# An Interesting and Useful Treatise on Twentieth Century Music



## Strange Magic

In a thread, "Russian Composers and Music", TC member JosefinaHW mentioned a recent (2014) doctoral thesis by one Herbert Pauls. It is titled Two Centuries in One: Musical Romanticism and the Twentieth Century and is available here:
http://www.musicweb-international.com/books/Pauls_two_centuries_in_one.pdf

It is a long (400 pages plus), thorough, but well-written and easily absorbed treatise that both JosefinaHW and I can recommend as very valuable background information for any discussion of the topics of "modernism", "tonal" v. "atonal", "Romanticism", "Neo-Romanticism" etc. that have so troubled the Forum recently. Pauls' argument in a nutshell, which he supports with some very interesting lists and tables, is that musical Romanticism/Neo-Romanticism overwhelmingly dominates the Twentieth Century, for which thesis he offers many arguments and much data. A corollary of this is that it would be very difficult to realize this if one relied primarily (until recently) on the major music history texts, which offer a significantly different view of the past hundred years. Pauls' Table 2 on pp. 51-52 is particularly enlightening. Of course, the thesis has nothing to do with whether any particular person should or should not like or listen to any particular kind or piece of music. It really is all a matter of taste.

It would be useful to have the comments of those who commit themselves to reading the work, and there is certainly no time pressure to do so.


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## Manxfeeder

I have it downloaded. I don't know if I'll ever have time to read it, but it has an interesting premise.


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## Chordalrock

> musical Romanticism/Neo-Romanticism overwhelmingly dominates the Twentieth Century


Just makes more far-out music all the more precious...


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## isorhythm

I'll look more closely later, but if this man is going to tell me to listen to Medtner, I'm out.


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## Truckload

Strange Magic said:


> In a thread, "Russian Composers and Music", TC member JosefinaHW mentioned a recent (2014) doctoral thesis by one Herbert Pauls. It is titled Two Centuries in One: Musical Romanticism and the Twentieth Century and is available here:
> http://www.musicweb-international.com/books/Pauls_two_centuries_in_one.pdf
> 
> It would be useful to have the comments of those who commit themselves to reading the work, and there is certainly no time pressure to do so.


Thank you so much for sharing. I plan to read this tonight. I can't wait to read what he has to say about Howard Hanson and Hindemith.


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## Chronochromie

That recent thing around here that says that



Strange Magic said:


> musical Romanticism/Neo-Romanticism overwhelmingly dominates the Twentieth Century,.


seems more like wishful thinking than what actually happened, but I'll give this guy a chance. I'll get back to you whenever I've read it.


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## Truckload

isorhythm said:


> I'll look more closely later, but if this man is going to tell me to listen to Medtner, I'm out.


Do we know who Medtner is? I don't think we do. We might have to look him up on YouTube or Groves. Is this Nicolas Medtner who famously played the piano at the age of six? Hmmm, perhaps it is this guy?

Nicolai Medtner
Russ. composer and pianist. Studied Moscow Cons. (pf. with Safonov, comp. with Arensky and Taneyev). Prof. at Moscow Cons. 1902 - 03 , 1909 - 10 and 1914 - 21 . Left Russ. 1921 , living in Ger. and France and touring as virtuoso pianist. Amer. début 1924 with Philadelphia Orch. Wrote much pf. mus.; was influenced by Ger. romanticism. Wrote book, 1935 , opposing modern innovations and affirming faith in tonality. Wrote 3 pf. concs. ( 1914 - 18 , 1920 - 7 , 1940 - 3 ); 9 pf. sonatas ( 1896 - 1935 ); many genre pieces for pf., e.g. series called 34 Fairy‐Tales ( 1905 - 29 ); and many songs. Settled in Eng. 1935 . Patronized by Maharajah of Mysore.

I had never heard of him. But now, because we have posted about him, he will live forever in the annals of Talk Classical. Here is link to his Concerto No. 1.


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## Headphone Hermit

Truckload said:


> Do we know who Medtner is? I don't think we do.
> 
> I had never heard of him.


But some of us *do* know about him

some of us even enjoy his music

... and I am thankful to Nikolai Demidenko for playing a Medtner piece as an encore at a concert a few years back because that is how I was first introduced to his music. I remember clearly that Demidenko said that Medtner was a genius. I was intrigued because I didn't know his music, but from that one piece (one of the skazki) I then went on to explore his other music - some lovely piano solo pieces, enjoyable piano concertos and some wonderful songs. Of course, there are some (many, even) who don't care for his music, and I wouldn't say anyone should enjoy his music, but it is only fair to give it a listen before dismissing it


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## Truckload

Headphone Hermit said:


> But some of us *do* know about him
> 
> some of us even enjoy his music
> 
> ... and I am thankful to Nikolai Demidenko for playing a Medtner piece as an encore at a concert a few years back because that is how I was first introduced to his music. I remember clearly that Demidenko said that Medtner was a genius. I was intrigued because I didn't know his music, but from that one piece (one of the skazki) I then went on to explore his other music - some lovely piano solo pieces, enjoyable piano concertos and some wonderful songs. Of course, there are some (many, even) who don't care for his music, and I wouldn't say anyone should enjoy his music, but it is only fair to give it a listen before dismissing it


I was listening to his Concerto No. 1 just now. Very emotional, very moving. It didn't quite rise to the "knock my socks off" level of the Beethoven P.C. #5 or the Rach. P.C.#2, but really quite attractive. I don't know why someone would hate Medtner. And I'm glad Isorythm mentioned him. I always love it when I find someone that is "new to me".


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## Strange Magic

We have Becca, and then the persistence of JosefinaHW, to thank for this publication. Becca mentioned some links in a thread on Boulez, and JosefinaHW patiently worked through the links and came up with Herbert Pauls' dissertation. Blame them.


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## Becca

No good deed goes unpunished


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## isorhythm

I'm happy some are enjoying Medtner's music! I have tried.


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## Nereffid

Strange Magic said:


> We have Becca, and then the persistence of JosefinaHW, to thank for this publication. Becca mentioned some links in a thread on Boulez, and JosefinaHW patiently worked through the links and came up with Herbert Pauls' dissertation. Blame them.


:tiphat: to all involved in bringing this to our attention!

I'm making my way through it and find it fascinating reading. Of course as I read I can already hear TC's voices of disapproval - but to me it's a perspective that clarifies a lot of thoughts I've had on the subject.


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## SimonNZ

Nereffid said:


> :tiphat: to all involved in bringing this to our attention!
> 
> I'm making my way through it and find it fascinating reading. Of course as I read I can already hear TC's voices of disapproval - but to me it's a perspective that clarifies a lot of thoughts I've had on the subject.


Could you give a longer precis of his argument than the OP?

edit: actually don't bother - ten pages in and I can already see what I'm in for. Unfortunately.


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## KenOC

Strange Magic said:


> In a thread, "Russian Composers and Music", TC member JosefinaHW mentioned a recent (2014) doctoral thesis by one Herbert Pauls. It is titled Two Centuries in One: Musical Romanticism and the Twentieth Century and is available here:
> http://www.musicweb-international.com/books/Pauls_two_centuries_in_one.pdf


I have just downloaded this and read a few pages. Fascinating indeed! I will be reading the whole thing and hope not to forget this thread so I can add a comment or two.


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## Guest

I've not yet committed to reading the entire thing. Based on Josefina's recommendation, I began the task, but did not find it easy to read as the author's style is rather too intrusively personal in places.

Simon, you can just cut to the Conclusion and you'll get the gist. Pauls is a defender of the place of romanticism in the 20th C; of the idea that music did not follow an inevitable course, nor was 'modernism' the inevitable destination; and of the idea that the historiography of music has been distorted most notably by those who advocate for both 'modernism' and the destiny theory.

I don't think you need to read a 400-page work to realise that there is not some pre-destined course for musical development or that modernism is (was) the destination; that the 'rejection' of Romanticism was a total contempt _by all _for all that had gone before the 20th C; that composers in the 20th C simultaneously maintained, countered, evolved the traditions inherited from the 19th C (and before). Nor to realise that a noisy advocacy for one type of music over another should be regarded with scepticism.


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## Nereffid

Strange Magic said:


> *Of course, the thesis has nothing to do with whether any particular person should or should not like or listen to any particular kind or piece of music. It really is all a matter of taste.*


I think you should have probably put this in big flashing lights, because it will get lost in the argument.


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## SimonNZ

MacLeod said:


> I've not yet committed to reading the entire thing. Based on Josefina's recommendation, I began the task, but did not find it easy to read as the author's style is rather too intrusively personal in places.
> 
> Simon, you can just cut to the Conclusion and you'll get the gist. Pauls is a defender of the place of romanticism in the 20th C; of the idea that music did not follow an inevitable course, nor was 'modernism' the inevitable destination; and of the idea that the historiography of music has been distorted most notably by those who advocate for both 'modernism' and the destiny theory.
> 
> I don't think you need to read a 400-page work to realise that there is not some pre-destined course for musical development or that modernism is (was) the destination; that the 'rejection' of Romanticism was a total contempt _by all _for all that had gone before the 20th C; that composers in the 20th C simultaneously maintained, countered, evolved the traditions inherited from the 19th C (and before). *Nor to realise that a noisy advocacy for one type of music over another should be regarded with scepticism.*


Does he really reduce the great stylistic spectrum of the twentieth century classical to just the simple opposites of romantic and not-romantic?


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## violadude

Well, it's not as if every composer besides the most "extreme" of modernist composers just continued on writing "Romantic Music". The developments of the 20th century were too influential to be ignored, even by self-appointed "Romanticists". For example, I would say many composers who are generally being labeled "Romantic" or Neo-Romantic have cultivated a language that has much more in common with Prokofiev or Hindemith than with Brahms or Wagner.

In fact, I can't really think of a single prominent composer writing today whose music sounds more influenced by "Romanticism" than by some early 20th century style. Even composers like Arvo Part, who is one of the "go to" composers for people looking for more "Romantic" 20th century music, doesn't sound any more "Romantic" to me than Webern.

I think ultimately, the flaw with the argument put forth in the OP is that "Romantic" is a term being used not as a way of objectively categorizing music based on a list of common characteristics, but as a blanket term for "this music sounds emotional to me", which is a label that could be used for any composer that speaks to someone deeply.

I'm listening to "Spiegal Im Spiegal" at the moment. Right off the bat it's very apparent to me that no Romantic composer would ever write music this harmonically static. Romantic music is just the opposite, full of swift and extreme harmonic shifts and instability. This piece to me seems to have more in common with "In a Landscape" by John Cage than with anything any composer from Schubert to Mahler ever wrote.


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## Guest

SimonNZ said:


> Does he really reduce the great stylistic spectrum of the twentieth century classical to just the simple opposites of romantic and not-romantic?


I'm not sure of the connection between my piece you emboldened and your comment. It would of course be grossly unfair to Pauls' work to assert that it can be reduced as simplistically as I have outlined, but I was just offering an initial response based on a skim of the opening, the chapter titles and the conclusion. I don't doubt that for those with the stamina to read it in full, they'll find it winds its way through a whole heap of ideas. I know I haven't the stamina, and in any case, if I'm going to commit to reading books about music, I'll take Alex Ross' _The Rest is Noise _first, not least because it's much shorter!

But if you want to know if Romanticism feels hard done by the 20th C music historians and allegedly militant composers, you might find evidence in Pauls' work.


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## Richannes Wrahms

Seems like 400 pages plus of what some TC members take just a post to say. 

Personally, If I were an avid physics reader I'd rather learn more about quantum mechanics than learn about reformulations of/'alternative' classical physics constructed by people who consider quantum mechanics absurd.


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## Strange Magic

I find it always a source of wonder that a person can read and digest a 400-page text in less than 24 hours, or that some can penetrate to the very core of a detailed argument on the basis of a quick précis of another who also has not read the work. There is no hurry, no need to rush to judgment. As a certified dullard, I took weeks to read Pauls' thesis, making sure I wasn't glossing over or inadvertently missing details of his argument. Take your time/read the text.


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## SimonNZ

I have hundreds of books waiting/wanting to be read. If I'm going to push this to the top of the pile I'm going to need more reassurance that its more than just telling the "romantic" crowd what they want to hear.


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## Strange Magic

SimonNZ said:


> I have hundreds of books waiting/wanting to be read. If I'm going to push this to the top of the pile I'm going to need more reassurance that its more than just telling the "romantic" crowd what they want to hear.


Who will provide it?


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## Nereffid

violadude said:


> Well, it's not as if every composer besides the most "extreme" of modernist composers just continued on writing "Romantic Music". The developments of the 20th century were too influential to be ignored, even by self-appointed "Romanticists". For example, I would say many composers who are generally being labeled "Romantic" or Neo-Romantic have cultivated a language that has much more in common with Prokofiev or Hindemith than with Brahms or Wagner.
> 
> In fact, I can't really think of a single prominent composer writing today whose music sounds more influenced by "Romanticism" than by some early 20th century style. Even composers like Arvo Part, who is one of the "go to" composers for people looking for more "Romantic" 20th century music, doesn't sound any more "Romantic" to me than Webern.
> 
> I think ultimately, the flaw with the argument put forth in the OP is that "Romantic" is a term being used not as a way of objectively categorizing music based on a list of common characteristics, but as a blanket term for "this music sounds emotional to me", which is a label that could be used for any composer that speaks to someone deeply.
> 
> I'm listening to "Spiegal Im Spiegal" at the moment. Right off the bat it's very apparent to me that no Romantic composer would ever write music this harmonically static. Romantic music is just the opposite, full of swift and extreme harmonic shifts and instability. This piece to me seems to have more in common with "In a Landscape" by John Cage than with anything any composer from Schubert to Mahler ever wrote.


Pauls by and large doesn't talk about today's music (or the last several decades), and he absolutely does not describe Part as "Romantic". In fact the only mention of Part is in a lengthy list of composers that appear in the _Penguin Guide_. But he does describe Webern's "musical temperament" as "ultra-romantic".
And an entire chapter is devoted to how one could apply the word "romantic" to 20th-century music - "a question bristling with difficulties".


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## violadude

Nereffid said:


> Pauls by and large doesn't talk about today's music (or the last several decades), and he absolutely does not describe Part as "Romantic". In fact the only mention of Part is in a lengthy list of composers that appear in the _Penguin Guide_. But he does describe Webern's "musical temperament" as "ultra-romantic".
> And an entire chapter is devoted to how one could apply the word "romantic" to 20th-century music - "a question bristling with difficulties".


In this case, I would say I was pretty grievously misled by some of the previous comments on the reading material.


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## Nereffid

SimonNZ said:


> I have hundreds of books waiting/wanting to be read. If I'm going to push this to the top of the pile I'm going to need more reassurance that its more than just telling the "romantic" crowd what they want to hear.


You probably don't intend to, but it _seems like_ you're dismissing the argument before you've read it. Which, you know...


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## Nereffid

violadude said:


> In this case, I would say I was pretty grievously misled by some of the previous comments on the reading material.


No, I think the OP summed it up well, and other posters who mentioned Medtner, Hanson and Hindemith were on the right lines too. You seem to have inferred something that wasn't there.


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## SimonNZ

Nereffid said:


> You probably don't intend to, but it _seems like_ you're dismissing the argument before you've read it. Which, you know...


Actually it was reading the introduction that made me disinclined. But I'll watch where the discussion goes.


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## violadude

Nereffid said:


> No, I think the OP summed it up well, and other posters who mentioned Medtner, Hanson and Hindemith were on the right lines too. You seem to have inferred something that wasn't there.


I think I mostly latched onto the sentence " Pauls' argument in a nutshell, which he supports with some very interesting lists and tables, is that musical Romanticism/Neo-Romanticism overwhelmingly dominates the Twentieth Century, for which thesis he offers many arguments and much data"I

I mean, the sentence is prefaced with "Paul's argument in a nutshell", but now you are telling me that Pauls considers the term Romantic as applied to the 20th century troubling? hmm...seems kind of the opposite of what this nutshell statement was reporting.

Just to let you know where I'm coming from, when someone uses the term "Romantic" in the context of the 20th century, my mind immediately goes to a composer like Kurt Atterberg...to which my response would be sure, every era of music has seen a vast amount of composers whose music seems completely impenetrable to the innovations that surround it. I certainly don't think of composers like Sibelius, whose music was absolutely new and original in the same sense that nearly any other highly considered composer of any era was.


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## Strange Magic

One could always read the text. Again, no hurry. No one will be graded. One can continue to enjoy whatever music one prefers.....

Pauls' argument will cause me to re-evaluate my own views on the utility of Leonard Meyer's thesis regarding his proposed New Stasis in the arts, as it applies specifically to music. Meyer may himself have acquired a not entirely accurate picture of the actual pervasiveness and true potency (or lack of it) of many of the multiple schools and trends that are alleged to typify twentieth century "classical" music. My own ox might be at some risk of being gored.


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## mmsbls

I know that reading the work would answer this question, but I'm not sure my interest is worth the 400 pages (for now). Reading the OP, I thought maybe the author was saying that Romantic and near-Romantic music actually makes up much more of 20th century music than people think because histories ignore these works or composers. This thesis would presumably not involve any bias but rather just a careful detailing of what works actually exist. Nereffid's post:



Nereffid said:


> Pauls by and large doesn't talk about today's music (or the last several decades), and he absolutely does not describe Part as "Romantic". In fact the only mention of Part is in a lengthy list of composers that appear in the _Penguin Guide_. But he does describe Webern's "musical temperament" as "ultra-romantic".
> And an entire chapter is devoted to how one could apply the word "romantic" to 20th-century music - "a question bristling with difficulties".


makes me think the thesis is perhaps more along the lines of "One could interpret modern music more along the lines of Romanticism than most historians do." In other words the works are what everyone thinks they are but they're really more Romantic than everyone thinks.

Is one of these views correct? If so, which one?


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## Nereffid

mmsbls said:


> I know that reading the work would answer this question, but I'm not sure my interest is worth the 400 pages (for now). Reading the OP, I thought maybe the author was saying that Romantic and near-Romantic music actually makes up much more of 20th century music than people think because histories ignore these works or composers. This thesis would presumably not involve any bias but rather just a careful detailing of what works actually exist. Nereffid's post:
> 
> makes me think the thesis is perhaps more along the lines of "One could interpret modern music more along the lines of Romanticism than most historians do." In other words the works are what everyone thinks they are but they're really more Romantic than everyone thinks.
> 
> Is one of these views correct? If so, which one?


Strange Magic's description is a better summation of the work; I was just addressing a particular point.

From the introduction:


> Rather perversely, perhaps, one of my
> goals here is to encourage continued use of the term romantic in
> order to highlight the twentieth century's many audible links to
> nineteenth-century musical styles and languages, and also to
> remind ourselves that we need not be embarrassed by the many
> obviously nineteenth-century-sounding stylistic features which
> continued to survive and even flourish in the early modern period
> and after. In other words, we are celebrating those composers who
> chose to pursue a much more gradual change in musical language
> and style, and are putting the radical early twentieth-century
> musical revolutions in the much larger perspective of our standard
> twentieth-century performing repertoire, which is undeniably still
> dominated by a preponderance of romantic-sounding works. We
> recognize that everyone has the right to listen to the music that
> pleases them, and reject the urge to intellectually belittle those who
> do not find pleasure in the most esoteric or "difficult" musical
> languages of the recent past.


and, later:


> Composers
> like Puccini are representative of the side of twentieth-century
> music which historically dominated the recording and concert
> world in much the same way that the more radical streams of
> modernism dominated history textbooks and musicological
> research. In certain respects, the long-term academic and music
> industry views of the twentieth century are so fundamentally
> contrary to one another that I have decided to reflect that fact in
> my main title, not only by using the word "romantic" but also by
> using Philadelphia Orchestra administrator Simon Woods' phrase
> "two centuries in one."


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## EdwardBast

violadude said:


> I mean, the sentence is prefaced with "Paul's argument in a nutshell", but now you are telling me that Pauls considers the term Romantic as applied to the 20th century troubling? hmm...seems kind of the opposite of what this nutshell statement was reporting.


Pauls' argument but someone else's nutshell?


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## Mahlerian

I read the first 100 pages last night, and I was shocked by the appearance of such a grossly false statement as this:



> Whatever the reasons for the alleged corruption of the tonal system, it remains a matter of history that musical composition finally came to a critical point with *atonality, which Schoenberg famously described as the "emancipation of the dissonance,"* or, as he also put it, "air from another plant [sic]."


Emancipation of the dissonance is a wider term used to describe the process by which dissonances come to be used freely, without the restrictions of earlier eras, and it is something which he describes as already true in the music around him before he stopped writing in keys.

Added to which, Schoenberg obviously didn't describe atonality as the "emancipation of the dissonance" as applied to his own music, because he regarded the term as meaningless and certainly not descriptive of what he was doing.

(As for the rest, "air from another planet" was a phrase from Stephan George's poem Entrucknung, which Schoenberg set in his Second String Quartet. The last word, incidentally, is set with the sound of a _*triad*_ in second inversion.)


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## Guest

Strange Magic said:


> I find it always a source of wonder that a person can read and digest a 400-page text in less than 24 hours, or that some can penetrate to the very core of a detailed argument on the basis of a quick précis of another who also has not read the work.


I wonder that a 400-page text can be reduced to a nutshell...but there you go...wonders never cease. I don't see that my gross oversimplification is so far from your nutshell - another wonder perhaps, which can be confirmed when we all convene here in x days/weeks having read it.


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## Strange Magic

MacLeod said:


> I wonder that a 400-page text can be reduced to a nutshell...but there you go...wonders never cease. I don't see that my gross oversimplification is so far from your nutshell - another wonder perhaps, which can be confirmed when we all convene here in x days/weeks having read it.


I read it. The whole thing. Took me weeks. But it gave me legitimate nutshell rights, IMO.


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## Nereffid

There's nothing wrong with nutshells.

Unless you have bad dreams, of course.


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## Headphone Hermit

MacLeod said:


> I wonder that a 400-page text can be reduced to a nutshell...but there you go...wonders never cease. I don't see that my gross oversimplification is so far from your nutshell - another wonder perhaps, which can be confirmed when we all convene here in x days/weeks having read it.


I understand what you mean, but it is a common expectation that the candidate who submits a thesis is able to 'put it in a nutshell' in the form of an abstract of pretty restricted length


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## JosefinaHW

:Strange Magic: You are a true gentleman. Thank you.


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## Strange Magic

JosefinaHW said:


> :Strange Magic: You are a true gentleman. Thank you.


Thank you for thanking me. But thank you even more for having the diligence to ferret out Pauls' dissertation from a maze of other leads and sources. It really is all your fault. :lol:


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## Guest

Headphone Hermit said:


> I understand what you mean, but it is a common expectation that the candidate who submits a thesis is able to 'put it in a nutshell' in the form of an abstract of pretty restricted length


Thanks HH, but I just wanted to play on the 'wonder'. I didn't get as far as Masters or Doctor myself, but I did write an extended piece once, though no abstract was required - either 'back in the day' or at humble BA level. It was about the novels of EM Forster and the extent to which his writing and philosophy was influenced by 'modernist' tendencies.


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## Strange Magic

MacLeod said:


> Thanks HH, but I just wanted to play on the 'wonder'. I didn't get as far as Masters or Doctor myself, but I did write an extended piece once, though no abstract was required - either 'back in the day' or at humble BA level. It was about the novels of EM Forster and the extent to which his writing and philosophy was influenced by 'modernist' tendencies.


You must have discussed The Machine Stops. Blew my mind when I read it as a kid, and it's largely coming true.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops


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## Nereffid

So I've finished reading it, and here are some thoughts.

First off, let's get one basic criticism out of the way, which is that it really needed a good proof-reading; there were some horrible errors such as misspellings of cited authors, and his "two centuries in one" quote was attributed to the wrong person. Annoying as such mistakes were, they don't affect the basic points he made.

I suppose an obvious criticism from someone unsympathetic to Pauls's view is that he's just cherry-picking data and/or using spurious appeals to popularity or dubious definitions of terms to justify the existence of the music he likes. Well, the first response to that is that - even if it's the case - it's the sort of thing done to a greater or lesser degree by anyone who wishes to defend their own taste in the face of other people's dislike. And second, it seems to me his approach is instead a perfectly reasonable one of attempting to describe a reality and seeing how it squares with ideology.
That Table 2, as SM mentioned, is a really interesting one. It's an imperfect measure, of course (take away Giordano's 4 most popular arias and he's nowhere) but it's one of those data sets that rises above such flaws. I'd love to see an equivalent table for 19th-century (and earlier) music. And also one for column-inches in the New Grove!
Of course popularity isn't everything, but on the other hand it's not nothing. And of course history books would be a chore to read if there was a lot more "and then composer X wrote some music that was quite similar to that of composer Y..."; it makes sense to focus on change and innovation at the expense of (relative) stability. The problem is that it appears that this kind of historical viewpoint doesn't stay confined to the textbooks in which it's found. I know myself: while reading the book, I would listen to something by a composer he mentioned, and I was struck by the fact that even though I don't consider terms like "old-fashioned" or "traditionalist" to be pejorative, I nonetheless do think of such terms when appraising the music; and the lesson I learn from Pauls is that such thinking in of itself perpetuates the misleading progress narrative (Taruskin's "law of stylistic succession"). So the main thing I'm actually going to get from reading Pauls is that when I think of, say, music composed in 1960 - Penderecki's _Threnody_ and Poulenc's _Gloria_ - I'm going to avoid calling one modern and the other not; they're both pieces of music from 1960. Whether I will translate this personal view into a trope that annoys people on TC remains to be seen.

One other key part of the thesis was the use of the term "romantic" and how it could apply to 20th-century music. As I noted above, the label we give something will contribute to how we view it, and by the time I was through I found myself rather resistant to labels generally. Was such-and-such a romantic or a modernist? I kind of don't care (though Pauls's discussion was interesting). Given that one can characterize the 20th century as one of increasing pluralism, we can trace lineages all over the place. Let's just make sure that no one appoints themselves the guardian of history and insists on the primacy of their personal labels.

In conclusion, then, Pauls's thesis, though not a work of humour, does indicate that the idea that a particular strain of music was the dominant force of the 20th century is quite laughable.


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## Strange Magic

I certainly agree about the need for proofreading. I used to earn my daily crust, in my youth, as a proofreader, and am constantly dismayed at the low and always lowering state of spelling, punctuation, etc. in what are supposed to be serious publications these days. But glad to see that you've read Pauls' thesis. From your remarks, I take some comfort that my nutshell contains an essential kernel of truth. Several other points crop up in the thesis: A) There is a concern, expressed by others quoted by Pauls, and given clear expression by Milton Babbitt, that there exists a wrong-headed effort to keep avant-garde works off of concert programs and off of classical radio. B) Pauls posits a counter-thesis that, for decades, music history texts have wrong-headedly promulgated a distorted view of what really has been written, recorded, and listened to over the past hundred years. Conspiracy v. Conspiracy, if you like. Another section I found fascinating was Pauls' discussion (pp. 141-163) of the myriad small independent labels that have sprung up over the decades to both create and satisfy a demand for relatively obscure mostly "tonal" works by a host of 20th century composers. Labels like BIS, Lyrita, Hyperion, Chandos, Vox, Albany, Naxos, cpo, Dutton, etc., founded by wealthy enthusiasts for such music, and evidently selling heaps of CDs.

I suppose the arguments all come down to popularity--who wants to pay money or take the time to hear what kinds of music. Pauls' point is that, broadly defined, Romantic music just never went away.


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## arpeggio

Strange Magic said:


> Pauls' argument in a nutshell, which he supports with some very interesting lists and tables, is that musical Romanticism/Neo-Romanticism overwhelmingly dominates the Twentieth Century, for which thesis he offers many arguments and much data.


This is a point many of us have been trying to make for years around here. That is the point of Mahlerian's "I am not a Modernists" Thread. Even the vast majority of us who follow modernistic music only devote maybe 10% of our listening time to it. We just do not turn off our radios or switch to the county western station when we hear it.

And remember the vast majority of American's do this when they hear Mozart.


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## Nereffid

Strange Magic said:


> A) There is a concern, expressed by others quoted by Pauls, and given clear expression by Milton Babbitt, that there exists a wrong-headed effort to keep avant-garde works off of concert programs and off of classical radio. B) Pauls posits a counter-thesis that, for decades, music history texts have wrong-headedly promulgated a distorted view of what really has been written, recorded, and listened to over the past hundred years. Conspiracy v. Conspiracy, if you like.


I suppose much of the conflict over modernism hinges not on whether these things are true, but on whether it's A or B that is wrong-headed.


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## Mahlerian

Nereffid said:


> I suppose much of the conflict over modernism hinges not on whether these things are true, but on whether it's A or B that is wrong-headed.


I prefer to avoid conspiracies myself.

If the nasty academics controlled what was played and recorded, why is it that the most popular composers of the 20th century never needed any kind of revival? Doesn't it make more sense to be consistent and say that the "hidden" Romantics of the 20th century were ignored because, during that time, there wasn't much interest in them, either popularly or among musicians?

No one commented on the blatant misrepresentation I posted above, which I would never have let get by in a doctoral thesis, but the entire premise of his presentation of the data in the first chapter seems flawed.



> As a methodology for determining greatness, the formula, "great composers equals most-played composers," may seem a little too facile, like paint-by-numbers. It is certainly not immune from criticism on that count, but it is significant that nobody has yet devised a method that can fully displace it....Which of course brings up one of the burning questions that surrounds popular romantic composers who flourished in the first half of the twentieth century: Why do we judge the post-1850 generation - that is, the first early twentieth-century generation of composers - according to completely different criteria?


This begs the question at best, but I think it's completely wrong on top of that. We (whoever that refers to here) *don't* judge later composers on different criteria than earlier, because the criteria he's positing of frequency of performances simply don't matter to our judgments of the earlier composers, either.

For example, how many would put Purcell ahead of Monteverdi and Lassus and Palestrina in terms of greatness? In terms of influence or any other more easily quantifiable criterion? Is Vivaldi so far ahead of Rameau that we consider the latter on a separate tier? Many would not consider it abnormal to rank Bruckner ahead of Johann Strauss, yet going by this chart to rank recordings (as he would have us do with the 20th century) would suggest otherwise.


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## Nereffid

Mahlerian said:


> For example, how many would put Purcell ahead of Monteverdi and Lassus and Palestrina in terms of greatness? In terms of influence or any other more easily quantifiable criterion? Is Vivaldi so far ahead of Rameau that we consider the latter on a separate tier? Many would not consider it abnormal to rank Bruckner ahead of Johann Strauss, yet going by this chart to rank recordings (as he would have us do with the 20th century) would suggest otherwise.


Interesting how you see him as "ranking" composers, whereas I see him as listing composers in descending order of recordings. After all, the purpose of that table was to compare public attention (recordings) with critical attention (coverage in music histories). At no point does Pauls say, or imply, or go anywhere near the idea, that (say) Gershwin is more significant, or better, or whatever, than Bartók.
But I had this conversation yesterday with violadude, so I'm not interested in rehashing the concept of a "big picture".


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## Mahlerian

Nereffid said:


> Interesting how you see him as "ranking" composers, whereas I see him as listing composers in descending order of recordings. After all, the purpose of that table was to compare public attention (recordings) with critical attention (coverage in music histories). At no point does Pauls say, or imply, or go anywhere near the idea, that (say) Gershwin is more significant, or better, or whatever, than Bartók.
> But I had this conversation yesterday with violadude, so I'm not interested in rehashing the concept of a "big picture".


He specifically says that he is using "great composers equals most-played composers" as "a methodology for determining greatness."

He goes on to ask the question of why different criteria are being used for the 20th century's music, when he has done nothing to demonstrate that these criteria are used for earlier music. That is why the argument begs the question; it depends on it being true that the criteria were in use for earlier composers for him to say that different criteria are being applied.

This is fallacious reasoning because it is circular. It assumes that his conclusion is true and reasons backwards from there.


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## Truckload

Mahlerian said:


> He specifically says that he is using "great composers equals most-played composers" as "a methodology for determining greatness."
> 
> He goes on to ask the question of why different criteria are being used for the 20th century's music, when he has done nothing to demonstrate that these criteria are used for earlier music. That is why the argument begs the question; it depends on it being true that the criteria were in use for earlier composers for him to say that different criteria are being applied.
> 
> This is fallacious reasoning because it is circular. It assumes that his conclusion is true and reasons backwards from there.


I am still working my way through the book, but there have been many arguments about the significance of popularity in classical music on this forum. People were arguing about it back in the 1970's when I was in college. Obviously the argument will continue. It is one of the few "objective" and numerical factors that can be considered, so as such he is using it. I don't think Pauls is arguing that it is the only factor that a music lover should consider in selecting works for listening. It is just one factor that can be totally objective.


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## Strange Magic

Mahlerian said:


> If the nasty academics controlled what was played and recorded, why is it that the most popular composers of the 20th century never needed any kind of revival? Doesn't it make more sense to be consistent and say that the "hidden" Romantics of the 20th century were ignored because, during that time, there wasn't much interest in them, either popularly or among musicians?.


I can't recall anywhere Pauls asserting that nasty academics controlled what was played and recorded. Pauls' whole point is that the music-listening public never wavered in its interest in those most popular composers. And to say there wasn't much interest in the "hidden" Romantics is true only in the case of the texts of those academics, as Pauls' discussion of the exploding independent label scene makes clear. Take another look at Table 2 and the independent label material on pp. 141-163.


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## Truckload

Strange Magic said:


> I can't recall anywhere Pauls asserting that nasty academics controlled what was played and recorded. Pauls' whole point is that the music-listening public never wavered in its interest in those most popular composers. And to say there wasn't much interest in the "hidden" Romantics is true only in the case of the texts of those academics, as Pauls' discussion of the exploding independent label scene makes clear. Take another look at Table 2.


