# Modern Atonal Music



## Saul_Dzorelashvili

Is popular today because of Academic promotions. 

Like one musician who has lots of degrees round his belt looks at the sky with amazement, so everyone else follows through and also begins to watch with amazement thinking that the famous music academic really knows what he is doing.

Take off that Academic and the entire fantasy just disappears and everyone realizes that , in reality there was nothing there to begin with.

Basically its a great bluff , a wizard's trick in the dark, a false prophet, a dreamer of stars, but not an accurate and objective description.

Since the Time of Mendelssohn, Chopin, Mozart and Bach has passed, there were no such Great geniuses in the world at large, therefore they have began telling dreams of sound that lack any sort of charm or bust, and the 'Intellectuals' and those who hold the papers are proud to promote their music to the audience least they would catch the great bluff.

So today all around the pass, there's a great fuss but in truth its nothing but dust.

Inability to compose as the greats of the past, shouldn’t be interpreted to mean that today's lack of talent is a must, to create a whole new expression' that lacks, any real depth, meaning or harmonious pomp.

In my section of music where I post my works , a number of friends have suggested to embrace the modern crust. I rejected it very soundly and respectfully, cause I view music as worthy of true value and price. 

What's the price you might ask?

Well, to sit and compose something real and aloof, against the stream of modern 'Balloons' least a needle will hit them all and cause them to explode, saying 'don't write music of the old, for they are gone and belong with us no more'...

Steadfast I hold the arts of the past , though I can't be great as them that much I know.

Cheers,

Saul


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## Air

Let me just point out that your whole argument is based on the risky assumption that no one in the world actually _likes_ "modern atonal music". So if there's but one person in the world who happens to come to your thread and claim to genuinely enjoy "modern atonal music", not for academic reasons but simply because it provides pleasure for them, then your argument will be disproved.

Let me be that one person and I'm sure more will follow.


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## Saul_Dzorelashvili

Air said:


> Let me just point out that your whole argument is based on the risky assumption that no one in the world actually _likes_ "modern atonal music" in and of itself. So if there's one person in the world who happens to come to your thread and claims to genuinely enjoy "modern atonal music", not for academic reasons but simply because it provides pleasure for them, then your argument will be disproved.
> 
> Let me be that one person and I'm sure more will follow.


Oh no, I do acknowledge the power of 'Flowing with the wind'...

My whole argument is if the wind is good to begin with…But I guess there are not so honest meteorologists who fool the masses.


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## tdc

I liked atonal music the first time I randomly came across it on youtube. It fascinated me, I had no idea what it was, but I liked it. It was Schoenberg.


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## Polednice

Despite my musically conservative ramblings on other threads, I think you do atonal music a great disservice. I would be inclined to agree that a lot of professional music critics can be blind followers of pseudo-artistic crap, but the wider audience is not so dumb, not so easily pleased, and not quickly fooled.


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## Weston

You must not be familiar with basic statistics. Since the global population is many, many times as large as in Mendelssohn, Chopin, Mozart and Bach's time, and since a large part of that population is far more affluent than most people in their times, the chances of genius in the arts is exponentially greater today.

You may think of Penderecki, for instance, as atonal, non-musical noise if you listen to his early compositions, but more recently he has switched to far more tonal pieces. They are still perhaps not entirely pretty or soothing, but that is not their purpose. Their complexity thrills me. I believe Penderecki has gone right back to Beethoven's Grosse Fuge for inspiration in his chamber music:





Why would extreme virtuosos like Rostropovich waste time embracing this music if it was a bluff?





And why would interesting composers like Penderecki waste so much of their lives with atonal if that too was a bluff?


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## Saul_Dzorelashvili

I cant stand listening to these examples.

"and since a large part of that population is far more affluent than most people in their times, the chances of genius in the arts is exponentially greater today"...

Facts speak for themselves, no Mendelssohns and Mozarts and Bachs today.


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## Air

But it's also true, Weston, that as soon as Penderecki began writing in the neo-romantic style, many intellectual musical circles began to dismiss him, even criticize him. And I don't agree with that either. I, for one, really enjoy the _Third Symphony_ even more so than many of his earlier works.


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## Saul_Dzorelashvili

Polednice said:


> Despite my musically conservative ramblings on other threads, I think you do atonal music a great disservice. I would be inclined to agree that a lot of professional music critics can be blind followers of pseudo-artistic crap, but the wider audience is not so dumb, not so easily pleased, and not quickly fooled.


Flip the coin, I believe the entire atonal establishment fueled by the Academia did a disservice not only to Classical music, but to music itself.


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## tdc

Penderecki is a giant of a composer, he is comparable to many of the greats of all time imo. I've never heard a piece of his I didn't think was good whether it be the avante garde tone cluster stuff or the more neo-romantic or whatever people are calling his newer stuff its ALL good.


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## Guest

For those of you who enjoy seeing history repeat itself:

The Saul of 1787 - "What a gulf between a Mozart and a Boccherini! The former leads us over rugged rocks on to a waste sparsely strewn with flowers."

The Saul of 1811 - "[Beethoven's two illustrious predecessors [Haydn and Mozart] had long since occupied all the main avenues, and had left him only a few steep and rocky paths, in which good taste and the purity of tradition can easily come to grief."

The Saul of 1875 - "There is a great wealth of ideas and melody in [Symphonie Fantastique], but they are like the good seed cast upon rocky ground."

In every age, there have been Sauls to say that everything valuable has already been done and the new things (Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner, Debussy, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Varese, Cage, Lachenmann) don't stand a chance against the giants of the past.

And in every age, there have been giants to give the Sauls the lie.

Heigh ho.


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## StlukesguildOhio

Despite my musically conservative ramblings on other threads, I think you do atonal music a great disservice.

And I would concur. I would also add that I think your entire rant completely misses the mark in that atonality has not dominated classical music for quite some time now. Many composers such as Alan Hovhaness, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Krzysztof Penderecki, George Rochberg, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Pēteris Vasks, etc... stradle the line... moving freely from atonality back to tonality. Others such as the "Spectralists" (Gerard Grisey, Tristan Murail, Giacinto Scelsi, Kaija Saariaho, and Julian Anderson are uncompromisingly "tonal"... but not in the manner you would recognize from traditional tonal music. The same might be said of the Minimalists and so-called "Holy Minimalists": Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams, Arvo Part, Henryck Gorecki, etc... Still any number of other leading contemporary composers are in no way "atonal": Peter Lieberson, David Lang, Osvaldo Golijov, Morten Lauridesen, etc...

Since the Time of Mendelssohn, Chopin, Mozart and Bach has passed, there were no such Great geniuses in the world at large...

Nonsense. What you mean, is that since Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart no composers have impressed YOU as being "geniuses" but many others would disagree. I would suggest Wagner is the most obvious example... but then there's Mahler, Richard Strauss, Brahms, Stravinsky, Bartok, Puccini, Verdi, Rachmaninoff... and quite possibly any number of others outside the realm of "classical music" including Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, etc...


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## Weston

Saul_Dzorelashvili said:


> I cant stand listening to these examples.


And yet, they are tonal examples, albeit with lots of so called dissonance, but even Mozart and Bach used dissonance, just in a different context. So it's not really atonality you are trying to discredit, it's merely the new.

If it is any consolation, I too tend to dislike atonality -- or rather that may not be the first thing I reach for on a day to day basis. I do have an open mind about it however and I'm slowly making the transition. Recently I've become much more interested in newer forms of music.

My only insistence is that a piece have either tonal accessibility, or rhythmic accessibility, or both. If it is simultaneously neither tonal nor rhythmic there is too little to anchor it to a musical language I care to interpret. One must draw the line somewhere.


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## Saul_Dzorelashvili

Weston said:


> And yet, they are tonal examples, albeit with lots of so called dissonance, but even Mozart and Bach used dissonance, just in a different context. So it's not really atonality you are trying to discredit, it's merely the new.
> 
> If it is any consolation, I too tend to dislike atonality -- or rather that may not be the first thing I reach for on a day to day basis. I do have an open mind about it however and I'm slowly making the transition. Recently I've become much more interested in newer forms of music.
> 
> My only insistence is that a piece have either tonal accessibility, or rhythmic accessibility, or both. If it is simultaneously neither tonal nor rhythmic there is too little to anchor it to a musical language I care to interpret. One must draw the line somewhere.


I can listen to this...


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## Guest

Weston said:


> My only insistence is that a piece have either tonal accessibility, or rhythmic accessibility, or both. If it is simultaneously neither tonal nor rhythmic there is too little to anchor it to a musical language I care to interpret. One must draw the line somewhere.


Must one??


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## emiellucifuge

The only thing necessary to refudiate this argument:

I dont have a degree. I love atonal music.


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## Aksel

I also do not have any degree, nor any music education, save some years of piano and trombone lectures.
I like atonal music.


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## Argus

Great thread.

First thing, Saul, you need to learn the difference between facts and opinions. That'd help you a lot.

Next, 'atonal' music is not popular. Look at the album/record charts, the only objective measure of popularity among the public. Andre Rieu and the like dominate them, and even your long dead musical heroes outsell contemporary 'non-tonal' composers.

Now the obvious. If you don't like a certain type of music, simply don't listen to it. It's not like atonal music is a towering commercial behemoth invading public spaces and the public consciousness. The only outlet you are likely to hear it would be in certain films to create atmosphere.

Now for my _opinion_ of the music. Like most musics, some of it I like, some of it I don't. Some Partch, Feldman, Cage, Scelsi, Ligeti, Penderecki, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Ruggles, plus some more I can't think of off the top of my head, I like. I don't like serialism much so Boulez, Berio, Nono, Babbitt etc don't appeal to me. Then there's stuff that is 'atonal' but isn't related to the classical tradition that I can enjoy like _some_free jazz/free improvisation/drone/noise. I prefer minimalism and harmonically structured improvisation, however.

From what I've read in your posts so far Saul, you seem to have a very chained, rooted view of life and specifically art. Your told to believe something so you do. You see guys like Mozart, Chopin etc praised and raised in status to an unattainable level and you willingly absorb this to be the correct position to hold. That's fine as long as you realise that is your _opinion_ and has no relation to any objective truth.

Try to ask yourself why you like or dislike a piece of music. If there is no answer then that is the true reflection of your taste.


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## Weston

some guy said:


> Must one??


For me the envelope should be pushed, not pulverized. If someone wants to make sounds without an identifiable rhythm or tonal structure, I say go for it. It doesn't harm me, but I will no more make the effort to appreciate it as music than I will to read poetry in Klingon. (Such things do exist.) I can enjoy a bit of ambient sound design, but this has the same function as wallpaper for me.


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## mmsbls

Polednice said:


> Despite my musically conservative ramblings on other threads, I think you do atonal music a great disservice. I would be inclined to agree that a lot of professional music critics can be blind followers of pseudo-artistic crap, but the wider audience is not so dumb, not so easily pleased, and not quickly fooled.


