not interested in proving to you that they're comparably great. I don't find the concept of greatness to be useful.



bigshot said:


> music that still connects with its culture.


All I need is for the music and myself to connect. All I need for my own personal enjoyment. But, as a human, I'm a social creature, too, and so I very naturally seek out other people with similar tastes. Since I have found thousands of those types, I suppose one could call us "a culture" or at the very least a "sub-culture," in which case, the music we listen to does indeed connect with its culture. Yes.

(For my personal listening to Bach, I also do not need any notions of greatness or any sense that there are other Bach enthusiasts in the world. There are some, I know. I even know some of them. We hang out and drink beer and talk about our favorite Bach pieces. It's enough.)


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## Guest (Jan 20, 2012)

I wonder if Katy Perry fans squabble so much?


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## AlexD (Nov 6, 2011)

Unlike literature which addresses issues and morals of its own age, music exists outside those parameters because it refers to nothing external to itself. Time is less important. Being "with it" is less important if being with it means listening to stuff you don't like.[/QUOTE]

Unless it has a title... The Alpine Symphony, The 1812 Overture and Fanfare for the Common Man. If it's a fanfare for the common man, then how are we supposed to listen to it when compared to the other fanfares for Gods, Kings and Wagnerian heros? Is the piece suggesting that the common man is just as important as the others or on a par with everyone else.

The best music, like Shakespeare, offers many meanings that transcend time - each age will hear the music, but might hear it differently. That's why it can sound "fresh" across the generatons.

The music (and theatre) we don't hear today, are the pieces that don't appeal just now. But may well be "discovered" in another age.


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## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

Actually, Rorem's complaints are nothing but sour grapes. The idolization of performers is nothing new . Paganini,Liszt, Paderewski, legendary singers usch as Adelina Patti, the castrati , etc, all were worshipped every bit as much as the most famous conductors, pianists,violinists, opera singers etc are today.
In fact, there is no lack of new music today. Adams,Glass, Saariaho, Higdon, 
Corigliano, Rouse, Ades,Carter,Boulez, Part, Gubaidullina, and many other composers don't lack performances at all, and recordings of their music are very much available. 
In fact, what most people don't realize is that there is actually greater diversity of repertoire currently being performed today than ever before in the history of western classical music. Beethoven,Bach,Mozart, Schubert,Tchaikovsky,Verdi,Puccini, 
Rachmaninov, Brahms, etc are still very popular, but this hasn't stopped John Adams or Philip Glass from getting performaces . Old and new co-exist ,period.
At the world's opera houses you can attend performances of operas by Monteverdi.Handel,Rameau,Gluck and Mozart, as well as by Verdi,Puccini,Wagner, Rossini, Bizet, Tchaikovsky,Mussorgsky, Janacek, Britten, Gershwin, Richard Strauss, 
Berg, etc as well as recent ones by Adams,Glass, Ades, Saariaho, Henze, Tan Dun, 
and other contemporary composers; four centuries worth of operas. 
In any given season, a major orchestra will play music by Bach,Handel, Haydn,Mozart,
Schubert,Schumann, Mendelssohn, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov,Saint-Saens,Rachmaninov, Berlioz, Debussy,Ravel, Prokofiev, Shostakovich,
Sibelius, Elgar, Smetana, Janacek, Bruckner,Mahler, Nielsen, etc , and there is a welcome trend to perform lesser known works by composers such as Franz Schmidt, 
Zemlinsky, Roussel, and others. Sometimes even Schoenberg,Berg and Webern. 
Not to mention new music, which DOES get performed. I could mention many other composers,living and dead, who have been performed in our time. 
In the period of the 20s to the 50s, you would never hear an orchestra such as the New York Phil. play things like the first six Dvorak symphonies, those of Nielsen, the two by Elgar, the one by Dukas( very underrated), etc. Now you can hear these works, 
Some orchestras are pretty cautious in their programming, but others do a lot more variety. The more the merrier !


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## bigshot (Nov 22, 2011)

some guy said:


> I can think of lots of things in lots of genre that I find valuable to me. If those would interest you, I could share some of those with you. But I would not be illustrating greatness. I don't find that concept to be useful. Sorry, that's just how I think.


If you can't think outside of your own self- if you can only think in terms of what YOU personally like- your opinions and recommendations aren't going to mean very much to other people. It's fine to "like something because I like it", but I don't see much point discussing it in a message board like this. Unless of course, if you're only speaking for your own benefit.

Personally, I like to share what I know and learn from other people. It's a fair exchange that way and it's led me into many areas of music that I might not have ever been aware of otherwise. A lot of my friends are musicians, and I enjoy hearing their opinions of *why* they think certain music is great. I'm not required to agree, but I do make an effort to understand where they are coming from with their praise and criticism.

When opinions are backed up with reasons and examples that illustrate those reasons, I can even learn from people that I don't agree with. But that takes an accepting attitude to disagreement, not a "win the argument at all costs" sort of approach.

There are lots of areas of music that I've attempted to appreciate and failed to find anything that engaged me. That is true of modern classical music like Glass and Cage and Ligetti. I have CDs and records in my collection from this genre, but they obviously aren't the right ones. I'm always open to being wrong about something. Finding out about great music I hadn't considered before is a great reward for being wrong.

For many years, I thought that country music was a dry well creatively- full of cliches and formulas. A friend of mine who was knowledgable on the subject played about five songs and told me the stories of the artists and what I should be listening for. It was just enough to open the door a crack so I could dive in and discover great new stuff. I had a similar experience with the Blues. I'm always looking for that particular person who can distill a genre into examples I can grasp and articulate the "why" of it. It doesn't appear that you are that sort of person.


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## Guest (Jan 21, 2012)

bigshot said:


> If you can't think outside of your own self- if you can only think in terms of what YOU personally like- your opinions and recommendations aren't going to mean very much to other people.


OK.



bigshot said:


> I'm always looking for that particular person who can distill a genre into examples I can grasp and articulate the "why" of it. It doesn't appear that you are that sort of person.


Perhaps not. I can certainly talk about music and why I like what I like. I can explain the "why" of it, with examples. (Your grasping them or not is rather outside my control.)

Maybe I'll start a new thread.


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