# The dearth of new music



## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

So we all have an understanding of the sequence of events, throughout the 20th century concert halls started programming less and less new music until we reached the state we're in now. Regardless of why this happened composers couldn't rely on their music being performed anymore, there was a slow retreat into institutional power - awards, academic posts, government arts grants. There was a small retreat back into popularity with steve reich and phillip glass but the second generation of minimalist composers (post-minimalists and totalists) never achieved the same popularity. Excepting glenn branca and john luther adams who both achieved some popular success, the rest of the post-minimalists are played less seldom than even the late serialists. It turned out that even writing in heavily tonal paradigms was not enough to convince concert halls to start programming new music.

Compare this with what happened in other art forms: Modernist literature is still extremely popular today. Now, I doubt that many people read joyce, but a lot of people certainly like to say that they've read joyce. Even people like nabokov who considered themselves academics are quite widely read. Playwrights like alfred jarry and beckett are still quite popular and their style of writing has had a profound effect on even mainstream popular television and movies. Playhouses quite often play new works and they also play lots of modernist works. With visual art, we have lots of museums dedicated to both modern and contemporary art. They may not be widely popular but they've certainly found both a niche market of extremely wealthy people and enough clout to still have new works displayed in museums for the public to see. In contrast, (new) classical music has not found any market to speak of. It's unclear whether there will be any funding in 20 years. 

Why is contemporary classical music then in such a dismal state? Why did classical music hit such a stumbling block with modernism in a way that other art forms figured out?

Is enjoying schoenberg that much harder than enjoying a cezanne? Is enjoying mauricio kagel that much harder than enjoying a play by beckett? Is enjoying milton babbitt that much harder than enjoying nabokov? I really don't think so - I'm not sure it has to do with the music itself. I can really only think of two answers and neither of them seem satisfying: (1) It could be that the shift out from common-practice music was actually much more radical than what happened with every other art form. That seems like quite a bold claim though. (2) Music wasn't as easily commodified as visual art nor did it have the strong intellectual associations of writing. I think this is part of the story, but clearly not the whole picture. The function of music in the romantic era was coincidental with the rise of nationalism and humanism, it served both purposes of the state and was easily commodified with aristocrats in various courts. I don't see why classical music couldn't serve similar purposes now. 

So if these answers aren't right, and I don't think they are, then what's the answer? What went wrong with classical music?


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## Guest (Dec 18, 2021)

"...._then what's the answer? What went wrong with classical music_?

It's what happened to literature and art: modernism and postmodernism and the difficulty of discerning the real from the fake. I don't think other art forms did "figure it out" either. Two world wars and nihilism provided the blunt edge for brutal art and a loss of belief in anything transcendent. We've read about 'the dark ages' before and we're in another one right now.


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

Christabel said:


> "...._ Two world wars and nihilism provided the blunt edge for brutal art and a loss of belief in anything transcendent. ._


_

It's interesting, I've often thought a lot about Eric Hobswam's concept of the late 19th century applied to art historiography. A lot of art from the 1914-1942 both looks and sounds like it would be on the avant-garde if it came out today. Now Hobswam talks about the short 20th century but I wonder if this is just wishful thinking in a lot of ways. A lot of music of the common practice period sounds "old". Medieval music before the early modern period sounds absolutely alien! The fact that the rite of spring sounds contemporary today - well that has to mean something right?



Christabel said:



We've read about 'the dark ages' before and we're in another one right now.

Click to expand...

Well remember the many contemporary historians now see the idea of the dark ages as poor historiography! The contemporary use of the term mostly refers only to the relative scarcity of the historical record. Now in this latter sense I actually agree with you - so much our art, especially our digital and electronic art, is not archived for posterity! It's not unforeseeable that much of what we have now will be lost to future generations._


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## AndorFoldes (Aug 25, 2012)

Visual art can be bought and sold, so there is a collectors market where people are looking to make a profit - a bit like with cryptocurrency.

Musical performances cannot be traded, however, and concert halls need to make a profit by having people show up for them. Atonal serialism became the dominating form of "classical" music in the 1950s, but there has never been a sizeable audience for this kind of music. So lacking new, popular music to program, older, established "safe" works are chosen.

It's not as if people don't want to listen to new music. I'm not a big fan myself, but just look at the popularity whenever John Williams' Star Wars soundtrack is on the program.


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

AndorFoldes said:


> Atonal serialism became the dominating form of "classical" music in the 1950s, but there has never been a sizeable audience for this kind of music.


But this isn't true right? Pretty much no one writes in atonal serialism anymore, only a handful of composers continued writing in serialism after darmstadt. There was a lot of tonal music in fact, and tonal music that used new paradigms. This is a good resource on postminimalism for example, if you want to take a look. https://www.kylegann.com/postminimalism.html. These composers did not make music that was 'difficult' to listen to - in fact there are many popular post-romantic works which are more harmonically complex! So why did none of these composers become popular? Can one only be popular if you produce music that fits squarely in already established paradigms, even tiny amounts of experimentation are not tolerated? That seems to be in stunning contrast with the romantic period which had people pushing boundaries all the time!


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## John Zito (Sep 11, 2021)

Opisthokont said:


> *Is enjoying schoenberg that much harder than enjoying a cezanne? Is enjoying mauricio kagel that much harder than enjoying a play by beckett? Is enjoying milton babbitt that much harder than enjoying nabokov? I really don't think so* - I'm not sure it has to do with the music itself. I can really only think of two answers and neither of them seem satisfying: (1) It could be that the shift out from common-practice music was actually much more radical than what happened with every other art form. That seems like quite a bold claim though. (2) Music wasn't as easily commodified as visual art nor did it have the strong intellectual associations of writing. I think this is part of the story, but clearly not the whole picture. The function of music in the romantic era was coincidental with the rise of nationalism and humanism, it served both purposes of the state and was easily commodified with aristocrats in various courts. I don't see why classical music couldn't serve similar purposes now.


I think it is fundamentally harder. Long-form concert music is much more abstract than the others arts, and most people (even educated, intelligent people) just don't know how to listen to it; it wasn't a part of their education, and it's not a skill they've bothered cultivating. And I'm talking about Beethoven, never mind Boulez. Take an educated, intelligent, and completely uninitiated person to a Haydn symphony, and I would bet they're going to space out, twiddle their thumbs, skim the program, and nod off. They'll have no idea how to take it in, they won't comprehend the form in real time, the musical idiom won't reach them all that much emotionally. They just aren't going to know where to start in following it. And the problem is compounded by the fact that they can't take it in at their own pace.

Put that same person in front of a Cézanne, or hand them a copy of _Pale Fire_, and they can at least get the gist. They know something about how to read books or view paintings or watch plays. Their education introduced them to these things, and maybe even encouraged them to try their hand at them. So they have some concept of how a novel/painting/play is put together, and they know where to start in consuming it.


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## Guest (Dec 18, 2021)

AndorFoldes said:


> Visual art can be bought and sold, so there is a collectors market where people are looking to make a profit - a bit like with cryptocurrency.
> 
> Musical performances cannot be traded, however, and concert halls need to make a profit by having people show up for them. Atonal serialism became the dominating form of "classical" music in the 1950s, but there has never been a sizeable audience for this kind of music. So lacking new, popular music to program, older, established "safe" works are chosen.
> 
> It's not as if people don't want to listen to new music. I'm not a big fan myself, but just look at the popularity whenever John Williams' Star Wars soundtrack is on the program.


Good points. We want our music to move forward, of course, and be represented by our contemporaries. However, it shouldn't just have shock value - which I think much of it has. And there's a confusion between 'music' and 'sonic art' or 'sound design'. Computer-generated, experimental sounds seem to attract a very few people but as for lasting into perpetuity; I very much have my doubts.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Opisthokont said:


> Why is contemporary classical music then in such a dismal state? Why did classical music hit such a stumbling block with modernism in a way that other art forms figured out?


False premise.

New Classical music is being written today by a wider demographic of young composers whose command of a plethora of styles is very impressive. These composers do not depend upon traditional institutions for validation but often form their own performance ensembles and/or collectives and fund their endeavors through a variety of methods to create opportunities for their work.