The most general assessment of the wider audience (i.e. classical music listeners) would be that they do not like atonal music. In a different thread I posted statistics from one classical music radio station and the San Francisco Symphony showing that play relatively little 20th century music (and much less atonal). Assuming orchestras and radio stations want to make money and know what they are doing, this would indicate that their audience does not want to hear atonal music.



Weston said:


> You must not be familiar with basic statistics. Since the global population is many, many times as large as in Mendelssohn, Chopin, Mozart and Bach's time, and since a large part of that population is far more affluent than most people in their times, the chances of genius in the arts is exponentially greater today.


This is true, but the questions is whether those geniuses are writing classical music today. Times are very different now. Perhaps they compose jazz or pop. Maybe they went into vastly different fields. I would guess that some do write classical music, but it's hard to know.



some guy said:


> For those of you who enjoy seeing history repeat itself:
> And in every age, there have been giants to give the Sauls the lie.


Based on Weston's quote we would assume this to be true, but something very interesting has happened to classical music in the past 100 years or so. In the past as some guy points out, composers have written music that may not have been immediately accessible to the listening audience. For composers writing more than 100 years ago, their compositions have been accepted by the listening audience relatively quickly (a few decades or less). Atonal (or nontonal) music has been around for 100 years. It has still not been "accepted" (enjoyed?) by the wider audience (the majority of listeners). Why is this? This year the San Francisco Symphony played roughly 25% of pieces written in the last 100 years. Imagine a symphony in 1900 playing only 25% works from 1800 - 1900.

I do not mean to suggest that atonal music is bad or even not as good as tonal music. I personally do not like it very much, but that is my opinion. I simply believe that modern listeners have a VERY different relationship to modern music than ever before.


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## Vaneyes

I use atonal as a vacation from the norm. I like it's unpredictable nature, disregarding minimalism of course. As far as drawing a line, for me, Janacek is the father of atonal.


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## Saul_Dzorelashvili

There's no point for me to argue this, this is my personal opinion, and I do respect everyone else's input on this matter.

Best Wishes to All.

Saul


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## TresPicos

I don't have a degree. I love atonal music. 

Its unpredictable nature makes it exciting and refreshing. Some of it I like because of its tranquilizing randomness, some for its ferocious and soothing ugliness, some for its unconventional beauty, some just for bringing me down paths I've never visited before. 

For me, it was an acquired taste. Bashing it for not being immediately accessible for one's ears is as intelligent as saying "whisky is so stupid - it doesn't taste sweet at all!"


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## tdc

mmsbls said:


> I do not mean to suggest that atonal music is bad or even not as good as tonal music. I personally do not like it very much, but that is my opinion. I simply believe that modern listeners have a VERY different relationship to modern music than ever before.


Some of your points are true, but you seem to be selectively referring to data that will substantiate ideas that atonal music isn't very good, and not generally appreciated and then suggesting that you're not suggesting it isn't good. Well, lets face it, you kind of are suggesting that but are free to your opinion.

The truth is we live in very different times than in the past therefore its hard to compare them apples for apples and say 'look it isnt catching on as quickly'. Well for one thing there are many more different kinds of music besides just classical out right now, this is unprecendented in history and lets face it much of what sells the most is simply based on image and the idea that sex sells. Corporations exploit young impressionable minds in such ways and the record sales speak for themselves. Since the invention of the television and its introduction into virtually every home in the western world I bet the amount of good books and poetry the younger generation is reading has also rapidly declined. This however, is not a sign that the available art/literature itself has actually dropped in quality.

I don't know this for sure but I've read the reasons virtually every department store and supermarket play top 40 music is because people tend to make more impulse decisions when listening to this kind of music - therefore buy more. This would probably explain why this is the music of choice for most corporate mainstream radio stations too - it sells more product.

So while some of the data you refer to is correct, the fact is we don't each live in a vacuum where we each independently choose what we like in all situations. Unfortunately decisions made on corporate and governmental levels have a huge effect on society and when these decisions are based largely on how to make the most possible profit above everything else its no suprise that the arts and culture has suffered as a result.


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## Guest

Edit: tdc's response came out before I finished this. So a lot of this just covers the same ground.

Oh well. (So long as tdc doesn't mind!)



mmsbls said:


> Atonal (or nontonal) music has been around for 100 years. It has still not been "accepted" (enjoyed?) by the wider audience (the majority of listeners). Why is this? This year the San Francisco Symphony played roughly 25% of pieces written in the last 100 years. Imagine a symphony in 1900 playing only 25% works from 1800 - 1900.


Actually, the anti-modern sentiment peaked around 1870, when the ratio got to about 90% dead to 10% live. (This is not exactly parallel to your "in the last 100 years," it's true.) That's well before Schoenberg.

"Atonal" is a questionable word to use if we're trying for the precision of numbers. It can mean anything from "what I don't like," which is how Saul uses it, to "dissonant," to "does not use 'common practice' patterns."

As for why people don't like what they don't like, well, in this regard, it probably has a lot to do with two trends in the twentieth century, the between the wars conservatism (which started out, in the twenties, being the post WWI radicalism--most of that stuff has dropped out of everyone's consciousness. Too bad. At least Schwitter's _Ursonate_ is pretty well known. I saw this performed in Norway a couple of years ago. It was very much appreciated), and the post-WWII recording technology, which allowed (encouraged) people to treat music even more efficiently as "a drowsy reverie relieved by nervous thrills." (The quote, from Santyana, is from 1903.)

"The audience" is questionable, too, of course, even when qualified by "wider" or "majority of listeners." There's a lot more popular music available now than there ever was before, and it has split off from art music in a more dramatic way than in Mozart's time, say. And the recording industry, again, encourages that split. So the "wider" classical audience is already pretty significantly narrow.

A better gauge than numbers, I think, is passionate involvement. And that's always been pretty small for any given piece. And I think that there are plenty of people nowadays who are passionately involved with new musics (even older new musics). The amount of new recordings coming out every day of new music suggests that even record company executives think there are enough people for them to put out dozens of new Schoenberg and Boulez cds every year, not to mention all the Ferrari and Ferneyhough, and all the reissues of Cage and Kagel and Sonic Arts Union.

But all that to the side, I think it's enough to say that the "wider" audience still doesn't accept "atonal" because no one is encouraging them to. No one is playing Boulez over and over again until people get it, as had to be done for Beethoven in the 19th century. We forget about that whenever this topic comes up, don't we? It was a real struggle, too. And you can read contemporary accounts of the difficulties that Beethoven aficionadoes had to go through to get that crazy music performed.

Marketing forces have created niches, and most people don't see very far outside of their particular niche.


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## mmsbls

tdc said:


> Some of your points are true, but you seem to be selectively referring to data that will substantiate ideas that atonal music isn't very good, and not generally appreciated and then suggesting that you're not suggesting it isn't good. Well, lets face it, you kind of are suggesting that but are free to your opinion.
> 
> The truth is we live in very different times than in the past therefore its hard to compare them apples for apples and say 'look it isnt catching on as quickly'.


I was not suggesting that atonal music isn't good. I was making an empirical statement that the available evidence seems to show that classical listeners in general do not enjoy it. I searched for evidence pertaining to the popularity of modern music not whether it is good or not (whatever that kind of evidence could possibly be). I did not find any evidence suggesting that significant percentages of listeners enjoy atonal music; therefore, I did not selectively refer to data. If you know of such evidence, I would be very interested. Perhaps data on all classical music downloads (youtube or pay sites) might show more interest in atonal or modern music.

If one believes that popularity of music determines whether it is good or not, then one could use my data to infer that atonal music is not good. I do not believe that.

We do live in different times. Apparently we agree on that. That was the main point of my post. It would be interesting to see how listeners would feel about modern or atonal music if it were a much greater part of the average person's musical experience (as it was in the past).


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## mmsbls

some guy said:


> A better gauge than numbers, I think, is passionate involvement. And that's always been pretty small for any given piece. And I think that there are plenty of people nowadays who are passionately involved with new musics (even older new musics). The amount of new recordings coming out every day of new music suggests that even record company executives think there are enough people for them to put out dozens of new Schoenberg and Boulez cds every year, not to mention all the Ferrari and Ferneyhough, and all the reissues of Cage and Kagel and Sonic Arts Union.


I understand how to gauge numbers, but I haven't the slightest idea how to accurately measure "passionate involvement". I would not believe anyone who said they could; therefore, I think "passionate involvement" is not very useful.



some guy said:


> But all that to the side, I think it's enough to say that the "wider" audience still doesn't accept "atonal" because no one is encouraging them to. No one is playing Boulez over and over again until people get it, as had to be done for Beethoven in the 19th century. We forget about that whenever this topic comes up, don't we? It was a real struggle, too. And you can read contemporary accounts of the difficulties that Beethoven aficionadoes had to go through to get that crazy music performed.


I agree that modern or atonal music is not played often. That was a major point to my post. As I said, "I simply believe that modern listeners have a VERY different relationship to modern music than ever before." The question is "Are people not playing atonal music much because listeners don't like it in general or do listeners not like atonal music in general because it is not played much?" I do not think that is an easy question to answer.

Marketing forces have created niches, and most people don't see very far outside of their particular niche.[/QUOTE]


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## HarpsichordConcerto

some guy said:


> Marketing forces have created niches, and most people don't see very far outside of their particular niche.


Not always. I say modern composers can create their own niches, especially with music like this, as the clip below shows. (But Baroque or Romantic for example, are no niches).

*Sofia Gubaidulina *(born 1931). This piece has been posted before but suits this thread.


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## Art Rock

I love the Gubaidulina SQ's!


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## Edward Elgar

Parameter of the past = Pitch
Parameter of the present = Texture/Timbre
Parameter of the future = ???

You can't simply look for the parameters that Bach, Beethoven and Brahms were interested in. Contemporary music embraces the more obscure musical parameters and even pushes them to the foreground.

Dissonance becomes consonance with careful, responsible listening. Here's a simple test, listen to Brian Ferneyhough and then listen to Schoenberg. How does Schoenberg sound in comparison? Schoenberg is still interested in pitch, that's why his music is now much easier to listen to.


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## wingracer

Edward Elgar said:


> Dissonance becomes consonance with careful, responsible listening. Here's a simple test, listen to Brian Ferneyhough and then listen to Schoenberg. How does Schoenberg sound in comparison? Schoenberg is still interested in pitch, that's why his music is now much easier to listen to.


Excellent point that I hadn't really realized consciously. When I first heard Schoenberg, I couldn't stand it. After listening to stuff that is even more extreme, I find him almost tame in comparison and can actually find some enjoyment in his music.


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## Argus

Edward Elgar said:


> Dissonance becomes consonance with careful, responsible listening. Here's a simple test, listen to Brian Ferneyhough and then listen to Schoenberg. How does Schoenberg sound in comparison? Schoenberg is still interested in pitch, that's why his music is now much easier to listen to.


Both bore my **** off.


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## Guest

If you're a guy, no problem.

But if you're a female type person, then for the love of Mike* stop listening to Schoenberg and Ferneyhough!!

