# Moving feelings to the background?



## kikko (Jun 19, 2014)

I think that from the baroque era to the late romantic era the main goal of music was to arouse feelings in audience and the innovations was aimed to find new ways to express these feelings.

With modernism on the oder hand (IMO) the main goal of music became the constant research of innovation.

No matter how it sounds. If it's new, if it is based on a rigorous and logical system and if it breaks previous rules than it can't be wrong.

That's why I'm asking if feelings became worthless in our contemporary music.


----------



## OlivierM (Jul 31, 2014)

I don't think so. There are incredible pieces that (at least to me) call directly my feelings. For instance, Fausto Romitelli's An Index Of Metal, and Kaija Saariaho D'Om Le Vrai Sens, which put me in trance. 
And so many string quartets by modern composers, like Wyschnegradsky, Jay Schwarz's vocal piece by the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart.
These are disturbed, if not disgruntled feelings, I grant it, but feelings nethertheless.


----------



## ptr (Jan 22, 2013)

kikko said:


> That's why I'm asking if feelings became worthless in our contemporary music.


No, not at all, this is a completely presumptious notion, for me, "good music" no matter what era it was written in evokes emotions! I get the same feeling of arousal from say Mahler's Fourth as I do Messiaen's 'La nativité..' or from Haas "limited approximation" or Merzbow's 13 Japanese Birds (The list could be endless!)

Nope, emotion is timeless, but You have to educate Yourself more intimately to the key's needed to de-code its more difficult safe-keepings!!

/ptr


----------



## violadude (May 2, 2011)

Music has never stopped being about expression. It may have at times not been about personal expression (Medieval sacred music, John Cage's philosophy). Sometimes it may not be about overwrought, extremely outward and in your face expression, as it was not with many turn of the 20th century composers who were sick of Romantic sentiment, but it has always been about expression.


----------



## SeptimalTritone (Jul 7, 2014)

Hey Mr. kikko 

I urge you to listen to this Messiaen symphonic piece!

In my opinion, it gets closer to God than Beethoven, Schubert, and Mahler.


----------



## dgee (Sep 26, 2013)

Back in Baroque and Classical expression is formalised and stylised - from then on expression was emancipated steadily over time and so in the mid C20 you have more expressive possibility than ever before

The comments about innovation and contemporary music seem to be based on wilful ignorance. It's OK to stick to what you like but I think it's a bit much to start a thread based on misconceptions of things which you don't know much about


----------



## violadude (May 2, 2011)

Kikko, your name reminds me of this:

http://www.dragonballencyclopedia.com/qdb/Kikoho

I'm a dragon ball nerd by the way.


----------



## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

kikko said:


> No matter how it sounds. If it's new, if it is based on a rigorous and logical system and if it breaks previous rules than it can't be wrong.


I've never heard of a single composer who thought this way. I can't imagine good music coming out of it. What are your examples?


----------



## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

That's not true. I listen to Schoenberg's Piano Concerto, Schuman's Symphonies #'s 6, 8 9 and 10, Persichetti's Piano Sonatas #'s 2-10, Ives' Concord Sonata, Berg's Violin Concerto and Piano Sonata and Webern's Variations and I am moved by each one of them.

You had better throw that one out!!


----------



## Trout (Apr 11, 2011)

kikko said:


> I think that from the baroque era to the late romantic era the main goal of music was to arouse feelings in audience and the innovations was aimed to find new ways to express these feelings.
> 
> With modernism on the oder hand (IMO) the main goal of music became the constant research of innovation.
> 
> ...


I disagree with your premises, if disagreeing is even possible since they just seem plain untrue (so not really something to be able to say "IMO" about). "Modernism" is simply using different means to reach the same ends of emotional satisfaction. To stigmatize it by suggesting that it was practically all about innovation with no regard to "quality" seems rather parochial as the strive for "quality"/emotional enjoyment/etc. has always been prominent, even if not readily noticeable from someone expecting beauty in the pre-20th-century sense.

There have been innumerable threads on people suggesting or addressing arguments very similar to, if not the same as, yours, so if you are genuinely curious I would check out some of the following:

http://www.talkclassical.com/28340-what-purpose-experimental-music.html
http://www.talkclassical.com/26825-another-thread-about-dissonance.html
http://www.talkclassical.com/31085-contemporary-art-music-wtf.html
http://www.talkclassical.com/16809-modern-music-novelty-almost.html
http://www.talkclassical.com/28115-enjoying-not-modern-contemporary.html
http://www.talkclassical.com/33650-atonal-music-feelings.html
http://www.talkclassical.com/13778-what-point-atonal-music.html
http://www.talkclassical.com/21938-hypotheses-why-certain-people.html
http://www.talkclassical.com/23209-desire-tonality.html
http://www.talkclassical.com/6498-dilemma-contemporary-music.html
http://www.talkclassical.com/8131-contemporary-music.html

(A caveat though: a good chunk of some threads comprise of the classic "trench warfare" debates between the supporters and detractors of modern music that tend to go nowhere.)


----------



## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

Mahlerian said:


> I've never heard of a single composer who thought this way. I can't imagine good music coming out of it. What are your examples?


Wasn't there a modern composer who commented on how him and his ilk got caught up in the intellectual pursuit of music and it became quite ugly? I can't remember who it was, though.


----------



## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Vesuvius said:


> Wasn't there a modern composer who commented on how him and his ilk got caught up in the intellectual pursuit of music and it became quite ugly? I can't remember who it was, though.


Ligeti. This was discussed on another forum.

"When I think of the avant-garde I have this image in my head: I am sitting in an airplane, the sky is blue and I see a landscape. And the plane flies into a cloud: everything is grey-white. At first the grey seems interesting if you compare it to the earlier landscape, but it soon becomes monotonous. I then fly out of the cloud and again see the landscape, which has completely changed in the meantime.

I believe that we have flown into such a cloud of high entropy and great disorder, particularly because of Schoenberg and the Viennese school but also due to the post-war generation in Darmstadt and Cologne - to which I more or less belonged. The instant I emerge out of the cloud I see, and this being very critical, that the music we wrote was in fact rather ugly. With 'we' I mean my generation, myself included. This ugly music was a consequence of twelve-tone music, of total chromaticism."


----------



## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

KenOC said:


> Ligeti. This was discussed on another forum.
> 
> "When I think of the avant-garde I have this image in my head: I am sitting in an airplane, the sky is blue and I see a landscape. And the plane flies into a cloud: everything is grey-white. At first the grey seems interesting if you compare it to the earlier landscape, but it soon becomes monotonous. I then fly out of the cloud and again see the landscape, which has completely changed in the meantime.
> 
> I believe that we have flown into such a cloud of high entropy and great disorder, particularly because of Schoenberg and the Viennese school but also due to the post-war generation in Darmstadt and Cologne - to which I more or less belonged. The instant I emerge out of the cloud I see, and this being very critical, that the music we wrote was in fact rather ugly. With 'we' I mean my generation, myself included. This ugly music was a consequence of twelve-tone music, of total chromaticism."


Yup, that's the one. Beyond my own satisfaction with the music, I understand what he's pointing to.


----------



## Morimur (Jan 23, 2014)

Ligeti is one of the greatest composers of our time, but blaming Schoenberg for the 'evils' of atonality and serialism is so passé and wrong. His music is breathtakingly beautiful, lush and full of feeling -- that's right, FEELING. If one isn't moved by Schoenberg's music, one should check one's pulse... and musical taste.


----------



## trazom (Apr 13, 2009)

violadude said:


> Kikko, your name reminds me of this:
> 
> http://www.dragonballencyclopedia.com/qdb/Kikoho
> 
> I'm a dragon ball nerd by the way.


My best friend from my elementary and junior high school years was as well. He even had a dragon ball birthday cake at one of his parties. I never got the hype wih that, nor with the Yu-Gi-Oh series. I was way more into Pokemon and Zelda.


----------



## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Vesuvius said:


> Yup, that's the one. Beyond my own satisfaction with the music, I understand what he's pointing to.


The quote still has nothing to do with composers who thought that "No matter how it sounds. If it's new, if it is based on a rigorous and logical system and if it breaks previous rules than it can't be wrong."


----------



## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

Mahlerian said:


> The quote still has nothing to do with composers who thought that "No matter how it sounds. If it's new, if it is based on a rigorous and logical system and if it breaks previous rules than it can't be wrong."


He uses some disagreeable words, but it's founded on similar grounds. There was a sort of obsession with intellectual discovery among these composers. I'm saying this as a fan myself, but I get it.


----------



## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Morimur said:


> Ligeti is one of the greatest composers of our time, but blaming Schoenberg for the 'evils' of atonality and serialism is so passé and wrong.


Ligeti doesn't criticize Schoenberg's music, merely says that it had a bad influence on him and his buddies. Made them write nasty stuff. Not much of a believer in free will, it appears.


----------



## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

kikko said:


> I think that from the baroque era to the late romantic era the main goal of music was to arouse feelings in audience and the innovations was aimed to find new ways to express these feelings.
> 
> With modernism on the oder hand (IMO) the main goal of music became the constant research of innovation.
> 
> ...


Every new generation that comes along in classical music wants to make a mark with their innovations. So what has tended to happen is a rejection of the past, in terms of music itself and also ideology. It doesn't necessarily have to be based on a system as such, it can also be certain values, philosophical or even regional approaches.

Music though is more complex and varied than any dividing lines put up by new trends or ideologies of the moment. For example, there are many sides to composers of the same era, there are many aspects or directions within the output of a single composer, and they also compose music for different purposes (eg. J.S. Bach, who I am focussing on these days, wrote music for church, for study, for court, and for purposes connected to the Collegium Musicum in Liepzig which was like a forerunner to the public concerts of a hundred years later at the Gewandhaus).

I would think of music as being many things, for different purposes, and with different aesthetic approaches underpinning it. Its also related to the context and times that it comes out of. It is kind of cool to negate the past in building up your own image - in this way, Boulez dissed Schoenberg, as did Cage, as did - according to the quote KenOC put in this thread - Ligeti, and also John Adams. So we all are the new man of the moment, and try to clearly dileneate ourselves from the past. In reality, its not that simple. This is more about an agenda, and in any case by the end of their lives all these guys where more or less establishment. All that is constant is music is that it is in a neverending state of flux and growth. What is new today might not be new tomorrow, what is considered old now might be revived and revitalised by later generations.


----------



## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

When my youngest niece was about _6 years old_ she heard a tape I had of Ligeti's Requiem playing in my car. Nearly in tears she asked, "What is that? It sounds like somebody died."