I find new Classical music being written today very exciting and plentiful.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

There is no death nor dearth of new music. There is only the death of the monopoly that Classical music had for ages. At first it was brought about by the Church, then the Bourgeoisie through the Concert Hall. Classical has now almost become underground music compared to other genres. There is little solidarity even within Classical music industry or community, when there are likes of A. Deutscher preaching against much of the Classical nowadays. 

Nothing really went 'wrong' with Classical, it was bound to lose connection with the main paying patrons, who'd rather listen to John Williams or old warhorses. It was inevitable given the social and economic circumstances.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

AndorFoldes said:


> Visual art can be bought and sold, so there is a collectors market where people are looking to make a profit - a bit like with cryptocurrency.
> 
> Musical performances cannot be traded, however, and concert halls need to make a profit by having people show up for them. *Atonal serialism became the dominating form of "classical" music in the 1950s,* but there has never been a sizeable audience for this kind of music. So lacking new, popular music to program, older, established "safe" works are chosen.
> 
> It's not as if people don't want to listen to new music. I'm not a big fan myself, but just look at the popularity whenever John Williams' Star Wars soundtrack is on the program.


Good points about commodification and the overhead of performing venues. I wonder, however, in what sense you think "atonal serialism" dominated classical music in the 1950s. One might get that impression from music history textbooks of the succeeding decades but I'm interested in evidence from reality.


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## larold (Jul 20, 2017)

I agree -- there is no lack of new music. There just isn't any that has caught on with people. The quality of most modern music is poor compared to what's been popular for the past 400 years.

There are a lot of reasons for this and one is the death of melody and sonata format, the elements that traditionally helped make certain classical compositions popular with audiences. Music evolved into a sound world over time and minimalism made it a repetitive sound world.

This stylistic combination has come to dominate film and popular music too, one of the reasons Williams music became and has remained popular.


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## mikeh375 (Sep 7, 2017)

Saying the quality of most modern music is poor is erroneous imv. Some modernity just aspires to a different aesthetic and yet generally speaking, still requires as much in the way of talent, skill and ability, just as composing has always done. There are always turkeys of course but is it helpful to use a broad and even misguided generalisation with which to condemn seemingly objectively, decades of creativity by skilled artists?
Obviously we can like or hate certain types or styles of music written today, but does disliking any become a reason to then question its quality or even integrity?


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## VoiceFromTheEther (Aug 6, 2021)

OP: check out my recent thread where so many lliving composers have been put forward:
Your list of five greatest LIVING composers
as well as a follow-up round about enjoyability of most common picks:
The music of which of those composers do you enjoy the most?

and tell me what you think


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## composingmusic (Dec 16, 2021)

> OP: check out my recent thread where so many lliving composers have been put forward:
> Your list of five greatest LIVING composers
> as well as a follow-up round about enjoyability of most common picks:
> The music of which of those composers do you enjoy the most?
> ...


Seconding this list! Lots of good names there - I might add a few (although picking just five is really, really hard)


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Opisthokont said:


> Is enjoying schoenberg that much harder than enjoying a cezanne? Is enjoying mauricio kagel that much harder than enjoying a play by beckett? Is enjoying milton babbitt that much harder than enjoying nabokov? I really don't think so - I'm not sure it has to do with the music itself. *I can really only think of two answers and neither of them seem satisfying: (1) It could be that the shift out from common-practice music was actually much more radical than what happened with every other art form. That seems like quite a bold claim though. (2) Music wasn't as easily commodified as visual art nor did it have the strong intellectual associations of writing.* I think this is part of the story, but clearly not the whole picture. The function of music in the romantic era was coincidental with the rise of nationalism and humanism, it served both purposes of the state and was easily commodified with aristocrats in various courts. I don't see why classical music couldn't serve similar purposes now.
> 
> So if these answers aren't right, and I don't think they are, then what's the answer? What went wrong with classical music?


I can think of another possible answer or contributing factor, one that's likely an inevitable corollary of what you've described as a lack of "strong intellectual associations" of the kind one finds in literature. The fact that instrumental music's content - the sum of its expressive, metaphorical, and quasi-narrative resonances - is abstract and resistant to verbal translation, means that the basis of communication and understanding between composer and audience is necessarily going to be slower to evolve and more readily disrupted than in other art forms because it can't be jump-started, course-corrected, or instantaneously mediated by words, visual images, and concepts. The lines of communication and understanding depend heavily on what's left: shared conventions and traditions that change incrementally on a long time scale.

In the Adirondack Mountains where I live the ecosystems above treeline also change gradually and on a long time scale. This is so because they depend on severely limited resources, less heat and light (the latter because of an extra month or two of snow cover), and virtually no mineral soil. Plants have to make the substrate in which they grow from the death and decay of their own species. So growth is gradual and incremental and a fire or the erosion caused by human traffic can destroy a century of progress in an instant. Because of its severely limited semantic resources, classical music's interface between composer and audience is a similarly fragile ecosystem.


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## AndorFoldes (Aug 25, 2012)

Opisthokont and EdwardBast, regarding atonal serialism.

From the 1950s and forward, at least in Europe, there were the composers associated with the Darmstadt school who were successful in gaining public funding for themselves. I know you mentioned that, Opisthokont. Beyond serialism I'm also thinking about other modernist music that is difficult to comprehend for a casual listener and will keep them away.

Ultimately, in a marketplace where people can choose what they want, some works will rise to the top while others will be forgotten. There is obviously a lot of competition in the marketplace from non-classical music too, which doesn't help budding composers either. People love the Beatles in this forum and they certainly played a part in that development back in the 1960s.


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## composingmusic (Dec 16, 2021)

AndorFoldes said:


> Opisthokont and EdwardBast, regarding atonal serialism.
> 
> From the 1950s and forward, at least in Europe, there were the composers associated with the Darmstadt school who were successful in gaining public funding for themselves. I know you mentioned that, Opisthokont. Beyond serialism I'm also thinking about other modernist music that is difficult to comprehend for a casual listener and will keep them away.
> 
> Ultimately, in a marketplace where people can choose what they want, some works will rise to the top while others will be forgotten. There is obviously a lot of competition in the marketplace from non-classical music too, which doesn't help budding composers either. People love the Beatles in this forum and they certainly played a part in that development back in the 1960s.


I've also encountered an attitude at some times where listeners have been told contemporary music is difficult to listen to, and they've said to me that they feel there's some kind of way of listening, which they haven't gotten into, and aren't privy to. Basically, they feel like they've been told it's difficult, so they feel it must be difficult to listen to. I've actually had interesting discussions with people who haven't encountered this attitude, and when I introduce them to contemporary music without introducing them to this attitude, they often find the sound world fascinating. This may be worth factoring in to this discussion, I think.


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## Guest (Dec 18, 2021)

EdwardBast said:


> I can think of another possible answer or contributing factor, one that's likely an inevitable corollary of what you've described as a lack of "strong intellectual associations" of the kind one finds in literature. The fact that instrumental music's content - the sum of its expressive, metaphorical, and quasi-narrative resonances - is abstract and resistant to verbal translation, means that the basis of communication and understanding between composer and audience is necessarily going to be slower to evolve and more readily disrupted than in other art forms because it can't be jump-started, course-corrected, or instantaneously mediated by words, visual images, and concepts. The lines of communication and understanding depend heavily on what's left: shared conventions and traditions that change incrementally on a long time scale.
> 
> In the Adirondack Mountains where I live the ecosystems above treeline also change gradually and on a long time scale. This is so because they depend on severely limited resources, less heat and light (the latter because of an extra month or two of snow cover), and virtually no mineral soil. Plants have to make the substrate in which they grow from the death and decay of their own species. So growth is gradual and incremental and a fire or the erosion caused by human traffic can destroy a century of progress in an instant. Because of its severely limited semantic resources, classical music's interface between composer and audience is a similarly fragile ecosystem.