*My real name is Michael, you know.


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## Weston

?? I find Ferneyhough easier to listen to than Schoenberg. There may be some intrinsic disconnection between some people and Schoenberg. I'm not sure what it is.

I don't necessarily agree that the parameter of the past=pitch. It was pitch+rhythm+phrasing+context+tone colors+lots of other stuff. In many ways by having no restrictions whatsoever, we may have lost more than we gained. Is this part of the old adage "less is more?" I can kind of see that working.

Of course the whole discussion is probably moot. Neither tonal nor atonal is going away any time soon. It is just a choice of palettes really, isn't it?


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## Guest

Weston said:


> Neither tonal nor atonal is going away any time soon. It is just a choice of palettes really, isn't it?


I'm pretty sure it is not. Though better people than I might disagree. (I can think of at least one who would. No one who posts online, I might add.)

I think it's more about history and zeitgeist, myself. And about progress, not in any "improvement" sense of that word, but simply "going somewhere else."

The problem with tonality being a palette is that it's not neutral. It never was neutral. It never was a "thing" but an immensely flexible and constantly flexed system that was changing from its first appearance and kept changing up to 1910 or so when was flexed about as much as it could be without turning into something else (much as happened with modal music turning into what we now call "common practice." Foolishly, I might add!).

The problem with using tonality now, long after its time has passed, is that it will inevitably sound like the past. Now, sounding like the past is what a lot of listeners want and have been wanting for hundreds of years. But a genuinely sincere and creative musician is not going to be content with sounding like the past, but will want to push things forward, for better or for worse. Movement, change, variety. Having bits and pieces of "tonal" things in a non-tonal context, just by the way, is not the same as doing everything as if Schoenberg and Cage had never existed. They did exist. And what they did has to be dealt with, unless all you want is to repeat the sounds (but not the spirit) of past musics.

And a lot of people do want just that.

Doesn't that then define the current zeitgeist, if that's what people are doing nowadays...?

I think not. In any time there will be creative energy. In any time there will be pastiche energy. Faux energies don't count in defining a zeitgeist, I would say.


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## Meaghan

some guy said:


> The problem with using tonality now, long after its time has passed, is that it will inevitably sound like the past.


I probably can't argue this very effectively, because my understanding and appreciation of atonal music is significantly less advanced than yours, but I do not think tonality became obsolete with the advent of Schoenberg. There has been innovative and original tonal music composed since the "breaking" of tonality in the early 20th century, and while I can understand the characterization of certain modern and contemporary composers (particularly neo-romantics) as "sounding like the past," I have a hard time seeing that label applied to others (like Britten) who wrote in a tonal idiom but nevertheless had an original voice and new things to say.

What I think has become antiquated, if anything, is the notion that atonality is the One True Path for contemporary composers. It seems to me that that was a commonly held belief in many musical institutions in the middle of the last century, and to cling exclusively to it today is not really progress, or especially creative. That said, I don't know what our _zeitgeist_ is. I can't think of any real musical innovations that have been made in my lifetime. But I think composers are wise who take Cage and Schoenberg among their many influences and view tonality and atonality as techniques they can employ as they see fit, depending on what they want to write. Composers writing strictly atonal music today are necessarily (and artificially) limiting themselves, and risk sounding like the past just as much as strictly tonal composers--just a more recent past.


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## Guest

Atonal is not a word I like to use. Buried somewhere in another thread in TC, I listed six different meanings for the word--those are just six that I had derived from listening to people talk. There may be more.

One of the characteristics of the twentieth century has been plurality. There were a few people in the fifties who were sure that serialism was the one true way, but that never really caught on. I think the notion that "atonality is the one true way" is probably quite a recent one, made up to retroactively fit what the fitter doesn't like.

There are many true ways, and always have been. There are many false ways, too. Or at least I think so.

Many things in music have become obsolete without anyone whinging much. (And tonality, remember, is only a few hundred years old--pretty damn impressive hundreds of years, of course, but not the only way to do things.) I think what's really different about nowadays is the militancy of nostalgia. After Haydn and Mozart's time, nostalgia began to be a thing to reckon with, but nothing like the ferocious savagery of 2011!! "I want my music to sound familiar, and I will crush anyone who does something unfamiliar!! Crush them like a little bug!!!!"


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## Elgarian

some guy said:


> The problem with using tonality now, long after its time has passed, is that it will inevitably sound like the past. Now, sounding like the past is what a lot of listeners want and have been wanting for hundreds of years. But a genuinely sincere and creative musician is not going to be content with sounding like the past, but will want to push things forward, for better or for worse. Movement, change, variety.


Will it, though, and will he? Is the sonnet similarly played out, in poetry? Or figuration in painting? Or heck, even painting _of any sort_? (Mere painting seems old hat according to some.)

I love Mozart not because he's in the past but because he's here and now, and saying "hey listen to this and oh by the way did you hear _that_ and _this_? - and just let me melt your heart fleetingly with _this other_." Superficially it has the 'datedness' of tonality, but to me it's a living presence. The envelope may be old, but the contents are bristling with freshness and life.

Of course if you produce a Mozart pastiche, you're strapping yourself to the ground, just as you would if you tried to paint like Picasso, or write in the manner of Shakespeare. But _tonality itself _ being a source of becoming rootbound? I don't see that, any more than I would for similar statements about the sonnet in poetry, or figuration in art.


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## Sid James

> I think it's more about history and zeitgeist, myself. And about progress, not in any "improvement" sense of that word, but simply "going somewhere else."...But a genuinely sincere and creative musician is not going to be content with sounding like the past, but will want to push things forward, for better or for worse. Movement, change, variety. Having bits and pieces of "tonal" things in a non-tonal context, just by the way, is not the same as doing everything as if Schoenberg and Cage had never existed. They did exist. And what they did has to be dealt with, unless all you want is to repeat the sounds (but not the spirit) of past musics.


Interesting discussion. I as a listener don't really care if a composer today likes Schoenberg or Cage or not, and I'm pretty sure composers are the same. I have a composer friend, who isn't working in the industry (it's not her day job), but she likes neither of those. However she likes a whole variety of composers from the Renaissance until now. She recommended me to listen to the music of Harry Partch. She likes Stravinsky, Messiaen and Reich. I haven't heard any of her compositions, this would be interesting.

The notion that music is about "progress" is a thing of the past - Boulez and Adorno argued this decades ago & rubbished a lot of good composers who didn't fit their ideals in the process. Boulez rubbished Shostakovich and Adorno did the same with the great Sibelius. If you start talking about "progress," inevitably - consciously or not - you start defining it in terms of what YOU like in music. I think the truth lies in music that can engage an individual or a group of people, whether it be of one style or another. Don't forget that there have been a lot of "third stream" composers who reject the outdated notions of divisions between so-called tonality and atonality. I think Messiaen probably thought like this, as did Lutoslawski & Dutilleux. Thomas Ades the British composer is of the same opinion. Like I've said in a number of these threads - and this is kind of like Andre's hobby horse - it's not EITHER/OR but BOTH. I read a quote by Morton Feldman that he made during a lecture. He started humming a tune from Sibelius' 5th symphony and said something to the effect that 'the composers who you think of as radicals are really conservatives, and the composers who you think of as conservatives are really radicals.' Now that was an interesting way of looking at things, for sure, more spot on than this outdated false dichotomy between "tonal" and "atonal"...


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## Guest

First of all, I much prefer arguing with people I admire and respect. Like you two.

Elgarian, music from the past does not lose anything for a listener. Of course not. But those patterns, those ways of doing music, are a result of those people living in those times. Times that are past. Because we have that music, we can mimic it, of course, but that's all it could be for someone _writing_ today. Writing being a very different kind of thing from listening. The person writing today using patterns of the past can hope for nothing more than pastiche. This is not 1711 or 1811 or 1911. It's not even 1971, for that matter. It's 2011. For better or worse. And a lot of things have happened since 1971, or 11, or 18whenever....

Andre, I did not and still do not want to frame the discussion as a conflict between tonal and atonal. I don't like the word atonal. It's too vague and imprecise. Tonal has changed over the couple or three centuries its been around. But it's a clear, definable thing. Atonal is nothing like that, as a word.

And far from three, there have been dozens of ways in the twentieth century.

As for "progress," maybe what you're saying is that that is as useless a term as "atonal." I can live with that. But music must change. Or, I should say, for genuine creators it really _will_ change. No must about it there. For less than genuine creators, people who are willing to pander to listeners' nostalgia, to the demand that everything stay the same, stay with what is already comfortable, for those people, encouragement is necessary. Encouragement to break away from mimicking empty patterns and doing something different.


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## StlukesguildOhio

The problem with using tonality now, long after its time has passed, is that it will inevitably sound like the past. Now, sounding like the past is what a lot of listeners want and have been wanting for hundreds of years. But a genuinely sincere and creative musician is not going to be content with sounding like the past, but will want to push things forward, for better or for worse. Movement, change, variety. Having bits and pieces of "tonal" things in a non-tonal context, just by the way, is not the same as doing everything as if Schoenberg and Cage had never existed. They did exist. And what they did has to be dealt with, unless all you want is to repeat the sounds (but not the spirit) of past musics.

SomeGuy... you know what's really ironic? You are as dated or more in your notions of art and music as any 1940's Neo-Romantic... and yet it completely evades you. You repeatedly spout the mantra of high-Modernism... not recognizing that Modernism itself is as dead of an issue as Romanticism. A composer can't compose anything of merit while acting as if Cage or Schoenberg never existed? Pure bunk. Schoenberg and Cage... by your own admission... are no longer an issue. Transplanted into my own realm of the visual arts, I could imagine you arguing that one cannot paint in a realistic manner today... as we've moved beyond "realism" (and yet Lucian Freud... perhaps the most important living artist... is a master realist) and that one cannot paint without dealing with Picasso and Rothko... and yet while Lucian Freud is undoubtedly aware of Picasso and Rothko, his work completely ignores them. What seems to have completely evaded you is the possibility that while many artists will build upon the work of their immediate predecessors some subsequent generations of artists may look upon the work of their immediate predecessors with disinterest... or even revulsion. The Baroque in painting was born of a complete rejection of the art of their immediate predecessors (the Mannerists) and a return to the "naturalism" of the Renaissance. The Neo-Classicism of J.L. David was born of a rejection of the Rococo and turned instead to the High Renaissance and classical Greece, Rome, and Egypt for models. What seems to stun you is the possibility that some of the real music of today... music of real merit... might be born of a rejection of Modernism... a rejection of all that which you so admire... not of a continual reductive endgame of Modernist concepts. You are so quick to point out the shortcomings of those who are closed to Modernism because it challenges all they believe in or value and love in music and pride yourself upon your own openness to all this "difficult" music... but you are just as closed to music that challenges your preconceived notion of the direction music "should" be heading in and quick to dismiss it as reactionary.

