# Expressivity in Modern Music



## Elliott Carter (Dec 23, 2020)

I was having a lively discussion with some friends a while back about modern music. In particular, the works of Elliott Carter came up. I found myself defending this music against claims of being "dry" and "academic." Eventually, I was passionately claiming that Carter's sting quartets contain all the emotional breadth and urgency of those of Beethoven. As I have thought more about this bold and perhaps naïve position, I wonder if this is really accurate, or if there is more to it. In particular, did the Modernists place as much emphasis on the expression of human emotions as the Romantics? If not, what new artistic concerns replaced those of the romantics? In other words, how might one sum up the fundamental difference between Modern musical expression and Romantic musical expression as concisely as possible? If that question is far too general to answer, how might one sum up the fundamental differences between Beethoven and Carter's expressive approaches?


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Elliott Carter said:


> I was having a lively discussion with some friends a while back about modern music. In particular, the works of Elliott Carter came up. I found myself defending this music against claims of being "dry" and "academic." Eventually, I was passionately claiming that Carter's sting quartets contain all the emotional breadth and urgency of those of Beethoven. As I have thought more about this bold and perhaps naïve position, I wonder if this is really accurate, or if there is more to it. In particular, did the Modernists place as much emphasis on the expression of human emotions as the Romantics? If not, what new artistic concerns replaced those of the romantics? In other words, how might one sum up the fundamental difference between Modern musical expression and Romantic musical expression as concisely as possible? If that question is far too general to answer, how might one sum up the fundamental differences between Beethoven and Carter's expressive approaches?


Have a look at Roger Reynold's Kokoro for solo violin. It is made of a dozen sections each of which is like an study of different types of expression - here:

With Abandon
Fierce / Placid
Dolce	
Relentless	
Drunken
Vivid, Eccentric, Brittle
Montage 
Ardently To Plaintivel
Montage II
Ardently / Plaintively
Anxiously / Reflectively
Dolce
Fierce / Placid


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## consuono (Mar 27, 2020)

Mandryka said:


> Have a look at Roger Reynold's Kokoro for solo violin. It is made of a dozen sections each of which is like an study of different types of expression - here:
> 
> With Abandon
> Fierce / Placid
> ...


Right. And can we tell what those expressions are without looking at the program notes? I doubt it.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Another obviously very expressive piece, working in a different way from the Reynolds, is Luigi Nono’s La Fabricata Illuminata.


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

A carriage wreck along a lonely road (in Beethoven's time) which spews a dead body to the roadside will provoke an emotional response from an empathetic human. An automobile wreck on a busy turnpike (in our own time) which spews a dead body to the roadside also provokes an emotional response, likely the same response from an empathetic human. Yet, the details of the two accidents differ in their terms of complexity. Though the scenes are clearly of different eras, the human emotional response remains the same.

So can music of the different eras provoke similar responses from listeners.


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## consuono (Mar 27, 2020)

Mandryka said:


> Another obviously very expressive piece, working in a different way from the Reynolds, is Luigi Nono's La Fabricata Illuminata.


I listened to the first few minutes. It sounds like a political demonstration or a football game or both of them confronting each other.


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## SeptimalTritone (Jul 7, 2014)

Elliott Carter said:


> In other words, how might one sum up the fundamental difference between Modern musical expression and Romantic musical expression as concisely as possible? If that question is far too general to answer, how might one sum up the fundamental differences between Beethoven and Carter's expressive approaches?


I'd say that forward-looking 20th century music tends to be more physical and _visceral_, and is more so about describing the complexities of the mind, body, and nature as they are rather than making a dialectical point with emotional contrasts - a very Beethovenian/Romantic aesthetic goal.

In a piece of music like the Carter 3rd quartet, we have the ensemble divided into two duets - first violin + cello, and second violin + viola. These two duets come in and out and shape-shift in their content - it sounds like a kaleidoscope of possibilities that are not _argued_ by a psychological narrator or person but are _experienced_ and whose complexity goes beyond what a person could dialectically argue. Contrast that to something like the finale of the Beethoven A flat major piano sonata op 110 with the explicit contrasts between the tragic soulful singing of the Arioso sections and divine ecstatic counterpoint of the Fugue sections. There's a clear explicit psychological point being argued with every note, as opposed to the more physical and visceral Carter.

This non-dialectical physicality manifests itself in many different forms, from Carter to Feldman to Cage to Parmegiani to Dhomont - especially with those that wrote electronic music.

To quote Schoenberg at the beginning of his expressionist period:



> My goal: complete liberation from form and symbols, cohesion and logic. Away with motivic work! Away with harmony as the cement of my architecture! Harmony is expression and nothing more. Away with pathos! Away with 24 pound protracted scores! My music must be short. Lean! In two notes, not built, but "expressed". And the result is, I hope, without stylized and sterilized drawn-out sentiment. That is not how man feels; it is impossible to feel only one emotion. Man has many feelings, thousands at a time, and these feelings add up no more than apples and pears add up. Each goes its own way. This multicoloured, polymorphic, illogical nature of our feelings, and their associations, a rush of blood, reactions in our senses, in our nerves; I must have this in my music. It should be an expression of feeling, as if really were the feeling, full of unconscious connections, not some perception of "conscious logic". Now I have said it, and they may burn me.


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## Knorf (Jan 16, 2020)

Elliott Carter said:


> Eventually, I was passionately claiming that Carter's sting quartets contain all the emotional breadth and urgency of those of Beethoven.


I wholeheartedly agree.



> As I have thought more about this bold and perhaps naïve position, I wonder if this is really accurate, or if there is more to it?


Well, yes, there is more to it.

There first thing we must sort out is that music in itself does not convey or express emotion at all. Emotion is something triggered by music, yes, but as something we and our subjective experiences bring to an association with it. This is easily seen by the fact that there is such widespread disagreement and lack of conformity of what even the most well-known music provokes emotionally, even when it traverses very well-established tropes. It is also seen in the music of cultures alien to one's experience: with no reference points and no established experience, very foreign music simply won't prompt a predictable emotional response. Imagine a Montana rancher sitting down to listen to classical music of North India...

For all its modernity, Carter's music contains more than sufficient connection to conventional tropes of the past (both near and far) for a listener well-versed in Western classical music to have a real emotional response, given half a chance and an open mind.

More later. Now sleep


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

Overall, the more you're familiar with such complex pieces, but in pure listening terms, the more you're able to invest emotional or non-musical stuff into it, IMHO, and the more satisfying it is for you in such matters, while keeping an intellectually stimulating angle too.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

I wish there was a separate subforum dedicated to discussing non-classical avantgarde music


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

hammeredklavier said:


> non-classical avantgarde music


It's all music! Yesterday I was listening to a piece by Paul Burwell and David Toop. To me it seems as classical as Scelsi.


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## Ethereality (Apr 6, 2019)

This is Talk Classical so I still don't understand people talking about Bach and Beethoven. However these categories are rather hard to make definitive in any way people would recognize: Take a plane from a forest country to the desert and the difference is quitr clear, but start walking from one to the other and there is no clear boundary anyone will notice.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

joen_cph said:


> complex pieces,.