Yes, I looked at the tables early on, and was surprised. Table 2 in particular is shocking, even for someone like myself who has seen the issue as a serious problem for a long time.


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## Mahlerian

Truckload said:


> I am still working my way through the book, but there have been many arguments about the significance of popularity in classical music on this forum. People were arguing about it back in the 1970's when I was in college. Obviously the argument will continue. It is one of the few "objective" and numerical factors that can be considered, so as such he is using it. I don't think Pauls is arguing that it is the only factor that a music lover should consider in selecting works for listening. It is just one factor that can be totally objective.


The significance of popularity is not my point. I am saying that Pauls misuses it to support a conclusion that depends on evidence that requires the conclusion to be true.


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## mmsbls

Mahlerian said:


> He specifically says that he is using "great composers equals most-played composers" as "a methodology for determining greatness."
> 
> He goes on to ask the question of why different criteria are being used for the 20th century's music, when he has done nothing to demonstrate that these criteria are used for earlier music. That is why the argument begs the question; it depends on it being true that the criteria were in use for earlier composers for him to say that different criteria are being applied.
> 
> This is fallacious reasoning because it is circular. It assumes that his conclusion is true and reasons backwards from there.


I'm a bit confused here. I have not read the thesis, but I did look at the portion discussed in the past few posts. When he writes:



> When evaluating historical periods and composers dating from the years before 1900 , historians active throughout the twentieth century generally tried to find a way to build key historical turning points and historical tendencies around composers who remained central to the concert and recorded repertoire as it existed throughout the twentieth century. Despite a certain circularity in the reasoning, the lines of music history that became established in the public consciousness were simply the lines that emerged when the most-played composers were connected together, at least as far as pre-1900 eras were concerned. The composers who were the most thoroughly represented in post- 1900 historical accounts o f eighteenth and nineteenth-century music therefore tended to be the same figures who received the bulk of present-day performances and recordings, which is another way of saying that music history textbooks and classical record catalogues emphasized a similar canon of great composers.


isn't he saying that _historians_ have used "most-played" = best. He also agrees with you that the reasoning is circular. He seems to be saying, "historians used this method for pre-1900s music, and the public came to believe this line of reasoning. Why do they not use the same method later?"

I can't comment on whether historians used that reasoning for pre-1900s music but not for post-1900s music or whether he demonstrated that. It looks like he is trying to see what historical consistency would show.


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## Mahlerian

Strange Magic said:


> I can't recall anywhere Pauls asserting that nasty academics controlled what was played and recorded. Pauls' whole point is that the music-listening public never wavered in its interest in those most popular composers.


I'm not disagreeing with that. Obviously what's popular is popular.



Strange Magic said:


> And to say there wasn't much interest in the "hidden" Romantics is true only in the case of the texts of those academics, as Pauls' discussion of the exploding independent label scene makes clear. Take another look at Table 2 and the independent label material on pp. 141-163.


No, if there had been a significant amount of interest, musicians would probably have performed them more frequently. The performing repertoires of conductors and soloists are used *by the author* as a barometer of popularity. If Bernstein supported a composer like Pfitzner or Bantock, he would have gone out of his way to perform their music regardless of fashion, just as he performed works by composers like Schuman and Harris which have gone into neglect.


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## Mahlerian

mmsbls said:


> I'm a bit confused here. I have not read the thesis, but I did look at the portion discussed in the past few posts. When he writes:
> 
> isn't he saying that _historians_ have used "most-played" = best. He also agrees with you that the reasoning is circular. He seems to be saying, "historians used this method for pre-1900s music, and the public came to believe this line of reasoning. Why do they not use the same method later?"
> 
> I can't comment on whether historians used that reasoning for pre-1900s music but not for post-1900s music or whether he demonstrated that. It looks like he is trying to see what historical consistency would show.


I think he is asserting an improper cause because of a connection when other factors are more likely to be the cause.

It is true that the list of most recorded composers between, say 1700 and 1900 is very close to the "academic/historical canon" for those centuries. It is not true that this in itself implies that they are in the canon *because* they are the most popular and performed, and he fails to substantiate his reasons for believing this and working from it.


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## Nereffid

Uh, well, I don't want to be sucked into this but let me just clarify.

Pauls says 


> As a methodology for determining greatness, the formula,
> "great composers equals most-played composers," may seem a
> little too facile, like paint-by-numbers. It is certainly not immune
> from criticism on that count, but it is significant that nobody has
> yet devised a method that can fully displace it. If anyone today
> were to rate a Gluck far ahead of a Mozart or a Beethoven, they
> would be received with, at most, a certain amount of indulgence.


Note that he says in his formula "composer*s*". To believe that he's implying that the composer with the most recordings is the greatest, the composer with the second-most recordings is the second-greatest, and so on is an obvious misinterpretation.
The issue isn't that Purcell has more recordings than Monterverdi, therefore Purcell is a greater composer. What we can get from the "formula" (and I do wish he hadn't used the simplistic "equals") is that both Purcell and Monteverdi have quite a lot of recordings, and as it happens they're both seen as great or significant composers. Whereas the composers that have very few recordings tend not to be the ones seen as great. Of course there will be outliers, but that doesn't mean a trend can't be identified.
Also, some indulgence is needed as regards comparing a composer from one period with a composer from another period. Notice that he compares "a Gluck" with "a Mozart or a Beethoven". But again, this seems so obvious as to hardly need mentioning.


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## mstar

Mahlerian said:


> He specifically says that he is using "great composers equals most-played composers" as "a methodology for determining greatness."


Wait a second - that would mean Beyoncé trumps all classical composers.

If that's true, I think I'll have to rethink everything I've ever known.


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## Strange Magic

Mahlerian said:


> I'm not disagreeing with that. Obviously what's popular is popular.
> 
> No, if there had been a significant amount of interest [in the "Hidden" Romantics], musicians would probably have performed them more frequently.


I think what Pauls is demonstrating is that the hunger of the music-listening, CD-buying public for "Romantic" works was not fully satisfied by the regular, popular composers--that audience had heard Rach and Debussy and whomever for the millionth time, had loved their work, continued to love it--but had a big appetite for more. That appetite was both stoked and slaked by the rapid growth of the independent labels. The continuing strength of the Romantic tradition is the sum of the audience for the regular, popular composers and the audience, often overlapping, for the host of more obscure tonal composers.


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## mmsbls

Mahlerian said:


> It is true that the list of most recorded composers between, say 1700 and 1900 is very close to the "academic/historical canon" for those centuries. It is not true that this in itself implies that they are in the canon *because* they are the most popular and performed, and he fails to substantiate his reasons for believing this and working from it.


Does he believe that? Again I have only read a small part, but from the quotes here he seems to be trying to establish how historians wrote their histories rather than say which composers he believes are actually best. These parts seem to be saying that historians have not been consistent.


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## Mahlerian

Nereffid said:


> Uh, well, I don't want to be sucked into this but let me just clarify.
> 
> Pauls says
> 
> Note that he says in his formula "composer*s*". To believe that he's implying that the composer with the most recordings is the greatest, the composer with the second-most recordings is the second-greatest, and so on is an obvious misinterpretation.
> The issue isn't that Purcell has more recordings than Monterverdi, therefore Purcell is a greater composer. What we can get from the "formula" (and I do wish he hadn't used the simplistic "equals") is that both Purcell and Monteverdi have quite a lot of recordings, and as it happens they're both seen as great or significant composers. Whereas the composers that have very few recordings tend not to be the ones seen as great. Of course there will be outliers, but that doesn't mean a trend can't be identified.
> Also, some indulgence is needed as regards comparing a composer from one period with a composer from another period. Notice that he compares "a Gluck" with "a Mozart or a Beethoven". But again, this seems so obvious as to hardly need mentioning.


I didn't mean to say that he meant it as an exact ranking, but yes, he is in fact using it in that way when he opines that the next table of 20th century composers shows a problem because the space allotted to popular composers such as Rachmaninoff and Elgar is smaller than that given to Schoenberg and Webern.

The entire point of those paragraphs is to establish the idea that a double standard is being perpetrated by historians of the 20th century.


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## Mahlerian

mmsbls said:


> Does he believe that? Again I have only read a small part, but from the quotes here he seems to be trying to establish how historians wrote their histories rather than say which composers he believes are actually best. These parts seem to be saying that historians have not been consistent.


Yes, and the way he attempts to prove this inconsistency *depends* on the unwarranted assumption that historians have used popularity as their measurement prior to the music of the 20th century. Otherwise, you just have coincidence, and that doesn't imply causation, as every college student knows.


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## arpeggio

Actually I do not have any idea what the dissertation and the OP are trying to prove.

If the dissertation is trying to prove that Andrew Lloyd Webber (who happens to be one of the richest living composers) is more popular than Webern my response is, "So what?"


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## Strange Magic

arpeggio said:


> Actually I do not have any idea what the dissertation and the OP are trying to prove.
> 
> If the dissertation is trying to prove that Andrew Lloyd Webber (who happens to be one of the richest living composers) is more popular than Webern my response is, "So what?"


What Pauls is saying is that if you relied upon the consensus music history texts of much of the twentieth century, you probably would never have heard of Andrew Lloyd Webber, or would have been told to pay no attention to his music because it represented the last ember of a decayed, outworn, obsolete, exhausted kind of music that has been superseded by more evolved musics. I exaggerate for effect, but that is one of the walnut's two hemispheres. The other is that Andrew Lloyd Webber is rich, famous, and surrounded by a host of eager listeners and of composers of similar ilk who never read those textbooks. Maybe not earth-shaking news perhaps--one can always say "I knew that all along; really I did.", but I found it interesting reading.


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## arpeggio

I still am not sure what the OP is trying to prove.

But I think we are a lot smarter that he thinks we are. It seems that most of us have an appreciation for the pros and cons of music history texts and we really do not need to read some obscure doctoral dissertation to learn about them.


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## violadude

I think maybe there's some generational gap going on in the discussion here. I'm 24 and I've never grown up with the idea that only certain "ultra-modern" composers mattered in the history of 20th century music. In fact, I would say in my years growing up in the Classical Music world Schoenberg and Boulez and such are back to being underdogs...

So when some of the older posters here talk about the modernist bogeyman, it just doesn't resonate with me or (probably) other people in my age group.


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## Truckload

Mahlerian said:


> The significance of popularity is not my point. I am saying that Pauls misuses it to support a conclusion that depends on evidence that requires the conclusion to be true.


You lost me with that one. I reread your posts 35, 48 and 50 and I still don't see your point. How can the evidence, which is a fact, require anything, let alone a "conclusion to be true." A fact is just a fact, right? The number of CD's available by any given composer is not going to change based on a conclusion that Pauls has reached. You could write a book, include your own conclusions, and include a table of number of CDs available by composer, and that would still be a fact no matter your conclusion, right?

But I did grasp that you have a problem with the book, and that certainly doesn't offend me in the slightest.


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## Truckload

Mahlerian said:


> I'm not disagreeing with that. Obviously what's popular is popular.
> 
> No, if there had been a significant amount of interest, musicians would probably have performed them more frequently. The performing repertoires of conductors and soloists are used *by the author* as a barometer of popularity. If Bernstein supported a composer like Pfitzner or Bantock, he would have gone out of his way to perform their music regardless of fashion, just as he performed works by composers like Schuman and Harris which have gone into neglect.


And Mahler. Bernstein's support for Mahler really propelled him into the spotlight during my lifetime.


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## Truckload

mmsbls said:


> I'm a bit confused here. I have not read the thesis, but I did look at the portion discussed in the past few posts. When he writes:
> 
> isn't he saying that _historians_ have used "most-played" = best. He also agrees with you that the reasoning is circular. He seems to be saying, "historians used this method for pre-1900s music, and the public came to believe this line of reasoning. Why do they not use the same method later?"
> 
> I can't comment on whether historians used that reasoning for pre-1900s music but not for post-1900s music or whether he demonstrated that. It looks like he is trying to see what historical consistency would show.


There was a very successful book "Classical Music: The 50 Greatest Composers and Their 1,000 Greatest Works" by Phil G. Goulding. It was a sort of layman's guide to classical music. I think it first came out in it's first edition in the 1980's or possibly before. The author talks about acquiring his collection on cassettes, CDs were not available yet. Anyway, Goulding did research based entirely on number of recordings and ranked them accordingly. It was a wildly popular book for a book on classical music. Not an academic text at all, but illustrative of the fact that the methodology has been around a long time.


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## Strange Magic

violadude said:


> I think maybe there's some generational gap going on in the discussion here. I'm 24 and I've never grown up with the idea that only certain "ultra-modern" composers mattered in the history of 20th century music. In fact, I would say in my years growing up in the Classical Music world Schoenberg and Boulez and such are back to being underdogs...
> 
> So when some of the older posters here talk about the modernist bogeyman, it just doesn't resonate with me or (probably) other people in my age group.


The benefit of actually reading a work that others are talking about is that one absorbs details that don't get picked up and passed on by seat of the pants commentators. Pauls makes a point that there is an ongoing evolution in the content of music history textbooks, with increasing recognition of the persistance of the Romantic tradition. You may well be the beneficiary of this evolution.


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## Mahlerian

Truckload said:


> You lost me with that one. I reread your posts 35, 48 and 50 and I still don't see your point. How can the evidence, which is a fact, require anything, let alone a "conclusion to be true." A fact is just a fact, right? The number of CD's available by any given composer is not going to change based on a conclusion that Pauls has reached. You could write a book, include your own conclusions, and include a table of number of CDs available by composer, and that would still be a fact no matter your conclusion, right?
> 
> But I did grasp that you have a problem with the book, and that certainly doesn't offend me in the slightest.


The facts cited are not in question. The correlation between the popular and critical repertoires prior to the 20th century is also not in question.

The author's conclusion that the 20th century critical canon has been constructed on the basis of different criteria does not follow from the evidence or that correlation. There is a possibility, which I think is true, that popularity was not used as a criterion for any of these periods. Just because two things happen together doesn't mean that one caused the other.


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## Strange Magic

arpeggio said:


> I still am not sure what the OP is trying to prove.
> 
> But I think we are a lot smarter that he thinks we are. It seems that most of us have an appreciation for the pros and cons of music history texts and we really do not need to read some obscure doctoral dissertation to learn about them.


If you feel you know all you need to know about this subject, I fully support your decision to pass on this obscure doctoral dissertation.


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## mmsbls

Truckload said:


> There was a very successful book "Classical Music: The 50 Greatest Composers and Their 1,000 Greatest Works" by Phil G. Goulding. It was a sort of layman's guide to classical music. I think it first came out in it's first edition in the 1980's or possibly before. The author talks about acquiring his collection on cassettes, CDs were not available yet. Anyway, Goulding did research based entirely on number of recordings and ranked them accordingly. It was a wildly popular book for a book on classical music. Not an academic text at all, but illustrative of the fact that the methodology has been around a long time.


When I first began to get serious about listening to classical music, I bought that book, and it guided me through my early years. I was simply stunned with how much beautiful music it listed. The top 5 (or 10) lists for each composer were perfect for me at that time.


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## Bulldog

arpeggio said:


> Actually I do not have any idea what the dissertation and the OP are trying to prove.
> 
> If the dissertation is trying to prove that Andrew Lloyd Webber (who happens to be one of the richest living composers) is more popular than Webern my response is, "So what?"


I don't have any particular affection for ALW, but being rich and famous doesn't sound so bad.


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## Strange Magic

Mahlerian said:


> The facts cited are not in question. The correlation between the popular and critical repertoires prior to the 20th century is also not in question.
> 
> The author's conclusion that the 20th century critical canon has been constructed on the basis of different criteria does not follow from the evidence or that correlation. There is a possibility, which I think is true, that popularity was not used as a criterion for any of these periods. Just because two things happen together doesn't mean that one caused the other.


I think there may be some confusion in discussing the 20th century critical canon. Pauls in Table 2, along the right column, lists composers born between 1850 and 1915 ranked by CDs available. This constitutes a canon that just about everyone would nod their head at; all the familiar names are there. Schönberg appears in 34th position; a handful of other avant-garde composers trail on down the long list. But the other 20th century critical canon is the one that Pauls exhibits in the other columns where he details the page counts in music history texts devoted to each and every composer. There, avant-grade composers hold a proportion of pages far in excess of their "popularity" in terms of CD sales. When you discuss the 20th century canon, to which are you referring? This will help clarify your position, and we can move forward.

This is why both Table 1 and Table 2 are so important to compare and understand.


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## Mahlerian

Strange Magic said:


> I think there may be some confusion in discussing the 20th century critical canon. Pauls in Table 2, along the right column, lists composers born between 1850 and 1915 ranked by CDs available. This constitutes a canon that just about everyone would nod their head at; all the familiar names are there. Schönberg appears in 34th position; a handful of other avant-garde composers trail on down the long list. But the other 20th century critical canon is the one that Pauls exhibits in the other columns where he details the page counts in music history texts devoted to each and every composer. There, avant-grade composers hold a proportion of pages far in excess of their "popularity" in terms of CD sales. When you discuss the 20th century canon, to which are you referring? This will help clarify your position, and we can move forward.
> 
> This is why both Table 1 and Table 2 are so important to compare and understand.


By critical canon, I mean what Pauls calls the "academic canon."

Look, I don't know why what I've been saying is so difficult to understand. Pauls' argument runs as follows:

- The critical and popular canons prior to the 20th century run in close parallel to each other

- The critical and popular canons in the 20th century differ on some figures

- Therefore, different criteria are being used to determine the critical canon in the 20th century as opposed to earlier eras.

The conclusion doesn't follow from the premises unless you accept the unproven premise that the criteria used to determine the critical canon in earlier eras depended on popularity, which is at the very least not proven.

Also, the top composer in table 2 is an avant-garde composer: Debussy. Stravinsky and Bartok are high up on the list as well.


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## Truckload

mmsbls said:


> When I first began to get serious about listening to classical music, I bought that book, and it guided me through my early years. I was simply stunned with how much beautiful music it listed. The top 5 (or 10) lists for each composer were perfect for me at that time.


Yep, it was very useful. I bought at least 10 copies to give away as Christmas presents to family and friends, hoping they would get interested in classical music. And of course I read it myself. It was very entertaining for a book on classical music.


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## fluteman

So, I'm reading this thread wondering if I should look at a 400-page (ouch!) dissertation. I first learned about the renaissance, baroque, classical, romantic and modern eras in my first music history class, given by Roland Trogan (anyone here know him?). One important lesson was that these may be convenient labels, but only in a rough and approximate way. The labels describe certain common but not universal characteristics of an era, and shouldn't be used to pigeonhole specific composers. "Romantic" composers didn't suddenly disappear the day Stravinsky wrote The Rite of Spring, to be replaced by the "modern" ones. In Stravinsky's music, the influence of his mentor Rimsky-Korsakov remains evident, as did the influence of Mahler on Schoenberg and Webern, Reger on Hindemith, Faure on Ravel, Gliere on Prokofiev, etc. Stravinsky, Debussy and Ravel had a broad influence in the 20th century on a lot of music, including popular music, that could hardly be described as "modern". And the influence of Prokofiev and Shostakovich on one of my favorite contemporary composers, Peteris Vasks, for example, is also evident. And all this doesn't even take into account the major influences of non-Western music, on the minimalists, for example, and jazz and other popular idioms on art music of all kinds throughout the 20th century.

So, one could just as easily view Western music in terms of a continuous evolution (I don't want to say advance or progression) as in a series of discrete eras. Or maybe as a mighty, fast flowing river, with any number of whirlpools, eddies, cross currents and tributaries. So I'm not sure why I should look at those tables and statistical popularity measurements. Heck, until I looked at these internet discussion groups, it never occurred to me that I had to choose sides between a neo-romantic camp and a modernist camp.


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## Truckload

Mahlerian said:


> The facts cited are not in question. The correlation between the popular and critical repertoires prior to the 20th century is also not in question.
> 
> The author's conclusion that the 20th century critical canon has been constructed on the basis of different criteria does not follow from the evidence or that correlation. There is a possibility, which I think is true, that popularity was not used as a criterion for any of these periods. Just because two things happen together doesn't mean that one caused the other.


OK, now I see your point. Yes, you may be right. A giant influence when I was in school was the almost psychotic fascination with "newness" and a composer as "rebel" and "innovator". This idea of greatness being measured by "newness" or "innovation" could explain in whole or in part the academic fascination with some composers rather than others.

For example in the 1970's, Beethoven and Wagner were held in perhaps the highest esteem of all precisely because they were innovators. Cary over that idea into 20th century composers and you would naturally see Schoenberg and Hindemith as more significant than Rachmaninoff and Sibelius.

Of course no one view is ever universal. My music history and musicology professor was an expert in the music of the Renaissance, and had very little interest in anything beyond Bach. He had a collection of viola da gamba in about six sizes and two different harpsichords in his home. He was an early advocate of "authentic" performances and was constantly trying to recruit students to get involved in playing in his ensemble. He sounds interesting, but he wasn't, he was boring and pedantic.

Another major "thread" running through music history and musicology at that time was the search for "consensus". It would have been extremely difficult for any musicologist with a divergent viewpoint from the consensus viewpoint to get a university appointment.

I am enjoying Pauls book. It will be interesting to see if in the conclusion he mentions these other forces that were influencing academics.


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## SimonNZ

Strange Magic said:


> Another section I found fascinating was Pauls' discussion (pp. 141-163) of the myriad small independent labels that have sprung up over the decades to both create and satisfy a demand for relatively obscure mostly "tonal" works by a host of 20th century composers. Labels like BIS, Lyrita, Hyperion, Chandos, Vox, Albany, Naxos, cpo, Dutton, etc., founded by wealthy enthusiasts for such music, and evidently selling heaps of CDs.
> 
> I suppose the arguments all come down to popularity--who wants to pay money or take the time to hear what kinds of music. Pauls' point is that, broadly defined, Romantic music just never went away.


Sorry, but that completely misrepresents the work done by these labels, who, moreover, I'm sure have no use at all for silly and simplistic opposites like TCs atonalist/traditionalist or this author's modernist/romantric.

Furthermore they are _creating_ a demand, believing that by making great recordings an audience will recognise quality, not _responding_ to a demand.

Can you tell me which part of the text makes the claims you describe? _That_ I want to read.

Half the ones you name have recorded John Cage and Stockhausen, ferchrissakes, so their only criteria for promoting a composer is belief in the work, regardless of the style chosen by the composer.


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## Strange Magic

SimonNZ, there is no substitute for reading the text. Otherwise, you are sitting on the sidelines with your Orange Crush. Join the game.


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## Woodduck

Mahlerian said:


> By critical canon, I mean what Pauls calls the "academic canon."
> 
> *Pauls' argument runs as follows:
> 
> - The critical and popular canons prior to the 20th century run in close parallel to each other
> 
> - The critical and popular canons in the 20th century differ on some figures
> 
> - Therefore, different criteria are being used to determine the critical canon in the 20th century as opposed to earlier eras.
> *
> The conclusion doesn't follow from the premises unless you accept the unproven premise that the criteria used to determine the critical canon in earlier eras depended on popularity, which is at the very least not proven.


I don't read Pauls' argument as such a simple syllogism. I read him as beginning with the observation, shown in Table 2, that the pre-1900 music which is most popular (now, and to a great extent in its own day) is largely the same music which is academically considered best or most important, while the most popular and most academically prestigious post-1900 composers and works are to a great degree not identical - and that, in fact, popularity and critical esteem have been in some cases inversely proportional. The idea that different criteria have been used in determining the value of pre- versus post-1900 music, and the nature of these criteria, appear to me to be what his entire study is intended to discuss and demonstrate.

That there have been different criteria is not difficult to see. It's obvious to anyone of a certain age, or anyone who's done much reading in the subject, that the artistic life of the 20th century was characterized by contentious factionalism and propaganda for one "-ism" or another which found expression not only in the actual output of composers but in academia and the intellectual professions concerned with music. Criticism of contemporary music often took the covert or overt form of advocacy (of which Pauls' study contains plenty of illustrations, and which are easy to find elsewhere). However, a historian or critic considering the music of earlier times would have no need to advocate for an aesthetic point of view, except as the significance of earlier music might be interpreted to support and validate a view of contemporary music of which the author approves or disapproves. In other words, it's easier to be objective about the past. Moreover, confronted with a present in which they have a stake, academics are in a position to impose their biases on the culture and so define it for their own and future times.


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## SimonNZ

Strange Magic said:


> SimonNZ, there is no substitute for reading the text. Otherwise, you are sitting on the sidelines with your Orange Crush. Join the game.


If you're agreeing with him and advocating his viewpoint, then I think I'm free to point out a really obvious error in your post when I see one. And I'm still waiting to find a reason to stop my other reading and put my time (and blood pressure) into this, and you're not providing it, particularly if it puts forward bizarre misrepresentations like those I address in my previous post - which I'd still like you to respond to.


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## EdwardBast

I hardly feel I need to read the book, since I have been aware of the relevant trends in historiography and the separate canons for nearly my whole life. And I have been critiquing the evolutionary view of music history for nearly as long. I am reading it nevertheless. 

I have some thoughts on the exaggerated relative attention given to the academic canon and canonic composers as enshrined in 20thc music history texts that haven't come up yet (I am about to start Chapter 2) in the Pauls. I think the tendency to extol the works and theories of the innovators and modernists over those of the more traditional composers is abetted by the fact that it is, quite simply, an easier task in every respect. Need to explain what Schoenberg and Boulez were about? They were quite happy to tell you what you need to know. It's like reporters relying on press releases. And twelve tone theory allows musicologists to spend pages on matrices and tracing rows and their transformations in various works. Integral serialism also allows for neat little charts and easy to comprehend yet impressive sounding explanations. In a word, it is convenient for authors to have the theoretic and philosophic content of music spoon fed to them by composers who were also theorists and writers of manifestos. On the other hand, if one wishes to find out what is new about the language of Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, Prokofiev or Shostakovich, composers whose eyes glazed over with boredom at the prospect of theoretical discussions, one gets no help whatever. So one has no recourse but to get in there and grapple with music that is very difficult to analyze and whose guiding principles don't reduce to neat little concepts and isms. Virtually no one has been willing to do the hard work. The neo-Riemannians are starting to catch up with some of the work I believe.


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## Mahlerian

EdwardBast said:


> I think the tendency to extol the works and theories of the innovators and modernists over those of the more traditional composers is abetted by the fact that it is, quite simply, an easier task in every respect. Need to explain what Schoenberg and Boulez were about? They were quite happy to tell you what you need to know.


_*WHAT?*_

You're talking about two composers who were loath to explain their works in any capacity, let alone in technical detail. People still disagree about exactly how their compositional processes worked in their major masterpieces that have been studied and discussed for decades.


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## SimonNZ

EdwardBast said:


> the exaggerated relative attention given to the academic canon and canonic composers as enshrined in 20thc music history texts.


There is vastly - _vaaastly _- more academic publishing done on the composers that this Paul guy likes than on those composers claimed to have an "unfair bias". Look at any University Press catalogue from any year of the last century. Look at the shelves of any campus library. Look in any secondhand bookshop. Look at the personal libraries of any academic.


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## EdwardBast

Mahlerian said:


> _*WHAT?*_
> 
> You're talking about two composers who were loath to explain their works in any capacity, let alone in technical detail. People still disagree about exactly how their compositional processes worked in their major masterpieces that have been studied and discussed for decades.


The methodologies are enough of a basis for historians to spin pages of charts and explanations. Just look at Watkins' or Morgan's texts. I'm not saying they necessarily produce good explanations or analyses. Only that it makes for convenient, facile material for history texts.


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## EdwardBast

SimonNZ said:


> There is vastly - _vaaastly _- more academic publishing done on the composers that this Paul guy likes than on those composers claimed to have an "unfair bias". Look at any University Press catalogue from any year of the last century. Look at the shelves of any campus library. Look in any secondhand bookshop. Look at the personal libraries of any academic.


So do you think there is more analytical work on Prokofiev and Shostakovich than on, say, Schoenberg or Webern? Not from what I have seen. But then I haven't done a full survey of what is currently out there.


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## Mahlerian

EdwardBast said:


> The methodologies are enough of a basis for historians to spin pages of charts and explanations. Just look at Watkins' or Morgan's texts. I'm not saying they necessarily produce good explanations or analyses. Only that it makes for convenient, facile material for history texts.


You said that the composers were happy to describe their methods; this is, strictly speaking, false.

Schoenberg did not talk about his methods at all. He was reluctant even to teach them to his students. He correctly reasoned that they would be misconstrued as a mechanical system and the music itself would remain unexamined.

Boulez was even more reticent, and we still only have a very incomplete knowledge of the way he composed works like Le marteau, which have been pored over in great detail. He was also extremely wary of any kind of system and relished the freedom to compose freely within the limits he set for himself.


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## SimonNZ

EdwardBast said:


> So do you think there is more analytical work on Prokofiev and Shostakovich than on, say, Schoenberg or Webern? Not from what I have seen. But then I haven't done a full survey of what is currently out there.


Do you really feel there's a hidden suppressed history of Prokofiev and Shostakovich and a neglect in academic publishing throughout the century?

(also: remind me again: are Prokofiev and Shostakovich in the romantic pigeonhole or the modern pigeonhole? - I can't keep these things straight)


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## Mahlerian

SimonNZ said:


> Do you really feel there's a hidden suppressed history of Prokofiev and Shostakovich and a neglect in academic publishing throughout the century?
> 
> (also: remind me again: are Prokofiev and Shostakovich in the romantic pigeonhole or the modern pigeonhole? - I can't keep these things straight)


The other thing I want to know is why the allegations of suppression rather than a lesser degree of interest. It seems like some are under the impression that there was this huge conspiracy to prevent certain composers from becoming respectable, whereas in actuality it was a collection of disparate individuals acting on their own tastes and perceptions that created this canon (somewhat, but far from entirely) separate from the popular one.

Plenty of avant-garde figures get far less space in history books than Prokofiev and Shostakovich, so the degree to which someone is considered important is not and never was solely determined by the degree to which their music is considered avant-garde.


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## violadude

In my college I took one 20th century history class and one 20th century theory class. These are the pieces I remember focusing on in those classes:

Webern's 5 pieces for String Quartet/String Orchestra
Schoenberg 5 Pieces for Orchestra (especially Farben)
Stravinsky's 3 Pieces for String Quartet
Ives' Unanswered Question
Ives' Concord Sonata
Ives' General Booth Goes to Heaven
Ives' Three Places in New England
Sibelius' 4th Symphony
Stravinsky Rite of Spring
Cage Aria
Crumb Madrigals book III
Bartok Music for Strings Percussion and Celesta
Bartok Concerto for Orchestra
Cage Music of Changes
Lutoslawski Symphony 3
Berio's Sinfonia
Berio's One of the Sequenzas
Debussy Nocturnes
Scheonberg Pierrot Lunaire (specifically "Nacht")
Some Ragtime Music by Joplin
Milhaud La Beouf Sur La Tout
Stravinsky Octet
Reich Clapping Music 
Britten Peter Grimes
Shostakovich 5th symphony
Messiaen Turangalila Symphony
Messiaen (Some piano piece)
Carter Enchanted Preludes
Some piece by Paul Dresher
Boulez Le marteau sans maître

I'm sure there's more. That's all I can remember at the moment. My 20th century history teacher, in particular, was very open minded and played just about everything for us. He even set up days where we could bring our own recordings of 20th century composers in and play them for the class. And he was (or acted) fairly neutral. As far as we were concerned he liked everything he played for us about equally.


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## Truckload

EdwardBast said:


> I hardly feel I need to read the book, since I have been aware of the relevant trends in historiography and the separate canons for nearly my whole life. And I have been critiquing the evolutionary view of music history for nearly as long. I am reading it nevertheless.
> 
> I have some thoughts on the exaggerated relative attention given to the academic canon and canonic composers as enshrined in 20thc music history texts that haven't come up yet (I am about to start Chapter 2) in the Pauls. I think the tendency to extol the works and theories of the innovators and modernists over those of the more traditional composers is abetted by the fact that it is, quite simply, an easier task in every respect. Need to explain what Schoenberg and Boulez were about? They were quite happy to tell you what you need to know. It's like reporters relying on press releases. And twelve tone theory allows musicologists to spend pages on matrices and tracing rows and their transformations in various works. Integral serialism also allows for neat little charts and easy to comprehend yet impressive sounding explanations. In a word, it is convenient for authors to have the theoretic and philosophic content of music spoon fed to them by composers who were also theorists and writers of manifestos. On the other hand, if one wishes to find out what is new about the language of Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, Prokofiev or Shostakovich, composers whose eyes glazed over with boredom at the prospect of theoretical discussions, one gets no help whatever. So one has no recourse but to get in there and grapple with music that is very difficult to analyze and whose guiding principles don't reduce to neat little concepts and isms. Virtually no one has been willing to do the hard work. The neo-Riemannians are starting to catch up with some of the work I believe.


Very well written. But you don't really think they were just all lazy do you? I mean, if you have a wife and kids and you need a well paid job with insurance, how could you defy the "consensus" and write about Hanson or Rachmaninoff? Anyone who stood out might have lost their job or been marginalized. And then the issue of publication. Want tenure? You better get published. Want to get published? You better write about the "innovators" the exciting new "rebels". Anyway, well written post. And who knows, you may be right.


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## arpeggio

I read enough of the dissertation to see that it is nothing but another denunciation of modernistic music.

Ladies and gentlemen. It has been demonstrated that the vast majority of the members here at Talk Classical are a very diverse eclectic group who follow all sorts of music classical and non-classical. Providing a hundred dissertations by Ludwig Von Drake is not going to change our approach to classical music.