But that doesn't take account of the rapid availability of resources to everybody, anywhere, anytime through the internet. Under such conditions one would imagine reaching people becomes easier, not harder. Your analogy of the forest ecosystem doesn't apply to culture - especially music - since glacial growth would mean we should be still back in the musical medieval period. From what I can tell your 'severely limited semantic resources' are easily challenged by hearing just a tiny sample of what is being composed, and has been composed, in the last 50 years. Would this not also apply to the colour spectrum in visual art? You can blend colours, alter shapes, confound and confuse with abstraction but the principle behind this would be familiarity with colour that the culture has in the first place. Perhaps this is why artists moved from paint to other substances and objects d'art. They didn't want their art to be 'familiar' - but needed it to challenge and confound, or provoke thought. Trouble is, this becomes the intrinsic message and quite often obscures the 'artfulness' of the work, existing in a culture in time.

Instrumental music's content becomes less abstract through the process of familiarization; a major factor in wider public acceptance. Does it need to be verbally translated? Does a fine film need to be verbally translated or does it 'bend with the remover to remove'; or is it "an ever fix'd mark"? This former might explain how a film today is appreciated and understood when it might not have been at the time of its creation - as is also the case in music. Could it be cultural change and context alone changes meaning? Are or were audiences looking for different things at the time?

I tend to think my latter question is relevant to the state of contemporary art music and this will explain the yawning void between creation and acceptance, especially in light of what I said about ease of dissemination. That and the intellectualization of culture through academe; some composers write because of a system of grants and their audience (for them) becomes those people who'll decide on the merits of a work.

I'm firmly of the view that the visual medium of cinema has had a huge influence on art music/concert music - whatever you want to call it. From the few pieces/works I've heard in a concert hall this became immediately apparent to me: short, sharp imagistic phrases and sequences, deliberate 'sound effects', atmospheric sections influenced by both musical impressionism and cinematic 'accompaniment' for the purposes of narrative development - or even just a kind of stasis that you might find in the 'bridge passage' of a sonata - and, of course, music can be narrative itself. In fact, the cinematic 'eye' can find much to 'hear' (sorry about the synaesthesia) in some contemporary music. The question of whether people 'like' or 'enjoy' it becomes another consideration altogether.

From my point of view, the styles and forms and means of performing (acoustic instruments, electronic/computer-generated) are a major part of the communication process. Over time audiences have familiarized themselves with the sound-world of acoustic classical instruments. You'll need a pretty compelling argument to move outside of that to a new medium of delivery for a composer to expect 'acceptance' within his or her own lifetime. If it's experimental then, by definition, that can fail as easily as it succeeds; it was explicitly designed that way. Then there is the matter of having audiences process 'sounds' themselves in new ways; this has a very long lead time for acceptance, even if that's possible.

If you look at very successful 'contemporary' composers like Penderecki, just to name one, he worked within a musical frame of reference most people understand - even if they don't like what he's done with it. Apart from a couple of his religious works I am not at all enamored with this composer's work. But if I lived another 50 years I might be because the culture might have 'caught up' with his musical thinking.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

mikeh375 said:


> Obviously we can like or hate certain types or styles of music written today, but does disliking any become a reason to then question its quality or even integrity?


Based on many TC threads, the answer is, unfortunately, yes, but certainly disliking music is not a _good_ reason to question quality or integrity.


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## allaroundmusicenthusiast (Jun 3, 2020)

SanAntone said:


> False premise.
> 
> New Classical music is being written today by a wider demographic of young composers whose command of a plethora of styles is very impressive. These composers do not depend upon traditional institutions for validation but often form their own performance ensembles and/or collectives and fund their endeavors through a variety of methods to create opportunities for their work.
> 
> I find new Classical music being written today very exciting and plentiful.


I don't think this is the discussion that OP was trying to get to


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

allaroundmusicenthusiast said:


> I don't think this is the discussion that OP was trying to get to


Oh, well, my bad ........ what discussion was the OP trying to get at?


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

SanAntone said:


> False premise.
> 
> New Classical music is being written today by a wider demographic of young composers whose command of a plethora of styles is very impressive. These composers do not depend upon traditional institutions for validation but often form their own performance ensembles and/or collectives and fund their endeavors through a variety of methods to create opportunities for their work.
> 
> I find new Classical music being written today very exciting and plentiful.


I've learned to beware posts that begin with statements like, "So we all have an understanding of the sequence of events." My understanding of the sequence of events differs markedly from that of the OP.


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## allaroundmusicenthusiast (Jun 3, 2020)

SanAntone said:


> Oh, well, my bad ........ what discussion was the OP trying to get at?


My takeaway was that why is "modern" music not held in the same regard as modern literature and visual arts, and not that good music is scarce today. It's an interesting discussion, IMO


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

fluteman said:


> I've learned to beware posts that begin with statements like, "So we all have an understanding of the sequence of events." My understanding of the sequence of events differs markedly from that of the OP.


Yeah. I should have learned by now that any discussion about new music is a minefield and best avoided.


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## composingmusic (Dec 16, 2021)

SanAntone said:


> Yeah. I should have learned by now that any discussion about new music is a minefield and best avoided.


Sad to hear - I do rather enjoy a discussion about new music. Although I suppose I'm new to this forum, so I don't have much to comment on that front in context. I agree with your earlier sentiment about there being a huge number of young composers, writing in a very wide variety of styles, however.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

allaroundmusicenthusiast said:


> My takeaway was that why is "modern" music not held in the same regard as modern literature and visual arts, and not that good music is scarce today. It's an interesting discussion, IMO


I don't believe that modern literature or art, e.g. Joyce, Beckett, Pollack, Rauschenberg, are held in higher esteem by the general public than composers such as Schoenberg or Boulez. And among the professionals all of these artists have their supporters and critics.

So, I repeat my initial comment: false premise.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

composingmusic said:


> Sad to hear - I do rather enjoy a discussion about new music. Although I suppose I'm new to this forum, so I don't have much to comment on that front in context. I agree with your earlier sentiment about there being a huge number of young composers, writing in a very wide variety of styles, however.


There are a few YouTube channels that post new music on a regular basis. I used to have a longer list, but can only remember three off the top of my head:

incipitsify

gɹinblat

Score Follower


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## allaroundmusicenthusiast (Jun 3, 2020)

composingmusic said:


> Sad to hear - I do rather enjoy a discussion about new music. Although I suppose I'm new to this forum, so I don't have much to comment on that front in context. I agree with your earlier sentiment about there being a huge number of young composers, writing in a very wide variety of styles, however.


Sometimes there are nice exchanges, check out the best living composers thread, that was as civil and as interesting as it can get when dealing with this subject here


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## allaroundmusicenthusiast (Jun 3, 2020)

SanAntone said:


> I don't believe that modern literature or art, e.g. Joyce, Beckett, Pollack, Rauschenberg, are held in higher esteem by the general public than composers such as Schoenberg or Boulez. And among the professionals all of these artists have their supporters and critics.
> 
> So, I repeat my initial comment: false premise.


Ask anyone of my generation if they know who Boulez is, then ask them if they know who Joyce is. Among those involved in each art, well yes, you're right, but those are skewed views.


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## composingmusic (Dec 16, 2021)

allaroundmusicenthusiast said:


> Sometimes there are nice exchanges, check out the best living composers thread, that was as civil and as interesting as it can get when dealing with this subject here


Yes, that's what got me to sign up as a member here in the first place! I stumbled across it and thought there was some good discussion there.


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## JackRance (Sep 13, 2021)

So, first of all (I don't know why) but music is one of the least followed arts, and maybe it's because it's not so immediate. What I mean is that art exhibitions, museums, books, literary events, cinemas, etc. they are full, while the concert halls are much less crowded ...

Furthermore, classical music has a huge rival which is pop music. It is true that there is also a "pop" literature (Harry Potter and all the other stupid books), a pop art and above all a cinema that is practically only pop.

