# Is All Classical Pretty?



## Captainnumber36 (Jan 19, 2017)

Due to the nature of the sound of the instruments being played, I think there is always a pretty nature to this medium, even at it's most atonal.

The instruments themselves just sound pretty when played well!


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Izzat so?


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## Captainnumber36 (Jan 19, 2017)

KenOC said:


> Izzat so?


Underneath all the tension and aggression lays a beauty that is produced by the instruments themselves. Just take any individual note from any work, and it sounds pretty when played well.


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

duplicate........


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## janxharris (May 24, 2010)

Beethoven's Great Fugue never fails to astonish and pack a punch; whether it's pretty or not is perhaps academic - but it seems to portray the myriad threads of human existential angst in a beautiful way.

The greatest mystery is how anyone could have written this in 1826. Stravinsky was right - it will be contemporary forever.


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

Captainnumber36 said:


>


I can't believe I'm saying this, but the_ Große Fuge_ after its initial gruffness sounds like Beethoven in a great state of exuberance, exaltation, and overwhelming joy. At least, that's the way it struck me tonight but I haven't had a glass of wine so I could be wrong.  It must have p*ssed him off that people didn't like or understand it at the time. Perhaps that's the price one pays for being a deaf or mostly deaf composer... I like this performance and it's not what I would consider pretty... exalted and exuberant, but not pretty... If everything in music was smooth and pretty, it would be like dating a mannequin.

Here's another string quartet playing Xenakis' _Ergma_ that's not exactly what I would call pretty. I could probably get used to music like this as a perverse delight, but I don't wanna.






I'm reminded of the effects of smelling salts or a bad trip on LSD. Whatever it is, it sounds like Xenakis is rubbing our noses in it and probably having a good laugh at our expense. And pretty-no.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

There's a performance of Ergma by the Mondriaan Quartet which I think gives it the wild, untamed quality of op 133. I'm not sure that the Jack quartet have the best approach


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Captainnumber36 said:


> Due to the nature of the sound of the instruments being played, I think there is always a pretty nature to this medium, even at it's most atonal.
> 
> The instruments themselves just sound pretty when played well!


I think there's a particular problem here with some modern pianos. Maybe in the 20th century instrument makers and performers explored smoother sounding instruments and temperaments at the expense of asperities, overtones and dissonances which brings prettiness. I noticed this recently listening to some Mozart violin sonatas on modern and correct instruments -- Leonhardt and Kuijken in K 304 for example.


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## Schoenberg (Oct 15, 2018)

A large part of whether a music sounds "pretty" or not is down to interpretation.
You could play the grosse fugue in a pretty way, but you could also play it in a harsh unforgiving way.

It could be said that the instruments used in classical music are pretty by nature, however this is generally only true of instruments that require mechanical action, eg. piano, organ, harpsichord.
Even still this is debatable as it is possible to make jarring sounds on a piano, not so much an organ or a harpsichord.
However on a violin it is very easy to make a not-pretty sound on the violin.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Schoenberg said:


> You could play the grosse fugue in a pretty way.


Can you find an example of that which I can hear? The only one that comes to mind is the transcription here, which I find rather revealing in fact.


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## flamencosketches (Jan 4, 2019)

What's the origin of that goofy album artwork? :lol:

@OP, definitely not... a lot of it is, and I think you can find beauty in a lot of what people describe as "harsh and unforgiving", but that doesn't mean it all is. Some people here have already covered some good examples so I'll leave just one more.






The guitar is a beautiful instrument with lots of beautiful and sometimes hidden sonorities, and this explores/exposes none of them.


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

No. Not in any way I define "pretty."


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

Considering that a lof of composers were actively trying to avoid prettiness that's basically saying that they failed


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

flamencosketches said:


> What's the origin of that goofy album artwork? :lol:


It's a fountain in Vienna - I remember taking almost the same shot.


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## larold (Jul 20, 2017)

I wouldn't call The Rite of Spring pretty.


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## Gordontrek (Jun 22, 2012)

You could ask the same question about art in general, and the answer would definitely be an unequivocal no. Sometimes the point of art is to NOT be pretty, and sometimes even to be ugly. Music is no different.


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## Eva Yojimbo (Jan 30, 2016)

Captainnumber36 said:


> Underneath all the tension and aggression lays a beauty that is produced by the instruments themselves. Just take any individual note from any work, and it sounds pretty when played well.


