# The Common Practice Era: Did it peak with Brahms, or Rachmaninov?



## chu42

Did common practice peak with Brahms, or did Rachmaninov extend the life of it into the 20th century? 

Note: Common practice era =/= tonal music. I would consider Wagner and late-Liszt to already being stepping foot outside common practice, even though their music is completely tonal.

For me (even though I consider Brahms a superior composer), 20th century composers like Sibelius and Rachmaninov had enough interesting things to say that I wouldn't say Brahms was necessarily the peak.


----------



## Phil loves classical

I'd say neither and no composer represented the peak. A whole spectrum, with different contributors.


----------



## chu42

> I'd say neither and no composer represented the peak. A whole spectrum, with different contributors.


Do you think there are important common practice era composers after Rachmaninov; i.e., those who heavily shaped what we consider to be common practice music?

I personally believe that Sibelius was the peak and it ended with Rachmaninov.


----------



## hammeredklavier

One thing I do know; your assertion that "Stockhausen, Ferneyhough, Xenakis _mastered_ the common practice" is absurd. 
(I would categorize them as non-classical music composers, btw)


----------



## chu42

hammeredklavier said:


> One thing I do know; your assertion that "Stockhausen, Ferneyhough, Xenakis _mastered_ the common practice" is absurd.
> (I would categorize them as non-classical music composers, btw)


Why is it absurd?


----------



## Aries

chu42 said:


> Did common practice peak with Brahms, or did Rachmaninov extend the life of it into the 20th century?
> 
> Note: Common practice era =/= tonal music. I would consider Wagner and late-Liszt to already being stepping foot outside common practice, even though their music is completely tonal.


I don't know what you mean exactly, but classical music overall peaked in the 1890s imo. Everything built up until then and then the first degeneration tendencies set in. But I don't think "common practice" ever ended. The styles just divided.



hammeredklavier said:


> One thing I do know; your assertion that "Stockhausen, Ferneyhough, Xenakis mastered the common practice" is absurd.
> (I would categorize them as non-classical music composers, btw)


Not sure if it was music what they composed.


----------



## chu42

Aries said:


> Not sure if it was music what they composed.





hammeredklavier said:


> One thing I do know; your assertion that "Stockhausen, Ferneyhough, Xenakis _mastered_ the common practice" is absurd.


We can either discuss this from a completely subjective point of view-your definition of "mastered" and "music" is different from mine, so we can agree to disagree.

Or we can put our personal biases aside and draw upon the viewpoints of accredited organisations and academics-where you will find that they rule vastly in the favor of my point of view.


----------



## Aries

chu42 said:


> Or we can put our personal biases aside and draw upon the viewpoints of accredited organisations and academics-where you will find that they rule vastly in the favor of my point of view.


Accredited organisations and academics rule for Stockhausen? Hm, I knew that they were stupid before.

Styles split at around 1895. And they split over and over again afterwards. And they stopped to address a common taste at some point. If Stockhausen is common practice everything is common practice. So I don't know what you are talking about. I would rather associate common practice with someone like John Williams today. Its not that different to 19th century music, and it is kinda mainstream like 19th century music was in the 19th century.


----------



## hammeredklavier

chu42 said:


> Or we can put our personal biases aside and draw upon the viewpoints of accredited organisations and academics-where you will find that they rule vastly in the favor of my point of view.


"It's not only artists who are at fault; it is equally the fault of the so-called art community: the museum heads, gallery owners, and the critics, who encourage and financially enable the production of this rubbish. It is they who champion graffiti and call it genius, promote the scatological and call it meaningful. It is they who, in reality, are the naked emperors of art, for who else would spend $10 million dollars on a rock and think it is art."


----------



## consuono

Neither. It peaked with Bach, Mozart and Beethoven.


----------



## chu42

Aries said:


> Accredited organisations and academics rule for Stockhausen? Hm, I knew that they were stupid before.


Yes they do, and you are free to believe that they are stupid. Artistic preferences is based on taste.



Aries said:


> Styles split at around 1895. And they split over and over again afterwards. And they stopped to address a common taste at some point. If Stockhausen is common practice everything is common practice. So I don't know what you are talking about.


The argument was never that Stockhausen's music is common practice era music. You do realize what the topic of the thread is, and you also do realize that Brahms and Rachmaninov both died before Stockhausen, correct?

What we are discussing here is whether or not Stockhausen mastered the common practice era before diverging from it. Based on his compositions alone (many of which are tonal), I would say yes. Based on his institutional accreditations and resume before starting his experimental works, I would also say yes.

The fact is, there are plenty of experimental composers who have published their early common practice works. Ligeti, Messiaen, Schoenberg, and many others do indeed have early works that signify their expertise in the common practice era, but Stockhausen to my knowledge is not among those composers.

Even so, it is silly to think that Stockhausen jumped straight into experimental music before learning tonal composition. One cannot make it out of conservatory without showing that you are adept in common practice era composition.



Aries said:


> I would rather associate common practice with someone like John Williams today. Its not that different to 19th century music, and it is kinda mainstream like 19th century music was in the 19th century.


Yes, John Williams composes largely within the common practice conventions.


----------



## chu42

hammeredklavier said:


> "It's not only artists who are at fault; it is equally the fault of the so-called art community: the museum heads, gallery owners, and the critics, who encourage and financially enable the production of this rubbish. It is they who champion graffiti and call it genius, promote the scatological and call it meaningful. It is they who, in reality, are the naked emperors of art, for who else would spend $10 million dollars on a rock and think it is art."


So I happen find Stockhausen meaningful. I listened to the entirety of Licht last week (20+ hours), and I am bound to listen to it some time again this month.

What does this say about me? Are my thoughts more or less legitimate that those at the far-right think tank known as PragerU?

They are free to have their opinion, and I have mine.


----------



## consuono

chu42 said:


> So I happen find Stockhausen meaningful. I listened to the entirety of Licht last week (20+ hours), and I am bound to listen to it some time again this month.
> 
> What does this say about me?...


That you have too much time on your hands.


----------



## chu42

consuono said:


> Neither. It peaked with Bach, Mozart and Beethoven.


Do you believe that common practice music started to decline after Beethoven's death? I am of the opposite opinion-I think it was just beginning to blossom while Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven provided the foundation.


----------



## chu42

consuono said:


> That you have too much time on your hands.


I don't know about you, but it's pretty common for people to listen to 20+ hours of music in a week...


----------



## DaveM

The Common Practice Period is relatively narrowly defined. There can be perhaps a little leeway in the definition, but why are some here thinking they can decide on a different definition or time period?. If you want to make your own period then go ahead, but the CPT is already defined. 

And how did Stockhausen become relevant in an OP having to do with the CPT?


----------



## Phil loves classical

chu42 said:


> Do you think there are important common practice era composers after Rachmaninov; i.e., those who heavily shaped what we consider to be common practice music?
> 
> I personally believe that Sibelius was the peak and it ended with Rachmaninov.


How about Vaughan Williams, isn't he quite CP? Don't know if he's important, but he was still around after Rachmaninov.



hammeredklavier said:


> One thing I do know; your assertion that "Stockhausen, Ferneyhough, Xenakis _mastered_ the common practice" is absurd.
> (I would categorize them as non-classical music composers, btw)


I'm curious about that statement. Did they write stuff in CP? I'd be interested to hear them.


----------



## Aries

chu42 said:


> The fact is, there are plenty of experimental composers who have published their early common practice works. Ligeti, Messiaen, Schoenberg


I don't know what Stockhausen did before he wrote serial music, but Schoenberg for sure wrote round about common practice music and I like it. But I wouldn't draw conclusions to Stockhausen, because during Schönbergs first period atonal music wasn't invented yet. When Stockhausen startet it already existed.



chu42 said:


> Even so, it is silly to think that Stockhausen jumped straight into experimental music before learning tonal composition. One cannot make it out of conservatory without showing that you are adept in common practice era composition.


I overall don't understand him. So I don't know. If he was able to write common practice music, why did't he use aspects of that in his compositions? Or did he? Even the things which seem interesting at the first look are unappealing to me at a closer look. I think it is possible to make good use of some of his tools, but why didn't the inventor himself made good use of it? I would like to like his music, but its not possible for me. It is way to far beyond.


----------



## Xisten267

Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner and Brahms represent the highest peaks of the Himalayas that the classical music of the common practice are, in my humble opinion of course.


----------



## chu42

DaveM said:


> The Common Practice Period is relatively narrowly defined. There can be perhaps a little leeway in the definition, but why are some here thinking they can decide on a different definition or time period?. If you want to make your own period then go ahead, but the CPT is already defined.


Perhaps the better question would be, "do you agree with the commonly accepted definition of common practice period?"

I think there is a discussion that can be had here, since 1650-1900 would indeed imply that common practice ended with Brahms. And in that sense it also excludes Sibelius and Rachmaninov and Vaughan-Williams and the other composers who mostly composed within CP boundaries.



DaveM said:


> And how did Stockhausen become relevant in an OP having to do with the CPT?


Hammered randomly brought it up.


----------



## chu42

Actually I take that back. The 1900 boundary for the common practice is in place due to the emergence of new music, rather than the death of old music.

Still, there are composers who stayed within common practice composition after 1900. The question is, did CP already peak by then?


----------



## SanAntone

I'd say Brahms.

But the expiration date for the common practice period was up. 

The 20th century has been the most exciting period for classical music with dozens composers emerging with creative and daring stylistic developments. There has never been a period with this much new music expanding the boundaries of classical music in a variety of directions.

And the 21st century seems to be continuing this trend.


----------



## Roger Knox

Personally I dislike the term "Common Practice Era" and never use it. Some of the comments above illustrate one of the problems -- confusion. The term "common practice" as I learned it around 1970 was applied to harmony, and associated with Walter Piston's text _Harmony_ (1st edition 1941). What "common practice" meant was that it was based on _actual music by well-recognized composers_, rather than on abstract systems of music theory. For example, in the nineteenth century there had been harmony textbooks based on questionable theories deriving harmony from the overtone series, including higher overtones.

In fact Piston was well aware of some of the better harmony textbooks of his time and incorporated material that was consistent with the practical intent of his book. Piston's book was directed at musicians and not at theorists. "Common practice harmony" as I learned it applied to the years c. 1680-c.1910. I don't know if that is still the case. I see "CPT" being bandied around a lot, but not consistently. In fact common practice harmony is still relevant, with some modifications, in analysing certain genres of 20th century music.


----------



## mmsbls

Like some others here, I'm not exactly sure what the question is. I think CPT peaked with Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. I think composers still write in the CPT style, so it's currently ongoing. The last CPT composer who I really love was probably Sibelius.


----------



## ORigel

I picked Brahms, but it probably peaked with Bach.


----------



## Aries

chu42 said:


> Actually I take that back. The 1900 boundary for the common practice is in place due to the emergence of new music, rather than the death of old music.
> 
> Still, there are composers who stayed within common practice composition after 1900. The question is, did CP already peak by then?


Isn't that a question of the personal subjective point of view?

I would say the 1880s or 1890s are the peak (and Brahms doesn't even play a major role). But some compositonal tools were developt afterwards, so theoretically it is possible to write better, probably even much better music today. But practically music rather declined at least in the average.


----------



## chu42

Aries said:


> Isn't that a question of the personal subjective point of view?


Yes, these are all subjective questions. The point is to gather various perspectives on a topic of discussion. If they had objective answers, I probably wouldn't be asking them!



Aries said:


> I would say the 1880s or 1890s are the peak (and Brahms doesn't even play a major role). But some compositonal tools were developt afterwards, so theoretically it is possible to write better, probably even much better music today. But practically music rather declined at least in the average.


So you don't believe Brahms plays a major role in the peak of CP. What other candidates would you suggest that had a more significant role here?

The obvious choice is Wagner, but I think Wagner is the very reason why CP ends in the first place and thus I don't consider him the "peak", but rather the twilight.

So if not Brahms or Wagner my only other suggestion would be Puccini.


----------



## chu42

Phil loves classical said:


> How about Vaughan Williams, isn't he quite CP? Don't know if he's important, but he was still around after Rachmaninov.
> 
> I'm curious about that statement. Did they write stuff in CP? I'd be interested to hear them.


They didn't publish anything in CP that I'm aware of. But other avant-garde composers have-try this early Ligeti work, for example.






Actually this hints a bit at works _before_ the common practice period.


----------



## chu42

Aries said:


> So I don't know. If he was able to write common practice music, why did't he use aspects of that in his compositions? Or did he?


I think he definitely did, in subtler ways then others perhaps-but a lot of his work is tonal, so why not?

He certainly used conventional aspects of harmony in "odd" ways, but they are still there. For example, his knowledge of overtones and harmonics is amply displayed in Stimmung. 

Sure, it sounds "funny" but it's tonal and requires CP compositional knowledge.


----------



## hammeredklavier

chu42 said:


> Hammered randomly brought it up.


To say "[X] peaked with [Y]" is a vague expression though. What do you mean by it exactly?



Aries said:


> I would say the 1880s or 1890s are the peak (and Brahms doesn't even play a major role).


I do think stuff like Brahms' Op.118 No.2 isn't any more interesting than


----------



## Aries

chu42 said:


> So you don't believe Brahms plays a major role in the peak of CP. What other candidates would you suggest that had a more significant role here?


I would say Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Dvorak and Borodin can be mentioned too.

Bruckner has a special style for which I have a personal affection. Its not representative, even tough I think it is the best. It is less personal with the other four, but I think they reached a perfection in style, that wasn't reached during other periods.


----------



## Woodduck

If I had to designate a "peak" for Common Practice - "peak" referring not to quality but to the clearest, most consistent employment of the tonal system presenting few ambiguities or need for alternative analytic approaches - I'd choose the Classical era culminating in Beethoven, with a continuation into the Romantic era by "conservatives" such as Mendelssohn and Brahms.


----------



## chu42

Aries said:


> I would say Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Dvorak and Borodin can be mentioned too.
> 
> Bruckner has a special style for which I have a personal affection. Its not representative, even tough I think it is the best. It is less personal with the other four, but I think they reached a perfection in style, that wasn't reached during other periods.


Yes, these are all strong candidates. Bruckner is the strongest I'd say. You could also add Mahler for something post-Brahms.



hammeredklavier said:


> To say "[X] peaked with [Y]" is a vague expression though. What does it mean exactly?


To me, it means that after that point, the style began to decline. For example, I didn't pick Brahms because I didn't think Sibelius represented a decline from Brahms. Whereas I do think that John Williams-as well-regarded of a composer as he is-represents a decline from Rachmaninov. So if there are not stronger CP composers than Rachmaninov after his death, then I would say CP peaked with Rachmaninov.



hammeredklavier said:


> I think stuff like Brahms' Op.118 No.2 isn't more interesting than


I love early Scriabin but his style is hardly off the path from Chopin. With his early works he did not add anything new to CP composition, whereas Brahms' late works are definitely unique regardless of whether or not you find them interesting.


----------



## consuono

chu42 said:


> I don't know about you, but it's pretty common for people to listen to 20+ hours of music in a week...


So you listen only to Stockhausen? And no, I don't work in music and have other aspects of life to attend to, so I'm not wasting 20+ hours a week on something like Stockhausen.


chu42 said:


> Do you believe that common practice music started to decline after Beethoven's death?


Yes. Everything since those 3 has either been a) riffing on them in some way or b) an acknowledgement that they can't be emulated without being derivative. Thus the Schoenbergs, Stockhausens and Cages and so on. Atonality and everything since that has fallen outside CP has been a reaction against those "peaks", not some organic development that was bound to happen anyway.


----------



## chu42

consuono said:


> So you listen only to Stockhausen? And no, I don't work in music and have other aspects of life to attend to, so I'm not wasting 20+ hours a week on something like Stockhausen.


Your life is not the same as my life-point taken. Also, it's not hard to listen to 3 hours of music in a day though, I'm pretty sure most people do it.

Also also, I wanted to listen to the whole opera cycle in a sort of connected fashion, and since I was immediately taken in by the music, it wasn't hard to just continue it over the week.



consuono said:


> Yes. Everything since those 3 have either been a) riffing on them in some way or b) an acknowledgement that they can't be emulated without being derivative. Thus the Schoenbergs, Stockhausens and Cages and so on.


Do you think opera during the 19th century had anything new to say? I can't really seem to connect Verdi/Puccini to Beethoven, Mozart, or Bach.


----------



## consuono

chu42 said:


> Your life is not the same as my life-point taken. Also, it's not hard to listen to 3 hours of music in a day though, I'm pretty sure most people do it.


It is if you work for a living and want to do something other than listen to music.



> Do you think opera during the 19th century had anything new to say? I can't really seem to connect Verdi/Puccini to Beethoven, Mozart, or Bach.


 Ever heard of Don Giovanni or The Marriage of Figaro? And "anything new to say"? Not completely new, no. Not even Wagner, musically. There are Beethoven antecedents there, too.
Here ya go:


> While it is tempting to try to find links in the composers' [Verdi and Wagner's] work, such efforts usually seem strained. But for me one thing they had in common illuminates certain aspects of their achievements: Both were devotees of Beethoven.
> 
> Beethoven, who wrote music of stunning dramatic intensity, was no natural at opera. It took him three tries to get "Fidelio," his one completed project, right. Despite awkward dramaturgy the opera is musically stupendous and deeply moving. Yet in Beethoven's symphonic and instrumental works Verdi (to some degree) and Wagner (decidedly) found a pathway to musical drama. The generation of symphonic composers that followed Beethoven was in awe of him. They struggled to channel the Romantic fervor of the age, along with its advancing harmonic vocabulary, into symphonic and sonata forms held over from the Classical era. You could argue that Verdi and Wagner did better at honoring the Beethoven tradition by adapting his techniques to opera.


https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/arts/music/did-beethoven-mold-verdi-and-wagner.html


----------



## Phil loves classical

chu42 said:


> I think he definitely did, in subtler ways then others perhaps-but a lot of his work is tonal, so why not?
> 
> He certainly used conventional aspects of harmony in "odd" ways, but they are still there. For example, his knowledge of overtones and harmonics is amply displayed in Stimmung.
> 
> Sure, it sounds "funny" but it's tonal and requires CP compositional knowledge.


I just listened to Stimmung in its entirety, having only sampled it before. I can say I really gained nothing from this work. I like Stockhausen, but I think that is probably my least favourite piece of music.


----------



## Aries

chu42 said:


> To me, it means that after that point, the style began to decline. For example, I didn't pick Brahms because I didn't think Sibelius represented a decline from Brahms. Whereas I do think that John Williams-as well-regarded of a composer as he is-represents a decline from Rachmaninov. So if there are not stronger CP composers than Rachmaninov after his death, then I would say CP peaked with Rachmaninov.


But there is no clear separation between CP composers and non CP composers. There are many moderate modern composers. For example for me Shostakovich 7th symphony is a peak in the music of the 20th century. It is maybe his most conservative symphony, but still not as "clean CP" as the music at the end of the 19th century, what doesn't make it worse. And what makes it strong also isn't just the conservative aspect or the modern aspect. So I don't think its a good idea to make this separation, as if there were just two entirely different styles. There are many transitions.

I also think that Sibelius and Mahler already show modern tendencies and are not "clean CP". Mahler obviously but also Sibelius. It is difficult to describe in Sibelius' case. It is not dissonance. It is a pronounced calmness and that motives have a more casual and impressionistic character and a less important role. Like with many modern musical ideas it is interessting and effective when added in slight admixture but it should not be exaggregated.

Sibelius, Mahler and Shostakovich were all good at moderate modern music built on a common practice musical basis.


----------



## chu42

consuono said:


> It is if you work for a living and want to do something other than listen to music.


Ok; this is untrue for myself and many others, but if it's true for you then sure.



consuono said:


> Ever heard of Don Giovanni or The Marriage of Figaro?


Yes, I'm aware that Verdi wasn't the first composer of opera. Might as well go all the back to Monteverdi if you're saying that Verdi is directly descended from The Marriage of Figaro.



consuono said:


> And "anything new to say"? Not completely new, no. Not even Wagner, musically. There are Beethoven antecedents there, too.


This is a weak argument. Nothing is "completely new"-not Mozart, not Beethoven, not Bach. The only "new" music arguably lies in the music that you hate the most.

So the real discussion lies not whether or not Verdi is "completely new", but whether Verdi/Wagner are different enough from Beethoven to warrant their compositions as being significant contributions to the style of an era. I'm arguing that they are. Certainly they are much more different from Beethoven than Brahms is.


----------



## consuono

chu42 said:


> Ok this is untrue for myself and many others, but if it's true for you then sure.


It's true for myself and many others who aren't retirees or shut-ins.



> Yes, I'm aware that Verdi wasn't the first composer of opera. Might as well go all the back to Monteverdi if you're saying that Verdi is directly descended from The Marriage of Figaro.


No, Monteverdi didn't have the impact and influence of Mozart.