Here's a piece of simple modern music which seems to me as expressive as, for example, a Brahms intermezzo


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## BachIsBest (Feb 17, 2018)

Knorf said:


> There first thing we must sort out is that music in itself does not convey or express emotion at all. Emotion is something triggered by music, yes, but as something we and our subjective experiences bring to an association with it. This is easily seen by the fact that there is such widespread disagreement and lack of conformity of what even the most well-known music provokes emotionally, even when it traverses very well-established tropes. It is also seen in the music of cultures alien to one's experience: with no reference points and no established experience, very foreign music simply won't prompt a predictable emotional response. Imagine a Montana rancher sitting down to listen to classical music of North India...


I think this goes too far; culture is relative, certainly, but claiming absolute cultural relativism is false. There are innate biological reasons things sound "sad" or "happy"; for example, ever notice how a moving string section is oft described as having violins that "sob"? The fact that violins produce a beautiful crying sound is not a by-product of western culture, rather, the sound is actually, universally, sad.

I just listened to Tchaikovsky's 6th symphony and Carter's 3rd string quartet today. If you let people with no prior listening in western classical music listen to the last movement of each (disregarding challenges in defining "the last movement" in the Carter piece) and take a poll on the emotions described in the music I somehow doubt the Carter piece would have a clearer poll result.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Mandryka said:


> It's all music! Yesterday I was listening to a piece by Paul Burwell and David Toop. To me it seems as classical as Scelsi.


It is indeed "music". I just don't think it's fair "film music" is considered "non-classical" when "avantgarde music" is considered "classical" in this forum. I think all the avantgarde stuff you post is really just horror film music in essence: 






Elliott Carter said:


> In particular, did the Modernists place as much emphasis on the expression of human emotions as the Romantics? If not, what new artistic concerns replaced those of the romantics?


Yes, avantgarde music is emotional, it's just that the emotions communicated are fitting/appropriate for horror/grotesque film contents. (I just think that's what it is, essentially. I'm not trying to ridicule or mock.) I think people ponder way too much over this issue, when the real answer is really simple.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

hammeredklavier said:


> It is indeed "music". I just don't think it's fair "film music" is considered "non-classical" when "avantgarde music" is considered "classical" in this forum. I think all the stuff you post is really just horror film music in essence:


Well I think it's not a question worth thinking about.

By the way, I don't see how you could say that that clarinet piece by Laurence Crane is film is horror film music! Or the Roger Reynolds. Basically, you're wrong. Here's something I'm enjoying this morning. Horror film music? I think it's as expressive as a song by Dowland


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## Celine (Dec 27, 2020)

Hello. Hmh hmh hmh hmh.


Mandryka's sentiments somewhat titilate me, giving me some slight cause to agree.....


However.....I prefer a neutraler rendering: we experience, we feel, we think, we 'fit'.


Unless.....

On first hearing Slayer's Reign in Blood, starting with Angel of Death, I felt only exhiliration. The lyrics had little import for me.

I played no instruments for several years. In my third semester of music, on first hearing (outside of any Pop Cul instance) Debussey's La Cathedral Engloutie I felt orgasmic bliss....on first hearing Scriabin's Vers la Flamme I felt elation and ascendance....on first hearing Schoenberg's twelve tone music I felt things I cannot describe....equally and somewhat differingly so hearing Webern's music.

In Music, I ~ see ~ a space - and of import the question: do I enjoy this space?


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Knorf said:


> There first thing we must sort out is that music in itself does not convey or express emotion at all. Emotion is something triggered by music, yes, but as something we and our subjective experiences bring to an association with it. This is easily seen by the fact that there is such widespread disagreement and lack of conformity of what even the most well-known music provokes emotionally, even when it traverses very well-established tropes.


Not only does music express emotion and other inner states, from Beethoven on the formal coherence of many works derives directly from its coherence as psychological expressive experience. This kind of abstract plot structure, if you will, is often the primary determinant of thematic processes on the grand scale in sonata cycles from Beethoven through Shostakovich (at least). Moreover, this kind of narrative organization does not require substantial or specific intersubjective agreement about what particular passages express. There is a whole branch of modern music theory, usually called musical narrative theory, addressing this kind of musical organization.


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

EdwardBast said:


> Not only does music express emotion and other inner states, from Beethoven on the formal coherence of many works derives directly from its coherence as psychological expressive experience. This kind of abstract plot structure, if you will, is often the primary determinant of thematic processes on the grand scale in sonata cycles from Beethoven through Shostakovich (at least). Moreover, this kind of narrative organization does not require substantial or specific intersubjective agreement about what particular passages express. There is a whole branch of modern music theory, usually called musical narrative theory, addressing this kind of musical organization.


Do you have any link to complete texts or any other exemplifying for that?


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

EdwardBast said:


> Not only does music express emotion and other inner states, from Beethoven on the formal coherence of many works derives directly from its coherence as psychological expressive experience. This kind of abstract plot structure, if you will, is often the primary determinant of thematic processes on the grand scale in sonata cycles from Beethoven through Shostakovich (at least). Moreover, this kind of narrative organization does not require substantial or specific intersubjective agreement about what particular passages express. There is a whole branch of modern music theory, usually called musical narrative theory, addressing this kind of musical organization.


I read your recent posts on Shostakovich string quartets regarding this topic. I think they're interesting, but also there are 18th-century examples that I think are interesting in a different way from Beethoven and Shostakovich:



hammeredklavier said:


> Aside from Pavel Wranitzky's Grand Symphony for the Peace with French Republic Op.31 (1797),
> J.H. Knecht's "Le portrait musical de la nature (1784)" is another good example of 18th century musical programme. ( the smooth transition between the 4th and 5th movements, and thematic linking of the 1st and 4th movements are also interesting. I think Wranitzky also has these elements, in the 1st, 3rd, final movements of his Grand symphony. )


*[ 2:36 ~ 3:18 ]*


















*1. Allegro (0:01)
2. Tema con variazioni (6:38)
1. Allegro (2:12)
6. Rondo (32:07)*
View attachment 137060








hammeredklavier said:


> M. Haydn - P 20, MH 393 - *Symphony No. 29 in D minor*: [ 0:01 ] , [ 12:52 ]
> the last movement isn't as "half-baked" as Joseph's and is reminiscent of the first movement.
> "The third movement is a rondeau, Presto scherzante. Horns are in F, trumpets in D. The A theme could be seen as a metamorphosis of the first subject of the first movement. The final statement of the A theme in D minor is almost the same as the first except the horns are absent while they change crooks to D. After a fermata on a V7 chord, the A theme is given in D major, the only difference from the first statement being the key signature."


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## Knorf (Jan 16, 2020)

"For I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc. Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence. If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion and not a reality. It is simply an additional attribute which, by tacit and inveterate agreement, we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a convention - in short, an aspect which, unconsciously or by force of habit, we have come to confuse with its essential being." 
-Igor Stravinsky (1936)

Stravinsky is quite correct.