I rest my case.


----------



## dgee (Sep 26, 2013)

KenOC said:


> Ligeti. This was discussed on another forum.
> 
> "When I think of the avant-garde I have this image in my head: I am sitting in an airplane, the sky is blue and I see a landscape. And the plane flies into a cloud: everything is grey-white. At first the grey seems interesting if you compare it to the earlier landscape, but it soon becomes monotonous. I then fly out of the cloud and again see the landscape, which has completely changed in the meantime.
> 
> I believe that we have flown into such a cloud of high entropy and great disorder, particularly because of Schoenberg and the Viennese school but also due to the post-war generation in Darmstadt and Cologne - to which I more or less belonged. The instant I emerge out of the cloud I see, and this being very critical, that the music we wrote was in fact rather ugly. With 'we' I mean my generation, myself included. This ugly music was a consequence of twelve-tone music, of total chromaticism."


This quote is in the following available on google books (p231):

http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=... mean my generation, myself included.&f=false

Excuse the horrible link. The context is quite interesting as it discusses reaction to and distancing from the European Avant Garde from the 1970s and Ligeti's growing dislike of serialism resulting in blanket aural impressions vs an emphasis on pitch and interval, distancing from Huber and Ferneyhough

There's also some reflection on how Ligeti used "ugly" in the quoted text - probably looking at post-war serialism in particular. It's intersting and nuanced stuff


----------



## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Weston said:


> When my youngest niece was about _6 years old_ she heard a tape I had of Ligeti's Requiem playing in my car. Nearly in tears she asked, "What is that? It sounds like somebody died."
> 
> I rest my case.


I think she caught on quite well. A requiem is, after all, a mass for the dead.


----------



## Morimur (Jan 23, 2014)

KenOC said:


> Ligeti doesn't criticize Schoenberg's music, merely says that it had a bad influence on him and his buddies. Made them write nasty stuff. Not much of a believer in free will, it appears.


It amounts to criticism all the same; he blames Schoenberg (among others) for some of his 'ugly' music. But look, who cares if their music is perceived as 'rather ugly' or forbidding? It's the quality that matters, and both Schoenberg and Ligeti are A-list composers -- the proof is in the pudding.


----------



## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

But not everyone enjoys momordica charantia pudding. So, the proof will be relative.


----------



## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

KenOC said:


> I think she caught on quite well. A requiem is, after all, a mass for the dead.


Yes. I was astonished, both at her and at Ligeti.


----------



## Morimur (Jan 23, 2014)

Vesuvius said:


> But not everyone enjoys momordica charantia pudding. So, the proof will be relative.


'Everyone' is responsible for orchestras going bankrupt and for making Justin Bieber a millionaire. 'Everyone' can go fly a kite.


----------



## ptr (Jan 22, 2013)

As usual, there is a fair amount of mistaking beauty or displeasure for the only creators of emotions, this is a false dichotomy, there is "feelings" in a much wider range of of emotional "labels"... There's not a lack of "feelings" just because You cant equate, relate or understand the emotions involved!
I believe that the major problem with modern "man" is that she is not tenacious enough for the great new experiences ! 

/ptr


----------



## Guest (Sep 19, 2014)

ptr said:


> There's not a lack of "feelings" just because you cant equate, relate or understand the emotions involved!
> 
> /ptr


/thread

/arcane


----------



## Alypius (Jan 23, 2013)

kikko said:


> I think that from the baroque era to the late romantic era the main goal of music was to arouse feelings in audience and the innovations was aimed to find new ways to express these feelings.


Really? What documentary evidence do you have that "arousing feelings" was the "main goal" of Baroque music? Have you read any documents from the period? What documentary evidence do you have that "arousing feelings" was the "main goal" of the era of Mozart and Haydn? I would like to see documents from the period to demonstrate such peculiar claims. Music had many functions in those eras. And what they meant by "feeling" was often quite stylized and corporate and decidedly religious. It had little to do with romantic gushings.



kikko said:


> With modernism on the oder [Sic] hand (IMO) the main goal of music became the constant research of innovation. No matter how it sounds. If it's new, if it is based on a rigorous and logical system and if it breaks previous rules than it can't be wrong. That's why I'm asking if feelings became worthless in our contemporary music.


"Modernism" is not contemporary music, and contemporary music is rarely "modernist" (except if it is a self-consciously old-fashioned homage to the early 20th century). Are you saying all music of the 20th century is "modernist"? Have you actually listened to any music from the 20th century? Or to contemporary music? If you have actually listened to contemporary music and still assert "feeling became worthless", then I must conclude that you are deaf or incapable of feelings. I don't know where to begin with such baseless and crass assertions.

I should add that we seem in this thread to have another of those disappearing thread-starters who do not actually engage in the flow of discussions but start threads for flame-throwing purposes.


----------



## science (Oct 14, 2010)

I think this kind of discussion often hinges on a semantic problem of what are meant by "feelings." 

Well, regardless, accepting all the standard dichotomies and setting aside all the questions we could raise about them for a moment, for me it's not at all clear that emotional music is superior to intellectual music. I enjoy Babbitt's music more than I enjoy Tchaikovsky's - or for that matter, more than I enjoy Adele's music. I guess it's nothing but a matter of taste. I don't mind at all that the world is filled with people who like Adele or Tchaikovsky more than they like Babbitt; there's room here for all of us.


----------



## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

I wasn't aware Ligeti made that statement, as far as I know he has always been a composer praised for staying cutting edge in his compositional style throughout his career, as opposed to someone like Penderecki who had a similar "epiphany" of sorts and then changed to a more traditional style of composition.

"..Penderecki explained this shift by stating that he had come to feel that the experimentation of the avant-garde had gone too far from the expressive, non-formal qualities of Western music: _'The avant-garde gave one an illusion of universalism. The musical world of Stockhausen, Nono, Boulez and Cage was for us, the young - hemmed in by the aesthetics of socialist realism, then the official canon in our country - a liberation...I was quick to realize however, that this novelty, this experimentation and formal speculation, is more destructive than constructive; I realized the Utopian quality of its Promethean tone'._ Penderecki concluded that he was 'saved from the avant-garde snare of formalism by a return to tradition"

I more or less agree with Vesuvius on this one, I can see both sides of the argument, but personally enjoy a lot of the music in question such as Schoenberg and Ligeti. I think that phase of music had to happen, and I think that natural creators of music are like antennas of sorts and respond to their surroundings. I do think the avant-garde music was a legitimate _expression_, of things at the time. I think that the classical canon is enriched and more dynamic for having this sort of expression in it, but I also think the "atonal" (sorry to use a dirty word) phase of classical music has likely peaked already and we will continue to see more composers who share similar philosophies to Ligeti and Penderecki in terms of wanting to return to a more traditionalist style. I could be wrong though and what we will actually see is more of a continuing schism of sorts between the avant-garde and the traditionalists. Whatever the case I am certain we will continue to hear a lot of good new music as this process unfolds.


----------



## violadude (May 2, 2011)

I wonder how Penderecki feels about the fact that his most popular and beloved (relatively) pieces continue to be from his Avant-Garde phase.


----------



## GioCar (Oct 30, 2013)

kikko said:


> ....
> With modernism on the oder hand (IMO) the main goal of music became the constant research of innovation.
> 
> No matter how it sounds. If it's new, if it is based on a rigorous and logical system and if it breaks previous rules than it can't be wrong.
> ....


Luckily this is not true, otherwise music would have been disappeared a long time ago, after submerging us with a lot of rubbish...


----------



## Badinerie (May 3, 2008)

All music must engage us emotionally at some level. A core reaction rather than purely emotive one. 
It may be an unspoken sub-emotion, an unrecognised gestalt. But its there. If its not then we dont return to the work.
Our emotions are the seat of our understanding without them form and function are meaningless.


----------



## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

violadude said:


> I wonder how Penderecki feels about the fact that his most popular and beloved (relatively) pieces continue to be from his Avant-Garde phase.


I really enjoy select things from his different eras. His avant-garde stuff can get too intense for me after a while, a lot of his more traditional stuff can get a little samey for me after a while, I find a lot of it very dark and brooding. He has quite a few works that I really like though. Certainly a very skilled composer.


----------



## Andreas (Apr 27, 2012)

violadude said:


> I wonder how Penderecki feels about the fact that his most popular and beloved (relatively) pieces continue to be from his Avant-Garde phase.


That's mostly Kubrick's fault, isn't it? 
Penderecki is happy to play his early stuff in concert, even at a rock festival like he did in 2012. I think he, like other composers who abandoned the avantgarde style, knew very well that this would make him a target for criticism and ridicule.


----------



## Guest (Sep 19, 2014)

Hmmm, as I recall, having been alive for both his "phases," the prevailing feeling was disappointment. No targetting. Criticism, maybe. Ridicule, possibly later, I don't know.

At the time, it was pretty clearly disappointment. A feeling of having been betrayed.

And against the two, isolated remarks by two "avant-garde" composers (and a few other remarks along the same lines by people like Glass), there are countless people who either went into serialism or experimentalism and never went back out, countless people who right now are doing work that has nothing to do with the simple binary tonal/atonal.

As a side-note, those of us who felt disappointed, at first, gradually came around to the sense that perhaps Penderecki was not quite the spectacular talent of Ligeti or Cage or Lachenmann. That he had a few genuinely interesting pieces that nontheless explored a very small vein. Kind of like Crumb, I guess. Some really interesting things in the early seventies, but all very much cut out of the same cloth. (You don't mind me playing fast and loose with the old metaphors, do you?)

But perhaps that's just sour grapes.


----------



## kikko (Jun 19, 2014)

I admit I've used bad words to express my opinion (this is not an excuse but it's probably due to the fact that I cannot express myself as well as I do in italian).

I'm not here to say "what a crap music you're listening at". I have no right to judge your taste (I shouldn't even specify that).

Then I try to riformulate my question.

Since "beauty" is a matter of taste, on which kind of basis do you evaluate new music?

I mean If a guy says that the music you listen at is bad, this doesn't mean it is bad music.

On the other hand if you like the music you listen at, this doesn't imply that this is a good quality music.


----------



## Triplets (Sep 4, 2014)

kikko said:


> I think that from the baroque era to the late romantic era the main goal of music was to arouse feelings in audience and the innovations was aimed to find new ways to express these feelings.
> 
> With modernism on the oder hand (IMO) the main goal of music became the constant research of innovation.
> 
> ...