This thread is strictly for those who listen only to tonal music. The rest of us might as well take a pass.


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## SimonNZ

Truckload said:


> Very well written. But you don't really think they were just all lazy do you? I mean, if you have a wife and kids and you need a well paid job with insurance, how could you defy the "consensus" and write about Hanson or Rachmaninoff? Anyone who stood out might have lost their job or been marginalized. And then the issue of publication. Want tenure? You better get published. Want to get published? You better write about the "innovators" the exciting new "rebels". Anyway, well written post. And who knows, you may be right.


This highlights another myth about academic canons, which I also see in discussions of literature: because repeating the same old same old about any established canon is not how you get ahead in academia - you do that by being the publishing enfant terrible who challenges all the previous generations or previous _year's_ canon-making - "rebels" and all - beginning your writing with the familiar "It is today commonly thought...but I however intend to show that...". If composers and works survive this constant reevaluation from every angle it must because they have more merit than just the bullying advocacy of some clique.


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## Vaneyes

Strange Magic said:


> ....satisfy a demand for relatively obscure mostly "tonal" works by a host of 20th century composers. Labels like BIS, Lyrita, Hyperion, Chandos, Vox, Albany, Naxos, cpo, Dutton, etc., founded by wealthy enthusiasts for such music, and evidently selling heaps of CDs.
> 
> I suppose the arguments all come down to popularity--who wants to pay money or take the time to hear what kinds of music. Pauls' point is that, broadly defined, Romantic music just never went away.


Better check again. BIS isn't in your pigeonhole, and cpo, Hyperion, Chandos, and Naxos have made commendable strides.


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## Truckload

SimonNZ said:


> This highlights another myth about academic canons, which I also see in discussions of literature: because repeating the same old same old about any established canon is not how you get ahead in academia - you do that by being the publishing enfant terrible who challenges all the previous generations or previous _year's_ canon-making - "rebels" and all - beginning your writing with the familiar "It is today commonly thought...but I however intend to show that...". If composers and works survive this constant reevaluation from every angle it must because they have more merit than just the bullying advocacy of some clique.


That is really interesting. I am enjoying the Pauls book. Could you point us to another dissertation whose subject is a negative reevaluation of Shostakovich or Cage or Beg or Stockhausen, etc? There must be a bunch of them out there for you to be so confident that this constant reevaluation is taking place. It would be very helpful. It could be a reevaluation of any 20th century composer of either tonal or atonal music, as long as it is a negative reevaluation. Thanks.


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## SimonNZ

Truckload said:


> That is really interesting. I am enjoying the Pauls book. Could you point us to another dissertation whose subject is a negative reevaluation of Shostakovich or Cage or Beg or Stockhausen, etc? There must be a bunch of them out there for you to be so confident that this constant reevaluation is taking place. It would be very helpful. It could be a reevaluation of a composer from either main stem, tonal or atonal. Just negative.


A critical reevaluation wouldn't look like the blunt negative hatchet job you're wanting. But then the academic books on the "romantics" that this Paul guy is describing arent hatchet jobs either, they likewise are critical. I could spend some time looking for and finding examples of these if I thought you might respond with something other than instant dismissal and doubling down on your previous statement.

Just spent another thirty pages on this damn book looking for the thing about the labels, and wanting to blue pencil every paragraph. Its very poorly written.


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## Truckload

SimonNZ said:


> A critical reevaluation wouldn't look like the negative hatchet job you're asking for. But then the academic books on the "romantics" that this Paul guy is describing arent hatchet jobs either, they likewise are critical. I could spend some time looking for and finding examples of these if I thought you might respond with something other than instant dismissal and doubling down on your previous statement.
> 
> Just spent another thirty pages on this damn book looking for the thing about the labels, and wanting to blue pencil every paragraph.


Interesting. I majored in music, and have read many books about music. I don't expect anything specifically until I read it. I was just hoping to read one of these many, many constant reevaluations such as you mentioned. I recently read a dissertation about the Dvorak "American" period that was quite interesting and informative. I enjoyed it. Just hoping for any example of a reevaluation as you described.

Oh I just remembered, what is the previous statement I am going to double down upon?


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## SimonNZ

You have a degree in music? Then why are all of your posts so hostile towards it? Why then can you never name composers or works when you dismiss all the modern/contemporary works you say ruin concerts? Why do you wish to appear as though you've never heard a single modern work?

I actually suspect you need to read an overview of the recent state of the art before going on to anything academic. Stop reading the confirmed-my-suspicions no-need-to-look-further stuff.


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## Truckload

SimonNZ said:


> You have a degree in music? Then why are all of your posts so hostile towards it? Why then can you never name composers or works when you dismiss all the modern/contemporary works you say ruin concerts? Why do you wish to appear as though you've never heard a single modern work?
> 
> I actually suspect you need to read an overview of the recent state of the art before going on to anything academic. Stop reading the confirmed-my-suspicions no-need-to-look-further stuff.


Yep, I actually have a degree in music and a Master of Education degree. Kind of strange that you will not read a list of composers published on Wiki, so you demand that I copy and paste them to this forum? You do know about copy and paste correct? I have heard many many atonal and avant-garde works. In my younger days I have actually pretended to like some of them so that I would be "accepted in the group". Shh, that's a secret, don't tell anybody.

Now I just call 'em as I see 'em and at 63 I have no time to waste on things people call music that I do not call music.

But I would still like to see some of these reevaluations. And what is the statement that I am going to double down upon?


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## SimonNZ

Truckload said:


> Yep, I actually have a degree in music and a Master of Education degree. *Kind of strange that you will not read a list of composers published on YouTube, so you demand that I copy and paste them to this forum? *You do know about copy and paste correct? I have heard many many atonal and avant-garde works. In my younger days I have actually pretended to like some of them so that I would be "accepted in the group". Shh, that's a secret, don't tell anybody.


What on earth does this mean?? I'm asking you who specifically which composers and works you take such offence to, and you've never been able to name them.

This is a wind-up, and I'm walking away.


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## aleazk

An Interesting and Useful Treatise on Twentieth Century Music

Yes, the ton of that music in youtube. Enjoy!


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## Truckload

SimonNZ said:


> What on earth does this mean?? I'm asking you who specifically which composers and works you take such offence to, and you've never been able to name them.
> 
> This is a wind-up, and I'm walking away.


Bye, see you soon. Sorry you can't read things on Wiki or name even one of those many reevaluations. Bye, bye.


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## Nereffid

Mahlerian said:


> By critical canon, I mean what Pauls calls the "academic canon."
> 
> Look, I don't know why what I've been saying is so difficult to understand. Pauls' argument runs as follows:
> 
> - The critical and popular canons prior to the 20th century run in close parallel to each other
> 
> - The critical and popular canons in the 20th century differ on some figures
> 
> - Therefore, different criteria are being used to determine the critical canon in the 20th century as opposed to earlier eras.
> 
> The conclusion doesn't follow from the premises unless you accept the unproven premise that the criteria used to determine the critical canon in earlier eras depended on popularity, which is at the very least not proven.


But what _is_ popularity?
Surely it's a manifestation of people liking something.

What ends up in the popular canon is a result of what the public prefers; what ends up in the critical canon is a result of what the critics prefer. If the canons start out in parallel and then at some point diverge, then the simplest explanation is that one group has (crudely putting it) changed the criteria by which something should be preferred.

If you can follow me when I make the distinction that the canon doesn't _depend on_ popularity but is instead _a manifestation of_ popularity, then we might make progress. But otherwise we seem to be genuinely at cross-purposes.


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## Guest

SimonNZ said:


> This highlights another myth about academic canons, which I also see in discussions of literature: because repeating the same old same old about any established canon is not how you get ahead in academia - you do that by being the publishing enfant terrible who challenges all the previous generations or previous _year's_ canon-making - "rebels" and all - beginning your writing with the familiar "*It is today commonly thought*...but I however intend to show that...".


Well a Google search for the phrase (add on the composer of your choice) throws up enough examples of its use in the literature (online and in print) to suggest there is some truth in what you say.


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## SimonNZ

Well...it doesn't have to be those exact words, just that approach/intention.


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## Strange Magic

Mahlerian said:


> The conclusion doesn't follow from the premises unless you accept the unproven premise that the criteria used to determine the critical canon in earlier eras depended on popularity, which is at the very least not proven.
> 
> Also, the top composer in table 2 is an avant-garde composer: Debussy. Stravinsky and Bartok are high up on the list as well.


The first sentence strikes at the core of the matter. I will grant that the correlation equals causation link between popularity and being in the canon of any era is unproven in terms of strict, neo-Euclidian logic. Neither is the postulated expansion of the universe proven by the Doppler redshift of the light from distant galaxies. But let's make an effort to be reasonable and to understand what's plausible: the undeniable correlation between popularity and canon membership in earlier eras certainly is most likely evidence of causality. What other explanations would you suggest? I understand why you cling to the "unprovenness" of this causal link with both hands, as the existence of such a link constitutes a real argument for a bias in many 20th century music history texts toward certain composers. If one chooses to add "at the expense of other, much more popular composers", go ahead. I don't doubt for a minute the sincerity with which the textbook authors believed that their favored composers ought to constitute the 20th century canon; Pauls' thesis is indeed based on that premise and its variance from that "unproven" causality. But please suggest a better, alternative explanation for the variance; don't just continue to chant "unproven".

Regarding the inclusion of Debussy, Stravinsky and Bartok as avant-garde, most people would say "no" to Debussy, "mostly no" to early Stravinsky, and "yes-and-no" to Bartok. But these three are useful stand-ins, in your argument, for people like the outright "atonalists" and aleatoric composers, and I can see why you choose to lump them in.


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## Strange Magic

SimonNZ said:


> Sorry, but that completely misrepresents the work done by these labels, who, moreover, I'm sure have no use at all for silly and simplistic opposites like TCs atonalist/traditionalist or this author's modernist/romantric.
> 
> Furthermore they are _creating_ a demand, believing that by making great recordings an audience will recognise quality, not _responding_ to a demand.
> 
> Can you tell me which part of the text makes the claims you describe? _That_ I want to read


I cannot help you, other than to suggest that you actually read the text. Really no substitute.


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## Guest

Strange Magic said:


> Regarding the inclusion of Debussy, Stravinsky and Bartok as avant-garde, most people would say "no" to Debussy


Would they? Was Debussy not avant-garde for 1894?


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## Strange Magic

Mahlerian said:


> It seems like some are under the impression that there was this huge conspiracy to prevent certain composers from becoming respectable, whereas in actuality it was a collection of disparate individuals acting on their own tastes and perceptions that created this canon (somewhat, but far from entirely) separate from the popular one.


I am not aware of a body of believers in a huge conspiracy to prevent certain composers from becoming respectable; I think there was a consensus among textbook authors, a meeting of the minds, a shared esthetic, that very understandably resulted in their writing extensively about those avant-garde composers who they felt represented music's true path forward. If I used the phrase "Conspiracy v. Conspiracy, if you like" before, my tongue was somewhat in my cheek, and I withdraw the characterization.


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## Strange Magic

MacLeod said:


> Would they? Was Debussy not avant-garde for 1894?


Sure, if you like, in 1894, though Ravel claimed he got there first. But who actually thinks of Debussy as an avant-garde composer today, or during the last 75 or so years, as they listen to the Nocturnes on their local classical music station?


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## Guest

Strange Magic said:


> Sure, if you like, in 1894, though Ravel claimed he got there first. But who actually thinks of Debussy as an avant-garde composer today, or during the last 75 or so years, as they listen to the Nocturnes on their local classical music station?


There's much to discuss here: the use of the term 'avant-garde'; the 'who' who might think this that or other other thing; the notion that a 'composer' might be defined by a single work; the idea that a local classical music station might play 'avant-garde' rather than 'smooooooth classics to help you relax as you cook your Sunday roast."


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## Nereffid

Strange Magic said:


> Sure, if you like, in 1894, though Ravel claimed he got there first. But who actually thinks of Debussy as an avant-garde composer today, or during the last 75 or so years, as they listen to the Nocturnes on their local classical music station?


Ah, the terrifying distinction between what music is and how it sounds!


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## JosefinaHW

Aristotle said something to the effect that only intellectual equals can be friends. I disagree.

Friends, would you please stop making comments on a text that you have not read carefully.

Those of you who aren't convinced that it is worth your time to read, please just let it go for awhile.

I really am enough of a ferret or a snapping turtle to bring the subject back up again in a week or two.

I effectively have been logged off of TC from before StrangeMagic began this thread until a few hours ago (approx. 5 AM, Saturday, EST) else I would have been on here responding to each of the posts that have been made. I saw on my phone that the thread was begun and I just logged in to thank SM for sharing this text that both of us think is most definitely interesting and useful especially but not only because of recent discussions on the forum. 

Please let me have another cup of tea before I come back on here and share my thoughts; I have read Pauls' text very carefully and I have collected many of his sources. There is no emergency here.


----------



## fluteman

SimonNZ said:


> Sorry, but that completely misrepresents the work done by these labels, who, moreover, I'm sure have no use at all for silly and simplistic opposites like TCs atonalist/traditionalist or this author's modernist/romantric.
> 
> Furthermore they are _creating_ a demand, believing that by making great recordings an audience will recognise quality, not _responding_ to a demand.
> 
> Can you tell me which part of the text makes the claims you describe? _That_ I want to read.
> 
> Half the ones you name have recorded John Cage and Stockhausen, ferchrissakes, so their only criteria for promoting a composer is belief in the work, regardless of the style chosen by the composer.


I have to side with you on this one. Among many other problems with this kind of analysis, there are major problems with attempting to compare 19th and 20th century music criticism or popularity. Before the 20th century, classical music was a pastime for the wealthy, educated elite, who could afford boxes at the opera and symphony, and in the late 19th century a newly forming upper middle class who could afford pianos for their parlors. The 20th century brought the golden age of recording, radio and TV, an era of far greater audience size and diversity, and a classical music boom. Anyone who isn't carefully examining the size and composition of the classical music audience has no business analyzing either popularity or criticism.


----------



## Strange Magic

fluteman said:


> Among many other problems with this kind of analysis....... Anyone who isn't carefully examining the size and composition of the classical music audience has no business analyzing either popularity or criticism.


A strong case could be made that anyone who hasn't carefully read the text being discussed in this thread has no business analyzing what is being advanced in the text concerning either popularity or criticism. But it's an open forum...room for everybody. Chairman Mao, the Great Helmsman, said "Learn Truth from Facts!". But he also said "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom!"


----------



## Nereffid

fluteman said:


> I have to side with you on this one. Among many other problems with this kind of analysis, there are major problems with attempting to compare 19th and 20th century music criticism or popularity. Before the 20th century, classical music was a pastime for the wealthy, educated elite, who could afford boxes at the opera and symphony, and in the late 19th century a newly forming upper middle class who could afford pianos for their parlors. The 20th century brought the golden age of recording, radio and TV, an era of far greater audience size and diversity, and a classical music boom. Anyone who isn't carefully examining the size and composition of the classical music audience has no business analyzing either popularity or criticism.


I agree that they are different audiences (critics? not quite sure), but on the other hand nobody's talking about 19th-century audiences; it's about current/recent popularity and criticism. One key point of Pauls's analysis is that academics and critics who were talking about 20th-century classical music _weren't_ taking the classical music audience into account.


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## Nereffid

Strange Magic said:


> A strong case could be made that anyone who hasn't carefully read the text being discussed in this thread has no business analyzing what is being advanced in the text concerning either popularity or criticism. But it's an open forum...room for everybody. Chairman Mao, the Great Helmsman, said "Learn Truth from Facts!". But he also said "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom!"


My understanding is that Mao said "let a hundred flowers bloom" to make it easier to identify which flowers to behead...


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## Morimur

Mao crippled an entire nation. I wouldn't pay much attention to his 'musings'.


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## Strange Magic

Nereffid said:


> My understanding is that Mao said "let a hundred flowers bloom" to make it easier to identify which flowers to behead...


Darn it all! You've seen through my scheme.:devil:


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## JosefinaHW

Nereffid said:


> I agree that they are different audiences (critics? not quite sure), but on the other hand nobody's talking about 19th-century audiences; it's about current/recent popularity and criticism. One key point of Pauls's analysis is that academics and critics who were talking about 20th-century classical music _weren't_ taking the classical music audience into account.


As Ilarion would say, Blessed Nerefid, if you are "not quite sure" why are you posting about it.... maybe spend the time CAREFULLy reading instead.


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## Strange Magic

Morimur said:


> Mao crippled an entire nation. I wouldn't pay much attention to his 'musings'.


My quotations of the Chairman are made in the same spirit as is expressed in The Producers. But you probably knew that.


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## Truckload

Nereffid said:


> My understanding is that Mao said "let a hundred flowers bloom" to make it easier to identify which flowers to behead...


Oh, that was excellent, and so true. The "cultural revolution" said much more in deeds about Mao than any quotation. Sorry, politics, wont happen again.

To relate to music, the music itself should be judged for itself, not based on what critics say about the music.


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## JosefinaHW

Pauls does not present himself to be against academics or academia. He is searching for the most accurate understanding of the history of Western music in the 20th-century. From his academic studies; observations of his colleagues and professors' music listening preferences; his own music listening; his years of reading Fanfare and Gramophone (might not have been both his entire life); his reading of the various Grove publications over the years; his extensive reading of other musicologists writings--whose work and minds he esteems even when he disagrees on how they presented something he has come to see that many academic textbooks and other writings have not presented an accurate account of the composers; the schema of their influences on each other; a listing of even whole "categories" of composing styles--e.g., the influence of nationalism: numerous Russians, Scandinavians, Latin American, Spanish, Hungarian, many former Soviet states, and others that I can't remember at this moment.


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## JosefinaHW

Pauls says later in the text that one of the greatest problems of attempting to write a thorough history and analysis of Western Music in the 20th-century is that it has been an extraordinarily prolific period of musical creativity. He does not even hint that there was a conspiracy on the part of musicologists to discuss only their "favorite" composers or types of composing styles.


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## Fugue Meister

Man that guy Pauls would really be thrilled about how much you guys continue to pour over his writings with a fine toothed comb. :devil:


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## JosefinaHW

Pauls gives the careful reader a gradual, progressively deeper understanding of all the complexities of trying to write a meaningful history: terms that were coined in the 18th and 19th centuries that even then were not completely agreed upon among the musicologists (it would seem to me that many musicologists were and still are also the composers we all listen to now)--ONE EXAMPLE is "Romanticism".


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## mmsbls

Strange Magic said:


> But let's make an effort to be reasonable and to understand what's plausible: the undeniable correlation between popularity and canon membership in earlier eras certainly is most likely evidence of causality. What other explanations would you suggest?


Here's a possible explanation, and in fact, I believe it also may be true.

1) The average classical music listener listens to music she finds enjoyable.
2) Historians and those who determine the critical canon select music they find most interesting, well crafted, and influential.

The historians are more interested in discussing music that has changed the course of music history. After all that is their field. So Haydn, Beethoven, and Wagner wrote new music that ultimately caused many other composers to follow their lead moving music from one era, style, or type to a new one. Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Stockhausen did so as well. The historians wish to document and describe what happened. Rachmaninoff did not change musical history as much so the historians are less interested (although they may certainly enjoy his music).

The listeners just want to enjoy music, but a fascinating change began to occur near the turn of the 20th century. Instead of music changing from one or two languages with some variation music began to change to use many languages. The multiplicity of languages made it much harder for listeners to become familiar with the new languages and they no longer enjoyed the new music as easily. When Romantic music began, people might have struggled somewhat with it, but all composers wrote in that language so listeners could catch up and enjoy essentially all the new works.

In the 20th century there were too many languages and listeners basically fell behind the composers never catching up. So the listener canon and critical canon diverged because the two were not determined the same way.


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## JosefinaHW

The term "Romantic" is not the only incredibly problematic term for the music historian. Neo-Classicism is another term that was used with totally different understandings. As mmsbls has jumped in after reading up to page nine, yes, historians had to try and define what Schoenberg's project was about, and there was then an attempt to formulate a coherent history by comparing Schoenberg's music (not Schoenberg himself--Pauls does not use any ad hominen arguments) to Stravinsky's so-called neo-Classicism. One of the problems of just that one analysis is that Stravinsky and others had a completely inaccurate understanding of how Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven understood their music, the many purposes of their music, even their "definition" of music. I need to look for the passage.....


----------



## Mahlerian

Strange Magic said:


> Sure, if you like, in 1894, though Ravel claimed he got there first. But who actually thinks of Debussy as an avant-garde composer today, or during the last 75 or so years, as they listen to the Nocturnes on their local classical music station?


I do. His music, including and *especially that piece*, undermines tonality and establishes an entirely new musical grammar. It is startling and fresh music in the best possible way.

The first time I heard his Images, I hated it: it was too avant-garde, too dissonant, too "modern."


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## Truckload

mmsbls said:


> In the 20th century there were too many languages and listeners basically fell behind the composers never catching up. So the listener canon and critical canon diverged because the two were not determined the same way.


I shortened the quote to save space, but I basically find your entire post plausible. The primary issue in my mind is, will academia acknowledge and correct the disproportional attention to one sub-genre, or ignore the issue.


----------



## mmsbls

JosefinaHW said:


> As mmsbls has jumped in after reading up to page nine,


Just to be clear, I have not read _any_ of the work except to scan the section near Table 1 and 2 and to scan the conclusions. I do not feel I can critique the work at all and would not try. I simply responded to Strange Magic's request to suggest another possible explanation for the divergence of the two canons.

I have not read the work, but I have enormous respect for academic scholarship. I spent many years on my doctorate and know how difficult it is to truly understand a topic. I assume Pauls' work contains an enormous amount of interesting and valuable content. That does not mean his conclusions are wholly accurate, but I wonder how many theses in this area contain conclusions that are met with even near universal acceptance.


----------



## mmsbls

Truckload said:


> I shortened the quote to save space, but I basically find your entire post plausible. The primary issue in my mind is, will academia acknowledge and correct the disproportional attention to one sub-genre, or ignore the issue.


I may be misunderstanding what you mean by one sub-genre. My understanding is that academia is focusing on many sub-genres and perhaps placing less emphasis on one (Neoromanticism or something along those lines) because they've discussed that music already.


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## JosefinaHW

My apologies, "the writers of musical treatises during the time of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were unified on one very important point--music that did not move the listeners was worthless".... numerous quotes related to this are not in one section of the text; Pauls states that Stravinsky instead thought that the Classical composers were primarily interested in forum, not emotion. His understanding that his neo-Classicism was the elimination of emotion and the attempt to portray any concrete image in the world, i.e., NO program music, no emotion, just "pure" music. He was one of a group of thinkers or a "fashionable" idea that emotions should be excluded from art (and life ??) in general. Pauls quotes various examples of how musicology temporarily was done in a pseudo-mathematical and antiseptically scientific manner. (I suppose somewhere in this component of the 20th-century is the origin of the term "Absolute Music".)


----------



## Mahlerian

Strange Magic said:


> The first sentence strikes at the core of the matter. I will grant that the correlation equals causation link between popularity and being in the canon of any era is unproven in terms of strict, neo-Euclidian logic. Neither is the postulated expansion of the universe proven by the Doppler redshift of the light from distant galaxies. But let's make an effort to be reasonable and to understand what's plausible: the undeniable correlation between popularity and canon membership in earlier eras certainly is most likely evidence of causality. What other explanations would you suggest? I understand why you cling to the "unprovenness" of this causal link with both hands, as the existence of such a link constitutes a real argument for a bias in many 20th century music history texts toward certain composers. If one chooses to add "at the expense of other, much more popular composers", go ahead. I don't doubt for a minute the sincerity with which the textbook authors believed that their favored composers ought to constitute the 20th century canon; Pauls' thesis is indeed based on that premise and its variance from that "unproven" causality. But please suggest a better, alternative explanation for the variance; don't just continue to chant "unproven".


You can create a number of theses to satisfy evidence, but unless there is some evidence that points to that particular explanation and no other, you can't say that it's really a likely conclusion, much less base conclusions on it (as he does).

For example, I could hypothesize that the reason for the disparity between the two canons is simple: musicologists worked backwards, starting with the 20th century, and decided by fiat that anything that was unpopular would be in and everything popular out. This plan was then thwarted by a mind control beam shot by a group of concerned musicians who struck the musicologists just as they were getting to the beginning of the 20th century and forced them to do the exact opposite of what they had been doing!

The implausibility of this on its own is not the point. The point is, given the ambiguous set of data, it fits just as well. You can't say that the data implies a specific cause unless you have proof of that. Unlike you, I find the idea that musicologists went out of their way to suppress certain kinds of music extremely _implausible_.

I did suggest a different explanation: you have a disparate collection of people who, guided by their own aesthetics and tastes, found the music and composers they considered the best. They did this in the same way for _*ALL eras*_. Does this result in certain figures being emphasized over others? Of course. Does it mean that they're using different criteria if their choices do not always line up with the popular choices? No.



Strange Magic said:


> Regarding the inclusion of Debussy, Stravinsky and Bartok as avant-garde, most people would say "no" to Debussy, "mostly no" to early Stravinsky, and "yes-and-no" to Bartok. But these three are useful stand-ins, in your argument, for people like the outright "atonalists" and aleatoric composers, and I can see why you choose to lump them in.


They are all at least as atonal as the "atonal" composers.


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## Guest

Does Pauls actually define either 'Modernism' or 'Romanticism'?


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## Woodduck

mmsbls said:


> Here's a possible explanation, and in fact, I believe it also may be true.
> 
> 1) The average classical music listener listens to music she finds enjoyable.
> 2) Historians and those who determine the critical canon select music they find most interesting, well crafted, and influential.
> 
> *The historians are more interested in discussing music that has changed the course of music history.* After all that is their field. So Haydn, Beethoven, and Wagner wrote new music that ultimately caused many other composers to follow their lead moving music from one era, style, or type to a new one. Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Stockhausen did so as well. The historians wish to document and describe what happened. Rachmaninoff did not change musical history as much so the historians are less interested (although they may certainly enjoy his music).
> 
> The listeners just want to enjoy music, but *a fascinating change began to occur near the turn of the 20th century. Instead of music changing from one or two languages with some variation music began to change to use many languages. The multiplicity of languages made it much harder for listeners to become familiar with the new languages and they no longer enjoyed the new music as easily. When Romantic music began, people might have struggled somewhat with it, but all composers wrote in that language so listeners could catch up and enjoy essentially all the new works. *
> 
> In the 20th century there were too many languages and listeners basically fell behind the composers never catching up. So the listener canon and critical canon diverged because the two were not determined the same way.


Pauls discusses this very point in chapter 6, "Twentieth-Century Musical Vocabulary and the Linguistic Analogy." He takes up the commonly drawn analogy between music and language, and points out that the normal rate of change in languages allows continuity of comprehension and communication across long spans of time, in some cases many centuries. Prior to the 20th century, the "common language" of Western music was what we call "common practice" tonality, and over the centuries terms were added to that basic language at a rate that allowed listeners to "keep up" with what composers were trying to communicate. In the 20th century the common language was broken down and scrambled by certain composers - much as the English language was by Joyce, Stein, and modern poets - and even replaced by wholly new systems of sounds (compared by Pauls to Esperanto) which listeners were unable to relate to the musical language they knew. That familiar language - common practice tonality - continued to exist as the common language despite the new languages created by avant-garde composers, and in fact continued to develop at a fairly normal rate in the hands of a majority of composers who, to varying degrees, resisted the pressure of the more extreme avant-garde developments, even if they found ways to incorporate some of the new sounds into their own styles.

The normal pace of musical development was not satisfactory to the avant-garde and their apologists, who rationalized their radical procedures in various ways and often tried to denigrate and discredit composers who did not agree that common practice needed to be consigned to history and replaced with previously unimagined systems of sounds. Composers who refused Modernist theories and agendas were characterized as "regressive" and "irrelevant," and defined as belonging to the 19th rather than the 20th century, despite the fact that they produced the majority of the 20th century's new music and despite the fact that theirs was the overwhelming bulk of the new music programmed, listened to, and enjoyed.

It makes sense that musicians, musicologists and critics judge music by criteria that less informed listeners cannot apply, and that they are more interested than the ordinary listener in understanding innovative practices and how those may contribute to development of music. But that does not automatically lead to academic and critical advocacy of music the public finds unappealing or incomprehensible. There have been many instances of the reverse: popular acceptance of music which drew the disdain of critics, who proved more conservative than audiences (popular versus critical acceptance of Wagner is a case in point, but the annals of criticism are full of hostile reviews of brand-new works which audiences nonetheless greeted with applause, and the conservatism of the musical academies in the 19th century is well-documented). As far as I can see, the domination of the academy by a radical avant-garde such as we saw in the mid-20th century has no precedent (but perhaps someone with a deeper historical perspective than mine can point to one).


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## fluteman

Strange Magic said:


> A strong case could be made that anyone who hasn't carefully read the text being discussed in this thread has no business analyzing what is being advanced in the text concerning either popularity or criticism. But it's an open forum...room for everybody. Chairman Mao, the Great Helmsman, said "Learn Truth from Facts!". But he also said "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom!"


This response saddens me, in part due to its sarcastic and condescending tone, which unfortunately infects many of the "debate" type threads here. Of course, I have read several portions of the text discussed here. Not having read it in its entirety, I wouldn't presume to judge how well the author executed his project, but I can still look at the premises underlying it and the methodology he uses and form an opinion on how much and what kind of insight or value might potentially be gained from such an undertaking.
On page 45, I see what appears to me a great fallacy and a great straw man. 
The fallacy:
As a methodology for determining greatness, the formula,
"great composers equals most-played composers," may seem a
little too facile, like paint-by-numbers. It is certainly not immune
from criticism on that count, but it is significant that nobody has
yet devised a method that can fully displace it.
The straw man, predicated on that fallacy:
There will come a time when the twentieth century
tonal/atonal culture wars are a thing of the past, and historical
methodologies such as that of pitting twentieth-century
traditionalists against radicals (at the expense of the traditionalists)
will no longer provide a credible strategy for how we assess
compositional greatness.
This is gibberish to me. What is "greatness" other than an entirely subjective assessment? You can define greatness as some form of current popularity if you like (such as number of available CDs), but for me, the real test of cultural significance of a work of art, or a group of works of art, is its long term impact on a society, not just its culture, and not just its musical culture. 
Also, I find it a bit ironic that in a world where many look down their noses at "popular music", for which many millions more CDs and downloads are sold every year than any music discussed in Paul's dissertation or this forum, popularity is suddenly the true benchmark for greatness.
Then there is the straw man concerning the "twentieth century tonal/atonal wars". I've never understood the obsession some have with this subject. The second Viennese school has had its impact on Western culture, as have Stravinksy, Varese, the electronic composers, the minimalists, the atonalists, the microtonalists, and so forth. No doubt that impact has not been and will not be as great as some of the composers themselves and their most ardent contemporary supporters claimed or hoped for. But that is neither as surprising nor as significant to me as it seems to be to many others. If you accept the idea that long-term impact is what matters most, analyses by composers, critics or academics of their own music and that of their contemporaries must be discounted as close to irrelevant, at least for these purposes, though potentially interesting from other perspectives. So however thoroughly one examines popularity or contemporary criticism, or the relationship or lack thereof between the two, for me it doesn't get one very far in evaluating social and cultural significance, which is in my opinion what matters most when it comes to art.


----------



## Guest

The more I read Pauls' work, the more I wonder at the purpose of classification. In fact, Pauls says this himself (though his approval of the search for academic respectability rather undermines what follows it):



> I support the "modernizing" aims discussed above. They are intended to enhance the academic respectability of composers who, for better or worse, are still commonly referred to in the general music world and the recording industry as romantics or late-romantics. And at the end of the day it may not be so important whether certain composers are classified as romantic or modern. What matters more is that many younger musicologists now generally agree that somehow, these "romantic modernists" and the varied styles they represent deserve a respected place in historical accounts devoted to the modern era.


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## Strange Magic

Mahlerian said:


> The first time I heard his [Debussy's] Images, I hated it: it was too avant-garde, too dissonant, too "modern."


By contrast, I loved it immediately from the first moment I heard it. My favorite Debussy, along with La Mer.


----------



## Mahlerian

Strange Magic said:


> By contrast, I loved it immediately from the first moment I heard it. My favorite Debussy, along with La Mer.


My point is that the work can indeed be taken as avant-garde, even as extreme or unpleasant. I have come to love Debussy's work and recognize it for how radical it was.

I loved Schoenberg's music from the first time I heard it. That doesn't mean that I didn't also hear it as avant-garde. I was just drawn to his particular blend of lyricism and counterpoint and development. I didn't know about any 12-tone method, and I didn't care about innovation for its own sake. It was, and still is, the music that matters.


