# Aunt Sally Disappointed With Contemporary Classical Piece



## Morimur (Jan 23, 2014)

I am a great proponent of new music but Aunt Sally's diatribe is hilarious.

http://www.throwcase.com/2015/11/23/aunt-sally-disappointed-with-contemporary-classical-piece/


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## Gordontrek (Jun 22, 2012)

"If you dispense with form, harmony and melody, you have to do something else to convince me that your politically relevant soundscape isn't just random noise made by musicians guessing their way through some indecipherable scrawls not even the composer can tell apart. I don't have time for that crap."


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

> "Anyway, she didn't even read my programme notes," he complained, "so it's no wonder she didn't understand my music."


Okay, that's pretty good.



> ...if I hear one more violinist scraping his bow on a toilet seat or just making endless, recycled bird noises...


That too.

(It occurred to me some time back that, in Romantic art, you always know things are going to get boring when a hermit shows up, and in Modernist art, the same goes for circus performers. Maybe our particular vice is post-Messiaenic birds.)


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## arpeggio (Oct 4, 2012)

"In Macon your music is atonal."


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## isorhythm (Jan 2, 2015)

I know this pain.

Why does this still happen in 2016? You go to see the new piece and the players unfold some kind of oversized modular score. We begin with a SHARP ATTACK of BREATHY FLUTE SOUNDS. Some high string harmonics. Pregnant silences.

Dismal.


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## regenmusic (Oct 23, 2014)

Because that kind of noise doesn't affect one's conscience, so people will not feel uncomfortable. At the same time they are giving themselves and others who agree with them the illusion that they are intelligent and progressive. There is also the problem that sometimes experiencing beauty is unpleasant for people.


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

regenmusic said:


> Because that kind of noise doesn't affect one's conscience, so people will not feel uncomfortable.


Obviously it does effect the conscience of the people who hate it. They may or may not be right to be so effected. (In this case, I would say they - we - are right, since I perceive the New Complexity as the soundtrack to European anti-consumerism, therefore to some extent to European austerity.)


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## Wood (Feb 21, 2013)

I like bird noises.


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## Guest (May 4, 2016)

Interesting that this should come up. I was engaged in a sort of stream of consciousness last night with myself whilst listening to Mauricio Kagel's _Playback Play_ and pondering the role of the spoken word in music, and my thoughts landed on that little poetry cycle of Saariaho about birds. As I traced it back to her obvious Frenchy fetishes, I wondered "What is it with the French and their damn birds?"


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## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

Gordontrek said:


> "If you dispense with form, harmony and melody, you have to do something else to convince me that your politically relevant soundscape isn't just random noise made by musicians guessing their way through some indecipherable scrawls not even the composer can tell apart. I don't have time for that crap."
> 
> View attachment 84226


That emoticon says it all :lol:


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

Gordontrek said:


> "If you dispense with form, harmony and melody, you have to do something else to convince me that your politically relevant soundscape isn't just random noise made by musicians guessing their way through some indecipherable scrawls not even the composer can tell apart. I don't have time for that crap."
> 
> View attachment 84226


Hey! Anyone know where I can buy the CD with "random noise made by musicians guessing their way through some indecipherable scrawls"? Sounds like something right up my contemporary music loving alley! (Then again, I probably already have the disc.)


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## Gordontrek (Jun 22, 2012)

SONNET CLV said:


> Hey! Anyone know where I can buy the CD with "random noise made by musicians guessing their way through some indecipherable scrawls"? Sounds like something right up my contemporary music loving alley! (Then again, I probably already have the disc.)


Just go to Amazon and search for "Stockhausen Gruppen."


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## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

Gordontrek said:


> Just go to Amazon and search for "Stockhausen Gruppen."


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## Arsakes (Feb 20, 2012)

I agree that contemporary classic music is "cringe-worthy"!


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## Guest (May 5, 2016)

I'm not sure I get it...