This prettiness must've escaped my mother who, when I was a teenager, burst into my room yelling "what the hell are you listening to?!" during the Grosse Fugue. Only classical work that ever provoked that reaction from her!


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## Captainnumber36 (Jan 19, 2017)

Eva Yojimbo said:


> This prettiness must've escaped my mother who, when I was a teenager, burst into my room yelling "what the hell are you listening to?!" during the Grosse Fugue. Only classical work that ever provoked that reaction from her!


lol! That's funny. I agree with the above posters who say modern instruments lend way to more smooth of a sound and that it is subjective.


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

Quoting Charles Ives: Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ear lie back in an easy chair. Many sounds that we are used to do not bother us, and for that reason we are inclined to call them beautiful. Frequently—possibly almost invariably—analytical and impersonal test will show that when a new or unfamiliar work is accepted as beautiful on its first hearing, its fundamental quality is one that tends to put the mind to sleep


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## Guest (Mar 10, 2019)

Captainnumber36 said:


> Due to the nature of the sound of the instruments being played, I think there is always a pretty nature to this medium, even at it's most atonal.
> 
> *The instruments themselves just sound pretty when played well*!


Well here's a link to a piece by Xenakis called *KOTTOS* which is played pretty well (more or less pretty faithful to the notated score), but I don't think Xenakis would have intended "prettiness": 



By the way, I think this is a wonderful piece for solo 'cello.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

No, but all K-pop is pretty


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## Eva Yojimbo (Jan 30, 2016)

Phil loves classical said:


> No, but all K-pop is pretty


J-pop counters with:


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## Captainnumber36 (Jan 19, 2017)

TalkingHead said:


> Well here's a link to a piece by Xenakis called *KOTTOS* which is played pretty well (more or less pretty faithful to the notated score), but I don't think Xenakis would have intended "prettiness":
> 
> 
> 
> By the way, I think this is a wonderful piece for solo 'cello.


I just don't take this work very seriously, personally. It to me is trying too hard to be unique and I just dislike it. It's using ways of playing the instrument that are meant to sound ugly; techniques that a beginner would perhaps fall victim to.

Also, the arrangement of notes played is outrageous to my ears, it's incoherent and not sensible. I find it to be completely lacking in musicality; but it had some nice moments that I enjoyed.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Eva Yojimbo said:


> This prettiness must've escaped my mother who, when I was a teenager, burst into my room yelling "what the hell are you listening to?!" during the Grosse Fugue. Only classical work that ever provoked that reaction from her!


My mother would mainly listen to Debussy and Rachmaninov. Maybe the Grosse Fuge is a guy thing. :lol:


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## Captainnumber36 (Jan 19, 2017)

KenOC said:


> My mother would mainly listen to Debussy and Rachmaninov. Maybe the Grosse Fuge is a guy thing. :lol:


:lol: But Rachmaninov is fairly aggressive as well, don't you think?


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Captainnumber36 said:


> I just don't take this work very seriously, personally. It to me is trying too hard to be unique and I just dislike it. It's using ways of playing the instrument that are meant to sound ugly; techniques that a beginner would perhaps fall victim to.
> 
> Also, the arrangement of notes played is outrageous to my ears, it's incoherent and not sensible. I find it to be completely lacking in musicality; but it had some nice moments that I enjoyed.


Someone said a very similar thing to me yesterday about op 131.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

TalkingHead said:


> Well here's a link to a piece by Xenakis called *KOTTOS* which is played pretty well (more or less pretty faithful to the notated score), but I don't think Xenakis would have intended "prettiness":
> 
> 
> 
> By the way, I think this is a wonderful piece for solo 'cello.


Yes it's was a pleasure to revisit this piece after so long. What I felt was rather strange: that the music seemed more charming than the Grosse Fugue! Maybe because the Xenakis is more playful. It may be that I'm not a very Beethoven sort of person really.


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## Captainnumber36 (Jan 19, 2017)

Mandryka said:


> Yes it's was a pleasure to revisit this piece after so long. What I felt was rather strange: that the music seemed more charming than the Grosse Fugue! Maybe because the Xenakis is more playful. It may be that I'm not a very Beethoven sort of person really.


I can see how someone can find a certain playful charm about that work, but I still think it's outrageous!