I do think that Modern ( primarily post Romantic era) music emphasizes form and structure and appeals more to the brain than the
Heart. It does a good job of portraying feelings such as loneliness, alienation, anxiety, and despair. Love, tenderness, solace--not so much.


----------



## kikko (Jun 19, 2014)

Triplets said:


> I do think that Modern ( primarily post Romantic era) music emphasizes form and structure and appeals more to the brain than the
> Heart. It does a good job of portraying feelings such as loneliness, alienation, anxiety, and despair. Love, tenderness, solace--not so much.


Yes the point of my thought was the kind of feelings expressed.


----------



## Skilmarilion (Apr 6, 2013)

science said:


> I don't mind at all that the world is filled with people who like Adele or Tchaikovsky more than they like Babbitt; there's room here for all of us.


Adele and Tchaikovsky in the same sentence?


----------



## Guest (Sep 19, 2014)

Triplets said:


> I do think that Modern ( primarily post Romantic era) music emphasizes form and structure and appeals more to the brain than the
> Heart.


So the testimony of all the people who have posted so far who do genuinely like "modern" music is so much chopped liver?



Triplets said:


> It does a good job of portraying feelings such as loneliness, alienation, anxiety, and despair. Love, tenderness, solace--not so much.


Wait a tick! Loneliness, alienation, anxiety, and despair are brain feelings as opposed to heart feelings?

Otherwise, you cannot have listened to very much "modern" music if this is your conclusion.

And otherotherwise, I'd like to inject the possibility that music does not convey anything--that different listeners will get different things out of different pieces.

This, for instance, makes me feel good:

http://ilsemusic.info/album/identent

It might not do the same for you, however.


----------



## Morimur (Jan 23, 2014)

violadude said:


> I wonder how Penderecki feels about the fact that his most popular and beloved (relatively) pieces continue to be from his Avant-Garde phase.


He's gone soft, to his detriment.


----------



## Guest (Sep 19, 2014)

I take zero issue with Penderecki's stylistic change. He felt somehow limited by his early medium, as if he had little more to say on sonorities, so he tried something different. 

However, when it comes to most of Penderecki's later works (with exceptions), I find he's simply not as good of a neo-romantic as others (say, later Rautavaara). But again, from how he felt about his old style, he probably would've had some rehashes with that style too. 

"A feeling of having been betrayed" sounds like utter nonsense to me, but then, that's just me forgetting that the whole "dodecaphonic police" attitude really does exist.


----------



## Andreas (Apr 27, 2012)

Triplets said:


> I do think that Modern ( primarily post Romantic era) music emphasizes form and structure and appeals more to the brain than the
> Heart. It does a good job of portraying feelings such as loneliness, alienation, anxiety, and despair. Love, tenderness, solace--not so much.


A concept does not equal a work. And a particularly clever and/or complex concept does not equal a great work. That's for sure. But it applies to all musical styles and techniques.
Apparently, not everybody needs perfect consonances and major triads to feel happy, cheerful, grateful, exalted, fulfilled or even transcendend. But as far as I am concerned, major key harmonies can produce extraordinary effects, especially if the overall harmonic language of a piece is much more ambivalent. Wagner, Bruckner, Mussorgsky are all, for me, great examples of that. In terms of modern/contemporary music, I love the way Schnittke incorporates diatonic and non-diatonic music. It seems that he is not willing to give up "old-fashioned" harmonies. And why should he? Having them at one's disposal just broadens the arsenal. Making it all fit, I'd suppose, is the hard part.


----------



## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

Morimur said:


> Ligeti is one of the greatest composers of our time, but blaming Schoenberg for the 'evils' of atonality and serialism is so passé and wrong. His music is breathtakingly beautiful, lush and full of feeling -- that's right, FEELING. If one isn't moved by Schoenberg's music, one should check one's pulse... and musical taste.


Ligeti is one of the greatest composers of our time exactly because he felt that way.


----------



## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

some guy said:


> pretty clearly disappointment. A feeling of having been betrayed.
> 
> And against the two,* isolated remarks* by two "avant-garde" composers


Ok, I think I'm arrived in a parallel dimension where Nono and Stockhausen are popular like Michael Jackson and the Beatles.


----------



## kikko (Jun 19, 2014)

some guy said:


> This, for instance, makes me feel good:
> 
> http://ilsemusic.info/album/identent
> 
> It might not do the same for you, however.


And this is music, this is art right?

I'm just asking.


----------



## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

kikko said:


> And this is music, this is art right?
> 
> I'm just asking.


It's the sound of your car radio when you're driving through the mountains and you can't find a station to tune into.


----------



## kikko (Jun 19, 2014)

starthrower said:


> It's the sound of your car radio when you're driving through the mountains and you can't find a station to tune into.


And then I ask you what people asked me to answer.

Why can't be this considered music or art? What are music and art for you?


----------



## Andreas (Apr 27, 2012)

kikko said:


> And this is music, this is art right?
> 
> I'm just asking.


I suppose it's either music or "music", or neither music nor "music", depending on your philosophy.


----------



## kikko (Jun 19, 2014)

Andreas said:


> I suppose it's either music or "music", or neither music nor "music", depending on your philosophy.


That means that music is strictly a subjective philosophical matter.

Then If I say that everything that was written in the past is NOT music nobody could contradict me because If you say that I'm wrong that means that you can clearly tell me what is music and what is not.

In short you have a definition of music, you know what is music and what is art.

I'm not trying to create confusion or flames, I'm just wondering if there are still limits between music and the rest.


----------



## Andreas (Apr 27, 2012)

kikko said:


> That means that music is strictly a subjective philosophical matter.
> 
> Then If I say that everything that was written in the past is NOT music nobody could contradict me because If you say that I'm wrong that means that you can clearly tell me what is music and what is not.


I'm sure if you said that, you would have your reasons for it. Music is a word and its official meaning can be found in the dictionary. But what it means to you, or anyone else, is a different thing. Everyone is free to define it whichever way they want. If they want to define it at all, that is. Not defining anything would probably be the greatest form of freedom. But that can make conversations difficult, because they usually depend on everybody being on more or less the same page in terms of the meaning of words.


----------



## Guest (Sep 19, 2014)

Words are an ideological construct that come to mean what they mean over the course of history. In other words, your example is silly; if it's widely accepted as music, it's your job to tear down the ideology behind the word "music". Why on earth would we submit ourselves to total subjectivity and have to defend Stockhausen or J.S. Bach as composers of music? If someone walks up to a group and says "the sky is red, prove me wrong" (yes, yes, i know about light, reflection, refraction, etc, it's just an example), that person doesn't deserve the time of day.

In other words, the burden of proof is yours. Argue your case adequately or have a good day.


----------



## Guest (Sep 19, 2014)

Andreas said:


> I'm sure if you said that, you would have your reasons for it. Music is a word and its official meaning can be found in the dictionary. But what it means to you, or anyone else, is a different thing. Everyone is free to define it whichever way they want. If they want to define it at all, that is. Not defining anything would probably be the greatest form of freedom. But that can make conversations difficult, because they usually depend on everybody being on more or less the same page in terms of the meaning of words.


Exactly. Total subjectivity implies that I can state that my car is actually a cat, my computer is a toilet, my right arm is Ludwig Van Beethoven, my left arm is a parking ticket, and this whole forum isn't actually visited by real people! And as you say....this total subjectivity is chaos. I can say to a man "I read a good book today" and he can respond "You did WHAT with my daughter?!"

So by all means, embrace chaos. Don't ask me to come along though. I'm going to stick with believing that music is what the culture of Planet Earth has decided it to be.


----------



## kikko (Jun 19, 2014)

arcaneholocaust said:


> I'm going to stick with believing that *music is* what the culture of Planet Earth has decided it to be.


Well actually this is a definition. You're basically saying that music is everything that is considered music, but it doesn't make any sense to use the word to define in the definition itself.

I used an extreme example trying to explain that there are no more limits between music and the rest since music became a total subjective matter.


----------



## julianoq (Jan 29, 2013)

I understand the point of the OP that some of the modern music does not say anything emotionally to him. People are different.

But listening to some of Rautavaara's works (and many other contemporary composers), I find amazing how someone can listen to something like this and don't feel anything. And it was premiered in 1994..


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

By the very nature of our organisms and the way we are affected by sound and the organization of sound we call music, all music can evoke feelings in us. All music is "expressive." But it doesn't follow from that that all music is equally expressive.

What we feel when we hear music, and how intensely we feel it, depends on the music and on how we receive it. How we receive it depends upon who we are and on the circumstances of our hearing it. This is quite variable from one hearer to another. Variable does not mean arbitrary; there are objective factors which are present and determine our feeling responses, and there must be attributes common to human beings which limit the possible responses and tend to produce similar kinds of responses in different people. But whatever the variables, the potential for evoking some feeling of some kind is always present whatever the music. 

The interesting question is not whether some music "expresses" feelings and some is "just intellectual" (it isn't), but what makes a given piece of music "express" (or evoke in us) feelings of certain kinds and intensities and not others. The "intellectual" versus "emotional" distinction is not meaningless; it would be strange and counterintuitive if there were not in fact certain sounds and patterns of sound that did not have stronger effects than others on different neural receptors and their intellectual and emotional functions. Different kinds of music must have different expressive potentials, and the historical development of music is not just a process of finding new ways to express the same things, but of finding sounds that can express things that were not expressible before. 

Like music's capacity to express and evoke feelings, the degree to which styles of music engage the intellect versus the emotions varies enormously. Many listeners feel that certain kinds of "modern" music appeal more to their minds than to their feelings, that such music may be "interesting" but that it doesn't move them, or does so in ways they do not enjoy. There is no question that the twentieth century brought about an unprecedented intensification of engagement by composers in the intellectual aspects of musical composition. This was in part a natural result of the extreme complexification of music's means of expression - particularly harmony and orchestration - during the nineteenth century; to put it a bit simplistically, composers found themselves with a lot more material to work with and an immense range of choices (courtesy of Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner and company), and so the need to create order out of a potential chaos of form and feeling was intensely felt. Schoenberg, with his innovations and his "system," was, in terms of his influence (regardless, it should be said, of his intentions), probably the central figure in this twentieth-century "intellectualization" of music. But the other major movement or trend in early twentieth-century music, neoclassicism, in its explicit and deliberate rejection of Romanticism's frank emotionality and its emphasis on the craft - the formal aspects - of musical composition, contributed nearly as much as the twelve-tone movement to what many people still mean when they express discomfort with, or dislike of, the "intellectual" and "unemotional" qualities of "modern" music. And since that time, composers have moved music in an infinite variety of directions and have, in the spirit of modern art in general, rationalized their aesthetic approaches to an intense degree, sometimes becoming more celebrated for what they've said about music than for the actual music they've written. 