EdwardBast said:


> Not only does music express emotion and other inner states, from Beethoven on the formal coherence of many works derives directly from its coherence as psychological expressive experience. This kind of abstract plot structure, if you will, is often the primary determinant of thematic processes on the grand scale in sonata cycles from Beethoven through Shostakovich (at least). Moreover, this kind of narrative organization does not require substantial or specific intersubjective agreement about what particular passages express. There is a whole branch of modern music theory, usually called musical narrative theory, addressing this kind of musical organization.


Not expression, not emotion. Abstract structure and process: sure. Nonetheless emotion is not expressed by this, but rather a reaction we bring ourselves to the experience.

As someone who taught music theory at the university level for 25 years, so much of what you referred to as "narrative theory" is such anti-scholarship and utter tosh. It's embarrassing really, non-scholars struggling for pitiful, edgy relevance via their own creative fiction masquerading as analysis.



BachIsBest said:


> I just listened to Tchaikovsky's 6th symphony and Carter's 3rd string quartet today. If you let people with no prior listening in western classical music listen to the last movement of each (disregarding challenges in defining "the last movement" in the Carter piece) and take a poll on the emotions described in the music I somehow doubt the Carter piece would have a clearer poll result.


Side note: this is how you get a lot of really terrible research, from people certain they know the answer before they've gathered any evidence at all.

In any case, humans are humans, and we have shared emotions because we're the same species. That doesn't change the fact that emotions are brought by the individual to the experience of music and not delivered inherently by it.


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## GucciManeIsTheNewWebern (Jul 29, 2020)

BachIsBest said:


> I think this goes too far; culture is relative, certainly, but claiming absolute cultural relativism is false. There are innate biological reasons things sound "sad" or "happy"; for example, ever notice how a moving string section is oft described as having violins that "sob"? The fact that violins produce a beautiful crying sound is not a by-product of western culture, rather, the sound is actually, universally, sad.
> 
> I just listened to Tchaikovsky's 6th symphony and Carter's 3rd string quartet today. If you let people with no prior listening in western classical music listen to the last movement of each (disregarding challenges in defining "the last movement" in the Carter piece) and take a poll on the emotions described in the music I somehow doubt the Carter piece would have a clearer poll result.


The first time I listened to Tchaikovsky's "Pathetique" I wasn't aware of the background of the piece in regards to the composer's personal life and mental turmoil surrounding the composition. After having finished listening to it, I read YouTube comments along the lines of "I feel like I just listened to the world's longest suicide note" and "I'm sobbing in a pool of tears this moved me so deeply, that poor tortured soul," and "just by listening to this piece you can tell he was obviously suicidal".

And that's not what I took away from the piece at all! It evoked a wide spectrum of emotions and ideas for me and many of those were certainly on the darker side, but feelings of futility and despair never came to me, let alone suicide. Going into the piece on a "blind test" if you will, brought about a different subjective experience than the others. I'm not sure exactly what I'm trying to say with this. I agree along the lines of Knorf that music inherently doesn't have any power, rather it is the psychological associations one makes with the piece. I think that's one of the incredible things about music actually, being able to connect to and interpret a piece of music in different ways that varies subjectively from person to person.

To be more germane to the thread's topic, I definitely believe modern music has no shortage of expressive power whatsoever. If anything, it has a staggeringly expansive pallette of sound that can be manipulated to express and evoke all sorts of moods, images, ideas etc. that would not have been made in music prior. Atonal music and contemporary music can accomplish the same goals as tonal in my opinion, it's just a different way of writing music. It doesn't have to be inherently unsettling, jarring or creepy like the way it is used in horror movies (though obviously lots of atonal music definitely IS unsettling, jarring, and creepy).

I also think the means of expression varies from era to era. In the classical era, for example, I believe expression is done by the means of restraint and priority given to cohesion and form, but that doesn't mean the feeling or emotion is any less there than a Romantic composer who pours his heart on his sleeve. As obvious to everyone here, Beethoven bridged the gap between classical and Romantic and is an incredible synthesis of both classical restraint and Romantic expression.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

EdwardBast said:


> Not only does music express emotion and other inner states.


What other inner states?



EdwardBast said:


> the formal coherence of many works.


What is formal coherence?



EdwardBast said:


> from Beethoven on the formal coherence of many works derives directly from its coherence as psychological expressive experience..


Ha! It made me think of Schoenberg's famous letter to Busoni, where he talks about the illogicality (in the English translation) - incoherence, I suppose - of the psychological experience.

http://www.csun.edu/~liviu7/603/Chapter 4-Schoenberg.pdf



EdwardBast said:


> Moreover, this kind of narrative organization does not require substantial or specific intersubjective agreement about what particular passages express.


I am sure you're right about this. However it's one thing to say that the music's structure reflects a certain common narrative structure. It's quite another thing to say that that narrative structure reflects something true about the human mind.

You once recommended a book about all of this, which I duly bought, read a couple of chapters and put aside. And I've spent the whole bloody afternoon trying to find it!


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## Knorf (Jan 16, 2020)

Smells and odors are well understood to be linked to memory and emotion from our experiences. It's a common event for even an ephemeral whiff to prompt, unbidden, a torrent of memory and the emotional states associated with it.

But who thinks the smells deliver the memory and emotions inherently in themselves? 

Obviously, people, carrying as they do different experiences and associated emotions, will frequently not have the same emotional response to the same smell.

So it is with music.

(It's just a metaphor.)


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## consuono (Mar 27, 2020)

Mandryka said:


> It's all music! ...


I think it is too, but there is good music and bad music. Or to put it another way, there is music that I love and music that I don't. It's not all absolutely equivalent. Any individual disco hit from the 70s, or the entire genre, is not equivalent to the last Beethoven quartets. And that doesn't mean that a disco hit or a bit of punk rock or hip hop isn't music. It's music that I don't care for, just as I don't care for the examples you posted here. And none of us are under any obligation to like any of it. In fact I'd say the separation of the composer from the audience is one thing that sets the "modern" apart. I don't know why it's perfectly acceptable to say you don't like Mozart or Bach or Chopin, but somehow if you say you don't care for modern atonal works you are evidently narrow-minded.


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## GucciManeIsTheNewWebern (Jul 29, 2020)

consuono said:


> I think it is too, but there is good music and bad music. Or to put it another way, there is music that I love and music that I don't. It's not all absolutely equivalent. Any individual disco hit from the 70s, or the entire genre, is not equivalent to the last Beethoven quartets. And that doesn't mean that a disco hit or a bit of punk rock or hip hop isn't music. It's music that I don't care for, just as I don't care for the examples you posted here. And none of us are under any obligation to like any of it. In fact I'd say the separation of the composer from the audience is one thing that sets the "modern" apart.


I agree with this. I also don't think music has to necessarily be "good" to be able to enjoy it either.


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## Knorf (Jan 16, 2020)

I mean, if you like something (as long as no one is getting hurt without their consent), then on some level it _is_ objectively good, whether sublime or insipid, whether slapdash or painstakingly crafted, whether gauche or sophisticated, whether much liked/hated or much ignored.

"Narrow minded" as a criticism is valid, not by the example of disliking "atonal" music in itself, but by the refusal to allow for new experiences, which incidentally has a large overlap with the group of people who reject "atonal" music.

As to the question as to whether "atonal" music can prompt as great an emotional response as tonal: of course it can!