Then, the point of literature is that each writer does his own thing.
Today no one (or almost) has followed and expanded on what Joyce did, but each writer takes his own path. In music, however, although there are various currents, there are very few who do everything on their own and are often not accredited.
Anyway, I love Beckett, I am interested in really reading Joyce (I have already read the Dubliners and the Portrait, but I am preparing to read Ulysses) and all the other writers of the 20th century and I also love Schonberg, Webern and I am moving towards Kurtàg .

And anyway yes, understanding Schoenberg is much more difficult than understanding Cezanne. To understand today's music it is necessary to spend a lot of time in the study (not necessarily academic) of music, which is not really necessary for the visual arts, where a guide is enough to explain the meaning of things ...


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## GucciManeIsTheNewWebern (Jul 29, 2020)

I agree with OP that listening to modernist music isn't fundamentally different than listening to Beethoven. If the music can't be appreciated by what I call the "naïve listener" and needs formal knowledge and intellectual prerequsites, then it really has no value as music. For example, I love the 2nd Viennese school but have zero understanding of how they write besides the basic concept of a tone row and how it's manipulated (inversion, retrograde, etc.) And I haven't got the faintest idea how Xenakis or Boulez write.

The thing is, modernist music is so alien to anything general audiences are accustomed to or enjoy and will be met with backlash by most, because there's the unfortunate tendency of human nature to deride things we are unfamiliar with. It's one thing to listen to it and not like it, but another to completely dismiss its value without giving it a fair shake. It's like learning another language. If you don't know Chinese, of course it's going to sound like gibberish. But if you "learn" the language of atonality by listening to it more, the more you'll at least understand, even if you don't like it.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

allaroundmusicenthusiast said:


> Ask anyone of my generation if they know who Boulez is, then ask them if they know who Joyce is. Among those involved in each art, well yes, you're right, but those are skewed views.


Have they read Joyce, other than as a university assignment?


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

I just don't see any connection whatsoever between Boulez and Joyce, I've heard Pli selon Pli and I've read Ulysses. I just deny there's any connection whatsoever. 

If you want a literary connection to Boulez it's not Joyce, it's Mallarmé, late Mallarmé. And if you want a musical connection to Joyce, I don't think there is one.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

GucciManeIsTheNewWebern said:


> I agree with OP that listening to modernist music isn't fundamentally different than listening to Beethoven. .


How am I supposed to verify that this is right?


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Mandryka said:


> I just don't see any connection whatsoever between Boulez and Joyce, I've heard Pli selon Pli and I've read Ulysses. I just deny there's any connection whatsoever.
> 
> If you want a literary connection to Boulez it's not Joyce, it's Mallarmé, late Mallarmé. And if you want a musical connection to Joyce, I don't think there is one.


The connection was if Joyce was more acceptable to the general public than Boulez. I say no, they are both either ignored or lampooned.


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## GucciManeIsTheNewWebern (Jul 29, 2020)

Mandryka said:


> How am I supposed to verify that this is right?


Knorf mentioned one time in a thread his young niece was dancing to Boulez. That anecdote kinda stuck with me. You don't need musical expertise to appreciate it any more than you do Beethoven, although it certainly helps in both cases.

Of course, listening to the respective music is different because the music itself is different. You don't listen to rap the same way you listen to Mozart.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Upon reading the thread title ("dearth"), I immediately thought of




. Anyway, new music is alive and well, and this is the proof.


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

allaroundmusicenthusiast said:


> Ask anyone of my generation if they know who Boulez is, then ask them if they know who Joyce is. Among those involved in each art, well yes, you're right, but those are skewed views.


James Joyce was an almost exact contemporary of Picasso and Stravinsky. Boulez came much later. I'd say that all three (Joyce, Picasso and Stravinsky, that is), remain big names and highly influential in our culture today. All three belong to a classical era and tradition that predates our current era.


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

*What went wrong with classical music?*

About 100 years ago there were basically two paths forward: follow the Schoenberg path or the one taken by composers like Ravel, Respighi or Debussy. What the former group failed at, miserably, was recognizing that music is the most abstract art form there is and that the average human brain - musically trained or not - can only understand a certain level of abstraction until it becomes muddled noise. The latter group kept to the ideals of earlier generations: melody above all matters the most in music. It springs from our ancient folk song heritage. There was a lot of bad, fake music written by poseurs, just like there was terrible art in every genre. Not everyone was fooled: there were a lot of musicians and conductors and record producers and listeners who knew they were being conned and resisted. By the time the jig was up and people realized just how horrible a lot of 20th c music was, the damage was done. Multitudes turned off to "modern" music and turned to easier, more brain-friendly repertoire be it Broadway, pop, rock, country/western, or even jazz. AM radio and TV clearly inflicted a lot of damage. But even the more traditional composers like Vaughan Williams, Shostakovich, Prokofieff, Hanson, and others shot themselves in the foot: their music is often utterly beyond the ability of amateurs to play, or play well. You do not want to hear the Vaughan Williams 4th played by anything less than a first rate orchestra. So all of those smaller orchestras resort to playing the safer, easier material from the 18th and 19th century that they stand a chance of getting through - their audiences (and players) will never be exposed to more modern music. There are some modern composers who realize that maybe they don't need to write music as difficult as Elliot Carter, and they stand a better chance of being heard if they don't: Theofanidis is one. But is it too little too late? Probably.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

GucciManeIsTheNewWebern said:


> Knorf mentioned one time in a thread his young niece was dancing to Boulez. That anecdote kinda stuck with me. You don't need musical expertise to appreciate it any more than you do Beethoven, although it certainly helps in both cases.
> 
> Of course, listening to the respective music is different because the music itself is different. You don't listen to rap the same way you listen to Mozart.


I am sure that you don't need expertise to enjoy Beethoven or Boulez - though maybe you do to appreciate Notations 1a, but let's stick with Marteau sans Maître say. The problem I have is this: I don't think the two activities are the same. I don't think that there is one activity called _appreciating music _or _listening to something as music_ which is exercised when someone appreciates Beethoven and Boulez. I think that the experiences are too different for that because in the Beethoven there is an ebb and flow, tension and relief, in Boulez not so. And that seems very fundamental to me.

In this sense I find myself in a fundamental disagreement with John Cage.


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## Aries (Nov 29, 2012)

Opisthokont said:


> I can really only think of two answers and neither of them seem satisfying: (1) It could be that the shift out from common-practice music was actually much more radical than what happened with every other art form. That seems like quite a bold claim though. (2) Music wasn't as easily commodified as visual art nor did it have the strong intellectual associations of writing. I think this is part of the story, but clearly not the whole picture. The function of music in the romantic era was coincidental with the rise of nationalism and humanism, it served both purposes of the state and was easily commodified with aristocrats in various courts. I don't see why classical music couldn't serve similar purposes now.
> 
> So if these answers aren't right, and I don't think they are, then what's the answer? What went wrong with classical music?


Music is more timeless than literature. Absolute music is at least supposed to have no non-artistic content. This is probably impossible for literature. Literature always has a content. But this means it is less timeless, and that new literature has the value to be more current. In music you can go back to 200-300 year old music with less missing. And that is what happend after the romantic era. The popularity of the classical era and the baroque era increased with time after the romantic era.

One aspect of visible art is, that you can own them. But you can't own music. Some visual art has absurd prices now because people use it as store of value like gold or company shares. I'm not sure how much artistic value such visual art actually has. Music is a purer art imo, the highest art.

To give art an high status was probably a romantic idea. That it hasn't this status anymore is maybe a characteristic of the modern ideology. Some modernist composers actually agitated against beauty in art, and I would say against the essence of art itself. Since music is a very pure art I think it is probably true that the shift out from common-practice music was actually much more radical than what happened with every other art form.

Tl;dr: Modern variants of other art forms have probably an advantage compared to modern music because of the non-artistic aspects of other art forms.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

mbhaub said:


> What the former group failed at, miserably, was recognizing that music is the most abstract art form there is and that the average human brain - musically trained or not - can only understand a certain level of abstraction until it becomes muddled noise. ........
> By the time the jig was up and people realized just how horrible a lot of 20th c music was, the damage was done. ..........