> This is a weak argument. Nothing is "completely new", not Mozart, not Beethoven, not Bach. The discussion lies within whether Verdi/Wagner are different enough from Beethoven to warrant their compositions as being significant contributions to the style of an era. They are certainly much more different from Beethoven than Brahms is.


It's nowhere near as weak as setting up Brahms and Rachmaninov as the peaks of CP. They weren't. Nor was Sibelius, nor was Wagner, nor was Bruckner, much as I love all of them.


----------



## chu42

consuono said:


> It's true for myself and many others who aren't retirees or shut-ins.


I guess that makes me a retiree or a shut-in. What I'm not going to do is get into a dick-measuring contest about who has more of a "life", just because you don't like the idea that someone happens to enjoy a composer that you don't enjoy.



consuono said:


> No, Monteverdi didn't have the impact and influence of Mozart.


In terms of opera, that's debatable. Verdi was a unique blend of the Italian and French grand styles of opera, both of which had lengthy histories before Mozart-and the origin of the Italian style began with Monteverdi.



consuono said:


> It's nowhere near as weak as setting up Brahms and Rachmaninov as the peaks of CP. They weren't. Nor was Sibelius, nor was Wagner, nor was Bruckner, much as I love all of them.


Ok, then we can have a discussion about it.


----------



## arpeggio

*CPT is not dead.*

We have been down this path so many times before.

As far as I am concerned this question is bogus.

I can think of many living composers and some who passed away since 2000 that employ CPT:

David Maslanka (Passed away 2017)
Richard Danialpour (Just won the Grammy for the Best Choral Performance: _The Passion of Yeshua_)
Frank Tichili
Eric Whitaker
Donald Granthan
Mark Camphouse (I know Camphouse. He considers himself a CPT composer. He told me once he has not given up on the key of C.)
Johan de Meij
Philip Sparke
Franco Cesarini
John Rutter

Do I dare mention film composers who also compose concert music? One who is very frequently performed.

I have provided You Tube examples of all of these composers in the past.

There was even a thread back in 2016: Your Top Ten Living Tonal Composers

How many more do you want? Again? How many times do we have to answer this question?

What I find interesting that the listeners who think CPT is dead do not acknowledge the many contemporary composers who employ CPT.


----------



## SanAntone

> What I find interesting that the listeners who think CPT is dead do not support the many contemporary composers who employ CPT.


That's me. I don't listen to the composers from the 20th century who wrote in a tonal style because I find it uninteresting. If I want to hear tonal music I'll listen to Beethoven or jazz, blues, bluegrass or popular music.

What I listen for from 20th century composers or living composers is new music that is going into areas that haven't been covered in previous periods.


----------



## BrahmsWasAGreatMelodist

hammeredklavier said:


> To say "[X] peaked with [Y]" is a vague expression though. What do you mean by it exactly?
> 
> I do think stuff like Brahms' Op.118 No.2 isn't any more interesting than


This is at least the third time (probably more) you've made this exact comparison on this forum. Chill out, bro.


----------



## fluteman

chu42 said:


> We can either discuss this from a completely subjective point of view-your definition of "mastered" and "music" is different from mine, so we can agree to disagree.
> 
> Or we can put our personal biases aside and draw upon the viewpoints of accredited organisations and academics-where you will find that they rule vastly in the favor of my point of view.


By your definition, I would disagree that the "common practice" era is over. Numerous modern composers never rejected "common practice", which I assume means more than just "tonality", which you can find in numerous genres of music, western and non-western, but rather predominant use of the diatonic scale and harmonic progressions around the circle of fifths. Many if not most prominent modern western composers never fully accepted "atonality" in the sense you are using it, if they accepted it at all -- Bela Bartok, Sergei Prokofiev, Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, Darius Milhaud, Dmitri Shostakovich, Olivier Messiaen, Bohuslav Martinu, Francis Poulenc, Andre Jolivet, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Alberto Ginastera, Aaron Copland, Ned Rorem, and Peteris Vasks, to name a few.

More and more, TC seems like a tiny hothouse where bizarre propositions, such as did classical music go downhill after the "tonal era" ended in 1900, or even in 1950, are debated ad infinitum. I say bizarre, since the tonal era has not ended, has never ended, and shows no sign of ending.


----------



## arpeggio

SanAntone said:


> That's me. I don't listen to the composers from the 20th century who wrote in a tonal style because I find it uninteresting. If I want to hear tonal music I'll listen to Beethoven or jazz, blues, bluegrass or popular music.
> 
> What I listen for from 20th century composers or living composers is new music that is going into areas that haven't been covered in previous periods.


I know how to respond to individuals who think CPT is dead.

I have no idea how to respond to those who think contemporary tonal music is unoriginal.


----------



## Conrad2

I'm a bit confused over the controversy over CPT. This is the only site I came across that have heated debate over this issue. Does CPT refer to a era of the tonal system that fall between roughly 1650 and 1900 (according to Wikipedia) or something else entirely?

Are there some posters arguing that after this period classical music went into a sharp decline, and other saying that classical music continue to thrive or evovle past that period?

Can someone catch me up on why works in CPT are considered "important" and "better" than successive works? Or am I missing the main crux of the controversy and is there a person kind enough to clear this for me?

Also what does tonality mean in this context? See that word thrown around a lot on this topic.


----------



## fluteman

arpeggio said:


> I am disappointed.
> 
> You are selling these composers short. They can still sound very original within the confines of tonality.
> 
> I do not know what is worse. People who deny CPT or people who deny CPT.


The way I would put this is, for at least six centuries, finally ending circa 1900, harmony played a steadily increasing role in western classical music, at the expense of all other elements -- most important, rhythm, timbre, dynamics, and structure, all of which increasingly had become subservient to harmony, their role often limited to enhancing harmonic progressions rather than having any independent significance. (Of course, all these other elements also can be and are used to establish tonality in music entirely apart from harmony.)

Suddenly, in the early 20th century some composers decided to remind us that there is nothing inevitable or required in this pervasive dominant position of harmony. That doesn't mean they abandoned harmony, just that they wanted to explore using other musical elements in a creative way.

I agree with SanAntone that this has been a wonderful development and greatly expanded the range and variety of our listening experiences.


----------



## Phil loves classical

Conrad2 said:


> I'm a bit confused over the controversy over CPT. This is the only site I came across that have heated debate over this issue. Does CPT refer to a era of the tonal system that fall between roughly 1650 and 1900 (according to Wikipedia) or something else entirely?
> 
> Are there some posters arguing that after this period classical music went into a sharp decline, and other saying that classical music continue to thrive or evovle past that period?
> 
> Can someone catch me up on why works in CPT are considered "important" and "better" than successive works? Or am I missing the main crux of the controversy and is there a person kind enough to clear this for me?
> 
> Also what does tonality mean in this context? See that word thrown around a lot on this topic.


Roger K. answered that in his post #23 on page 2. Although the CP period ended in around 1900 or 1910, that system it employed still survives.

I don't think CPT is considered more important or better, except that it is more popular. Ok, and then they do put Bach, Mozart and Beethoven higher up. But not everyone adopts this view, there was a poll among active composers, and their list is quite different of who the greatest are.


----------



## fluteman

Phil loves classical said:


> Roger K. answered that in his post #23 on page 2. Although the CP period ended in around 1900 or 1910, that system it employed still survives.


If we define the CPT period as 1600 - 1910, for me there was no significant peak or trough, though I might say the peak was circa 1720 - 1847. I do think it is a bad misnomer to call this the tonal period, but reasonable to call it the period of increasing dominance of tonality established through harmonic progression. I notice Wikipedia, which fixes the CPT period as 1600-1910, defines "the tonal system" this way. After 1910, that dominance receded somewhat, but still is very much present.


----------



## chu42

arpeggio said:


> Do I dare mention film composers who also compose concert music? One who is very frequently performed.
> 
> I have provided You Tube examples of all of these composers in the past.
> 
> There was even a thread back in 2016: Your Top Ten Living Tonal Composers
> 
> How many more do you want? Again? How many times do we have to answer this question?
> 
> What I find interesting that the listeners who think CPT is dead do not acknowledge the many contemporary composers who employ CPT.


I do not believe that tonal music has stopped development for one second, but how many of the composers you named will be revered and studied? Many of them are fairly unknown and unperformed except in wind ensembles, and I can only recognize some of their names because many of my friends were in band and I went to some of their concerts.

This is not to say that they are poor composers, but I have never felt that they added significantly new ideas to the repertoire. In fact, many of the composers you named are especially conventional in their use of CPT instruments.

Here is a short list of composers that I believe to have added significant ideas to the tonal repertoire since 1950:

Shostakovich
Stockhausen
Ligeti
Messiaen
Ginastera
Higdon
Tippett
Reich
Ades
Copland
Schnittke
Adams
Kapustin
Barber

And even then, many of them I would not consider to fall under CPT, but certainly under tonal music.


----------



## ORigel

chu42 said:


> Do you believe that common practice music started to decline after Beethoven's death? I am of the opposite opinion-I think it was just beginning to blossom while Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven provided the foundation.


Almost no other music quite reached their peaks. Common practice did not steadily "decline" in the decades after Beethoven, though: Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Verdi, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak...even Rachmaninoff and RVW were great post-Beethoven common practice composers.


----------



## ORigel

chu42 said:


> Actually I take that back. The 1900 boundary for the common practice is in place due to the emergence of new music, rather than the death of old music.
> 
> Still, there are composers who stayed within common practice composition after 1900. The question is, did CP already peak by then?


It peaked 1718-1826 but stayed strong after that.


----------



## hammeredklavier

chu42 said:


> In terms of opera, that's debatable. Verdi was a unique blend of the Italian and French grand styles of opera, both of which had lengthy histories before Mozart-and the origin of the Italian style began with Monteverdi.


Just because someone did something good long ago, it doesn't necessarily mean he had impact and influence throughout all that history. (And Monteverdi didn't invent opera). By the sort of logic you're using, Palestrina would be considered to have had more impact than Bach in Western classical music. For example, the likes of Berlioz, Meyerbeer, Wagner were far more interested in Gluck than Monteverdi, which is one of the reasons why a lot of Monteverdi's work had been lost in the first place. https://www.google.ca/books/edition...k+berlioz+wagner&pg=PA108&printsec=frontcover

"What then is "Romantic"? How far back should its beginnings, in music, be pushed? To 1793, when a review of a new work by "Citizen Méhul" described him as a Romantic? Or further - to year 1780-81, the year of Mozart's Idomeneo, a work whose use of orchestral colour for structural and psychological purposes anticipates nineteenth-century Romantic opera?" <Berlioz: The Making of an Artist 1803-1832 , By David Cairns , P. 193>


----------



## DaveM

The OP is a fairly simple question about a period that has already been accepted, not as some rigid era with an agenda, but as an attempt to delineate periods when CM with certain characteristics predominated. Enough people find it helpful that it appears to serve some purpose.

In general, the general time periods of 1600/1650 to 1900/1910 are meant to encompass the Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods. Romantic works *predominated* in the last half of the 19th century. They did not predominate in the first half of the 20th century and new Romantic works essentially fell off a cliff after 1910-20 virtually ending the Romantic period as we knew it, so the argument by a previous poster that some composers composed CPT-like music beyond the end of the CPT era is simply not relevant.


----------



## chu42

hammeredklavier said:


> For example, the likes of Berlioz, Meyerbeer, Wagner were far more interested in Gluck than Monteverdi, which is one of the reasons why a lot of Monteverdi's work had been lost in the first place.


Sure. I'm not sure what this has to do with Mozart's influence on Verdi. There are a dozen composers who influenced Verdi more than Mozart.


----------



## hammeredklavier

chu42 said:


> Sure. I'm not sure what this has to do with Mozart's influence on Verdi.


I can tell you about Mozart's "influence" on Wagner though:
https://www.talkclassical.com/70545-why-i-believe-mozart-3.html#post2048800

"During his studies with Weinlig he had tried to discover the secret of Mozart's fluency and lightness in solving difficult technical problems. In particular he tried to emulate the fugal finale of the great C major Symphony, 'magnificent, never surpassed', as he called it years later, and at eighteen he wrote a fugato as the finale of his C major Concert Overture, 'the very best that I could do, as I thought at the time, in honour of my new exemplar'."
< Wagner: A Biography / Curt von Westernhagen / P. 82 >









< The Aesthetic State: A Quest in Modern German Thought / Josef Chytry / P. 291 >

Look at measure 18 in the slow movement of Mozart string quartet K.428:














if you transpose this up a semitone to A major, it looks like this:








D -------------------------
---G#---A ---A#--- B --- C#
---B --- A ---G#-------
--------- F ---E ----------------

Now look at this passage in Wagner Tristan und Isolde Prelude:













D--------------------------
---G#---A ---A# --- B --- C#
B-------------
F--------------E--G#-B---- E

Also look at the ways to reach climax (before falling with arpeggios to the reprise of the initial material) in both Wagner and Mozart (sonata K.533), with a 7th chord built on F.
Wagner uses a half-diminished 7th. Mozart uses a dominant 7th.




 ( 5:05 ~ 5:35 )




 ( 7:00 ~ 7:30 )














View attachment 148131

"... Yes, the missing tonality was in fact C minor; "atonality" is of course not justified, but it was certainly hinted…Adorno's « hegemony of tonality» remains and Mozart's acquisitions anticipate those of Wagner, transforming musical language « only indirectly, by means of the amplification of the tonal space and not through its abolition»""





"There is something Tristanesque avant la lettre about the opening vertical sonority of the Adagio; and in fact, three of its four notes (E-sharp, B, G-sharp) are enharmonically identical to the so-called Tristan chord, even in their register. As in Tristan und Isolde, the dissonance of this initial descends here rather than rising, as in Wagner's opera. The composer of Tristan greatly admired Mozart, particularly his works in the minor, and regarded him as "der große Chromatiker"- a quality that undoubtedly inspired Wagner." < Mozart's Piano Music / William Kinderman / P.35 >


----------



## janxharris

consuono said:


> So you listen only to Stockhausen? And no, I don't work in music and have other aspects of life to attend to, so I'm not wasting 20+ hours a week on something like Stockhausen.
> Yes. Everything since those 3 has either been a) riffing on them in some way or b) an acknowledgement that they can't be emulated without being derivative. Thus the Schoenbergs, Stockhausens and Cages and so on. Atonality and everything since that has fallen outside CP has been a reaction against those "peaks", not some organic development that was bound to happen anyway.


I would be interested to see you 'derive' the mature works of Sibelius - and perhaps Debussy and Vaughan Williams. If you want derivative then look no further than the harmony of Haydn, Mozart and early Beethoven.


----------



## Enthusiast

hammeredklavier said:


> One thing I do know; your assertion that "Stockhausen, Ferneyhough, Xenakis _mastered_ the common practice" is absurd.
> (I would categorize them as non-classical music composers, btw)


Then I must categorise you as a member with a liking for some classical music.


----------



## Fabulin

I would consider CP an affair that went out locally before going out globally, not unlike, for example, Roman legal practices in ancient / medieval Europe.

1921-1924 In France, the deaths of Saint-Saens and Faure.
1945 In Italy, the death of Mascagni.
1949 In Germany, the death of Richard Strauss.
1957 In Austria, the death of Erich Korngold, who wasn't culturally accepted back after the war, because he represented "the old world" (he, who in 1914 had been voted the greatest living Viennese composer together with Schoenberg)
1975 In Russia, the death of Shostakovich. As Aram Khachaturian said ca. 1960s, the younger generations were not interested in continuing the path of himself, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Myaskovsky. By the time of DSCH's death, Khachaturian himself had already retired from composing. He died soon after, in 1978.
1983 in the UK, the death of William Walton. He was very highly regarded on both sides of the pond. Symbolically, shortly before his death, he was asked to make a cameo in the 9-hour Wagner biopic, as a king.

Russia and the UK always seemed to me like the last two bastions of textbook CP. They managed to resist the nazi invasions and preserved more of their old ways of being.

The last tradition standing was the youngest and somewhat hodgepodge one, the conglomerate of musical characters lured into settling in California. In addition to fames like Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Korngold, Alma Mahler and Bruno Walter living there, a new generation of excellent composers (Herrmann, Goldsmith, Williams, E. Bernstein, and others) played chamber music together and together with the studio orchestras up till the 1960s, each with a pan-European palette of emigree top performers, constituted a living musical culture comparable to any French, German, or Russian circle in the 19th century.

By 1983 and Walton's death, Williams was already in the field with a battery of his strongest scores (Jaws 1975, Star Wars 1977, Close Encounters 1977, Superman 1978, Empire Strikes Back 1980, Raiders... 1981, E.T. 1982, The Return of the Jedi 1983). So...

The line of succession in my view has never been broken. It might change if Williams dies without a successor, which sadly seems very likely.

Anyway, 'Extended CP' (literally extended with various modernist techniques, jazz influences etc.) could be said to have lasted into the 2020s.

Of course there are no hard borders with the contemporary trends of modernism, jazz music, and so on.


----------



## Aries

arpeggio said:


> What I find interesting that the listeners who think CPT is dead do not acknowledge the many contemporary composers who employ CPT.


I think it is because these composers are rather unknown. It feels like common knowledge about classcial music ends with Mahler or Shostakovich. I guess most people think that it was just superseded by popular music or atonal music. But this story isn't true. David Hurwitz says:

"The fact of the matter is that if you really took a survey of what all composers were doing in all the various countries irrespective to how advanced they were - just what they did and the style in which they did it, if that was your criterion then the entire atonal, serial, chromatic period probably would just be a bilp because the vast majority of composers continued to write tonal music along some lines."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFcG6GiWQVo#t=7m31s

But this isn't common knowledge. We need to spread this message. History needs to be rewritten.


----------



## Phil loves classical

Aries said:


> I think it is because these composers are rather unknown. It feels like common knowledge about classcial music ends with Mahler or Shostakovich. I guess most people think that it was just superseded by popular music or atonal music. But this story isn't true. David Hurwitz says:
> 
> "The fact of the matter is that if you really took a survey of what all composers were doing in all the various countries irrespective to how advanced they were - just what they did and the style in which they did it, if that was your criterion then the entire atonal, serial, chromatic period probably would just be a bilp because the vast majority of composers continued to write tonal music along some lines."
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFcG6GiWQVo#t=7m31s
> 
> But this isn't common knowledge. We need to spread this message. History needs to be rewritten.


I can understand the sympathy for these composers. But History and the Arts are selective. Which tonal composers should be promoted, since you can't promote them all? How would you determine which to promote, by popularity or nationality? 
I think the innovations were outside of CPT, and those achievements were justly recognized.


----------



## Aries

Phil loves classical said:


> Which tonal composers should be promoted, since you can't promote them all? How would you determine which to promote, by popularity or nationality?


Just promote what you artistically like. In the last half of a year I bumped on Georgy Sviridov, Joly Braga Santos, Alexey Rybnikov and Bernard Herrmann for example to just name first tier composers. I will promote them and search for more.



Phil loves classical said:


> I think the innovations were outside of CPT, and those achievements were justly recognized.


I'm not sure. My feeling is that the innovation comes rather from film music. I mean yes, as I said before, Stockhausen invented some things (concerning instrumentation), but he did not use them in a senseful way. Maybe inventions come from film music, but if you look at Bernard Herrmann for example, he used to write in his inventive way before he wrote film music. Hear his symphony or his symphonietta for example. This way of writing didn't exist at the end of the 19th century. But it has nothing to do with atonalism or serialism.


----------



## consuono

janxharris said:


> I would be interested to see you 'derive' the mature works of Sibelius - and perhaps Debussy and Vaughan Williams.


You need only to look at their influences, and often in terms of reaction *away* from dominant influences in order to find some other path...which I think is what happened with modern music. Debussy was influenced by Chopin and Tchaikovsky who were influenced by Mozart. Debussy also adored Bach. In the case of influences on Sibelius, you have Beethoven>Wagner>Bruckner and also Bach>Beethoven>Busoni and also Mozart and Beethoven>Schumann>Tchaikovsky. Vaughan Williams is a little trickier given the place of English Renaissance music in his style, but he was also influenced by Ravel who was influenced by Mozart and Liszt (who was also influenced by Bach, Mozart and Beethoven) and on and on.


> If you want derivative then look no further than the harmony of Haydn, Mozart and early Beethoven.


How can you call these derivative when they were the among the first and most dominant exemplars of the styles in which they wrote?


----------



## mikeh375

consuono said:


> .......Vaughan Williams is a little trickier given the place of English Renaissance music in his style, but he was also influenced by Ravel who was influenced by Mozart and Liszt (who was also influenced by Bach, Mozart and Beethoven) and on and on.


RVW had some orchestration lessons from Ravel who incidentally, said that RVW was the only student of his who didn't sound like himself.
I can't say I've detected what could reasonably be called an influence of Ravel in RVW's work.