To me the point is moot. I'm not a composer... nor a music critic with a vested interest in the direction of contemporary music. I am merely a member of the audience... a listener. I'm not interested in limiting myself to that music which pushes the art form as a whole in shocking and unexpected directions... although I'm certainly open to such if the result engages me. Indeed, I'm only interested in that which engages me, without concerning myself as to whether it is too reactionary or not avant garde enough. Certainly there is that music which strikes me as nothing more than pastiche... music which reminds me of other music that is actually quite good... but really brings nothing new... nothing unique to that composer... to the table. But emptiness... vacuousness... is not something limited to the reactionary and unknown to the avant garde.

Again, such abstract arguments about contemporary music are ultimately tiresome and meaningless and unlikely to change anyone's opinion... yours... or mine... or Saul's. Again the only real means of engaging others with the music you love is that direction taken by Andre (and some others at times)... that of sharing thoughts on a particular composer and particular piece of music you admire... and ideally sharing links to a site where the interested might listen to excerpts of said music. It has only been through such an approach that I have found myself intrigued enough to check out a composer unknown until that time.

:tiphat:


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## StlukesguildOhio

The notion that music is about "progress" is a thing of the past.

Bingo!!! The Modernist past.


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## Sid James

> As for "progress," maybe what you're saying is that that is as useless a term as "atonal." I can live with that. But music must change. Or, I should say, for genuine creators it really will change. No must about it there. For less than genuine creators, people who are willing to pander to listeners' nostalgia, to the demand that everything stay the same, stay with what is already comfortable, for those people, encouragement is necessary. Encouragement to break away from mimicking empty patterns and doing something different.


Well I'm probably not as sophisticated or knowledgeable as you in this area (i.e. the latest classical music), but when I go to a concert & hear new works (which I've been trying to do lately, as well as listen to the older stuff) I'm not that worried if a composer is pushing the boundaries of music or not. This probably applies to my friends into classical as well. I'm more interested in whether a piece of music engages me in some way or other. I actually like the contrast between the different styles at these recitals. No two composers are the same. All composers come up with different solutions to various problems. There are countless ways of writing for any combination of instruments, be they more conservative or radical, if we want to use these imprecise labels. I just like contemporary classical music, period. When I go to a recital or concert, I don't block my ears if a piece comes up that is not 110% to my taste. I hope to be as flexible as possible in that regard, and get something out of everything I hear, even it's only a little bit.

As for "doing something different," I'd argue that there really is nothing new under the sun. Whatever is done today in classical music, or was done 100 or even 200 years ago, is just really variations on a theme. Listening to the odd harmonies and dissonances employed by guys like Monteverdi & Gesualdo five hundred years ago, one comes to realise that the same kinds of techniques were used from the late c19th and early c20th onwards. As is well known, J.S. Bach has influenced a whole variety of composers across the ages - from Beethoven to Brahms, Tippett, Villa-Lobos, Hindemith, Piazzolla to name a few.

Influence is one thing, pastiche is another. I don't mind if one composer is heavily influenced by what went on before, as long as they are responding to the influence creatively. It doesn't necessarily have to be highly innovative but just engaging for me as a listener. Anyway, what is defined as innovative changes over time. Brahms was seen by some like that ideologue Hanslick as a bulwark of conservatism against the likes of Liszt, Wagner & Bruckner. But somewhat later Schoenberg described Brahms as being just as radical as those three. I agree with you that pure pastiche is not particularly appealing to me either. I can think of some fairly prominent composers who I think of as being masters of pastiche rather than developing their own unique styles. I won't name names, that would be just too divisive and inflamatory. But let's face it, some people enjoy pastiche, even swear by it as being life changing or some such for them, so there is obviously a place in today's market for pastiche, as there is a place for more wholistic, integrated and unique voices. One man's trash is another man's treasure.

Basically what enjoying music boils down to is the *quality* of the music, not necessarily the style. I like Barber's violin concerto as well as Carter's, Henze's and Dutilleux's. Bernstein's Serenade for violin & orchestra as well. Gubaidulina's or Rautavaara's didn't grab me much, and yet their "new age" style harks back a bit to the Romantic leanings of the Barber and the dramatic quality of the Bernstein. Then Sculthorpe's _Irkanda IV for violin & orchestra_ is also a mixture of the Romantic & modern, but I love it. I also like Glass' concerto, which is totally different than all of those above. But as you see, even talking about one genre, it is difficult to compare these things in a useful way. The less I intellectualise these things and just enjoy things that I do, the more I am able to engage with the music. Last weekend, I played the Gubaidulina concerto to a friend. His reaction was really positive, a huge contrast to my mixed feelings about the work. I really like this plurality of opinion on these kinds of things. Everyone has a different "take" on the same work. Without this variety, I think the world would be a very boring place indeed...


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## Elgarian

some guy said:


> Elgarian, music from the past does not lose anything for a listener. Of course not. But those patterns, those ways of doing music, are a result of those people living in those times. Times that are past. Because we have that music, we can mimic it, of course, but that's all it could be for someone _writing_ today. Writing being a very different kind of thing from listening. The person writing today using patterns of the past can hope for nothing more than pastiche.


We're not getting to the root of this. I agree completely about the pastiche aspect, and covered it in my earlier post. What I'm questioning is whether the mere adoption of tonality automatically implies 'pastiche' (which is what you seem to be saying).

Let me go back again to a comparison with other art forms. 
1. If I write a sonnet, is it pastiche just because it has 14 lines and follows a Shakespearean rhyme scheme? It may be pastiche for other reasons - but the essential question is whether it's inevitably pastiche because of its use of a traditional form? 
2. Now we know about abstract art, does that mean that all new figurative painting is pastiche? Has painting itself been superseded merely because video art, or installation art, have become new ways of expression?

If we think the answer to these questions is 'yes', then I think we're in trouble. We'd be in the position of the abstract painter, who, having perceived for himself the notion that the proper subject of a painting is paint (and being rightly inspired by that perception to produce his own abstract work), insists that from here on all painting, by everybody, must be abstract, else it is pastiche. In so doing he brings down the shutters, and is set on limiting the progress of the art he so earnestly wishes to develop.

If I'm a poet, burning with something to say, and if that something is best expressed as a sonnet, then a sonnet it must be. The moment I choose some other structure _merely to avoid using the sonnet form_, it's all over with me. Similarly, if I'm a composer burning with something to say that is urging me to express it as a symphony in C, then that's what it has to be.

Whether there are such composers I wouldn't know. But I'm concerned about this proposed general principle for composers of the future: 'if tonal then outdated'. I don't (_can't_, actually) believe it.


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## Argus

some guy said:


> Many things in music have become obsolete without anyone whinging much. (And tonality, remember, is only a few hundred years old--pretty damn impressive hundreds of years, of course, but not the only way to do things.)


If you by tonality you strictly mean the diatonic system of the heptatonic major and three minor scales, and the applied harmonic functions from these, then you are correct. However, if by tonality you mean any music were a single tone is the foundation of the system, then it's closer to three millennia than three centuries. From Pythagoras we know the Greeks based their modal monophonic system on mathematic relationships to a centre tone or tonic. I'm pretty sure China was already using a similar modal arrangement for at least a few centuries before this.

I agree with you on the misuse of the word 'atonal'. The only true atonal music would be various degrees of sounds with high levels of noise (unpitched sounds). So tribal drumming is technically more atonal than Schoenberg, but the word has got applied to a certain style and has stuck.

As has been pointed out, there is more to music than simply pitch. You can have modern music that uses a historic pitch system as long as one of the other parameters is innovative, or even a new way of presenting old things; por ejemplo, if you were to cut up/sample a Beethoven symphony and transform it into something beyond recognition in its original form.

The traditional Eurocentric mindset seems to get fixated on vertical/pitch matters, at the expense of all else though.


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## wingracer

StlukesguildOhio said:


> The problem with using tonality now, long after its time has passed, is that it will inevitably sound like the past. Now, sounding like the past is what a lot of listeners want and have been wanting for hundreds of years. But a genuinely sincere and creative musician is not going to be content with sounding like the past, but will want to push things forward, for better or for worse. Movement, change, variety. Having bits and pieces of "tonal" things in a non-tonal context, just by the way, is not the same as doing everything as if Schoenberg and Cage had never existed. They did exist. And what they did has to be dealt with, unless all you want is to repeat the sounds (but not the spirit) of past musics.
> 
> SomeGuy... you know what's really ironic? You are as dated or more in your notions of art and music as any 1940's Neo-Romantic... and yet it completely evades you. You repeatedly spout the mantra of high-Modernism... not recognizing that Modernism itself is as dead of an issue as Romanticism. A composer can't compose anything of merit while acting as if Cage or Schoenberg never existed? Pure bunk. Schoenberg and Cage... by your own admission... are no longer an issue. Transplanted into my own realm of the visual arts, I could imagine you arguing that one cannot paint in a realistic manner today... as we've moved beyond "realism" (and yet Lucian Freud... perhaps the most important living artist... is a master realist) and that one cannot paint without dealing with Picasso and Rothko... and yet while Lucian Freud is undoubtedly aware of Picasso and Rothko, his work completely ignores them. What seems to have completely evaded you is the possibility that while many artists will build upon the work of their immediate predecessors some subsequent generations of artists may look upon the work of their immediate predecessors with disinterest... or even revulsion. The Baroque in painting was born of a complete rejection of the art of their immediate predecessors (the Mannerists) and a return to the "naturalism" of the Renaissance. The Neo-Classicism of J.L. David was born of a rejection of the Rococo and turned instead to the High Renaissance and classical Greece, Rome, and Egypt for models. What seems to stun you is the possibility that some of the real music of today... music of real merit... might be born of a rejection of Modernism... a rejection of all that which you so admire... not of a continual reductive endgame of Modernist concepts. You are so quick to point out the shortcomings of those who are closed to Modernism because it challenges all they believe in or value and love in music and pride yourself upon your own openness to all this "difficult" music... but you are just as closed to music that challenges your preconceived notion of the direction music "should" be heading in and quick to dismiss it as reactionary.
> 
> To me the point is moot. I'm not a composer... nor a music critic with a vested interest in the direction of contemporary music. I am merely a member of the audience... a listener. I'm not interested in limiting myself to that music which pushes the art form as a whole in shocking and unexpected directions... although I'm certainly open to such if the result engages me. Indeed, I'm only interested in that which engages me, without concerning myself as to whether it is too reactionary or not avant garde enough. Certainly there is that music which strikes me as nothing more than pastiche... music which reminds me of other music that is actually quite good... but really brings nothing new... nothing unique to that composer... to the table. But emptiness... vacuousness... is not something limited to the reactionary and unknown to the avant garde.
> 
> Again, such abstract arguments about contemporary music are ultimately tiresome and meaningless and unlikely to change anyone's opinion... yours... or mine... or Saul's. Again the only real means of engaging others with the music you love is that direction taken by Andre (and some others at times)... that of sharing thoughts on a particular composer and particular piece of music you admire... and ideally sharing links to a site where the interested might listen to excerpts of said music. It has only been through such an approach that I have found myself intrigued enough to check out a composer unknown until that time.
> 
> :tiphat:


Thank you, this is pretty much exactly how I feel but couldn't figure out how to express.