----------



## Woodduck

fluteman said:


> This response saddens me, in part due to its sarcastic and condescending tone, which unfortunately infects many of the "debate" type threads here. Of course, I have read several portions of the text discussed here. Not having read it in its entirety, I wouldn't presume to judge how well the author executed his project, but I can still look at the premises underlying it and the methodology he uses and form an opinion on how much and what kind of insight or value might potentially be gained from such an undertaking.
> On page 45, *I see what appears to me a great fallacy* and a *great straw man.*
> The fallacy:
> *As a methodology for determining greatness, the formula,
> "great composers equals most-played composers," may seem a
> little too facile, like paint-by-numbers. It is certainly not immune
> from criticism on that count, but it is significant that nobody has
> yet devised a method that can fully displace it.*
> The *straw man*, predicated on that fallacy:
> *There will come a time when the twentieth century
> tonal/atonal culture wars are a thing of the past, and historical
> methodologies such as that of pitting twentieth-century
> traditionalists against radicals (at the expense of the traditionalists)
> will no longer provide a credible strategy for how we assess
> compositional greatness.*
> This is gibberish to me. What is "greatness" other than an entirely subjective assessment? You can define greatness as some form of current popularity if you like (such as number of available CDs), but for me, the real test of cultural significance of a work of art, or a group of works of art, is its long term impact on a society, not just its culture, and not just its musical culture.
> Also, I find it a bit ironic that in a world where many look down their noses at "popular music", for which many millions more CDs and downloads are sold every year than any music discussed in Paul's dissertation or this forum, popularity is suddenly the true benchmark for greatness.
> Then there is the straw man concerning the "twentieth century tonal/atonal wars". I've never understood the obsession some have with this subject. The second Viennese school has had its impact on Western culture, as have Stravinksy, Varese, the electronic composers, the minimalists, the atonalists, the microtonalists, and so forth. No doubt that impact has not been and will not be as great as some of the composers themselves and their most ardent contemporary supporters claimed or hoped for. But that is neither as surprising nor as significant to me as it seems to be to many others. *If you accept the idea that long-term impact is what matters most, analyses by composers, critics or academics of their own music and that of their contemporaries must be discounted as close to irrelevant*, at least for these purposes, though potentially interesting from other perspectives. * So however thoroughly one examines popularity or contemporary criticism, or the relationship or lack thereof between the two, for me it doesn't get one very far in evaluating social and cultural significance, which is in my opinion what matters most when it comes to art.*


What you're calling a "fallacy" in Pauls' thinking is really just a useful observation. Pauls writes: _As a methodology for determining greatness, the formula, "great composers equals most-played composers," may seem a little too facile, like paint-by-numbers. *It is certainly not immune from criticism* on that count, but it is significant that nobody has *yet* devised a method that can *fully* displace it._

I've put his qualifying terms in bold. I hope it's clear that Pauls is not saying categorically that popularity is the standard of greatness. If he were writing about standards of greatness as such, I'm sure he would have a lot more to say. What he _is_ suggesting is that criteria of music's "value" which don't consider the demonstrable interest shown by listeners in that music are likely to be faulty.

As for your straw man, it appears to me that you simply want to write a different essay than the one Pauls does. His is not a general study of how we determine the social and cultural significance of music, but only of certain ways in which music's significance has been assessed, ways which he believes are wrong. He may very well agree with your final point, but has simply not considered it within the scope of his thesis.


----------



## violadude

So...who is this thread directed at then? I don't think anyone here has the kind of "ultra-modernist" bias that you guys are talking about.


----------



## fluteman

Woodduck said:


> What you're calling a "fallacy" in Pauls' thinking is really just a useful observation. Pauls writes: _As a methodology for determining greatness, the formula, "great composers equals most-played composers," may seem a little too facile, like paint-by-numbers. *It is certainly not immune from criticism* on that count, but it is significant that nobody has *yet* devised a method that can *fully* displace it._
> 
> I've put his qualifying terms in bold. I hope it's clear that Pauls is not saying categorically that popularity is the standard of greatness. If he were writing about standards of greatness as such, I'm sure he would have a lot more to say. What he _is_ suggesting is that criteria of music's "value" which don't consider the demonstrable interest shown by listeners in that music are likely to be faulty.
> 
> As for your straw man, it appears to me that you simply want to write a different essay than the one Pauls does. His is not a general study of how we determine the social and cultural significance of music, but only of certain ways in which music's significance has been assessed, ways which he believes are wrong. He may very well agree with your final point, but has simply not considered it within the scope of his thesis.


Fair enough, but I've tried to explain why the subject of his essay is not especially interesting or important (or "useful", if that is the term he uses), to me at least, and thus not worthy of 400 pages of discussion, or at least not worthy enough for me to be willing to plow through.


----------



## Harold in Columbia

Strange Magic said:


> Pauls' argument in a nutshell, which he supports with some very interesting lists and tables, is that musical Romanticism/Neo-Romanticism overwhelmingly dominates the Twentieth Century, for which thesis he offers many arguments and much data.


Rodgers and Hammerstein and the Beatles overwhelmingly dominate the 20th century.


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## Truckload

One thing to keep in mind is that the music that reaches either public or academic notice is only a small fraction of the music written. In every university with a medium or larger music department there are composition faculty and students writing lots of music. Say you have 10 pieces per month per university, 500 universities in the western world, that would be 5,000 per month or about 60,000 per year. For the past 100 years that would be about 6,000,000 pieces. Whoa, that is a scary big number.

OK, let's just say faculty pieces. Each composition faculty member composes say 2 to 4 pieces per year. In medium sized schools there may be only 1 composition faculty member, in big schools there might be as many as 3. So if we pretend the average is 1.5 composition faculty writing 3 pieces per year each, that would be 4.5 faculty pieces per year for 500 universities would be 2,250 per year. That would be 225,000 for the past 100 years by people who should be expected to compose worthwhile music. After all, they are teaching others.

So how many of those 225,000 pieces have come to the attention of either the public or academia? Not very many.


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## Truckload

violadude said:


> So...who is this thread directed at then? I don't think anyone here has the kind of "ultra-modernist" bias that you guys are talking about.


I think the thread is for everyone who is interested in knowing more about the recent history of music and the impact of academia on the creating and appreciation of music. But this thread would not appeal to anyone not interested in those topics.


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## Strange Magic

Mahlerian said:


> You can create a number of theses to satisfy evidence, but unless there is some evidence that points to that particular explanation and no other, you can't say that it's really a likely conclusion, much less base conclusions on it (as he does).
> 
> For example, I could hypothesize that the reason for the disparity between the two canons is simple: musicologists worked backwards, starting with the 20th century, and decided by fiat that anything that was unpopular would be in and everything popular out. This plan was then thwarted by a mind control beam shot by a group of concerned musicians who struck the musicologists just as they were getting to the beginning of the 20th century and forced them to do the exact opposite of what they had been doing!
> 
> The implausibility of this on its own is not the point. The point is, given the ambiguous set of data, it fits just as well. You can't say that the data implies a specific cause unless you have proof of that. Unlike you, I find the idea that musicologists went out of their way to suppress certain kinds of music extremely _implausible_.
> 
> I did suggest a different explanation: you have a disparate collection of people who, guided by their own aesthetics and tastes, found the music and composers they considered the best. They did this in the same way for _*ALL eras*_. Does this result in certain figures being emphasized over others? Of course. Does it mean that they're using different criteria if their choices do not always line up with the popular choices? No.


Pardon me for thinking that you have not advanced one iota toward a reasonable, common sense conclusion that popularity has a very high probability of being a fundamental component of why certain pieces and composers are in the pre-20th century canons. You are still looking for something you will never get--proof of a causal connection. But most people can say it's really a likely conclusion; it's a "preponderance of the evidence" thing, not a Euclidian theorem that must be rejected if not "proven". In the arts, there is no such rigid certainty.


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## Strange Magic

Harold in Columbia said:


> Rodgers and Hammerstein and the Beatles overwhelmingly dominate the 20th century.


Do not forget Elvis.


----------



## Strange Magic

violadude said:


> So...who is this thread directed at then? I don't think anyone here has the kind of "ultra-modernist" bias that you guys are talking about.


The thread is for those interested in an Interesting and Useful Treatise on Twentieth Century Music.


----------



## Guest

fluteman said:


> Fair enough, but I've tried to explain why the subject of his essay is not especially interesting or important (or "useful", if that is the term he uses), to me at least, and thus not worthy of 400 pages of discussion, or at least not worthy enough for me to be willing to plow through.


It was obviously useful to Pauls as it gained him his PhD, but that doesn't confer automatic status as an insightful work. He hasn't become a published writer (at least, his name doesn't pop up on Amazon!) so I can't find any reviews of his work. That doesn't mean there's no value in his work, but if I wanted to read a book about musical periods, or one that reappraised the range of music of the 20th C, I guess I'd be more likely to go elsewhere.


----------



## Nereffid

Strange Magic said:


> The thread is for those interested in an Interesting and Useful Treatise on Twentieth Century Music.


Although, to be fair, a number of contributors to the thread have made it clear they're _not_ interested in it. So I guess the thread is for everyone!


----------



## Nereffid

Mahlerian said:


> The first time I heard his Images, I hated it: it was too avant-garde, too dissonant, too "modern."





Strange Magic said:


> By contrast, I loved it immediately from the first moment I heard it. My favorite Debussy, along with La Mer.


As a musically naive listener, when I first heard Images it never occurred to me that it might be avant-garde, dissonant, or modern. It was different from most of what I'd heard up to that point, and I can't say I was especially fond of it, but it was certainly not any of those (at the time pejorative) adjectives.
Fascinating how we can have such different ears!


----------



## regenmusic

What's interesting to me is how world music influences Western classical music that is beyond the present scope of the influence that we see right now. I get bored pretty quickly with Minimalism that is supposed to be influenced by Eastern music, but may like a classically trained but still "outsider's" music who was influenced by Kung Bushman music


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## Woodduck

MacLeod said:


> It was obviously useful to Pauls as it gained him his PhD, but that doesn't confer automatic status as an insightful work. He hasn't become a published writer (at least, his name doesn't pop up on Amazon!) so I can't find any reviews of his work. That doesn't mean there's no value in his work, but if I wanted to read a book about musical periods, or one that reappraised the range of music of the 20th C, I guess I'd be more likely to go elsewhere.


Pauls' thesis has evidently been well-received in some quarters.

http://www.herbertpauls.com/writing.html


----------



## mmsbls

Strange Magic said:


> Pardon me for thinking that you have not advanced one iota toward a reasonable, common sense conclusion that popularity has a very high probability of being a fundamental component of why certain pieces and composers are in the pre-20th century canons. You are still looking for something you will never get--proof of a causal connection. But most people can say it's really a likely conclusion; it's a "preponderance of the evidence" thing, not a Euclidian theorem that must be rejected if not "proven". In the arts, there is no such rigid certainty.


I apologize for asking questions about the dissertation without having read it, but I hope you will indulge me. I understand that Pauls believes it clear that popularity was a significant component in historians construction of the pre-20th century canon. He apparently believes that popularity is much less significant for the 20th century canon. Does he speculate on why popularity is no longer a significant part of the 20th century critical canon? In other words what changed for the historians, and maybe why, when they analyzed 20th century works?


----------



## Mahlerian

Strange Magic said:


> Pardon me for thinking that you have not advanced one iota toward a reasonable, common sense conclusion that popularity has a very high probability of being a fundamental component of why certain pieces and composers are in the pre-20th century canons. You are still looking for something you will never get--proof of a causal connection. But most people can say it's really a likely conclusion; it's a "preponderance of the evidence" thing, not a Euclidian theorem that must be rejected if not "proven". In the arts, there is no such rigid certainty.


But he doesn't present _ANY_ evidence for his conclusion. Just a bunch of coincidences.

The version of events I gave has the advantage of being simpler and not relying on the circular logic of *assuming* that popularity was the method for decisions prior to the 20th century in the attempt to show that there was a different metric used.


----------



## mmsbls

Thanks to the link in Woodduck's post I found at least a partial answer to my question above. On his website Pauls says:



> Perhaps the biggest philosophical problem for traditional tonal and romantic music composed in the Modern Era was that Schoenberg's famous "emancipation of the dissonance" had claimed not only musical and historical primacy but also, in a certain sense, a kind of scientific superiority as well. Many advanced thinkers sincerely believed that, on many levels, musical evolution favoured the so-called "dissonant" revolution and therefore felt that its musical products occupied the intellectual high ground. The vast majority of music history textbooks and overviews written in the second half of the 20th Century are deeply indebted to this general viewpoint.


So I guess historians or musicologists came to believe that dissonant music was more important than extensions of Romanticism and favored composers who wrote using more dissonant music.


----------



## Mahlerian

Nereffid said:


> As a musically naive listener, when I first heard Images it never occurred to me that it might be avant-garde, dissonant, or modern. It was different from most of what I'd heard up to that point, and I can't say I was especially fond of it, but it was certainly not any of those (at the time pejorative) adjectives.
> Fascinating how we can have such different ears!


Yes, it is, isn't it?

The fact remains that the Debussy is in fact an avant-garde work, extremely modernist, and it includes a good deal of dissonances without conventional resolution. I was not at all wrong to hear in it something that went against everything I thought was normal musically, and nor were you wrong to assimilate it without such difficulties.

But if I went on the basis of that first judgment to say that it wasn't music at all, and built a campaign to show others that it was horrible and awful, people would think I was silly (not back in 1905, then Saint-Saens, Rimsky-Korsakov, and others would have backed me up).


----------



## Mahlerian

mmsbls said:


> Thanks to the link in Woodduck's post I found at least a partial answer to my question above. On his website Pauls says:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Perhaps the biggest philosophical problem for traditional tonal and romantic music composed in the Modern Era was that Schoenberg's famous "emancipation of the dissonance" had claimed not only musical and historical primacy but also, in a certain sense, a kind of scientific superiority as well. Many advanced thinkers sincerely believed that, on many levels, musical evolution favoured the so-called "dissonant" revolution and therefore felt that its musical products occupied the intellectual high ground. The vast majority of music history textbooks and overviews written in the second half of the 20th Century are deeply indebted to this general viewpoint.
> 
> 
> 
> So I guess historians or musicologists came to believe that dissonant music was more important than extensions of Romanticism and favored composers who wrote using more dissonant music.
Click to expand...

But Pauls is absolutely dead wrong about what the emancipation of the dissonance is. It is not atonality or total chromaticism, it is the freer use of dissonances without needing to follow their conventional resolutions.

This is also true, not at all coincidentally, of the vast majority of the music Pauls classifies as romantic in his study. By the time of Strauss and Mahler, already, to say nothing of Debussy, the traditional dissonance resolution and voice leading patterns no longer had any binding force.

As Schoenberg said, the emancipation of the dissonance was something that had already been accomplished in fact, if not in name, before any of the so-called atonal music was written.

At best, his misinterpretation of the term (which, as I mentioned above, crops up in his book as well) is a careless misreading based on second-hand information. At worst, it shows his own bias against Schoenberg that he would fabricate an idea to attribute to him that props up his own thesis of bias.


----------



## mmsbls

Mahlerian said:


> The fact remains that the Debussy is in fact an avant-garde work, extremely modernist, and it includes a good deal of dissonances without conventional resolution. I was not at all wrong to hear in it something that went against everything I thought was normal musically, and nor were you wrong to assimilate it without such difficulties.


My reaction was similar to yours. I found Debussy and much early Stravinsky unpleasant. To a lesser extent I had some trouble with Prokofiev and Shostakovich. Independent of what's actually going on in the music, I think people could argue that Debussy, early Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich required much less listening to "learn to enjoy." Other composers such as Schoenberg, Webern, Varese, Dutilleux, etc. require vastly more listening time for most people. There's of course nothing right or wrong with that, but those other composers could be separated from Debussy on the basis of the _average time necessary for assimilating their language_.

I'm not sure how useful that would be other than as a guide to those new to modern music.


----------



## mmsbls

Mahlerian said:


> But Pauls is absolutely dead wrong about what the emancipation of the dissonance is. It is not atonality or total chromaticism, it is the freer use of dissonances without needing to follow their conventional resolutions.


That may certainly be, but his point I think is that historians were convinced to value music that was more removed from what many listeners felt comfortable with. Even if you can't define it, you can measure it in popularity.

(This is of course my guess at his views and not mine).


----------



## Mahlerian

mmsbls said:


> That may certainly be, but his point I think is that historians were convinced to value music that was more removed from what many listeners felt comfortable with. Even if you can't define it, you can measure it in popularity.
> 
> (This is of course my guess at his views and not mine).


It's not that it _may be_, it _is_.

Pauls is absolutely wrong about what Schoenberg meant by emancipation of the dissonance. I've read Schoenberg's writings extensively, and I cannot imagine how anyone could come to the conclusion he reaches.

I believe, as before, that Pauls is also wrong about historians using different criteria for the canon of the 20th century as compared to earlier eras. At the very least he presents no evidence for this claim.


----------



## mmsbls

Mahlerian said:


> Pauls is absolutely wrong about what Schoenberg meant by emancipation of the dissonance. I've read Schoenberg's writings extensively, and I cannot imagine how anyone could come to the conclusion he reaches.


He may be wrong about interpreting Schoenberg's meaning - I accept that. But he may be correct that a general sense of Schoenberg's thoughts on "the freer use of dissonances without needing to follow their conventional resolutions" had permeated historians views such that Romantic music or music closer to the Romantic style was considered less important. At least that would be an explanation of why historians might have changed their relative valuing of popularity in Pauls' view.


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## Bulldog

Am I the only member who considers all the pages devoted to record company releases not up to PHD standards?


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## Woodduck

mmsbls said:


> My reaction was similar to yours. I found Debussy and much early Stravinsky unpleasant. To a lesser extent I had some trouble with Prokofiev and Shostakovich. Independent of what's actually going on in the music, I think people could argue that Debussy, early Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich required much less listening to "learn to enjoy." Other composers such as Schoenberg, Webern, Varese, Dutilleux, etc. require vastly more listening time for most people. There's of course nothing right or wrong with that, but those other composers could be separated from Debussy on the basis of the _average time necessary for assimilating their language_.
> 
> I'm not sure how useful that would be other than as a guide to those new to modern music.


I had little difficulty with Debussy, as far as I can remember (I'm talking close to 50 years now). I could never think of him as "dissonant," but "dissonance" can be defined in different ways. If we mean the non-resolution of harmonies normally resolved, then of course Debussy is dissonant, but if dissonance is defined acoustically, in terms of the coincidence or clash of overtones, then most of Debussy is quite easy on the ear. If dissonance is merely a subjective matter of what sounds "strange" or "unpleasant," then any music might strike anyone as dissonant and there's nothing more to be said, except to note what sorts of music numbers of listeners find most problematic.

I think most people who've gone beyond the "that sounds weird" stage of music appreciation will find most dissonant such music as is filled with acoustically dissonant intervals such as seconds, sevenths, ninths, and tritones, especially if they don't sense a relation to a tonal center and don't hear a resolution to more consonant intervals. Other factors, such as timbre, dynamics, and speed of succession, may also increase the effect of dissonance. I was listening happily to _Pelleas et Melisande_ long before I could enjoy _Le Sacre du Printemps_.

Debussy, in sound, temperament, and artistic goals, seems to me at least as much "Romantic" as "Modern," but I won't fight about it.


----------



## mmsbls

Bulldog said:


> Am I the only member who considers all the pages devoted to record company releases not up to PHD standards?


Aren't they data relevant to his thesis? My gut feeling is that there could have been more such tables with more data.


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## Harold in Columbia

mmsbls said:


> But he may be correct that a general sense of Schoenberg's thoughts on "the freer use of dissonances without needing to follow their conventional resolutions" had permeated historians views such that Romantic music or music closer to the Romantic style was considered less important.


Rachmaninov, Vaughan Williams, and whoever aren't considered less important than Schönberg because Schönberg's thoughts "permeated historians." They're considered less important than Schönberg because Schönberg is better.

Conversely, Bartók is about as good as Schönberg, and his being "closer to the Romantic style" - actually not _at all_, but when people say "Romantic," they really just mean "consonant plus lyrical" - hasn't prevented him from being considered as important as Schönberg.

And of course the by-consensus most important 20th century composer of all is, on the one hand, not atonal (until the '50s), and, at the same time, much_ further_ away from Romanticism than Schönberg is.


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## JosefinaHW

MacLeod said:


> Does Pauls actually define either 'Modernism' or 'Romanticism'?


He cannot clearly define either term because there is no agreed-upon meaning of these terms. A great deal of Pauls text is explicating the various completely contradictory understandings of the terms at different times and by different people. In the end he argues for the use of the term "romantic" because out of the many possible options (which he describes and presents arguments for and against) he thinks it the least/lesser (escapes me) of all evils.


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## Bulldog

mmsbls said:


> Aren't they data relevant to his thesis?


Yes, but I got his point long before he was done with that section of his dissertation.


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## JosefinaHW

My understanding is that Pauls' ultimate goal is for an accurate history of 20th-century music. No, he does not attempt to write that history, he is trying to tell the reader that we still do not have an accurate history and that because of the incredibly prolific amount of creative music composition the way that music history has been written has to change. 

He describes in great length how various scholars have attempted to schematize the century and how they have been unsuccessful (and how opinions over the matter were fought over rather viciously at times). Previous centuries had a RELATIVELY linear or clean progression of influences and convenient set of dates. Baroque: 1600 composition of opera Euridice; 1750 death of Bach; Bach influenced by French dance form, German polyphony, Italian lyrical melody and concerto form..... (in reality is not clean, significant music still being found in collections throughout Europe and how long did it take musicologists to arrive at this understanding of the influences on Bach, etc.) This linearity is what he means by (what I think is an unfortunate phrase) "the law of stylistic succession".


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## JosefinaHW

In the case of the history of the 20th-century, historians--until only very recently and only at a very preliminary level--have been trying to still fit an immensely complex body of information (music) into a neat, clean, a to b, b to c, presentation. 

Pauls and a growing number of other musicologists are trying to find a new methodology, a new method of historiography. He discusses various approaches: one method has been to look for how many pages in the Grove have been written for each different composer. Another method is to track how frequently pieces of music are performed in the concert hall (and the salon !! this is where the "romantic revival" becomes important to the history). Another method is track how many recordings of a composer, or the various stages of a composer's works have been released on CD.


----------



## JosefinaHW

Pauls also discusses how for some composers and musicologists (again they are frequently the same people) the understanding of the definition of Romanticism includes/included the concept of the lone individual, rebelling against everything from the past, and blazing a totally new trail of music. Another group of composers and musicologists believes that the trail blazing, avante garde is completely contrary to the concept of Romanticism.........

It is in this interest of the tables where I think StrangeMagic and I differ. They were of very minimal interest to me. Again because I think Pauls is only trying to suggest one of many possible methodologies of making sense of the music of the 20th-century. Yes, they introduced me to new composers and to explore "record" companies in much greater depth and that is a wonderful thing, but by no means what Pauls is really about or what interests me.

Re/ the posts about the quality of Pauls' text as a doctoral dissertation in music....


----------



## JosefinaHW

I am familiar with doctoral dissertations in the area of Scripture studies and systematic theology and yes they are extremely narrow in focus, so I would imagine that is the same for dissertations in music. Based on my experience in the other fields I would agree that Pauls' text is not a well-written dissertation. The fact that it was a doctoral dissertation was not really of much consequence to me. I called it that because that is what it is; it's not a "book", it's not an article, and I think it's too broad to be a thesis either. Pauls has tried to take on an incredibly complicated subject. I liken it to trying to create a three-dimensional diagram of the neural network of the brain. It's not going to be perfect and it doesn't have to be for us here. 

Re/ my mention of Medtner in the Russian music thread....


----------



## DaveM

U


Harold in Columbia said:


> Rachmaninov, Vaughan Williams, and whoever aren't considered less important than Schönberg because Schönberg's thoughts "permeated historians." They're considered less important than Schönberg because Schönberg is better.


Schoenburg better than Rachmaninoff. Hmm.


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## Strange Magic

mmsbls said:


> That may certainly be, but his [Pauls'] point I think is that historians were convinced to value music that was more removed from what many listeners felt comfortable with. Even if you can't define it, you can measure it in popularity.


This is indeed much of Pauls' argument: that as certain composers continued to write music that they felt put them into the van, that put them onto the cutting edge of musical evolution, they absorbed the attention of the writers of music history texts, who were sympathetic to that perceived evolution. Meanwhile, the compositions thus generated failed to engage the interest of a large general classical music audience. There is no mystery here; there is no conspiracy-- it's just been demonstrated (by, for example, Pauls' CD sales data) that the audience has well-defined preferences in what musics it will spend money and time on. The audience preferred its old friend, musical "Romanticism", which it has defined to include the allegedly avant-grade musics of Debussy, early Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Bartok. This has resulted, until recently, in a divergence of views and tastes between a body of true "avant-garde" "atonal", "serial", and aleatoric composers and their textbook-writing advocates, and the larger, musically conservative audience. Again, this has nothing to do with what anybody should like or dislike--everyone is _sui generis_--but it is what it is. But there must be something disturbing about this notion, because there is so much resistance to it. The most common reaction is that the audience is just misinformed, or being manipulated, or just fails, inexplicably, to "get" this music. I go with the latter: almost nobody likes my traditional _cante flamenco_ either, and I actually do understand why not.


----------



## fluteman

"Does Pauls actually define either 'Modernism' or 'Romanticism'?"

"He cannot clearly define either term because there is no agreed-upon meaning of these terms. A great deal of Pauls text is explicating the various completely contradictory understandings of the terms at different times and by different people. In the end he argues for the use of the term "romantic" because out of the many possible options (which he describes and presents arguments for and against) he thinks it the least/lesser (escapes me) of all evils."

In other words, no. Yet his entire thesis is based on distinctions between "romantic" and "modern" music, i.e., comparative popularity and attention from academicians and critics? Oy.


----------



## SimonNZ

Man, I hope this doesn't become a regular thing: expecting people on a chat forum to read some random 400 page book before they can actually respond to the OP and chat.

Especially as the author isn't here to confirm, deny or clarify.

The thread might have been less troublesome if we were asked to respond instead to the OPs opinions following his reading of the book.

It would be one thing if we had a reading group, agreed on a book and had a specific time to report back - but this isn't that.

btw: I've read about a hundred pages of this book now, and feel I have the right to make some assessments of the author's methodology, logic and conclusions and raise these issues with the person recommending it. I won't be reading more.


----------



## Harold in Columbia

JosefinaHW said:


> He describes in great length how various scholars have attempted to schematize the century and how they have been unsuccessful


Debussy, Schönberg, Stravinsky ---> Bartók, Messiaen ---> Boulez, Stockhausen, Young ---> Reich, Grisey

How hard was that?



JosefinaHW said:


> Previous centuries had a RELATIVELY linear or clean progression of influences and convenient set of dates. Baroque: 1600 composition of opera Euridice; 1750 death of Bach; Bach influenced by French dance form, German polyphony, Italian lyrical melody and concerto form..... (in reality is not clean, significant music still being found in collections throughout Europe and how long did it take musicologists to arrive at this understanding of the influences on Bach, etc.)


Bach is a _disaster_ for "clean progression!" The master contrapuntalist who came in between Corelli and Pergolesi.


----------



## KenOC

I've now read the first 86 pages. Nothing new or exciting. Papers like this really don't matter nor ultimately do the opinions of critics, academics, authors, or even composers themselves. What matters is what people want to hear, what puts listeners in seats at concert halls, what CDs sell well, and what radio listeners will listen to without changing the station. In that sense, the 20th century has been pretty consistent in the nature of its musical choices, at least as far as the broader audience is concerned.

The classical audience is, of course, somewhat fragmented, so there's plenty of room for different tastes in music. That's a good thing!


----------



## Strange Magic

SimonNZ said:


> Man, I hope this doesn't become a regular thing: expecting people on a chat forum to read some random 400 page book before they can actually respond to the OP and chat.
> 
> Especially as the author isn't here to confirm, deny or clarify.
> 
> The thread might have been less troublesome if we were asked to respond instead to the OPs opinions following his reading of the book.
> 
> It would be one thing if we had a reading group, agreed on a book and had a specific time to report back - but this isn't that.
> 
> btw: I've read about a hundred pages of this book now, and feel I have the right to make some assessments of the author's methodology, logic and conclusions and raise these issues with the person recommending it. I won't be reading more.


I really only expected those interested enough in the subject to read the text. The thread isn't troublesome to those who have chosen to read the text and dialogue back and forth about it. Nobody is compelling anybody to read the text, or to discuss it. What's curious is that some choose to display their intention to not read the text, or to read some of it only, as a badge of honor:"Here I Stand! Nobody is going to make me read that useless, worthless, boring text." If you're not going to read the text, don't read it.


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## SimonNZ

Well the subject is kind of interesting, and as I've now said a bunch of times I'm interested in hearing your take on what you've read, but if this thread - on the main discussion board - is for just those willing to drop everything and read this book cover to cover then its a thread for about three people.


----------



## Becca

SimonNZ said:


> Man, I hope this doesn't become a regular thing: expecting people on a chat forum to read some random 400 page book before they can actually respond to the OP and chat.
> 
> Especially as the author isn't here to confirm, deny or clarify.
> 
> The thread might have been less troublesome if we were asked to respond instead to the OPs opinions following his reading of the book.
> 
> It would be one thing if we had a reading group, agreed on a book and had a specific time to report back - but this isn't that.
> 
> btw: I've read about a hundred pages of this book now, and feel I have the right to make some assessments of the author's methodology, logic and conclusions and raise these issues with the person recommending it. I won't be reading more.


OK, now let's substitute 'composition' for 'book' in this post and then ltake another look at it. Seems to me that others have offered some very firm opinions about THAT!


----------



## violadude

Becca said:


> OK, now let's substitute 'composition' for 'book' in this post and then ltake another look at it. Seems to me that others have offered some very firm opinions about THAT!


Hm, touche'...................

But considering a book a written in a language that presumably everyone understands...not quite as comparable as you might think.

I get your point though, and I won't contribute anymore unless I have read the book.


----------



## Harold in Columbia

Becca said:


> OK, now let's substitute 'composition' for 'book' in this post and then ltake another look at it. Seems to me that others have offered some very firm opinions about THAT!


Do they? It's one thing to say you shouldn't carelessly dismiss Schönberg. It's another to say you should listen to Whoozits McNobody's symphony because somebody mentioned it on talkclassical.


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## SimonNZ

Becca said:


> OK, now let's substitute 'composition' for 'book' in this post and then ltake another look at it. Seems to me that others have offered some very firm opinions about THAT!


Firstly: reading a 400 page book requires a far, far greater time investment than playing a concerto or whatever. Anyone could actually hear it in the time it takes for someone to respond to a question about it.

Secondly: when people here are asked for information about a composition, what another member likes about it, why its worth their while, they never get a flat refusal to answer.


----------



## Strange Magic

SimonNZ said:


> Well the subject is kind of interesting, and as I've now said a bunch of times I'm interested in hearing your take on what you've read, but if this thread - on the main discussion board - is for just those willing to drop everything and read this book cover to cover then its a thread for about three people.


I repeat for the umpteenth time: there is no hurry, no need to drop everything to read the text right now. Did you not see those reminders? No one is being graded. Take your time. The thread can be brought back up again anytime. Either read the text or don't. I think you've exhausted that as a topic.


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## SimonNZ

Way to ignore all the points I'm trying to make. Could you answer at least one of them?


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## KenOC

SimonNZ said:


> Firstly: reading a 400 page book requires a far, far greater time investment than playing a concerto or whatever.


A task of truly Wagneresque proportions.


----------



## SimonNZ

KenOC said:


> A task of truly Wagneresque proportions.


No...but there are other differences between assessing books and music in the analogy that Becca set up.

As I said I've read a hundred or so pages and feel I can at least say a little about the author's methodology and problems - a statement I would never make about only a partial listen to a work or a limited exposure to a composer's ouevre. Also a piece of classical music may require multiple listens before having the measure of it, may best be heard in the context of the composer's other works, which is not the case of a book on music history.


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## ArtMusic

I do think Romanticism/Neo-Romanticism overwhelmingly dominates the influence of music making. This is good. The Romanticism/Neo-Romanticism heritage was a very rich one that was built on a few hundred years of serious development prior. By music making, I mean in the very broad sense that includes composition, music performance, standard repertoire, study in professional and training levels.


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## Harold in Columbia

ArtMusic said:


> The Romanticism/Neo-Romanticism heritage was a very rich one that was built on a few hundred years of serious development prior.


Or it's just a make-work program for all those symphony orchestras that we Westerners overconfidently established in our years of strength.


----------



## KenOC

Harold in Columbia said:


> Or it's just a make-work program for all those symphony orchestras that we Westerners overconfidently established in our years of strength.


Now _there's _an idea worth another 400-page paper!


----------



## Woodduck

fluteman said:


> "Does Pauls actually define either 'Modernism' or 'Romanticism'?"
> 
> "He cannot clearly define either term because there is no agreed-upon meaning of these terms. A great deal of Pauls text is explicating the various completely contradictory understandings of the terms at different times and by different people. In the end he argues for the use of the term "romantic" because out of the many possible options (which he describes and presents arguments for and against) he thinks it the least/lesser (escapes me) of all evils."
> 
> In other words, no. Yet his entire thesis is based on distinctions between "romantic" and "modern" music, i.e., comparative popularity and attention from academicians and critics? Oy.


You seem to be suggesting that even though there is no agreed-upon definition of Romanticism, no one should use the word without offering an unambiguous definition. Are most terms we use to describe styles and periods of music perfectly clear and rigidly defined? Actually, if you would read the book, you would see terms which describe certain features of the sort of music Pauls is calling Romantic - certain qualities of melody, harmony, form and sonority. You'd be entitled to disagree with his use of the term (and Pauls honorably admits his own reservations about it), but you'd possibly be less inclined to say "oy." It really isn't too hard to discern his basic meaning, the core of which isn't obscured by a little fuzz around the edges.