Stravinsky's _Requiem Canticles_ for me never, ever fails to induce frisson and bring tears to my eyes. This has happened even when I've brought it up as a musical example in a university lecture. I have to have apologies on hand whenever I do... Anyway, just an example. I have more others than I can count.


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## consuono (Mar 27, 2020)

Knorf said:


> Narrow minded as a criticism is valid, not by the example of disliking "atonal" music itself, but by the refusal to allow for new experiences, which incidentally has a large overlap with the group of people who reject "atonal" music.
> ...


Actually I do "like" the Second Viennese School as intellectual exercises. There is precision and craftsmanship in what they were doing that can be enjoyed as such. I do have to wonder though if that became as stale and clichéd as common practice works were becoming.


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## BachIsBest (Feb 17, 2018)

Knorf said:


> In any case, humans are humans, and we have shared emotions because we're the same species. That doesn't change the fact that emotions are brought by the individual to the experience of music and not delivered inherently by it.


I think we may largely agree except on some more minor points. Take, for example, the sound of a woman sobing. I think it is safe to say that every rational human being would classify this sound as "sad"; given that I have had no conversations with non-humans, nor even know if such a thing is possible, I conclude that it is reasonable to say this sound is "objectively sad" as it is "sad" independent of any one person (i.e. a person who considers the sound to be "not sad" is wrong).

Furthermore, as I explained previously, it is clear that many sounds in music in all cultures derive from sounds that will have innate emotional meaning to humans; ergo, I believe it is reasonable to argue that some of these sounds can be said to contain, innately, some of the emotions they attempt to convey. My argument is not that modern music is somehow bad but that it has detached itself from the intuitive human associations between sound and emotion to some degree; I think this results in a lot of the difficulty in understanding it and is one main reason why laypeople (or really anyone) still aren't humming Schoenberg.


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## BachIsBest (Feb 17, 2018)

GucciManeIsTheNewWebern said:


> The first time I listened to Tchaikovsky's "Pathetique" I wasn't aware of the background of the piece in regards to the composer's personal life and mental turmoil surrounding the composition. After having finished listening to it, I read YouTube comments along the lines of "I feel like I just listened to the world's longest suicide note" and "I'm sobbing in a pool of tears this moved me so deeply, that poor tortured soul," and "just by listening to this piece you can tell he was obviously suicidal".
> 
> And that's not what I took away from the piece at all! It evoked a wide spectrum of emotions and ideas for me and many of those were certainly on the darker side, but feelings of futility and despair never came to me, let alone suicide. Going into the piece on a "blind test" if you will, brought about a different subjective experience than the others. I'm not sure exactly what I'm trying to say with this. I agree along the lines of Knorf that music inherently doesn't have any power, rather it is the psychological associations one makes with the piece. I think that's one of the incredible things about music actually, being able to connect to and interpret a piece of music in different ways that varies subjectively from person to person.


Do you mean to tell me you listened to the last movement of Tchaikovsky's 6th and thought it was about skipping through a sunny park? I get that music can express a wide range of emotions, find that there is a wide range of emotions in the 6th, and even agree with you that suicidal themes can be "written in" to the music. However, I find it hard to believe that, if after hearing the final movement, someone asked you, "did this piece of music end on a somewhat sad subdued note" you would have replied "no".


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## consuono (Mar 27, 2020)

GucciManeIsTheNewWebern said:


> After having finished listening to it, I read YouTube comments along the lines of "I feel like I just listened to the world's longest suicide note" and "I'm sobbing in a pool of tears this moved me so deeply, that poor tortured soul," and "just by listening to this piece you can tell he was obviously suicidal".


Ya gotta love YT comments. Actually I think some of that would apply more to Der Abschied from Mahler's Das Lied.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Deleted Post. Deleted Post. Deleted Post. Deleted Post. Deleted Post.


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## consuono (Mar 27, 2020)

BachIsBest said:


> Do you mean to tell me you listened to the last movement of Tchaikovsky's 6th and thought it was about skipping through a sunny park? I get that music can express a wide range of emotions, find that there is a wide range of emotions in the 6th, and even agree with you that suicidal themes can be "written in" to the music. However, I find it hard to believe that, if after hearing the final movement, someone asked you, "did this piece of music end on a somewhat sad subdued note" you would have replied "no".


I think the point is that we read a lot into the music by knowing beforehand the back story of Tchaikovsky's life and output.


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## consuono (Mar 27, 2020)

Comment deleted.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

consuono said:


> How do you know I didn't listen to some of it? I did. That's *your* narrow-mindedness and prejudice.


OK Your right, I'll delete the post.


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## consuono (Mar 27, 2020)

OK, out of courtesy I'll do the same. Forgotten.


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## BachIsBest (Feb 17, 2018)

Knorf said:


> Smells and odors are well understood to be linked to memory and emotion from our experiences. It's a common event for even an ephemeral whiff to prompt, unbidden, a torrent of memory and the emotional states associated with it.
> 
> But who thinks the smells deliver the memory and emotions inherently in themselves?
> 
> ...


I don't think this is a good metaphor. Humans communicate verbally, with a large part of the communication occurring based on the sound we make with our voices rather than the words we are saying (think of the issues communicating on the internet where you can't hear the other person). It makes sense then that sound itself has innate and universal communicative power.

Humans do not communicate via smell.


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## GucciManeIsTheNewWebern (Jul 29, 2020)

BachIsBest said:


> Do you mean to tell me you listened to the last movement of Tchaikovsky's 6th and thought it was about skipping through a sunny park? I get that music can express a wide range of emotions, find that there is a wide range of emotions in the 6th, and even agree with you that suicidal themes can be "written in" to the music. However, I find it hard to believe that, if after hearing the final movement, someone asked you, "did this piece of music end on a somewhat sad subdued note" you would have replied "no".


Even though Consuono replied to this above pretty much explaining what I was saying I wanted to respond myself as well. While you're right in that I wouldn't have said the last movement was about unicorns and butterflies and also in your hypothetical would also have agreed that it did indeed end on a "sad, subdued note", music expresses a lot of varying shades of gray and emotions that are not readily described by word alone. So with the Tchaikovsky, I experienced a wide range of complex feelings that were very dark, but I still never quite got that "suicide" theme from it. And totally I don't mean this condescendingly, as since you're an experienced appreciator of music so you're obviously well aware of the various complex ideas and emotions that can be expressed that defy description.

If you'll indulge an tiny anecdote, one time I was playing a contrasting C minor Bourée in the Bach's 3rd Cello suite in C major and my teacher said, "So maybe it's not my place to tell you how to interpret the piece, but you're playing it way too mournfully and dirge-like. It makes it too one dimensional". I realized he was absolutely right, as there's many, many different shades of gray and feelings that can be articulated when taking a different approach, and Bach is an incredibly multi-dimensional composer to say the least. I feel like this applies here.


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## GucciManeIsTheNewWebern (Jul 29, 2020)

BachIsBest said:


> I don't think this is a good metaphor. Humans communicate verbally, with a large part of the communication occurring based on the sound we make with our voices rather than the words we are saying (think of the issues communicating on the internet where you can't hear the other person). It makes sense then that sound itself has innate and universal communicative power.
> 
> Humans do not communicate via smell.