As for pastiche, was Mozart pastiche? He used basically the same tonality as Bach, who was basically the same as his predecessors and yet the classical composers were quite new and different from their baroque ancestors.

If I write a piece of serial music, wouldn't that also be pastiche? I'm just following the techniques of the long dead Schoenberg, so what would be so new about my work?


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## Polednice

There's been a lot of interesting discussion on here since the last time I looked a few days ago. The most critical point I've come upon seems to be this question of whether or not certain _forms_ are outmoded and, therefore, whether or not a composer ought to be immediately labelled as pastiche for using them.

Surely, it ought to be the case that if a composer sets out to _imitate_ Mozart, then his music is pastiche; but if a composer sets forth his unique voice using the same tools that Mozart used, then we should approach that music as unique.

Having written that, the immediate question that springs to my mind is: "Can a composer exclusively use the tools available to Mozart without sounding like an imitator?" It's tempting to say that it's not possible, however, I think that notion requires a rather simplistic view of music. In fact, though they each had the same tools available to them, composition is a complex enough process to have allowed all the composers of the classical period distinct voices.

So, finally, given that fact, you must ask: "Were all of the possible distinct 'voices' fully explored by composers during that period?" I don't think any person can answer 'yes' to that question; perhaps we should be skeptical, and it might well take a genius, but I think it's entirely possible that someone could use that style and still be original and inspirational.


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## Guest

Elgarian said:


> What I'm questioning is whether the mere adoption of tonality automatically implies 'pastiche' (which is what you seem to be saying).
> 
> Let me go back again to a comparison with other art forms.
> 1. If I write a sonnet, is it pastiche just because it has 14 lines and follows a Shakespearean rhyme scheme? It may be pastiche for other reasons - but the essential question is whether it's inevitably pastiche because of its use of a traditional form?


Tonality is not an art form.

If you write a Shakespearean sonnet with 14 lines using Shakespearean diction and a Shakespearean topic, then _that_ would be pastiche.

Sonnet is otherwise just a box, like symphony, that you can fill with almost anything. Symphony in C though? Already with "in C" you have put something in the box.

Otherwise, I don't think that this expresses a real situation: "If I'm a poet, burning with something to say, and if that something is best expressed as a sonnet, then a sonnet it must be. The moment I choose some other structure _merely to avoid using the sonnet form,_ it's all over with me." If you're a poet in 2011 (and not a poet manque or an earnest student steeped in the glories of the past who hasn't yet grown into his or her own time), then you will probably never face this exact situation. Indeed, I don't know that this way of choosing a structure has ever been a real thing.

But for the sake of argument, let's say that it is. I'd say that the decision to use some other structure to avoid the sonnet form might the first glimmering recognition that the sonnet form is somehow inappropriate to these times and that other forms are better for saying 2011 kinds of things. (Only the rampant and extremely powerful ahistorical sense among students that particular times do not have their own personality, as it were--that the past is not a different time from the present but merely a repository of useable tricks--will find "2011 kinds of things" to be ridiculous.)

Otherwise, poets writing today, just like composers or writers or architects, will divide into different groups depending on their motives, from nostalgia to novelty. An honest creator will be both of and in her or his time. Will respect the past (all of it) without wanting to reproduce it, will certainly not be afraid of taking from the past what seems appropriate to now, but the focus will be on now, not on then, which is over. And if that sounds like contradiction, let me reiterate the important phrase "the focus will be on now," and add that the feeling for the more recent past will be generally stronger than that for the more distant past.

And yes, wingracer, if you write a piece of serial music, it will probably be pastiche. If you're doing that as an exercise, in order to learn something, then it will be fine. Serialism isn't something that even Boulez does any more, you know. It certainly doesn't have anything to do with what eRikm or Tetreault or Otomo are doing, nor with what Oliveros or Lachenmann are doing (to cite a couple of people in Boulez' generation).

Somehow the simplification of the twentieth century into tonal and atonal has proven to be the only picture people are able to make of that incredibly various time. And it hamstrings practically every discussion of new music, on online boards, anyway!! And to add insult to injury, "atonal" is almost useless to describe anything real.


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## Guest

Oooh, good points to raise, Polenice.



Polednice said:


> "Can a composer exclusively use the tools available to Mozart without sounding like an imitator?" It's tempting to say that it's not possible, however, I think that notion requires a rather simplistic view of music. In fact, though they each had the same tools available to them, composition is a complex enough process to have allowed all the composers of the classical period distinct voices.


Important distinction here. "Of the classical period." In the eighteenth century, people thought and lived a certain way. Everything, from their clothes to their houses to their food to the ideas they read about and discussed, to the bars and in the parties they did the discussing, is part of the eighteenth century. For a homely example, think of someone dressing today like someone in 1764. Unless they were on a movie set, everyone would probably think they were a crank. No one else would be likely to imitate them, and we probably wouldn't have online discussions in which the majority of posters were in favor of people dressing like it's 1764. (Even dressing like it's 1964 would be looked on as some sort of joke at best.)



Polednice said:


> "Were all of the possible distinct 'voices' fully explored by composers during that period?" I don't think any person can answer 'yes' to that question; perhaps we should be skeptical, and it might well take a genius, but I think it's entirely possible that someone could use that style and still be original and inspirational.


This is the crux of it, I think. We can look back into the past and see styles and techniques and tools. But would people in 1764 have seen what they were doing as simply a collection of tools and techniques? Why, they didn't even think of themselves as being in the "classical" era. (The term "classical music" not being coined until around 1825 or so, in Germany, not getting into English until some time in the 1830s, long after what we now call the "classical era.") The characteristic sounds and patterns that we can now identify as being from that time are just the things that they did, as a matter of course, because that's when they were alive.

Nowadays, looking back on a time that is over, we can look at the tools and techniques in isolation, as if they were not an integral part of the whole era. And we can use those tools and techniques to imitate the sound (but not the spirit) of that time. There will always be something fake about such imitation, even if that fakeness is not immediately apparent to every listener, because that's not how we think today. We don't dress that way or eat that way. The topics of our conversations are different. The movies we watch are different from the plays they would have watched. Our politics are different. Our transportation is different. Our houses are different.

Only by externalizing everything (which unfortunately IS a characteristic of our time), can we think that we can do something new with the old tools and techniques. No, not "all of the possible distinct 'voices' [were] fully explored by composers during that period," but too bad. That period is over, thanks not only to Herr Beethoven, but even to the ceaseless efforts of people inside that period who were pushing pushing.... Things change. That's what it means to be alive. People are born and grow up in different circumstances from their parents and have different ideas and ideals. And so it goes. Not everything is better in this picture, but if everyone is alive, then everything will continue to change. "Static," I would say, is worse than "change for the worse."


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## Argus

some guy said:


> Important distinction here. "Of the classical period."* In the eighteenth century, people thought and lived a certain way. Everything, from their clothes to their houses to their food to the ideas they read about and discussed, to the bars and in the parties they did the discussing, is part of the eighteenth century. For a homely example, think of someone dressing today like someone in 1764. Unless they were on a movie set, everyone would probably think they were a crank. No one else would be likely to imitate them, and we probably wouldn't have online discussions in which the majority of posters were in favor of people dressing like it's 1764. (Even dressing like it's 1964 would be looked on as some sort of joke at best.)


So you just wear polyester, nylon and other modern synthetic materials? You said yourself ''Tonality is not an art form''. Surely, a parallel for tonality would be the material not the outfit. Thus, cotton or wool would be a better analogy. Plenty people still wear those materials.

You're categorising tonality by a certain way it has been used in the past, not by the nature of it.

(Fairly) modern sounding tonal music (I think these are tonal):


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## tdc

I have to side with St. Lukes on whether or not old forms can be used. His argument seems very logical. Artists are creatures of feeling and expression, they should feel free to express themselves in whatever way seems appropriate, and as long as it is an honest and sincere expression from within - a valid piece of art that shouldn't be labelled fake or pastiche. While someguy has some good points what I'm getting is that artists should always check on what other artists have or haven't done to seek authenticity for their own expression. To make sure its 'real'. This seems like an awful lot to worry about in seeking expression and is something that would be stifling and not very productive in my opinion and more or less an intellectual exercise in 'pushing boundaries' as opposed to an honest creative expression from within. 

Again we don't exist in a vacuum - artists are bound to be influenced greatly by each other, and whats been done in the past. Not only is nothing wrong with this but most of the best music has come about by this influence and inspiration. Bach was looked at as an artist that tied together in a brilliant way the loose strands of the baroque period more so than the inventor of anything wholly novel. But contributions such as this are brilliant and far more substantial than anything thats come about as a conscious exercise in pushing boundaries or consciously trying to be new. The best forms of 'novel' I would say come as a by-product of the instinctual creative drive. Something that is a natural process, and happens irregardless of what supposedly should or shouldn't be done in art.


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## tdc

Argus said:


> So you just wear polyester, nylon and other modern synthetic materials? You said yourself ''Tonality is not an art form''. Surely, a parallel for tonality would be the material not the outfit. Thus, cotton or wool would be a better analogy. Plenty people still wear those materials.
> 
> You're categorising tonality by a certain way it has been used in the past, not by the nature of it.


I also agree with this. Labelling tonality as a thing of the past to me is like saying ' the wheel is a thing of the past, - its been done. Squares are new, and they don't copy circles!'

Its not a logical argument. If it isn't broke don't fix it, and if it is still has useful purposes - use it.


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## Guest

tdc said:


> [W]hat I'm getting is that artists should always check on what other artists have or haven't done to seek authenticity for their own expression. To make sure its 'real'. This seems like an awful lot to worry about in seeking expression and is something that would be stifling and not very productive in my opinion and more or less an intellectual exercise in 'pushing boundaries' as opposed to an honest creative expression from within.


Hmmm. Too bad. That's not what I intended to convey, anyway. I was trying simply to counter the idea that the past is simply a repository of tricks and tools, not that in each era the things we can now see as techniques were the living, breathing expression of life at that time.

Composers who mimic the characteristic sounds of the past are not creating.

And it's not that "artists should always check on what other artists have or haven't done," but certainly one should know what's going on, if only to avoid that solecism of reinventing the wheel! Of course the wheel is still useful (and I think it's a much more basic thing than tonality), but you don't want to keep reinventing it. You want to keep improving it, maybe (from wood to rubber, say?), and using it in new ways. And neither carriages nor monster trucks are analogous to works of art.

Imagine if you will, how someone in Beethoven's time would have been taken who insisted on writing pre-Baroque music.


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## Elgarian

some guy said:


> Tonality is not an art form.


Aaaargh! You're wriggling out of it, and we're still not getting to grips with this. OK then, if the sonnet form won't do as a parallel to tonality, then take something that will. Rhyme, perhaps? I don't mind. But I haven't enough time this evening, so I'll come back later and say more.