We don't have to agree with the conception of modern music as more intellectual than expressive, but it's useful to know where that conception comes from. And the truth is that for those unsympathetic to a lot of the musical developments of the last century - those for whom the music actually does have little to say, or at least little that gives pleasure - that conception can be pretty hard to avoid.


----------



## kikko (Jun 19, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> /cut


Thanks that was a really solid argument.


----------



## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> Like music's capacity to express and evoke feelings, the degree to which styles of music engage the intellect versus the emotions varies enormously. Many listeners feel that certain kinds of "modern" music appeal more to their minds than to their feelings, that such music may be "interesting" but that it doesn't move them, or does so in ways they do not enjoy.


In my experience, this is primarily expressed by those who do not enjoy the music very much or at all. Those who do enjoy it generally find it just as emotionally powerful as that of earlier eras, or more so, albeit in different ways. For those who dislike it, the idea of the music's lacking emotion gives them a way to express their discomfort and give it an "objective" guise.

But what is intellectual pleasure in this case? When I listen to Schoenberg, Boulez, Stravinsky, or Ligeti, I am struck first and foremost by the sonority, by the melodies/motifs, or by the harmony; in other words, my pleasure is _sensual_. It derives from the sound of what I am hearing, not the construct behind it, which in many cases is so opaque to the listener as to be invisible.


----------



## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

Woodduck said:


> We don't have to agree with the conception of modern music as more intellectual than expressive, but it's useful to know where that conception comes from. And the truth is that for those unsympathetic to a lot of the musical developments of the last century - those for whom the music actually does have little to say, or at least little that gives pleasure - that conception can be pretty hard to avoid.


Your whole post was interesting and very well expressed. Thank you. I find this last paragraph especially relevant to discussions such as these. Many people have started threads or posted on TC expressing dismay (or worse) with modern music. Their _experience_ with the newer music _seems to them_ to be profoundly different from what they've previously experienced and enjoyed.

The music sounds bizarre, unpleasant, and unlike anything they've heard. How could anyone like it? We all know people who don't like opera or maybe Baroque music, but those people in general accept that their tastes are different and don't express dismay or bewilderment that people could possibly enjoy those works. This new music is somehow different. In order to make sense of this odd, unpleasant new music, some may hypothesize several possible explanations - the music is purely for intellectual pursuits, the music only expresses negative emotions, people are pretending they like it, etc. The point is the music _does not make sense_ to them. For them, there's too large a break with what they know. Obviously the new music is not like the old music in fundamental ways.

I feel it's critical for those "shocked" by modern music to understand that, while the music is different (all new eras are), composers of modern music write with essentially similar intent as earlier composers. Music is meant to be experienced and enjoyed. Some enjoyed modern music immediately, and others required much listening to "learn" the new language. Either way, once one "gets" the language, the music can be appreciated in similar ways to older music.


----------



## Guest (Sep 19, 2014)

arcaneholocaust said:


> "A feeling of having been betrayed" sounds like utter nonsense to me, but then, that's just me forgetting that the whole "dodecaphonic police" attitude really does exist.


"'Dodecaphonic police' attitude" sounds like utter nonsense to _me._

Besides which, the pieces we were enjoying in the sixties were not dodecaphonic at all. So not only nonsense, but errant nonsense as well. And this was long before I personally (thanks for your personal slam of my feelings, btw) was listening to any kind of 12-tone music at all. So it would have been quite a feat for me to have been able to pull off a "'docecaphonic police' attitude."


----------



## binkley (Feb 2, 2013)

julianoq said:


> But listening to some of Rautavaara's works (and many other contemporary composers), I find amazing how someone can listen to something like this and don't feel anything.


Thank you julianoq. That was beautiful, and now I have a new composer to learn about!

I sympathize with the OP because I used to feel the same way. But then I actually started listening to 20th century music and found the reality was quite different from my preconceptions. I started with composers I found approachable -- Mahler, Strauss, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Copland, a few others. After a few years of this I found that my listening perspectives had somehow shifted, and I suddenly enjoyed pieces I once dismissed as unlistenable -- even the dreaded Schoenberg!

As to some music being purely mathematical or intellectual, for me that comes closer to describing certain baroque pieces (eg, Musical Offering or Art of the Fugue) than any modern/contemporary pieces I'm familiar with. First and foremost it's always visceral appeal (or lack thereof). Anything intellectual comes later, when I read analyses or critiques of the piece.


----------



## Guest (Sep 19, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> There is no question that the twentieth century brought about an unprecedented intensification of engagement by composers in the intellectual aspects of musical composition.


There is too a question. I'm questioning it right now.

Start hanging out with some composers would be my suggestion. Oh, they're fun!! Clean and well-behaved and no trouble at all.


----------



## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

kikko said:


> I think that from the baroque era to the late romantic era the main goal of music was to arouse feelings in audience and the innovations was aimed to find new ways to express these feelings.
> 
> With modernism on the oder hand (IMO) the main goal of music became the constant research of innovation.
> 
> ...


I guess I will be the odd man out and state that I reject all of the premises behind this question:

I don't believe the arousal or expression of feelings was the main goal of music in any era, including "from the baroque era to the late romantic era." It might have been the principal way in which music connects to other humanistic concerns, but this is far from the same thing. I believe the main goal of music in these eras was creating enthralling sequences of sounds capable of holding the interest and involvement of listeners, often for as long a time as possible. Incorporating structures isomorphic with patterns of emotional life and expression was one particularly effective way of accomplishing this goal - but, IMO, not the goal itself.

My other major source of bemusement in this thread is the apparent need of some modern music lovers to defend the music they love by claiming it is just as expressive as earlier music. Much of it is, of course. But why need it be? Why should it aspire to be? Well designed patterns can inspire awe and can be enthralling without overtly or intentionally expressing emotion of any kind. Just as above, I don't think emotion and expression is the be all and end all, and certainly not the arbiter of aesthetic value.


----------



## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

binkley said:


> I sympathize with the OP because I used to feel the same way. But then I actually started listening to 20th century music and found the reality was quite different from my preconceptions. I started with composers I found approachable -- Mahler, Strauss, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Copland, a few others. After a few years of this I found that my listening perspectives had somehow shifted, and I suddenly enjoyed pieces I once dismissed as unlistenable -- even the dreaded Schoenberg!


Your experience was very similar to mine. My "listening perspectives" have slowly morphed to allow me to enjoy vastly more modern music than before. I constantly am amazed at the change and find myself wondering how I could ever have disliked some of the works I love today.


----------



## Guest (Sep 19, 2014)

some guy said:


> "'Dodecaphonic police' attitude" sounds like utter nonsense to _me._
> 
> Besides which, the pieces we were enjoying in the sixties were not dodecaphonic at all. So not only nonsense, but errant nonsense as well. And this was long before I personally (thanks for your personal slam of my feelings, btw) was listening to any kind of 12-tone music at all. So it would have been quite a feat for me to have been able to pull off a "'docecaphonic police' attitude."


The term typically refers to the most intense Darmstadts, but the implication is a general "avant-garde or die" kinda thing.


----------



## Guest (Sep 19, 2014)

kikko said:


> Well actually this is a definition. You're basically saying that music is everything that is considered music, but it doesn't make any sense to use the word to define in the definition itself.


Not in the sense of defining a word in a dictionary, no. But the definitions of a word develop over decades, centuries, millenniums... Like I said, a word is inherently backed by ideology. The word "cat" doesn't refer to a feline because there is a universal law that connects felines to the three letters "C A T" in succession. The word "cat" refers to a feline simply because we decided that it must be so over time, in order to avoid confusion. Likewise, music is a term for a really complicated and diverse form of sound-related "stuff". What we know as music, we call "music", and it should not be our burden to defend the words we invented. If people disagree, big deal - bring something new to the table.

/reallyconfusingwording


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

some guy said:


> There is too a question. I'm questioning it right now.
> 
> Start hanging out with some composers would be my suggestion. Oh, they're fun!! Clean and well-behaved and no trouble at all.


Cute as ever, some guy. :lol:

20th century art came to us accompanied, and often introduced, by a flood of explanatory and justificatory verbiage such as no previous period in history had ever approached. Artists participated in the deluge, and were often themselves caught up in arcane conceptualizing about what they were doing and why. Talk about art, and artists talking, wasn't anything new, but the intensity of it certainly was. Times were changing, and art, like everything elde, was moving, and fast. I'm sure you're aware that there are whole books devoted to what modern artists, including composers, had to say about, for, and against one art form or artist or another. It's not obscure or secret information. So, given that artists themselves (not to mention their intermediaries with the public, critics) seemed to feel that _concepts of art_, as an adjunct to (or in some cases a replacement for) the art object itself, were an essential aspect of what they were about, why would people not directly engaged in artistic production, but subjected to the new and difficult-to-understand artistic products which they were ill-equpped to comprehend or enjoy, not feel that it was their brains rather than their hearts which were being addressed? Many people, sooner or later, caught up with various new forms of art and found that they did indeed say something meaningful to them, albeit something unfamiliar, and many came to find the experience enjoyable. Others did not and do not. Which is just fine.

I suspect it's easy now, given all the kinds of music from all times and places which we've heard in our lifetimes, to underestimate the radicalism and the sense of crisis that existed in the minds of both artists and their audience in the early twentieth century. The cultural changes in general were enormous, and the first world war seemed to both embody and precipitate the new era. People cope with the new by talking about it, and artists are no different. We still live with, as a legacy of the "modernist" era, a lot of chatter about art, much of it pointless, incomprehensible, or laughable (love those interviews with artists in which they "explain" what their work means!), but it seems at last to have lost its sense of mission, its justificatory edge. So now, it seems, we can just listen to any sort of music, old or new, familiar or strange, without any member of any faction or school claiming to be a spokesperson for the new world order and implying that if we don't get it we are as passe as saddle shoes (or have they come back too?).

That, at least, is a mercy.


----------



## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

kikko said:


> Well actually this is a definition. You're basically saying that music is everything that is considered music, but it doesn't make any sense to use the word to define in the definition itself.
> 
> I used an extreme example trying to explain that there are no more limits between music and the rest since music became a total subjective matter.