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Captainnumber36 said:


> but I still think it's outrageous!


That sense of outrage may fade away if you become more familiar with the genre.


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## Captainnumber36 (Jan 19, 2017)

Mandryka said:


> That sense of outrage may fade away if you become more familiar with the genre.


What genre is it, exactly?


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Captainnumber36 said:


> What genre is it, exactly?


Same as the last three Bach cello suites I think.


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## Eva Yojimbo (Jan 30, 2016)

KenOC said:


> My mother would mainly listen to Debussy and Rachmaninov. Maybe the Grosse Fuge is a guy thing. :lol:


My mom was more a Motown/Michael Jackson person, so classical wasn't her thing in general. But she had plenty of objections to my various listening choices, especially when I got into jazz and extreme metal. She typically didn't mind classical, but the Grosse Fugue was an exception!


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## Xisten267 (Sep 2, 2018)

*Is All Classical Pretty?*

Obviously not.


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

Pretty is an awful word to describe most music. There are pieces that fit it but they are mostly minor in charming. Beautiful is a much much bigger word and, as we know, it is in the ear of the listener. Personally, I find all music moves me (I don't mean only in the romantic or schmaltzy way) beautiful. It doesn't matter if it is Xenakis or Bach. And I find a lot of music that seems to me to want to be beautiful or pretty but is merely pastiche or, even worse, is manipulative ... I find that music disturbingly ugly. But that is just me and we all have our different tastes.


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## Captainnumber36 (Jan 19, 2017)

I suppose all I'm really noting on is that the instruments used in Classical Music always sound pretty to me when played in a traditional manner.

Take Tom Waits voice, for instance, it is not pretty by nature (his later works) like a violin or cello, piano or harp imo. Classical instruments played in a traditional manner, attempting to sound discordant, all have an underlying beauty to them to my ears.

Tom Waits trying to sound pretty always has an underlying discordance to it imo.


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## StrangeHocusPocus (Mar 8, 2019)

What is pretty to one in not another


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## Xisten267 (Sep 2, 2018)

Allerius said:


> *Is All Classical Pretty?*
> 
> Obviously not.


Let me elaborate. When one says "pretty" in regard to music it in my perspective means "music with superficial beauty, without substance". "Pretty" is different from "beautiful", at least as I understand it, and as Enthusiast put it in post #34. In some contexts, "pretty" can even be understood as a negative trait. For example, Tchaikovsky criticizes Arensky's _Marguerite Gautier_ by calling it "pretty". His words about it:

"Its beauty is external, conventional and contains nothing which grips one. Such beauty is not absolute beauty, but just prettiness (conventional beauty), and the latter (that is prettiness) is more of a deficiency than a virtue. Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Mendelssohn, Massenet, Liszt,etc. are always pretty. Of course they, too, are masters in their own way, but their predominant trait is not the ideal towards which we should be striving, since neither Beethoven nor Bach, who is boring but still a genius, nor Glinka nor Mozart ever chased after conventional prettiness, but rather after ideal beauty, which often manifests itself in a form that sometimes, at a first, superficial glance, is not even beautiful."

Considering this, it's reasonable to consider that every genre has "pretty", shallow music. Every pop or rock song with catchy tunes, created to please the masses can be said to be "pretty", and classical also has it's examples of it, like in music by minor composers from the Baroque or the Rococo periods that was made only to please rich patrons. But the great compositions of a Bach, a Mozart, a Beethoven or, why not, a Tchaikovsky, are not "pretty", although they can be "beautiful". Beethoven's Pastoral symphony or Mozart symphony No. 39 have great beauty, but there's much more to their music than just a pretty surface - they stir intense emotions, are rich in technical details, and have great depth. They are true examples of art in music.