Can someone explain the satirical point being made please?


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

MacLeod said:


> I'm not sure I get it...
> 
> Can someone explain the satirical point being made please?


Well, the joke subverts our expectations. The stereotype is that people who respond unfavourably to new music are ultra-conservative, profoundly ignorant and possibly even mentally retarded, and Aunt Sally's insightful comments up-end this.


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## Petwhac (Jun 9, 2010)

isorhythm said:


> I know this pain.
> 
> Why does this still happen in 2016? You go to see the new piece and the players unfold some kind of oversized modular score. We begin with a SHARP ATTACK of BREATHY FLUTE SOUNDS. Some high string harmonics. Pregnant silences.
> 
> Dismal.


When the flautist unfolds her music across 5 music stands, the fun begins.
She makes her way along the piece, flutter tongue by flutter tongue, trill by trill and after ten minutes she's only on the third stand.
If someone swiped one of the stands away they'd be doing us all a favour and no one would any the wiser as the only way we know the piece has ended is when the flute is lowered to a safe distance from the mouth.


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## Wood (Feb 21, 2013)

Nereffid said:


> Well, the joke subverts our expectations. The stereotype is that people who respond unfavourably to new music are ultra-conservative, profoundly ignorant and possibly even mentally retarded, and Aunt Sally's insightful comments up-end this.


I read it as a send up of all those, including respondents of this thread, who dismiss modern classical as crap. Of course, I could be wrong, but I choose not to be.


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## Guest (May 5, 2016)

MacLeod said:


> I'm not sure I get it...
> 
> Can someone explain the satirical point being made please?


Perhaps you had to be there.


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## Petwhac (Jun 9, 2010)

dogen said:


> Perhaps you had to be there.


I have been, all too often!


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## Guest (May 5, 2016)

Nereffid said:


> Well, the joke subverts our expectations. The stereotype is that people who respond unfavourably to new music are ultra-conservative, profoundly ignorant and possibly even mentally retarded, and Aunt Sally's insightful comments up-end this.


So Aunt Sally is a real person and we are to take her criticism at face value?

Or it's a parody of the criticisms of modern music?


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## Truckload (Feb 15, 2012)

Aunt Sally is a very polite person. This is a major flaw in the conservative character. She sat through the torture. I am not so polite. I would have run for the exit.


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## Wood (Feb 21, 2013)

> *Macleod:* So Aunt Sally is a real person and we are to take her criticism at face value?
> 
> Or it's a parody of the criticisms of modern music?


The latter. It's a suckers thread.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

MacLeod said:


> So Aunt Sally is a real person and we are to take her criticism at face value?
> 
> Or it's a parody of the criticisms of modern music?


For me, at least, it operates as both a (jokey) observation of one aspect of modern music and as a satire on how criticisms of modern music are perceived. Whether the author intended it that way is another matter. But the point is, I laughed, right?

Aunt Sally is not real, although no doubt some people do have an aunt called Sally and will use her existence to refute whatever argument they think I'm making.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Aunt Sally needs to make sure she is not attacked from behind:
https://reason.com/archives/1997/07/01/adieu-to-the-avant-garde/


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## Gordontrek (Jun 22, 2012)

MacLeod said:


> So Aunt Sally is a real person and we are to take her criticism at face value?
> 
> Or it's a parody of the criticisms of modern music?


The website that it came from is basically the musical version of The Onion.


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## isorhythm (Jan 2, 2015)

Harold in Columbia said:


> Obviously it does effect the conscience of the people who hate it. They may or may not be right to be so effected. (In this case, I would say they - we - are right, since I perceive the New Complexity as the soundtrack to European anti-consumerism, therefore to some extent to European austerity.)


I actually wasn't thinking about New Complexity - I assume there's actually something to New Complexity, though I've never bothered to figure out what it is - but about much dumber pieces.


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

New Complexity seems pretty **** ing dumb to me, even when it's good. What pieces were you thinking of?