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## Polednice

some guy, I find some of your points persuasive, but I'm not entirely convinced 

One of the main problems I have with your argument (this time looking forward rather than back), is that there is the implicit suggestion that composers (or artists of any type) ought to continually keep pushing, and pushing, and pushing at the boundaries of what we accept as art, in order to avoid mimicry. There are two issues I have with this notion:

1) I certainly can't predict the future, but I'm hesitant about how far an endless quest for the 'new' will take us. Even if there are so many permutations of possible styles and forms that we could continue on this path for centuries, and we take this only as a theoretical point, it must still be the case that there is a finite number of things that we can do with sound. Isn't it therefore reasonable for a composer to use whatever techniques of the past or present that he or she prefers?

2) I'm also uncomfortable with the thought of a composer putting originality at the forefront of his or her ideals, as - for me at least - this could potentially detract from the value of an artwork in other areas. If I'm going to devote some intense concentration to someone's music, I'd like to think that their primary motivation was to move me somehow, or reveal some beauty, rather than to demonstrate something not done before.

---

On a separate point, I'd be interested to hear whether you think it's out-dated for contemporary composers to use an arrangement of standard orchestral instruments in their compositions, and, if not, why not? Given our undoubted capacity for the exploration of sound with technology, and therefore its potential for original creative thought, shouldn't any serious composer abandon well-used acoustic instruments?


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## Guest

*Polednice, *You might be interested that the "only a finite number of things" argument has had a long history. In music, particularly, it has gone something like this: Since Bach and others have already done everything that could be done, it is left for Mozart to tread the rocky ways. (This is the actual metaphor that was used in 1787 for Mozart.) Then, after some time, it went like this, Since Mozart and Haydn have already done everything that's any good, it is left to Beethoven to tread the rocky ways. Then, later, it was Since Beethoven has already and et cetera, all that was left for Berlioz were and so forth.

And so it goes.

Otherwise, with reservations, yes, I think all the rest is true too. But instead of giving my opinion, let me just note what some composers have already been doing. One, they have been getting more and more different kinds of sounds out of the "traditional" instruments. Two, they have been relying more and more on electronics. Three, they (it's clear, is it not, that the members of "they" has been changing from number to number, right?) have been making their own instruments, acoustic or electronic. Four, they have been using anything that can sound, buildings, rain, automobiles, the kitchen sink (and all its contents), and so forth, either live or recorded.

It seems an odd reservation, to be uncomfortable with creators being original.

*Elgarian,* I would be very sorry to think that you, of all people, would think I were "wriggling out" of anything.

I don't see myself as an outwriggler, anyway.

Tonality is a system for organizing pitches, like modality and serialism. And most of the music of the past several centuries, in the west anyway, has been very much a matter of pitches and pitch relations. African drumming, however, to take just one example, is very much a matter of rhythms and relationships between rhythmic patterns. One thing that has not found "tonality" to be primal.

Tonality is also not a static system, but an extremely flexible one that composers have been flexing for its entire brief history. And the direction it has always headed, no matter who's been using it or where, has always been toward where it actually did go, towards pantonality and serialism. That since then, many pitch-oriented composers have backtracked or sidestepped the issue, even to the extent of writing some very fine music indeed (Prokofiev, Britten, Shostakovich) is beside the point. People in what we now call the classical era were still writing music with a "baroque" feel to it. Listen to Gluck's overture to _Orpheo ed Euridice_ to hear both baroque and classical things.

Tonality, whether straight up or a- or serial, is a pitch-oriented system. It's not the only way to organize the elements of music. And it's not the only way people have done music in the past 100 years.

Here's some things that have nothing to do with tonality or serialism either one:

Cage's music (until the very end, when he "came to terms with harmony" as he put it).
Electroacoustic music. (Early electronic music in Germany was very much an extension of serial logic. Otherwise, electroacoustics generally have not been about pitch.)
Fluxus.
Percussion music (largely, not solely of course).
Minimalism of the non-repetition variety
Happenings.
Various manifestations of instrumental exploration, from Lachenmann to Simon Steen-Andersen and Mark Andre.
Turntablism.
EAI.
Noise.

And even the repetitious kinds of minimalism, like Reich and ten Holt and such, aren't really tonal. They seduce the unwary into thinking that by using open harmonies and diatonic melodies (often), but using them in ways that have nothing to do with the tension of consonance and dissonance, with modulation, which are so important in the tonal system. (One could argue, as a technical point, that "dissonance" is the chief motivating force of tonality.)

And finally, to look at your rhyme analogy. In the first place, it is not up to me to make your points for you. That's for you to do! But if you want what I think, it's that rhyme is a much closer thing to tonality than any of the other things that have been offered up. Rhyme is a system that uses sounds to organize--the initial sounds of words in front rhyme (including alliteration), the middle sounds in assonance, and the end sounds in end rhyme (which is what most people mean by the word "rhyme"). And if you look at the history of poetry, you will find that (end) rhyme has had a pretty good run in English poetry, not so much in other languages though. And that rhyme has not been the end all and be all for very much of English verse over the past 1200 years or so. It had a kind of revival in the twentieth century by poetasters like Rod McKuen and by versifiers who write pop songs and most recently by hip hop artists. But, especially for the latter, it's as little a system as consonance is in pattern minimalists.

And finally finally (for reals:lol, I completely understand the impulse of a listener to cling to the familiar and to wish for living composers to play to that need for familiarity. (Jennifer Hidgon's career has been remarkably successful in that regard.) But for the most part (the Baxes and Higdons and Fabian Muellers notwithstanding), the impulse of a creator is quite other.


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## Elgarian

some guy said:


> *Elgarian,* I would be very sorry to think that you, of all people, would think I were "wriggling out" of anything.


I was pulling your leg, because I had no time to do anything else. Like the chap who pushed someone else's face into a plate of mashed potatoes at the dinner table; and then when asked afterwards why he'd done it, said that he couldn't think of anything else to do in the time available. (You're just lucky I didn't have any mashed potato handy.)

But seriously, I do think we're not understanding properly what the other is saying, and I can't figure how to fix that at the moment. Meanwhile, feel free to wriggle if you wish, and so shall I.

*Later:* I was just thinking though about your comment that "I completely understand the impulse of a listener to cling to the familiar and to wish for living composers to play to that need for familiarity." That supposed desire plays no part at all in what I've been trying (unsuccessfully) to talk about. I know it's something you encounter a good deal, and so - in a different sphere (the visual arts) - do I. So I understand why you say that. But I'm not in the least suggesting that some kind of retreat into the familiar is a good thing. I wish we could get away from that notion, really. I'm concerned about the opposite, rather: that is, the incessant drive towards originality _for its own sake_ becoming a stifling and counterproductive impulse.

Since I've had no success with my poetry analogy, let me fall back on my painting analogy. Could we agree that the transition from figurative to abstract art in some degree parallels the movement away from tonality? (They certainly generate the same sort of reactions in the uninitiated.) If we could agree on that, we might start there. (If we can't agree on that, then I need to think again.)


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## Polednice

some guy said:


> *Polednice, *You might be interested that the "only a finite number of things" argument has had a long history. In music, particularly, it has gone something like this: Since Bach and others have already done everything that could be done, it is left for Mozart to tread the rocky ways. (This is the actual metaphor that was used in 1787 for Mozart.) Then, after some time, it went like this, Since Mozart and Haydn have already done everything that's any good, it is left to Beethoven to tread the rocky ways. Then, later, it was Since Beethoven has already and et cetera, all that was left for Berlioz were and so forth.
> 
> And so it goes.


I don't mean to suggest that I expect everything to 'be done' any time soon; simply that I imagine it is bound to happen at some point - in the far future or otherwise - because our brains only have the capacity to recognise and understand a finite range of sounds (still large, I know). But perhaps it won't be until the fall of civilisation (providing some of us poor beasts survive!) that we return to 'the old ways'!



some guy said:


> It seems an odd reservation, to be uncomfortable with creators being original.


I don't mind that being _a_ motivation, I'm just wary of it being the _primary_ motivation.

Now I need to go away and think for a while


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## Guest

Elgarian, I love mashed potatoes!!



Elgarian said:


> Could we agree that the transition from figurative to abstract art in some degree parallels the movement away from tonality? (They certainly generate the same sort of reactions in the uninitiated.) If we could agree on that, we might start there. (If we can't agree on that, then I need to think again.)


Not sure. I haven't thought as much about painting as I have about poetry or music.

But sure. Let's agree about this. But my hopeless dufferness might mean I have to bow out earlier than is satisfying, for either of us.

One thing I would say is that even in figurative art, it's the abstract values that are the most important, and always have been.


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## Guest

Polednice said:


> Now I need to go away and think for a while


Hahaha, good one.

If I were as disciplined as you are, I would have put myself on time out long before this!!


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## HarpsichordConcerto

Polednice said:


> ... and it might well take a genius, but I think it's entirely possible that someone could use that style and still be original and inspirational.


Exactly. Mozart's early pieces, while displaying his precocious genius at such an young age, was heavily influenced by their family friend, and the youngest son of J. S. Bach, namely Johann Christian Bach, pioneers of the glante style. Original and yet inspirational, even centuries later. But much of modern atonal music might be original, but I don't find the works terribly inspirational. In fact, I have yet to read one to declare that piece XYZ composed by ABC/modern atonal to be inspirational, it's not a word that used often at all.


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## HarpsichordConcerto

By modern, I meant to say within the last 50 to 60 years, post WWII.


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## Elgarian

some guy said:


> One thing I would say is that even in figurative art, it's the abstract values that are the most important, and always have been.


Oh how easy it is in these discussions to be distracted away from the main issue. Reading this, I immediately want you to explain what you mean by 'important'. Important to what purpose, or to whom? (My intention being not to challenge your statement, but to be clear about what you mean by it.)

But no, I'll resist that and try to stick to the matter in hand. I'll try to distill the issue down to a single preliminary question (aware that my created monster will sprout as many heads as the hydra as soon as I've done it):

Along comes a chap who declares that painting is its own subject, and, enthused with passion for this new idea, produces a series of purely abstract canvases. Other chaps say 'what a good idea' and make similar explorations of their own. And in the course of these explorations the meaning of visual art becomes debated in a highly creative way, and indeed the way we 'understand' a painting can never be never quite the same again.

Does this mean that henceforward, anyone producing figurative art is engaged in pastiche?


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## Guest

By important, I mean important to the total impression the painting conveys. Subject matter notwithstanding, any painting consists of balance and shape and line and color and the like, all abstract qualities. Whether a painting is "of" a recognizable thing that exists outside the painting or whether a painting is just itself, those qualities are equally important is all I was saying.

If someone now could do a figurative painting that did not remind a viewer of Rembrandt or Rubens or Vermeer or any other figurative painter of the past (including, I suppose, even people who started out as abstract painters, like Rockwell), then that would not be pastiche. I can't imagine how that could possibly be done, but that's no argument.


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## Elgarian

some guy said:


> If someone now could do a figurative painting that did not remind a viewer of Rembrandt or Rubens or Vermeer or any other figurative painter of the past (including, I suppose, even people who started out as abstract painters, like Rockwell), then that would not be pastiche. I can't imagine how that could possibly be done, but that's no argument.