----------



## SanAntone

arpeggio said:


> I know how to respond to individuals who think CPT is dead.
> 
> I have no idea how to respond to those who think contemporary tonal music is unoriginal.


I didn't say anything about the quality of 20th century tonal music, i.e. unoriginal. I said it was uninteresting to me. I rarely (never) make value judgments about any music other than how I respond to it.


----------



## consuono

mikeh375 said:


> RVW had some orchestration lessons from Ravel who incidentally, said that RVW was the only student of his who didn't sound like himself.
> I can't say I've detected what could reasonably be called an influence of Ravel in RVW's work.


I'm not an authority on RVW -- his work never appealed much to me -- so we can call him an outlier then. I don't think it refutes the overall point that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven represent the peaks of Common Practice style.


----------



## SanAntone

consuono said:


> I'm not an authority on RVW -- his work never appealed much to me -- so we can call him an outlier then. I don't think it refutes the overall point that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven represent the peaks of Common Practice style.


I agree with you. Just wanted to chime in since it is rare when that happens.


----------



## Phil loves classical

consuono said:


> I'm not an authority on RVW -- his work never appealed much to me -- so we can call him an outlier then. I don't think it refutes the overall point that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven represent the peaks of Common Practice style.


How would you describe what makes their music in particular the peak relative to what came after?


----------



## consuono

Phil loves classical said:


> How would you describe what makes their music in particular the peak relative to what came after?


Ask the OP the same question about Brahms.


----------



## chu42

consuono said:


> Ask the OP the same question about Brahms.


I have already said that I don't consider Brahms the peak. I consider Rachmaninov or Sibelius the peak because I believe that strictly within the confines of CPT, no composer after them has reached their heights in terms of significant contributions to the repertoire.

I don't think this can be said for Beethoven because of the massive contributions made by Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Brahms, Mahler, etc. Of course this is all subjective so if you believe all of the above represent a decline in significance, then that's fine.


----------



## janxharris

chu42 said:


> I have already said that I don't consider Brahms the peak. I consider Rachmaninov or Sibelius the peak because I believe that strictly within the confines of CPT, no composer has reached their heights in terms of significant contributions to the repertoire.
> 
> I don't think this cannot be said for Beethoven because of the massive contributions made by Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Brahms, Mahler, etc. Of course this is all subjective so if you believe all of the above represent a decline in significance, then that's fine.


Could you clarify re LVB?


----------



## chu42

janxharris said:


> Could you clarify re LVB?


After Beethoven: Berlioz, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, Puccini, Mahler, Bruckner, Wagner, Sibelius

After Rachmaninov: John Williams, Alan Silvestri, Howard Shore? Maybe some of the composers for band that Arpeggio named.

The point is that tonal music significantly diverted from CPT after Rachmaninov, including the incorporation of Impressionism, folk music, metatonality, polytonality, etc.

Today's excellent tonal composers like Jennifer Higdon are nowhere near CPT in terms of compositional style:






I think Rachmaninov, Vaughan-Williams, Strauss, and Sibelius may have said all there is worth saying within the confines of CPT. Until another composer comes along and extends the chain, this remains my opinion.


----------



## janxharris

chu42 said:


> After Beethoven: Berlioz, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, Puccini, Mahler, Bruckner, Wagner, Sibelius
> 
> After Rachmaninov: John Williams, Alan Silvestri, Howard Shore? Maybe some of the composers for band that Arpeggio named.
> 
> The point is that tonal music significantly diverted from CPT after Rachmaninov, including the incorporation of Impressionism, folk music, metatonality, polytonality, etc.
> 
> Today's excellent tonal composers like Jennifer Higdon are nowhere near CPT in terms of compositional style:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I think Rachmaninov, Vaughan-Williams, Strauss, and Sibelius may have said all there is worth saying within the confines of CPT. Until another composer comes along and extends the chain, this remains my opinion.


Thanks. I should have been clearer. Did you mean:

I don't think this can be said for Beethoven

Rather than

I don't think this cannot be said for Beethoven

?

Rachmaninov and Sibelius are such different composers - so I'm curious about what you think Sergei achieved. I understand Sibelius's contribution.


----------



## consuono

chu42 said:


> I have already said that I don't consider Brahms the peak. I consider Rachmaninov or Sibelius the peak because I believe that strictly within the confines of CPT, no composer after them has reached their heights in terms of significant contributions to the repertoire.
> 
> I don't think this cannot be said for Beethoven because of the massive contributions made by Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Brahms, Mahler, etc. Of course this is all subjective so if you believe all of the above represent a decline in significance, then that's fine.


The "peak" implies as near to perfection in a genre as you can get, whatever is meant by "perfection". I don't think any composer post-Beethoven ever equaled him, much less surpassed his achievements. Not Brahms, not Sibelius and certainly not Rachmaninov the symphonist. They would probably agree.


----------



## chu42

janxharris said:


> Thanks. I should have been clearer. Did you mean:
> 
> I don't think this can be said for Beethoven
> 
> Rather than
> 
> I don't think this cannot be said for Beethoven
> 
> ?
> 
> Rachmaninov and Sibelius are such different composers - so I'm curious about what you think Sergei achieved. I understand Sibelius's contribution.


Yes, edited.

As for Rachmaninov, I think his significance lies mostly in his oeuvre in the piano, where he refined and wrung out every last bit of compositional technique from Romantic-era piano writing.


----------



## chu42

consuono said:


> The "peak" implies as near to perfection in a genre as you can get, whatever is meant by "perfection". I don't think any composer post-Beethoven ever equaled him, much less surpassed his achievements. Not Brahms, not Sibelius and certainly not Rachmaninov the symphonist. They would probably agree.


Maybe I should be more specific. When saying "peak", I meant in terms of innovation rather than refinement.


----------



## hammeredklavier

chu42 said:


> Note: Common practice era =/= tonal music. I would consider Wagner and late-Liszt to already being stepping foot outside common practice, even though their music is completely tonal.


I remember a certain member expressing their view that Rachmaninoff's Op.39 set represents his "move" away from the common practice.


----------



## chu42

hammeredklavier said:


> I remember a certain member expressing their view that Rachmaninoff's Op.39 set represents his "move" away from the common practice.


No, that would be his Piano Concerto No.4. Rachmaninov's etudes-tableaux are very chromatic but still firmly within CPT in my opinion.


----------



## arpeggio

Just because I have not heard of a composer does it mean that they are not well known.


----------



## Fabulin

chu42 said:


> Maybe I should be more specific. When saying "peak", I meant in terms of innovation rather than refinement.


What makes you consider Rachmaninoff so innovative, if I may ask?


----------



## Bruckner Anton

Brahms is considered by a lot of musicians to be the greatest romantic era composer, including Professor Robert Greenberg.


----------



## chu42

Fabulin said:


> What makes you consider Rachmaninoff so innovative, if I may ask?


I believe he pushed Romanticism to its technical and harmonic limit


----------



## Fabulin

chu42 said:


> I believe he pushed Romanticism to its technical and harmonic limit


But what does that even mean? This phrase gets thrown around so much, from Wagner through Debussy, Schoenberg's romantic works, Richard Strauss, Reger, Scriabin... even Mahler...

I am especially puzzled because to me Rachmaninoff's music (in the context of his times) sounds like a boring old hat compared to even some much earlier composers, such as Berlioz, Wagner, and Bruckner, not to mention wilder contemporaries like Bartok, Khachaturian, or Herrmann (or Messiaen or Scelsi), or Williams and Goldsmith later. I can't fathom Rach of all people being the innovative one. He seems more like Sergei Bortkiewicz - a syrrupy concoction of Chopin and the Russians. A perfector - maybe - but an innovator?


----------



## chu42

Fabulin said:


> But what does that even mean? This phrase gets thrown around so much, from Wagner through Debussy, Schoenberg's romantic works, Richard Strauss, Reger, Scriabin... even Mahler...
> 
> I am especially puzzled because to me Rachmaninoff's music (in the context of his times) sounds like a boring old hat compared to even some much earlier composers, such as Berlioz, Wagner, and Bruckner, not to mention wilder contemporaries like Bartok, Khachaturian, or Herrmann (or Messiaen or Scelsi), or Williams and Goldsmith later. I can't fathom Rach of all people being the innovative one. He seems more like Sergei Bortkiewicz - a syrrupy concoction of Chopin and the Russians. A perfector - maybe - but an innovator?


I enjoy Bortkiewicz, but his style comprises the worst of early Rachmaninov. Later Rachmaninov is much more unique and compelling-listen to the following works to break his stereotype as a "syrupy" composer.


----------



## janxharris

consuono said:


> You need only to look at their influences, and often in terms of reaction *away* from dominant influences in order to find some other path...which I think is what happened with modern music. Debussy was influenced by Chopin and Tchaikovsky who were influenced by Mozart. Debussy also adored Bach. In the case of influences on Sibelius, you have Beethoven>Wagner>Bruckner and also Bach>Beethoven>Busoni and also Mozart and Beethoven>Schumann>Tchaikovsky. Vaughan Williams is a little trickier given the place of English Renaissance music in his style, but he was also influenced by Ravel who was influenced by Mozart and Liszt (who was also influenced by Bach, Mozart and Beethoven) and on and on.


And Buxtehude on Bach - Bach, Handel and Haydn on Mozart...so I'm not sure of your point.
Early Sibelius is very redolent of Tchaikovsky - but it didn't last.



> How can you call these derivative when they were the among the first and most dominant exemplars of the styles in which they wrote?


I referred specifically to their (we are talking about Haydn, Mozart and early Beethoven) harmony, which for me is akin to pastiche. I don't believe it is disputed that harmony in the 18th century was _relatively_ simple and that composers were using progressions in common usage. I recognise this obviously isn't an issue for many listeners but there comes a point the closer you get to derivative when it does.

I'd still be interested to see you cite some passages of Sibelius's symphonies (4-7) where he is riffing off of the big 3 or anyone else for that matter.


----------



## Wilhelm Theophilus

Allerius said:


> Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner and Brahms represent the highest peaks of the Himalayas that the classical music of the common practice are, in my humble opinion of course.


Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner and Brahms represent the highest peaks of...music.


----------



## hammeredklavier

janxharris said:


> And Buxtehude on Bach - Bach, Handel and Haydn on Mozart...so I'm not sure of your point.
> Early Sibelius is very redolent of Tchaikovsky - but it didn't last.


I also don't get about some of these people constantly harping on the "absolute/objective greatness" of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. Sometimes they're obsessed to indoctrinate other people about the composers' "absolute/objective greatness", but other times they pretend as if these composers wrote music that's just "obsolete" by the later composers' standards. At least I try to be consistent with my viewpoint by avoiding falling into that "paradox".



consuono said:


> I can see why the form.fell by the wayside in favor of cyclical themes or "thematic cells" and whatnot though. After a while it seems to me that sonata form would become like a straitjacket.


----------



## consuono

janxharris said:


> And Buxtehude on Bach - Bach, Handel and Haydn on Mozart...so I'm not sure of your point.
> Early Sibelius is very redolent of Tchaikovsky - but it didn't last.


Of course they all had their influences. Nobody said they didn't. It's what's achieved in synthesizing influences. Buxtehude was a big influence on Bach. On Mozart or Beethoven or Stravinsky, not so much. Bach was, though.



> I referred specifically to their (we are talking about Haydn, Mozart and early Beethoven) harmony, which for me is akin to pastiche. I don't believe it is disputed that harmony in the 18th century was _relatively_ simple and that composers were using progressions in common usage. I recognise this obviously isn't an issue for many listeners but there comes a point the closer you get to derivative when it does.


Only you demonstrate absolutely nothing about "derivative".


hammeredklavier said:


> I also don't get about some of these people constantly harping on the "absolute/objective greatness" of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven.


Or harping on the objective wealth of ideas in Michael Haydn and the objective dearth of them in his brother Joseph. Get outta here.


----------



## janxharris

consuono said:


> Only you demonstrate absolutely nothing about "derivative".


I could do but, as I said, it isn't an issue for all listeners; in any case, you made the initial assertion and I asked you to show the derivation regarding Sibelius. Sibelius is often cited as someone with a totally unique voice...but Mozart not so much.

Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy some of WAM's work and certainly would cite him as the best from his era.


----------



## chu42

janxharris said:


> I referred specifically to their (we are talking about Haydn, Mozart and early Beethoven) harmony, which for me is akin to pastiche. I don't believe it is disputed that harmony in the 18th century was _relatively_ simple and that composers were using progressions in common usage. I recognise this obviously isn't an issue for many listeners but there comes a point the closer you get to derivative when it does.





consuono said:


> Only you demonstrate absolutely nothing about "derivative".


It is scientifically proven that Beethoven, Mozart, etc. used more derivative harmonies, melodies, and chord progressions than their successors.

The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology designed a computer program in order to identify "similar" chord progressions and melodies.

When analyzing the music of 19 major composers of the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic eras, Rachmaninov, Bach, and Brahms were found to be the least derivative with their predecessors, while the classical composers (Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn) were found to be the most derivative with their predecessors.

This result doesn't surprise me. As far as Beethoven goes, a lot of his originality stemmed from his use of structure, rhythm, sonority, and texture-none of which were considered in the study.

Furthermore, only a select few of his late works are decidedly exceptional in terms of harmonic invention, and he has hundreds of early works that are not so original.

And of course, we don't judge music with computer programs. Novelty doesn't necessarily correlate with enjoyability.

But for those of you who like "objectivity" in music, this is as objective as it gets.

https://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-01/s-rtm012820.php


----------



## arpeggio

I think it would kill some of our members if they came up with objective criteria to judge music and then discover Boulez is a great composer.


----------



## Fabulin

chu42 said:


> It is scientifically proven that Beethoven, Mozart, etc. used more derivative harmonies, melodies, and chord progressions than their successors.
> 
> A computer program created by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology was designed in order to identify "similar" chord progressions and melodies.
> 
> When analyzing the music of 19 major composers of the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic eras, Rachmaninov, Bach, and Brahms were found to be the least derivative with their predecessors, while the classical composers (Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn) were found to be the most derivative with their predecessors.
> 
> This result doesn't surprise me. As far as Beethoven goes, a lot of his originality stemmed from his use of structure, rhythm, sonority, and texture-none of which were considered in the study.
> 
> Furthermore, only a select few of his late works are decidedly exceptional in terms of harmonic invention, and he has hundreds of early works that are not so original.
> 
> And of course, we don't judge music with computer programs. Novelty doesn't necessarily correlate with enjoyability.
> 
> But for those of you who like "objectivity" in music, this is as objective as it gets.
> 
> https://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-01/s-rtm012820.php


Wait a minute... it's only about piano music, not ensemble music!


----------



## chu42

Fabulin said:


> Wait a minute... it's only about piano music, not ensemble music!


Right. But surely the same aspects hold up in terms of harmony and melody.

Furthermore, Romantic era composers had a larger variety of instruments, ensemble varieties, structures, etc. Compare the orchestration of Rimsky-Korsakov vs. Haydn and I think you will find that one was much less constrained than the other.

Again, nothing to do with enjoyability or "greatness". Just objectively speaking.


----------



## hammeredklavier

chu42 said:


> It is scientifically proven that Beethoven, Mozart, etc. used more derivative harmonies, melodies, and chord progressions than their successors.
> A computer program created by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology was designed in order to identify "similar" chord progressions and melodies.
> When analyzing the music of 19 major composers of the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic eras, Rachmaninov, Bach, and Brahms were found to be the least derivative with their predecessors, while the classical composers (Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn) were found to be the most derivative with their predecessors.


I know that article. But as far as I remember, the research was conducted by a statistical physicist who doesn't understand much classical music. You grossly misinterpret their findings. They use the term 화음 (chords) instead of 화성 (harmony) and so they don't take into account the composers' use of nonharmonic tones. So Bach (whose predecessors used modality) and the Romantics would score high, whereas the Classicists with their surface I-V structure would score low.


----------



## hammeredklavier

janxharris said:


> I could do but, as I said, it isn't an issue for all listeners; in any case, you made the initial assertion and I asked you to show the derivation regarding Sibelius. Sibelius is often cited as someone with a totally unique voice...but Mozart not so much.
> Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy some of WAM's work and certainly would cite him as the best from his era.


Mozart actually does have a unique voice.*** You and consuono both have good points, but I think, when it comes to matters of "greatness", people in general are too fixated on the earlier composers. It's unfair to judge the later composers by the same yardsticks as the earlier composers. Mozart wrote fast, and in many genres, but this was what all great professional composers in the 18th century were required to do. I don't think you can judge, for example, Wagner, by the same standards. Considering the context in which they achieved artistry, I'm actually inclined to think they're both equally "great" in their own individual ways.

***
Bernstein (in his lecture on Mozart's symphony in G minor K.550): [ 8:07 ]
"Do you realize that, that wild, atonal-sounding passage contains every one of the twelve chromatic tones except the tonic note G? ... Take my word for it, that out-burst of chromatic rage is Classically-contained, and so is the climax of this development section, which finds itself in the unlikely key of C-sharp minor, which is as far away as you can get from the home key of G minor."
missa sancti trinitatis K.167 [ 3:52 ]

Bernstein: [ 2:03 ] "But notice that Mozart's theme is already chromatically formed. And even more so when it repeats."
missa brevis K.275 [ 3:07 , 3:18 ] , [ 10:33 , 10:58 ] , [ 14:00 , 14:37 ]
missa brevis K.257 [ 3:57 , 4:10 ] , [ 8:22 , 9:50 ]

Bernstein: [ 2:59 ] "There's that Classical balance we were talking about -chromatic wandering on the top, firmly supported by tonic-and-dominant structure underneath."
missa brevis K.258 [ 2:53 ~ 3:31 ]

Bernstein: [ 6:02 ] "Even this lead-in to the home key, is chromatically written, firmly held in place by a dominant pedal." 
missa brevis K.275 [ 7:12 ~ 7:21 ]

Look at the introduction to the K.465 "dissonance" quartet,
and then this contrapuntal passage of chromatic fourths in 
missa sancti Trinitatis K.167 [ 10:47 ]

Also compare K.551/iv with K.192/iii

Luchesi or Salieri, for example, ([E.M.], [H.M.], [R]) don't orchestrate like this: 
spatzenmesse K.220 [ 2:30 ~ 4:00 ]
"On the other hand, for the French, Mozart was certainly not 'one of us' from a national point of view. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, before Berlioz's time, some influential critics - for instance, Julien-Louis Geoffroy - rejected Mozart as a foreigner, considering his music 'scholastic', stressing his use of harmony over melody, and the dominance of the orchestra over singing in the operas - all these were considered negative features of 'Germanic' music."
<
View attachment 130858
>


----------



## fluteman

arpeggio said:


> I think it would kill some of our members if they came up with objective criteria to judge music and then discover Boulez is a great composer.


And it might be easier to do that with Boulez than nearly anyone else. I made a similar point, maybe in not quite as skilled and diplomatic a way, in another thread, a very long one now closed. No problem, arpeggio. You are always welcome to be the smarter, more articulate version of me.


----------



## consuono

chu42 said:


> It is scientifically proven that Beethoven, Mozart, etc. used more derivative harmonies, melodies, and chord progressions than their successors.
> 
> The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology designed a computer program in order to identify "similar" chord progressions and melodies.
> 
> When analyzing the music of 19 major composers of the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic eras, Rachmaninov, Bach, and Brahms were found to be the least derivative with their predecessors, while the classical composers (Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn) were found to be the most derivative with their predecessors.
> 
> This result doesn't surprise me. As far as Beethoven goes, a lot of his originality stemmed from his use of structure, rhythm, sonority, and texture-none of which were considered in the study.
> 
> Furthermore, only a select few of his late works are decidedly exceptional in terms of harmonic invention, and he has hundreds of early works that are not so original.
> 
> And of course, we don't judge music with computer programs. Novelty doesn't necessarily correlate with enjoyability.
> 
> But for those of you who like "objectivity" in music, this is as objective as it gets.
> 
> https://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-01/s-rtm012820.php


Derived from what? Doing a word search of that page, the word "derivative" doesn't come up once. And Rachmaninov derived much from Tchaikovsky.


> The authors found that compositions from the Classical period (1750 to 1820) tended to have the lowest novelty scores. During this period Haydn and Mozart were highly influential but were later overtaken by Beethoven during the Classical-to-Romantic transitional period.


If Beethoven was "derivative", he could hardly have been "transitional".


arpeggio said:


> I think it would kill some of our members if they came up with objective criteria to judge music and then discover Boulez is a great composer.


I still wouldn't be a Boulez fan, nor would very many others. Not much would change.


----------



## SanAntone

consuono said:


> I still wouldn't be a Boulez fan, nor would very many others. Not much would change.


So what good is objective greatness if it won't influence listening habits?


----------



## consuono

SanAntone said:


> So what good is objective greatness if it won't influence listening habits?