I found the essay a little overlong and repetitive, but it has some good scholarship behind it, and some really amusing quotes from composers, academics and critics showing just how preposterous some of the prejudices of the era were, and how some of them do indeed survive even into the present. Imagine writing of Strauss in 1919 that he

_"had now contented himself with writing a kind of music that appears to us like a ghost from an empty past that has already been lived. It is the kind of music in which we hear worn-out forms, cheap and titillating melodies, artificially generated passion, overpowering gestures, and a psycho-intellectual, illustrative compositional technique. It is a kind of music that is no longer able to move us."_

Or try this: _"Sibelius had a definite contribution to make in the first quarter of our century, when the public was finding its way to the new music. There was sufficient novelty in his work to attract those listeners who liked to think of themselves as advanced. At the same time there was enough of the old to reassure those who were not yet ready for the truly modern in art." _

Maybe even better, here is Elliott Carter on Sibelius: _"It is not that he is unoriginal (at best he has some new color effects which are one of the minor originalities); not that he is unskillful, although in his rather subconscious style of composing he often falls into the abuse of crude procedures; not that his nationalist point of view is a little belated; but that his whole attitude toward music is deeply reactionary. This inevitably prevents his being really fresh and new. A few pieces sum up his point of view artfully and well. The rest are generally flat. But since audiences well trained in nineteenth-century heroics will stand for a lot of tedium, his music has what it takes to be popular at this time."_

Here is the distinguished musicologist Edward Dent in 1933: _"At the present day it is generally considered that the romantic composers are, of all composers, the most remote in feeling from ourselves; there are many musicians who cannot contemplate them without positive disgust. That is perhaps a very good reason for studying them in a spirit of scientific analysis. Nothing can be disgusting if we approach it in a scientific spirit, and the dissection of romantic emotion may teach us much about the psychology of musical expression."_

These are expressions of the then-respectable "progress fallacy," to which we can add many more famous remarks (Groves on Rachmaninoff, whose popularity is "unlikely to last," Leibowitz and Thomson on poor Sibelius, the "worst composer in the world...provincial beyond description," Boulez on practically everybody). When you've read enough of these attempts on the part of major "progressive" composers and their academic and critical advocates to consign "traditional" composers and their music to oblivion, it becomes impossible not to see the validity of Pauls' observations on the abyss between popular and "official" valuations of music in the modern era, and impossible to deny that recent revaluations, which have been taking place, are overdue.


----------



## Nereffid

One of my favourite quotes given by Pauls is this one:
_"The romantic school has lived its life and done its work, and has died an honourable death; to honour it truly is to let it rest in peace... no progressive musician can go on writing romantic music; that is over and done for, and the way has been cleared for pure music to resume its sway."_
...which shows how complicated the whole notion of what's "progressive" can be, given that those words were written in 1897 by Vaughan Williams.


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## Guest

Woodduck said:


> You seem to be suggesting that even though there is no agreed-upon definition of Romanticism, no one should use the word without offering an unambiguous definition.


It seems to me quite important to have a working definition if one is proposing a thesis that depends on identifying composers and works that belong to a genre in order to argue that 'romanticism' continued alongside 'modernism'; and that it's misleading at best to conclude that 'modernism' was the dominant (only?) genre during the bulk of the 20th C.

To those for whom it matters, claiming that one genre was in the ascendancy depends on demonstrating a claim that Debussy, for example, is either a modern or a romantic. I note in the Chapter about the difficulties of classifying Debussy (p228), it seemed significant to point to Claude's "beautiful sound" as evidence that he was a romantic. That's not merely 'fuzz'.



> The most popular textbook writers as late as 1960 duly picked up on this traditional classification of Debussy as a late Romantic. Machlis (1961 and 1979) still saw Debussy basically as a romantic because of his lyricism, beautiful sound, emphasis on mood and atmosphere, and poetic titles


In fairness, Pauls doesn't seem to conclude either way. But that, it seems to me, is a fault. It's all very well going on to point out other commentators who wanted to 'rescue' Debussy for the modernists, but it undermines his case if he fails to be more conclusive.


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## Strange Magic

I don't believe it is either correct or useful to conceive as fuzzy a term as Romanticism as an on/off switch. Better to visualize Romanticism as a dial, where you can have less or more of it as you rotate the dial. There will be transitions and transitional figures at the margins--people talk about Beethoven and Schubert on one margin and Debussy, early Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Bartok on the other. But even lacking a crisp and universally-accepted (like that's going to happen!) definition, distinctions can be made and understood: here is my man Edmund Burke....

"Though no man can draw a stroke between the confines of day and night, yet light and darkness are upon the whole tolerably distinguishable." Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770).

Very apt--both quote and title of the work wherein the quote is found.


----------



## Guest

Strange Magic said:


> *I don't believe it is either correct or useful to conceive as fuzzy a term as Romanticism as an on/off switch.* Better to visualize Romanticism as a dial, where you can have less or more of it as you rotate the dial. There will be transitions and transitional figures at the margins--people talk about Beethoven and Schubert on one margin and Debussy, early Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Bartok on the other. But even lacking a crisp and universally-accepted (like that's going to happen!) definition, distinctions can be made and understood: here is my man Edmund Burke....
> 
> "Though no man can draw a stroke between the confines of day and night, yet light and darkness are upon the whole tolerably distinguishable." Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770).
> 
> Very apt--both quote and title of the work wherein the quote is found.


Nor do I, but I think it needs something more than just the subjective/pejorative. The day/night analogy is rather too simple, since it is the mere presence or absence of light that counts. There's more to definitions of R and M than a single element - just taking 'dissonance' is problematic, without other complicating factors.


----------



## fluteman

Strange Magic said:


> I don't believe it is either correct or useful to conceive as fuzzy a term as Romanticism as an on/off switch. Better to visualize Romanticism as a dial, where you can have less or more of it as you rotate the dial. There will be transitions and transitional figures at the margins--people talk about Beethoven and Schubert on one margin and Debussy, early Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Bartok on the other. But even lacking a crisp and universally-accepted (like that's going to happen!) definition, distinctions can be made and understood: here is my man Edmund Burke....
> 
> "Though no man can draw a stroke between the confines of day and night, yet light and darkness are upon the whole tolerably distinguishable." Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770).
> 
> Very apt--both quote and title of the work wherein the quote is found.


"How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms." - Aristotle


----------



## Harold in Columbia

Woodduck said:


> These are expressions of the then-respectable "progress fallacy," to which we can add many more famous remarks (Groves on Rachmaninoff, whose popularity is "unlikely to last," Leibowitz and Thomson on poor Sibelius, the "worst composer in the world...provincial beyond description," Boulez on practically everybody). When you've read enough of these attempts on the part of major "progressive" composers and their academic and critical advocates to consign "traditional" composers and their music to oblivion, it becomes impossible not to see the validity of Pauls' observations on the abyss between popular and "official" valuations of music in the modern era, and impossible to deny that recent revaluations, which have been taking place, are overdue.


Rachmaninov and Sibelius have been benefiting from "recent reevaluation" for more than 40 years. It's become part of their brand.


----------



## Harold in Columbia

MacLeod said:


> There's more to definitions of R and M than a single element - just taking 'dissonance' is problematic, without other complicating factors.


Except, as can be seen in this thread, the conservatives _do_ just mean "dissonance" - because "I'm a Romantic" (if they met any real Romantics, they'd tell them to take a bath) sounds better than "I don't like dissonance."

(Now somebody's calling early Stravinsky "Romantic!" Yeah, maybe if "early" means "up through _The Firebird_.")


----------



## Strange Magic

Harold in Columbia said:


> Except, as can be seen in this thread, the conservatives _do_ just mean "dissonance" - because "I'm a Romantic" (if they met any real Romantics, they'd tell them to take a bath) sounds better than "I don't like dissonance."
> 
> (Now somebody's calling early Stravinsky "Romantic!" Yeah, maybe if "early" means "up through _The Firebird_.")


I would definitely include an abundance of easily discerned and recalled melodies as a key attribute. This _Le Sacre_ has in spades. I recall my delight in first hearing _Le Sacre_; the dissonances were as nothing. Rather, I was struck by the sheer quantity of melodies and themes-- it's like a melody soup--and wondered what all the fuss was about. I remember reading somewhere, maybe a bio of Diaghilev, that the real indignation at the premier had to do with the choreography much more than with the music.


----------



## Strange Magic

fluteman said:


> "How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms." - Aristotle


Why don't you take a stab at it--it could be in the form of a poll.


----------



## Harold in Columbia

Strange Magic said:


> I would definitely include an abundance of easily discerned and recalled melodies as a key attribute.


This confirms my point. That has _nothing_ to do with Romanticism. Vivaldi has an abundance easily discerned and recalled melodies. The Beatles have an abundance of easily discerned and recalled melodies. For that matter, Vaughan Williams has an abundance of easily discerned and recalled melodies, and it's as absurd to classify him as a Romantics as it is with the first two, except we don't notice as much, because we've become accustomed to conservatives using "Romantic" to mean "Late 19th and 20th century classical music that doesn't upset me too much."


----------



## fluteman

Woodduck said:


> You seem to be suggesting that even though there is no agreed-upon definition of Romanticism, no one should use the word without offering an unambiguous definition. Are most terms we use to describe styles and periods of music perfectly clear and rigidly defined? Actually, if you would read the book, you would see terms which describe certain features of the sort of music Pauls is calling Romantic - certain qualities of melody, harmony, form and sonority. You'd be entitled to disagree with his use of the term (and Pauls honorably admits his own reservations about it), but you'd possibly be less inclined to say "oy." It really isn't too hard to discern his basic meaning, the core of which isn't obscured by a little fuzz around the edges.
> 
> I found the essay a little overlong and repetitive, but it has some good scholarship behind it, and some really amusing quotes from composers, academics and critics showing just how preposterous some of the prejudices of the era were, and how some of them do indeed survive even into the present. Imagine writing of Strauss in 1919 that he
> 
> _"had now contented himself with writing a kind of music that appears to us like a ghost from an empty past that has already been lived. It is the kind of music in which we hear worn-out forms, cheap and titillating melodies, artificially generated passion, overpowering gestures, and a psycho-intellectual, illustrative compositional technique. It is a kind of music that is no longer able to move us."_
> 
> Or try this: _"Sibelius had a definite contribution to make in the first quarter of our century, when the public was finding its way to the new music. There was sufficient novelty in his work to attract those listeners who liked to think of themselves as advanced. At the same time there was enough of the old to reassure those who were not yet ready for the truly modern in art." _
> 
> Maybe even better, here is Elliott Carter on Sibelius: _"It is not that he is unoriginal (at best he has some new color effects which are one of the minor originalities); not that he is unskillful, although in his rather subconscious style of composing he often falls into the abuse of crude procedures; not that his nationalist point of view is a little belated; but that his whole attitude toward music is deeply reactionary. This inevitably prevents his being really fresh and new. A few pieces sum up his point of view artfully and well. The rest are generally flat. But since audiences well trained in nineteenth-century heroics will stand for a lot of tedium, his music has what it takes to be popular at this time."_
> 
> Here is the distinguished musicologist Edward Dent in 1933: _"At the present day it is generally considered that the romantic composers are, of all composers, the most remote in feeling from ourselves; there are many musicians who cannot contemplate them without positive disgust. That is perhaps a very good reason for studying them in a spirit of scientific analysis. Nothing can be disgusting if we approach it in a scientific spirit, and the dissection of romantic emotion may teach us much about the psychology of musical expression."_
> 
> These are expressions of the then-respectable "progress fallacy," to which we can add many more famous remarks (Groves on Rachmaninoff, whose popularity is "unlikely to last," Leibowitz and Thomson on poor Sibelius, the "worst composer in the world...provincial beyond description," Boulez on practically everybody). When you've read enough of these attempts on the part of major "progressive" composers and their academic and critical advocates to consign "traditional" composers and their music to oblivion, it becomes impossible not to see the validity of Pauls' observations on the abyss between popular and "official" valuations of music in the modern era, and impossible to deny that recent revaluations, which have been taking place, are overdue.


Those quotes are fun, here are some more:

"Beethoven's Second Symphony is a crass monster, a hideously writhing wounded dragon, that refuses to expire, and though bleeding in the Finale, furiously beats about with its tail erect." 
(Zeitung fur die Elegente Welt, Vienna, May 1804)

"For a while, it moves along well enough, musical and not lacking in spirit, but soon the roughness gets the upper hand and remains in charge until the end of the first movement. It is no longer a question of whether the violin is being played, but of being yanked about and torn to tatters. Whether it is at all possible to extract a pure sound out of these hair-raising acrobatics I do not know, but I do know that in making the attempt Mr. Brodsky tortured his audience no less than he did himself. The adagio, with its gentle Slav melancholy, is well on the way to reconciling us and winning us over. But abruptly it ends, making way for a finale that transports us into the brutish, grim jollity of a Russian church festival. In our mind's eye we see nothing but common, ravaged faces, hear rough oaths, and smell cheap liquor."  
Eduard Hanslick on the Tchaikovsky violin concerto after its premiere in 1881.

"[A] laborious and puerile barbarity." French music critic Henri Quittard on Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring after its premiere in 1913.

These all make fun reading. But all they really establish is the importance of historical perspective in evaluating art. Don't forget that J.S. Bach's music was nearly forgotten until a century after his death. As for the definition issue, the trouble is, you can't really equate 20th and now 21st century "romantic" music with 19th century romantic music, 20th century audiences with 19th century audiences, or 20th century popularity with 19th century popularity. In earlier times, the classical music audience was a wealthy, highly educated elite that may have had more in common with the academicians of their day than today's larger, more diverse audience do with theirs. How many CD sales were there in the 19th century?


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## Harold in Columbia

fluteman said:


> .In earlier times, the classical music audience was a wealthy, highly educated elite that may have had more in common with the academicians of their day than today's larger, more diverse audience do with theirs.


This is, of course, a lie we tell ourselves, because we want to think we're better than our ancestors, and we know we're so obviously inferior to them. I do wonder how anybody manages to do it with a straight face: Is this a class of people that just doesn't know what a ticket to see a popular entertainer in concert costs?


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## Harold in Columbia

Woodduck said:


> Imagine writing of Strauss in 1919 that he
> 
> _"had now contented himself with writing a kind of music that appears to us like a ghost from an empty past that has already been lived. It is the kind of music in which we hear worn-out forms, cheap and titillating melodies, artificially generated passion, overpowering gestures, and a psycho-intellectual, illustrative compositional technique. It is a kind of music that is no longer able to move us."_


Sounds about right. What, like anybody actually cares about anything Strauss did after _Rosenkavalier_? (Except the four last songs, which we can get sentimental about because they're last.)



Woodduck said:


> Here is the distinguished musicologist Edward Dent in 1933: _"At the present day it is generally considered that the romantic composers are, of all composers, the most remote in feeling from ourselves; there are many musicians who cannot contemplate them without positive disgust. That is perhaps a very good reason for studying them in a spirit of scientific analysis. Nothing can be disgusting if we approach it in a scientific spirit, and the dissection of romantic emotion may teach us much about the psychology of musical expression."_


This of course simply proves that Romanticism meant more to Dent than it can ever mean to us. He could remember a time when Romanticism was so ubiquitous that it was unbearable. The closest we can get to hearing the real Romanticism at all is scratchy old recordings made before it was completely swept away in the '30s - which most of the people who think they like Romantic music don't listen to.



Woodduck said:


> These are expressions of the then-respectable "progress fallacy,"


Never existed.


----------



## fluteman

Harold in Columbia said:


> This is, of course, a lie we tell ourselves, because we want to think we're better than our ancestors, and we know we're so obviously inferior to them. I do wonder how anybody manages to do it with a straight face: Is this a class of people that just doesn't _know_ what a ticket to see a popular entertainer in concert _costs_?


Someone once replied, when asked whether people today typically know more or less than the greatest minds of earlier centuries, "We know more, but understand less." By "more diverse", I certainly didn't mean "better". For music, the great playing-field levelers of the 20th century were recordings, broadcast radio, later in the century, TV, and finally, the internet. Suddenly, anyone could afford to listen to any music regardless of what concert tickets cost. Does Dr. Pauls consider how this impacts his analysis?


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## Mahlerian

Strange Magic said:


> I would definitely include an abundance of easily discerned and recalled melodies as a key attribute. This _Le Sacre_ has in spades. I recall my delight in first hearing _Le Sacre_; the dissonances were as nothing. Rather, I was struck by the sheer quantity of melodies and themes-- it's like a melody soup--and wondered what all the fuss was about. I remember reading somewhere, maybe a bio of Diaghilev, that the real indignation at the premier had to do with the choreography much more than with the music.


And gee, that's exactly how I feel listening to Schoenberg. It's all melodies all the time. I just had several themes from the Second Quartet run through my head after reading about the string quartets.

Of course, in actual sentiment and aesthetic, Schoenberg is much more of a Romantic with a capital R than Stravinsky ever was.


----------



## Harold in Columbia

fluteman said:


> For music, the great playing-field levelers of the 20th century were recordings, broadcast radio, later in the century, TV, and finally, the internet. Suddenly, anyone could afford to listen to any music regardless of what concert tickets cost.


A recording costs as much as a cheap concert seat. Free music on the internet costs the listener nothing, of course, but that just transfers the cost to the musicians who don't get paid for their work.

Recordings make distance less important: now somebody in Iowa can hear a recording of the New York Philharmonic about as easily as somebody in New York. But that's merely a leveling between relatively well off people in Iowa and relatively well off people in New York.

The more important divide, which isn't effected by recordings at all, is between people who have leisure time and people who don't. Whether you're hearing a pick-up band arrangement of the music, or a recording of the music as the composer conceived it, doesn't matter when you never have the opportunity to listen to music as anything but background noise anyway.


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## Strange Magic

Harold in Columbia said:


> This confirms my point. That has _nothing_ to do with Romanticism. Vivaldi has an abundance easily discerned and recalled melodies. The Beatles have an abundance of easily discerned and recalled melodies. For that matter, Vaughan Williams has an abundance of easily discerned and recalled melodies, and it's as absurd to classify him as a Romantics as it is with the first two, except we don't notice as much, because we've become accustomed to conservatives using "Romantic" to mean "Late 19th and 20th century classical music that doesn't upset me too much."


The melodies of Vivaldi, Vaughan Williams and the Beatles, as well as those of _Le Sacre_, pleasant as they may be, are as nothing compared to the melodies of the serialists and aleatorists, which are heard on every street corner. But, seriously, we can include melody as a key component then, necessary but not sufficient, defining Romantic music, and also present in all preceding canons. Melody has, clearly, something to do with Romanticism. Pauls' argument certainly focuses on the persistance and durability of Romanticism throughout the 20th century, certainly due to its being the preceding canon allegedly being swept aside by the New Musics. But the listening public's respect and affection for the older canons as well contrasts with the indifference if not repugnance which has greeted much "atonal", serial, aleatoric and other sundry musics wherein melody is not discerned by a large majority of CM listeners. Who shall we find to blame for this state of affairs? The audience? A conspiracy? Mean people on TC?


----------



## Harold in Columbia

Strange Magic said:


> The melodies of Vivaldi, Vaughan Williams and the Beatles, as well as those of _Le Sacre_, pleasant as they may be, are as nothing compared to the melodies of the serialists and aleatorists, which are heard on every street corner. But, seriously, we can include melody as a key component then, necessary but not sufficient, defining Romantic music, and also present in all preceding canons. Melody has, clearly, something to do with Romanticism.


That's like saying breathing oxygen has something to do with being a primate. What you call "melody" has something to do with _all_ music except "the serialists and aleatorists." (Of course, Schönberg is actually more often melodic than, say, arch-Romantic Liszt, but when you say melody you don't mean melody.) You're taking an objection to a particular strain of Modernism and presenting it as a preference for Romanticism.



Strange Magic said:


> Pauls' argument certainly focuses on the persistance and durability of Romanticism throughout the 20th century


The way you're describing him, Pauls seems to try to dignify a grudge against atonality by calling everything else "Romantic." (Which isn't just wrong and transparently disingenuous - though maybe Pauls is too dumb to realize he's a liar - but the exact _opposite_ of correct, because Schönberg, Webern, and Berg are among the _least_ anti-Romantic major composers of their time.)


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## isorhythm

Melodies became, in general, less easily discerned and recalled in Romantic music, not more.


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## fluteman

Strange Magic said:


> Why don't you take a stab at it--it could be in the form of a poll.


I started down that path in my first post of this thread, when I cited one of my first music history teachers, Roland Trogan. But the real champ in this area is Charles Rosen, cited in the Pauls dissertation and probably every other musicology text on this subject in the last 30 years. Rosen was also a champion of the music of Pierre Boulez and a close friend of Elliott Carter.


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## fluteman

Harold in Columbia said:


> A recording costs as much as a cheap concert seat.


You are not from New York City.


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## Strange Magic

fluteman said:


> In earlier times, the classical music audience was a wealthy, highly educated elite that may have had more in common with the academicians of their day than today's larger, more diverse audience do with theirs.


Those quotes about Beethoven and Tchaikovsky were indeed fun, but the critics were castigating the music as too rough, too cheap, too "strong", maybe too "new" if you like-- they did not belabor it for being the dying embers of an obsolete, discarded, no longer vital musical impulse, as the quotes Pauls includes do.

Also, much classical music was bought, played, consumed by a growing bourgeois middle class in the 19th and early 20th centuries, not just by that wealthy, highly educated elite.


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## isorhythm

fluteman said:


> You are not from New York City.


You need to have student friends! They can hook you up.


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## Harold in Columbia

fluteman said:


> You are not from New York City.


I am not, but I do know that anybody can see and hear everything at a Metropolitan Opera performance for $20, because I do it fairly often, which a lot of New Yorkers seemingly don't.

Of course, at the Vienna State Opera you can do the same for 4 euros, but it's not my fault New York is such a hick town.


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## Strange Magic

Harold in Columbia said:


> The way you're describing him, Pauls seems to try to dignify a grudge against atonality by calling everything else "Romantic." (Which isn't just wrong and transparently disingenuous - though maybe Pauls is too dumb to realize he's a liar - but the exact _opposite_ of correct, because Schönberg, Webern, and Berg are among the _least_ anti-Romantic major composers of their time.)


I sense that you, like several other commentators on this thread, have not read Pauls' text. Am I correct?


----------



## Harold in Columbia

Strange Magic said:


> Also, much classical music was bought, played, consumed by a growing bourgeois middle class in the 19th and early 20th centuries, not just by that wealthy, highly educated elite.


Correct, of course, though that "bourgeois" should have a "petit" in front of it - in the case of, for example, Gershwin's parents, _very_ petit. And then, of course, the vast majority of actual musicians, for example Brahms' father, were actual proletarians. (Musicians became part of Anton Pannekoek's "new middle class" when the advent of recorded music put some of them out of a job and elevated the rest of them by turning live music into more of a luxury commodity.)


----------



## Harold in Columbia

Strange Magic said:


> Those quotes about Beethoven and Tchaikovsky were indeed fun, but the critics were castigating the music as too rough, too cheap, too "strong", maybe too "new" if you like-- they did not belabor it for being the dying embers of an obsolete, discarded, no longer vital musical impulse, as the quotes Pauls includes do.


fluteman was supplying examples of conservative attacks on music that everybody likes now. For examples of what you're talking about now, see Wagner on Mendelssohn.


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## Harold in Columbia

Strange Magic said:


> I sense that you, like several other commentators on this thread, have not read Pauls' text. Am I correct?


I have not read Pauls text. I sense that you may not have listened to _Pierrot lunaire_. One of us is the poorer for this.


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## mmsbls

For a couple of US dollars a year, most people today can listen to more classical music in one year than the richest people in the world could in their entire lives before 1900. Access to classical music is almost infinitely different today than in the past. 

What's really fascinating is that while the amount of classical music I can listen to for that incredibly small amount of money is enormous, almost none of that music would fall into Pauls' post-1900 critical canon. That disconnect is, in some sense, amazing. I'm always a bit surprised that TC members prefer contentious arguments about the disconnect rather than interesting discussions attempting to understand it better.


----------



## Chronochromie

Strange Magic said:


> I don't believe it is either correct or useful to conceive as fuzzy a term as Romanticism as an on/off switch. Better to visualize Romanticism as a dial, where you can have less or more of it as you rotate the dial. There will be transitions and transitional figures at the margins--people talk about Beethoven and Schubert on one margin and Debussy, early Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Bartok on the other. But even lacking a crisp and universally-accepted (like that's going to happen!) definition, distinctions can be made and understood: here is my man Edmund Burke....
> 
> "Though no man can draw a stroke between the confines of day and night, yet light and darkness are upon the whole tolerably distinguishable." Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770).
> 
> Very apt--both quote and title of the work wherein the quote is found.


Claiming that Debussy, early Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Bartók are on the "Romanticism dial", yet ignoring that Schoenberg is THE big modernist who is closest to Romanticism...You can't make this up!


----------



## KenOC

mmsbls said:


> What's really fascinating is that while the amount of classical music I can listen to for that incredibly small amount of money is enormous, almost none of that music would fall into Pauls' post-1900 critical canon. That disconnect is, in some sense, amazing. I'm always a bit surprised that TC members prefer contentious arguments about the disconnect rather than interesting discussions attempting to understand it better.


Perhaps, just perhaps, that's because there's not much to understand. Certainly 400 pages aren't necessary (IMO).


----------



## Harold in Columbia

mmsbls said:


> For a couple of US dollars a year, most people today can listen to more classical music in one year than the richest people in the world could in their entire lives before 1900.


For all the time that their bosses allow.



mmsbls said:


> What's really fascinating is that while the amount of classical music I can listen to for that incredibly small amount of money is enormous, almost none of that music would fall into Pauls' post-1900 critical canon. That disconnect is, in some sense, amazing.


Huh? Meaning you personally don't listen to "Pauls' post-1900 critical canon"? Or what?



mmsbls said:


> I'm always a bit surprised that TC members prefer contentious arguments about the disconnect rather than interesting discussions attempting to understand it better.


There's nothing to understand. Either you decide to acquire the taste for it or you don't - and, in the latter case, maybe feel kind of anxious that you're missing out on something and compensate by loudly insisting there's nothing there to miss.


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## Chronochromie

Woodduck said:


> When you've read enough of these attempts on the part of major "progressive" composers and their academic and critical advocates to consign "traditional" composers and their music to oblivion, it becomes impossible not to see the validity of Pauls' observations on the abyss between popular and "official" valuations of music in the modern era, and impossible to deny that recent revaluations, which have been taking place, are overdue.


Recent as in "many decades ago" probably.


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## Mahlerian

Strange Magic said:


> The melodies of Vivaldi, Vaughan Williams and the Beatles, as well as those of _Le Sacre_, pleasant as they may be, are as nothing compared to the melodies of the serialists and aleatorists, which are heard on every street corner. But, seriously, we can include melody as a key component then, necessary but not sufficient, defining Romantic music, and also present in all preceding canons. Melody has, clearly, something to do with Romanticism. Pauls' argument certainly focuses on the persistance and durability of Romanticism throughout the 20th century, certainly due to its being the preceding canon allegedly being swept aside by the New Musics. But the listening public's respect and affection for the older canons as well contrasts with the indifference if not repugnance which has greeted much "atonal", serial, aleatoric and other sundry musics wherein melody is not discerned by a large majority of CM listeners. Who shall we find to blame for this state of affairs? The audience? A conspiracy? Mean people on TC?


You realize that ridiculing what someone else has said doesn't constitute an argument, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_ridicule

There's no such thing as atonal music, and yes, Schoenberg was one of the great melodists of the 20th century.


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## Nereffid

mmsbls said:


> What's really fascinating is that while the amount of classical music I can listen to for that incredibly small amount of money is enormous, almost none of that music would fall into Pauls' post-1900 critical canon. That disconnect is, in some sense, amazing. I'm always a bit surprised that TC members prefer contentious arguments about the disconnect rather than interesting discussions attempting to understand it better.


It's not just the "disconnect", or any other particular topic for that matter.
I long (without hope, of course) for the day when "I don't agree with that statement, but it's really interesting" becomes the norm.


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## Strange Magic

Harold in Columbia said:


> I have not read Pauls text. I sense that you may not have listened to _Pierrot lunaire_. One of us is the poorer for this.


I would counsel you to read Pauls' thesis, if only to provide yourself with the wherewithal to better (and more convincingly) gnaw at the vitals of his argument. Know thine Enemy. You have already determined that he is a liar; perhaps worse horrors lie within, and you can tell us about them.


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## Woodduck

fluteman said:


> Those quotes are fun, here are some more:
> 
> "Beethoven's Second Symphony is a crass monster, a hideously writhing wounded dragon, that refuses to expire, and though bleeding in the Finale, furiously beats about with its tail erect."
> (Zeitung fur die Elegente Welt, Vienna, May 1804)
> 
> "For a while, it moves along well enough, musical and not lacking in spirit, but soon the roughness gets the upper hand and remains in charge until the end of the first movement. It is no longer a question of whether the violin is being played, but of being yanked about and torn to tatters. Whether it is at all possible to extract a pure sound out of these hair-raising acrobatics I do not know, but I do know that in making the attempt Mr. Brodsky tortured his audience no less than he did himself. The adagio, with its gentle Slav melancholy, is well on the way to reconciling us and winning us over. But abruptly it ends, making way for a finale that transports us into the brutish, grim jollity of a Russian church festival. In our mind's eye we see nothing but common, ravaged faces, hear rough oaths, and smell cheap liquor."
> Eduard Hanslick on the Tchaikovsky violin concerto after its premiere in 1881.
> 
> "[A] laborious and puerile barbarity." French music critic Henri Quittard on Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring after its premiere in 1913.
> 
> These all make fun reading. But all they really establish is the importance of historical perspective in evaluating art. Don't forget that J.S. Bach's music was nearly forgotten until a century after his death. As for the definition issue, the trouble is, you can't really equate 20th and now 21st century "romantic" music with 19th century romantic music, 20th century audiences with 19th century audiences, or 20th century popularity with 19th century popularity. In earlier times, the classical music audience was a wealthy, highly educated elite that may have had more in common with the academicians of their day than today's larger, more diverse audience do with theirs. How many CD sales were there in the 19th century?


It won't do to cite examples of foolish critical invective from the past in order to minimize the popularity/comprehensibility problems of 20th-century music and the dogmatism of its advocates: "See? Beethoven was misunderstood and rejected at first too!" But just who was doing the misunderstanding and rejecting? Is there really a parallel to the Modern era? Beethoven was actually quite successful and popular, whether he was well understood or not. People like to cite famous first-run failures such as _Carmen_, neglecting to note factors other than the sound of the music that may have contributed to the problem, and ignoring the overwhelming success that followed as soon as the work was revived. Even Berlioz's _Symphonie Fantastique_ - about as startling a piece of "modernism" as any pre-20th-century composer has ever sprung on the public - was immediately successful and frequently performed.

It may be fun to remember poor Hanslick, whose infamous description of the Tchaikovsky concerto is correct only about the cadenza, which represents one of Tchaikovsky's bad days - and don't forget the part where he said the music "stinks in the ear"! A supporter of Brahms (and in a way a predecessor of Stravinsky) with his "neoclassical" ideals, Hanslick will always be known, fairly or not, as a stuffy conservative and anti-Romantic, way behind the public as regards Wagner. But in opposing the "progressive" music of his time he actually represents the very opposite of the problem Pauls describes. In pre-Modern eras, academics and critics tended to be more conservative than the public; while they were upholding the eternal verities, the audience was looking for exciting new music. Its true that the increasing availability of older music during the 19th century resulted in more conservative concert programming, and presumably more conservative public taste, as the century wore on. But massive public resistance to the music of composers proclaimed by academics to be the most important of their time, alongside academics belittling and dismissing as obsolete relics accomplished contemporary composers loved by contemporary audiences, seems mainly a 20th-century phenomenon.


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## KenOC

Cherry-picking old reviews for the negative ones says little about the acceptance of the music at the time. Beethoven's 2nd Symphony, for instance, was quite popular and was described more often as "colossal" or "tremendous." Of course the Eroica still hadn't come along!


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## Mahlerian

KenOC said:


> Cherry-picking old reviews for the negative ones says little about the acceptance of the music at the time. Beethoven's 2nd Symphony, for instance, was quite popular and was described more often as "colossal" or "tremendous." Of course the Eroica still hadn't come along!


Well, of course there were plenty of positive audience reactions to "high modernist" music as well. Schoenberg's Ode to Napoleon and Survivor from Warsaw were so successful, despite the hemming and hawing of conservative critics, that they were brought back in successive seasons. Pierrot lunaire and Wozzeck were hugely successful.


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## mmsbls

Harold in Columbia said:


> Huh? Meaning you personally don't listen to "Pauls' post-1900 critical canon"? Or what?


Almost no radio stations play it.



Harold in Columbia said:


> There's nothing to understand. Either you decide to acquire the taste for it or you don't - and, in the latter case, maybe feel kind of anxious that you're missing out on something and compensate by loudly insisting there's nothing there to miss.


That sounds a little like, "What's there to understand about fusion? You smash some hydrogen atoms together and boom!" The phenomenon of acquiring a taste for changing music styles, and especially why the early 20th century saw such a change in the rate of learning the new musical languages, is rather complex and fascinating at least to some of us.


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## fluteman

mmsbls said:


> For a couple of US dollars a year, most people today can listen to more classical music in one year than the richest people in the world could in their entire lives before 1900. Access to classical music is almost infinitely different today than in the past.
> 
> What's really fascinating is that while the amount of classical music I can listen to for that incredibly small amount of money is enormous, almost none of that music would fall into Pauls' post-1900 critical canon. That disconnect is, in some sense, amazing. I'm always a bit surprised that TC members prefer contentious arguments about the disconnect rather than interesting discussions attempting to understand it better.


I just don't see this disconnect everyone keeps mentioning is so dramatic or amazing. Nowadays, everyone can listen to any music, any time, anywhere, and at almost no cost. And that has pretty much been true since the early 20th century. So why should there be some close correspondence between what is popular, especially in the simplistic sense of number of listeners, and what is the subject of serious academic study? Is there such a close correspondence in the world of literature? No. Theater? No. Visual arts? No. And that's because, though academics sometimes study popular tastes and trends, they study many other things too, and rightly so.