It still has its uses/applications in modern culture. Watch this with its volume muted; 




while listening to Karlheinz Stockhausen - Luzifers Abschied:


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Aries said:


> Music is more timeless than literature.


Have you read Homer?


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## composingmusic (Dec 16, 2021)

Mandryka said:


> I am sure that you don't need expertise to enjoy Beethoven or Boulez - though maybe you do to appreciate Notations 1a, but let's stick with Marteau sans Maître say. The problem I have is this: I don't think the two activities are the same. I don't think that there is one activity called _appreciating music _or _listening to something as music_ which is exercised when someone appreciates Beethoven and Boulez. I think that the experiences are too different for that because in the Beethoven there is an ebb and flow, tension and relief, in Boulez not so. And that seems very fundamental to me.
> 
> In this sense I find myself in a fundamental disagreement with John Cage.


I disagree in that saying that Boulez doesn't have an ebb or flow, tension and relief. Perhaps yes, it's not constructed through common practice tonality, but it definitely has direction, and it definitely has ebb and flow.


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## allaroundmusicenthusiast (Jun 3, 2020)

fluteman said:


> James Joyce was an almost exact contemporary of Picasso and Stravinsky. Boulez came much later. I'd say that all three (Joyce, Picasso and Stravinsky, that is), remain big names and highly influential in our culture today. All three belong to a classical era and tradition that predates our current era.


You're right, but same difference. I don't know anyone my age who enjoys Stravinsky, but a lot of people enjoy Picasso and Joyce.



> Have they read Joyce, other than as a university assignment?


I started reading Joyce in my final year of high school, so did one of my best friends at the time, and another HS colleague. But Joyce is just a placeholder name, we could be referring to Virgina Woolf, Paul Celan, Beckett, etc etc etc, tons of writers from the 20th century, and where I live they'll be more known, consumed and respected than any composer from the 20th century, let alone from the 2nd half. Even more so, again, if you ask anyone from my generation.

I don't know how we can pretend to sit here and pretend that love, appreciation and awareness for 20th century and 21st century composers doesn't lag with respect to the other arts, when even lovers of classical music won't even listen to them, thinking they're corrupt.


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## Aries (Nov 29, 2012)

Mandryka said:


> Have you read Homer?


Yes, in school. But its is very connected to a time like a historical document.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Aries said:


> Yes, in school. But its is very connected to a time like a historical document.


Yes, sure, but the same is true of Art of Fugue -- with its insistence on certain a certain tradition of harmony and counterpoint, its preoccupation with certain traditional forms.

Some people think that the author of the Homeric epics captured aspects of what it is to be a person which have been part of the human experience for a very long time. Examples may be Achilles and Priam in Bk 24 of the Illiad, Hecuba's begging Hector to avoid Achilles . . .

There's also the timelessness of the Mahabharata to think about, Arjuna and Krishna before the start of the Kurukshetra battle . . .


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

allaroundmusicenthusiast said:


> You're right, but same difference. I don't know anyone my age who enjoys Stravinsky, but a lot of people enjoy Picasso and Joyce.
> 
> I started reading Joyce in my final year of high school, so did one of my best friends at the time, and another HS colleague. But Joyce is just a placeholder name, we could be referring to Virgina Woolf, Paul Celan, Beckett, etc etc etc, tons of writers from the 20th century, and where I live they'll be more known, consumed and respected than any composer from the 20th century, let alone from the 2nd half. Even more so, again, if you ask anyone from my generation.
> 
> I don't know how we can pretend to sit here and pretend that love, appreciation and awareness for 20th century and 21st century composers doesn't lag with respect to the other arts, when even lovers of classical music won't even listen to them, thinking they're corrupt.


While I will agree that literature is more accessible than some modern Classical music, I think experimental art will always be considered difficult. All of these examples, Joyce, Beckett, Boulez, Stockhausen, Cage, Calvino, etc. probably enjoy a greater critical reputation than audience among the wider population.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Christabel said:


> But that doesn't take account of the rapid availability of resources to everybody, anywhere, anytime through the internet. Under such conditions one would imagine reaching people becomes easier, not harder. Your analogy of the forest ecosystem doesn't apply to culture - especially music - since glacial growth would mean we should be still back in the musical medieval period. From what I can tell your 'severely limited semantic resources' are easily challenged by hearing just a tiny sample of what is being composed, and has been composed, in the last 50 years. Would this not also apply to the colour spectrum in visual art? You can blend colours, alter shapes, confound and confuse with abstraction but the principle behind this would be familiarity with colour that the culture has in the first place. Perhaps this is why artists moved from paint to other substances and objects d'art. They didn't want their art to be 'familiar' - but needed it to challenge and confound, or provoke thought. Trouble is, this becomes the intrinsic message and quite often obscures the 'artfulness' of the work, existing in a culture in time.
> 
> Instrumental music's content becomes less abstract through the process of familiarization; a major factor in wider public acceptance. Does it need to be verbally translated? Does a fine film need to be verbally translated or does it 'bend with the remover to remove'; or is it "an ever fix'd mark"? This former might explain how a film today is appreciated and understood when it might not have been at the time of its creation - as is also the case in music. Could it be cultural change and context alone changes meaning? Are or were audiences looking for different things at the time?
> 
> ...


None of the above connects to anything I was saying. I wouldn't even know where to start to get on the same page, so, with apologies, I won't respond further.


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

allaroundmusicenthusiast said:


> You're right, but same difference. I don't know anyone my age who enjoys Stravinsky, but a lot of people enjoy Picasso and Joyce.
> 
> I started reading Joyce in my final year of high school, so did one of my best friends at the time, and another HS colleague. But Joyce is just a placeholder name, we could be referring to Virgina Woolf, Paul Celan, Beckett, etc etc etc, tons of writers from the 20th century, and where I live they'll be more known, consumed and respected than any composer from the 20th century, let alone from the 2nd half. Even more so, again, if you ask anyone from my generation.
> 
> I don't know how we can pretend to sit here and pretend that love, appreciation and awareness for 20th century and 21st century composers doesn't lag with respect to the other arts, when even lovers of classical music won't even listen to them, thinking they're corrupt.


Did anyone your age enjoy the movie Jaws? John Williams adapted his ominous theme for the attacking shark from the Sacrificial Dance of The Rite of Spring. How about Disney's Fantasia? Again, The Rite of Spring. The Soldier's Tale is often performed, and I have a record of it with Vanessa Redgrave, Ian McKellen and the rock star Sting as soloists. I'm a big fan of Joyce, and have read and reread Ulysses, but I don't think he looms any larger than Stravinsky today, if anything, less so.

Love, appreciation and awareness for 20th century and 21st century composers doesn't lag with respect to the other arts. John Corigliano and Tan Dun have won Academy awards for their film scores. Stephen Sondheim was a leader in the Broadway musical world. Philip Glass has achieved pop culture stardom (and three Academy award nominations for his film scores, which aren't even his most famous works).

I don't know which current or recent visual artists or novelists get more love, appreciation an awareness. John Updike? Philip Roth? Toni Morrison? Frank Stella? Jeff Koons? Those are all famous names, but more famous than Sondheim? I do not see even a trace of this 'lag' you mention.


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## Guest (Dec 18, 2021)

Edward Bast: I thought I'd covered your eco-system metaphor and lag-time in developing a new 'discourse' in music well enough. I didn't think the eco-system analogy was valid in the age of mass communication and the exponentially wider dissemination of all art forms. The explanation demands a more varied response and I identified some of these.

To the poster who wrote about "lag time" in musical understanding, I completely agree; surely certain literature has also 'lagged' in acceptance and understanding. Think Gertrude Stein. As have the visual arts. 

We ought not confuse 'lag time' (towards the path of understanding and acceptance) with antipathy in many instances. Unless we think personal taste has nothing whatever to do with how music is received, irrespective of its merits.


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

SanAntone said:


> Oh, well, my bad ........ what discussion was the OP trying to get at?


Sorry for the lack of my responses I had a quite a busy day!

I love contemporary and modern music. I love serialism, lachenmann methods, spectralism, post-spectralism, (anything coming out of IRCAM really) etc...