So where do we stand, then, on figurative artists like David Hockney, Francis Bacon, Stanley Spencer, or Paula Rego? Or Picasso, who was never really drawn into the purely abstract route and continued to produce figurative work to the end of his life? The thing is, that powerful though the abstraction movement was (and still is for painters like Albert Irvin, or until recently, Sandra Blow), its existence didn't mean the death of figurative art at all. It represented not a new route for all to follow, but another opportunity for development to those who chose to take it. And that's quite right: the idea that the real subject of a painting is itself is one that can (and should) be questioned by each painter who contemplates it. (Just as each composer, I presume, must contemplate the tonal/atonal divide and make his or her own decision.)

The same could be said of any new development in visual art. Fundamental shifts produce branches, not a single line of development. Installation art doesn't mean the death of painting; it offers a different mode of expression - another branch line on the history of art railway. In fact I can't think of a single development in the history of art that could stand in the same relation to what has gone before as you seem to claim for the Great Tonality Divide. Even pure abstraction itself has now slipped behind us and is no longer on the front line: but anyone declaring the abstract work of Bert Irvin or Sandra Blow to be pastiche would be either very foolish or hopelessly unperceptive. They are (in her case, were) committed explorers, both, bristling with creative energy.

It's this that makes me suspect the validity of the claim for the Great Tonality Divide. There's no evidence for any comparable thing in the visual arts. (Incidentally, don't let's get bogged down in the name, or precisely what it is that produces the divide. Feel free to call it what you will. What I'm resisting is the notion that 'from here on there is only forward movement, or backwards-looking pastiche'. I don't think art - any art - is like that at all.)


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## tdc

Elgarian said:


> So where do we stand, then, on figurative artists like David Hockney, Francis Bacon, Stanley Spencer, or Paula Rego? Or Picasso, who was never really drawn into the purely abstract route and continued to produce figurative work to the end of his life? The thing is, that powerful though the abstraction movement was (and still is for painters like Albert Irvin, or until recently, Sandra Blow), its existence didn't mean the death of figurative art at all. It represented not a new route for all to follow, but another opportunity for development to those who chose to take it. And that's quite right: the idea that the real subject of a painting is itself is one that can (and should) be questioned by each painter who contemplates it. (Just as each composer, I presume, must contemplate the tonal/atonal divide and make his or her own decision.)
> 
> The same could be said of any new development in visual art. Fundamental shifts produce branches, not a single line of development. Installation art doesn't mean the death of painting; it offers a different mode of expression - another branch line on the history of art railway. In fact I can't think of a single development in the history of art that could stand in the same relation to what has gone before as you seem to claim for the Great Tonality Divide. Even pure abstraction itself has now slipped behind us and is no longer on the front line: but anyone declaring the abstract work of Bert Irvin or Sandra Blow to be pastiche would be either very foolish or hopelessly unperceptive. They are (in her case, were) committed explorers, both, bristling with creative energy.
> 
> It's this that makes me suspect the validity of the claim for the Great Tonality Divide. There's no evidence for any comparable thing in the visual arts. (Incidentally, don't let's get bogged down in the name, or precisely what it is that produces the divide. Feel free to call it what you will. What I'm resisting is the notion that 'from here on there is only forward movement, or backwards-looking pastiche'. I don't think art - any art - is like that at all.)


:tiphat:

Bravo! Nicely spoken/typed.


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## StlukesguildOhio

So where do we stand, then, on figurative artists like David Hockney, Francis Bacon, Stanley Spencer, or Paula Rego? Or Picasso, who was never really drawn into the purely abstract route and continued to produce figurative work to the end of his life? The thing is, that powerful though the abstraction movement was (and still is for painters like Albert Irvin, or until recently, Sandra Blow), its existence didn't mean the death of figurative art at all. It represented not a new route for all to follow, but another opportunity for development to those who chose to take it. And that's quite right: the idea that the real subject of a painting is itself is one that can (and should) be questioned by each painter who contemplates it. (Just as each composer, I presume, must contemplate the tonal/atonal divide and make his or her own decision.)

The same could be said of any new development in visual art. Fundamental shifts produce branches, not a single line of development. Installation art doesn't mean the death of painting; it offers a different mode of expression - another branch line on the history of art railway. In fact I can't think of a single development in the history of art that could stand in the same relation to what has gone before as you seem to claim for the Great Tonality Divide. Even pure abstraction itself has now slipped behind us and is no longer on the front line: but anyone declaring the abstract work of Bert Irvin or Sandra Blow to be pastiche would be either very foolish or hopelessly unperceptive. They are (in her case, were) committed explorers, both, bristling with creative energy.

It's this that makes me suspect the validity of the claim for the Great Tonality Divide. There's no evidence for any comparable thing in the visual arts. (Incidentally, don't let's get bogged down in the name, or precisely what it is that produces the divide. Feel free to call it what you will. What I'm resisting is the notion that 'from here on there is only forward movement, or backwards-looking pastiche'. I don't think art - any art - is like that at all.)

Exactly! And intriguingly there was just as much of a debate about the "death of figuration" following the innovation of abstraction and the "death of painting" with the spread of installation art and in both instances the death, to paraphrase Twain, was announced quite prematurely. Today "realist/figurative" art is just as strong as it ever was and painting remains quite healthy.

The assertion that traditional tonality is dead is equally premature. Indeed, reducing the discussion of contemporary music to a debate between traditional tonality vs atonality is absurb. For the contemporary composer, these are but two possibilities among many.


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## Guest

Elgarian said:


> Just as each composer, I presume, must contemplate the tonal/atonal divide and make his or her own decision.


But you know already that I reject this as the fundamental dichotomy of the twentieth century.

One of my points about twentieth century music and pastiche is that there is music that attempts to do something new, either by building on past ideas or by incorporating some of same in a new context or by breaking with the past (which is never strictly possible anyway), and there is music that attempts to recreate the sounds and patterns of a past time.

I'm interested in history and in how certain patterns and ideas and techniques in the arts come about and then fade away or are replaced with something else. Remember what I said about clothing? If you dressed like Mozart, people would think you were a bit goofy (at best), unless it was around October 31st or you were on a movie set. Are those clothes ugly or nonfunctional now? Not at all. But they are of their time, and that time is over. When Mozart wore his clothes, it was just the way people dressed then. It was normal.

Look at your high school year book, if you're old enough to do so. If enough time has passed since those days, you'll notice how funny everyone looks, the clothes, the hairdos. Did we really look like that? Well no, we didn't. We were doing the normal thing. It's not the same as today's normal thing, though, which will look just as goofy in twenty years, or fifty, or....

Odd thing about music, at least nowadays, is that there's a huge contingent of listeners who not only think pastiche is OK, but absolutely demand it. Look around on any modern music thread. Somewhere, someone will say something like "Why can't composers write X, Y, or Z anymore."

And the simple (and apparently absolutely unconvincing) answer to that is that now is now.


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## tdc

some guy said:


> But you know already that I reject this as the fundamental dichotomy of the twentieth century.
> 
> One of my points about twentieth century music and pastiche is that there is music that attempts to do something new, either by building on past ideas or by incorporating some of same in a new context or by breaking with the past (which is never strictly possible anyway), and there is music that attempts to recreate the sounds and patterns of a past time.
> 
> I'm interested in history and in how certain patterns and ideas and techniques in the arts come about and then fade away or are replaced with something else. Remember what I said about clothing? If you dressed like Mozart, people would think you were a bit goofy (at best), unless it was around October 31st or you were on a movie set. Are those clothes ugly or nonfunctional now? Not at all. But they are of their time, and that time is over. When Mozart wore his clothes, it was just the way people dressed then. It was normal.
> 
> Look at your high school year book, if you're old enough to do so. If enough time has passed since those days, you'll notice how funny everyone looks, the clothes, the hairdos. Did we really look like that? Well no, we didn't. We were doing the normal thing. It's not the same as today's normal thing, though, which will look just as goofy in twenty years, or fifty, or....
> 
> Odd thing about music, at least nowadays, is that there's a huge contingent of listeners who not only think pastiche is OK, but absolutely demand it. Look around on any modern music thread. Somewhere, someone will say something like "Why can't composers write X, Y, or Z anymore."
> 
> And the simple (and apparently absolutely unconvincing) answer to that is that now is now.


^But you don't deal with any of the great points others have brought up. You are just re-wording the same ideas again and again, as though completely oblivious to the fact many of your views have been exposed to everyone else as total fallacies. The irony here is that you are the one not being open enough to concede anything or share a different perspective. You have become the very thing you suggest people should avoid - stagnant.


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## StlukesguildOhio

I'm interested in history and in how certain patterns and ideas and techniques in the arts come about and then fade away or are replaced with something else. Remember what I said about clothing? If you dressed like Mozart, people would think you were a bit goofy (at best), unless it was around October 31st or you were on a movie set. Are those clothes ugly or nonfunctional now? Not at all. But they are of their time, and that time is over. When Mozart wore his clothes, it was just the way people dressed then. It was normal.

Look at your high school year book, if you're old enough to do so. If enough time has passed since those days, you'll notice how funny everyone looks, the clothes, the hairdos. Did we really look like that? Well no, we didn't. We were doing the normal thing. It's not the same as today's normal thing, though, which will look just as goofy in twenty years, or fifty, or....

Odd thing about music, at least nowadays, is that there's a huge contingent of listeners who not only think pastiche is OK, but absolutely demand it. Look around on any modern music thread. Somewhere, someone will say something like "Why can't composers write X, Y, or Z anymore."

The analogy works fine enough... but I don't think anyone is suggesting that music of today should sound like the music of the past. Arvo Part, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Osvaldo Golijov, Peter Lieberson, and jake Heggie surely don't sound as if they were living in the 19th century to me in spite of the fact that they employ a traditional approach to tonality. Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon's use of "realism/figuration" in painting are undeniably of the 20th century.

And the simple (and apparently absolutely unconvincing) answer to that is that now is now.

And the question to this answer is just who gets to decide what "NOW" looks like or sounds like... and it would seem that you are certain that you alone have the answer to that and anybody who takes a different position is but a reactionary.


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## Sid James

> Arvo Part, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Osvaldo Golijov, Peter Lieberson, and jake Heggie surely don't sound as if they were living in the 19th century to me in spite of the fact that they employ a traditional approach to tonality.


I'd actually be interested in what some guy thinks of these kinds of composers. It would be useful for the debate if he'd name names of composers who he thinks are "pastiche."

Speaking for myself, I tire of composers who end up doing "pastiche" of their own & others music. One composer - who is long dead - that I think had a tendency to do this quite a bit was Vaughan Williams. I feel that he doesn't particularly skillfully absorb and integrate his influences. Like a piece like the London Symphony has bits of Ravel, Puccini, Elgar, Brahms. It sounds clumsy to me, but I'm sure there are many here and elsewhere who think it's a very good symphony. I personally don't...