I must support my arcane colleague here: His definition: music is that which is considered music, is in fact a respectable position in the world of art and aesthetic philosophy. It is usually called the institutional definition. In general, however, there is no reason to expect complex concepts like music to have definitions. They don't, except in the trivial dictionary sense. As Wittgenstein argued, the things to which a complex concept like music applies are linked by clouds of family resemblance, but one will not find a single shared element that simultaneously unites all instances and distinguishes such instances from the nonmusical. Wittgenstein used the example of the concept "game" to make this point.


----------



## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

There aren't very many composers who have spent as much time justifying their own music and theories of music as Wagner...and probably none who have declared their own way that of "the future" quite as heartily.

Don't forget that many 19th century composers, especially Brahms, were accused of dry intellectualism. I remember from reading La Grange that Mahler's orchestration was frequently ridiculed as "over-intellectualized".

Your earlier post also left out the Impressionists, who were the first to explicitly react against the explicit emotionalism of Romanticism. Why?


----------



## kikko (Jun 19, 2014)

I'm here because I really want to give a chance to modern music. If I'm posing questions it's because I want to mature my thought and I want to understand what I'm misunderstanding. 

Maybe next year I'll read this post and I'll say "oh my gosh I was so outmode".

Anyways I've recently bought a book about John Cage's philosophy and I've just started reading it. 

But when it comes to face with some complex new music I feel confused.

I've read the manual by Piston but there's a really shot section at the ending of the book about modern music.

It's pretty hard to find out some books which treat exclusively modern music. 

Can you suggest me some books?

Thanks!


----------



## dgee (Sep 26, 2013)

EdwardBast said:


> I guess I will be the odd man out and state that I reject all of the premises behind this question:
> 
> I don't believe the arousal or expression of feelings was the main goal of music in any era, including "from the baroque era to the late romantic era." It might have been the principal way in which music connects to other humanistic concerns, but this is far from the same thing. I believe the main goal of music in these eras was creating enthralling sequences of sounds capable of holding the interest and involvement of listeners, often for as long a time as possible. Incorporating structures isomorphic with patterns of emotional life and expression was one particularly effective way of accomplishing this goal - but, IMO, not the goal itself.
> 
> My other major source of bemusement in this thread is the apparent need of some modern music lovers to defend the music they love by claiming it is just as expressive as earlier music. Much of it is, of course. But why need it be? Why should it aspire to be? Well designed patterns can inspire awe and can be enthralling without overtly or intentionally expressing emotion of any kind. Just as above, I don't think emotion and expression is the be all and end all, and certainly not the arbiter of aesthetic value.


I'd agree with much of what you said here, Edward. I think the most important "feeling" I have when listening to music is "enjoyment" or "delight" that arises through listening to good music ("oooh, this is gooood!" I think to myself) and is not necessarily linked to the "emotions" conveyed if any. Excuse the scare quotes!

That said, I do find expressiveness (which is a know it when I hear it sort of thing for me) is a quality in greater abundance and richer variety in music from the 20th century to now, in general, and that's one of the features that attracts me to it


----------



## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

kikko said:


> It's pretty hard to find out some books which treat exclusively modern music.
> 
> Can you suggest me some books?


Paul Griffiths: Modern Music and After (there are other versions of this book under other names)

As there is no "20th century common practice" though, it may be much more helpful to refer to books on individual composers:
Eric Walter White: Stravinsky, The Man and his Works
Allen Shawn: Schoenberg's Journey
Peter Burt: The Music of Toru Takemitsu
Hill/Simone: Messiaen


----------



## dgee (Sep 26, 2013)

kikko said:


> I'm here because I really want to give a chance to modern music. If I'm posing questions it's because I want to mature my thought and I want to understand what I'm misunderstanding.
> 
> Maybe next year I'll read this post and I'll say "oh my gosh I was so outmode".
> 
> ...


Why not just listen? There are so many threads and introductory guides online you really don't need to ask again - go away and check it out and then come back and tell us what you found!

Or if you really want to read, the first 3/4 of "The Rest is Noise" is pretty good introduction. The last bit is very US-centric but interesting none-the-less.


----------



## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

dgee said:


> I'd agree with much of what you said here, Edward. I think the most important "feeling" I have when listening to music is "enjoyment" or "delight" that arises through listening to good music ("oooh, this is gooood!" I think to myself) and is not necessarily linked to the "emotions" conveyed if any. Excuse the scare quotes!
> 
> That said, I do find expressiveness (which is a know it when I hear it sort of thing for me) is a quality in greater abundance and richer variety in music from the 20th century to now, in general, and that's one of the features that attracts me to it


I agree with all of this. The point you make in the first paragraph is particularly important, I think. I wonder (1) how much of the emotion being discussed above in this thread comes down to aesthetic delight of the kind you describe, and (2) whether those discussing such emotion and expression are aware of or are concerned with this distinction?


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Mahlerian said:


> There aren't very many composers who have spent as much time justifying their own music and theories of music as Wagner...and probably none who have declared their own way that of "the future" quite as heartily.
> 
> Don't forget that many 19th century composers, especially Brahms, were accused of dry intellectualism. I remember from reading La Grange that Mahler's orchestration was frequently ridiculed as "over-intellectualized".
> 
> Your earlier post also left out the Impressionists, who were the first to explicitly react against the explicit emotionalism of Romanticism. Why?


Wagner was... well, Wagner! But of course you're right: the sense of the world accelerating, with its attendant anxieties, didn't begin in 1900. The 19th century, politically, economically, scientifically, and artistically, obviously prepared the way for the 20th, and the Romantics did nurture the idea of innovation and progress as an important aspect of artistic achievement and criterion of value. Everything is a matter of degree. Besides, It didn't take long for Wagner's operas to establish themselves in the standard repertoire. Wagner may have intellectualized and written endlessly about everything under the sun - but, beyond thinking it might be helpful to remember the spurious names of a few leitmotivs, the opera-going public had no doubt about what parts of their organisms his music was addressed to. They got it, and pretty fast.


----------



## Guest (Sep 19, 2014)

N.B.--I wrote this before I had read Woodduck's most recent post. Oh well.



Woodduck said:


> 20th century art came to us accompanied, and often introduced, by a flood of explanatory and justificatory verbiage such as no previous period in history had ever approached.


Except, of course for that pesky 19th century. So easy to forget, but characterized by floods of explanatory and justificatory verbiage, some of which (_pace_ Wagner) even preceded the music by some years. And the 19th was the century that saw the great shift from audiences attending concerts in order to hear new music to audiences attending concerts in order to hear old music. That's a pretty significant shift of sensibility there. Probably more significant than anything that happened in the next century, which was very much and in every way an extension of the 19th century, not a break from it.



Woodduck said:


> It's not obscure or secret information.


No, but it's mostly made up information. Or at the very least it is over-stated information. And it has gotten increasingly over-stated just in the short 60+ years I've been around.



Woodduck said:


> ...their brains rather than their hearts which were being addressed?


Um, looking for some excuse for rejecting the unfamiliar? (Speaking of the nineteenth century, that was the origin of the "brains rather than heart" criticism, you know. Indeed, I can't think of any criticism of "modern" music that didn't have its start in the nineteenth century if not earlier.)



Woodduck said:


> I suspect it's easy now, given all the kinds of music from all times and places which we've heard in our lifetimes, to underestimate the radicalism and the sense of crisis that existed in the minds of both artists and their audience in the early twentieth century.


Actually, what's gotten easier in actual practice is to over-estimate the radicalism and the sense of crisis that existed in et cetera.

The cultural changes in the nineteenth century in general were enormous, and the Napoleonic wars and the ideas of Darwin and the revolutions (especially in 1848) seemed to both embody and precipitate the new era.



Woodduck said:


> ...implying that if we don't get it we are as passe as saddle shoes....


I've seen a whole passel of "implyings" recently. This is one of them. It is too **** easy to bolster an otherwise unbolsterable notion with the word "imply." Way too easy.

But I digress. There seems to be a concerted and almost universal amnesia about the century that preceded the twentieth. Possibly because people in the early twentieth century were keen to distance themselves and their problems (which were continuations, mainly) from the century before. Makes one seem/feel more unique, you know. And the mere scope of the extremely efficient ways to kill lots of people all at once has bedazzled almost everyone with how different the twentieth century was from the nineteenth.

Well, none of that is obscure or secret. Just studiously ignored.


----------



## Guest (Sep 19, 2014)

kikko said:


> Can you suggest me some books?
> 
> Thanks!


David Cope, New Directions in Music


----------



## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> Wagner may have intellectualized and written endlessly about everything under the sun - but, beyond thinking it might be helpful to remember the spurious names of a few leitmotivs, the opera-going public had no doubt about what parts of their organisms his music was addressed to. They got it, and pretty fast.


But the question was not about popularity, it was about whether the influx of writing about music by composers was proof of a sea change towards intellectualization.

Furthermore, I'm not aware of any composers whose music requires an understanding of the methods used to produce it for enjoyment. Often, these discussions have an undercurrent of "this is intellectual music because it requires the hearer to understand things on some abstruse theoretical level inaccessible to the layman". This is false, and the sooner this supposition disappears, the sooner people will be able to hold more meaningful conversations regarding the audible content of the music, which does not consist of theory or abstraction.


----------



## Triplets (Sep 4, 2014)

some guy said:


> So the testimony of all the people who have posted so far who do genuinely like "modern" music is so much chopped liver?
> 
> Wait a tick! Loneliness, alienation, anxiety, and despair are brain feelings as opposed to heart feelings?
> 
> ...


 You assume that I don't listen to modern music. That would be incorrect. 
The emotional experience that I get from listening to, for eample, Ligetti's second String Quartet (currently playing as I type this) is different, however, than what I get from listening to (for example) Tchaikovsky's Second Quartet..
I would also not cite the opinions of other posters as "proof" that Modern Music has value. The relative paucity of Modern Music in Concert Halls would suggest that most Classical Music Lovers don't want to hear it. Are we therefore to infer that the relative lack of an audience for such music is "proof" that it has no worth?


----------



## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

I'm starting to feel the strong question of why we keep trying to monopolize each era into one unit. The modern expression is not the same as the romantic... it's an evolution of the human psyche - a deeper exploration of life. The more humans inhabit this realm of existence, the more subtleties they will explore. 