Reading the responses in this thread so far I think that I my thread title was a bit poorly chosen. New music isn't scarce in the sense of very little of it is written: a lot of brilliant stuff is written all the time - that's not what I meant exactly. I meant scarcity in terms of the economics of music - very little of it is played and a lot of new composers are starving. The funding is drying up! Of course people are still going to make this sort of music, but what are the chances that they will make a living off of it; what are the chances that their music will ever be performed? I've run across contemporary composers that I literally could not find any performances or recordings of! For some context, I made this thread after I got frustrated searching for Jonathan Kramer's moving music and could not find any extant recordings.



VoiceFromTheEther said:


> OP: check out my recent thread where so many lliving composers have been put forward:
> Your list of five greatest LIVING composers
> as well as a follow-up round about enjoyability of most common picks:
> The music of which of those composers do you enjoy the most?
> ...


It's interesting again though, right? Most of these composers are in their 60s or 70s - they're most famous for forms that are already quite "old", serialism, minimalism, spectralism, new complexity. But there is classical music being composed every month, every year - how many of us can actually go down to a concert hall and see music composed this year being performed? I get to go and watch master's thesis projects in composition each year, but I'm one of the few people there that isn't music faculty or friends and family of the composer! This is one performance of music that is genuinely new each year: the rest is a vast majority of romantic, classical and post-romantic performances. And each year there is less and less funding for this sort of work.

In contrast, the independent and experimental films that come out every year have deliberately cultivated audience - there a metric ton of film festivals supporting them: they may not be extremely popular but there is still an actual market there. Furthermore literature has a wide network of dissemination, and still holds an insane amount of cultural clout - much more so than contemporary music. It too is drying up as funding for all arts is, but literature still remains culturally very important. The US government has poet laureates that they show off to the public, could you ever imagine this happening with a composer? Well, that's actually what the situation was with many romantic era composers! The only analogue here is what the US government did with jazz during the cold war.

Even more than contemporary music, modernist music remains so oddly divergent with other art forms. Everyone agrees that joyce was a genius even if nobody who says they've read him actually reads him - in the same way everybody that everybody agrees that goethe and beethoven are geniuses even if they've never engaged with their work. Why do webern and krenek remain so contentious? On the other hand pollock and duchamp are still contentious but it doesn't really matter because somehow visual art was able to enculturate itself incredibly well to very rich people and museuem curators in a way classical music hasn't.

This is not meant to diss on 'popular music' either - I think there is a lot of fascinating things there. I think classical music (and jazz!) is important too and it's fundamentally sad that contemporary classical composers are in such tough situation - I want to be able to hear their music regularly played at concert halls!

And just so it's clear again, I love modernist music - it's the vast majority of what I listen to! My first post on this forum was about wuorinen. I don't mean to insult this music in anyway when I call it unpopular - I don't think it's necessarily any better than the situation romantic music is in: I'd much rather have milton babbitt be unpopular than having milton babbitt played at the train station to discourage graffitti artists in the same way they play chopin. That fate is truly abominable; being unpopular is sad, but there are much worse fates that music can suffer.


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## composingmusic (Dec 16, 2021)

Opisthokont said:


> It's interesting again though, right? Most of these composers are in their 60s or 70s - they're most famous for forms that are already quite "old", serialism, minimalism, spectralism, new complexity. But there is classical music being composed every month, every year - how many of us can actually go down to a concert hall and see music composed this year being performed? I get to go and watch master's thesis projects in composition each year, but I'm one of the few people there that isn't music faculty or friends and family of the composer! This is one performance of music that is genuinely new each year: the rest is a vast majority of romantic, classical and post-romantic performances. And each year there is less and less funding for this sort of work.


On this note, one interesting thing to consider that especially with so many stylistic directions available, it can take quite a while for a composer to figure out what they want to do! As partially a result of this, and how the scene is laid out (getting things played requires you to be in the scene for really quite a long time and make connections), it takes a long time for people to actually get established and for others in the environment to really become familiar with your work. I don't know where you're based, but at least in both London, and in Finland, there are a number of concerts every year that feature newly composed pieces, and I do make an effort to go to these concerts. It's true that they often aren't as well advertised as the standard concerts with older repertoire, but they do have a decent audience.


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## Dan Ante (May 4, 2016)

My two penny worth and entirely personal, the basic of music is melody some modern composers provide this, second is beat, rhythmic or not, so for me and I would suggest for the majority of serious music lovers if a piece of music has neither melody or beat then we are not interested.


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## composingmusic (Dec 16, 2021)

Dan Ante said:


> My two penny worth and entirely personal, the basic of music is melody some modern composers provide this, second is beat, rhythmic or not, so for me and I would suggest for the majority of serious music lovers if a piece of music has neither melody or beat then we are not interested.


That's fair enough - however, something to consider is that there's so many other parameters that contemporary composers focus on nowadays, such as gesture, timbre, flow, texture, and harmony. Sometimes composers will just focus on a single parameter, or a couple of them; this can result in some really interesting sound worlds.


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## allaroundmusicenthusiast (Jun 3, 2020)

fluteman said:


> Did anyone your age enjoy the movie Jaws? John Williams adapted his ominous theme for the attacking shark from the Sacrificial Dance of The Rite of Spring. How about Disney's Fantasia? Again, The Rite of Spring. The Soldier's Tale is often performed, and I have a record of it with Vanessa Redgrave, Ian McKellen and the rock star Sting as soloists. I'm a big fan of Joyce, and have read and reread Ulysses, but I don't think he looms any larger than Stravinsky today, if anything, less so.
> 
> Love, appreciation and awareness for 20th century and 21st century composers doesn't lag with respect to the other arts. John Corigliano and Tan Dun have won Academy awards for their film scores. Stephen Sondheim was a leader in the Broadway musical world. Philip Glass has achieved pop culture stardom (and three Academy award nominations for his film scores, which aren't even his most famous works).
> 
> I don't know which current or recent visual artists or novelists get more love, appreciation an awareness. John Updike? Philip Roth? Toni Morrison? Frank Stella? Jeff Koons? Those are all famous names, but more famous than Sondheim? I do not see even a trace of this 'lag' you mention.


Academy award for best film score is not a good parameter to measure awareness. People who follow those things know who John Williams, Hans Zimmer or Alexandre Desplat are, not Corigliano. And, while Corigliano could be a somewhat "difficult composer", Sondheim surely isn't. So the comparison modernist literature vs Sondheim is hardly relevant in this discussion.

We are not talking about fame, and if we were, then for each Sondheim people could probably mention 100 different writers or film directors more well known and loved.

I'll give you Jaws tho, but who then goes on and listens to other works by Stravinsky that are not The Rite? Disney's Fantasia... man that was some 70 years ago, and most music in it is not from the 20th century. Furthermore, who cares if Sting and Ian McKellen recorded Peter and the Wolf or The Soldier's Tale? Those are passion projects of theirs, and they bring clout to those works, not the other way around.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

> New music isn't scarce in the sense of very little of it is written: a lot of brilliant stuff is written all the time - that's not what I meant exactly. I meant scarcity in terms of the economics of music - very little of it is played and a lot of new composers are starving.


What evidence do you have of this?

My sense is that composers in their 20s and 30s are writing the Classical music they wish to write, funding their ensembles and performances through some grants, some independent kickstarter style social media events, and simply from scaling down their venues to match their audience.

I have interviewed about 75 composers in this demographic for my blog and many teach at university, others are performers, or conductors, while also composing, .

And while they are not "household names", they are not starving either.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Christabel said:


> Edward Bast: I thought I'd covered your eco-system metaphor and lag-time in developing a new 'discourse' in music well enough. I didn't think the eco-system analogy was valid in the age of mass communication and the exponentially wider dissemination of all art forms. The explanation demands a more varied response and I identified some of these.