Y'know, I initially agreed with Knorf's statement here (and still do to an extent) but that's a pretty good point you raise. When you think about language, phonemes and words and syntax structures are really just arbitrary sounds that we apply meaning to, and that has given rise to the concept of communication. Music and language are both sound and thus share the same qualities.


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## Celine (Dec 27, 2020)

I see a lot of expression about expressing.

I see no one who natively speaks a tonal language commenting.......


Knorf appears to have the clearest vision....despite his romanticism....


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## Roger Knox (Jul 19, 2017)

SeptimalTritone said:


> I'd say that forward-looking 20th century music tends to be more physical and _visceral_, and is more so about describing the complexities of the mind, body, and nature as they are rather than making a dialectical point with emotional contrasts - a very Beethovenian/Romantic aesthetic goal ... This non-dialectical physicality manifests itself in many different forms, from Carter to Feldman to Cage to Parmegiani to Dhomont - especially with those that wrote electronic music.


This is an insightful way of looking at the differences and one that I haven't encountered before. It concerns me that the changeover in classical music from romanticism to modernism has been a point of contention throughout my career. My one comment is that I wish people who post messages wouldn't throw whole areas of knowledge and experience out the window, just because their own opinions are being challenged.


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## consuono (Mar 27, 2020)

Roger Knox said:


> ... My one comment is that I wish people who post messages wouldn't throw whole areas of knowledge and experience out the window, just because their own opinions are being challenged.


But when a work has to be accompanied by monographs on all these other bodies of knowledge and experiencd just to gain a basic appreciation of it, something is wrong (in my view). I don't have to be an expert on contrapuntal structure to be able to detect beauty and craftsmanship in the Ricercar a 6. In fact I fell in love with that piece before I knew much about fugal structure. The beauty of the piece encouraged me to learn more about the way the music was structured, not the other way around.


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## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

re: Modernism and "expressiveness"

It's interesting to me that Arnold Schoenberg who is most often seen as the foremost figure in Ultra-Modernism, seemed to see himself as a Romantic, and musically grounded in Austrian and German traditions. Schoenberg's musical influences were Wagner and Brahms, and I see his compositions as an attempt to unite the two: Wagner's sense of passion and Brahms' sense of craftsmanship. Schoenberg called his 12-Tone system "Expressionistic" after the Expressionistic movement in painting that was taking hold in Europe at the time, and Schoenberg himself was also a painter.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Coach G said:


> Schoenberg's musical influences were Wagner and Brahms, and I see his compositions as an attempt to unite the two: Wagner's sense of passion and Brahms' sense of craftsmanship. Schoenberg called his 12-Tone system "Expressionistic" after the Expressionistic movement in painting that was taking hold in Europe at the time, and Schoenberg himself was also a painter.


"In the second of his 1931 essays on 'National Music', *Schoenberg acknowledged Bach and Mozart as his principal teachers* and told his readers why." <PA124>
Schoenberg: *"My teachers were primarily Bach and Mozart*, and secondarily Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner." <PA173>






"Strict Serial Technique in Classical Music" by Hans Keller is an interesting read regarding this topic. ( It's only 9 pages. You can read it online for free if you register)

Here's an excerpt from the article:
"we note that K 428 in E♭ is another quartet of which the youthful Schoenberg had acquired an intimate, inside knowledge. The canonic opening of the first movement's development section (Ex. 3), which exposes the twelve notes within the narrowest space, is a mature example of strict serialism: an anti- (tri-) tonal row of three notes and its mirror forms (BS, I, R, RI) revolves both horizontally and vertically underneath the rotations of its own segmental subordinate row, which is a series in extremest miniature consisting of two notes at the interval of a minor second.








This is purest Schoenberg. In a forthcoming Mozart symposium, I am in fact trying to demonstrate that the passacaglia from the chamber-musical Pierrot lunaire is actually if unconsciously modelled on this development. At the same time, the latter's technique looks far into Schoenberg's own future, down to the (pan)tonal serial technique of the Ode to Napoleon. Beside unifying the anti-harmonic passage as such, that is to say, Mozart's strict serial method has to conduct it back into its wider, harmonic context, whence the series continue to rotate down to the perfect C minor cadence, every note of which remains serially determined."






"Schoenberg now proudly described himself as Mozart's pupil - and the final movement of the Suite, the 'Gigue', comes close to explicit homage to the G major Gigue, KV 574, in which Mozart at his most neo-Baroque and most harmonically chromatic seems almost to anticipate elements of Schoenberg's serial method." < Arnold Schoenberg, By Mark Berry, Page 135 >


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## Celine (Dec 27, 2020)

And Mahler, yah?


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## thejewk (Sep 13, 2020)

I think, and I could be wrong, that there are excellent parallels to be drawn between modernist literature and music when it comes to their potential for emotional impact. To speak very generally, if we take the musical tradition from Beethoven and through the Romantic age, we see progression of the attempt to forge a narrative journey out of classical forms, with a much greater focus on the narrative of the whole piece, in contrast to the earlier classical pieces that were often front loaded and tended to get lighter as they progressed. Look, for example, at Beethoven's Op 18 No 6, where we have an ostensibly traditional piece which keeps getting interrupted by 'melancholia' and as a result forms a comprehensible arc of narrative. Or the 'Moonlight' Sonata, which traces a clear narrative arc.

I think that modernist tendencies in music can be somewhat exemplified by Joyce's Ulysses. Instead of one narrative and dramatic arc, Joyce's book attempts to display the almost infinite changes in experience and emotion of a person to the vast variety of stimuli encountered in a short period of time. It's often slippery and contradictory, often doesn't tie directly and neatly in a stimulus-response relationship, and it doesn't try to create neat arc. To my mind, it seems to be an expression of faith in the tools of communication, whether literary or musical, to be able to get at the real essences of experiences without the trappings of traditional narrative forms. 

I wonder if there is evidence in the second half of the 20thC for a similar movement in music as the one in literature where frustrations with the failings of modernist ideals led instead to mistrust of both preceding ideas? Personally, I mistrust such ideas as the one I myself have presented here. It might contain some seeds of truth, but it is far too general an idea to even begin capturing most of the musical output of the periods in question.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

thejewk said:


> I think, and I could be wrong, that there are excellent parallels to be drawn between modernist literature and music when it comes to their potential for emotional impact. To speak very generally, if we take the musical tradition from Beethoven and through the Romantic age, we see progression of the attempt to forge a narrative journey out of classical forms, with a much greater focus on the narrative of the whole piece, in contrast to the earlier classical pieces that were often front loaded and tended to get lighter as they progressed. Look, for example, at Beethoven's Op 18 No 6, where we have an ostensibly traditional piece which keeps getting interrupted by 'melancholia' and as a result forms a comprehensible arc of narrative. Or the 'Moonlight' Sonata, which traces a clear narrative arc.
> 
> I think that modernist tendencies in music can be somewhat exemplified by Joyce's Ulysses. Instead of one narrative and dramatic arc, Joyce's book attempts to display the almost infinite changes in experience and emotion of a person to the vast variety of stimuli encountered in a short period of time. It's often slippery and contradictory, often doesn't tie directly and neatly in a stimulus-response relationship, and it doesn't try to create neat arc. To my mind, it seems to be an expression of faith in the tools of communication, whether literary or musical, to be able to get at the real essences of experiences without the trappings of traditional narrative forms.
> 
> I wonder if there is evidence in the second half of the 20thC for a similar movement in music as the one in literature where frustrations with the failings of modernist ideals led instead to mistrust of both preceding ideas? Personally, I mistrust such ideas as the one I myself have presented here. It might contain some seeds of truth, but it is far too general an idea to even begin capturing most of the musical output of the periods in question.