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## Wood (Feb 21, 2013)

Nereffid said:


> For me, at least, it operates as both a (jokey) observation of one aspect of modern music and as a satire on how criticisms of modern music are perceived. Whether the author intended it that way is another matter. But the point is, I laughed, right?
> 
> Aunt Sally is not real, although no doubt some people do have an aunt called Sally and will use her existence to refute whatever argument they think I'm making.


'Aunt Sally' is another way of saying 'straw man'. The article contains many Aunt Sallys.

If it was actually written by an 'anti-modernist' the piece becomes even funnier.


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## Guest (May 5, 2016)

Harold in Columbia said:


> Obviously it does effect the conscience of the people who hate it. They may or may not be right to be so effected. (In this case, I would say they - we - are right, since I perceive the New Complexity as the soundtrack to European anti-consumerism, therefore to some extent to European austerity.)


But the New Complexity school is no more bound to Europe than the 12-tone technique. Unless that doesn't matter for your argument, in which case, forgive me.

For the record, I always thought the _idea_ of the New Complexity school was stupid and pretentious until I listened to the music and realized that it's just another shallow name for some good music I like.


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

nathanb said:


> But the New Complexity school is no more bound to Europe than the 12-tone technique. Unless that doesn't matter for your argument, in which case, forgive me.


They're not bound to Europe, of course, but they did originate there - more specifically, in Germany (you can actually narrow it down further, to the largely Catholic strip of the German speaking world bordering on the Latin world, from the Rhineland to Austria, plus Austrian emigrant Schönberg working in Berlin) - and New Complexity is most widely composed and performed there (in the same part of the German speaking world, and England).

While we're on the subject, I think the 12 tone music of the Second Viennese School and whatever we want to call the music of Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez written after the war are informed by very different world views - the former analogous to the combination of rigor, opulence, neo-classicism, and populism in Art Deco architecture, and fascist propaganda (Schönberg would have loved to have been the musical representative of a resurgent German rightist nationalism, if only the Nazis had let him), the latter analogous to Brutalist architecture, anti-populist and anti-historical (that is, rejecting forms inherited from history, and trying to find and work from more universally applicable principles). To be clear, none of this is supposed to be pejorative.


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## isorhythm (Jan 2, 2015)

Harold in Columbia said:


> New Complexity seems pretty **** ing dumb to me, even when it's good. What pieces were you thinking of?


I was really just thinking of a bunch of pieces by various nobodies I've heard, though most recently something by Matthias Pintscher (movement from Figura II/Frammento).

It's the thing where the composer is a) exploring "sound" or extended instrumental techniques for their own sake, and/or b) fascinated by the idea of a piece that consists of some handful of discrete "sonic events" that are arranged in some way or other - composers come up with different ways to describe this stuff in program notes but it all amounts to the same thing.

I should listen to some New Complexity stuff, whenever anyone talks about it, it always sounded really dumb to me, but I've heard bits of Finnissy that I enjoyed.


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## Guest (May 5, 2016)

Harold in Columbia said:


> They're not bound to Europe, of course, but they did originate there - more specifically, in Germany (you can actually narrow it down further, to the largely Catholic strip of the German speaking world bordering on the Latin world, from the Rhineland to Austria, plus Austrian emigrant Schönberg working in Berlin) - and New Complexity is most widely composed and performed there (in the same part of the German speaking world, and England).


You mean they originated in Germany in the sense that the composers were located there at the time? Most of the composers behind the first wave are British. Of course, there is this whole second wave thing more focused in Germany that Mahnkopf wants to call "The Second Darmstadt School". Anyway, that's neither here nor there.

@isorhythm: It's going to be pretty hard to "talk about" New Complexity while doing it justice. You end up flustered, trying desperately to convince the other that it's not about the complexity, but what the complexity yields, and you walk away feeling like you sold yourself short. Even I tend to giggle at some of Brian's quotes in the little mini-documentary about the Arditti Quartet learning and performing Ferneyhough's 6th quartet. As I just said, I held similar prejudices until my opinion became entirely based on listening experience rather than rhetoric.