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## Strange Magic

My counsel to those who wish to comment in an informed way about Pauls' thesis, which was to read it, is directed to all and sundry. This way, too, the discussion need not be hijacked/sidetracked/frogmarched as so often happens, into a perceived attack/defense of poor Schönberg. There is a tiny bit more to Pauls' treatise than endless discussion of Herr Schönberg, yet the old reflexes seem to kick in every time. He is probably sick of it.


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## Mahlerian

Strange Magic said:


> My counsel to those who wish to comment in an informed way about Pauls' thesis, which was to read it, is directed to all and sundry. This way, too, the discussion need not be hijacked/sidetracked/frogmarched as so often happens, into a perceived attack/defense of poor Schönberg. There is a tiny bit more to Pauls' treatise than endless discussion of Herr Schönberg, yet the old reflexes seem to kick in every time. He is probably sick of it.


You could stop bringing up the specters of "atonality" and serialism, perhaps? Schoenberg is just a great composer, like Bach or Mozart or Debussy or Stravinsky, and he doesn't need defense. He's not really attacked much either, because people seem much more intent on knocking down this audience-hating, cacophony-pushing, tuneless music-writing straw man than actually talking about anything he *did* do.


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## DaveM

Harold in Columbia said:


> There's nothing to understand. Either you decide to acquire the taste for it or you don't - and, in the latter case, maybe feel kind of anxious that you're missing out on something and compensate by loudly insisting there's nothing there to miss.


That's just the sort of silliness that can drive a discussion into a ditch. It won't happen here because mmsbls doesn't tend to take the bait.


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## JosefinaHW

KenOC said:


> A task of truly Wagneresque proportions.


Thanks, I needed a good chuckle!


----------



## Strange Magic

Strange Magic said:


> My counsel to those who wish to comment in an informed way about Pauls' thesis, which was to read it, is directed to all and sundry. This way, too, the discussion need not be hijacked/sidetracked/frogmarched as so often happens, into a perceived attack/defense of poor Schönberg. There is a tiny bit more to Pauls' treatise than endless discussion of Herr Schönberg, yet the old reflexes seem to kick in every time. He is probably sick of it.


I like this so much that I'll repeat it.


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## Chronochromie

Strange Magic said:


> I like this so much that I'll repeat it.


...Yet ignore all the questions and objections to your previous posts (not comments about Pauls' book), in the past few pages. Okay.


----------



## DaveM

isorhythm said:


> Melodies became, in general, less easily discerned and recalled in Romantic music, not more.


I may be misunderstanding you, but I tend to think the opposite. The easily accessible melodies of Chopin (particularly), Mendelssohn, Schumann etc. were IMO what made them so popular and the emotions that they evoked what made the Romantic era what it was.


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## isorhythm

DaveM said:


> I may be misunderstanding you, but I tend to think the opposite. The easily accessible melodies of Chopin (particularly), Mendelssohn, Schumann etc. were IMO what made them so popular and the emotions that they evoked what made the Romantic era what it was.


I was thinking more of later Romantics (Brahms, Wagner, Mahler, Bruckner, Liszt, etc). Long stretches of their music don't really have a simple tune; it's more about harmony.

Though I think even Schumann, Mendelssohn and Chopin - especially Chopin! - wrote melodies that are a lot harder to remember and sing back than melodies of Mozart and Beethoven.


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## violadude

DaveM said:


> I may be misunderstanding you, but I tend to think the opposite. The easily accessible melodies of Chopin (particularly), Mendelssohn, Schumann etc. were IMO what made them so popular and the emotions that they evoked what made the Romantic era what it was.


They're accessible now to our ears...but compared to the Classical Era, the melodies of the Romantic Era tended to be much more fragmented (in some cases), contain many more dissonant leaps, contain more irregular rhythmic structures.

Isorhythm wasn't saying that Romantic Era melodies are not accessible, but comparison to Classical Era melodies, I'm not sure how you could say that they were more accessible.


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## fluteman

DaveM said:


> I may be misunderstanding you, but I tend to think the opposite. The easily accessible melodies of Chopin (particularly), Mendelssohn, Schumann etc. were IMO what made them so popular and the emotions that they evoked what made the Romantic era what it was.


Ouch. If you really believe that, may I recommend a book by Charles Rosen called The Romantic Generation (Harvard University Press 1995)? It even comes with a CD. And Rosen is cited by Pauls, so he has earned his bona fides for this thread!


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## JosefinaHW

:Woodduck: In fairness to fluteman, the following part of his post was a statement that I made.  I didn't want to have to say anything about the essay yet (thank you for that word) and I had jumped from what Pauls said to my own understanding of the challenge of thinking/learning about 20th-century music..... The response and the discussion that you have started is what I was excited about hearing from the forum when the text was suggested reading. 

"He cannot clearly define either term because there is no agreed-upon meaning of these terms. A great deal of Pauls text is explicating the various completely contradictory understandings of the terms at different times and by different people. In the end he argues for the use of the term "romantic" because out of the many possible options (which he describes and presents arguments for and against) he thinks it the least/lesser (escapes me) of all evils.'"

In other words, no. Yet his entire thesis is based on distinctions between "romantic" and "modern" music, i.e., comparative popularity and attention from academicians and critics? Oy.
You seem to be suggesting that even though there is no agreed-upon definition of Romanticism, no one should use the word without offering an unambiguous definition. Are most terms we use to describe styles and periods of music perfectly clear and rigidly defined? Actually, if you would read the book, you would see terms which describe certain features of the sort of music Pauls is calling Romantic - certain qualities of melody, harmony, form and sonority. You'd be entitled to disagree with his use of the term (and Pauls honorably admits his own reservations about it), but you'd possibly be less inclined to say "oy." It really isn't too hard to discern his basic meaning, the core of which isn't obscured by a little fuzz around the edges.


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## Strange Magic

Chronochromie said:


> ...Yet ignore all the questions and objections to your previous posts (not comments about Pauls' book), in the past few pages. Okay.


Do you wish to comment in an informed way about Pauls' thesis? Now would be a good time (I assume you have read the text).


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## DaveM

isorhythm said:


> I was thinking more of later Romantics (Brahms, Wagner, Mahler, Bruckner, Liszt, etc). Long stretches of their music don't really have a simple tune; it's more about harmony.
> 
> Though I think even Schumann, Mendelssohn and Chopin - especially Chopin! - wrote melodies that are a lot harder to remember and sing back than melodies of Mozart and Beethoven.


I see what you're saying. I must agree that in some of the lost/rare adagios/and andantes from the late 19th/early 20th century that I've been 'investigating' lately, the melodies sometimes take a little more listening to to appreciate their emotional depth & beauty.


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## Chronochromie

Strange Magic said:


> Do you wish to comment in an informed way about Pauls' thesis? Now would be a good time (I assume you have read the text).


Sorry, but you made posts which were not about Pauls's thesis and people replied. You don't want to answer them, that's fine, if you think it could potentially derail the thread.

And no, I've not yet read all of it, but I'm losing the drive to do that too...


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## isorhythm

I actually am reading the the thing, slowly, but my basic problem is clear very early:



> As far as the general world of "classical" or "art" music is concerned, twentieth-century composers of a tonal/romantic inclination have long been among the most frequently-performed composers of their time. Despite this, they have always been among the worst casualties of a very powerful and influential philosophy of music history [...]


If they're among the most frequently performed...in what possible sense are they "casualties" of anything? It sounds like they're successes.

There's a desire for validation here that I don't understand. And it goes both ways. Very frequently on TalkClassical someone will get a little offended when someone points out that what we're calling "modernist" music is unpopular with audiences. I don't understand that - it's just a fact. It is (relatively) unpopular.

But here is sort of the reverse - you have a champion of music that _is_ relatively popular with concert audiences complaining that the music is _not_ as popular with another set of listeners - academics, musicologists, composers, critics.

Well, tough! It's not as popular with them. People like what they like. Isn't popularity with concert audiences enough?


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## fluteman

JosefinaHW said:


> :
> You seem to be suggesting that even though there is no agreed-upon definition of Romanticism, no one should use the word without offering an unambiguous definition.


No, but nor am I a fan of nearly 500-page edifices of academic sophistry built on flimsy foundations. SimonNZ, Harold in Columbia (why isn't he in Italy?) Mahlerian and a number of others here have made good points and I guess it's all getting repetitive at this point. I'll stay with Charles Rosen for an academician's (and musician's) insightful and worthwhile analysis of Romanticism.


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## Blancrocher

isorhythm said:


> But here is sort of the reverse - you have a champion of music that _is_ relatively popular with concert audiences complaining that the music is _not_ as popular with another set of listeners - academics, musicologists, composers, critics.


Out of curiosity, how did this author establish the popularity of various kinds of music with academics, musicologists, composers, and critics (if that wasn't just a casual aside)? I'd be curious about the results of reliable surveys of individuals and publications--whether from this dissertation or elsewhere--if they exist.


----------



## mmsbls

fluteman said:


> I just don't see this disconnect everyone keeps mentioning is so dramatic or amazing. Nowadays, everyone can listen to any music, any time, anywhere, and at almost no cost. And that has pretty much been true since the early 20th century. So why should there be some close correspondence between what is popular, especially in the simplistic sense of number of listeners, and what is the subject of serious academic study? Is there such a close correspondence in the world of literature? No. Theater? No. Visual arts? No. And that's because, though academics sometimes study popular tastes and trends, they study many other things too, and rightly so.


Disconnect was probably a poor word choice. I'm simply referring to the significant increase in listening time generally needed to appreciate the new musical languages of the 20th century compared to what was needed for earlier new music (Classical, early and late Romantic). Also many people today still have trouble appreciating early 20th century music.


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## Strange Magic

isorhythm said:


> I actually am reading the the thing, slowly, but my basic problem is clear very early:
> 
> If they're among the most frequently performed...in what possible sense are they "casualties" of anything? It sounds like they're successes.
> 
> There's a desire for validation here that I don't understand. And it goes both ways. Very frequently on TalkClassical someone will get a little offended when someone points out that what we're calling "modernist" music is unpopular with audiences. I don't understand that - it's just a fact. It is (relatively) unpopular.
> 
> But here is sort of the reverse - you have a champion of music that _is_ relatively popular with concert audiences complaining that the music is _not_ as popular with another set of listeners - academics, musicologists, composers, critics.
> 
> Well, tough! It's not as popular with them. People like what they like. Isn't popularity with concert audiences enough?


Pauls' thesis is that, until recently, through much of the past 100 years, people have been listening happily mostly to Romantic music (broadly defined), but that the major music history texts in no way reflected this. Rather, they have concentrated their attention to what they viewed as cutting-edge, evolutionary changes in music that were rendering the "old" music obsolete, sterile, exhausted, dead. So that an inaccurate history of music was what one gleaned from the textbooks, wherein one should have expected to find a history that matched perceived reality. But the newer texts and writings on music history are more closely mirroring reality. That's it in a nutshell. Simple stuff. Innocuous, really. Yet it seems to blow the craniums of several posters here on this thread, especially those who haven't read the text of Pauls' thesis.


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## Strange Magic

Blancrocher said:


> Out of curiosity, how did this author establish the popularity of various kinds of music with academics, musicologists, composers, and critics (if that wasn't just a casual aside)? I'd be curious about the results of reliable surveys of individuals and publications--whether from this dissertation or elsewhere--if they exist.


Read the text. It's all there.


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## violadude

Strange Magic said:


> Pauls' thesis is that, until recently, through much of the past 100 years, people have been listening happily mostly to Romantic music (broadly defined), but that the major music history texts in no way reflect this. Rather, they have concentrated their attention to what they viewed as cutting-edge, evolutionary changes in music that were rendering the "old" music obsolete, sterile, exhausted, dead. So that an inaccurate history of music was what one gleaned from the textbooks, wherein one should have expected to find a history that matched perceived reality. But the newer texts and writings on music history are more closely mirroring reality. That's it in a nutshell. Simple stuff. Innocuous, really. Yet it seems to blow the craniums of several posters here on this thread, especially those who haven't read the text of Pauls' thesis.


But "Romantic Music" is so broadly defined that it's basically meaningless. Wanna talk about inaccurate historical portrayals? Let's start with trying to present the battleground of the various styles 20th century as being simply "Romantic" vs. "Modernist". It makes no sense really. And it's hard to understand why anyone would cast it in these terms.


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## Petwhac

Harold in Columbia said:


> Either you decide to acquire the taste for it [Paul's post 1900 critical canon]or you don't - and, in the latter case, maybe feel kind of anxious that you're missing out on something and compensate by loudly insisting there's nothing there to miss.


 [My brackets]

That sentence exposes the poverty of the, what shall we call it?, the anti anti-modernist proposition.


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## violadude

Petwhac said:


> [My brackets]
> 
> That sentence exposes the poverty of the, what shall we call it?, the anti anti-modernist proposition.


Hm, I see more poverty in the rejection of the idea that it takes time to acclimate to a new musical language and the insistence that someone's disinterest in taking that time to do so equates to "this music sucks!".


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## Strange Magic

violadude said:


> But "Romantic Music" is so broadly defined that it's basically meaningless. Wanna talk about inaccurate historical portrayals? Let's start with trying to present the battleground of the various styles 20th century as being simply "Romantic" vs. "Modernist". It makes no sense really. And it's hard to understand why anyone would cast it in these terms.


We could talk about atonal music, but some here say there is no such thing. We could talk about serialism and aleatoric music, but that's been dismissed as a red herring. So we're stuck with the fuzzy term Romanticism v. Other Kinds of Music. Sorry about that. But Inquiring Minds can learn more by reading Pauls' text. Having read it myself, I can afford the time to pound away here on my iPad; others could post less and read more. Just sayin'.


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## mmsbls

Petwhac said:


> [My brackets]
> 
> That sentence exposes the poverty of the, what shall we call it?, the anti anti-modernist proposition.


To be fair, in some sense it's true. Many people have decided to listen repeatedly to the newer music that they dislike, and they often find that they begin to appreciate some or much of it. It's also true that it may take a long time (years) or learning to listen in a new manner so it's by no means straightforward. Some people find they never learn to appreciate the new music, and I think it would be unfair to simply say they didn't "work hard enough", "listen long enough", or "have the right attitude." 
Of course, some people listen and quickly decide it's not for them, and they may very well be right.


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## Strange Magic

violadude said:


> Hm, I see more poverty in the rejection of the idea that it takes time to acclimate to a new musical language and the insistence that someone's disinterest in taking that time to do so equates to "this music sucks!".


This is called "Blame the Audience!"


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## violadude

Strange Magic said:


> This is called "Blame the Audience!"


Okay. I'm not blaming anyone for anything. I'm saying "don't blame the music if you're not interested in learning the language".

Put in other terms "Don't go to China and accuse the people of speaking gibberish".

Isn't "blame the audience" what we normally do though? If someone thinks Beethoven sucks we all rally together to defend Beethoven, not the audience member. I don't see how this is any different.


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## Chronochromie

Strange Magic said:


> Pauls' thesis is that, until recently, through much of the past 100 years, people have been listening happily mostly to Romantic music *(broadly defined)*, but that the major music history texts in no way reflected this. Rather, they have concentrated their attention to what they viewed as cutting-edge, evolutionary changes in music that were rendering the "old" music obsolete, sterile, exhausted, dead. So that an inaccurate history of music was what one gleaned from the textbooks, wherein one should have expected to find a history that matched perceived reality. But the newer texts and writings on music history are more closely mirroring reality. That's it in a nutshell. Simple stuff. Innocuous, really. Yet it seems to blow the craniums of several posters here on this thread, especially those who haven't read the text of Pauls' thesis.


And that's a problem right there. Too broadly defined, and Pauls essentially puts Debussy and Prokofiev there too, and his reasoning for doing so seems to me to be clutching at straws (cherry-picking of quotes, the melody and performance arguments are weak imo).


----------



## fluteman

mmsbls said:


> Disconnect was probably a poor word choice. I'm simply referring to the significant increase in listening time generally needed to appreciate the new musical languages of the 20th century compared to what was needed for earlier new music (Classical, early and late Romantic). Also many people today still have trouble appreciating early 20th century music.


Do they, really? Disney's Fantasia, with music of Stravinsky and Debussy, made a huge and permanent impression on me when I was four. Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf has always been a children's favorite. Not long ago, I took my kids to the movies and we saw a preview for the latest Ice Age movie, which prominently featured Aarvo Part's Spiegel im Spiegel (which has already been used in several other movies). I very much doubt anyone in that theater knows who Part is, much less owns any of his CDs (other than me). Yet his music is now in the bloodstream of those kids.
Anyway, as I mentioned above, Bach's music was ignored for nearly a century, and some contemporaries suggested Beethoven's late string quartets were the result not merely of his deafness but of a general loss of mental faculties. To this day they have failed to get near the top of the classical hit parade, although Op. 131 was used to great effect in a fine movie called A Late Quartet.


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## Strange Magic

Chronochromie said:


> And that's a problem right there. Too broadly defined, and Pauls essentially puts Debussy and Prokofiev there too, and his reasoning for doing so seems to me to be clutching at straws (cherry-picking of quotes, the melody and performance arguments are weak imo).


Take a break from TC, kick back, and listen to some _Nocturnes_, maybe a bit of _Firebird_, _Romeo and Juliet_, perhaps Shosty's piano concertos (pick one), some _Divertimento_. Then, read Pauls' text (last resort).


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## KenOC

fluteman said:


> ...and some contemporaries suggested Beethoven's late string quartets were the result not merely of his deafness but of a general loss of mental faculties. To this day they have failed to get near the top of the classical hit parade, although Op. 131 was used to great effect in a fine movie called A Late Quartet.


I read somewhere that the late quartets are now more popular than the early or middle ones, which puts them near the top of the string quartet hit parade. Also, the movie _The Soloist _uses the slow movement of Op. 132 quite effectively. So Beethoven's late quartets have finally gained respect -- movie music!


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## Chronochromie

Strange Magic said:


> Take a break from TC, kick back, and listen to some _Nocturnes_, maybe a bit of _Firebird_, _Romeo and Juliet_, perhaps Shosty's piano concertos (pick one), some _Divertimento_. Then, read Pauls' text (last resort).


No, I already know those works beginning to end, thanks. Maybe you should listen again (hopefully) to The Rite, Les Noces, the Preludes, Jeux, Prokofiev's first 3 piano concertos and Shostakovich's string quartets, then think again. But you've pretty much confirmed what I suspected. I don't know why anyone should waste anymore time with this thread.


----------



## Woodduck

Chronochromie said:


> Claiming that Debussy, early Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Bartók are on the "Romanticism dial", yet ignoring that *Schoenberg is THE big modernist who is closest to Romanticism*...You can't make this up!


But how many people _hear_ Schoenberg's 12-tone music as Romantic?

All of these composers have strong Romantic traits - but as we've noted, Romanticism has different meanings, embraces different sensibilities, and took different artistic forms, some of those forms very different according to culture (German and French Romanticism were quite different in spirit, for example). Certainly Schoenberg began as a full-fledged German Romantic, but although he may have remained one by temperament, it's worth asking why his later, non-tonal music is felt to be emotionally arid or negative - un-Romantic - by so many people. The big melodic gestures of late German Romanticism are still there, but the harmonic underpinning has changed in a way that seems to deny those gestures much of the expressive power which similar gestures have in the tonal music of Wagner, Mahler or Strauss (in this connection, it seems to me that the relationship of tonal harmony to melody, and to the perception of melody, hasn't been discussed too effectively on this forum).

Obviously any music that sounds strange to people will fail to communicate on an emotional level. I'm not saying that Schoenberg's music is inexpressive; like any music, it has its own expressive domain. It's just not surprising that a type of music which so many people find emotionally uncommunicative or forbidding (and they _do_, like it or not) is not going to be widely considered "Romantic." And what's true of Schoenberg is likely to be even more true of later serialism, when Schoenberg's own residue of Romanticism was subjected to the...well, the Boulez Purge. Maybe Romantic old Arnold's music gets lumped together with what later, avowedly un- or anti-Romantic composers did with his method. But really, wasn't "the method" a pretty un-Romantic idea in itself, and bound to appeal to a scientific age?


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## Strange Magic

Chronochromie said:


> No, I already know those works beginning to end, thanks. Maybe you should listen again (hopefully) to The Rite, Les Noces, the Preludes, Jeux, Prokofiev's first 3 piano concertos and Shostakovich's string quartets, then think again. But you've pretty much confirmed what I suspected. I don't know why anyone should waste anymore time with this thread.


Love 'em all. Our tastes are quite similar.


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## violadude

I think one of the issues here is that people are trying to define music, not based on the music, but based on their response to the music.


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## violadude

Woodduck said:


> But how many people _hear_ Schoenberg's 12-tone music as Romantic?
> 
> All of these composers have strong Romantic traits - but as we've noted, Romanticism has different meanings, embraces different sensibilities, and took different artistic forms, some of those forms very different according to culture (German and French Romanticism were quite different in spirit, for example). Certainly Schoenberg began as a full-fledged German Romantic, but although he may have remained one by temperament, it's worth asking why his later, non-tonal music is felt to be emotionally arid or negative - un-Romantic - by so many people. The big melodic gestures of late German Romanticism are still there, but the harmonic underpinning has changed in a way that seems to deny those gestures much of the expressive power which similar gestures have in the tonal music of Wagner, Mahler or Strauss (in this connection, it seems to me that the relationship of tonal harmony to melody, and to the perception of melody, hasn't been discussed too effectively on this forum).
> 
> Obviously any music that sounds strange to people will fail to communicate on an emotional level. I'm not saying that Schoenberg's music is inexpressive; like any music, it has its own expressive domain. It's just not surprising that a type of music which so many people find emotionally uncommunicative or forbidding (and they _do_, like it or not) is not going to be widely considered "Romantic." And what's true of Schoenberg is likely to be even more true of later serialism, when Schoenberg's own residue of Romanticism was subjected to the...well, the Boulez Purge. Maybe Romantic old Arnold's music gets lumped together with what later, avowedly un- or anti-Romantic composers did with his method. But really, wasn't "the method" a pretty un-Romantic idea in itself, and bound to appeal to a scientific age?


Oh great, we're back to categorizing composers like Schoenberg based on the reactionary responses of thousands of anonymous, faceless individuals, instead of based on people that actually listen to his music.

How about this, what if you let those actually deeply familiar with the music in question have the last word on its qualities. WOW what novel idea :O People who have more experience with a subject have more authority over it. That sounds downright revolutionary to me.


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## Chronochromie

Woodduck said:


> But how many people _hear_ Schoenberg's 12-tone music as Romantic?
> 
> All of these composers have strong Romantic traits - but as we've noted, Romanticism has different meanings, embraces different sensibilities, and took different artistic forms, some of those forms very different according to culture (German and French Romanticism were quite different in spirit, for example). Certainly Schoenberg began as a full-fledged German Romantic, but although he may have remained one by temperament, it's worth asking why his later, non-tonal music is felt to be emotionally arid or negative - un-Romantic - by so many people. The big melodic gestures of late German Romanticism are still there, but the harmonic underpinning has changed in a way that seems to deny those gestures much of the expressive power which similar gestures have in the tonal music of Wagner, Mahler or Strauss (in this connection, it seems to me that the relationship of tonal harmony to melody, and to the perception of melody, hasn't been discussed too effectively on this forum).
> 
> Obviously any music that sounds strange to people will fail to communicate on an emotional level. I'm not saying that Schoenberg's music is inexpressive; like any music, it has its own expressive domain. It's just not surprising that a type of music which so many people find emotionally uncommunicative or forbidding (and they _do_, like it or not) is not going to be widely considered "Romantic." And what's true of Schoenberg is likely to be even more true of later serialism, when Schoenberg's own residue of Romanticism was subjected to the...well, the Boulez Purge. Maybe Romantic old Arnold's music gets lumped together with what later, avowedly un- or anti-Romantic composers did with his method. But really, wasn't "the method" a pretty un-Romantic idea in itself, and bound to appeal to a scientific age?


How many people hear melody in Schoenberg? Does that mean that there aren't any, etc. you know how it goes.

First off, the debt to Romanticism is more obvious to me in the free atonal, pre-12 tone works of Schoenberg. To your first question, I think it's much the same way that Brahms harmony and counterpoint is un-romantic to some. Schoenberg was very much influenced by Brahms, not just Wagner, and I can hear that, in works like the Chamber Symphony and the string quartets especially (and I've seen people react negatively to the first string quartet and chamber symphony, and those are what you'd call tonal). Sure, the music is not emotional in the same way that Wagner, Mahler or Strauss, but to me it's even more so. Works like Erwartung, the second string quartet, Pierrot lunaire are extremely emotional to me, but it is an issue of perception. I can't explain why they pack a massive emotional punch to me, because if someone tells me that free atonal Schoenberg isn't expressive that makes as much sense to me as if you said the same of Wagner (it's even called his Expressionist period!). I too would like to know why it's seen as intellectual and dry (and why Berg isn't, they aren't _that_ different to get polar opposite reactions...).

I don't know much about theory, but I think the method (which again one should remember that the 12-tone works come _after_ his Expressionist period and are in a way more laid back and "neoclassical" - works like the Suite, Serenade, piano and violin concertos) is only un-Romantic as much as late Beethoven or Brahms fascination with fugues, passacaglias and the like are.

(Funnily enough I've read a big Brahms fan on this forum call the finale to the 4th symphony "a tuneless mess" or something to that effect.)


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## Woodduck

violadude said:


> Oh great, we're back to categorizing composers like Schoenberg based on the reactionary responses of thousands of anonymous, faceless individuals, instead of based on people that actually listen to his music.
> 
> How about this, what if you let those actually deeply familiar with the music in question have the last word on its qualities. WOW what novel idea :O People who have more experience with a subject have more authority over it. That sounds downright revolutionary to me.


Don't shoot the messenger.

I don't think anyone has the last word on what music communicates, for the simple reason that it communicates different things to different people. All we can do is look at what people - most of them anonymous - say about it over time. Let's see... How long has it been? About a century? What are they saying? Or are they too anonymous and faceless to be asked?

Don't knock anonymous individuals. I know a lot of anonymous individuals. Some of them are very perceptive.


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## violadude

Woodduck said:


> Don't shoot the messenger.
> 
> I don't think anyone has the last word on what music communicates, for the simple reason that it communicates different things to different people. All we can do is look at what people - most of them anonymous - say about it over time. Let's see... How long has it been? About a century? What are they saying? Or are they too anonymous and faceless to be asked?
> 
> Don't knock anonymous individuals. I know a lot of anonymous individuals. Some of them are very perceptive.


Ya okay Woodduck. 5 or so people on TC whose opinions on composer X were formed after years of listening and studying don't matter, but the opinion of 1,000 John Doe's saying "I don't like composer X" (what have they listened of composer x? who knows) that's all that matters.

Jeeze, in what universe does that make sense?

By that logic, we should never study music or spend years listening to it. That would only make our opinion less likely to be taken seriously :lol:

Man, I'm this close to leaving TC. It's pretty obvious that people who take the time to study and measure up music the best they can aren't welcomed, or at least not as welcomed any random dude saying "THIS SUCKS" "THIS DOESN'T" with nothing but "I felt it in my gut at first listen" to back it up.

Have fun with your popularity contests.


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## mmsbls

fluteman said:


> Do they, really? Disney's Fantasia, with music of Stravinsky and Debussy, made a huge and permanent impression on me when I was four. Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf has always been a children's favorite. Not long ago, I took my kids to the movies and we saw a preview for the latest Ice Age movie, which prominently featured Aarvo Part's Spiegel im Spiegel (which has already been used in several other movies). I very much doubt anyone in that theater knows who Part is, much less owns any of his CDs (other than me). Yet his music is now in the bloodstream of those kids.
> Anyway, as I mentioned above, Bach's music was ignored for nearly a century, and some contemporaries suggested Beethoven's late string quartets were the result not merely of his deafness but of a general loss of mental faculties. To this day they have failed to get near the top of the classical hit parade, although Op. 131 was used to great effect in a fine movie called A Late Quartet.


I'm sorry. I was referring to Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Varese and on to others such as Boulez, Carter, and Ligeti. Not all early 20th century composers posed the same difficulty.


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## Strange Magic

Uh-Oh. Back to Schönberg again. Let's be clear. Anybody can like or dislike or avoid or listen to any piece by any composer. Pauls' thesis is not about whether anyone should or shouldn't listen to Schönberg or anybody else; it is about whether the music history establishment accurately mirrored and accurately recorded what a large majority of classical music enthusiasts were listening to. He reported that the books were not a good guide to actual music history, though things were improving. So what's with the Schönberg obsession, over and over again? Enough already.


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## SeptimalTritone

Strange Magic said:


> Pauls' thesis is not about whether anyone should or shouldn't listen to Schönberg or anybody else; it is about whether the music history establishment accurately mirrored and accurately recorded what a large majority of classical music enthusiasts were listening to.


Oh boy.

Once we portray those knowledgeable about Schoenberg as an elite establishment that doesn't have contact with what the "majority of enthusiasts" like, we lose everything. This is music, not Congressional lobbying reform or international economic relations where there really is a political conflict between the elite and the worker.

Yes, the audience size for the second Viennese school and the post-1950 avant garde is smaller. Yes, there is a divergence between the wider classical music fans who don't like their music and a smaller group of avant garde people who do like their music.

But you know what, the fans who don't like Schoenberg, Boulez, and Lachenmann are still waiting for their Messiah of the caliber of Bach and Beethoven to arrive. But the fans who do like Schoenberg, Boulez, and Lachenmann: we have our Messiahs who are of equal or greater caliber, a lot of them who are alive! So our internal experiences are much more positive and enriching, and that is more valuable than anything else. Those who stop at Schoenberg have nothing today for them that competes in quality with Bach and Beethoven, but those who have followed avant-garde music do have composers they hold in equal or higher esteem.


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## Chronochromie

Strange Magic said:


> Uh-Oh. Back to Schönberg again. Let's be clear. Anybody can like or dislike or avoid or listen to any piece by any composer. Pauls' thesis is not about whether anyone should or shouldn't listen to Schönberg or anybody else; it is *about whether the music history establishment accurately mirrored and accurately recorded what a large majority of classical music enthusiasts were listening to*. He reported that the books were not a good guide to actual music history, though things were improving. So what's with the Schönberg obsession, over and over again? Enough already.


Do books on the Baroque era place a larger emphasis on Telemann over, say, Bach? Or books on Romanticism on Meyerbeer over Wagner? Or Rossini over Beethoven? Or Cimarosa over Mozart? I don't know, I'm genuinely curious. Please correct me if I misinterpreted you.


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## fluteman

KenOC said:


> I read somewhere that the late quartets are now more popular than the early or middle ones, which puts them near the top of the string quartet hit parade. Also, the movie _The Soloist _uses the slow movement of Op. 132 quite effectively. So Beethoven's late quartets have finally gained respect -- movie music!


Yes, The Soloist was a fun movie, too. And never underestimate movie and TV music, it has a profound influence on our culture. But if we use the Pauls metric (number of recordings available on arkivmusic.com, wasn't it?), Schubert's Death and the Maiden quartet easily beats all of Beethoven's quartets, even the late ones.


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## KenOC

fluteman said:


> But if we use the Pauls metric (number of recordings available on arkivmusic.com, wasn't it?), Schubert's Death and the Maiden quartet easily beats all of Beethoven's quartets, even the late ones.


Checked. Yes, Death and the Maiden has more recordings than any of Beethoven's (103). Beethoven's late quartets range from 66 to 84, just about equal to his middle quartets and somewhat more than the Op. 18 ones. But I wonder if, aside from the Schubert work, any other quartet has more recordings than the Beethoven ones. Mozart's "Dissonance" is right up there at 62...


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## Petwhac

fluteman said:


> Do they, really? Disney's Fantasia, with music of Stravinsky and Debussy, made a huge and permanent impression on me when I was four. Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf has always been a children's favorite. Not long ago, I took my kids to the movies and we saw a preview for the latest Ice Age movie, which prominently featured Aarvo Part's Spiegel im Spiegel (which has already been used in several other movies). I very much doubt anyone in that theater knows who Part is, much less owns any of his CDs (other than me). Yet his music is now in the bloodstream of those kids.
> Anyway, as I mentioned above, Bach's music was ignored for nearly a century, and some contemporaries suggested Beethoven's late string quartets were the result not merely of his deafness but of a general loss of mental faculties. To this day they have failed to get near the top of the classical hit parade, although Op. 131 was used to great effect in a fine movie called A Late Quartet.


I'm afraid using music from films is a red herring. Or worse, it is more likely to undermine the very argument you appear to be making. If you want film music that regularly makes it to the concert platform then John Williams, Ennio Morricone, Hans Zimmer and Danny Elfman are more likely candidates. Stravinsky, Debussy and Pärt are in the mainstream concert repertoire quite independently of any association with film. Peter and the Wolf is a very tonal and melodic piece with a narrator as I'm sure you know.
Yes, Beethoven's late quartets are perhaps more for the connoisseur than the casual listener but they are a million miles closer to being in the 'hit' parade than anything by Stockhausen, Xenakis or Finnissy will ever be. And I mean ever. 
One may stamp one's foot furiously and proclaim that the 'public' caught up with Beethoven, Berlioz, Mahler, Debussy and therefore need only be exposed to the same degree to Stock, Xen and Fin in order to catch up with them too. But how ever loud one shouts or how ever often one repeats it, it isn't true.
The fact that there are many members here who demonstrate intelligence and knowledge yet cannot grasp this fact, is a source of great bewilderment to me.
It is just wishful thinking!


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## EdwardBast

SimonNZ said:


> Do you really feel there's a hidden suppressed history of Prokofiev and Shostakovich and a neglect in academic publishing throughout the century?
> 
> (also: remind me again: are Prokofiev and Shostakovich in the romantic pigeonhole or the modern pigeonhole? - I can't keep these things straight)


I said nothing about suppression. It just wasn't considered as cool. When I read papers about these composers at academic conferences, I received comments about how interesting or refreshing it was that I focused on noncanonic composers. Of course, noncanonic is cool now. Times change.