The limited resource to which I refer isn't in the area of musical dissemination, it's the scarcity of verbalizable content in the reception and appreciation of music


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## composingmusic (Dec 16, 2021)

SanAntone said:


> What evidence do you have of this?
> 
> My sense is that composers in their 20s and 30s are writing the Classical music they wish to write, funding their ensembles and performances through some grants, some independent kickstarter style social media events, and simply from scaling down their venues to match their audience.
> 
> ...


Thanks for posting the link to this blog! I had a quick look and there's a lot of very interesting people there. Some of them I am familiar with, others not so much - more to explore


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

allaroundmusicenthusiast said:


> Academy award for best film score is not a good parameter to measure awareness. People who follow those things know who John Williams, Hans Zimmer or Alexandre Desplat are, not Corigliano. And, while Corigliano could be a somewhat "difficult composer", Sondheim surely isn't. So the comparison modernist literature vs Sondheim is hardly relevant in this discussion.
> 
> We are not talking about fame, and if we were, then for each Sondheim people could probably mention 100 different writers or film directors more well known and loved.
> 
> I'll give you Jaws tho, but who then goes on and listens to other works by Stravinsky that are not The Rite? Disney's Fantasia... man that was some 70 years ago, and most music in it is not from the 20th century. Furthermore, who cares if Sting and Ian McKellen recorded Peter and the Wolf or The Soldier's Tale? Those are passion projects of theirs, and they bring clout to those works, not the other way around.


I can't agree with any of that. You ignore the huge influence Stravinsky has had on 20th and 21st century western music. And I've never heard of Hans Zimmer or Andre Desplat.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

fluteman said:


> Did anyone your age enjoy the movie Jaws? John Williams adapted his ominous theme for the attacking shark from the Sacrificial Dance of The Rite of Spring.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

SanAntone said:


> All of these examples, Joyce, Beckett, Boulez, Stockhausen, Cage, Calvino, etc. probably enjoy a greater critical reputation than audience among the wider population.


It can be argued some people's way to "approach" their music is wrong. Music must be "felt", rather than "understood", and I think certain music can be only be "felt" properly in certain contexts.


hammeredklavier said:


> Watch this with its volume muted;
> 
> 
> 
> while listening to Karlheinz Stockhausen - Luzifers Abschied:


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## Guest (Dec 19, 2021)

fluteman said:


> I can't agree with any of that. You ignore the huge influence Stravinsky has had on 20th and 21st century western music. And I've never heard of Hans Zimmer or Andre Desplat.


John Corigliano is a very interesting contemporary composer. I presented a program on him 2 years ago for our community music group. A friend - an Ethnomusicologist - came up afterwards and asked me why I liked the String Quartet:






I said the first four minutes reminded me of Biber's "Battalla" but after that it was crunchy and difficult but somehow appealing. Then I remembered the words of John Kennedy, "we do it not because it's easy but because it's hard". That covers quite a lot of western art music appreciation, I think!!


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

hammeredklavier said:


> It can be argued some people's way to "approach" their music is wrong. Music must be "felt", rather than "understood", and I think certain music can be only be "felt" properly in certain contexts.


I consider linking modern music to horror movies quite silly.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

hammeredklavier said:


> It can be argued some people's way to "approach" their music is wrong. Music must be "felt", rather than "understood", and I think certain music can be only be "felt" properly in certain contexts.


Yes! Mozart can only be felt in the context of horror movies actually


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

SanAntone said:


> I consider linking modern music to horror movies quite silly.


That's just how most people in the world today enjoy the strange, grotesque atmospheres it creates- the way stuff like 'Luzifers Abschied' is relevant to our society and culture today. Regardless of whether you like it (the fact) or not, it's true.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

hammeredklavier said:


> *That's just how most people in the world today enjoy the strange, grotesque atmospheres it creates*- the way stuff like 'Luzifers Abschied' is relevant to our society and culture today. *Regardless of whether you like it (the fact) or not, it's true.*


Gross generalization. It's _*true*_ that *most *people in the world enjoy modern music, as horror film music? You don't like it, that's fine, but to presume how others like it?


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

hammeredklavier said:


> That's just how most people in the world today enjoy the strange, grotesque atmospheres it creates- the way stuff like 'Luzifers Abschied' is relevant to our society and culture today. Regardless of whether you like it (the fact) or not, it's true.


Your allegation is far from being a fact. I won't engage with you any further on this subject.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

"It makes sense that we're experiencing a horror renaissance. The genre took off during the Great Depression and has been there for us in difficult times to accentuate and provide some semblance of shelter from our biggest fears. Since the dawn of the medium, music has proven just as important to film as visuals are; film scores complete the illusion of movement and help to further remove us from reality. But more so than any other genre of film music, horror is distinct and modern.
Cliff Martinez explained this to me perfectly when I interviewed him about his score for Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon (2016). "I hear some of the most adventurous, sound designer-ly music that seems to be happening a lot more in horror scores," he offered. "Also horror is the stuff that sounds more like modern 20th century symphonic music - it's the only stuff that references Stockhausen or Penderecki or Ligeti. That stuff doesn't go a long way in your romantic comedies or anyplace else, but it has a home in horror movies." Modern music, often composed in response to an increasingly terrifying reality, has become the perfect accompaniment to the nightmares we put up on the silver screen."
https://www.stereogum.com/2020331/h...vie-soundtrack-songs/lists/ultimate-playlist/

"From Bodysong (2003) to There Will Be Blood (2007) - which was disqualified from the Oscars because the soundtrack included music he had already released - there is much to love about his non-Radiohead cannon. The former film's score uses limited transposition and impressionistic strings; Stockhausen-inspired movements and exposing Olivier Messiaen's theory of grouping melodies around interval groups." https://www.musicmusingsandsuch.com...or-film-soundtrack-and-why-less-can-mean-more


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## allaroundmusicenthusiast (Jun 3, 2020)

fluteman said:


> I can't agree with any of that. You ignore the huge influence Stravinsky has had on 20th and 21st century western music. And I've never heard of Hans Zimmer or Andre Desplat.


I'm not ignoring anything! This isn't a discussion about influence, you're very wrong about that. And if you don't know who Zimmer or Desplat are (indeed academy award winners who write music for the biggest films, esp Zimmer), then how can you argue with me about the standing of composers in society today and in my generation?


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

hammeredklavier said:


> It can be argued some people's way to "approach" their music is wrong. Music must be "felt", rather than "understood", and I think certain music can be only be "felt" properly in certain contexts.





hammeredklavier said:


> "It makes sense that we're experiencing a horror renaissance. The genre took off during the Great Depression and has been there for us in difficult times to accentuate and provide some semblance of shelter from our biggest fears. Since the dawn of the medium, music has proven just as important to film as visuals are; film scores complete the illusion of movement and help to further remove us from reality. But more so than any other genre of film music, horror is distinct and modern.
> Cliff Martinez explained this to me perfectly when I interviewed him about his score for Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon (2016). "I hear some of the most adventurous, sound designer-ly music that seems to be happening a lot more in horror scores," he offered. "Also horror is the stuff that sounds more like modern 20th century symphonic music - it's the only stuff that references Stockhausen or Penderecki or Ligeti. That stuff doesn't go a long way in your romantic comedies or anyplace else, but it has a home in horror movies." Modern music, often composed in response to an increasingly terrifying reality, has become the perfect accompaniment to the nightmares we put up on the silver screen."
> https://www.stereogum.com/2020331/h...vie-soundtrack-songs/lists/ultimate-playlist/
> 
> "From Bodysong (2003) to There Will Be Blood (2007) - which was disqualified from the Oscars because the soundtrack included music he had already released - there is much to love about his non-Radiohead cannon. The former film's score uses limited transposition and impressionistic strings; Stockhausen-inspired movements and exposing Olivier Messiaen's theory of grouping melodies around interval groups." https://www.musicmusingsandsuch.com...or-film-soundtrack-and-why-less-can-mean-more


You're quoting a guy from the Red Hot Chili Pepper's, who is not a modern Classical composer, but a film composer. It may be news to you, but modern Classical can be appreciated without horror film connotations or visuals, even if horror film music can't.

How many people do you know listen to modern music and say "I like this because it reminds me of a girl running away from a monster, etc."?