When people talk about narrative structure in tonal classical music they sometimes mean just leaving the home key, having all sorts of adventures away from home and possibly returning. Does it really get more sophisticated than that? You could have "infinite changes in experience and emotion" within that structure -- I'd say that's exactly what you have in the great tonal variation sets like in K 563 or op 131. Schumann also is interesting in this respect.

The Schoenbergian idea about human emotion in the letter to Busoni I referenced in a post here yesterday (http://www.csun.edu/~liviu7/603/Chapter 4-Schoenberg.pdf) is that we experience many of emotions simultaneously, but this is IMO exactly what you find in baroque and classical counterpoint -- in the more complex contrapuncti in Art of Fugue for example, or one of the big ensemble pieces from a Mozart/Da Ponte opera.

That Schoenbergian idea seems to me to call to mind The Sound and The Fury more than Ulysses.

I'll just mention in passing that there was a recent piece which we listened to here which had a very clear narrative structure -- Jonathan Harvey's Nachtlied. Here's an old post of mine about it



Mandryka said:


> I like this because of the way he uses simple electronic effects to suggest the mystical, other worldly. And I like the sense of something resembling a home key which seems to me to pervade the work -- which is, after all, about a journey and a return.
> 
> The composer's note
> 
> ...


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

thejewk said:


> I wonder if there is evidence in the second half of the 20thC for a similar movement in music as the one in literature where frustrations with the failings of modernist ideals led instead to mistrust of both preceding ideas?


See what you think of Michel van der Aa's Up-close for cello, orchestra and video. When the video intrudes at about 8 minutes it does seem to be the start of a genuine attempt creating a narrative about identity and anxiety.


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## Roger Knox (Jul 19, 2017)

consuono said:


> But when a work has to be accompanied by monographs on all these other bodies of knowledge and experiencd just to gain a basic appreciation of it, something is wrong (in my view). I don't have to be an expert on contrapuntal structure to be able to detect beauty and craftsmanship in the Ricercar a 6. In fact I fell in love with that piece before I knew much about fugal structure. The beauty of the piece encouraged me to learn more about the way the music was structured, not the other way around.


I agree, listeners shouldn't have to plow through long jargon-filled explanations to appreciate a composition. But I was thinking about these particular discussions. Edward Bast's comment that musical narrative theory might be useful seems valid. Plus, there is lots in aesthetics and philosophy of music concerning expressivity. And in psychology of music and the neurosciences there is scientific research on music and the emotions, including on modern music.

I am actually overwhelmed by these huge topics. The intital gut reaction coming from my music composition and theory background is to heave them overboard and take up a hard simplistic stance. But that's wrong, and the use of Schoenberg's or Stravinsksy's comments in support is troublesome. Those comments are really composer's statements valid for their own music. Schoenberg is clearly referring to the point at which he left off big postromantic works like the _Gurrelieder_, and began writing atonal, expressionist music in the last movement of String Quartet No. 2, op. 10 and the Three Pieces for Piano, op. 11. Stravinsky is presenting his neoclassical credo, applicable to his Piano Sonata for example. Successful composers tend to use hyperbole needed to establish their profiles; it may take them into knowledge areas where their views are hardly authoritative.

What we can do here is express our own feelings and experiences. So I'm going to do the Beethoven and Carter listens now.


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## Celine (Dec 27, 2020)

A bit in my first post I felt unfinished and has sat percolating: "...Angel of Death. The lyrics had no import for me." ...beyond the portrayal of and reflection on grotesqueness. As I have not enjoyed and have steered away from visual and written material containing overly graphic violence and concepts.

@Roger Knox: the cosmos provides us experience. Our feelings judge that experience. Or do not through use of basic Science methodology applied in one's life. Putting a fine point on it, or some may perhaps feel this putting a knife to their nose: I find people tend away from Science, especially the more their academic accomplishment.

Listeners don't *have* to do *anything*. Their human need for _duty_ makes them feel they do.

More on topic: I found the following performance at the Talea Ensemble site, per the recommendation of the latter in this or another thread. The piece satisfies what I look for in a piece of Music. It embodies the kind of Music I have wished to hear above all else since I heard Stockhausen's Kontra-Punkte twenty-four years ago. (K-P a top favored piece for a long while.)


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

I've been listening to a lot of Beat Furrer recently, the vocal works. I'm not sure I like the busy speedy textures of a lot of the music, his style can become predictable and wearing for me. There is one which has caught my imagination slightly though -- this


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## Celine (Dec 27, 2020)

Here:






Seems not vocal-oriented. Similar here:






In non-tonal, etc contexts, what do you look for in vocal pieces?


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Roger Knox said:


> I agree, listeners shouldn't have to plow through long jargon-filled explanations to appreciate a composition. But I was thinking about these particular discussions. Edward Bast's comment that musical narrative theory might be useful seems valid. Plus, there is lots in aesthetics and philosophy of music concerning expressivity. And in psychology of music and the neurosciences there is scientific research on music and the emotions, including on modern music.
> 
> I am actually overwhelmed by these huge topics. The intital gut reaction coming from my music composition and theory background is to heave them overboard and take up a hard simplistic stance. But that's wrong, and the use of Schoenberg's or Stravinsksy's comments in support is troublesome. Those comments are really composer's statements valid for their own music. Schoenberg is clearly referring to the point at which he left off big postromantic works like the _Gurrelieder_, and began writing atonal, expressionist music in the last movement of String Quartet No. 2, op. 10 and the Three Pieces for Piano, op. 11. Stravinsky is presenting his neoclassical credo, applicable to his Piano Sonata for example. Successful composers tend to use hyperbole needed to establish their profiles; it may take them into knowledge areas where their views are hardly authoritative.
> 
> What we can do here is express our own feelings and experiences. So I'm going to do the Beethoven and Carter listens now.


I also have a music theory and composition education, and do not look for expressiveness in any music, tonal or atonal. I also have not read any "long jargon-filled explanations" in preparation of listening to any music in a long time. I generally agree with the premise that the music itself has no inherent emotional or expressive content, but music can sometimes trigger those reactions in listeners. However, the same piece will cause different listeners to describe it differently; i.e. music cannot describe anything specific to anyone, except in very crude examples (cannon shots, crashes, and other "film music" kinds of stretches).

So, I don't place much stock in the discussion this thread seems to be promoting.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Celine said:


> Here:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


It's easier to say what I don't like! I don't like music with a strong underlined pulse, I don't like music which is very busy with notes, music without air.

I like heterophony and polyphony.

The opera which has caught my imagination most over the past few months is Michael Levinas's La Metamorphose.

