# Recapturing Radicalsim



## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

Thinking about some of our discussions on new music lately, I'm drawn to an interesting fact about appreciating what's 'new' in _old_ music. As people have often pointed out, the music of the 19th Century that we find so easy to cherish was once trashed by critics for being radical and alien - but are we still able to sense the radicalism when listening?

I don't think so. When we listen, we can accept the historical fact, but we can't hear it like a contemporary audience would have. For example, I became familiar with the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto over a period of time, and, afterwards, found that the opening was novel for a concerto of the time. "Oh, OK then." I'm fairly certain that my reaction would have been the same if I had read about the opening before my first listen. Of course, there are many better examples of more radical innovations that nevertheless strike us as normal, even banal, but I can't think of them right now!

Because we are immersed from birth in a culture with hundreds of different styles of music, all of them readily available and played almost constantly wherever we go, we lose that feeling of novelty. I think it's worth being aware, then, that when you listen to a piece that's 200 hundred years old, if it has some innovations, you can appreciate them intellectually, but not aurally to their full extent. You're hearing something undoubtedly sublime, but you're not hearing everything that the composer intended.

EDIT: Change my typo in the title if you could, kind moderator who may read this plea.


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## regressivetransphobe (May 16, 2011)

Like you suggest, all novelty wears off. A lot of music that tried to push boundaries in terms of extremity in the 70s and 80s can sound downright docile now, if you don't prepare yourself with a bit of historical context. 

Some genres of music are moving so fast that stuff from around five years ago sounds dated. In cases like that, I think it's clear there's too much memery and "scene mentality" involved, and too little regard for creating art that retains depth regardless of how it inevitably shows it age.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Heaps of things like that, what you speak of Polednice. Not everything that's radical has to bang you over the head like _The Rite of Spring_.

Some examples off the top of my head -

- *Monteverdi's* _Vespers of 1610 _ruffled a few feathers of hard-liners who didn't like it because it was a combination of all genres under the sun (therefore not "real" church music, same old same old false dichotomy way of thinking which is bullsh*t then as now). It bought together opera (a new genre then, so naturally suspicious in itself), sacred music of course, concerto, sonata (chamber), a kind of art-song (the songs to the Virgin Mary are like serenades by the guys to their lover, pointing to another aspect, the underlying real human passion behind this work). But the majority, which is the audience, loved it, thus since then we don't think of it as radical in the usual sense.

-* Brahms*, he did a lot of things outside of the box, but now we don't notice it. Eg. his concertos with their lengthy first movements, greatly expanding the concerto form, as did Bruckner with the symphony. Also not doing things by the book, eg. his_ Piano Quartet #3 in C minor, Op. 60 _does not end as is the custom in C major but C minor. Critics pulled him down for this, well the conservative fools did. But in this work, he doesn't give the usual Hungarianised cheerful ending, this is a bit of a Hungarian vibe but it's dark, broken, fragmented. Reflecting on the death of his friend and mentor Robert Schumann, which happened decades before when this work was started, he was only able to get over the grief and finish it like 20 years later.

- *Elgar *- _String Quartet _& also his _Piano Quintet_. Both written after world war I, Elgar getting old and missing the young Worcester lads that had grown up in his native Sussex, gone off to fight the war, and were now lying in the fields of France. In the SQ esp., he does not hold back from expressing outright anger and frustration, a questioning theme coming like he's asking "whY" over and over again. This is very dissonant too, and loud, the thematic development not predictable and fragmented. Of course the critics said that it was ugly, esp. the outer movements of these works. In the outer louder movements of the PQ, Elgar used a rarely used dynamic marking to make the players play orchestrally. These works were highly innovative for the UK of the time, when most of it was esconced in Brahms rehash. & yet simple minded thinking is that Elgar was a "conservative." Well, not in these works he wasn't, otherwise why were the conservatives up in arms? Even the audience gave lukewarm applause at the premiere of these works at the Wigmore Hall in London in 1919.

- *Vaughan Williams *- _Fantasia on A Theme by Thomas Tallis _- in this, RVW bought into the orchestral/chamber or concert hall area the harmonies of Tallis and the Renaissance, which had not happened since they were written, eg. over 400 years or so. The sounds which have a pared down feel and the polyphony go against the grain of heavy Romanticism of the time (early c20th). This was not just transcription but changing the way composers wrote for the strings. Also an early form of neo-classicism, the concerto grosso format, splitting the orchestra into a larger and smaller group. All in all probably the most innovative RVW got, yet we now put this work in the basket of "cowpat pastoralism." Which I was guilty of myself, until I read about these facts in a book.

Some of these examples and more on an earlier thread I made around similar topics to the present thread -

http://www.talkclassical.com/14431-conservatives-radicals-all.html


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Other ones -

-* Tchaikovsky *- He's still pulled down around these quarters for having not good thematic development. Well, so what? He himself admitted this, and the guy who can be said to his finest successor, Janacek (highly influenced by Tchiakovsky & the Russians) didn't give a rat's a*** about the three B's or traditional counterpoint which he saw as straightjacketed. But in terms of Tchaikovsky, his not always following convention was a plus overall. Eg. not bringing back the theme in his first piano concerto. Now it's one of the most popular in the repertoire, who cares about this (minor?) techinical "fault" which he knew about and left it firmly there, so it's probably no fault at all. & how about the _Pathetique_ symphony, most unconventionally ending with a slow movement? Why is this inferior compared to any other major contemporary symphonist of his time? It's not in my book if it possibly influenced Mahler with his 9th, also ending on a slow movt., also many others, incl. Vaughan Williams in his 6th.

Then there's the* early forms of neo-classicism emerging in mid to late c19th.* Tchaikovsky was among these (eg. _Rococo Variations_), as was Grieg (_Holberg Suite_), the symphonies of Gounod & Bizet, not to speak of Brahms who is still seen as a bit of a "romantic classicist" but I think he's much more. They're all much more than they seem to be really. It's just that the mists of time seem to blind us to their innovations, on first listen that is, or without knowing their music or the music or historical context of the time, etc. This is why I dislike simplistic black vs. white labelling of composers, musicians and their art, as well as "boxing" listeners into camps and cliques, as we're all different. It's only the extremists at either end of the normal spectrum, also the fetishists and groupies, who are all the same or similar, eg. many of these inflexible, self-limiting and not able to think outside certain stereotypes.

- Another is *Rachmaninov* who did so much to push forward keyboard technique. Eg. his employment of block chords which eventually found it's way to the Americas, the music of USA composers like Copland and the Mexican Chavez. His amazing ability to write variations that were at the highest level (as where Tchaikovsky's) and also Rachmaninov's use of repetition which many times, to my ears, prefigures the minimalism that emerged 1960's by at least 65 years. This guy was amazing, ultimately made just a big impact as Scriabin (maybe more than him, it seems to me?) and an equal to Stravinsky, imo, but of course different as well in some aspects...


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## brianwalker (Dec 9, 2011)

What about pieces that don't need its radicalism to be recaptured? Stravinsky said that he Grosse Fugue would always be "contemporary", to which I might add The Rite of Spring and Mahler's 6th.


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## Taneyev (Jan 19, 2009)

Kreisler. What the hell had to do his only string quartet with all the rest of his works? A higly chromatic and introverted piece with no similar on any of his other pieces.


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