Useful for analysis, but my giving you the objective measurements of the Parthenon won't in itself make you think it's a beautiful building. Greatness *does* influence listening habits, btw.


----------



## fluteman

SanAntone said:


> So what good is objective greatness if it won't influence listening habits?


Historically, the idea has been, 'great' music is permitted, promoted and funded by the government or those in power. Bad or degenerate music is censored or banned, or at minimum, not funded. ArtMusic reflected his support of this approach when he said it would be a waste of taxpayer's money to support the music you like. As greatness is objective, your subjective preferences need not be considered, rather, standards are imposed by those in power.
Sometimes, the idea is, society as a whole can be strong-armed into accepting these aesthetic judgments, as part of a program of social control over all aspects of society, as with Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Some here at TC simply see themselves as privileged elitists who have succeeded in appreciating this greatness, whereas those poor, tone-deaf souls like you who can't, or at least not to the same extent, are excluded from the club. Some at TC even want what they think is "avant garde" music excluded from the definition of classical music and moved to separate forums. If you insist on discussing this music, they want to kick you out of the TC club, or at least their part of it.

I am reminded of Groucho Marx's famous comment, "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member."


----------



## consuono

fluteman said:


> Historically, the idea has been, 'great' music is permitted, promoted and funded by the government or those in power. Bad or degenerate music is censored or banned, or at minimum, not funded. ArtMusic reflected his support of this approach when he said it would be a waste of taxpayer's money to support the music you like. As greatness is objective, your subjective preferences need not be considered, rather, standards are imposed by those in power.
> Sometimes, the idea is, society as a whole can be strong-armed into accepting these aesthetic judgments, as part of a program of social control over all aspects of society, as with Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Some here at TC simply see themselves as privileged elitists who have succeeded in appreciating this greatness, whereas those poor, tone-deaf souls like you who can't, or at least not to the same extent, are excluded from the club. Some at TC even want what they think is "avant garde" music excluded from the definition of classical music and moved to separate forums. If you insist on discussing this music, they want to kick you out of the TC club, or at least their part of it.
> 
> I am reminded of Groucho Marx's famous comment, "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member."


A straw man, ad hominem and Godwin all rolled into one. Impressive.


----------



## fbjim

It's not out of line, given the attitudes hardline right wingers have toward modern art and their idealized vision of the past, though. Aesthetics are political.


----------



## consuono

fbjim said:


> It's not out of line, given the attitudes hardline right wingers have toward modern art and their idealized vision of the past, though. Aesthetics are political.


Which means they're objective in some way, right? I mean if there's a hardline right-wing and a hardline left-wing...(where does that leave the libertarian-ish types or the apolitical, btw?)


----------



## Bwv 1080

Mahler and Reger - Sibelius and Rachmaninoff were approaching pastiche


----------



## fbjim

No, aesthetics being political is just another way of saying that art can't be separated from the society which produces it, or the society and culture of the audience.


----------



## consuono

fbjim said:


> No, aesthetics being political is just another way of saying that art can't be separated from the society which produces it, or the society and culture of the audience.


It's just another way of saying that all existence is political, which is something I don't accept. If I were to favor funding a Bach choir over a nude dancing troupe it doesn't mean I'm a Nazi. (And I don't think art should be banned or censored, incidentally.)


----------



## arpeggio

I do not like Boulez either, so what?


----------



## consuono

arpeggio said:


> I do not like Boulez either, so what?


Nothing, I guess. What was your point? Continuing this weird objective-subjective obsession that so many here seem to have? Subjectively speaking, of course.


----------



## arpeggio

consuono said:


> Nothing, I guess. What was your point? Continuing this weird objective-subjective obsession that so many here seem to have? Subjectively speaking, of course.


Give me a break. You do not know?  I refuse to believe that after all of this time you have to ask that question.

(I think that this is an example of a person asking a question they already know the answer to.)


----------



## consuono

arpeggio said:


> Give me a break. You do not know?  I refuse to believe that after all of this time you have to ask that question.
> 
> (I think that this is an example of a person asking a question they already know the answer to.)


No, I really don't know what the point is other than wagging a finger at the "objectivists" (which over dozens of pages in that other thread was never clearly defined). The ones most obsessed with it seem to be "subjectivists" who ironically are apparently 110% sure they're right. Whatever "right" means.


----------



## SanAntone

consuono said:


> Useful for analysis, but my giving you the objective measurements of the Parthenon won't in itself make you think it's a beautiful building. Greatness *does* influence listening habits, btw.


You said it wouldn't influence you to enjoy Boulez. The same is true of everyone, i.e. they won't enjoy a composer they don't like even if they're told he was a great composer.


----------



## consuono

SanAntone said:


> You said it wouldn't influence you to enjoy Boulez. The same is true of everyone, i.e. they won't enjoy a composer they don't like even if they're told he was a great composer.


Well SanAntone the problem is that to imagine Boulez being demonstrated "objectively" as a "great composer", you'd have to subject his music to a standard other than his "own demanding esthetic requirements" as I think you put it in some other thread. By that standard I'm also a great -- er, interesting *to me* composer. So no, I agree that Boulez isn't great.


----------



## Bwv 1080

Well, Hitler did not like Boulez’s music either, just sayin if the shoe fits...


----------



## fluteman

SanAntone said:


> You said it wouldn't influence you to enjoy Boulez. The same is true of everyone, i.e. they won't enjoy a composer they don't like even if they're told he was a great composer.


Yes. And FWIW, I've consistently said this supposed subjectivist / objectivist distinction is illogical and ridiculous. There are those who believe certain art is of inherent value, independent of how it is perceived. They are more comfortable thinking of it that way, perhaps because they are worried that their own perceptions are suspect and unreliable. My guess is, due at least in some instances to a lack of knowledge of music theory, say, what a fugue is, how it is constructed, and why it 'works', why they like it so much is a mystery to them, when it's really rooted in what one expects and wants to hear in harmony, i.e., harmonic progressions (or modulations), ambiguities and resolutions. What one expects and wants to hear in this regard, in turn, is rooted in one's own experience. Certainly, harmonic progression is only one possible element in music, and some music lacks it entirely.

What would spur these people to conclude that certain specific harmonic progressions or modulations, ambiguities and resolutions are inherently superior to others, aside from this insecurity in their own preferences due to lack of basic music theory knowledge, I don't know. They don't care what your perceptions are if you disagree, though if you agree, they do take comfort in numbers. But, as you have repeatedly pointed out, if numbers matter, why isn't the latest hip hop sensation the greatest musician? Why isn't Jay Z the master rather than Bach? Good question. The real answer is, we value long standing cultural traditions that help bind our society together. But only Strange Magic and Portamento seem to enjoy discussing anthropology here.


----------



## SanAntone

arpeggio said:


> I think it would kill some of our members if they came up with objective criteria to judge music and then discover Boulez is a great composer.





consuono said:


> I still wouldn't be a Boulez fan, nor would very many others. Not much would change.





consuono said:


> Well SanAntone the problem is that to imagine Boulez being demonstrated "objectively" as a "great composer", you'd have to subject his music to a standard other than his "own demanding esthetic requirements" as I think you put it in some other thread. By that standard I'm also a great -- er, interesting *to me* composer. So no, I agree that Boulez isn't great.


I posted the exchange to refresh your memory. Moving the goalposts won't wash. You said objective criteria demonstrating Boulez's greatness would not change your opinion of his music, and you went on to say nor would it change many people's opinion of his music.

So, I ask again: what good is objective greatness if it won't influence a listener's opinion of a composer's music?


----------



## fluteman

SanAntone said:


> I posted the exchange to refresh your memory. Moving the goalposts won't wash. You said objective criteria demonstrating Boulez's greatness would not change your opinion of his music, and you went on to say nor would it change many people's opinion of his music.
> 
> So, I ask again: what good is objective greatness if it won't influence a listener's opinion of a composer's music?


The answer is, it establishes a long term cultural tradition that helps bind our society together, even if we never have quite the same tastes in music. It has a practical purpose, arbitrary though it inevitably is. That's why I like a society that values, and preserves, a tradition of musical diversity.


----------



## arpeggio

consuono said:


> No, I really don't know what the point is other than wagging a finger at the "objectivists" (which over dozens of pages in that other thread was never clearly defined). The ones most obsessed with it seem to be "subjectivists" who ironically are apparently 110% sure they're right. Whatever "right" means.


I am a member of the greatness is in the ears of the beholder school.

I refuse to believe that any veteran of this forum does not know this. This is a point I have made countless times over the years.

I have also stated many times I am an adherent to the aesthetics of John Dewey.

After all of these years if someone still thinks I am an pseudo self-righteous, anachronistic, subjectionist, I give up. I have been accused of being all sorts of things over the years.

I really am an agnostic, dyslectic, insomniac who spends his evenings contemplating the existence of dog.


----------



## SanAntone

fluteman said:


> The answer is, it establishes a long term cultural tradition that helps bind our society together, even if we never have quite the same tastes in music. It has a practical purpose, arbitrary though it inevitably is. That's why I like a society that values, and preserves, a tradition of musical diversity.


It hasn't bound this forum together. It's been a very divisive issue played out over hundreds of pages in several threads.

My point is simple: if alleged greatness does not convince anyone to change their opinion about a composer, why elevate it to such a level as to argue endlessly about it and alienate countless fans of classical music?


----------



## fluteman

consuono said:


> No, I really don't know what the point is other than wagging a finger at the "objectivists" (which over dozens of pages in that other thread was never clearly defined). The ones most obsessed with it seem to be "subjectivists" who ironically are apparently 110% sure they're right. Whatever "right" means.


I'll try, one last time. The debate here, called empiricism v. rationalism outside this little TC hothouse, is not about which side is right, but rather, which approach is a more useful way of thinking of the world. I've defined both approaches as clearly as I could, once again in post 115. I've even made your argument (in favor of rationalism) for you, as there is a potential advantage to the rationalist approach in the arts, as it promotes social unity through long term cultural traditions. The other side of the coin is that it also can promote elitism and intolerance of diversity.

Please stop trying to "prove" your position. Proof is an empirical concept, and you are only handing the empiricists the win. If you want to represent the rationalist side effectively, point to the human need to organize into societies and the need for long term cultural traditions to hold societies together. Point out that our individual uniqueness and diversity in the way we see things is a strength, but so are our common values. Paradoxical, but true. Therefore, we need different people to take a leap of faith and accept the idea, without proof, that were are the same in certain important ways, so our society will hold together. You and I may not agree on Boulez's Notations, or Brucker's 8th symphony, but there need to be enough cultural traditions we do agree on that we can live together in the same society. QED.



SanAntone said:


> It hasn't bound this forum together. It's been a very divisive issue played out over hundreds of pages in several threads.
> 
> My point is simple: if alleged greatness does not convince anyone to change their opinion about a composer, why elevate it to such a level as to argue endlessly about it and alienate countless fans of classical music?


As you can see, I've taken this simple point of yours to heart and made one last attempt to convince these rationalists of the futility of proving the 'rightness' of their position. I hope it helps.


----------



## arpeggio

It is actually a very small vocal minority that cause these problems. The vast majority of the members are pretty cool.


----------



## RogerWaters

I interpret this question as when did the common-practice tradition cease developing/advancing.

In what sense could it be argued that Rachmaninoff advanced common-practice?

More fundamentally, what is the boundary between extending the tradition and leaving it? Did the following composers advance common-practice or simply augment it with non-common-practice elements (modality, for instance, in the case of VW):

- early Schoenberg (with atonality)
- Vaughan Williams (with modality)
- Faure (?)
- Reger (?)
- Sibelius (?)

Very interested in this topic.

:tiphat:


----------



## fluteman

arpeggio said:


> It is actually a very small vocal minority that cause these problems. The vast majority of the members are pretty cool.


Yes, good to hear. As a musician (which you must be) and an adherent to the aesthetics of John Dewey, the last thing you need from me is a lesson on pragmatism. Or anything else. But why do internet classical music enthusiasts feel need to act like Michael Caine and the other outnumbered British soldiers in Zulu and defend the fort to the death against the invading hordes? It's hard to escape this mentality here. I once posted a comment about a contemporary music performance that occurred in my neighborhood in the 'wrong' place, i.e., not in a thread exclusively devoted to contemporary music, and got rewarded with a very negative comment about this music in particular and contemporary music in general. Sheesh.


----------



## DaveM

fluteman said:


> Yes. And FWIW, I've consistently said this supposed subjectivist / objectivist distinction is illogical and ridiculous. There are those who believe certain art is of inherent value, independent of how it is perceived. *They are more comfortable thinking of it that way, perhaps because they are worried that their own perceptions are suspect and unreliable. My guess is, due at least in some instances to a lack of knowledge of music theory, say, what a fugue is, how it is constructed, and why it 'works', why they like it so much is a mystery to them,* when it's really rooted in what one expects and wants to hear in harmony, i.e., harmonic progressions (or modulations), ambiguities and resolutions. What one expects and wants to hear in this regard, in turn, is rooted in one's own experience. Certainly, harmonic progression is only one possible element in music, and some music lacks it entirely.
> 
> *What would spur these people to conclude that certain specific harmonic progressions or modulations, ambiguities and resolutions are inherently superior to others, aside from this insecurity in their own preferences due to lack of basic music theory knowledge, I don't know. They don't care what your perceptions are if you disagree, though if you agree, they do take comfort in numbers.* But, as you have repeatedly pointed out, if numbers matter, why isn't the latest hip hop sensation the greatest musician? Why isn't Jay Z the master rather than Bach? Good question. The real answer is, we value long standing cultural traditions that help bind our society together. But only Strange Magic and Portamento seem to enjoy discussing anthropology here.


Who are you addressing: anybody who believes that there are objective elements in declaring a given composer or work great? Among those who have posted on the side of some objectivity, there have been different interpretations, some more extreme than others. A very few have had more extreme positions, but most have had moderate views.

So why the broad brush? Why the inference that the reason anyone who believes in some objectivity is_ 'perhaps because they are worried that their own perceptions are suspect and unreliable_ or due to _'a lack of knowledge of music theory,_? And why repeat that this is '_ from this insecurity in their own preferences due to lack of basic music theory knowledge_? Does this make your position more righteous? Are you more secure in your belief system and more knowledgeable than anyone who has supported any level of objectivity? When you point this kind of finger at others, there are four fingers pointing back at you.

And as for the 'numbers'. Practically everyone who talks about numbers supporting this or that is talking about classical music. Why does the comparison with other genres of music have any relevance at all. Bach's music is lousy hip hop and Jay Z does awful baroque.


----------



## arpeggio

fluteman said:


> Yes, good to hear. As a musician (which you must be) and an adherent to the aesthetics of John Dewey, the last thing you need from me is a lesson on pragmatism. Or anything else. But why do internet classical music enthusiasts feel need to act like Michael Caine and the other outnumbered British soldiers in Zulu and defend the fort to the death against the invading hordes? It's hard to escape this mentality here. I once posted a comment about a contemporary music performance that occurred in my neighborhood in the 'wrong' place, i.e., not in a thread exclusively devoted to contemporary music, and got rewarded with a very negative comment about this music in particular and contemporary music in general. Sheesh.


Reminder, I am an amateur bassoonist.

I have given up trying to understand these critics. I have no idea what they are trying to prove.

The key to Dewey's aesthetics is how we react to art is dependent on our experiences. In music each of us is going to gravitate toward those composers we are the most comfortable with.

Some of us are comfortable listening to Boulez, some of us are not.

I do not care for Cage. But I still am compelled to support those who like him.

In spite of my laissez-faire attitude I have lost track on all of the members who have accused me of being dogmatic.


----------



## Luchesi

fluteman said:


> By your definition, I would disagree that the "common practice" era is over. Numerous modern composers never rejected "common practice", which I assume means more than just "tonality", which you can find in numerous genres of music, western and non-western, but rather predominant use of the diatonic scale and harmonic progressions around the circle of fifths. Many if not most prominent modern western composers never fully accepted "atonality" in the sense you are using it, if they accepted it at all -- Bela Bartok, Sergei Prokofiev, Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, Darius Milhaud, Dmitri Shostakovich, Olivier Messiaen, Bohuslav Martinu, Francis Poulenc, Andre Jolivet, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Alberto Ginastera, Aaron Copland, Ned Rorem, and Peteris Vasks, to name a few.
> 
> More and more, TC seems like a tiny hothouse where bizarre propositions, such as did classical music go downhill after the "tonal era" ended in 1900, or even in 1950, are debated ad infinitum. I say bizarre, since the tonal era has not ended, has never ended, and shows no sign of ending.


That's my thinking too. Tonality is an unavoidable universal. We imagine we hear the relationships (if incompletely, and slightly twisted) even in atonal works. My brain sparks a little when I think I hear a chord progression 'imitated' for a connective sequence. Music still seems to be rooted in the simple integers, 2,3,4 and 5. I agree, - shows no sign of ending.. 
The problem for me (and I've heard it also from composers) is that the stale, sing-songy sounds of tonal music in the neo-classical throw backs become too obvious for an interesting narration. It comes across as too 'diatonic', but what's the fix? It seems to me that there's still plenty of clever concepts in the various styles of Prokofiev and Bartok and Shostakovich.


----------



## consuono

fluteman said:


> Yes. And FWIW, I've consistently said this supposed subjectivist / objectivist distinction is illogical and ridiculous. There are those who believe certain art is of inherent value, independent of how it is perceived. They are more comfortable thinking of it that way, perhaps because they are worried that their own perceptions are suspect and unreliable. ...


But yet you've been one of the most vocal in railing against "objectivists" (Hitler, Stalin and Mao? Come on.) Maybe it's the "subjectivists"' who feel insecure in a devotion to music that not many people like, and therefore all taste-judgements must be given equal weight. Maybe there are those who think there's no inherent value in anything at all. In That mindset is actually closer to those historical baddies than any pro-Big 3 enthusiasm.


----------



## Art Rock

Are we now at the stage that even threads about other subjects are turned into another objectivists/subjectivists debate?

Let's not.


----------



## Wilhelm Theophilus

Art Rock said:


> Are we now at the stage that even threads about other subjects are turned into another objectivists/subjectivists debate?
> 
> Let's not.


You need to change the name of the forum :lol:


----------



## consuono

Art Rock said:


> Are we now at the stage that even threads about other subjects are turned into another objectivists/subjectivists debate?
> 
> Let's not.


Hey, don't look at me. :lol:


----------



## Fabulin

Wilhelm Theophilus said:


> You need to change the name of the forum :lol:


from "talk classical" to "beat jectivist strawmen - and dead horses" :lol:


----------



## fluteman

Art Rock said:


> Are we now at the stage that even threads about other subjects are turned into another objectivists/subjectivists debate?
> 
> Let's not.


It's even worse than that, I think. Any thread, like this one, that demands the participants make basic value judgments about particular styles of music, and, presumably, back those judgments up with some explanation, comes down to the question, What principles underlie one's system of aesthetic values? Otherwise, you're just doing another ranking poll or game. Some people insist on proving the legitimacy, or even superiority, of their aesthetic value systems, but that can't be done, as the acceptance of an aesthetic values system always requires faith as well as reason.

Where these threads go off the rails is with pronouncements like, "Boulez is a minor composer", which is another way of saying, "My aesthetic value system is superior to others". The question posed as the topic of this thread is another such troll, because the presumption that the Common Practice Era "peaked" with either Brahms or Rachmaninov, two late Romantic composers, and not with Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, or with Bach, Telemann, Vivaldi and Rameau, or not at all, also is a presumption of the superiority of a certain system of aesthetic values.

Over and over, certain posters here start threads with troll questions or polls like the one that opens this thread. They can be on either side of the debate. Sometimes the OP wants to demonstrate how absurd it is to think, for example, that a 310-year era of western music 'peaked' with one particular composer. That's also a troll, designed to draw out the "other side" and make them look silly.

The more thoughtful participants in these debates shrug off the trolls and try to point out there is no right or wrong. When the issue comes up, and I'm never the one to bring it up, I consistently say that the aesthetic value systems of zhdanov, ArtMusic, DaveM, consuono, et al., have a lot to be said on their behalf, in the most fundamental and important ways. Thumbs up to them. I happen to have a slightly different aesthetic value system, slightly more oriented towards broadness and diversity.

So, the real argument here is whether one tolerates or accepts diversity. Who is constantly bringing this issue up? Not me.


----------



## consuono

fluteman said:


> ...I happen to have a slightly different aesthetic value system, slightly more oriented towards broadness and diversity.
> 
> So, the real argument here is whether one tolerates or accepts diversity. Who is constantly bringing this issue up? Not me.


I think it was one of the "subjectivists" who can't let the subject go. Anyway, what you set up there is a false dichotomy. I also like diversity and there's a lot of modern music I deeply respect. But saying "Bach/Mozart/Beethoven is better" or expressing dislike for a work/composer doesn't in itself make me narrow-minded. Any time in these threads anyone expresses a notion of "great composer" you can be sure a load of "well can you put greatness in a test tube?" posturing will follow.