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## Petwhac

SeptimalTritone said:


> . Those who stop at Schoenberg have nothing today for them that competes in *quality* with Bach and Beethoven, but those who have followed avant-garde music do have composers they hold in equal or higher esteem.


By 'quality' I presume you mean likability for you personally. Or would you like to suggest which post Schoenberg composer competes in 'quality' with B and B and what the nature of that quality is. You do realise that who one holds in high esteem can be a popular musician, a film composer, a neo-romantic or an avant-garde composer.


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## violadude

Petwhac said:


> Yes, Beethoven's late quartets are perhaps more for the connoisseur than the casual listener but they are a million miles closer to being in the 'hit' parade than anything by Stockhausen, Xenakis or Finnissy will ever be. And I mean ever.
> One may stamp one's foot furiously and proclaim that the 'public' caught up with Beethoven, Berlioz, Mahler, Debussy and therefore need only be exposed to the same degree to Stock, Xen and Fin in order to catch up with them too. But how ever loud one shouts or how ever often one repeats it, it isn't true.
> The fact that there are many members here who demonstrate intelligence and knowledge yet cannot grasp this fact, is a source of great bewilderment to me.
> It is just wishful thinking!


Ah, I see we're becoming fortune tellers now, hm?

Well, my issue isn't that Stockhausen and co. may never be popular, my issue is with people using popularity as if it means anything about the quality of the music.


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## Petwhac

violadude said:


> Ah, I see we're becoming fortune tellers now, hm?
> 
> Well, my issue isn't that Stockhausen and co. may never be popular, my issue is with people using popularity as if it means anything about the quality of the music.


Ok, so I may be proved wrong in time ( I really doubt it, mind you) but the point I'm really making is that never before has it been necessary for professed art music lovers to make _quite _such an effort for _quite_ so long, 100 years and counting. The reason is to do with the music NOT the listener. Nothing to do with quality in the good/bad sense but everything to do with the qualities, in the characteristics sense, present in the music.


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## violadude

Petwhac said:


> Ok, so I may be proved wrong in time ( I really doubt it, mind you) but the point I'm really making is that never before has it been necessary for professed art music lovers to make _quite _such an effort for _quite_ so long, 100 years and counting. The reason is to do with the music NOT the listener. Nothing to do with quality in the good/bad sense but everything to do with the qualities, in the characteristics sense, present in the music.


Ya I agree with all of what you said. It does take listeners a longer time to acclimate to much 20th century music than older music. Just like it would probably be easier for an English speaking person to learn Spanish than Vietnamese. That's not my point.

I think my point is that, ya the music takes more time to get used to, but if you're not willing to put in that time or effort why not just leave it be, rather than complaining about how horrible/unmelodic/noisy it is when you're actually not that qualified to be making such pronouncements.


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## SeptimalTritone

SeptimalTritone said:


> Those who stop at Schoenberg have nothing today for them that competes in *quality* with Bach and Beethoven, but those who have followed avant-garde music do have composers they hold in equal or higher esteem.





Petwhac said:


> By 'quality' I presume you mean likability for you personally. Or would you like to suggest which post Schoenberg composer competes in 'quality' with B and B and what the nature of that quality is. You do realise that who one holds in high esteem can be a popular musician, a film composer, a neo-romantic or an avant-garde composer.


Your post indicates a misunderstanding of what I said. By quality there, I meant quality _for them_, that is, for the classical music listeners who stop at Schoenberg and Stockhausen. They don't have anything for them to match the quality (for them) of Bach, in their own estimation. Whereas listeners who include Schoenberg and Stockhausen, we do have, for us, composers of equal or greater quality. So our internal joy and discovery and emotional richness from listening to post-1950 avant garde is equal or greater to that from listening to the common practice greats: we have an immeasurable experience, they don't. Not that one is _required_ in any moral absolute sense to like Xenakis and Finnissy, but overwhelmingly those who do like them have listening experiences that are comparable or greater than the experiences listening to common practice composers, and yet, _we have the full richness of listening experience from the common practice composers that the anti-second Viennese listeners have._


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## Petwhac

violadude said:


> Ya I agree with all of what you said. It does take listeners a longer time to acclimate to much 20th century music than older music. Just like it would probably be easier for an English speaking person to learn Spanish than Vietnamese. That's not my point.
> 
> I think my point is that, ya the music takes more time to get used to, but if you're not willing to put in that time or effort why not just leave it be, rather than complaining about how horrible/unmelodic/noisy it is when you're actually not that qualified to be making such pronouncements.


I agree with your second paragraph but isn't the point about language exactly what the problem is. The 19thC Romantics were speaking English and composers in the 20C not only started speaking in Spanish but more in Vietnamese, Hindi, Mandarin and Arabic- using 
completely new alphabets compared to the one in use for the previous few centuries.


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## Petwhac

SeptimalTritone said:


> Your post indicates a misunderstanding of what I said. By quality there, I meant quality _for them_, that is, for the classical music listeners who stop at Schoenberg and Stockhausen. They don't have anything for them to match the quality (for them) of Bach, in their own estimation. Whereas listeners who include Schoenberg and Stockhausen, we do have, for us, composers of equal or greater quality. So our internal joy and discovery and emotional richness from listening to post-1950 avant garde is equal or greater to that from listening to the common practice greats: we have an immeasurable experience, they don't. Not that one is _required_ in any moral absolute sense to like Xenakis and Finnissy, but overwhelmingly those who do like them have listening experiences that are comparable or greater than the experiences listening to common practice composers, and yet, _we have the full richness of listening experience from the common practice composers that the anti-second Viennese listeners have._


Except that we have no way of knowing the intensity of pleasure that someone else gets from music. As I said, they may look for that rich and extreme pleasure elsewhere other from 'art' music, which is what large numbers of music lovers do, Jazz, Rock, Film Music, whatever, forms that have no equivalence in the Classical/Baroque/ Romantic eras. (Note: I didn't include Folk). And when I say music lovers I'm not restricting it to casual listeners but to the many highly gifted, trained and educated musicians who just don't like what is commonly called atonal or avant-garde music. Some of whom play it regularly as their job!


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## mmsbls

SeptimalTritone said:


> Those who stop at Schoenberg have nothing today for them that competes in quality with Bach and Beethoven, but those who have followed avant-garde music do have composers they hold in equal or higher esteem.


This is exactly the reason I pushed to learn to like 20th century music. I loved Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, ..., Mahler, and discovering their music was truly a joy. I wanted new music to discover, new music to love, and new music to look forward to. I now have all of those, and I'm continuously discovering more. I just played Ligeti's Piano Concerto and found that, wonder of wonders, I like it.


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## SimonNZ

Strange Magic said:


> Uh-Oh. Back to Schönberg again. Let's be clear. Anybody can like or dislike or avoid or listen to any piece by any composer. Pauls' thesis is not about whether anyone should or shouldn't listen to Schönberg or anybody else; i*t is about whether the music history establishment accurately mirrored and accurately recorded what a large majority of classical music enthusiasts were listening to*. He reported that the books were not a good guide to actual music history, though things were improving. So what's with the Schönberg obsession, over and over again? Enough already.


You know...the issue of popularity is well covered in academic publishing on classical music. Also the issue of critical success vs. popular success or the overlap of both or the absense of both. Lots of books, lots and lots of chapters in books, lots of articles. These aren't new questions that are only being addressed now.

Also: I tell you what, SM: I'll read every single page of this book if you agree to read one that I recommend, hows that for a deal? I think I'll choose Alvin Lucier's "Music 109" - its only half the length of this thing and much better written.


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## fluteman

KenOC said:


> Checked. Yes, Death and the Maiden has more recordings than any of Beethoven's (103). Beethoven's late quartets range from 66 to 84, just about equal to his middle quartets and somewhat more than the Op. 18 ones. But I wonder if, aside from the Schubert work, any other quartet has more recordings than the Beethoven ones. Mozart's "Dissonance" is right up there at 62...


I don't know. Ravel's Quartet is on par with Beethoven's late quartets at 74. But there are numerous chamber music pieces by many composers, Beethoven included, that have far more. Look at Ravel's beautiful Pièce en forme de Habañera, for example -- 146. And as a flute player, I'd look at Prokofiev's flute sonata. If you include the arrangement for violin Prokofiev made at David Oistrakh's request -- 87. Still more than any of Beethoven's quartets.


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## Woodduck

Chronochromie said:


> How many people hear melody in Schoenberg? Does that mean that there aren't any, etc. you know how it goes.
> 
> First off, the debt to Romanticism is more obvious to me in the free atonal, pre-12 tone works of Schoenberg. To your first question, I think it's much the same way that Brahms harmony and counterpoint is un-romantic to some. Schoenberg was very much influenced by Brahms, not just Wagner, and I can hear that, in works like the Chamber Symphony and the string quartets especially. Sure, the music is not emotional in the same way that Wagner, Mahler or Strauss, but to me it's even more so. Works like Erwartung, the second string quartet, Pierrot lunaire are extremely emotional to me, but it is an issue of perception. I can't explain why they pack a massive emotional punch to me, because if someone tells me that free atonal Schoenberg isn't expressive that makes as much sense to me as if you said the same of Wagner (it's even called his Expressionist period!). I too would like to know why it's seen as intellectual and dry (and why Berg isn't, they aren't _that_ different to get polar opposite reactions...).
> 
> I don't know much about theory, but I think the method (which again one should remember that the 12-tone works come _after_ his Expressionist period and are in a way more laid back and "neoclassical" - works like the Suite, Serenade, piano and violin concertos) is only un-Romantic as much as late Beethoven or Brahms fascination with fugues, passacaglias and the like are.


Valid points all. I concur that there's a real difference between the Expressionistic "free atonal" works and the serial stuff, and that _Erwartung_ is, stylistically, Romantic music and powerfully expressive. I'm not at all denying Schoenberg's Romantic roots (which is the main point at the moment, I think), but German Expressionism is a particular outgrowth of Romanticism that explicitly deals with a certain range of phenomena: with the dark, the morbid, the decadent, the abnormal... Its emotional world is rather specialized, intense but narrow; precedents for it in music may begin with Wagner (Kundry's music in _Parsifal_) and Mahler, but with both of those composers the expression of such states is given a much wider context and, like dissonance, a resolution. The irredeemable darkness of Expressionism represents a new aesthetic experience - primal therapy without expectation of a cure, perhaps - which is hard to call "Romantic."

There does seem to be a general feeling that Berg is more Romantic in feeling, warmer emotionally, than Schoenberg (at least the 12-tone music). What's the difference? Structure, for one thing, but Berg also uses more infusions of tonal harmony, and it's interesting that in his operas he does it precisely where he knows it's going to arouse deep and sympathetic emotions. Its hard to argue that there isn't an expressive difference between tonal and atonal idioms when you hear the way Berg uses them in _Wozzeck_ and _Lulu._(I don't actually know whether anyone has argued that, but I expect someone will. :lol

I suppose I'm questioning how Romantic atonal music can be, in terms of the range of meanings the word "Romantic" is asked to bear. But what we call things doesn't really alter the point of the essay that's supposed to be the subject of this thread. Pauls may be a bit sloppy and rambling, but I don't think he's wrong on the history. Whether his observations still have relevance to present day perspectives on 20th-century music, I don't know. I'm just an old guy in a small town in Oregon, and I have a ton of CDs of unfashionable unprogressive music by composers whose names I'd never heard of thirty years ago and who I now know were irrelevant in 1930 and weren't supposed to last.


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## Strange Magic

I


SimonNZ said:


> Also: I tell you what, SM: I'll read every single page of this book if you agree to read one that I recommend, hows that for a deal? I think I'll choose Alvin Lucier's "Music 109" - its only half the length of this thing and much better written.


No deal. You will read Pauls' treatise because you want to.


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## Woodduck

EdwardBast said:


> I said nothing about suppression. It just wasn't considered as cool. When I read papers about these composers at academic conferences, I received comments about *how interesting or refreshing it was that I focused on noncanonic composers.* Of course, noncanonic is cool now. Times change.


Doesn't anyone else find this funny?


----------



## Chronochromie

Woodduck said:


> Valid points all. I concur that there's a real difference between the Expressionistic "free atonal" works and the serial stuff, and that _Erwartung_ is, stylistically, Romantic music and powerfully expressive. I'm not at all denying Schoenberg's Romantic roots (which is the main point at the moment, I think), but German Expressionism is a particular outgrowth of Romanticism that explicitly deals with a certain range of phenomena: with the dark, the morbid, the decadent, the abnormal... Its emotional world is rather specialized, intense but narrow; precedents for it in music may begin with Wagner (Kundry's music in _Parsifal_) and Mahler, but with both of those composers the expression of such states is given a much wider context and, like dissonance, a resolution. The irredeemable darkness of Expressionism represents a new aesthetic experience - primal therapy without expectation of a cure, perhaps - which is hard to call "Romantic."
> 
> There does seem to be a general feeling that Berg is more Romantic in feeling, warmer emotionally, than Schoenberg (at least the 12-tone music). What's the difference? Structure, for one thing, but Berg also uses more infusions of tonal harmony, and it's interesting that in his operas he does it precisely where he knows it's going to arouse deep and sympathetic emotions. Its hard to argue that there isn't an expressive difference between tonal and atonal idioms when you hear the way Berg uses them in _Wozzeck_ and _Lulu._(I don't actually know whether anyone has argued that, but I expect someone will. :lol
> 
> I suppose I'm questioning how Romantic atonal music can be, in terms of the range of meanings the word "Romantic" is asked to bear. But what we call things doesn't really alter the point of the essay that's supposed to be the subject of this thread. Pauls may be a bit sloppy and rambling, but I don't think he's wrong on the history. Whether his observations still have relevance to present day perspectives on 20th-century music, I don't know. I'm just an old guy in a small town in Oregon, and I have a ton of CDs of unfashionable unprogressive music by composers whose names I'd never heard of thirty years ago and who I now know were irrelevant in 1930 and weren't supposed to last.


Well there's always Dallapiccola. 
Honestly, as I know little to nothing about theory and can't read music, I couldn't tell you which bits of Berg's or Schoenberg's or Dallapiccola's or whoever's music are tonal and which are atonal, or if Berg uses more "infusions of tonal harmony" than Schoenberg. All I have is my intuition, and that's not extremely accurate here. You ask how Romantic atonal music can be, but did Schoenberg really set out to write music that had no "infusions of tonal harmony" at all? Did Webern even? I don't know, but in Schoenberg's case I've seen on this forum knowledgeable people say that he didn't, and read similar things elsewhere.

I don't think in terms of "tonal" or "atonal". I'll just listen to any piece many times if necessary and see if I like it. What bothers me is people disregarding tons of music because it isn't very similar to the music they already like, or, worse still, dismissing it before listening due to how some classify it (Romantic, tonal, atonal, modern, avant-garde, minimalist, spectralist, whatever).


----------



## DaveM

violadude said:


> How about this, what if you let those actually deeply familiar with the music in question have the last word on its qualities. WOW what novel idea :O People who have more experience with a subject have more authority over it. That sounds downright revolutionary to me.





violadude said:


> Man, I'm this close to leaving TC. It's pretty obvious that people who take the time to study and measure up music the best they can aren't welcomed, or at least not as welcomed any random dude saying "THIS SUCKS" "THIS DOESN'T" with nothing but "I felt it in my gut at first listen" to back it up.


It's really desperation time when someone pulls out the old '_I'm just about to leave_' card. Why not just avoid these threads if the subject troubles you so much? I have read and re-read this entire thread and can't find one post that is disrespectful to 'modern', twentieth-century, atonal or 'whatever you want to call it' music.

There hasn't been one post that infers that this music is not accepted in the way you might like because it is not music of quality (please point me to such a post if I have missed it). Nor has anyone with musical education been treated as unwelcome. You seem to be the one making that leap. And if such an inference or outright statement has been made elsewhere then it was probably made by an outlier because the posters who you seem to have the biggest issue with here simply don't post in that disrespectful a way.

I like Baroque music (which covers a period over 100 years). I like Classical era music which covers 50-75 years. I like Romantic era music which covers 75-100 years. I don't like most modern music in the category of Schoenberg and anything in the category of atonal which covers a fair amount of music over the last 100 years. Why should that upset anybody any more than if I said I can't stand the entire Baroque period? Why should I be told that I haven't given 'modern' music a chance or that I just need to study it more? Or that I should listen to the opinion of someone more musically educated than myself?


----------



## violadude

Petwhac said:


> I agree with your second paragraph but isn't the point about language exactly what the problem is. The 19thC Romantics were speaking English and composers in the 20C not only started speaking in Spanish but more in Vietnamese, Hindi, Mandarin and Arabic- using
> completely new alphabets compared to the one in use for the previous few centuries.


I think that's a pretty fair analogy. All I'm saying is one shouldn't come into the house of an Arab speaker and say his language is stupid if you're not willing to take the time it takes to learn it. That's my main point in any of these discussions.


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## violadude

I just really don't understand what the big deal with popularity is. I really don't. Why should any of us care which composers are popular? Lots of things are popular for lots of different reasons. McDonalds is popular. Anime is popular. Touring France is popular. Alcohol is popular. Pornography is popular. Dogs are popular. Will Smith is popular. Kim Kardashian is popular. Doing drugs is popular. 

What does any of that mean? How does that bear on quality of anything? If Niki Minaj and the Beatles both are popular, what does that say about popularity's capacity for predicting quality? I think most people would agree with me if it weren't for the fact that somehow, when it comes to modern music and modern music only "The word of the people is god".


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## fluteman

violadude said:


> Ah, I see we're becoming fortune tellers now, hm?
> 
> Well, my issue isn't that Stockhausen and co. may never be popular, my issue is with people using popularity as if it means anything about the quality of the music.


As obvious as that may seem to you and me, violadude, after 1 post in this thread, much less 286, we'll just have to give up. According to some PhD candidate, popularity, as measured by the number of currently in print CD releases, is the best possible way to measure "compositional greatness", as he puts it. And don't complain until you've read nearly 500 pages based on that premise.


----------



## violadude

DaveM said:


> It's really desperation time when someone pulls out the old '_I'm just about to leave_' card. Why not just avoid these threads if the subject troubles you so much? I have read and re-read this entire thread and can't find one post that is disrespectful to 'modern', twentieth-century, atonal or 'whatever you want to call it' music.
> 
> There hasn't been one post that infers that this music is not accepted in the way you might like because it is not music of quality (please point me to such a post if I have missed it). Nor has anyone with musical education been treated as unwelcome. You seem to be the one making that leap. And if such an inference or outright statement has been made elsewhere then it was probably made by an outlier because the posters who you seem to have the biggest issue with *here simply don't post in that disrespectful a way.*
> 
> I like Baroque music (which covers a period over 100 years). I like Classical era music which covers 50-75 years. I like Romantic era music which covers 75-100 years. I don't like most modern music in the category of Schoenberg and anything in the category of atonal which covers a fair amount of music over the last 100 years. Why should that upset anybody any more than if I said I can't stand the entire Baroque period? Why should I be told that I haven't given 'modern' music a chance or that I just need to study it more? Or that I should listen to the opinion of someone more musically educated than myself?


Respect is a facade really. If you're intelligent enough you can think of a "respectful" way of saying anything terrible. I don't know if I would characterize anything anyone's said here as "terrible" but you catch my drift.

Anyway, actually, if people were saying that Baroque composers were bad because they weren't popular I'd take issue with that too. If people were saying Bach's music had no counterpoint even though it clearly does because most people don't "perceive" the counterpoint. Ya I'd take issue with that.

Would you "audience blame" if the majority of people couldn't hear that Beethoven's 5th symphony 1st movement was in sonata form? Ya, probably, because the majority of people would be wrong. But if you were to take the advice of some people in this thread, then you might say "Well I guess Beethoven's 5th symphony 1st movement isn't in sonata form, or at the very least it doesn't matter that it's in sonata form because people can't hear it".

Horsepucky spun any other way, but somehow it passes when modern music is involved.


----------



## EdwardBast

Chronochromie said:


> And that's a problem right there. Too broadly defined, and Pauls essentially puts Debussy and Prokofiev there too, and his reasoning for doing so seems to me to be clutching at straws (cherry-picking of quotes, the melody and performance arguments are weak imo).


I agree. Working from the standard aesthetic criteria for defining romantic art, that is, the centrality of subjective expression, the focus on the inner life of its subjects and authors, and the expressive teleology and psychological motivation underlying its structures, it is hard to see how Debussy fits the mold. Prokofiev, on the other hand, in much of his work, clearly does meet the criteria - it was, after all, a more or less a legal requirement for a flourishing career in the USSR.  His late symphonies and sonatas are certainly directly comprehensible through the rhetoric of romantic expression, although not always easily so. Yeah, Pauls' fast and loose play with categories seems motivated by expediency alone.


----------



## KenOC

Based on my reading of the first part of the paper, I don't see that the author is talking about "greatness." His thesis is that the composers and pieces getting the most print and attention among academic and critical authorities over recent decades are precisely NOT those gaining public acceptance and entering the performing repertoire. At the same time, those composers getting the least attention, and often sneering and withering attention when they _are _noticed, are those who have achieved the highest popularity and added most to the repertoire.

He may draw some conclusions from all this, which was kind of obvious without reading his analysis or his first hundred pages. We'll see. (And I didn't even mention that "S" guy!)


----------



## Harold in Columbia

DaveM said:


> That's just the sort of silliness that can drive a discussion into a ditch. It won't happen here because mmsbls doesn't tend to take the bait.


Evidently he leaves that to you.


----------



## Harold in Columbia

Strange Magic said:


> I would counsel you to read Pauls' thesis, if only to provide yourself with the wherewithal to better (and more convincingly) gnaw at the vitals of his argument. Know thine Enemy.


I know mine enemy. His name is Richard Taruskin and he's quite formidable. If I wanted to know what the ants are doing, I'd be a formicologist.


----------



## Mahlerian

Harold in Columbia said:


> I know mine enemy. His name is Richard Taruskin and he's quite formidable. If I wanted to know what the ants are doing, I'd be a formicologist.


It shouldn't surprise you to know that Pauls seems to lean heavily on Taruskin. He's certainly acquired his biases.


----------



## violadude

Also, I'd like to point out this fun little hypocrisy -

Schoenberg, Webern, Boulez, Stockhausen Xenakis and Cage aren't very popular = well this music isn't as good or doesn't resonate with audiences very well.

Ullmann, Melartin, Atterberg, Tubin and Yoshimatsu aren't very popular = Wow, look at all these great composers the "official canon" has neglected

:lol:


----------



## Harold in Columbia

Petwhac said:


> Yes, Beethoven's late quartets are perhaps more for the connoisseur than the casual listener but they are a million miles closer to being in the 'hit' parade than anything by Stockhausen, Xenakis or Finnissy will ever be. And I mean ever.


No, just until the bottom finishes falling out from under the concert hall industry. Stockhausen and Xenakis are already bigger with pop music fans than the late Beethoven quartets (though of course not bigger than the 9th symphony).


----------



## EdwardBast

Chronochromie said:


> First off, the debt to Romanticism is more obvious to me in the free atonal, pre-12 tone works of Schoenberg. To your first question, I think it's much the same way that Brahms harmony and counterpoint is un-romantic to some. Schoenberg was very much influenced by Brahms, not just Wagner, and I can hear that, in works like the Chamber Symphony and the string quartets especially (and I've seen people react negatively to the first string quartet and chamber symphony, and those are what you'd call tonal). Sure, the music is not emotional in the same way that Wagner, Mahler or Strauss, but to me it's even more so. Works like Erwartung, the second string quartet, Pierrot lunaire are extremely emotional to me, but it is an issue of perception. I can't explain why they pack a massive emotional punch to me, because if someone tells me that free atonal Schoenberg isn't expressive that makes as much sense to me as if you said the same of Wagner (it's even called his Expressionist period!). I too would like to know why it's seen as intellectual and dry (and why Berg isn't, they aren't _that_ different to get polar opposite reactions...).


Yes, by any standard I think the links between Schoenberg's free atonal works and romantic aesthetics are quite strong and obvious, as is true with anything that tends to fit the expressionist category. And neoclassicism, whether serial or Stravinskian does not. Not sure how this jibes with Pauls' categories.


----------



## Woodduck

fluteman said:


> As obvious as that may seem to you and me, violadude, after 1 post in this thread, much less 286, we'll just have to give up. According to some PhD candidate, popularity, as measured by the number of currently in print CD releases, is the best possible way to measure "compositional greatness", as he puts it. And don't complain until you've read nearly 500 pages based on that premise.


Perhaps giving up would be the best course, since you are still missing (or evading) the point of the book. The truth of that point has not been refuted by anyone here, distracting rants on statistics and semantics notwithstanding.


----------



## violadude

Woodduck said:


> Perhaps giving up would be the best course, since you are still missing (or evading) the point of the book. The truth of that point has not been refuted by anyone here, distracting rants on statistics and semantics notwithstanding.


The point that "The importance put on composers in older music textbooks didn't reflect what people were listening to"?

Ya, what about it?

What does that imply?

What should I take from that?


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## Harold in Columbia

I think what Woodduck is trying to tell us is that Gilbert & Sullivan are better than Wagner.


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## EdwardBast

I should say that while I find some of Pauls' intellectual framework flimsy, as I've noted above, I think his observation that nearly every 20thc music history text showed an extreme bias toward modernist and avant-garde currents and an equally extreme neglect of anything that didn't fit the stylistic succession/evolutionary model, is perfectly obvious. It was inevitable that this balance would begin to be set straight once we gained a little historical distance. No surprises for me.


----------



## Woodduck

violadude said:


> Also, I'd like to point out this fun little hypocrisy -
> 
> Schoenberg, Webern, Boulez, Stockhausen Xenakis and Cage aren't very popular = well this music isn't as good or doesn't resonate with audiences very well.
> 
> Ullmann, Melartin, Atterberg, Tubin and Yoshimatsu aren't very popular = Wow, look at all these great composers the "official canon" has neglected
> 
> :lol:


To your first equation: it seems obvious that if music isn't popular it either doesn't resonate well with audiences or hasn't been heard by them. If it's the latter, there's always hope. As for the equation of popularity with quality, I don't see Pauls or anyone here offering anything so simplistic. Pauls is not ranking music's quality.

To your second: who has called those composers great? Some here are complaining that Pauls equates popularity with greatness. Well, if Atterberg isn't popular, Pauls, using the standard attributed to him, wouldn't consider him great. So Atterberg, whether officially neglected or not, is irrelevant.


----------



## DaveM

violadude said:


> Respect is a facade really. If you're intelligent enough you can think of a "respectful" way of saying anything terrible.


Interesting viewpoint. I would say that respect is very real and it occurs here when intelligent people disagree with each other, but don't devalue what others feel passionately about as much as possible.



> I don't know if I would characterize anything anyone's said here as "terrible"...


Well that should make you feel more optimistic and less like leaving.


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## Harold in Columbia

EdwardBast said:


> It was inevitable that this balance would begin to be set straight once we gained a little historical distance.


The amazing lengthening "historical distance": Your favorite composers are always _just starting_ to get the respect they deserve, and all you have to do is hope that nobody remembers you were saying exactly the same thing about exactly the same already-fairly-well-respected composers 20 and 40 years ago.

Not that some things haven't changed in recent decades. For example, the minimalists have become more respectable.


----------



## violadude

Woodduck said:


> To your first equation: it seems obvious that if music isn't popular it either doesn't resonate well with audiences or hasn't been heard by them. *If it's the latter, there's always hope*. As for the equation of popularity with quality, I don't see Pauls or anyone here offering anything so simplistic. Pauls is not ranking music's quality.
> 
> To your second: who has called those composers great? Some here are complaining that Pauls equates popularity with greatness. Well, if Atterberg isn't popular, Pauls, using the standard attributed to him, wouldn't consider him great. So Atterberg, whether officially neglected or not, is irrelevant.


There's always hope if it's either, really. Are you telling me that you don't like any composers that didn't resonate with you at first? I always thought this was a pretty common experience for people.

My point was that popularity either matters or it doesn't. But there are some people who seem to think that if they like an unpopular composer, it means that composer is unfairly neglected. But if they dislike a popular composer, that composers lack of popularity is indicative of its quality. If it's not indicative of its quality, then why bring it up?


----------



## fluteman

Woodduck said:


> Perhaps giving up would be the best course, since you are still missing (or evading) the point of the book. The truth of that point has not been refuted by anyone here, distracting rants on statistics and semantics notwithstanding.


Well, if the point is more or less what EdwardBast says in post no. 315, I don't think I'm missing or evading it. And in the portions I read, which included the introduction and conclusions, I saw many statements that were true enough. Just not very interesting or useful. As the old saying goes, he who frames the issues wins the debate. But to say something interesting or useful, one would have to get into which issues are the important ones and why. Neither Pauls himself in any of the portions I read, nor anyone advancing his ideas in this thread, has come anywhere near doing that. I won't use the word "evade", since that implies motive, and I have no reason or desire to impugn anyone's motives.


----------



## KenOC

The title of Paul's dissertation is"Two Centuries in One." This appears to refer to the development of two canons during the twentieth century: one based on tastes of the broad classical music audience, the other based on the preferences of critics, academics, and other music specialists.

His thesis is that these two canons, which encompass in time almost the entire century, have almost no composers or musical works in common. The question I assume he wants to answer is: Why? Or so I suppose since I haven't gotten that far yet (though he has given some hints). I can't get very excited because I consider only the preferences of the listening audience to be of any significance; the rest of them might as well be writing on water because, frankly, nobody cares but themselves.

Certainly the first 86 pages could have been treated in 20 without great loss. But evidently his dissertation readers are not enamored with brevity; they gave his dissertation a magna cum laude!

I'm going to give his work a break until others actually read enough of it to give some indication of whether it's worth any more of my time.


----------



## Woodduck

violadude said:


> There's always hope if it's either, really. Are you telling me that you don't like any composers that didn't resonate with you at first? I always thought this was a pretty common experience for people.
> 
> *My point was that popularity either matters or it doesn't.* But there are some people who seem to think that if they like an unpopular composer, it means that composer is unfairly neglected. But if they dislike a popular composer, that composers lack of popularity is indicative of its quality. *If it's not indicative of its quality, then why bring it up?*


What does "popularity matters or it doesn't" mean? "Matters" - for what purpose? In what context? Popularity with whom? As determined how? Naturally people like to think that the music they like deserves to be liked. So?

This is a distraction.

The relative popularity of music among the generality of classical music listeners and among professionals in musical fields figures in Pauls' study only to provide some statistical grounding. It provides some reference for questions about the way the culture of classical music has been portrayed in the 20th century. Just who values and listens to what, why they do, how their tastes and judgments are reflected in their opinions and behaviors, and how posterity has viewed music because of those opinions and behaviors - all questions essential to the topic. It looks like a reasonable and legitimate inquiry to me.

Could Pauls' subject be treated more thoroughly and carefully? No doubt. But I can't believe you don't see what that subject is. Unless of course you're just picking up second, third, or fourth hand information here from all the people who want to criticize the book without having read it or understood it.

P.S. A few of us here do understand the book. Our second hand information is in the public domain.


----------



## mmsbls

I unapproved several posts that were purely political in content. Recently political posts have derailed threads and potentially led to infractions. They actually can be interesting, funny, and thoughtful, but they can be deadly to threads. It's best simply to avoid them.


----------



## Harold in Columbia

Woodduck said:


> Could Pauls' subject be treated more thoroughly and carefully? No doubt.


In fact, it has been! https://books.google.com/books?id=CafvvoPxvzcC&printsec=frontcover


----------



## Strange Magic

Mahlerian said:


> It shouldn't surprise you to know that Pauls seems to lean heavily on Taruskin. He's certainly acquired his biases.


Anybody who agrees with me is objective. Anyone who disagrees is biased. That's a fact.


----------



## Marschallin Blair

mmsbls said:


> I unapproved several posts that were purely political in content. Recently political posts have derailed threads and potentially led to infractions. They actually can be interesting, funny, and thoughtful, but they can be deadly to threads. It's best simply to avoid them.


mmsbls, is it just 'pattern' or 'coincidence'?- that when I post a rebut to something political someone 'else' posted, it gets deleted.

But if I do not post a rebut to the purely political post that they posted- then you allow it to stand?

Funny how that works out.


----------



## Harold in Columbia

KenOC said:


> His thesis is that these two canons, which encompass in time almost the entire century, have almost no composers or musical works in common.


The century to which this actually applies is the 19th: The "music of the future" - Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner - on one side; Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms on the other. (Though Liszt himself of course liked everything.)

In contrast, big bad Modernist polemicist Boulez's canon included Stravinsky, Bartók, and Messiaen. Admittedly, if a great new conservative composer had appeared in the '50s, Boulez presumably wouldn't have given them the time of day. But no great conservative composer _did_ appear - which may be the conservatives' real problem here.


----------



## isorhythm

KenOC said:


> I can't get very excited because I consider only the preferences of the listening audience to be of any significance; the rest of them might as well be writing on water because, frankly, nobody cares but themselves.


How big does the listening audience have to be for you to care?


----------



## Harold in Columbia

Strange Magic said:


> Anybody who agrees with me is objective. Anyone who disagrees is biased. That's a fact.


Mahlerian didn't say anything about anybody being less biased than anybody else. He identified whose particular biases inform Pauls'.


----------



## Strange Magic

To sum up then, Herbert Pauls' thesis has, in fact, been An interesting and Useful Treatise on Twentieth Century Music for all those who have troubled to read it. I am glad to have been of service to bring it to a wide and intellectually curious audience, and bid all a pleasant evening.