It's no longer the blunt emotions of simple relationships and emotions - it's an exploration of being conscious of abstract realities where things no longer adhere to our previous concepts of ourselves. In that, it is utterly beautiful. In the comparison of the overtly gross emotions of personal love, lose, friendship, yada-yada, this new expression will seem quite ugly. But that ugliness only appears in a mind that is operating on one track. A track solidified by the past, so it seems safe. But nothing is safe in this world of constant change.


----------



## binkley (Feb 2, 2013)

kikko said:


> Can you suggest me some books?


I had the same questions as you. I got Aaron Copland's book, and I got Alex Ross's book. But then I got ambitious, and before I read them I went about collecting their recommended recordings. And of course I listened to them as I collected them. Funny thing though, even before I'd collected them all, I found that I "got it", and didn't need to read the books anymore!

Mind you, they're good books, but you can certainly skip them and just listen to more music. You don't have to start with the hardest of hard-core avant garde stuff. Start with what you like and branch out. Surely there must be some 20th century composer you find approachable: Shostakovich? Debussy? Ravel? Mahler? They all used elements found in more challenging music, and once you get really familiar with them, the more challenging pieces may become approachable as well. Or not. That's OK too! It's meant to be enjoyed, not stressed over.


----------



## Guest (Sep 20, 2014)

Triplets said:


> You assume that I don't listen to modern music.


No, I _concluded_ from your conclusion that your experience of "modern" music was limited.



Triplets said:


> The emotional experience that I get from listening to, for eample(sic), Ligetti's second String Quartet (currently playing as I type this) is different, however, than what I get from listening to (for example) Tchaikovsky's Second Quartet.


The emotional experience that I get from listening to, for example, Tchaikovsky's second symphony is different from what I get from listening to Tchaikovsky's second ballet. Not surprisingly. They're different pieces.



Triplets said:


> I would also not cite the opinions of other posters as "proof" that Modern Music has value.


Nor would I. That would be silly. (Nor _did_ I, as your "also" suggests.)


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

EdwardBast said:


> I guess I will be the odd man out and state that I reject all of the premises behind this question:
> 
> I don't believe the arousal or expression of feelings was the main goal of music in any era, including "from the baroque era to the late romantic era." It might have been the principal way in which music connects to other humanistic concerns, but this is far from the same thing. *I believe the main goal of music in these eras was creating enthralling sequences of sounds *capable of holding the interest and involvement of listeners, often for as long a time as possible. *Incorporating structures isomorphic with patterns of emotional life and expression was one particularly effective way of accomplishing this goal - but, IMO, not the goal itself.*My other major source of bemusement in this thread is the apparent need of some modern music lovers to defend the music they love by claiming it is just as expressive as earlier music. Much of it is, of course. But why need it be? Why should it aspire to be? Well designed patterns can inspire awe and can be enthralling without overtly or intentionally expressing emotion of any kind. Just as above, I don't think emotion and expression is the be all and end all, and certainly not the arbiter of aesthetic value.


I'm afraid I can't agree with this. Art can be treated as a perceptual game or sensual indulgence if that is all we want to do with it, but "sequences of sounds," or of patterns on canvas, or of words on a page, however interesting, pleasing, or "enthralling" they may be to the aesthetic sense, have not been pursued as ends in themselves by most human beings throughout most of their time on earth. Art isn't just a way of decorating the environment, training our perceptual faculties, or distracting us from mundane concerns, even though it may do all those things. Most people expect art to _say_ something to them. That communication may be quite intangible and indescribable in words, but people know when it's happening and when it isn't, and when it happens they feel a unique kind of gratification and satisfaction, a sense not merely of "this is pleasant" or "this is interesting" but of "this is what life means to me." Speaking as a creative and performing artist in both music and visual art, I can say that although the expressive intent of the creative act may never be verbalized and may exist largely on a subconscious level during the creative process, it is the ultimate criterion of what "works" on the perceptual level - the level of sounds, colors, and patterns - and the irresistible director of the aesthetic choices I make that determine whether the art I produce, or the music I perform, is going to give people the kind of experience they're looking for. "Structures isomorphic with patterns of emotional life," with all their potential power to touch people in ways various, deep, and subtle, are not merely shtick to keep people entertained. If they were, I would cede the stage to folks who are better comedians than I.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Mahlerian said:


> But the question was not about popularity, it was about whether the influx of writing about music by composers was proof of a sea change towards intellectualization.
> 
> Furthermore, I'm not aware of any composers whose music requires an understanding of the methods used to produce it for enjoyment. Often, these discussions have an undercurrent of "this is intellectual music because it requires the hearer to understand things on some abstruse theoretical level inaccessible to the layman". This is false, and the sooner this supposition disappears, the sooner people will be able to hold more meaningful conversations regarding the audible content of the music, which does not consist of theory or abstraction.


Neither is my comment about popularity. You brought up Wagner as evidence that the phenomenon of artists and critics talking extensively about art as an integral part of presenting that art to the public was not new in the twentieth century. Of course I never said talk about art was new, merely that it reached unprecedented proportions, and did so concurrently with the production of styles of art which were initially, and to a great extent subsequently (and to some extent still), baffling to said public. Wagner was an extreme individual case of an artist for whom thinking and writing about what he was doing was as important and necessary to him as doing it. But he never regarded his theorizing as a gateway to public comprehension, and in fact - this is the point of the remark you quote - no such gateway was needed, despite the initial shock of the new his work created. Whether such a gateway was needed for some of the art movements of the 20th century may be debated; certainly people writing about art often behaved as if it was. And my original point is not to prove that it is; I completely agree that art must speak for itself, and stand or fall without special pleading. I still find it an interesting question why those of us who lived through a substantial part of the century recently past were inundated with so much such pleading wherever the "new" in art was on display.


----------



## Marschallin Blair (Jan 23, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> Neither is my comment about popularity. You brought up Wagner as evidence that the phenomenon of artists and critics talking extensively about art as an integral part of presenting that art to the public was not new in the twentieth century. Of course I never said talk about art was new, merely that it reached unprecedented proportions, and did so concurrently with the production of styles of art which were initially, and to a great extent subsequently (and to some extent still), baffling to said public. Wagner was an extreme individual case of an artist for whom thinking and writing about what he was doing was as important and necessary to him as doing it. But he never regarded his theorizing as a gateway to public comprehension, and in fact - this is the point of the remark you quote - no such gateway was needed, despite the initial shock of the new his work created. Whether such a gateway was needed for some of the art movements of the 20th century may be debated; certainly people writing about art often behaved as if it was. And my original point is not to prove that it is; I completely agree that art must speak for itself, and stand or fall without special pleading. I still find it an interesting question why those of us who lived through a substantial part of the century recently past were inundated with so much such pleading wherever the "new" in art was on display.


Those who can, _do_.

Those, who can't _teach_. . . or theorize.

The art critic Hilton Kramer, who incidentally was a huge Kandinsky fan, said that he couldn't understand a lot of modernist paintings _without _an explanation as to _what_ they were about.

Wagner's legions of cultivated fans (and a few uncultivated ones), thank God, have no such problem. The music intuitively and immediately touches you.


----------



## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> Whether such a gateway was needed for some of the art movements of the 20th century may be debated; certainly people writing about art often behaved as if it was.


I suppose a case like this could be made for Babbitt's _The Composer as Specialist_, but even there I am sure that the gateway in question would not have to be anything other than one of listening comprehension and familiarity with a certain type of listening that is in some ways different from that of earlier Western music, and in some ways the same (of course we can agree that one does not listen to Western music the way one listens to the music of other cultures).

But that brings me to the point below:


> Of course I never said talk about art was new, merely that it reached unprecedented proportions, and did so concurrently with the production of styles of art which were initially, and to a great extent subsequently (and to some extent still), baffling to said public.


Did it? The early 20th century was not a time of composer-critics in the way that the 19th century was (Wagner, Schumann, Berlioz, Saint-Saens), or the later 20th century. Schoenberg, Bartok, and Stravinsky _*rarely if ever talked about their own music*_, and only then in generalities, not in detailed explanations or theory.

Although he wrote extensively as an outgrowth of his teaching, Schoenberg's books barely mention 20th century styles of music. The first composer of the 20th century I can think of that wrote a massive text that also serves as a description of their own musical style is Hindemith, whose music was more popular in his time than it is now. Messiaen would be next.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Mahlerian said:


> I suppose a case like this could be made for Babbitt's _The Composer as Specialist_, but even there I am sure that the gateway in question would not have to be anything other than one of listening comprehension and familiarity with a certain type of listening that is in some ways different from that of earlier Western music, and in some ways the same (of course we can agree that one does not listen to Western music the way one listens to the music of other cultures).
> 
> But that brings me to the point below:
> 
> ...


Interesting point about the 19th century and those composers who were also critics. Not having been alive then, I have to admit to not knowing how much people attending concerts and going to art galleries were exposed to explanatory verbiage, or how much they expected or felt the need to be told about what they were seeing or hearing. I suspect that before the "information age" it was very little, and that they had to subscribe to newspapers and journals to find out what Schumann thought about Chopin's use of sonata form. I do know that I have not encountered examples from that time of the sort of arcane puffery, complete with diagrams, koans, and heartfelt personal credos from the artists, that I've seen in my time on concert programs, record sleeves and museum walls, not to mention in the literally incomprehensible pages of upscale art journals. They may have talked a great deal about music in 1850, but they did so in the language people actually spoke, a condition which still prevailed, as far as my reading can tell me, in the early 20th century. The change in the quality of artistic discourse (which I am not alone in noting) that occurred in the course of the 20th century cannot be unrelated to the presumed difficulty of coming to terms with the art of the time.


----------



## Guest (Sep 20, 2014)

Woodduck, I think that these two comments present a common but false picture of the situation:



Woodduck said:


> ...styles of art which were initially, and to a great extent subsequently (and to some extent still), baffling to said public.





Woodduck said:


> The change in the quality of artistic discourse (which I am not alone in noting) that occurred in the course of the 20th century cannot be unrelated to the presumed difficulty of coming to terms with the art of the time.


The historical record shows something quite different. The record shows that early in the nineteenth century, the idea that new equals bad (or at least suspect) began to assume noticable proportions. It took until about 1870 for that idea to have become fully entrenched, but you can see its inexorable growth for all the decades before that. It had nothing to do with what the music sounded like, either. Audiences were rejecting new music simply on the basis that it was new. Even new music that was made to sound old (and thus gain market share) was rejected. This is, just by the way, a substantial difference between then and now.