----------



## Fabulin

fluteman said:


> So, the real argument here is whether one tolerates or accepts diversity. Who is constantly bringing this issue up? Not me.


Diversity and _equality _are two different concepts.


----------



## fbjim

*is* it absurd to say a music discipline peaked as a relevant medium at some point? I'm wondering about this since there seems to be an acceptance in the pop field that rock is close to catatonic as a relevant field at the moment, with only a few indie artists trying to keep the flares burning- as for classical, you see schools and sub-genres rise and fall as creative movements all the time.


like, I think it's pretty clear that it wouldn't be "objectivist overreach" to say "French Grand Opera was more relevant in the 19th century than it is now". so is that an absurd statement to make with CPE music in general?


----------



## fluteman

Fabulin said:


> Diversity and _equality _are two different concepts.


Yes! Exactly! The first applies to comparisons of aesthetic value systems, the second doesn't.


----------



## Fabulin

fluteman said:


> Yes! Exactly! The first applies to comparisons of aesthetic value systems, the second doesn't.


Yes, so one can't say that Boulez is as good as Beethoven.


----------



## fluteman

fbjim said:


> *is* it absurd to say a music discipline peaked as a relevant medium at some point?


The idea of the OP is, one composer can represent the peak of all western music, not just "a music discipline", over a 310-year period. And if we're being honest about it, it's really a 600-year period, as the renaissance saw the key development of "true harmony", based on the triad, overtake medieval polyphony. And if we think of 1910-2020 as an off-peak period for true, triad-based harmony generally, but still within the true harmony period, it's 720 years and counting. All of western music is one "discipline" throughout that period? That in itself is quite an aesthetic value judgment.



Fabulin said:


> Yes, so one can't say that Boulez is as good as Beethoven.


One can say it, but what does it mean? Nothing very interesting or insightful, I think.


----------



## Bwv 1080

Fabulin said:


> Yes, so one can't say that Boulez is as good as Beethoven.


Boulez is as good as Beethoven


----------



## Bwv 1080

fluteman said:


> The idea of the OP is, one composer can represent the peak of all western music, not just "a music discipline", over a 310-year period. And if we're being honest about it, it's really a 600-year period, as the renaissance saw the key development of "true harmony", based on the triad, overtake medieval polyphony.


Harmony did not exist in Renaissance. Did not exist on its own in Baroque or Classical period music either, it was just a result of proper counterpoint


----------



## fluteman

Bwv 1080 said:


> Harmony did not exist in Renaissance. Did not exist on its own in Baroque or Classical period music either, it was just a result of proper counterpoint


You win the prize for number and significance of musical aesthetic value judgments in two sentences. Plus, you understand the distinction between diatonic harmonic progression, which you accept as harmony, and modal harmony, which you apparently don't. Also, for me, you greatly undervalue the role of modulation in harmony, as contrasted with progression and as used with great sophistication by Mozart, in addition to ignoring that the Bachian emphasis on counterpoint already was in decline during the classical period. Still, you get Zhdanov points for clarity and logic.


----------



## SanAntone

Bwv 1080 said:


> Harmony did not exist in Renaissance. Did not exist on its own in Baroque or Classical period music either, it was just a result of proper counterpoint


The Renaissance was a long period, generally 1400-1600. The composers range from Dufay to Palestrina. With Palestrina and other Late Renaissance composers the music has become more diatonic in style than the earlier modal style. Multi-voiced polyphony, with cadences and diatonic movement is clearly harmonic.


----------



## Aries

fluteman said:


> The question posed as the topic of this thread is another such troll, because the presumption that the Common Practice Era "peaked" with either Brahms or Rachmaninov, two late Romantic composers, and not with Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, or with Bach, Telemann, Vivaldi and Rameau, or not at all, also is a presumption of the superiority of a certain system of aesthetic values.


But not just the aesthetic values change from era to era. The experience, the knowledge and the number of inventions increase. A decrease is also possible.

It is not just an aesthetic question but also a question of the philosophy of history.

And this is really interessting. While I think there is overall an progress in music through the centuries, all kinds of weird stuff started to happen at around 1900. But why and why then? And what will happen in the future?



fluteman said:


> So, the real argument here is whether one tolerates or accepts diversity.


Yes, and I think it is good to not tolerate some things. Hip hop for example. It is non-music in the place of music. So from a musical point of view it should not be tolerated. What is useful in tolerating it? I'm not sure about serial music. It seems to function differently to all other music. What it does is not what I expect music (good or bad) to do. But I don't understand it. I want to understand it first. But I tend to not tolerate non explanatory advertising of serial music.


----------



## fluteman

Aries said:


> Yes, and I think it is good to not tolerate some things. Hip hop for example. It is non-music in the place of music. So from a musical point of view it should not be tolerated. What is useful in tolerating it? I'm not sure about serial music. It seems to function differently to all other music. What it does is not what I expect music (good or bad) to do. But I don't understand it. I want to understand it first. But I tend to not tolerate non explanatory advertising of serial music.


Or, to put it succinctly, Zhdanov-style, hip hop is "a pile of crap, not music." I just don't see any general social benefit to your intolerance, much less how it is "good" for anyone but you.


----------



## Bwv 1080

SanAntone said:


> The Renaissance was a long period, generally 1400-1600. The composers range from Dufay to Palestrina. With Palestrina and other Late Renaissance composers the music has become more diatonic in style than the earlier modal style. Multi-voiced polyphony, with cadences and diatonic movement is clearly harmonic.


We call it that and maybe its all just semantics, but to composers at the time it was just polyphony. Cadences were just established contrapuntal formulas. These formulas became codified and incorporated into figured bass in the baroque, but figured bass was short hand counterpoint as much as it was harmony.


----------



## Bwv 1080

Aries said:


> Yes, and I think it is good to not tolerate some things. Hip hop for example. It is non-music in the place of music. So from a musical point of view it should not be tolerated. What is useful in tolerating it? .


by what criteria, other than crotchety old white guy, is hip hop not music?


----------



## arpeggio

If a person wants to spend their lives just listening to Bach, Beethoven and Brahms no problem. To each his own.

But most of us like all sorts of music. If that means we are pseudo-dogmatic neo-subjectionists, so be it.

Are the Beach Boys as good as Beethoven? No way. But I still dig their music.

And I'll have fun, fun, fun till Art Music take my headphones away.


----------



## Aries

Bwv 1080 said:


> by what criteria, other than crotchety old white guy, is hip hop not music?


I'm a 31 year old white man, don't worry.

They use speaking or Sprechgesang instead of singing. The other sounds behind it are just a joke, at least in newer hip hop. Even older hip hopers just joke about it. Its the worst of the worst. Technically maybe still music but calling it music is an offense to real music.


----------



## fluteman

arpeggio said:


> If a person wants to spend their lives just listening to Bach, Beethoven and Brahms no problem. To each his own.
> 
> But most of us like all sorts of music. If that means we are pseudo-dogmatic neo-subjectionists, so be it.
> 
> Are the Beach Boys as good as Beethoven? No way. But I still dig their music.
> 
> And I'll have fun, fun, fun till Art Music take my headphones away.


If you like the Beach Boys, you'll like The Four Freshmen, a vocal jazz group founded in 1948 and still going strong, though the last original member died in 2011. They were the most important influence on Brian Wilson, more important even than Chuck Berry, I think. Talk about harmony! But I'm guessing you already know all about them.


----------



## La Passione

arpeggio said:


> Are the Beach Boys as good as Beethoven? No way. But I still dig their music.


Exactly. Its possible to enjoy something and still recognize its not as good as something else.


----------



## SanAntone

Aries said:


> I'm a 31 year old white man, don't worry.
> 
> They use speaking or Sprechgesang instead of singing. The other sounds behind it are just a joke, at least in newer hip hop. Even older hip hopers just joke about it. Its the worst of the worst. Technically maybe still music but calling it music is an offense to real music.


You clearly have your opinion about hip-hop, but you act as if hip-hop is monolithic, all equally bad. I disagree, but feel it is not worth discussing it further with you since it is way off-topic.

I come from a non-classical music background but went to music school and have a masters degree. The first thing I noticed was an attitude among the other students of arrogant superiority over other genres of music. However, in my professional career I also noticed that the better the musician the more open they were to genres outside of their own style. It was not unusual for a classical pianist to listen to and have respect for jazz or blues or metal or hip-hop.

It only discredits classical music when its fans speak with your style of "looking down your nose" at hip-hop.


----------



## SanAntone

arpeggio said:


> If a person wants to spend their lives just listening to Bach, Beethoven and Brahms no problem. To each his own.
> 
> But most of us like all sorts of music. If that means we are pseudo-dogmatic neo-subjectionists, so be it.
> 
> Are the Beach Boys as good as Beethoven? No way. But I still dig their music.
> 
> And I'll have fun, fun, fun till Art Music take my headphones away.





fluteman said:


> If you like the Beach Boys, you'll like The Four Freshmen, a vocal jazz group founded in 1948 and still going strong, though the last original member died in 2011. They were the most important influence on Brian Wilson, more important even than Chuck Berry, I think. Talk about harmony! But I'm guessing you already know all about them.





La Passione said:


> Exactly. Its possible to enjoy something and still recognize its not as good as something else.


I have a somewhat different take on this idea, i.e. relative quality of classical music compared to other genres.

I don't find it useful or even possible to do head-to-head comparisons of music between different genres. The styles are so different, and the priorities of each also very different, as to make any comparison superficial and/or reductive. What I see as more relevant is my view that the best from one genre is of a similarly high artistic level as the best of other genres.


----------



## Aries

SanAntone said:


> I come from a non-classical music background but went to music school and have a masters degree. The first thing I noticed was an attitude among the other students of arrogant superiority over other genres of music. However, in my professional career I also noticed that the better the musician the more open they were to genres outside of their own style. It was not unusual for a classical pianist to listen to and have respect for jazz or blues or metal or hip-hop.
> 
> It only discredits classical music when its fans speak with your style of "looking down your nose" at hip-hop.


This matches the new attitude of the elites. They seem to not look down. The psychology behind that is, that if they don't even have to defend themselves they must be really strong and great. And it is working for the elites. But it is not working for the cultural values.

This is not about classical music vs. popular music. Popular music has its qualities in jazz or metal or other genres. But hip-hop is worse. It is basically just a display of a specific lifestyle which should not be examplary.

But hip hops grows and the style has even worsened. Something really goes wrong, and it should be said.


----------



## fbjim

yes, the "elites" are the ones pushing hip-hop whereas it's presumably the downtrodden masses clutching their Brahms symphony cycle boxes


----------



## Bwv 1080

Aries said:


> Popular music has its qualities in jazz or metal or other genres. But hip-hop is worse. It is basically just a display of a specific lifestyle which should not be examplary.


As opposed to say, bro country or smooth jazz? Statements like that just illustrate your ignorance of hip hop


----------



## hammeredklavier

Bwv 1080 said:


> Harmony did not exist in Renaissance. Did not exist on its own in Baroque or Classical period music either, it was just a result of proper counterpoint


"... With regard to counterpoint in Chopin's music, you might be interested in the conversation that Chopin had not long before his death with the painter Eugène Delacroix. Delacroix was one of a handful of quite intimate friends of Chopin's. In his diary, he mentions how he had picked Chopin up in a carriage, and they had ridden out beyond the Arc de Triomphe and gone to a café. Chopin then began to speak about music. What makes logic in music, Chopin said, is counterpoint, getting notes to sound against each other. He said the problem with the way they teach nowadays is that they teach the chords before they teach the movement of voices that creates the chords. That's the problem, he said, with Berlioz. He applies the chords as a kind of veneer and fills in the gaps the best way he can. Chopin then said that you can get a sense of pure logic in music with fugue and he cited not Bach-though we know that he worshiped Bach-but Mozart. He said, in every one of Mozart's pieces, you feel the counterpoint. The fact that Chopin had this idea about counterpoint as being so foundational in music is, I think, very significant. ..."
(The Art of Tonal Analysis: Twelve Lessons in Schenkerian Theory, By Carl Schachter, Page 57)


----------



## Aries

Bwv 1080 said:


> As opposed to say, bro country or smooth jazz? Statements like that just illustrate your ignorance of hip hop


I mean the hip hop in the charts. Mainstream hip hop. Yeah, I am ignorant. I don't care about hip hop. There are 2985 or so music subgenres. I think there are much better ones worth to spend time for information.



fbjim said:


> yes, the "elites" are the ones pushing hip-hop whereas it's presumably the downtrodden masses clutching their Brahms symphony cycle boxes


The elites leave evaluations of cultural values up to the wide mass while counting their money (and maybe hearing a Brahms symphonic cycle). This secures their position but ruins culture.


----------



## Bwv 1080

hammeredklavier said:


> "... With regard to counterpoint in Chopin's music, you might be interested in the conversation that Chopin had not long before his death with the painter Eugène Delacroix. Delacroix was one of a handful of quite intimate friends of Chopin's. In his diary, he mentions how he had picked Chopin up in a carriage, and they had ridden out beyond the Arc de Triomphe and gone to a café. Chopin then began to speak about music. What makes logic in music, Chopin said, is counterpoint, getting notes to sound against each other. He said the problem with the way they teach nowadays is that they teach the chords before they teach the movement of voices that creates the chords. That's the problem, he said, with Berlioz. He applies the chords as a kind of veneer and fills in the gaps the best way he can. Chopin then said that you can get a sense of pure logic in music with fugue and he cited not Bach-though we know that he worshiped Bach-but Mozart. He said, in every one of Mozart's pieces, you feel the counterpoint. The fact that Chopin had this idea about counterpoint as being so foundational in music is, I think, very significant. ..."
> (The Art of Tonal Analysis: Twelve Lessons in Schenkerian Theory, By Carl Schachter, Page 57)


You might like this, Chopin and Liszt via Kulkbrenner and standard teaching of the time


----------



## SanAntone

One of the hip-hop/rap albums I heard that impressed me was The Roots _Things Fall Apart_ (1999). I am the first to say that I don't listen to rap/hip-hop a lot, but this album exhibited many qualities which I consider of a high artistic value. The Black Eyed Peas are another group that does hip-hop that is something I enjoy, and their last record came out in 2020. Lauren Hill came out of the Fugees, again a bit old, but quality stuff, IMO. There's others, but you get the idea.

I haven't kept up with rap/hip-hop, but do have friends, friends whose opinion I respect, speak highly of some recordings from the genre.

When someone who paints a genre with a broad brush in a negative characterization, I know two things: 1) they don't have much experience with the genre and 2) I won't trust their opinion about any music.


----------



## fbjim

there's positively zero reason to consider it "not music" in any case, unless you also think electronic music isn't music


----------



## Aries

fbjim said:


> there's positively zero reason to consider it "not music" in any case, unless you also think electronic music isn't music


Where is a connection between hip hop and electronic music?

Instrumental music is music, Electronic music is music, singing is music, speaking is lyric at most, hip hop is bad mannered street kids lyric.


----------



## arpeggio

The point I am trying to make is even if Art Music wins the argument that Elliot Carter is a bad composer, those of us who like his music will continue to listen to it and want to talk about it.


----------



## Phil loves classical

arpeggio said:


> The point I am trying to make is even if Art Music wins the argument that Elliot Carter is a bad composer, those of us who like his music will continue to listen to it and want to talk about it.


I've been listening to his quartet no. 3 over and over last couple days. It's really some provocative stuff. There is no way to say he's a great composer objectively, but there is also no way to say he's a bad one objectively either. Lucky it works both ways.


----------



## consuono

fluteman said:


> Or, to put it succinctly, Zhdanov-style, hip hop is "a pile of crap, not music." I just don't see any general social benefit to your intolerance, much less how it is "good" for anyone but you.


But why is that reaction not allowed? "Tolerance" and "diversity" don't mean that everything has to be liked equally. If nobody has to explain and defend their dislike of Mozart, or of classical music in general, I don't know why they have to do so in regards to their dislike of whatever genre of pop. Say you don't like it, and the usual reply (as above) is "you're just ignorant about it". Say that about classical and it's "arrogant superiority".


----------



## chu42

This thread has, predictably, veered off in a dozen different directions. I'll try to get it deleted. Sorry folks for adding to the hubbub of nonsense on this forum.


----------



## arpeggio

chu42 said:


> This thread has, predictably, veered off in a dozen different directions. I'll try to get it deleted. Sorry folks for adding to the hubbub of nonsense on this forum.


The OP is based on the supposition that tonality peaked with Brahms or Rachmaninov.

Many of us believe that CPT is still alive and well. One can not expect us to roll over and play dead.


----------



## RogerWaters

arpeggio said:


> The OP is based on the supposition that tonality peaked with Brahms or Rachmaninov.
> 
> Many of us believe that CPT is still alive and well. One can not expect us to roll over and play dead.


I'd still like to know where the boundary is between:

- Extending CPT, and
- Leaving it

Presumably Brahms was extending CPT (why?)

Was someone like Vaughan Williams on the other hand simply leaving it, by injecting pre-CPT features (modality) into CPT music, or was he, too extending it?

What about Faure? Reger?

I ask for my own lack of knowledge.


----------



## chu42

arpeggio said:


> The OP is based on the supposition that tonality peaked with Brahms or Rachmaninov.
> 
> Many of us believe that CPT is still alive and well. One can not expect us to roll over and play dead.


Tonality =/= CPT. CPT officially ended in 1900. Tonality is still flourishing in many ways. This was all in the thread description.

The question is whether or not CPT in practice had not yet climaxed when it had ended on paper.

Your citation of recent CPT composers that you consider to be excellent convinces me even further that CPT began its decline after Rachmaninov/Sibelius. I will hold this opinion and you can hold yours, until either of us are convinced otherwise. Music is subjective, after all.


----------



## chu42

RogerWaters said:


> I'd still like to know where the boundary is between:
> 
> - Extending CPT, and
> - Leaving it
> 
> Presumably Brahms was extending CPT (why?)
> 
> Was someone like Vaughan Williams on the other hand simply leaving it, by injecting pre-CPT features into CPT music, or was he, too extending it?
> 
> What about Faure? Reger?
> 
> I ask for my own lack of knowledge.


This is what the discussion was supposed to be about. There are no concrete answers to these things. I'd like to think that all of the above were extending CPT, whereas Scriabin, Bartok, Stravinsky diverted from it.

I believe a clear antecedent must be had in order for a composer to be "extending" rather than "diverting". The adoption of parallel fifths, for example, goes directly against CPT conventions and thus is a diversion rather than an extension (with that being said, I must change my stance on Vaughan-Williams who probably diverts from CPT in some of his major work).


----------



## RogerWaters

chu42 said:


> This is what the discussion was supposed to be about. There are no concrete answers to these things. I'd like to think that all of the above were extending CPT, whereas Scriabin, Bartok, Stravinsky diverted from it.
> 
> I believe a clear antecedent must be had in order for a composer to be "extending" rather than "diverting". The adoption of parallel fifths, for example, goes directly against CPT conventions and thus is a diversion rather than an extension (with that being said, I must change my stance on Vaughan-Williams who probably diverts from CPT in some of his major work).


Ok, well I'm at least glad I got the vague point, without having any answers.

I am but a meagre piano student, with little understanding of theory, so I find these topics fascinating.

What are you reasons for thinking VW, Faure and Reger were extending CPT but Scriabin, Bartok and Stravinsky were saying goodbye?


----------



## Aries

fluteman said:


> Or, to put it succinctly, Zhdanov-style, hip hop is "a pile of crap, not music." I just don't see any general social benefit to your intolerance, much less how it is "good" for anyone but you.


Rappers are a bad example for the youth. Rappers showcase a gangster lifestyle. So reducing their influence protects some teenagers from becoming gansters. If something goes wrong in the society it is important to point it out, because then more people have to decide on which side they stand, what helps to organize intact groups.


----------



## SanAntone

*Soul Motivation Records*



> love hip-hop. The music. The culture. It has been such a big part of my life since I was a kid. I don't know if you are like me, but I have grown really tired of hip-hop being painted in such a negative light all the time. So many people don't understand the music. It's incredibly frustrating.
> 
> I know a big part of the problem is that so much popular hip-hop music is focused on money, drugs, violence, and strippers. And although all those subjects may have their place in hip-hop, I'm tired of these things always being the focus. Music should lift us up. Encourage us. Not continue to take us down a dead end path of self-destruction.
> 
> The good news is there are a lot of rap artists making positive music. I am here to tell you that positivity is alive and well in rap music today. And to get you started on your journey into the positive side of rap, here are my top 10 favorite positive rappers along with a few key tracks to check out ASAP!