----------



## mmsbls

I think both canons can be rather useful but perhaps to different people. Five to ten years ago I would have vastly preferred the popular canon and would have used it as suggestions for works to hear. Today the academic canon provides more satisfying suggestions for me than the popular canon would. I actually like many works of Bax, Atterberg, Tubin and Yoshimatsu, but when I look for something post 1900 I tend to prefer Schnittke, Dutilleux, Haas, and Schoenberg. 

There was nothing wrong with my preferences 5-10 years ago, and there's nothing right about them now. There's plenty of good music for both preferences, and that's a great thing. Each canon can be very useful, and people should simply use whichever one works for them. I do think it's interesting that the canons are quite different, and I think it's fascinating how classical music has developed in the 20th and 21st centuries. 

People have used the word blame as in "blaming the public" or "blaming the composers/music." I think blame is altogether inappropriate - no one and no thing is to blame. There are reasons why people enjoy and reasons why people hate certain music, but there should be no blame involved. As Berg said, "Mr. Gershwin, music is music."


----------



## Harold in Columbia

Harold in Columbia said:


> The century to which this actually applies is the 19th: The "music of the future" - Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner - on one side; Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms on the other. (Though Liszt himself of course liked everything.)
> 
> In contrast, big bad Modernist polemicist Boulez's canon included Stravinsky, Bartók, and Messiaen.


Or I guess you could say it applies to the 1920s-1940s - Stravinsky's Neoclassicism versus the Second Viennese School - except that wasn't two parallel canons so much as it was the Viennese doing their own thing and nobody else really caring, until Adorno and Boulez found them useful.


----------



## Harold in Columbia

mmsbls said:


> ...the popular canon...


Should be called the "relatively popular canon." The popular canon after World War I is non-classical.


----------



## violadude

Woodduck said:


> What does "popularity matters or it doesn't" mean? "Matters" - for what purpose? In what context? Popularity with whom? As determined how? Naturally people like to think that the music they like deserves to be liked. So?
> 
> This is a distraction.
> 
> The relative popularity of music among the generality of classical music listeners and among professionals in musical fields figures in Pauls' study only to provide some statistical grounding. It provides some reference for questions about the way the culture of classical music has been portrayed in the 20th century. Just who values and listens to what, why they do, how their tastes and judgments are reflected in their opinions and behaviors, and how posterity has viewed music because of those opinions and behaviors - all questions essential to the topic. It looks like a reasonable and legitimate inquiry to me.
> 
> Could Pauls' subject be treated more thoroughly and carefully? No doubt. But I can't believe you don't see what that subject is. Unless of course you're just picking up second, third, or fourth hand information here from all the people who want to criticize the book without having read it or understood it.


What I mean by "Popularity either matters or it doesn't" is that popularity either indicates quality or it doesn't. I don't think it does. But you can't pick and choose which composers for whom popularity is indicative quality and which for whom it's not.

"Just who values and listens to what, why they do"

That's pretty easy. The academics were pushing the composers they were pushing because they changed the face of music. However, they had a skewed view about which composers were influential, which composers were "not worthy". They should have been more inclusive. People so close to the time they are writing about are bound to make mistakes.

The public values what they value because at the very least, the music they were listening to was good, if not also great. And they were avoiding the music of academic choice because people don't like confronting things that are too unfamiliar to them. That's human nature. It's the same instinct that makes many people uncomfortable in cultures they didn't grow up in.

That sure didn't take 400 pages.


----------



## KenOC

Harold in Columbia said:


> ...Admittedly, if a great new conservative composer had appeared in the '50s, Boulez presumably wouldn't have given them the time of day. But no great conservative composer _did_ appear - which may be the conservatives' real problem here.


Shostakovich wrote over half his most popular works after 1950 (the 1st Violin Concerto didn't quite make it) and up through 1975. Others can probably name more post-1950 "great" conservative composers -- but probably not many, it's true.


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## Harold in Columbia

KenOC said:


> Shostakovich wrote over half his most popular works after 1950 (the 1st Violin Concerto didn't quite make it) and up through 1975.


Not sure what works you're referring to. But in any case, I said "if a great *new* conservative composer had *appeared*."

Also, Shostakovich ain't all that great.


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## KenOC

Harold in Columbia said:


> Also, Shostakovich ain't all that great.


Thanks for your opinion, which I'm sure is quite objective, as such opinions normally are.


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## Harold in Columbia

Well, yeah, when they're mine.


----------



## KenOC

I feel quite the same. Verbatim!


----------



## Woodduck

violadude said:


> What I mean by "Popularity either matters or it doesn't" is that popularity either indicates quality or it doesn't. I don't think it does. But you can't pick and choose which composers for whom popularity is indicative quality and which for whom it's not.
> 
> "Just who values and listens to what, why they do"
> 
> That's pretty easy. The academics were pushing the composers they were pushing because they changed the face of music. However, they had a skewed view about which composers were influential, which composers were "not worthy". They should have been more inclusive. People so close to the time they are writing about are bound to make mistakes.
> 
> The public values what they value because at the very least, the music they were listening to was good, if not also great. And they were avoiding the music of academic choice because people don't like confronting things that are too unfamiliar to them. That's human nature. It's the same instinct that makes many people uncomfortable in cultures they didn't grow up in.
> 
> That sure didn't take 400 pages.


Summary statements (accurate or not) never take 400 pages. Most people studying a subject want more than summaries. At least they used to. Maybe young folks now only want as much as they can see on their phone screens.


----------



## violadude

Woodduck said:


> Summary statements (accurate or not) never take 400 pages. Most people studying a subject want more than summaries. At least they used to. Maybe young folks now only want as much as they can see on their phone screens.


Nice try. I don't have a phone.

I guess my point was that if your guys' reasons for citing the book you cited really just to explain how textbooks used to not be fully representative of the listening public, then I don't think you really need to convince anyone of that. We were all aware. Nevertheless, I suspect ulterior motives.


----------



## Woodduck

Originally Posted by KenOC:

His thesis is that these two canons, which encompass in time almost the entire century, have almost no composers or musical works in common.



Harold in Columbia said:


> The century to which this actually applies is the 19th: The "music of the future" - Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner - on one side; Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms on the other. (Though Liszt himself of course liked everything.)


Not true. These trios don't represent a "popular canon" versus an "academic canon." Concert and opera goers enjoyed all these composers. Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner had plenty of popular success. The conservative/progressive war was waged among composers, academics and critics.

If you had said only that popular tastes in the 19th century were growing more conservative - which was a natural result of the increasing availability and programming of older music - I would agree with you. It must certainly have helped prepare the ground for the split between composer and public in the next century, but wasn't enough to cause it. Plenty of great music after 1900 had no trouble winning audiences (maybe not music you would proclaim great, but who cares?).

The "music of the future," as you must know, was a critic's parody of Wagner's phrase "artwork of the future," a product of his early theorizing phase. Unlike some people after 1910, Wagner was too modest to claim to be writing music for the future, or even the "correct" music for the present.


----------



## Sloe

What is the popular canon and what is the critical canon?


----------



## Marschallin Blair

*


KenOC said:



I feel quite the same. Verbatim!

Click to expand...

*Well both of yours don't have 'my' aesthetic buy in- which makes them null, void, and of no binding authority whatsoever.

_"Marschallin Blair, making the world a better place, by pointing out the faults of others." _


----------



## KenOC

Marschallin Blair said:


> Well both of yours don't have 'my' aesthetic buy in- which makes them null, void, and of no binding authority whatsoever.


The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.


----------



## Marschallin Blair

*


KenOC said:



The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.

Click to expand...

*Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

B-I-T-C-H: Being In Total Control of Herself

I don't play Bitch, I just am one.


----------



## KenOC

Marschallin Blair said:


> Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.


Can't send you a PM, your mailbox is full! Anyway, just kidding. Irresistible impulse, a legal defense in some states.


----------



## science

Woodduck said:


> Maybe young folks now only want as much as they can see on their phone screens.


Do you also insult young people this way who share your beliefs? Perhaps their agreement with you signals a superior intelligence or attention span. I'd like to know so that I can advise youth about how to avoid being thus impaled.


----------



## Nereffid

I see little way of contributing anything more to this thread, but I do want to thank everyone who posted, especially the nay-sayers. I had planned to do a really thorough analysis of "popularity" versus "significance" using a different data set than Pauls. The preliminary work suggests that the situation is somewhat as Pauls describes it but a lot more subtle than he thinks. Inquiring minds might have appreciated my analysis, but seeing as the arguments in this thread have split along the usual ideological lines (even though, for my money, Pauls was trying to describe a reality rather than ideology) I don't have any hope that I'd be any better received than Pauls, so I'll not carry on with the work. Thanks for saving my time! :tiphat:


----------



## DavidA

Woodduck said:


> Summary statements (accurate or not) never take 400 pages. Most people studying a subject want more than summaries. At least they used to. *Maybe young folks now only want as much as they can see on their phone screens.*


I think each older generation says things like this about young folks!


----------



## Woodduck

science said:


> Do you also insult young people this way who share your beliefs? Perhaps their agreement with you signals a superior intelligence or attention span. I'd like to know so that I can advise youth about how to avoid being thus impaled.


Good grief! A little poke in violadude's sturdy ribs, a gentle satire on the shrinking attention span of the culture of texting, and the child protection agency is on my tail.

I thought his riposte was apt and sufficient.


----------



## science

mmsbls said:


> I think both canons can be rather useful but perhaps to different people. Five to ten years ago I would have vastly preferred the popular canon and would have used it as suggestions for works to hear. Today the academic canon provides more satisfying suggestions for me than the popular canon would. I actually like many works of Bax, Atterberg, Tubin and Yoshimatsu, but when I look for something post 1900 I tend to prefer Schnittke, Dutilleux, Haas, and Schoenberg.
> 
> There was nothing wrong with my preferences 5-10 years ago, and there's nothing right about them now. There's plenty of good music for both preferences, and that's a great thing. Each canon can be very useful, and people should simply use whichever one works for them. I do think it's interesting that the canons are quite different, and I think it's fascinating how classical music has developed in the 20th and 21st centuries.
> 
> People have used the word blame as in "blaming the public" or "blaming the composers/music." I think blame is altogether inappropriate - no one and no thing is to blame. There are reasons why people enjoy and reasons why people hate certain music, but there should be no blame involved. As Berg said, "Mr. Gershwin, music is music."


I'm very happy to agree that there _should_ be no blame, but I have to admit that there undeniably is, and I can't manage to proceed without acknowledging it.

But I feel really good every time I see that someone enjoys the music of 'Schnittke, Dutilleux, Haas, and Schoenberg" and so on. I'd like to celebrate the sharing of such pleasures. I'm afraid to do so too enthusiastically because of the sensitivities of people who don't share them. It just seems to me like we can't express an opinion on such a matter without being perceived as criticizing, "blaming," someone for not sharing such pleasures, and of course they will bite back.

I mean, I'm defeated. I guess the cultural battles of a hundred years ago still rage around us, and trying to make peace is effort wasted. If you're unwilling or unable to take a side, you're attacked by both sides. And I won't pretend not to deserve it, because in not taking a side I'm (perceived as or perhaps actually) taking a side against them both. Out in the real world, people who agree with us are winning. But what wins in the real world often runs into a great deal of abuse on the internet.


----------



## Guest

Nereffid said:


> I see little way of contributing anything more to this thread, but I do want to thank everyone who posted, especially the nay-sayers. I had planned to do a really thorough analysis of "popularity" versus "significance" using a different data set than Pauls. The preliminary work suggests that the situation is somewhat as Pauls describes it but a lot more subtle than he thinks. Inquiring minds might have appreciated my analysis, but seeing as the arguments in this thread have split along the usual ideological lines (even though, for my money, Pauls was trying to describe a reality rather than ideology) I don't have any hope that I'd be any better received than Pauls, so I'll not carry on with the work. Thanks for saving my time! :tiphat:


I'm sure the OP intended nothing more than to offer a source of information for the genuinely interested to read. However, I have form in this kind of activity, and I think I understand the reasons things didn't work quite as planned. First, and most obviously (IMO) this kind of forum thrives on the instant because if you disappear for more than a day, the conversation has usually moved on. So, few will bother to go away and actually read the text, even when it's presented online (in my case, you had to obtain the book in reality) not least because you might miss something!

Second, the OP, in trying to give some kind of summary, inadvertently drew up the battle-lines:



> It is a long (400 pages plus), thorough, but well-written and easily absorbed treatise that both JosefinaHW and I can recommend as very valuable background information for any discussion of the topics of "modernism", "tonal" v. "atonal", "Romanticism", "Neo-Romanticism" etc. that have so troubled the Forum recently. Pauls' argument in a nutshell, which he supports with some very interesting lists and tables, is that *musical Romanticism/Neo-Romanticism overwhelmingly dominates the Twentieth Century*


No need to bother with a long text when the battle is already engaged (and some already can't be bothered to read the longer expositions posted by some combatants) and one side is given a nudge by the seemingly provocative assertion in that last line.

That's not to say that the thread has been entirely fruitless or the OP's purpose entirely defeated, but given the topic, it seems unlikely that Pauls' thesis was ever just going to provide some light background reading.


----------



## science

Woodduck said:


> Good grief! A little poke in violadude's sturdy ribs, a gentle satire on the shrinking attention span of the culture of texting, and the child protection agency is on my tail.
> 
> I thought his riposte was apt and sufficient.


I don't believe you sincerely intend me to take you for a "little poke" or "gentle satire" kind of guy any more than you take me for CPS.


----------



## KenOC

DavidA said:


> I think each older generation says things like this about young folks!


And each older generation is right! Durn whippersnappers, world's goin' to hell in a handbasket, everybody knows that. Ma! Where'd you put my Depends?


----------



## science

My next big project as far as reading about music goes is to read Taruskin. I might read a couple of Swafford's books first.... But that's a few years in the future in any case as I still have a lot of fundamental reading to do in literature and US history, which are my higher priorities right now. 

Still, I read a few dozen pages of this since it's under discussion here, and my main thought is that there is probably an interesting parallel to "the shock of the old." I don't mean this observation to imply that I actually believe in the idea of "progress" in music (distinguishing music itself from the technology that musicians have available), but that for people who DO believe in such progress, or take the succession of styles as analogous to progress, there could be a similar shock. And that might be all that this author's observations amount to. I don't know that for sure because I haven't read all 400 pages. But it's a possibility as far as I know. 

Along those lines, it's interesting that we appear to value handcrafted, traditional modes of production about proportionately to mechanization's dominance of our material lives. Perhaps there is a musical analogy to that too.... But that could relate to the use of folk music or "world" music by classical musicians rather than merely to "romanticism." I don't know. Strikes me as also a possibility, and smarter people here can figure out whether there's anything to it. 

Finally, it really should go without saying that when a new style or new values appear in an art, the old styles and values do not immediately disappear. I can't blame people for not realizing that, given that I have been permanently taken aback by the persistence of (what I take to be) the hundred-year-old values of modernism and anti-modernism among people who are obviously my betters here. Still, both for me and everyone else, it should go without saying.


----------



## Petwhac

Harold in Columbia said:


> No, just until the bottom finishes falling out from under the concert hall industry. Stockhausen and Xenakis are already bigger with pop music fans than the late Beethoven quartets (though of course not bigger than the 9th symphony).


Yeah, I hear the Arditti quartet will be supporting Radiohead on tour next year! :lol:


----------



## EdwardBast

Harold in Columbia said:


> The amazing lengthening "historical distance": Your favorite composers are always _just starting_ to get the respect they deserve, and all you have to do is hope that nobody remembers you were saying exactly the same thing about exactly the same already-fairly-well-respected composers 20 and 40 years ago.
> 
> Not that some things haven't changed in recent decades. For example, the minimalists have become more respectable.


Why on earth would I hope no one remembered? I reminded them in a couple of my earlier posts! People like me pointing out the obvious, people who have read papers, published dissertations and articles, and written program notes on the music of the then non-canonic composers is part of the reason the correction is taking place.

Not sure what you mean by "already-fairly-well-respected composers." Have you actually examined the texts on 20thc music history cited in the Pauls? I have. When I tried to find a well-balanced text to use in teaching. Very little respect to be found anywhere.


----------



## Blancrocher

EdwardBast said:


> Not sure what you mean by "already-fairly-well-respected composers." Have you actually examined the texts on 20thc music history cited in the Pauls? I have. When I tried to find a well-balanced text to use in teaching. Very little respect to be found anywhere.


Did you finally find any texts you could recommend?


----------



## Truckload

Nereffid said:


> I see little way of contributing anything more to this thread, but I do want to thank everyone who posted, especially the nay-sayers. I had planned to do a really thorough analysis of "popularity" versus "significance" using a different data set than Pauls. The preliminary work suggests that the situation is somewhat as Pauls describes it but a lot more subtle than he thinks. Inquiring minds might have appreciated my analysis, but seeing as the arguments in this thread have split along the usual ideological lines (even though, for my money, Pauls was trying to describe a reality rather than ideology) I don't have any hope that I'd be any better received than Pauls, so I'll not carry on with the work. Thanks for saving my time! :tiphat:


The situation does seem difficult. I for one would have liked to see your analysis regardless of the results and conclusions. If you go forward with it, please post, or if not, send me a PM. I would find it interesting.

I think all composers want to be at least somewhat "popular". After all, why compose if not to be heard? If a composer had absolutely no interest in being heard, which means being at least somewhat popular, they could just stay in their music studio and never put their music out to the public.

So regardless of the ultimate cause and effect relationship of popularity and composer significance, or lack thereof, I find it an interesting subject.


----------



## Harold in Columbia

Petwhac said:


> Yeah, I hear the Arditti quartet will be supporting Radiohead on tour next year! :lol:


Oh man, did you pick the wrong band: http://www.barbican.org.uk/music/event-detail.asp?ID=12902


----------



## Harold in Columbia

EdwardBast said:


> I reminded them in a couple of my earlier posts! People like me pointing out the obvious, people who have read papers, published dissertations and articles, and written program notes on the music of the then non-canonic composers is part of the reason the correction is taking place.


People like you, present tense, aren't the reason anything is happening, because the thing you're talking about happened long ago.



EdwardBast said:


> When I tried to find a well-balanced text to use in teaching. Very little respect to be found anywhere.


Should have hired me. I would have sent you to that obscurity, the New Grove (first edition, 1980). Or, of course, as of 2004, Taruskin's Oxford history - which why the heck do none of the conservatives here seem to have read that? You're not going to use the best guy on your team because he also has a b---- for Steve Reich? Or what?


----------



## tdc

Harold in Columbia said:


> Oh man, did you pick the wrong band: http://www.barbican.org.uk/music/event-detail.asp?ID=12902


There is also pianist Christopher O'Riley who I've seen perform Radiohead in concert following Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand.

http://www.classicalite.com/article...turns-radiohead-classical-music-multitude.htm


----------



## EdwardBast

Harold in Columbia said:


> People like you, present tense, aren't the reason anything is happening, because the thing you're talking about happened long ago.
> 
> Should have hired me. I would have sent you to that obscurity, the New Grove (first edition, 1980). Or, of course, as of 2004, Taruskin's Oxford history - which why the heck do none of the conservatives here seem to have read that? You're not going to use the best guy on your team because he also has a b---- for Steve Reich? Or what?


You were the one who said 20-40 years. Now you want to make it 11? Make up your mind.

I've recommended and extensively quoted Taruskin's work on TC a number of times, so I have less idea what the last half of your post is about than you do.


----------



## Petwhac

Harold in Columbia said:


> Oh man, did you pick the wrong band: http://www.barbican.org.uk/music/event-detail.asp?ID=12902


I'm all for it. Just don't expect it to be anything other than an occasional dalliance for a small section of Radiohead's or any other band's following.


----------



## Harold in Columbia

EdwardBast said:


> You were the one who said 20-40 years. Now you want to make it 11?


No, now you want me to make it 11, because evidently you've decided that your only hope of looking good in this conversation is that everybody forgets the previous sentence of my post, where I made it 36.

I could have made it even more, if I wanted to make some effort, because I know, for example, that Harold Schonberg took the "rehabilitation" line on Rach and Sib in his great composers guide (first edition, 1970), and if he did it then, that means at least half the real critics were already doing it sooner.


----------



## EdwardBast

You are the one trying to put dates on a process that has been going on continuously for quite a while and which is still going on. If anyone were paying attention, which seems unlikely, they would be asking what the New Groves has to do with anything, since we were talking about textbooks. Speaking of which, the number of pages devoted to Sibelius, Rachmaninoff et alia in 20thc music history texts published well after Schonberg and the New Grove sources you cite (for what reason I'm still not sure) is right there in Chapter 1 of the Pauls. It indicates that the situation to which our attention is being called by that source and this thread continued well after the random dates of random sources you are throwing around. The subject of the thread and the essential evidence the Pauls cites might be helpful to hold in mind. I'll take my chances on how I will look after this dialogue.


----------



## Harold in Columbia

EdwardBast said:


> Speaking of which, the number of pages devoted to Sibelius, Rachmaninoff et alia in 20thc music history texts published well after Schonberg and the New Grove sources you cite (for what reason I'm still not sure) is right there in Chapter 1 of the Pauls.


Okay, so I accidentally showed that Pauls' data is worthless. Not sure why you think calling attention to that is a good idea.


----------



## Strange Magic

Harold in Columbia said:


> I could have made it even more, if I wanted to make some effort, because I know, for example, that Harold Schonberg took the "rehabilitation" line on Rach and Sib in his great composers guide (first edition, 1970), and if he did it then, that means at least half the real critics were already doing it sooner.


I thought I was done with this thread, but I'll just chime in here with an update on Harold C. Schonberg's thinking on Sibelius as of 1997. I don't know if this is damning with faint praise, or the opposite (whatever that might be), but here's how Schonberg wraps up his take on Sibelius:

"Sibelius composed only a handful of works that have any chance of survival. Yet even that is a better average than many composers can show, and in years to come the chances are that the music of Sibelius will occupy a more prominent place than it currently does. At the time of his death he was suffering from a bad name and an aesthetic that ran counter to the age. If a new age does produce a resurgent Romanticism or neo-Romanticism, Sibelius could come back with it. He did, after all, talk with an individual voice when he was at his best, and he deserves to occupy an honorable place among the minor composers."

I never realized that Sibelius was such a minor figure. I'll need a whole new head.


----------



## EdwardBast

Harold in Columbia said:


> Okay, so I accidentally showed that Pauls' data is worthless. Not sure why you think calling attention to that is a good idea.


Well, if you think you have demonstrated that the data is worthless, you should probably write something about that in more detail and address it to the thread at large. That might be a useful contribution to the discussion, the fact that I have no idea what you are talking about notwithstanding.


----------



## Harold in Columbia

Strange Magic said:


> I never realized that Sibelius was such a minor figure. I'll need a whole new head.


Sibelius is a minor figure, compared to a Beethoven or a Wagner. As somebody already pointed out, this is the problem for 20th and 21st century conservatives: people who like Schönberg may not think he's quite as good as Beethoven either, but at least he's _different_.

And then there's the other joke: the strongest case for Sibelius as a major figure comes from the spectral composers who claim him as a predecessor - but the conservatives don't like spectral music either.


----------



## Blancrocher

I think Sibelius is a major composer--though in all honesty I think that all "minor" composers, defined as someone who composed a small number of irreplaceable masterworks, are major composers as well.


----------



## science

Schobert was a minor composer. Back in the old days, he was the minorest.


----------



## Strange Magic

Harold in Columbia said:


> Sibelius is a minor figure, compared to a Beethoven or a Wagner. As somebody already pointed out, this is the problem for 20th and 21st century conservatives: people who like Schönberg may not think he's quite as good as Beethoven either, but at least he's _different_.


No, not Schönberg again?! Talk about OCD. The Schonberg I was discussing--his book is titled _The Lives of the Great Composers_--at least Sibelius has that (Greatness) to fall back on. But please supply a list of the major composers, and please also grade them strictly in order of majority. Thank you in advance.


----------



## Harold in Columbia

In the 20th century?

1. Stravinsky
2. Debussy
3. details


----------



## Strange Magic

Harold in Columbia said:


> In the 20th century?
> 
> 1. Stravinsky
> 2. Debussy
> 3. details


You are far, far too modest. You and I both want you to produce the complete list, going back to, say, Josquin de Près; you can do this! I can't. (Sobs)


----------



## Harold in Columbia

Josquin? That's for wimps. We're going back at least to Hildegard or not at all.


----------



## Woodduck

Harold in Columbia said:


> Sibelius is a minor figure, compared to a Beethoven or a Wagner. As somebody already pointed out, this is the problem for 20th and 21st century conservatives: people who like Schönberg may not think he's quite as good as Beethoven either, but at least he's _different_.


Almost _everyone_ is a "minor figure" compared with Beethoven and Wagner, how "minor" depending on one's definition of "minor." We don't seem to agree on a definition of "Romantic," so let's raise the level of this already exalted discussion and argue about "minor," shall we?

Sibelius produced a sizable amount of well-composed, authentic, original, expressive, powerful music which has made a deep impression on musicians, including many other composers, and the music-listening public, and which appears to be as well-loved as ever after more than a century.

All other considerations are "minor."


----------



## Harold in Columbia

Woodduck said:


> Almost _everyone_ is a "minor figure" compared with Beethoven and Wagner...


Exactly. (15 characters)


----------



## isorhythm

It's not crazy to put Sibelius on par with Schoenberg.

Schoenberg's music is not a great hill to die on, if you ask me. His post-1920 output is wildly uneven.


----------



## Harold in Columbia

isorhythm said:


> Schoenberg's music is not a great hill to die on, if you ask me.


But nobody's dying on it, except the conservatives. People who like Schönberg are happy where they are. It's the conservatives who can't stand the thought that Schönberg should have any territory at all and keep trying to drive him off of what he has.



isorhythm said:


> His post-1920 output is wildly uneven.


Yeah, but the Expressionist period is just so good. Schumann's uneven after 1840, and it would likewise be a mistake to hold that against him.


----------



## Woodduck

Harold in Columbia said:


> But nobody's dying on it, except the conservatives. People who like Schönberg are happy where they are. It's the conservatives who can't stand the thought that Schönberg should have any territory at all and keep trying to drive him off of what he has.


Schoenberg's territory, like every composer's territory, is different for every listener. I doubt that the "conservatives," whoever _they_ are, care what territory he occupies in your mind. So why bother about what territory he occupies in theirs?

There's too much talk about the amorphous "they" around here. We're individuals, even if we don't always act like it.


----------



## Harold in Columbia

When people don't act like individuals, they aren't.


----------



## Mahlerian

isorhythm said:


> It's not crazy to put Sibelius on par with Schoenberg.
> 
> Schoenberg's music is not a great hill to die on, if you ask me. His post-1920 output is wildly uneven.


So was Beethoven's, but people don't hold it against him. Schoenberg's late masterpieces (the string quartets and string trio, the Serenade, the Suite for piano, the Variations for Orchestra, Moses und Aron, the concertos, the late choral works) are every bit as good as his earlier ones.

Also, unlike some of Beethoven's throwaway works, Schoenberg's lesser pieces are always at the least well-composed. He's closer to Bach or Mozart in that even his least important mature works show his genius to some degree and contain beauties of their own.


----------



## Woodduck

Harold in Columbia said:


> When people don't act like individuals, they aren't.


And when they do, they are.

Any more tautologies to entertain us with?


----------



## Marschallin Blair

*


Woodduck said:



And when they do, they are.

Any more tautologies to entertain us with?

Click to expand...

*As if a feckless 'taut'-ology causes me to stress out, worry, and tense-up.

_;D_


----------



## Strange Magic

I will now take my second leave of this thread (am I entitled to three?), with this performance of one of my very real favorite pieces of the 20th century, and I am not kidding--loved it from when I was a teen--Mosolov's _Iron Foundry_: Something to clear the mind.....


----------



## Marschallin Blair

Woodduck said:


> Almost _everyone_ is a "minor figure" compared with Beethoven and Wagner, how "minor" depending on one's definition of "minor." We don't seem to agree on a definition of "Romantic," so let's raise the level of this already exalted discussion and argue about "minor," shall we?
> 
> Sibelius produced a sizable amount of well-composed, authentic, original, expressive, powerful music which has made a deep impression on musicians, including many other composers, and the music-listening public, and which appears to be as well-loved as ever after more than a century.
> 
> *All other considerations are "minor."*


I'd say only Sibelius' putative critics are.

Speaking of whom, I remember once seeing_ Kullervo _at Dorothy Chandler with Salonen and they had some Sibelius scores and epistolary correspondence on display for the occasion. I remember reading a piece by Theodore Adorno saying something to the effect that if Sibelius' music was valid, then all music from Bach to the Twentieth Century wasn't.

The only thing that's valid is that Adorno, not even with the biggest step ladder in world, couldn't clip Sibelius' toenails.

I don't even know why the curator of the Sibelius exhibit included anything by that bozo.


----------



## Harold in Columbia

Well, it's just a fact that Adorno was a greater philosopher than Sibelius was a composer. An evil philosopher, of course, but then, we don't fail to recognize Wagner's greatness just because he was an evil composer.


----------



## Marschallin Blair

*


Harold in Columbia said:



Well, it's just a fact that Adorno was a greater philosopher than Sibelius was a composer. An evil philosopher, of course, but then, we don't fail to recognize Wagner's greatness just because he was an evil composer.

Click to expand...

*Adorno isn't even up to Marcuse's sophomoric lysergic level- who are you fooling?


----------



## Harold in Columbia

Case in point: The fact that people hate Adorno more than Marcuse proves he's greater.


----------



## isorhythm

No one really hates Adorno though.


----------



## Harold in Columbia

Taruskin hates Adorno.


----------



## isorhythm

You have to approach Adorno the way you approach the French philosophers, i.e. not take it so seriously. Then it's fun.

The French philosophers of course knew that themselves, whereas Adorno sadly thought he was super serious.


----------



## amfortas

Nereffid said:


> There's nothing wrong with nutshells.
> 
> Unless you have bad dreams, of course.


I see what you did there.


----------



## Taggart

Please stay on topic and avoid personal banter.

Some posts have been removed.


----------



## Woodduck

Harold in Columbia said:


> Well, it's just a fact that Adorno was a greater philosopher than Sibelius was a composer. An evil philosopher, of course, but then, we don't fail to recognize Wagner's greatness just because he was an evil composer.


"Just a fact"? What makes Adorno "great"? Can a philosopher be great if he peddles pernicious nonsense? Is he great because he stays up all night penning impenetrable poppycock? Is he great because a lot of other "great" people say he is?

"Evil composer"? What is an "evil composer"? Great art may be created by men who do evil deeds and think evil thoughts. They may be evil men - but not evil _artists_. And if a man's art is truly great, we ought to be at least temperate in judging the source of it evil.

Wagner produced something inescapably great, even sublime. Adorno did not. The world would be poorer without Wagner. It would be better without Adorno.


----------



## Harold in Columbia

Woodduck said:


> "Just a fact"? What makes Adorno "great"? Can a philosopher be great if he peddles pernicious nonsense?


Yes, of course.



Woodduck said:


> Is he great because he stays up all night penning impenetrable poppycock?


Yes, though no more than if he works during sensible daylight hours.



Woodduck said:


> Is he great because a lot of other "great" people say he is?


Well, he is if I say he is.



Woodduck said:


> "Evil composer"? What is an "evil composer"? Great art may be created by men who do evil deeds and think evil thoughts.


More to the point is that great art may be created by men who create evil art.



Woodduck said:


> The world would be poorer without Wagner. It would be better without Adorno.


The world would indeed be poorer without Wagner. It would also probably be more improved by the absence of Wagner than by the absence of Adorno.


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## Guest

The phenomenon of "Pet Composers" has always been highly amusing to me.


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## Woodduck

nathanb said:


> The phenomenon of "Pet Composers" has always been highly amusing to me.


What is a pet composer?


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## Harold in Columbia

Woodduck said:


> What is a pet composer?


Well for example:


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## Guest

Woodduck said:


> What is a pet composer?


Nothing you need worry about.


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## Woodduck

nathanb said:


> Nothing you need worry about.


Then why drop it into this discussion?


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## JosefinaHW

Several people have asked to know specifically what might be interesting and useful to them in Pauls' paper. Since StrangeMagic isn't here I think I can at least let the cat's nose out of the bag...

1. We know that Pauls' compares various academic textbooks and the number and nature of various types of content in the _Grove_ publications in various editions, but he has observed that a much more accurate history of music in the 20th-century (hereafter, _20thMH_) is revealed in the reviews in _Fanfare_ and _Gramophone_. He briefly touches on the subject, but he is proposing this as another method of gathering information necessary to write a more comprehensive account of 20thMH. I would love to see some form of summarized presentation of that data. I am certain that at least one person would be very happy to provide access to those archives.

2. For those of you who are deeply interested in making an attempt to address social and personal injustices, Pauls discusses the scholar Alan "X", his research, and efforts to show the world the true heroism of a much-maligned 19th/20th century composer. I'll let you find the info if you are interested.

3. He discusses at great length the tremendous abundance of piano composition and performance during this period and the many individuals who were involved in this area of music, one of the many examples is Raff's story.

4. The tremendous explosion in the "salon" performances of other instruments, including the voice, and chamber music that has only just begun to be explored and included in the history of the century.

.... these are just a very few examples.

Since StrangeMagic shared with you a few examples that his motive for recommending the text is his love of learning; (I'd like to share a few of my examples, especially because I also have a research project that I would love to read, don't have time to do, and is much better suited to some of you... I will post this in some thread on Modernism or Post-Modernism so I don't divert this thread....)


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## mmsbls

The thread is temporarily closed.


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