There were several peaks in the anti-modernist sentiment. One of the biggest was in 1900, a dozen years before any of the modernist works that get credit for alienating audiences were premiered. (And, obviously, even more than a dozen years before any of these works were well known enough to have any kind of effect.) That is, the anti-modernist sentiment predates by at least a dozen years (and several decades before that as well) the modernist works that supposedly started all the ruckus.



Woodduck said:


> ...why those of us who lived through a substantial part of the century recently past were inundated with so much such pleading wherever the "new" in art was on display.


Perhaps a sign of the desperation of artists that their work was being rejected before it even had a chance to be heard. (By the way, your conflation of visual art and its special pleaders and musical art and its special pleaders is not helpful. That is, the verbiage associated with visual art is almost always much worse than that associated with music, so you're damning music by association rather than by any actual misdeeds.)

In any case, unless the attitude in question is recognized as preceding the music that supposedly caused the attitude--as pretty firmly entrenched quite a long ways before--then the wrong things will continue to be identified as causes, with the result that nothing about the situation will ever change. Maybe, I sometimes think, that's exactly what some people want. As long as they can blame the music for there being negative reactions to it, then no one need take any responsibility. "It's the composers' fault for writing such horrible music! I'm off the hook, yay!!"


----------



## Marschallin Blair (Jan 23, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> Interesting point about the 19th century and those composers who were also critics. Not having been alive then, I have to admit to not knowing how much people attending concerts and going to art galleries were exposed to explanatory verbiage, or how much they expected or felt the need to be told about what they were seeing or hearing. I suspect that before the "information age" it was very little, and that they had to subscribe to newspapers and journals to find out what Schumann thought about Chopin's use of sonata form. I do know that I have not encountered examples from that time of the sort of arcane puffery, complete with diagrams, koans, and heartfelt personal credos from the artists, that I've seen in my time on concert programs, record sleeves and museum walls, not to mention in the literally incomprehensible pages of upscale art journals. They may have talked a great deal about music in 1850, but they did so in the language people actually spoke, a condition which still prevailed, as far as my reading can tell me, in the early 20th century. The change in the quality of artistic discourse (which I am not alone in noting) that occurred in the course of the 20th century cannot be unrelated to the presumed difficulty of coming to terms with the art of the time.


Complexity in art is fine.

Academic imposture is not-- perhaps that's why post-modernism wouldn't survive the withering scrutiny of an educated Victorian audience.

I'll leave it to others to decide where one stops and the other begins.


----------



## Guest (Sep 20, 2014)

Marschallin, perhaps you'll favor us with exactly how you are able to distinguish between "complexity" and "academic imposture."

In the meantime, let us savor this risible collection of vocables:



Marschallin Blair said:


> the withering scrutiny of an educated Victorian audience.


----------



## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> Interesting point about the 19th century and those composers who were also critics. Not having been alive then, I have to admit to not knowing how much people attending concerts and going to art galleries were exposed to explanatory verbiage, or how much they expected or felt the need to be told about what they were seeing or hearing.


The 19th century was actually one of the times when explanatory verbiage became almost a matter of course, especially with the "music of the future", as programmatic explanations of non-programmatically conceived works proliferated. To be sure, these are in the 'common language', as you said, but the implication was still that the music, apart from such explanations, was difficult or even impossible to understand.

I remember early criticisms of Mahler's Symphonies stated more than once or twice that the music was inexplicable without a program (and by this time Mahler, who had always been wary of the practice and wanted to distance himself from the symphonic poems of Strauss, had stopped providing them).



> I do know that I have not encountered examples from that time of the sort of arcane puffery, complete with diagrams, koans, and heartfelt personal credos from the artists, that I've seen in my time on concert programs, record sleeves and museum walls, not to mention in the literally incomprehensible pages of upscale art journals.


Not all diagrams are arcane, of course. Some of them, like this one explaining the choice of timbres in _Le marteau_, are pretty self-explanatory:









Furthermore, the existence of diagrams that are inaccessible to the layman hardly imply much about the comprehensibility of the music:











> They may have talked a great deal about music in 1850, but they did so in the language people actually spoke, a condition which still prevailed, as far as my reading can tell me, in the early 20th century. The change in the quality of artistic discourse (which I am not alone in noting) that occurred in the course of the 20th century cannot be unrelated to the presumed difficulty of coming to terms with the art of the time.


You are perhaps right that there is a pseudo-scientific strain to some 20th century musical criticism (or in some titles, even). I am not sure that this validates your previous points, though.

At the beginning of this discussion you were saying that the rise of styles considered intellectual in the early 20th coincided with a corresponding rise in musical criticism. This was later changed to remove the explicit connection or perhaps shifted to the later 20th century, when it was pointed out that such a correspondence does not in fact exist. But this undermines your original point, which concerned supposed intellectualism in the the music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky.


----------



## Marschallin Blair (Jan 23, 2014)

some guy said:


> Marschallin, perhaps you'll favor us with exactly how you are able to distinguish between "complexity" and "academic imposture."


One's interesting to a point; the other to the point of departure.


----------



## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

kikko said:


> I think that from the baroque era to the late romantic era the main goal of music was to arouse feelings in audience and the innovations was aimed to find new ways to express these feelings.
> 
> With modernism on the oder hand (IMO) the main goal of music became the constant research of innovation.
> 
> ...


See my blog:
http://www.talkclassical.com/blogs/millionrainbows/1069-instrumental-music-dramatic-gesture.html

To take matters even further into the fog, when we get into more modern music, I think "emotion" as a descriptive term begins to fail us. For example, in Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, the "emotional gestures" expressed are so complex that we begin to experience them as "states of being," like anxiety, foreboding, fear, tension, awe, etc., creating in our minds, empathetically, a reflection of our own, and the artist's, "inner state of being."


----------



## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

kikko said:


> That means that music is strictly a subjective philosophical matter.
> 
> Then If I say that everything that was written in the past is NOT music nobody could contradict me because If you say that I'm wrong that means that you can clearly tell me what is music and what is not.
> 
> ...


The old music was notated, on paper. This has parameters: Pitch and rhythm, with some added expressive marks. Any timbral results or effects were accomplished with orchestration, or the specified instrument. This is "writing", which is essentially a visual medium of the eye. Notation created a "definitive" fixed version of the music, down to the smallest details, as long as they fit into the prescribed parameters notation was capable of.

When recording developed, it became_ as viable_ as a score in preserving a "fixed" and "definitive" version of any sound event. Recording is an "ear" medium.

Thus, after recording had been used as a way to capture performances, it then began to be used as a way of capturing non-notated "folk" musics. An "ear" recording is both a performance and the "score," if it has not been notated in written form.

Thus, "the ear," through recording, regained the viability it once had, before written scores and notation undermined it. Thus, any sound which can be recorded can now be considered "music" if so deemed by a composer.

And, as in jazz and folk musics, a performance gains new importance. John Coltrane's sax solo on Rogers & Hammerestein's My Favorite Things, is of more interest to jazz listeners than the composition itself.


----------



## Guest (Sep 20, 2014)

Marschallin Blair said:


> One's interesting to a point; the other to the point of departure.[/IMG]


So I take that as a "No," then. Oh well. Thought I'd give it a try. (Seriously, I didn't have any hopes, so dinna fash.)


----------



## Marschallin Blair (Jan 23, 2014)

> someguy: Marschallin, perhaps you'll favor us with exactly how you are able to distinguish between "complexity" and "academic imposture."In the meantime, let us savor this risible collection of vocables:





> Marschallin Blair: the withering scrutiny of an educated Victorian audience.





> Originally Posted by Marschallin Blair
> 
> One's interesting to a point; the other to the point of departure.





some guy said:


> So I take that as a "No," then. Oh well. Thought I'd give it a try. (Seriously, I didn't have any hopes, so dinna fash. )


You mean of course, "_Dinna fash yersel_"--- as I wouldn't want you to stumble into a Marschallin at the cocktail party with anything less than a right-proper 'risible collection of vocables.'


----------



## Guest (Sep 20, 2014)

millionrainbows said:


> See my blog:
> http://www.talkclassical.com/blogs/millionrainbows/1069-instrumental-music-dramatic-gesture.html
> 
> To take matters even further into the fog, when we get into more modern music, I think "emotion" as a descriptive term begins to fail us. For example, in Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, the "emotional gestures" expressed are so complex that we begin to experience them as "states of being," like anxiety, foreboding, fear, tension, awe, etc., creating in our minds, empathetically, a reflection of our own, and the artist's, "inner state of being."


I wanted to give the Schoenberg another listen as I was pretty sure that "we" did not include "me."

I was correct in that. And I certainly don't experience anything like anxiety, foreboding, or fear when I listen to these delightful gems. But more importantly, I was reminded as they played that listening to music is so much more rewarding than talking about it. So much more rewarding that I wish I could talk about it.

Anyway, however much fun it is to try to correct mistakes and misapprehensions--clearing the way, doncha know, for more accurate and informed subsequent experiences--it is so much more fun to listen to music.

Now if only there were a place where one could talk with like-minded people about one's experiences....


----------



## Guest (Sep 20, 2014)

Marschallin Blair said:


> You mean of course, "_Dinna fash yersel_"--- I wouldn't want you to stumble into a Marschallin at the cocktail with anything less than a 'risible collection of vocables.'


I think that "dinna fash" is a perfectly acceptable variant of "dinna fash yersel'." You know, like saying "dia" instead of "bon dia." Or "Tag" instead of "Guten Tag."

Otherwise, I'm with ya all the way. Never leave home without a risible collection of vocables, I say.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Mahlerian said:


> The 19th century was actually one of the times when explanatory verbiage became almost a matter of course, especially with the "music of the future", as programmatic explanations of non-programmatically conceived works proliferated. To be sure, these are in the 'common language', as you said, but the implication was still that the music, apart from such explanations, was difficult or even impossible to understand.
> 
> I remember early criticisms of Mahler's Symphonies stated more than once or twice that the music was inexplicable without a program (and by this time Mahler, who had always been wary of the practice and wanted to distance himself from the symphonic poems of Strauss, had stopped providing them).
> 
> ...


In response to the OP, my original point had to do with public perception of music (and art generally), specifically the imagined need to "understand" intellectually music that baffles or alienates people when actually heard. If I may restate what I was trying to say, I suggest three things contributing to this perception in recent times: 1. the unfamiliar sounds of the music itself, beginning with (but certainly going far beyond) the renunciation of tonality by Schoenberg and his musical followers; 2. the theory which purports to make aesthetic and historical sense of this emblematic development, and the theoretical statements by the advocates of various new kinds of music, which projected a long-lasting (and growing until perhaps the 1960s or later) notion that this was the music of the new age whether John and Jane Doe showed up to listen to it or not, perhaps especially if they did not; and 3. the transformation of art criticism into an often arcane logorrhea which reinforced the notion that the fine arts were something that could not be comprehended directly, if at all, by the average museum- or concert-goer, much less anyone not inclined to set foot into such places.