----------



## consuono

SanAntone said:


> *Soul Motivation Records*


Not to go off on a hip hop tangent here, but hip hop painted itself in a negative light for decades now. The whole genre has been overwhelmingly a big "f*** you". It's nice that more positivity is coming along but there hasn't been enough variety within it to avoid being painted with a broad brush. Here's a view from way back in 2003:



> Of course, not all hip-hop is belligerent or profane-entire CDs of gang-bangin', police-baiting, woman-bashing invective would get old fast to most listeners. But it's the nastiest rap that sells best, and the nastiest cuts that make a career. As I write, the top ten best-selling hip-hop recordings are 50 Cent (currently with the second-best-selling record in the nation among all musical genres), Bone Crusher, Lil' Kim, Fabolous, Lil' Jon and the East Side Boyz, Cam'ron Presents the Diplomats, Busta Rhymes, Scarface, Mobb Deep, and Eminem. Every one of these groups or performers personifies willful, staged opposition to society-Lil' Jon and crew even regale us with a song called "Don't Give a F***"-and every one celebrates the ghetto as "where it's at." Thus, the occasional dutiful songs in which a rapper urges men to take responsibility for their kids or laments senseless violence are mere garnish. Keeping the thug front and center has become the quickest and most likely way to become a star.


https://www.city-journal.org/html/how-hip-hop-holds-blacks-back-12442.html


----------



## Bwv 1080

arpeggio said:


> tonality peaked with Brahms or Rachmaninov.
> 
> Many of us believe that CPT is still alive and well.


Those statements can both be true. Does anyone really believe CP tonality's best days are yet to come?


----------



## consuono

Bwv 1080 said:


> Those statements can both be true. Does anyone really believe CP tonality's best days are yet to come?


No, but then atonality is passé now as well.


----------



## fbjim

consuono said:


> Not to go off on a hip hop tangent here, but hip hop painted itself in a negative light for decades now. The whole genre has been overwhelmingly a big "f*** you". It's nice that more positivity is coming along but there hasn't been enough variety within it to avoid being painted with a broad brush. Here's a view from way back in 2003:
> 
> https://www.city-journal.org/html/how-hip-hop-holds-blacks-back-12442.html


This is tangential, but the deliberate affectation of negative cultural stereotypes has a longstanding history in the practice of art among minorities and marginalized cultures. You see a lot of this in gay culture as well.

Also anyone who still thinks "gangsta" stuff is the main thing- that's kind of just saying you haven't listened to the genre since like the early 2000s.


----------



## arpeggio

If a person believes that CPT is dead or declining I still do not understand what they are trying to prove.


----------



## fbjim

I guess the question is what "alive" means. Prog hasn't been relevant since about 1975 but there's still niche artists who love the genre plugging away at it. If "alive" means "at the forefront of musical art culture, not just in popularity, but as the prime mover of artistic movements at large, then I don't see any way to say it's just as big as it was in Brahms' day.


----------



## SanAntone

fbjim said:


> This is tangential, but the deliberate affectation of negative cultural stereotypes has a longstanding history in the practice of art among minorities and marginalized cultures. You see a lot of this in gay culture as well.
> 
> Also anyone who still thinks "gangsta" stuff is the main thing- that's kind of just saying you haven't listened to the genre since like the early 2000s.


Even back in the '90s there were rap/hip-hop artists not doing the gangsta thing: The Roots, Fugees, Lauren Hill, and others, and contrary to how it is being protrayed in this thread, rap/hip-hop is not monolithic and there is variety in the genre. But ultimately it is an expression of Black culture, including the reality of life in the neighborhoods, drugs, violence, racism, police abuse, poverty, and the anger and hopelessness these chronic problems produce.

However, there is something unseemly about the subject of rap/hip-hop appearing on TC. I doubt anyone here can claim credibility talking about rap, and considering the general insulting manner in which it is being treated, I am hoping we bring the discussion back on-topic.


----------



## arpeggio

^^^^^
You are not answering my question. What are you hoping to accomplish by proving today's tonal composers are inferior to Brahms?


----------



## fbjim

my hot take is that the minimalists passed the baton of the artistic cutting edge to early electronic artists and as a result electronic music has been the vanguard of art music ever since, and I'm only half joking


----------



## fbjim

arpeggio said:


> ^^^^^
> You are not answering my question. What are you hoping to accomplish by proving today's tonal composers are inferior to Brahms?


it's cuz music doesn't exist in a vacuum. I don't think there's any reason anyone can't, or isn't creating tonal CPE-style music better than Brahms did in a *craftsmanship* point of view, but you can't outdo him in terms of (for lack of a better word) progressiveness and artistic relevance anymore than I can make a punk record that matters as much as it would have in 1976.

And of course there's no reason that any listener must value these things, and if you just love CPE style music and want more, there's absolutely stuff still being made! But that doesn't mean the movement hasn't "declined" in the way that usually is implied.


----------



## arpeggio

fbjim said:


> it's cuz music doesn't exist in a vacuum. I don't think there's any reason anyone can't, or isn't creating tonal CPE-style music better than Brahms did in a *craftsmanship* point of view, but you can't outdo him in terms of (for lack of a better word) progressiveness and artistic relevance anymore than I can make a punk record that matters as much as it would have in 1976.
> 
> And of course there's no reason that any listener must value these things, and if you just love CPE style music and want more, there's absolutely stuff still being made! But that doesn't mean the movement hasn't "declined" in the way that usually is implied.


OK. So what are you trying to accomplish by proving today's CPT composers are inferior to Brahms?


----------



## Phil loves classical

fbjim said:


> it's cuz music doesn't exist in a vacuum. I don't think there's any reason anyone can't, or isn't creating tonal CPE-style music better than Brahms did in a *craftsmanship* point of view, but you can't outdo him in terms of (for lack of a better word) progressiveness and artistic relevance anymore than I can make a punk record that matters as much as it would have in 1976.
> 
> And of course there's no reason that any listener must value these things, and if you just love CPE style music and want more, there's absolutely stuff still being made! But that doesn't mean the movement hasn't "declined" in the way that usually is implied.


Tend to agree. I think at the minimum, to be more relevant in these times, it has to be an extended tonality. It can't be 18th or early 19th century tonality.


----------



## Aries

fbjim said:


> it's cuz music doesn't exist in a vacuum. I don't think there's any reason anyone can't, or isn't creating tonal CPE-style music better than Brahms did in a *craftsmanship* point of view, but you can't outdo him in terms of (for lack of a better word) progressiveness and artistic relevance anymore than I can make a punk record that matters as much as it would have in 1976.


Brahms was conservative not progressive. And his Vienna fanclub attacked Wagner, Bruckner and others for things others described as progressive.

Something new can be good or bad. Sometimes it is required that something is new, and sometimes it is required that something is old. Shocking with something new can have an effect as well as doing the opposite. In a fast chnaging world like today many people yearn for something known and stable. This is a new chance for CP music. Always doing something new/progressive is a dead end.


----------



## SanAntone

*Arnold Schoenberg: Brahms The Progressive*



> Schoenberg's essay is a version of his lecture, given on the event of Brahms' 100th birthday, then substantially revised on the 50th anniversary of Brahms' death. This is a wide-ranging essay of uneasy organization, ostensibly dealing with a false characterization of Brahms as more backward-looking than his contemporaries, particularly Wagner. Schoenberg sets out "to prove that Brahms, the classicist, the academician, was a great innovator in the realm of musical language, that, in fact, he was a great progressive."
> 
> Schoenberg annotates his points with many musical examples. For any wishing to understand his points in such detail, the essay is worth seeking out. Interwoven throughout the essay are Schoenberg's own ideas about the nature of music, and regarding music's progression from Bach to his own time. I extract these observations as a preface below, then discuss Schoenberg's conclusions regarding Brahms' position in advancing this progression.


----------



## Aries

SanAntone said:


> *Arnold Schoenberg: Brahms The Progressive*


He was the favorite of the conservative vienna audience for a reason. And that doesn't mean that he wasn't inventive too. But his overall style was conservative. To twist that into the opposite is nonsense.


----------



## chu42

arpeggio said:


> If a person believes that CPT is dead or declining I still do not understand what they are trying to prove.


It means that we are trying to establish if the major tonal composers are moving in a different direction, which I believe that they are.

The Baroque era ended in the 1750s-composers moved on.

The Classical era ended in the 1820s-composers moved on.

Now we are discussing whether or not the Romantic era (which we mostly all agree is over) was the end of CPT.

I believe that it is over and I believe that Rachmaninov, Sibelius, Strauss, and maybe Korngold were the last great Romantic composers. I see John Williams and the other composers you listed as excellent composers but not ones that have reinvigorated the Romantic era.

I don't know why you seem to feel personally attacked by the implications that CPT is dead or declining. You certainly wouldn't feel the same way if someone said the Baroque era is dead-which it is, but this doesn't say anything about the value of the music itself.

We are in an age where not only tonality in general has shifted away from CPT, but metatonality, microtonality, and atonality also share the podium with tonality.

As a hypothetical, let's say that there are 10 "musical geniuses" in every era of music. In the Baroque era, all 10 would be focused on Baroque music. In the Classical era, all 10 would be focused on Classical music. And so on.

But today, perhaps 1 or 2 out of the 10 would be composing CPT works, and that's being generous. The rest are split between all the other genres at hand.

So I ask you: How can CPT not be declining when so many of the strong talents are no longer focused on it?


----------



## chu42

Aries said:


> He was the favorite of the conservative vienna audience for a reason. And that doesn't mean that he wasn't inventive too. But his overall style was conservative. To twist that into the opposite is nonsense.


I agree that he was a conservative but only because he resisted the changes that were being made by Wagner. Even so, he was subtly progressive in his own direction. Certainly his late piano works represent harmonic changes that were novel and original.

I would wager that the true conservatives were those like Moszkowski, Leschetizky, and Paderewski who were still stuck knee-deep in Chopin's wake. Rachmaninov was very much like these composers in his early career but his mature style was almost a completely different animal.


----------



## SanAntone

Aries said:


> He was the favorite of the conservative vienna audience for a reason. And that doesn't mean that he wasn't inventive too. But his overall style was conservative. To twist that into the opposite is nonsense.


Okay. So you think Schoenberg was talking nonsense.


----------



## RogerWaters

chu42 said:


> We are in an age where not only tonality in general has shifted away from CPT, but metatonality, microtonality, and atonality also share the podium with tonality.


Dumb question(s):

I understand that CPT is characterised by "a harmonic language to which modern music theorists can apply Roman numeral chord analysis". I take this to mean functional harmony.

While 'tonality' is a more general concept meaning " the arrangement of pitches and/or chords of a musical work in a hierarchy of perceived relations, stabilities, attractions and directionality".

My questions are:

1. What form does the hierarchy of perceived relations, stabilities, attractions and directionality take if not functional harmony?
2. What are examples of composers who's works are tonal but which you can't do roman numeral chord analysis on (i.e. aren't functional harmony)?


----------



## arpeggio

chu42 said:


> It means that we are trying to establish if the major tonal composers are moving in a different direction, which I believe that they are.
> 
> The Baroque era ended in the 1750s-composers moved on.
> 
> The Classical era ended in the 1820s-composers moved on.
> 
> Now we are discussing whether or not the Romantic era (which we mostly all agree is over) was the end of CPT.
> 
> I believe that it is over and I believe that Rachmaninov, Sibelius, Strauss, and maybe Korngold were the last great Romantic composers. I see John Williams and the other composers you listed as excellent composers but not ones that have reinvigorated the Romantic era.
> 
> I don't know why you seem to feel personally attacked by the implications that CPT is dead or declining. You certainly wouldn't feel the same way if someone said the Baroque era is dead-which it is, but this doesn't say anything about the value of the music itself.
> 
> We are in an age where not only tonality in general has shifted away from CPT, but metatonality, microtonality, and atonality also share the podium with tonality.
> 
> As a hypothetical, let's say that there are 10 "musical geniuses" in every era of music. In the Baroque era, all 10 would be focused on Baroque music. In the Classical era, all 10 would be focused on Classical music. And so on.
> 
> But today, perhaps 1 or 2 out of the 10 would be composing CPT works, and that's being generous. The rest are split between all the other genres at hand.
> 
> So I ask you: How can CPT not be declining when so many of the strong talents are no longer focused on it?


First, I have been a member since 2012 and I have lost track on how many times I have been accused of being overly sensitive.

I have carefully read your response and it still does not answer my question.

OK. What do you hope to accomplish be proving everything you are saying?


----------



## chu42

RogerWaters said:


> Dumb question(s):
> 
> I understand that CPT is characterised by "a harmonic language to which modern music theorists can apply Roman numeral chord analysis". I take this to mean functional harmony.


But that's not all CPT means. It is also limited by timeframe, origin, and "style". A folk dance from Argentina is not CPT just because one could possibly apply Roman numeral analysis to it.



> 2. What are examples of composers who's works are tonal but which you can't do roman numeral chord analysis on (i.e. aren't functional harmony)?


There are many tonal composers which can "theoretically" be analyzed with Roman numerals yet in real-life application the analysis is useless due to the constantly shifting tonal center. Thus the label of "CPT" here no longer holds any practical value.

Villa-Lobos-Rudepoema
Scriabin-Sonata No.5
Ravel-Gaspard de la Nuit
Busoni-Fantasia Contrappuntistica


In the jazz world there are many such works, the most famous of them being Giant Steps by John Coltrane.

And there are plenty of tonal works that-as far as I can tell-cannot be analyzed with roman numerals at all due to one or more of the following factors:

1. Over-chromaticism
Feinberg-Piano Concerto No.1
Prokofiev-Toccata 
Ligeti-Etude No.13
Roslavets-Piano Sonata No.1

2. Polytonality
Ives-Halloween
Stravinsky-Petrushka
Ligeti-Etude No.1

2. Monophony (that is, with no clear harmonic outlines)
Bartok-Etude Op.18 No.1
Messiaen-Regard de l'Esprit de joie
Crumb-Vox Balaenae

3. Overtones
Stockhausen-Stimmung
Sciarrino-Violin Caprices

4. Microtonality
Ives-Three Quarter Tone Pieces
Ben Johnston-String Quartet No.9
Haas-Limited Approximations
Cage-Sonata V

All these works are clearly "tonal" but not in a sense that can be readily analyzed, at least not in a clear and understandable manner by standard roman numeral conventions.


----------



## chu42

arpeggio said:


> OK. What do you hope to accomplish be proving everything you are saying?


We are discussing art. Quite simply, we cannot hope to prove anything at all-this is just casual discussion and if it doesn't interest or entertain you, then the point of it is lost. I for one am having fun in this back and forth and I hope you can as well.


----------



## arpeggio

*CPT is alive and well*

^^^^^^^^^^^^
First of all this debate about CPT has been going on in this forum for years. I have been in other forums were this rarely comes up.

Most of us do not consider CPT dead. In the past when we had a discussion with those who thought CPT was dead we would provide examples of living composers who practice CPT. I remember years ago I found an organization of composers who embraced CPT. Our efforts fell on deaf ears. I recall one former member who insisted that most living composers wrote atonal music and our examples were freak exceptions.

They would come back with we were being too defensive or we were just having a friendly discussion about art or we were being close minded or whatever.

We do not understand why some people are so set on killing off CPT.


----------



## Fabulin

arpeggio said:


> We do not understand why some people are so set on killing off CPT.


I heard it summarized as "cries of indifference".


----------



## EdwardBast

RogerWaters said:


> In what sense could it be argued that Rachmaninoff advanced common-practice?


Rachmaninoff's role wasn't advancing CP language so much as it was refining and rationalizing it. His music's relationship to late CP style is sort of like that of Bach's to the language of the Baroque. He was in the Chopin-Liszt line of development but with greater contrapuntal skill, while integrating the inflections of the Russian school. He pushed the linear fluency of chromatic voice-leading as far as he could without weakening a sense of tonal gravity and motivated progression. The peak of his progress in this regard is 1917, when he published his second set of Etudes Tableaux, a towering achievement and summary of his stylistic development:






Rachmaninoff also played somewhat of a summarizing role in his rationalization of thematic processes on the cyclic scale.


----------



## Aries

SanAntone said:


> Okay. So you think Schoenberg was talking nonsense.


I think Schönberg wanted to make the point, that Brahms was less conservative/more progressive than people thought.



> Schoenberg sets out "to prove that Brahms, the classicist, the academician, was a great innovator in the realm of musical language, that, in fact, he was a great progressive."


But he still called him a classicist and a progressivist in the same sentence. I would not take every word so seriously. When you are trying to make such a statement it is not unusual that you exaggerate a bit. "Brahms the progressive" that is just a clickbait headline imo.



chu42 said:


> The Baroque era ended in the 1750s-composers moved on.
> 
> The Classical era ended in the 1820s-composers moved on.
> 
> Now we are discussing whether or not the Romantic era (which we mostly all agree is over) was the end of CPT.


There was a connection between era and style before 1900, but that changed afterwards. Now there is style pluralism. We don't live in the romantic era anymore but era and style aren't connected anymore. There are still romantic composers, and all kinds of different composers.



chu42 said:


> I believe that it is over and I believe that Rachmaninov, Sibelius, Strauss, and maybe Korngold were the last great Romantic composers. I see John Williams and the other composers you listed as excellent composers but not ones that have reinvigorated the Romantic era.


We live in a new era, but there are many different styles now.



chu42 said:


> I don't know why you seem to feel personally attacked by the implications that CPT is dead or declining. You certainly wouldn't feel the same way if someone said the Baroque era is dead-which it is, but this doesn't say anything about the value of the music itself.


The Baroque style really just disappeared, but the same did not happen at the end of the romantic "era", because some composers just continued to write and develop romantic music while multiple other styles emerged at the same time.

By saying Common practice as a style is dead, you are devaluing newer romantic composers. That is an attack of course.



chu42 said:


> But today, perhaps 1 or 2 out of the 10 would be composing CPT works, and that's being generous. The rest are split between all the other genres at hand.


There was a substantial growth of the world population and improvement of living condidtions. Much more people have the possibility right now to write music in absolute numbers. So even if the relative number of CP composers is very low today, the absolute number may still be higher than in the 19th century.


----------



## chu42

Aries said:


> By saying Common practice as a style is dead, you are devaluing newer romantic composers. That is an attack of course.


It is stagnant, rather than dead. Says nothing about the quality of the music, just rather the progression of it.



> There was a substantial growth of the world population and improvement of living condidtions. Much more people have the possibility right now to write music in absolute numbers. So even if the relative number of CP composers is very low today, the absolute number may still be higher than in the 19th century.


And you don't think this has diluted the quality of the music?


----------



## arpeggio

I feel sorry for living composers. If they composes tonal music it is mediocre because it is not as good as Brahms. If it is atonal it is mediocre because it is not tonal.

Maybe they should give up and sell insurance like Ives.


----------



## SanAntone

arpeggio said:


> I feel sorry for living composers. If they composes tonal music it is mediocre because it is not as good as Brahms. If it is atonal it is mediocre because it is not tonal.
> 
> Maybe they should give up and sell insurance like Ives.


Or they should ignore these people on the sidelines throwing garbage on the field of play.


----------



## Aries

chu42 said:


> It is stagnant, rather than dead. Says nothing about the quality of the music, just rather the progression of it.


I actually don't think that this is true. I think there is progression. Sometimes you could say its not CP anymore, but sometimes it is imo. But overall there is no sharp line between modern classical music and CP music.



chu42 said:


> And you don't think this has diluted the quality of the music?


I think the overall average quality of music was the highest in the 1880s or 1890s. Now much less composers write in a style that I like. But I feel like I have much to explore yet. Sometimes I have to search in cyrillic letters for it, what doesn't make it easier. But it is very promising. In the west most good modern classical music is used for films and video games especially. It is clear that the tools for composition are better now than in the 19th century. But I see no genius like Anton Bruckner today.


----------



## arpeggio

We have provided examples of living composers who employ tonality.

If that is not good enough I do not know what else can be said.


----------



## chu42

arpeggio said:


> We have provided examples of living composers who employ tonality.
> 
> If that is not good enough I do not know what else can be said.


But this is entirely irrelevant to the thread.


----------



## arpeggio

chu42 said:


> But this is entirely irrelevant to the thread.


That is the point we are trying to make.

Many of us do not believe that tonality peaked with Brahms or Rachmaninov.

"Other" would not work because we do not think it has peaked.

And every time we try to support this we are told that our observations are irrelevant or some other argument. So why bother.


----------



## consuono

SanAntone said:


> Or they should ignore these people on the sidelines throwing garbage on the field of play.


I would imagine many of them would be grateful for garbage instead of the usual indifference.


----------



## chu42

arpeggio said:


> That is the point we are trying to make.
> 
> Many of us do not believe that tonality peaked with Brahms or Rachmaninov.
> 
> "Other" would not work because we do not think it has peaked.
> 
> And every time we try to support this we are told that our observations are irrelevant or some other argument. So why bother.


The reason why I'm having trouble with your discussion points is because you seem to conflate tonality with CPT.