At the moment I'm enjoying something by Klaus Lang called einfalt stille, and Li-Faced Doll on David Toop's recording Black Chamber. Over the past few months I've been enjoying Stockhausen's Freude, and some of Licht scenes.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

thejewk said:


> I think, and I could be wrong, that there are excellent parallels to be drawn between modernist literature and music when it comes to their potential for emotional impact. *To speak very generally, if we take the musical tradition from Beethoven and through the Romantic age, we see progression of the attempt to forge a narrative journey out of classical forms, with a much greater focus on the narrative of the whole piece,* in contrast to the earlier classical pieces that were often front loaded and tended to get lighter as they progressed. Look, for example, at Beethoven's Op 18 No 6, where we have an ostensibly traditional piece which keeps getting interrupted by 'melancholia' and as a result forms a comprehensible arc of narrative. Or the 'Moonlight' Sonata, which traces a clear narrative arc.
> 
> I think that modernist tendencies in music can be somewhat exemplified by Joyce's Ulysses. Instead of one narrative and dramatic arc, Joyce's book attempts to display the almost infinite changes in experience and emotion of a person to the vast variety of stimuli encountered in a short period of time. It's often slippery and contradictory, often doesn't tie directly and neatly in a stimulus-response relationship, and it doesn't try to create neat arc. *To my mind, it seems to be an expression of faith in the tools of communication, whether literary or musical, to be able to get at the real essences of experiences without the trappings of traditional narrative forms. *
> 
> I wonder if there is evidence in the second half of the 20thC for a similar movement in music as the one in literature where frustrations with the failings of modernist ideals led instead to mistrust of both preceding ideas? *Personally, I mistrust such ideas as the one I myself have presented here. It might contain some seeds of truth,* but it is far too general an idea to even begin capturing most of the musical output of the periods in question.


I think you're wise to mistrust the ideas you've expressed. The lessening of the force of narrativity in music after the Romantic era is real, but it does not follow that modern art is "an expression of faith in the tools of communication, whether literary or musical, to be able to get at the real essences of experiences without the trappings of traditional narrative forms." It's a fallacy to define either the "real essences of experiences" or the "tools of communication" so as to exclude the omnipresent and inescapable tensions and structures of temporal life which musical narrativity embodies, and embodies more intensely and with greater variety in the Western classical tradition than in any other music of which I'm aware. That, above all, is its unique achievement, and in achieving it it marshals a vast array of "tools of communication."

Our every living moment contains past, present, and, up to the point of death - the ultimate narrative event - future. Narrativity in music is not a "trapping" but an expression of the "real essence" of the way the human mind makes sense of a life lived in time. Of course, there is no necessity of making sense of life beyond the shortest range necessary for survival. We can live almost without aspiration, hope, purpose or ambition, from meal to meal, just getting up from the couch long enough to grab a leftover slice of pizza and wondering, in reflective moments, whether this is "all there is." Music with a sense of purpose and direction says that there is more, and invites the listener to live, for ten minutes or an hour, as if he knows it.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Woodduck said:


> I think you're wise to mistrust the ideas you've expressed. The lessening of the force of narrativity in music after the Romantic era is real, but it does not follow that modern art is "an expression of faith in the tools of communication, whether literary or musical, to be able to get at the real essences of experiences without the trappings of traditional narrative forms." It's a fallacy to define either the "real essences of experiences" or the "tools of communication" so as to exclude the omnipresent and inescapable tensions and structures of temporal life which musical narrativity embodies, and embodies more intensely and with greater variety in the Western classical tradition than in any other music of which I'm aware. That, above all, is its unique achievement, and in achieving it it marshals a vast array of "tools of communication."
> 
> Our every living moment contains past, present, and, up to the point of death - the ultimate narrative event - future. Narrativity in music is not a "trapping" but an expression of the "real essence" of the way the human mind makes sense of a life lived in time. Of course, there is no necessity of making sense of life beyond the shortest range necessary for survival. We can live almost without aspiration, hope, purpose or ambition, from meal to meal, just getting up from the couch long enough to grab a leftover slice of pizza and wondering, in reflective moments, whether this is "all there is." Music with a sense of purpose and direction says that there is more, and invites the listener to live, for ten minutes or an hour, as if he knows it.


There's a difference between "omnipresent and inescapable tensions and structures of temporal life" and "a sense of purpose and direction " unless by direction you just mean the direction of past, present and future. Stockhausen's _Momente _has moments (= sections, periods of music with a distinctive timbre, duration, rhythm, structure etc) which take from what we have already heard and influence future moments. But there is not, I think, a sense of direction beyond that -- I may be wrong about that.

Stockhausen thinks that's a metaphor for human life. Just as there are some people who are very independent, some people who like to control others, some people who are themselves willing to let their ideas be the result of unquestioning influence, so it is with the moments in _Momente_.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Here's an example of some tonal music with no narrative at all, there is no telos. I used to do a Buddhist meditation called Just Walking, walking around the room mindfully with no sense of goal, pure journey, Philip Glasses _Music in Fifths_ is the musical equivalent.


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## GucciManeIsTheNewWebern (Jul 29, 2020)

Mandryka said:


> Here's an example of some tonal music with no narrative at all, there is no telos. I used to do a Buddhist meditation called Just Walking, walking around the room mindfully with no sense of goal, pure journey, Philip Glasses _Music in Fifths_ is the musical equivalent.


That is really sobering (if that makes sense) and interesting to listen to. The parallel fifth is so evocative of ancient music (like plainchant) and that 'hollow' feeling of the hollow fifth without a third filling in a triad makes it feel impartial to emotional associations or tonality. That combined with the hypnotic minimalism makes it very meditative, like you said.


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## Ethereality (Apr 6, 2019)

hammeredklavier said:


> I wish there was a separate subforum dedicated to discussing non-classical avantgarde music


I think there should be a forum for each genre of Classical because it would unite us more than divide us. Right now TalkClassical feels slow almost like unwelcome people are constantly leaving this forum ie. there's not enough activity in their subgenre. Based on the poll from last year, the most representative genres of music have their most representative composers (see here) that's what this list is about. There is a reason to my posts.

Therefore, if each forum listed at the top of Talk Classical could be in this exact order, I feel like people would feel more welcome and find more like-minded people, and each forum will get equal traffic and liven this place up, ie.

*Early Music Forum*, _ie. Tallis, Dufay, Josquin, Machaut, Monteverdi_
_
*Baroque and Early Classical Forum*, ie. Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Handel, Corelli, Gluck_

*Early Romantic/Late Classical Forum,* _ie. Beethoven, Brahms, Wolf, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin_

*Programmatic/Epoch Music Forum*, _ie. Wagner, Mahler, Sibelius, Russian Composers and Film Music_

*Modern Classical Forum*, _ie. a place to talk about all 20th, 21st avante-garde music, _and finally the last 3:

*Classical Undivided*, _ie. The Main forum, but listed 6th: Universal forum for all Classical as it relates to any genre_

*All Music*, _ie. forum for all music as it relates to the quality and appeal of Classical, ie. comparing non-classical music to classical
_
*Games and Listening Projects*, _ie. ongoing games and surveys on music_


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## Lisztian (Oct 10, 2011)

Edit: post I responded to ought to be ignored.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

I wonder what people will make of this, Ashley Fure, Something to Hunt. It seems to me expressive music, and rather nice too.