I take the point that this process of the alienation of the arts from the public was not new to the twentieth century. But I have to see the desire of nineteenth-century audiences for an explanatory program as a rather mild predecessor of the phenomenon I'm discussing. It was pretty fundamental to the Romantic aesthetic that music was felt to be "about" something both extramusical and expressible in language. I had a book as a kid called "Great Program Music" by Sigmund Spaeth which actually put words to the melodies of famous classical works, not all of them intended to have terribly specific programs by their composers. It was actually a handy way to remember the tunes, but what a relic! Still, given that most of the examples were Romantic, it was basically true to the aesthetic presuppositions behind the music. Mahler was still a Romantic, albeit an intelligent artist who knew that such programs were limiting and could not do justice to the works to which they were attached (much as Beethoven hastened to point out that his "Pastoral" Symphony was more an expression of feeling than actual tone-painting). What I'm saying is that I can't see the desire for programmatic explanations, in an age when programmatic, literary, or other extramusical significance was routinely intended, as any equivalent to the kind of pseudo-scientific or quasi-philosophical expostulation which arose later, which was more likely to confuse the average music lover than to enlighten him, and which reinforced the idea that "serious" art needed to be understood in order to be experienced properly.

No doubt some guy is right to point out that criticism in the visual arts was (and is) a worse offender than music criticism, although ultimately the takeover of the world's brain by deconstructionism in the later twentieth century made offenders of nearly everyone with a pen. But public perception tends to fuse "the arts" into a single phenomenon; we live in a society of extreme cultural stratification, where the people who can appreciate Gaughin and those who can enjoy Messiaen tend to be the same people, and those who have no interest in either just "don't understand that stuff" - the latter being, of course, in the vast majority. I think we all agree that music, and all art, exists primarily to be experienced directly and not to be "understood," explained, justified, or propagandized, regardless of the precise chronological sequence of cultural developments by which it has come to be, and/or to be perceived as, something occult, exclusive, and in need of intellectual avatars and gatekeepers, and regardless of where the fault for this misguided attitude may lie. It does at least seem a good sign that "the arts" themselves, including classical music (whatever that is now or will be in the future), do at least appear to have survived the posturing orthodoxies of the mid-twentieth century.

As a student , during that perplexing era, I used to speculate and argue with friends about where music was going or ought to go. History's answer now appears to be, "everywhere." Categorical distinctions may be breaking down, and intellectual turf wars seem more and more relics of the past. Maybe cultural stratification will lessen too, as the internet brings art to everyone, either without comment or open to the comments of all. In any case I'm too old to worry about it.


----------



## kikko (Jun 19, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> I think we all agree that music, and all art, exists primarily to be experienced directly and not to be "understood," explained, justified, or propagandized.


These are the words I couldn't find out.


----------



## Guest (Sep 21, 2014)

The "public" doesn't even know about the music and the art Woodduck is so concerned about, so cannot be doing any of that perceiving stuff.

But don't get me started.

Oops. Too late.


Woodduck said:


> I think we all agree that music, and all art, exists primarily to be experienced directly and not to be "understood," explained, justified, or propagandized....


But I thought that deconstructionism had taken over the world's brain. Is this agreement that you cite a result of deconstructionism's take over? So the take-over is a good thing?

Seems to me that this long and detailed post of yours is a sustained effort to have your cake and eat it too. It's quite a popular desire. Think of the savings. You buy one cake and you have cake to eat forever. Sweet!

Anyway, I found this remark to be quite revealing and perhaps explains not only what Woodduck perceives as the situation but also his resistance to any suggestion that the real situation is significantly different from what he's describing. Well, aside from the lip service. But come on; you're not counting lip service, are you? Well? Are you?


Woodduck said:


> As a student , during that perplexing era....


What you found perplexing as a student may not, in fact, been universally or even generally perplexing. When I was in junior high, I found Sibelius music, of all things!, to be perplexing. But I got over that. From where I'm standing at the moment, I cannot imagine how I could ever have been perplexed by Sibelius. I know that I've never ever heard of anyone else being so perplexed.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

some guy said:


> The "public" doesn't even know about the music and the art Woodduck is so concerned about, so cannot be doing any of that perceiving stuff.
> 
> But don't get me started.
> 
> ...


Leaving aside the fact that you've misinterpreted one of my statements (possibly my fault), I just want to affirm that I welcome and greatly appreciate all civil and useful comments on anything I say on this forum. Unfortunately most of the above doesn't fall into that category. Disagree with me and feel you can't persuade me to your point of view? Fine. Tip your hat and depart. If you can find the time to respond to a post you can find the time to make it constructive. Personally insulting or derisive remarks such as the above are not generally liked around here.


----------



## Triplets (Sep 4, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> Leaving aside the fact that you've misinterpreted one of my statements (possibly my fault), I just want to affirm that I welcome and greatly appreciate all civil and useful comments on anything I say on this forum. Unfortunately most of the above doesn't fall into that category. Disagree with me and feel you can't persuade me to your point of view? Fine. Tip your hat and depart. If you can find the time to respond to a post you can find the time to make it constructive. Personally insulting or derisive remarks such as the above are not generally liked around here.


Some guy laments that he can't find like minded people to share his experiences with, then blasts everyone else for not being those like minded people. I'll bet he is a lot of fun at cocktail parties.


----------



## Marschallin Blair (Jan 23, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> Leaving aside the fact that you've misinterpreted one of my statements (possibly my fault), I just want to affirm that I welcome and greatly appreciate all civil and useful comments on anything I say on this forum. Unfortunately most of the above doesn't fall into that category. Disagree with me and feel you can't persuade me to your point of view? Fine. Tip your hat and depart. If you can find the time to respond to a post you can find the time to make it constructive. Personally insulting or derisive remarks such as the above are not generally liked around here.


What's that line from that Bob Dylan song?: "Clowns to the left of me, jokers to my right"?


----------



## Itullian (Aug 27, 2011)

Marschallin Blair said:


> What's that line from that Bob Dylan song?: "Clowns to the left of me, jokers to my right"?


Scuse please. 
That's not a Dylan song.
Stealers Wheel did that.


----------



## Marschallin Blair (Jan 23, 2014)

some guy said:


> I think that "dinna fash" is a perfectly acceptable variant of "dinna fash yersel'." You know, like saying "dia" instead of "bon dia." Or "Tag" instead of "Guten Tag."
> 
> Otherwise, I'm with ya all the way. Never leave home without a risible collection of vocables, I say.


I only want for you to sound as 'risably vocable' as you so richly deserve.


----------



## Marschallin Blair (Jan 23, 2014)

Itullian said:


> Scuse please.
> That's not a Dylan song.
> Stealers Wheel did that.


Thanks for the correction, Itullian. _;D_

You can take it to the bank that if I don't botch it, I'll blonde it.


----------



## Marschallin Blair (Jan 23, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> In response to the OP, my original point had to do with public perception of music (and art generally), specifically the imagined need to "understand" intellectually music that baffles or alienates people when actually heard. If I may restate what I was trying to say, I suggest three things contributing to this perception in recent times: 1. the unfamiliar sounds of the music itself, beginning with (but certainly going far beyond) the renunciation of tonality by Schoenberg and his musical followers; 2. the theory which purports to make aesthetic and historical sense of this emblematic development, and the theoretical statements by the advocates of various new kinds of music, which projected a long-lasting (and growing until perhaps the 1960s or later) notion that this was the music of the new age whether John and Jane Doe showed up to listen to it or not, perhaps especially if they did not; and 3. the transformation of art criticism into an often arcane logorrhea which reinforced the notion that the fine arts were something that could not be comprehended directly, if at all, by the average museum- or concert-goer, much less anyone not inclined to set foot into such places.
> 
> I take the point that this process of the alienation of the arts from the public was not new to the twentieth century. But I have to see the desire of nineteenth-century audiences for an explanatory program as a rather mild predecessor of the phenomenon I'm discussing. It was pretty fundamental to the Romantic aesthetic that music was felt to be "about" something both extramusical and expressible in language. I had a book as a kid called "Great Program Music" by Sigmund Spaeth which actually put words to the melodies of famous classical works, not all of them intended to have terribly specific programs by their composers. It was actually a handy way to remember the tunes, but what a relic! Still, given that most of the examples were Romantic, it was basically true to the aesthetic presuppositions behind the music. Mahler was still a Romantic, albeit an intelligent artist who knew that such programs were limiting and could not do justice to the works to which they were attached (much as Beethoven hastened to point out that his "Pastoral" Symphony was more an expression of feeling than actual tone-painting). What I'm saying is that I can't see the desire for programmatic explanations, in an age when programmatic, literary, or other extramusical significance was routinely intended, as any equivalent to the kind of pseudo-scientific or quasi-philosophical expostulation which arose later, which was more likely to confuse the average music lover than to enlighten him, and which reinforced the idea that "serious" art needed to be understood in order to be experienced properly.
> 
> ...


So much care and thought was put into this post. I wish everyone would read it and click 'like.'

This is the level of discourse that TC should be about.


----------



## dgee (Sep 26, 2013)

I listen to a lot of contemporary and modern music and know a lot of composers and performers in this space but I am yet to discover a body of music where some sort of "understanding" delivered via a written explanation is intended as a component of engaging with the work. I also wasn't aware that "everyday listeners" were routinely engaging with critical theory or technical analysis as an unavoidable requirement of modern and contemporary music to the point where it put them off new art. There is a paucity of examples of these phenomena on this thread which is a shame as I'd be interested in seeing some

Of course, the lazy caricatures of "Modern Art" and "Modernism" are so pervasive that I'm sure many people believe the above situation to be the case. How much does this situation put people off engaging with modern and contemporary music, or change how they think they should engage, or put up barriers to just listening with an open mind? Who knows, although it's certainly one of a number of "exhibits" that those who don't like modern music tout regularly

Anyway , there's part of me that would like to see people "get" modern and contemporary music and be converted, there's another part that just recognises that there's always going to be a robust following for new music, haters gonna hate and there'll be plenty of calling of the waaahmbulance if you ever want to be in a conversation about the matter


----------