Time and time again I have reiterated that tonality is NOT directly conjugate to CPT. Please reread the thread topic and/or learn the difference between the two.

Time and time again you complain that "tonality isn't dead!" and that "there are so many living composers that use tonality!" etc. when this thread was never meant to be about tonality. Yet every single one of your posts has managed to hedge it into the discussion somewhere.

Do you see why this makes it rather hard to get anywhere when you use the terms tonality and CPT interchangeably?

The fact is, most modern composers are tonal-very few today are true serialists-and yet most of them do not identify nor sound like common practice composers. Please do not continue conflating the two.

CPT is a compositional style that references a specific time, origin, and series of conventions.

Tonality is not. Tonality is just...any music that arranges tones in a hierarchy.

Pop music is tonal. Folk music is tonal. Heavy metal is tonal. Ligeti is tonal.

*None of them are CPT.*


----------



## consuono

Ok, well then getting back to the topic, how can you demonstrate that Brahms (or Sibelius or Rachmaninov) represented the CP "peak" rather than Bach or Beethoven? It can't be just chronological order, otherwise we can say that Martial or Suetonius represented the "peak" of Latin literature.


----------



## SanAntone

consuono said:


> Ok, well then getting back to the topic, how can you demonstrate that Brahms (or Sibelius or Rachmaninov) represented the CP "peak" rather than Bach or Beethoven? It can't be just chronological order, otherwise we can say that Martial or Suetonius represented the "peak" of Latin literature.


LOL. Asking for objective proof?


----------



## consuono

SanAntone said:


> LOL. Asking for objective proof?


Well wasn't that the question?


chu42 said:


> Do you think there are important common practice era composers after Rachmaninov; i.e., those who heavily shaped what we consider to be common practice music?
> 
> I personally believe that Sibelius was the peak and it ended with Rachmaninov.


Sibelius and Rachmaninov shaped an era that was over before they even composed their most notable works? And yeah, things like influence can be fairly objectively described. Not everything related to existence is subjective or else must be measurable with calipers.


----------



## chu42

consuono said:


> Ok, well then getting back to the topic, how can you demonstrate that Brahms (or Sibelius or Rachmaninov) represented the CP "peak" rather than Bach or Beethoven?


This is not to say they were better composers, but in my opinion, they expanded the conventions of CP in a meaningful way.

All CPT composers can be traced back to a series of compositional ancestries-here are some examples:

Beethoven > Schumann > Brahms > Reger

Berlioz > Liszt > Wagner > Bruckner > Mahler > Strauss

Benoist > Gounod > Bizet > Saint-Saëns > Franck > Poulenc

These are very approximate outlines. There are plenty of composers who drew on one or more of these origins and cannot really be labelled. However, they still come out of one school or a combination of several and they expanded upon the composers before them.

Back in the 19th century, these schools of composition were highly competitive and musicians sought to stay within them due to the heavy hand of nationalism and the more dogmatic approaches taken at the time.

But today, nationalism is in far smaller effect than that of the 19th century. Globalization is massive now. There are so many compositional tools nowadays that it seems unlikely to me that many composers would choose to limit themselves to one school or another.

The point of this to show how these lineages are no longer in full force-today many have become stagnant or have stopped entirely. Who is the next in the line of Beethoven? Or who follows Poulenc? Strauss? Etc.

The French school ate up Impressionism and abandoned CPT almost entirely, leading to composers like Messiaen.

The school initiated by Berlioz led to the 2nd Viennese school, which is obviously a diversion from CPT and led to composers like Boulez.

The school that originated with Beethoven eventually left CPT with Hindemith.

I can't see why anybody could believe CPT is in full flourish when nearly all of the great Romantic schools either dissipated or bridged out of CPT by the 1940s.

So it's not that Rachmaninov is necessarily a better composer than Bach/Beethoven/Mozart, but it's that his music is the end of a line. For him it's one that started with Chopin and Glinka.

I invite someone who believes that CPT is_ not _stagnant to show me a recent CPT composer who has convincingly continued one of the Romantic lines and/or has expanded the conventions of the Romantic era. This is not a rhetorical question; it's a legitimate petition for answers.


----------



## Phil loves classical

chu42 said:


> The reason why I'm having trouble with your discussion points is because you seem to conflate tonality with CPT.
> 
> Time and time again I have reiterated that tonality is NOT directly conjugate to CPT. Please reread the thread topic and/or learn the difference between the two.
> 
> Time and time again you complain that "tonality isn't dead!" and that "there are so many living composers that use tonality!" etc. when this thread was never meant to be about tonality. Yet every single one of your posts has managed to hedge it into the discussion somewhere.
> 
> Do you see why this makes it rather hard to get anywhere when you use the terms tonality and CPT interchangeably?
> 
> The fact is, most modern composers are tonal-very few today are true serialists-and yet most of them do not identify nor sound like common practice composers. Please do not continue conflating the two.
> 
> CPT is a compositional style that references a specific time, origin, and series of conventions.
> 
> Tonality is not. Tonality is just...any music that arranges tones in a hierarchy.
> 
> Pop music is tonal. Folk music is tonal. Heavy metal is tonal. Ligeti is tonal.
> 
> *None of them are CPT.*


I think a lot of John Williams can be considered CP tonal but not CP era.


----------



## chu42

Phil loves classical said:


> I think a lot of John Williams can be considered CP tonal but not CP era.


Yes, John Williams is one of the strongest examples of a recent CPT composer. However, I am not convinced that his music actively broadens the CPT archetypes.

A lot of great composers' early works are highly characteristic of the composers before them-before eventually culminating in a unique and mature style that expands the established conventions. John Williams has never seemed to do the latter. He masterfully borrows rather than expands.

But why should he care. He is highly commercially and critically successful and probably sleeps on a bed of cash.


----------



## Phil loves classical

I agree, it seems the more original composers are into neotonality or extended tonality. There you can find lots, throughout the 20th Century till now. But even in the extended tonal department I don't hear anything very original. Hopefully someone can prove me wrong on that.


----------



## chu42

Phil loves classical said:


> But even in the extended tonal department I don't hear anything very original. Hopefully someone can prove me wrong on that.


You mean recently?


----------



## Phil loves classical

chu42 said:


> You mean recently?


Yes, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong in say the last 25 years something very original in the tonal department. I don't consider Aho or Matthews that original.


----------



## chu42

Phil loves classical said:


> Yes, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong in say the last 25 years something very original in the tonal department. I don't consider Aho or Matthews that original.


What about Ligeti? I find his Etudes to be strikingly original. They were composed at the turn of the century.


----------



## Bwv 1080

arpeggio said:


> That is the point we are trying to make.
> 
> Many of us do not believe that tonality peaked with Brahms or Rachmaninov.
> 
> "Other" would not work because we do not think it has peaked.
> 
> And every time we try to support this we are told that our observations are irrelevant or some other argument. So why bother.


Unless you believe that CP tonal music 'greater' (whatever that means to you) than Brahms or Rachmaninoff has yet to come, then it has peaked, hence the OP


----------



## SanAntone

Thomas Adès: _Variations for Blanca_ (2015)
Luca Buratto:






Don't know about original, but this work is tonal.


----------



## Fabulin

chu42 said:


> Yes, John Williams is one of the strongest examples of a recent CPT composer. However, I am not convinced that his music actively broadens the CPT archetypes.


Williams' harmony is characterized by jazzy logic of chords freely progressing to the next ones, shifting between diatonic, quartal and bitonal harmonies, and including all sorts of one-off harmonic moments that evade Roman numeral analysis and are better described in terms of pitch sets. There are passages that are described as 'lacking functional harmony' or even atonal, and then they progress to more tonal ones.

Compared to that old Rach is boring as hell. In fact, I once heard a piece on the radio that was described as a work by Rachmaninoff and was shocked how modern it sounded.

And then I noticed that the label was wrong, it was actually The Rise of Skywalker (2019)... silly me thought that any past composer can sound like late Williams.

This is what one scholar recently described as "spoiling" effect, where after one has been accustomed to the music of John Williams, no earlier music has everything; there is always something lacking - either in melody and rhythm (usually those), 20th century harmony, classical counterpoint, or full orchestration.

Meanwhile John Mauceri has argued the the Hollywood film score isn't late Romantic or post Romantic, but in fact the peak of Romantic music. If you look at my previous post in this thread, you will see a clear line of succession.



chu42 said:


> All CPT composers can be traced back to a series of compositional ancestries-here are some examples:
> 
> Beethoven > Schumann > Brahms > Reger
> 
> Berlioz > Liszt > Wagner > Bruckner > Mahler > Strauss
> 
> Benoist > Gounod > Bizet > Saint-Saëns > Franck > Poulenc
> 
> These are very approximate outlines. There are plenty of composers who drew on one or more of these origins and cannot really be labelled. However, they still come out of one school or a combination of several and they expanded upon the composers before them.


Mahler, Richard Strauss, Puccini -> Korngold -> Williams
Berlioz -> 19th c. Russians -> 20th c. French (Debussy, Ravel, Dutilleux) -> Williams

P.S. As for the borders of tonality, _Hedwig's Theme_ is a very widely recognizable theme that uses all 12 tones... where else can one go from there in western equal temperament?


----------



## Phil loves classical

chu42 said:


> What about Ligeti? I find his Etudes to be strikingly original. They were composed at the turn of the century.


They're not that tonal to my ears. Ligeti himself said they are neither tonal nor atonal. I think the rhythms and range are what's most notable about it.



SanAntone said:


> Thomas Adès: _Variations for Blanca_ (2015)
> Luca Buratto:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Don't know about original, but this work is tonal.


Quite nice. Sounds original enough for me. Probably my favourite my Ades (never liked his stuff before).


----------



## arpeggio

Bwv 1080 said:


> Unless you believe that CP tonal music 'greater' (whatever that means to you) than Brahms or Rachmaninoff has yet to come, then it has peaked, hence the OP


For the record I am a big fan of Rachmaninoff and Brahms and I really enjoy performing their music.

I have given my answer and told that I do not know what I am talking about.


----------



## chu42

Phil loves classical said:


> They're not that tonal to my ears. Ligeti himself said they are neither tonal nor atonal. I think the rhythms and range are what's most notable about it.


Wait, he said that? Most of his etudes seem to me to be quite clearly tonal. They branch off of whole tone scales, polytonality, diatonicism, and certain chord intervals. All of these are hallmarks of tonality.

If you want something less ambivalent though:











Kapustin is certainly a continuation of Gershwin and an eclectic mix of classical and jazz musicians, but at the same time a clearly unique voice.

I have also found Jennifer Higdon's music to be consistently original:






And perhaps amongst the greatest chamber music of the 20th century:






Really recommend the listen all the way through if this is your first time hearing this.

Unfortunately I am not well-versed enough in the "recent" composer scene in order to dive really deep, but these are some of the more well-known examples.


----------



## arpeggio

chu42 said:


> Wait, he said that? Most of his etudes seem to me to be quite clearly tonal. They branch off of whole tone scales, polytonality, diatonicism, and certain chord intervals. All of these are hallmarks of tonality.


The Ligiti Etudes are tonal yet none of the composers on my list are? I give up.


----------



## chu42

arpeggio said:


> The Ligiti Etudes are tonal yet none of the composers on my list are? I give up.


When did I ever say that you didn't list any tonal composers? All of the composers on your list are obviously tonal (and perhaps even CPT style) composers. I simply do not think they expanded or progressed the conventions of the Romantic era, and that is the crux of the topic at hand.

I respect you a lot but you are getting nowhere in this conversation; you are constantly mixing up basic concepts like CPT and tonality, you are attacking arguments that I never made, and here you are claiming I said something that you will find no proof of me saying.

Actually, if you were to carefully read each and every one of my posts, you will see that I have consistently defended the existence and prevalence of tonality in modern and avant-garde music.

But because you seem unable to separate the idea of tonality from CPT and Romanticism, I don't know how much longer we can continue to discuss this topic.


----------



## chu42

Fabulin said:


> Williams' harmony is characterized by jazzy logic of chords freely progressing to the next ones, shifting between diatonic, quartal and bitonal harmonies, and including all sorts of one-off harmonic moments that evade Roman numeral analysis and are better described in terms of pitch sets. There are passages that are described as 'lacking functional harmony' or even atonal, and then they progress to more tonal ones.
> 
> Compared to that old Rach is boring as hell. In fact, I once heard a piece on the radio that was described as a work by Rachmaninoff and was shocked how modern it sounded.
> 
> And then I noticed that the label was wrong, it was actually The Rise of Skywalker (2019)... silly me thought that any past composer can sound like late Williams.
> 
> This is what one scholar recently described as "spoiling" effect, where after one has been accustomed to the music of John Williams, no earlier music has everything; there is always something lacking - either in melody and rhythm (usually those), 20th century harmony, classical counterpoint, or full orchestration.
> 
> Meanwhile John Mauceri has argued the the Hollywood film score isn't late Romantic or post Romantic, but in fact the peak of Romantic music. If you look at my previous post in this thread, you will see a clear line of succession.
> 
> Mahler, Richard Strauss, Puccini -> Korngold -> Williams
> Berlioz -> 19th c. Russians -> 20th c. French (Debussy, Ravel, Dutilleux) -> Williams
> 
> P.S. As for the borders of tonality, _Hedwig's Theme_ is a very widely recognizable theme that uses all 12 tones... where else can one go from there in western equal temperament?


Ok. This is the soundest argument I have heard so far. Perhaps it is because I don't like Williams very much on his own (he is excellent in films though) that I am biased against the idea that he expands the Romantic archetype.

But outside of subjective analyses, I can certainly see where one might think Williams is the continuation of the Romantic era. I do still think that he represents a decline from Sibelius or Rachmaninov, but this is a completely personal assessment.


----------



## janxharris

chu42 said:


> I have already said that I don't consider Brahms the peak. I consider Rachmaninov or Sibelius the peak because I believe that strictly within the confines of CPT, no composer after them has reached their heights in terms of significant contributions to the repertoire.
> 
> I don't think this can be said for Beethoven because of the massive contributions made by Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Brahms, Mahler, etc. Of course this is all subjective so if you believe all of the above represent a decline in significance, then that's fine.


The passage for fast moving strings with bassoon/clarinet in the first movement of Sibelius's 5th may be beyond CPT - any sense of a relationship with a tonal centre is pretty tenuous I think.


----------



## consuono

chu42 said:


> I have already said that I don't consider Brahms the peak. I consider Rachmaninov or Sibelius the peak because I believe that strictly within the confines of CPT, no composer after them has reached their heights in terms of significant contributions to the repertoire.
> 
> I don't think this can be said for Beethoven because of the massive contributions made by Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Brahms, Mahler, etc. Of course this is all subjective so if you believe all of the above represent a decline in significance, then that's fine.


Sibelius and Rachmaninov are stylistically within the confines of CP, but chronologically they're holdouts. They may have influenced some film score composers though.


----------



## Phil loves classical

chu42 said:


> And perhaps amongst the greatest chamber music of the 20th century:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Really recommend the listen all the way through if this is your first time hearing this.
> 
> Unfortunately I am not well-versed enough in the "recent" composer scene in order to dive really deep, but these are some of the more well-known examples.


I was into Johnston for a while. I liked his quartet 9 the most from those I've heard. Not into his microtonal reharmonizations of folk songs as here.


----------



## janxharris

Fabulin said:


> Williams' harmony is characterized by jazzy logic of chords freely progressing to the next ones, shifting between diatonic, quartal and bitonal harmonies, and including all sorts of one-off harmonic moments that evade Roman numeral analysis and are better described in terms of pitch sets. There are passages that are described as 'lacking functional harmony' or even atonal, and then they progress to more tonal ones.
> 
> Compared to that old Rach is boring as hell. In fact, I once heard a piece on the radio that was described as a work by Rachmaninoff and was shocked how modern it sounded.
> 
> And then I noticed that the label was wrong, it was actually The Rise of Skywalker (2019)... silly me thought that any past composer can sound like late Williams.
> 
> This is what one scholar recently described as "spoiling" effect, where after one has been accustomed to the music of John Williams, no earlier music has everything; there is always something lacking - either in melody and rhythm (usually those), 20th century harmony, classical counterpoint, or full orchestration.


Your perception of 'The Rise of Skywalker' underlines the subjective nature of music because I do not hear it as particularly modern. Clearly there are some unusual shifts but it's all wrapped up in very easy on the ear veneer. That's not a criticism of Williams's work but just how I hear it.


----------



## Bwv 1080

consuono said:


> Sibelius and Rachmaninov are stylistically within the confines of CP, but chronologically they're holdouts. They may have influenced some film score composers though.


Certainly that is true - the last CP composers to make the canon


----------



## janxharris

Bwv 1080 said:


> Mahler and Reger - Sibelius and Rachmaninoff were approaching pastiche


I would be interested to see you demonstrate that with regard to Sibelius's later major works; harmonically it's unique to my ears. Though I like Mahler, I could not say the same for much of his work...for example the adagio from his ninth is steeped in tradition. Just my opinion of course.


----------



## Enthusiast

^ Or, indeed, any Sibelius major work. He had a very distinctive voice for a start and all his major works have totally new things to say (the very opposite of pastiche). His music was actually experienced as quite difficult until half way through the 20th century. Rachmaninov was, I think, a lesser composer than Sibelius but he still had a distinctive voice and produced quite a number of works that could not have been by anyone else. As for the other hallmark of pastiche - perhaps because it is a rehash it gives no sense of inspiration, of climbing to the stars or plumbing the depths - the very opposite is found in Sibelius and Rachmaninov's stronger works also achieve a great sense of inspiration.


----------



## chu42

Enthusiast said:


> ^ Or, indeed, any Sibelius major work. He had a very distinctive voice for a start and all his major works have totally new things to say (the very opposite of pastiche). His music was actually experienced as quite difficult until half way through the 20th century. Rachmaninov was, I think, a lesser composer than Sibelius but he still had a distinctive voice and produced quite a number of works that could not have been by anyone else. As for the other hallmark of pastiche - perhaps because it is a rehash it gives no sense of inspiration, of climbing to the stars or plumbing the depths - the very opposite is found in Sibelius and Rachmaninov's stronger works also achieve a great sense of inspiration.


Pastiche is like Moszkowski or Bortkiewicz or early Ives...I agree that neither Sibelius or Rachmaninov qualify.

Especially not Sibelius. You could not listen to the 7th Symphony, for example, and think it is anybody but Sibelius.


----------



## Aries

chu42 said:


> All CPT composers can be traced back to a series of compositional ancestries-here are some examples:
> 
> Beethoven > Schumann > Brahms > Reger
> 
> Berlioz > Liszt > Wagner > Bruckner > Mahler > Strauss
> 
> Benoist > Gounod > Bizet > Saint-Saëns > Franck > Poulenc


What about Bach?

If Bach and other Baroque composers were CPT composer but nobody of these listed CPT composers can be traced back to him or another Baroque composer, then it doesn't make sense that newer CP composers need to be traced back to one of these listed lines.

What about Tchakovsky or Glazunov for example? More lines?

What about soviet composers like Shostakovich, Popov, Mjaskovsky, Sviridov and Khachaturian? Where is the boundary of CPT and why?



chu42 said:


> I can't see why anybody could believe CPT is in full flourish when nearly all of the great Romantic schools either dissipated or bridged out of CPT by the 1940s.


If the vienna classic was CPT too, why is it today a requirement for CPT to be romantic? The question is what is the contentual definition. But whatever it is, it is possible that new schools fall into it.

What about Prokofievs Symphony No. 1? Is this still CP? It is clearly not romantic, but just very moderate modern.



chu42 said:


> I invite someone who believes that CPT is_ not _stagnant to show me a recent CPT composer who has convincingly continued one of the Romantic lines and/or has expanded the conventions of the Romantic era. This is not a rhetorical question; it's a legitimate petition for answers.


Stagnation is true partwise. An example is Thomas Schmidt-Kowalski. Thats just 19th century music. Example: 4th symphony 1st movement (2003)

But in other cases I see progress.

I just searched a bit and came across Jeremy Soule. I don't know much about him, but this seems to be CP for me that is different to 19th century music:


----------



## Enthusiast

chu42 said:


> Pastiche is like Moszkowski or Bortkiewicz or early Ives...I agree that neither Sibelius or Rachmaninov qualify.
> 
> Especially not Sibelius. You could not listen to the 7th Symphony, for example, and think it is anybody but Sibelius.


Or even the early and withdrawn Kullervo!


----------



## chu42

Aries said:


> What about Bach?
> 
> If Bach and other Baroque composers were CPT composer but nobody of these listed CPT composers can be traced back to him or another Baroque composer, then it doesn't make sense that newer CP composers need to be traced back to one of these listed lines.


Except many composers can be traced back to Bach in terms of influence; Bach > Late Mozart > Beethoven > Schumann for example, or Bach > Late Mozart > Beethoven > Mendelssohn.