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## Guest

St said:


> Arvo Part, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Osvaldo Golijov, Peter Lieberson, and jake Heggie surely don't sound as if they were living in the 19th century to me in spite of the fact that they employ a traditional approach to tonality.


Of course they don't. There's the irony. In spite of using the language of the nineteenth century, they are quite clearly not IN the nineteenth century. You really cannot go back.



Andre said:


> I'd actually be interested in what some guy thinks of these kinds of composers. It would be useful for the debate if he'd name names of composers who he thinks are "pastiche."


I don't think highly of them, no. Jennifer Higdon and Fabian Mueller are two others, if you really want to know.

I don't care for naming names of composers I don't like. One, I'm only one guy. Two, there may be people who care for them very much. I wouldn't want to spoil their enjoyment.

On the other hand, I do think that some composers are doing bad work. And it might be useful to point that out. Probably not, though. Just put people's backs up. (And some people, like Mr. Ohio, have their backs up even before I say a word. So that when I do, hey presto, I've put their backs up. (Not.))

I'd much rather spend time talking about what I enjoy and on what I think is valuable. I only engage in these contentious discussions in the fond hope that maybe clearing away some undergrowth might help us see the forest more clearly. I think I've been singularly unsuccessful in that. (My theory is that people don't want to learn or expand or know, they want to have their prejudices reinforced not attacked!! An obviously self-serving theory, but "Oh, well." And not all people are like that. You for instance, and Elgarian, are quite definitely not that way!! Hey! So there IS hope!)


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## Saul_Dzorelashvili

HarpsichordConcerto said:


> Exactly. Mozart's early pieces, while displaying his precocious genius at such an young age, was heavily influenced by their family friend, and the youngest son of J. S. Bach, namely Johann Christian Bach, pioneers of the glante style. Original and yet inspirational, even centuries later. But much of modern atonal music might be original, but I don't find the works terribly inspirational. In fact, I have yet to read one to declare that piece XYZ composed by ABC/modern atonal to be inspirational, it's not a word that used often at all.


That's right, Modern Atonal music is not inspirational.


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## HarpsichordConcerto

some guy said:


> On the other hand, I do think that some composers are doing bad work.


Really? Are you sure?


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## Saul_Dzorelashvili

Polednice said:


> There's been a lot of interesting discussion on here since the last time I looked a few days ago. The most critical point I've come upon seems to be this question of whether or not certain _forms_ are outmoded and, therefore, whether or not a composer ought to be immediately labelled as pastiche for using them.
> 
> Surely, it ought to be the case that if a composer sets out to _imitate_ Mozart, then his music is pastiche; but if a composer sets forth his unique voice using the same tools that Mozart used, then we should approach that music as unique.
> 
> Having written that, the immediate question that springs to my mind is: "Can a composer exclusively use the tools available to Mozart without sounding like an imitator?" It's tempting to say that it's not possible, however, I think that notion requires a rather simplistic view of music. In fact, though they each had the same tools available to them, composition is a complex enough process to have allowed all the composers of the classical period distinct voices.
> 
> So, finally, given that fact, you must ask: "Were all of the possible distinct 'voices' fully explored by composers during that period?" I don't think any person can answer 'yes' to that question; perhaps we should be skeptical, and it might well take a genius, but I think it's entirely possible that someone could use that style and still be original and inspirational.


Well Yes and No.

First of all yes,

In that case the composer would have to be a world class genius to achieve that without creating his own style (Mendelssohn in his youth up until 13)

But he got greater fame and appreciation when he began developing his own unique style added together with the tools and style that he learned from Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven.

Said all this, the vast majority of composers come nowhere near that kind of genius therefore in order to create something distinct and original, they must create some new style that they can call their own.


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## StlukesguildOhio

SLG- Arvo Part, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Osvaldo Golijov, Peter Lieberson, and jake Heggie surely don't sound as if they were living in the 19th century to me in spite of the fact that they employ a traditional approach to tonality.

Andre- I'd actually be interested in what some guy thinks of these kinds of composers. It would be useful for the debate if he'd name names of composers who he thinks are "pastiche.

SomeGuy- I don't think highly of them, no. Jennifer Higdon and Fabian Mueller are two others, if you really want to know.

And I can live with the fact that SomeGuy doesn't particularly like these composers.

I don't care for naming names of composers I don't like. 

I have no problem in telling you when I don't like something. Why lie or beat about the bush. And no... its not just electronic scribbles and farts that I dislike... I made the mistake of purchasing a choral work by Karl Jenkins last year. God! What awful pop-schlock New-Age pablum that was!

I'd much rather spend time talking about what I enjoy and on what I think is valuable. I only engage in these contentious discussions in the fond hope that maybe clearing away some undergrowth might help us see the forest more clearly. I think I've been singularly unsuccessful in that.

And here you begin to lose me again (and others as well I would presume) because it seems quite obvious that the "undergrowth" you would like to see cleared away is that of the preferences and likes of others...

I think I've been singularly unsuccessful in that. (My theory is that people don't want to learn or expand or know, they want to have their prejudices reinforced not attacked!!...)

And my theory as to your continued failings is that you are so quick to recognize others failings... preferences and prejudices... yet you are completely blind to your own. I like Arvo Part, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Osvaldo Golijov, Peter Lieberson, and Jake Heggie (among others) but not eRikm or Helmut Lachenmann... and you would have us believe that this is because I am not able to see beyond my personal prejudices and preferences. You, on the other hand, like Helmut Lachenmann and eRikm... but don't think much of Arvo Part, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Osvaldo Golijov, Peter Lieberson, and Jake Heggie... and you would have us believe that there is no personal preferences or prejudices involved.


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## Sid James

> I don't think highly of them, no. Jennifer Higdon and Fabian Mueller are two others, if you really want to know.


Of the composers mentioned, I've come across Arvo Part's & Golijov's music live in concert last year. That's the way I usually access contemporary classical. I haven't heard anything of the others mentioned, but I will probably go to an orchestral concert later this year where they'll play a piece by Higdon. By the same token, I look forward to going to a Harry Partch concert. & I attend performances of new works by Aussie composers at Sydney Conservatorium as well. As far as things go, I don't have a clear preference for any type of contemporary music - I like chamber the best, but also choral, electroacoustic, artsong and orchestral. Sometimes, I probably can't tell whether something's "pastiche" or not. But I'd hazard a guess that there are many types of "pastiche" - some of it is "new age" pastiche, some of it is Romantic, some Modernist or Post-Modernist. I'm getting the feeling that you're mainly talking about the Romantic type of pastiche and not the others. That's ok, we all have our preferences...



> I'd much rather spend time talking about what I enjoy and on what I think is valuable. I only engage in these contentious discussions in the fond hope that maybe clearing away some undergrowth might help us see the forest more clearly. I think I've been singularly unsuccessful in that. (My theory is that people don't want to learn or expand or know, they want to have their prejudices reinforced not attacked!! An obviously self-serving theory, but "Oh, well." And not all people are like that. You for instance, and Elgarian, are quite definitely not that way!! Hey! So there IS hope!)


Yes, I try to be positive as well, as much as I can. I think it's wise not to shut off ourselves from experiences of new things, even if they might not work out the way we thought they would. I also don't like certain composers whose music I have heard - it's my right like anyone else. Sometimes I have solid reasons for rejecting something, sometimes it's just a "gut" feeling. Everyone has a certain amount of prejudice or ideological baggage when approaching music that's new to them (of any kind, whether it be Mozart or Golijov). What I aim to do is at least be able to appreciate as wide as a variety of music as is possible. Not necessarily to say "I loved that 100%" but to come away from it feeling that it's done something for me on some level. For me it's all about experience, and all of our experiences are different & are constantly changing. Nothing is set in stone, imo. Perhaps people like Stlukesguildohio or HarpsichordConcerto will one day hear some electroacoustic music that they'll end up liking & engage with on a deeper level. It's worked the other way with me, I used to practically reject a lot of Baroque music, now I'm listening to it fairly regularly & going to as many live concerts of it as I can (particularly the choral)...


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## Elgarian

some guy said:


> But you know already that I reject this as the fundamental dichotomy of the twentieth century.


That is _definitely_ a Wriggling-Out (he said, looking around for a plate of mashed potato). I concede that I've used 'atonality' as an abbreviated label for a complicated conglomerate of post-tonal ideas, and you're right to point that out, but it doesn't affect in the least the central point I'm making. Remember, you left me in no doubt about what you think of tonality, namely:

"The problem with using tonality now, long after its time has passed, is that it will inevitably sound like the past."

That's the issue I'm addressing, by analogy. Does the best figurative art of today look like the past because it's not abstract? Does the best abstract art of today look like the past because it's not an installation? And if (as I propose, in each of those cases) it resoundingly and excitingly _doesn't_, then might we not reasonably challenge the idea that tonal music inevitably sounds like the past?

I don't disagree with anything in the rest of your post (but then, it doesn't address the issues I've raised). "Music that attempts to recreate the sounds and patterns of a past time" is pastiche - we both agree on that - just as someone who tries to paint white abstract reliefs like Ben Nicholson is producing pastiche. That's not what I'm questioning at all.


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## Argus

tdc said:


> ^But you don't deal with any of the great points others have brought up. You are just re-wording the same ideas again and again, as though completely oblivious to the fact many of your views have been exposed to everyone else as total fallacies. The irony here is that you are the one not being open enough to concede anything or share a different perspective. You have become the very thing you suggest people should avoid - stagnant.


This is the worst performance I've seen from some_guy. There's a lot of people's points he's conveniently neglecting.

I have also yet to hear his opinion of funk and bluegrass.


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## Guest

Argus said:


> This is the worst performance I've seen from some_guy.


I've slipped my chain and left the circus to be a wild bear. GrrrrooOOOWWLLL.


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## Sid James

Yes, discussion on this thread has been going around in circles for a while now. Let's just all agree that most of us like contemporary music of some sort, whether it be "atonal" or not...


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## Weston

While everyone is busy pontificating, I thought it might be nice to share this link I found with a large list of modern, (i.e. 20th century to the present) composers, most of which I've never heard of. I've already made a few interesting discoveries through it, as I am not very knowledgeable of the more recent music.

http://www.modernclassical.com/index.html


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## Guest

Be nice to know a bit about who's running this site.

And how to contact them to point out (politely and nonpontificatingly) the glaring omissions in both composer and label lists.

To take the latter, as it's more manageable: Wergo, Kairos, sub rosa, emprientes DIGITales, Stradivarius _times future,_ Cybele, Mode, Aurora, XI Records, New World Records, innova, Mnemosyne, Metamkine--too many to list without me getting off my duff and looking at my CDs. (They're clear across the room. I think I've broken my foot.)

Of the three labels this site mentions, two are not by any means "modern music labels," although they put out some recent stuff, and the third, _Mythical,_ is tiny to the point of nonexistence, and strangely does not mention certain of its minute stable of composers by name, using such elocutions as "a modern classical music composer" and "this new age music composer" instead of his or her name.


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