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

Petwhac said:


> When the flautist unfolds her music across 5 music stands, the fun begins.
> She makes her way along the piece, flutter tongue by flutter tongue, trill by trill and after ten minutes she's only on the third stand.
> If someone swiped one of the stands away they'd be doing us all a favour and no one would any the wiser as the only way we know the piece has ended is when the flute is lowered to a safe distance from the mouth.


D#mn! I'd better start practicing. Fortunately, I think I do have five music stands, but good to know I could make do with four.


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

nathanb said:


> You mean they originated in Germany in the sense that the composers were located there at the time? Most of the composers behind the first wave are British.


I was including Helmut Lachenmann, which, now that I'm thinking about it, was sloppy (result of habit of opposing him to Germany's New Simplicity).


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## Guest (May 5, 2016)

Harold in Columbia said:


> I was including Helmut Lachenmann, which, now that I'm thinking about it, was sloppy (result of habit of opposing him to Germany's New Simplicity).


It's all convoluted by now anyway. In a way, the New Complexity composers tend to borrow from every big contemporary technique (except spectral analysis and [lol] minimalism).


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

isorhythm said:


> I was really just thinking of a bunch of pieces by various nobodies I've heard, though most recently something by Matthias Pintscher (movement from Figura II/Frammento).
> 
> It's the thing where the composer is a) exploring "sound" or extended instrumental techniques for their own sake, and/or b) fascinated by the idea of a piece that consists of some handful of discrete "sonic events" that are arranged in some way or other - composers come up with different ways to describe this stuff in program notes but it all amounts to the same thing.


Yeah, I think that's primarily what I was talking about. Sorry, careless terminology on my part. By themselves, Finnissy and Ferneyhough don't seem to me important enough to worry about.


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## Petwhac (Jun 9, 2010)

fluteman said:


> D#mn! I'd better start practicing. Fortunately, I think I do have five music stands, but good to know I could make do with four.


Perhaps playing a piece with a few crotchets and minims instead of hemi-demi-semi quavers would save paper!


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

Petwhac said:


> When the flautist unfolds her music across 5 music stands, the fun begins.
> She makes her way along the piece, flutter tongue by flutter tongue, trill by trill and after ten minutes she's only on the third stand.
> If someone swiped one of the stands away they'd be doing us all a favour and no one would any the wiser as the only way we know the piece has ended is when the flute is lowered to a safe distance from the mouth.


On the other hand: "the better the jokes one makes about them, the more seriously one will have to take them."


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## Petwhac (Jun 9, 2010)

Harold in Columbia said:


> On the other hand: "the better the jokes one makes about them, the more seriously one will have to take them."


I take my jokes very seriously! That's a joke too!


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

OH I GET IT, Cause contemporary music is horrible. HAHAHAHA so funny!


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## Richannes Wrahms (Jan 6, 2014)

Violinvitch said:


> OH I GET IT,
> Cause contemporary music is horrible.
> 
> 
> ...


BananaRaspberryRoselle


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

Petwhac said:


> Perhaps playing a piece with a few crotchets and minims instead of hemi-demi-semi quavers would save paper!


The music you are making fun of usually has all sorts of additional symbols resulting in the requirement to do all sorts of additional things rather that simply playing notes: whisper tones, multiphonics, microtones, percussive effects, etc. All this isn't necessarily wacky and far out, especially by today's standards, but what can seem wacky and far out is using a mid-19th century instrument like the standard flute to make those sounds. Not surprisingly, Eva Kingma, Robert Dick and others have redesigned the flute to make a lot of those things easier to do. But your psychological expectations on seeing what is still essentially a traditional 19th century instrument are still upset by the wacky stuff.


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