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## Nawdry (Dec 27, 2020)

Elliott Carter said:


> ... In particular, did the Modernists place as much emphasis on the expression of human emotions as the Romantics? If not, what new artistic concerns replaced those of the romantics? In other words, how might one sum up the fundamental difference between Modern musical expression and Romantic musical expression as concisely as possible? If that question is far too general to answer, how might one sum up the fundamental differences between Beethoven and Carter's expressive approaches?


In my own assessment (which considers most 20th-century music as "modern"), modern music has presented a veritable volcanic explosion of expressivity. For reference, here are just a few compositions (some of my favorites, of course) that come immediately to mind for their engulfing passion:

Barber: Violin Concerto; Symphony #1; Quartet #1/Adagio for Strings; Piano Sonata
Prokofiev: Violin Concerto #2; Classical Symphony; Symphonies #5, 7; Lt. Kije Suite; Piano Sonata #7
Hindemith: Nobilissima Visione; Mathis der Maler Symphony; Metamorphoses on Themes of Weber; Violin Sonata #1
Rozsa: Concerto for String Orchestra; Theme, Variations & Finale
Piston: Symphonies #3, 4
Bartok: Concerto for Orchestra; Piano Concertos #1-3; Piano Sonata; Music for Strings, Percussion & Celesta
Schoenberg: Five Pieces for Orchestra
Mennin: Symphonies #3, 5
Shostakovich: Symphonies #5, 7; Preludes & Fugues for Piano; Piano Quintet
Honegger: Symphony #5; Pacifique 2-3-1; Rugby; Mouvemente Symphonique #3
Rorem: Symphony #3
Weill: Symphony #2
Stravinsky: Le Sacre du Printemps
Diamond: Symphonies #2, 4
Zyman: Quintet for Winds, Strings, and Piano; Concerto for Piano and Chamber Ensemble

In my opinion, those pieces would provide a acceptable and broad virtual starting tour of modern romantic-ish musical expressionism ...


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## Doctor Fuse (Feb 3, 2021)

It's all expressive!


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Instrumental music is not, literally, about any particular "narrative." This doesn't mean it has no other meaning, such as evoking strong "emotional states," as in Schoenberg's Transfigured Night, Five Pieces and Mahler's symphonies.

Instrumental music, "musical sound", when divorced from "literal action" and drama, lost its connection to explicit meaning, and was revealed for what it is: a non-representational medium (in the sense that it is not enhancing or describing literal dramatic action), the abstract evocation of "inner" states of being, which, coincidentally, is exactly what "abstract art" does: it reveals the artist's, and by empathy, the viewer's inner emotional state of being.

Music gradually divorced itself from drama over several centuries. Look at the rise of instrumental forms: the symphony, the concerto, tone poems, etc.

In instrumental Romanticism, although it was music divorced from drama, still had residual traces of drama, expressed as "dramatic gestures."

This "splitting" of drama from music opened-up a new can of worms, giving us the whole range of the non-specific "feelings" evoked by music, which are by their very "non-narrative nature" fleeting, transitory, and ephemeral, unclear, evocative, vague, and indefinable (meaning non-narrative).

Still, this is not a requirement for music to be expressive of emotion or states of being. To take matters even further into the fog, when we get into more modern music, I think "emotion" as a descriptive term begins to fail us. For example, in Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, the "emotional gestures" expressed are so complex that we begin to experience them as "states of being," like anxiety, foreboding, fear, tension, awe, etc., creating in our minds, empathetically, a reflection of our own, and the artist's, "inner state of being."

Concerning modernism, it's true that in many instances the "evoking" of dramatic emotion, and dramatic gesture is absent (but certainly not always). Stockhausen evokes, for me, a sort of "Platonic classicism" in his Klavierstücke; with some modernism (Babbitt's Piano Concerto), we must put aside our need for drama and overt emotion, and listen on the level of "pure abstraction," an enjoyment of color, sound, and timbre itself. In this sense, modern music is not "modern" at all; music has always been "abstract expressionism" when divorced from drama and opera.

So, in a sense, this is an "internal narrative" we share with the composer, but indefinable in literal narrative terms, because these are transitory, fleeting states by nature; simply "gestures of meanings."

Our general knowledge, and the historical context of a work can provide a source of "general narrative content" which can add greatly to the meaning of a piece, if only in our own minds. This always happens for me with Shostakovich (images of Soviet Russia) and with Webern's Op. 6 (Six Pieces for Orchestra), which always evokes in me grey images of Europe immediately preceding the World Wars. With Mahler, the Sixth Symphony snare-drum always evokes images of some malevolent military presence marching through our once-peaceful existence.

I think in many cases, the composer actually is composing with a specific narrative in mind, from his own emotionally-charged experience of events in his life, and then leaving it up to us to interpret it as we will; but we will never know for sure. That's the beauty of all art, music, and poetry; it is open-ended in meaning.

That's a useful distinction, I think; instrumental non-narrative music (containing "dramatic gesture") is more like poetry (condensed, vague, evocative), whereas the explicit meaning and narrative of opera is like a story or novel.

Perhaps that's the reason opera seems to lend itself to an audience easily; the "poetry" of instrumental music is an "inner" experience, more solitary in nature, like reading a book of poems by yourself. Maybe sitting there in the concert hall listening to instrumental music gave audiences too much idle time to think.
*MIICMM*
​


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Missed this before. But I do believe and also experienced myself modern music being just as expressive as any other era including Carter (have to admit it did take a while with him). I believe it comes down to sonorities (and also rhythms, something Debussy sort of mentioned). Modern music explores different sonorities than the Romantic Era, which most listeners aren't used to at the beginning, so it sounds dry and academic. As you get familiar with them they take on much more expressiveness.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Phil loves classical said:


> Missed this before. But I do believe and also experienced myself modern music being just as expressive as any other era including Carter (have to admit it did take a while with him). I believe it comes down to sonorities (and also rhythms, something Debussy sort of mentioned). Modern music explores different sonorities than the Romantic Era, which most listeners aren't used to at the beginning, so it sounds dry and academic. As you get familiar with them they take on much more expressiveness.


What do you think of what the great man says here?


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Mandryka said:


> What do you think of what the great man says here?


Asking the wrong guy. I find it hard to hear music as a 'space art' as opposed to a 'time art'. I can't see it as anything but a combination of both. I still find it hard to hear 'sounds just as they are' like traffic as music. I don't think he's wrong to say that. Just not how my brain works when it comes to music.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Mandryka said:


> What do you think of what the great man says here?


I agree with everything he says, although I prefer listening to Beethoven to traffic. But I am not interested in finding "meaning" in music. I am able to enjoy just the sounds, which is probably why I can enjoy avant-garde music while others find it confusing and frustrating.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Mandryka said:


> I wonder what people will make of this, Ashley Fure, Something to Hunt. It seems to me expressive music, and rather nice too.


I enjoyed this - not because of any expressivity - but just because I liked the sounds.


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