It should be noted though that even "beauty" is a word that perhaps does not apply to all great music. When I think in "beautiful" in music, the names Tchaikovsky and Mozart are the first the appear in my mind. For everything has to be beautiful for them - the greatest dissonances, for example in a K. 465, must be done in a way that is "friendly" to the ears, opposed to a harsh, raw dissonance in a Beethoven's _Grosse Fuge_ for example. In this way, when a Brahms praises Mozart for his "true" dissonances, I think that he means dissonance with beauty, that is so subtle in the music that it may not be perceived by some listeners. In opposition, other great composers may sometimes sacrifice "beauty" for "expression", for example in modern music such as Stravinsky's _The Rite of Spring_, or in Wagner's operas (I remember reading somewhere a person suggesting that the parts singed by Mime in _Siegfried_, for example, are deliberately annoying and that it fits to the musical painting of his character as we see and listen to in the drama). I believe that this effect exists in earlier music also. For example, in Bach's aria _Ächzen und erbärmlich Weinen_ (groaning and pitiful weeping) from his cantata BWV 13. My impression is that the singer seems to be really groaning and weeping, to great expressive effect, instead of just singing a beautiful melody to please the listener - the first time I listened to this aria it seemed so unpleasant to my ears that my impression was that it was rather boring. Listening more times and trying to understand it's context made me now believe that it's actually a stroke of genius.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Allerius said:


> It should be noted though that even "beauty" is a word that perhaps does not apply to all great music. When I think in "beautiful" in music, the names Tchaikovsky and Mozart are the first the appear in my mind. For everything has to be beautiful for them - the greatest dissonances, for example in a K. 465, must be done in a way that is "friendly" to the ears, opposed to a harsh, raw dissonance in a Beethoven's _Grosse Fuge_ for example. In this way, when a Brahms praises Mozart for his "true" dissonances, I think that he means dissonance with beauty, that is so subtle in the music that it may not be perceived by some listeners. In opposition, other great composers may sometimes sacrifice "beauty" for "expression",


I think it's cliche how much people discuss how Grosse Fuge is deeper on the philosophical level compared to music before it, saying that it challenged the conventional notion of music, "music must be easy on the ear", as if all music before it was only meant to please the listener on the skin-deep level.
On the contrary, if I were to make an analogy comparing Grosse Fuge with other 'complex-sounding' works that came before it, it is like an athlete who relies on 'brute force' rather than 'meticulous technique' and 'gradual control'. It is a great work no doubt, but in all honesty, I think there's certain hype with this work you don't see often in similarly complex works of other greats. Sure, Stravinsky admired it. But that doesn't mean 20th century composers didn't see merit in the other greats: 



Again I keep saying this, by the logic 'if harshier the dissonance, the better it is', Shostakovich string quartets would be greater than Beethoven's. And Mozart's use of dissonance wasn't the only one Brahms compared with Beethoven's, remember he said 'especially compared to Sebastian Bach.' 
I find it funny even this thread has almost turned into an appreciation thread for Grosse Fuge. Sometimes I wonder why isn't there a separate thread dedicated for that.


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## Xisten267 (Sep 2, 2018)

hammeredklavier said:


> I think it's cliche how much people discuss how Grosse Fuge is deeper on the philosophical level compared to music before it, saying that it challenged the conventional notion of music, "music must be easy on the ear", as if all music before it was only meant to please the listener on the skin-deep level.
> On the contrary, if I were to make an analogy comparing Grosse Fuge with other 'complex-sounding' works that came before it, it is like an athlete who relies on 'brute force' rather than 'meticulous technique' and 'gradual control'. It is a great work no doubt, but in all honesty, I think there's certain hype with this work you don't see often in similarly complex works of other greats. Sure, Stravinsky admired it. But that doesn't mean 20th century composers didn't see merit in the other greats:
> 
> 
> ...


Oh, you got me. Now I'll have to tell you the truth: I'm part of a secret sect whose main goal is to dominate the world and enslave all poor mozarteans we find in the way, forcing them to listen to the _Grosse Fuge_ twelve hours a day in honor of our illuminated god, van Beethoven the Mighty! A pity that now you know... :devil:

Seriously, where in my text did I say that the _Grosse Fuge_ is "deeper on the philosophical level compared to music before it"? Didn't you read my favourable remark about Mozart in the middle of my text (that you omitted in your quote)? And what makes you believe that "beautiful" is "bad" in the context of what I wrote?



Allerius said:


> But the great compositions of a Bach, a Mozart, a Beethoven or, why not, a Tchaikovsky, are not "pretty", although they can be "beautiful". *Beethoven's Pastoral symphony or Mozart symphony No. 39 have great beauty, but there's much more to their music than just a pretty surface - they stir intense emotions, are rich in technical details, and have great depth. They are true examples of art in music*.


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

larold said:


> I wouldn't call The Rite of Spring pretty.


Pretty incredible!


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