Bach himself can be traced to Heinrich Schutz, who is one of the very first CPT composers. Whereas all Italian opera can be traced back to Monteverdi, who is another one of the first CPT composers.

The tracing is important because in order for a composer to be expanding CPT, obviously they have to build on something that exists already and not something completely new. That's the only way to tell if something is CPT or not.



> What about Tchakovsky or Glazunov for example? More lines?


Both date back to Glinka.



> What about soviet composers like Shostakovich, Popov, Mjaskovsky, Sviridov and Khachaturian? Where is the boundary of CPT and why?


Shostakovich and Popov grow out of the styles of Prokofiev and Stravinsky, who are already outside of CPT.

Myaskovsky comes from Tchaikovsky, and then later Prokofiev and late Scriabin, who are both outside of CPT.

Sviridov was highly influenced by sacred music, which constitutes as CPT (yet originates long before CPT adopted it). I would say he is just on the line. Overall, I do not think Sviridov expanded the CPT idiom at all. He is just one of those composers of stereotypical Soviet propaganda music.

Khachaturian is probably the most Romantic out of this list. The only real non-CPT element is the heavy use of folk music, but his compositional style is completely within CPT. I would say he is a CPT composer but I don't think he expanded it too much other than his usage of Armenian folk music.



> If the vienna classic was CPT too, why is it today a requirement for CPT to be romantic? The question is what is the contentual definition. But whatever it is, it is possible that new schools fall into it.


Because the topic is progression in CPT. How can music be progressing CPT if it is being composed in the style of an era that was already superseded?

In order to compose in the Vienna style, you have to actively limit the amount of tools you are using. I can't see how one can expand CPT by limiting oneself to a certain set of idioms and tools.



> What about Prokofievs Symphony No. 1? Is this still CP? It is clearly not romantic, but just very moderate modern.


Neoclassical. Modern plus classical era elements.



> Stagnation is true partwise. An example is Thomas Schmidt-Kowalski. Thats just 19th century music. Example: 4th symphony 1st movement (2003)
> 
> But in other cases I see progress.
> 
> I just searched a bit and came across Jeremy Soule. I don't know much about him, but this seems to be CP for me that is different to 19th century music:


I don't know if I would call that CP. It has a highly ambient vibe, with clear influences from pop and video game music. For example, the opening minutes are all the same chord progression, with variation in texture.


----------



## Aries

chu42 said:


> Overall, I do not think Sviridov expanded the CPT idiom at all. He is just one of those composers of stereotypical Soviet propaganda music.


I think he achieved a higher accessibility than previous composers. He could even combine accessibility with dissonance like in his Music for Chamber Orchestra.



chu42 said:


> Because the topic is progression in CPT. How can music be progressing CPT if it is being composed in the style of an era that was already superseded?


The old style could be progressed into another direction than back in the time.



chu42 said:


> I don't know if I would call that CP. It has a highly ambient vibe, with clear influences from pop and video game music. For example, the opening minutes are all the same chord progression, with variation in texture.


I would say this style is capable of a wide atmospheric expression, something I see in many modern classical music. I see this as a progression. It has to do with instrumentation, but also with something else.

It is also easy accessible like Sviridov.

Pop influence? Maybe. I don't know much about pop and don't care for it.

Video game music? Yeah, obviously, but that says nothing about the style. Video game music can be rock, techno, hip-hop, classical or really anything else.

So lets says this music was influence by pop. Is it forbidden for CP music to be influenced by non CP music? You could define CP music as only influenced by previous CP music. But overall what relevance has this? Doesn't it make more sense to have a term for overall rather conservative classical music regarding the end result?


----------



## chu42

Aries said:


> Pop influence? Maybe. I don't know much about pop and don't care for it.
> 
> Video game music? Yeah, obviously, but that says nothing about the style. Video game music can be rock, techno, hip-hop, classical or really anything else.
> 
> So lets says this music was influence by pop. Is it forbidden for CP music to be influenced by non CP music? You could define CP music as only influenced by previous CP music. But overall what relevance has this? Doesn't it make more sense to have a term for overall rather conservative classical music regarding the end result?


This is a very complicated and interesting topic to handle. Obviously CPT is allowed to have influence from outside sources like folk music, popular tunes, etc.

We have Brahms' Hungarian Dances, Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies, Sullivan's operettas, etc. that all have heavy outside influences and are still considered CPT.

But then we have works like Gershwin's music which are no longer considered CPT because they stray too far from the previous idioms.

The truth is, there is no objective boundary that distinguishes the works that are on the borderline between CPT and non-CPT. So it's really just a subjective discussion where we lay down our thoughts and see if we can convince each other.



> I would say this style is capable of a wide atmospheric expression, something I see in many modern classical music. I see this as a progression. It has to do with instrumentation, but also with something else.


Now about Jeremy Soule. Perhaps Soule represents an advance in "atmospheric" expression, but there is a very clear regression in harmonic expression. A lot of the chord progressions are repetitive and derivative, and the non-repetitive elements sound very much to me like watered down Sibelius.

Furthermore, I think Sibelius already achieved this kind of atmospheric ambience and expression in his 7th Symphony, which is why I don't consider your example to be that much of an expansion.


----------



## fbjim

What about Dvorak's American period works, then? The Humoresques have pretty evident proto-jazz/ragtime influences...


----------



## chu42

fbjim said:


> What about Dvorak's American period works, then? The Humoresques have pretty evident proto-jazz/ragtime influences...


Not enough to remove it from CPT in my opinion. But it's subjective. I would say Gershwin crosses the line for sure, Dvorak not so much.


----------



## Aries

chu42 said:


> Now about Jeremy Soule. Perhaps Soule represents an advance in "atmospheric" expression, but there is a very clear regression in harmonic expression. A lot of the chord progressions are repetitive and derivative, and the non-repetitive elements sound very much to me like watered down Sibelius.


I think, yes, overall that is fair.

Jeremy Soule and other recent composers show an advance in atmospheric expression and accessibility but the compositional structure is not as good as in the 19th century imo. So it has pros and contras.

But it is maybe comparable with the translation from Baroque to the Classic. I think the Baroque was better in harmonics, polyphony and accessibility. But the Vienna Classic introduced new structures that are much better for "story telling" (per aspera ad astra etc.). And it really payed of with Beethoven and the Romantics later.

So I hope that in the future some composers combine the new achievements in atmospheric expression and accessibility with the highly evolved compositional structure of the late romantic age. This would be really great.


----------



## Sid James

The traditional diatonic system of harmony and form reached breaking point in the late 19th century. By the 1910's it was finished as a major force in Western classical music, being replaced by methods of composing which either disregard tonality or retain it in such a weak sense as to virtually make it a different thing altogether.

So, in effect, the generation of Brahms was the beginning of the end, and that of Rachmaninov the end. His was the last generation to compose with reference to the rules of tonal harmony as a benchmark. An anecdote which relates to this is when Henry Cowell, a teenager at the time (c. 1930's), showed one of his piano scores to Rachmaninov. Cowell was already using tone clusters and Rachmaninov genuinely thought they where mistakes, counting around thirty or forty errors in harmony in the score. He tried to be encouraging to Cowell, saying that he made many mistakes at a similar age.

While popular music and jazz have generally retained elements of traditional harmony more strongly than Western classical music, all types of music have come to reflect a diversity of approaches to composition. It could be said that the crisis of tonality wasn't so much a crisis but more of a readjustment to new realities - such as more music crossing borders, especially with the blending of Eastern and Western traditions, and this can also be related to the impact made by recording technology.


----------



## Botschaft

Brahms was the peak of the universe itself.


----------



## hammeredklavier

janxharris said:


> I'd still be interested to see you cite some passages of Sibelius's symphonies (4-7) where he is riffing off of the big 3 or anyone else for that matter.


To me, there are some similarities of idiomatic language:
Holst - The Planets




Sibelius symphony No.7


----------



## Fabulin

Beethoven No. 9




Sibelius No. 7


----------



## hammeredklavier

also, 
Mendelssohn symphony No.3




Sibelius symphony No.7


----------



## EdwardBast

consuono said:


> Sibelius and Rachmaninov are stylistically within the confines of CP, but chronologically they're holdouts. They may have influenced some film score composers though.


Rachmaninoff's influence on the next generation of Russian composers is pretty obvious. Early Myaskovsky symphonies, to some extent Prokofiev and Shostakovich as well.


----------



## janxharris

hammeredklavier said:


> To me, there are some similarities of idiomatic language:
> Holst - The Planets
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Sibelius symphony No.7


Maybe you are identifying the fact that both use a base pedal (though the Sibelius soon moves off). To my ears they are very different - to suggest that Sibelius is riffing off of (ie taking an idea and elaborating on it) Holst here is hard to accept for me.


----------



## janxharris

Fabulin said:


> Beethoven No. 9
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Sibelius No. 7


Different harmony and melody - but, yes, both are in compound duple time (actually I think the Beethoven is in 3/4 though it does sound like 6/8).

To riff-off is to take an idea and elaborate on it.


----------



## janxharris

hammeredklavier said:


> also,
> Mendelssohn symphony No.3
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Sibelius symphony No.7


Similar response as in my previous post. If you think they are similar then I can't really argue with your perception. I hear that both pieces use compound duple or triple time.



>


?


----------



## chu42

janxharris said:


> Similar response as in my previous post. If you think they are similar then I can't really argue with your perception. I hear that both pieces use compound duple or triple time.
> 
> ?


I don't get it either.


----------



## Couchie

Botschaft said:


> Brahms was the peak of the universe itself.


The universe is then overrated. Where the universe ends, Wagner begins. :tiphat:


----------



## hammeredklavier

janxharris said:


> ?


I was just saying that the Mendelssohn, Sibelius, Wagner, Liszt all utilize up/downward chromatic scales in unison to create agitated "feelings of fantasy"


----------



## ArtMusic

Couchie said:


> The universe is then overrated. Where the universe ends, Wagner begins. :tiphat:


Wagner begins and there is no end. It is not even allowed to end. It is the only resolve.


----------



## tdc

Sibelius late symphonies use a similar harmonic language as his early symphonies, his early influences therefore still contribute to his sound, because his late work is an outgrowth of his early work. Its not like when you hear late Sibelius you feel as though you are listening to a completely different composer.


----------



## Botschaft

Couchie said:


> The universe is then overrated. Where the universe ends, Wagner begins. :tiphat:


Yes, I do think of Wagner's music as otherworldly, whereas Brahms I feel is more realistic and human.


----------



## consuono

janxharris said:


> I could do but, as I said, it isn't an issue for all listeners; in any case, you made the initial assertion and I asked you to show the derivation regarding Sibelius. Sibelius is often cited as someone with a totally unique voice...but Mozart not so much. ...


This comment came to mind while I was listening to the Sibelus 5th. That wonderful coda with that brass wall of sound with the strings hammering chords home is...Brucknerian. Of course Sibelius delivers this in his own voice, but the precedents were there in Wagner and Bruckner.


----------



## janxharris

consuono said:


> This comment came to mind while I was listening to the Sibelus 5th. That wonderful coda with that brass wall of sound with the strings hammering chords home is...Brucknerian. Of course Sibelius delivers this in his own voice, but the precedents were there in Wagner and Bruckner.


I agree that the influence is there (Sibelius was very taken with Bruckner's 5th though with Wagner he both enthused and criticized). I would underline your , '...Sibelius delivers this in his own voice.'


----------



## janxharris

tdc said:


> Sibelius late symphonies use a similar harmonic language as his early symphonies, his early influences therefore still contribute to his sound, because his late work is an outgrowth of his early work. Its not like when you hear late Sibelius you feel as though you are listening to a completely different composer.


I understand the similarities, but I personally think of him as two different composers. Gone are the sweeping romanticisms that are so redolent of Tchaikovsky; instead we have much greater austerity and an increasing rigour in thematic development ('...the profound logic that created an inner connection between all the motifs)'- with the 7th and Tapiola being the culmination.


----------



## consuono

janxharris said:


> I agree that the influence is there (Sibelius was very taken with Bruckner's 5th though with Wagner he both enthused and criticized). I would underline your , '...Sibelius delivers this in his own voice.'


But there goes your "*totally* unique voice" as opposed to Mozart. Sibelius, like Bach and Mozart and Beethoven and every other composer, was the sum of his influences mixed with his own voice. And yes, Mozart is very different from Haydn and J. C. Bach.


----------



## EdwardBast

tdc said:


> Sibelius late symphonies use *a similar harmonic language as his early symphonies,* his early influences therefore still contribute to his sound, because his late work is an outgrowth of his early work. Its not like when you hear late Sibelius you feel as though you are listening to a completely different composer.


There is more to style than harmonic language. Why does it always reduce to this one parameter when the history of musical style is being discussed? Spoiler: When one (not you specifically tdc, I mean tonal CP theory) only has a hammer everything sounds like a nail.


----------



## janxharris

consuono said:


> But there goes your "*totally* unique voice" as opposed to Mozart. Sibelius, like Bach and Mozart and Beethoven and every other composer, was the sum of his influences mixed with his own voice. And yes, Mozart is very different from Haydn and J. C. Bach.


Bruckner's influence is felt, perhaps, in Sibelius's earlier symphonies (the third movement of his first is somewhat like Bruckner's ninth scherzo) - but I referred to Sibelius's unique harmony in his later works. I don't hear that in much Mozart or any classical era composer: just look at how many times they employ similar cadences. As I said, this is not an issue for many (most) listeners.


----------



## tdc

EdwardBast said:


> There is more to style than harmonic language. Why does it always reduce to this one parameter when the history of musical style is being discussed? Spoiler: When one (not you specifically tdc, I mean tonal CP theory) only has a hammer everything sounds like a nail.


I'm not sure. For me, it is the main thing that I find attractive about a composer's style. I think different listeners sometimes are attracted to different things. For example many people comment on the interesting treatment of themes and humor in Haydn, I've never noticed any of that. Musical narratives of that nature just don't really seem to interest me very much. If I like a composer's harmonic language I tend to like their music regardless of the form. Perhaps for this reason I like early Sibelius just as much as later Sibelius. I like Sibelius harmonic language so however he is structuring his music it seems to work for me, but I can't say I like symphony 7 more than number 1 or 3.

I'm not an expert on how Sibelius was structuring his later works, but I suspect that there could be some connection to Brahms thematic treatment.


----------



## hammeredklavier

Even in Beethoven, it's interesting to look at how he continues to build on his earlier expressions;
For instance, in certain moments of his variations:
sections of off-beat syncopations: Op.26 , Op.57 , Op.109 
sections of melodies with accompanied figures: Op.26 , Op.57 , Op.109


----------



## hammeredklavier

tdc said:


> For example many people comment on the interesting treatment of themes and humor in Haydn, I've never noticed any of that.


I also think that people tend to make a bit too much a fuss about it:




^I'm not sure if this is any more interesting than, say;
1:45 



11:18


----------



## hammeredklavier

janxharris said:


> I don't hear that in much Mozart or any classical era composer: just look at how many times they employ similar cadences.






Yes, they employ similar cadences, but their ways arrive at those are different from one another.



hammeredklavier said:


> Mozart actually does have a unique voice.*** You and consuono both have good points, but I think, when it comes to matters of "greatness", people in general are too fixated on the earlier composers. It's unfair to judge the later composers by the same yardsticks as the earlier composers. Mozart wrote fast, and in many genres, but this was what all great professional composers in the 18th century were required to do. I don't think you can judge, for example, Wagner, by the same standards. Considering the context in which they achieved artistry, I'm actually inclined to think they're both equally "great" in their own individual ways.
> 
> ***
> Bernstein (in his lecture on Mozart's symphony in G minor K.550): [ 8:07 ]
> "Do you realize that, that wild, atonal-sounding passage contains every one of the twelve chromatic tones except the tonic note G? ... Take my word for it, that out-burst of chromatic rage is Classically-contained, and so is the climax of this development section, which finds itself in the unlikely key of C-sharp minor, which is as far away as you can get from the home key of G minor."
> missa sancti trinitatis K.167 [ 3:52 ]
> 
> Bernstein: [ 2:03 ] "But notice that Mozart's theme is already chromatically formed. And even more so when it repeats."
> missa brevis K.275 [ 3:07 , 3:18 ] , [ 10:33 , 10:58 ] , [ 14:00 , 14:37 ]
> missa brevis K.257 [ 3:57 , 4:10 ] , [ 8:22 , 9:50 ]
> 
> Bernstein: [ 2:59 ] "There's that Classical balance we were talking about -chromatic wandering on the top, firmly supported by tonic-and-dominant structure underneath."
> missa brevis K.258 [ 2:53 ~ 3:31 ]
> 
> Bernstein: [ 6:02 ] "Even this lead-in to the home key, is chromatically written, firmly held in place by a dominant pedal."
> missa brevis K.275 [ 7:12 ~ 7:21 ]
> 
> Look at the introduction to the K.465 "dissonance" quartet,
> and then this contrapuntal passage of chromatic fourths in
> missa sancti Trinitatis K.167 [ 10:47 ]
> 
> Also compare K.551/iv with K.192/iii
> 
> Luchesi or Salieri, for example, ([E.M.], [H.M.], [R]) don't orchestrate like this:
> spatzenmesse K.220 [ 2:30 ~ 4:00 ]
> "On the other hand, for the French, Mozart was certainly not 'one of us' from a national point of view. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, before Berlioz's time, some influential critics - for instance, Julien-Louis Geoffroy - rejected Mozart as a foreigner, considering his music 'scholastic', stressing his use of harmony over melody, and the dominance of the orchestra over singing in the operas - all these were considered negative features of 'Germanic' music."
> < Mozartian Undercurrents in Berlioz / Benjamin Pearl / P.21 >


----------



## janxharris

hammeredklavier said:


> Yes, they employ similar cadences, but their ways arrive at those are different from one another.


It's interesting to hear Seth Monahan speak on the classical cadence. It would seem that for some they represent something of a platonic ideal, whilst for others they can be irritating. For me this would be a good example of why it's not useful to speak of objective superiority.

You reference some of Mozart's use of chromatics - well I would agree that this is where he can be rather interesting - the best that I have heard from that period imo.


----------



## BeatriceB

This is quite a strange poll because I don't think CP peaked with any period or composer. It is still alive today and it is still developing. I would hate to see a biased thinking in saying that it peaked with any composer in any period.


----------



## hammeredklavier

chu42 said:


> consuono said:
> 
> 
> 
> That you have too much time on your hands.
> 
> 
> 
> I don't know about you, but it's pretty common for people to listen to 20+ hours of music in a week...
Click to expand...

Yeah, I listen to music when I drive to work, that's 10 hours of listening time per week. And I also do while having meals, there's another 10 hours.


----------



## Luchesi

yes, it's all indelible/ineradicable now. You will hold up well.


I play all the time (and the music that comes out is more mysterious to me all the time), but I only listen to the cream of the crop recordings about 5 hours a week. I should get back to listening.


----------



## consuono

hammeredklavier said:


> Yeah, I listen to music when I drive to work, that's 10 hours of listening time per week. And I also do while having meals, there's another 10 hours. Btw, consuono apparently has the time to go through a vast amount of old threads just to find how a member's view changed over the years. I'm scared, if I argue my views too much with him, he'll "investigate".


You're the one that sifts through months-old comments, not me. Projecting there, hammered. And sympathies for that brutal drive time. But how attentively can you be listening while driving or eating? It proves my point...poor old working people have to try to cram in some Stockhausen under circumstances more fitted for Telemann. :lol:


----------



## chu42

consuono said:


> And sympathies for that brutal drive time


Bit of a tangent but a 40 min commute is pretty typical, no? That's my own commute time


----------



## consuono

In a five day week that would be an hour to and from.


----------



## chu42

consuono said:


> In a five day week that would be an hour to and from.


Still pretty typical due to suburbanization. It's not great but it's normal.

Anyways, I still don't see how one would be hard pressed to listen to 20 hours of music in a week. 10 hours on the drive, 10 hours at home...yeah, not exactly difficult.


----------



## consuono

chu42 said:


> Still pretty typical due to suburbanization. It's not great but it's normal.
> 
> Anyways, I still don't see how one would be hard pressed to listen to 20 hours of music in a week. 10 hours on the drive, 10 hours at home...yeah, not exactly difficult.


OK.

,,....,.,,.............gujjkojnhgyihgfjhfh


----------



## Rapide

A poll with a rather outdated question; common practice has never peaked with Brahms or anyone. It is still developing today albeit perhaps with less intensity but it is still alive and well. It is dangerous to assume some stagnancy.


----------



## Bwv 1080

The pre-Covid bumper to bumper traffic was better for listening to CM - less road noise to drown out the dynamics. Now I dont listen to much CM in the car unless short trips around my house


----------



## consuono

I don't find driving to be conducive to careful listening anyway. That's what pop is for. Or talk radio.


----------