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## Simon Moon (Oct 10, 2013)

I have zero problems finding new, interesting, emotionally and intellectually satisfying contemporary classical music.

A dearth of great music is not a problem for me.


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## Aries (Nov 29, 2012)

Phil loves classical said:


> Gross generalization. It's _*true*_ that *most *people in the world enjoy modern music, as horror film music? You don't like it, that's fine, but to presume how others like it?


Why is such music used for horror films but not for love films or comedy for example? Obviously some things go well together for the audience and some things don't.

So the reception of the majority is rather clear, but it is interesting what kind of minority receptions of modern, atonal music exist. If they differ greatly from the average reception, then we maybe have an answer why there is a lack of popularity.

Maybe some people associate piece, harmony and power with dissonant serial pieces, who knows? I can just guess.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

^ There is a big difference between using modern music for horror films like the Shining, and getting something else out of the music besides its horror film potential, just like using Mozart's Requiem Introitus in a commercial or movie (which I've seen done in both, for a sense of dread). When I listen to the stuff in the Shining, I don't think of any visuals or any creep factor. The music has much more potential than that. But if you take made-for horror film music outside of the visuals then there isn't much to listen to. I have the Omen soundtrack by Goldsmith. It's not the same as listening to the movements or the pieces in the Shining, or say the Ligeti in 2001.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Phil loves classical said:


> ^ There is a big difference between using modern music for horror films like the Shining, and getting something else out of the music besides its horror film potential





hammeredklavier said:


> There is a well-known anecdote about Anton Bruckner at the opera attending a performance of Tristan und Isolde where he drew the curtain of his box because he did not want to be distracted from the impact of the music by having to see what was happening on stage.


I think you just have a mindset like Bruckner. I'm saying that the modern music aesthetics is an indispensable part of our culture today because of its use in the horror genre. That's where there is demand for it, and the money lies. No one in the world would want to listen to Brahms instead of Penderecki in the context of a horror film. And as long as music has its function in society, it has its value. Anyone can be _pretentious_ with any music all they want, accuse others for "simply enjoying" and "not understanding properly". Yet, the _bottomline_ with any music, is to put simply; whether or not people _want to listen_ to it. And in certain contexts, people today have demand for the modern music aesthetics.


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## arpeggio (Oct 4, 2012)

Oh no. Not another classical music is dying thread.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

hammeredklavier said:


> I think you just have a mindset like Bruckner. I'm saying that the modern music aesthetics is an indispensable part of our culture today because of its use in the horror genre. That's where there is demand for it, and the money lies. No one in the world would want to listen to Brahms instead of Penderecki in the context of a horror film. And as long as music has its function in society, it has its value. Anyone can be _pretentious_ with any music all they want, accuse others for "simply enjoying" and "not understanding properly". Yet, the _bottomline_ with any music, is to put simply; whether or not people _want to listen_ to it. And in certain contexts, people today have demand for the modern music aesthetics.


Yes, you're right. I'm sure then that the use of Mozart's Requiem Introitus in commercials and movies is now likewise inseparable. To listen to it outside of the context of a movie or shaving commercial is just being pretentious.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Phil loves classical said:


> How many people do you know listen to modern music and say "I like this because it reminds me of a girl running away from a monster, etc."?


Music must always go together with the culture where it was created. I visualize "horror" in my mind whenever listening to the stuff, and everything makes sense.


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## arpeggio (Oct 4, 2012)

As a band junkie based on my experiences these discussions are bogus.

One who follows concert classical band music learns that concert band music is alive and well.

There are only a few band junkies here. 

Over the years we have provided dozens of examples composers who have composed concert band music that are successful.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

arpeggio said:


> As a band junkie based on my experiences these discussions are bogus.
> 
> One who follows concert classical band music learns that concert band music is alive and well.
> 
> ...


I just discovered the composer *Nigel Clarke* who has written a number of works for concert band.

Here's some excerpts from his cornet/trumpet concerto for wind ensemble.






Coincidently the ensemble is the Middle Tennessee State University Wind Ensemble conducted by Reed Thomas, a university close to me and very familiar.


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## Dan Ante (May 4, 2016)

composingmusic said:


> That's fair enough - however, something to consider is that there's so many other parameters that contemporary composers focus on nowadays, such as gesture, timbre, flow, texture, and harmony. Sometimes composers will just focus on a single parameter, or a couple of them; this can result in some really interesting sound worlds.


I don't know what you mean by 'gesture' but timbre, flow, texture and harmony have existed just about forever and is present in all types of music. Interesting sound worlds can be created electronically and acoustically but does it make you tap your foot or anticipate the next note or phrase and is it really music? In my world the answer is no but for those that like that type of thing ok.


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## arpeggio (Oct 4, 2012)

SanAntone said:


> I just discovered the composer *Nigel Clarke* who has written a number of works for concert band.
> 
> Here's some excerpts from his cornet/trumpet concerto for wind ensemble.
> 
> ...


I met Clark a few years ago at a concert with the Marine Band. He was visiting Washington, DC, learned that the band was performing one of his works and he turned up for the concert.


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

I didn't mean this thread to be as acrimonious as it became! I was mostly just very curious at the way my friends talked about literature versus the way they talked about music.

On the horror topic, I honestly have no idea. I think post-tonal music can express joy, sorrow, love, excitement, whimsy, etc... just as well as tonal music can. Its an interesting counterpoint to note that the state of modernist music being relegated to horror and dread in the popular culture is the diametric opposite of the way common-practice music is related to "relaxing" or "studying" in popular culture. Both are unfair and untrue characteristizations of course.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

hammeredklavier said:


> *Music must always go together with the culture where it was created*. I visualize "horror" in my mind whenever listening to the stuff, and everything makes sense.


Did you actually read about the circumstances that modern music was created before it was used in some horror movies? Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta was not remotely made for slasher horror film culture which didn't exist at the time, but sounds of nature at night. Penderecki's Threnody was intended to develop a new musical language and dedicated to the victims of Hiroshima.


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## arpeggio (Oct 4, 2012)

Opisthokont said:


> I didn't mean this thread to be as acrimonious as it became! I was mostly just very curious at the way my friends talked about literature versus the way they talked about music.
> 
> On the horror topic, I honestly have no idea. I think post-tonal music can express joy, sorrow, love, excitement, whimsy, etc... just as well as tonal music can. Its an interesting counterpoint to note that the state of modernist music being relegated to horror and dread in the popular culture is the diametric opposite of the way common-practice music is related to "relaxing" or "studying" in popular culture. Both are unfair and untrue characteristizations of course.


These discussions have been acrimonious in internet classical music forums for years.

And each side points to the other side on who started the latest dispute.

There are some members who believe that classical music died with Mahler.

And there are some of us who believe that it is doing OK.

Just because John Adams is not as popular as Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga does it mean that classical music is dead.


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

arpeggio said:


> These discussions have been acrimonious in internet classical music forums for years.
> 
> And each side points to the other side on who started the latest dispute.
> 
> There are some members who believe that classical music died with Mahler.


Ahh! Sometimes I'm quite bad at tone (pun intended) - I forgot all of this context really. I never meant to imply that contemporary (non-neoclassical) classical music is dead, just that it's underground, underfunded and hard to find in live performance! The reason I care about the perception of this music is because I like it. Often times unpopularity can seem like an insult, but I don't think it is - although I have to think that since I'm quite unpopular lmao. Part of my point about the postminimalists is that the conservative nature of concert halls, in my estimation, actually has very little to do with "tonality" or "atonality" and much more to do with cultural perception.


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## BachIsBest (Feb 17, 2018)

Phil loves classical said:


> ^ There is a big difference between using modern music for horror films like the Shining, and getting something else out of the music besides its horror film potential, just like using Mozart's Requiem Introitus in a commercial or movie (which I've seen done in both, for a sense of dread). When I listen to the stuff in the Shining, I don't think of any visuals or any creep factor. The music has much more potential than that. But if you take made-for horror film music outside of the visuals then there isn't much to listen to. I have the Omen soundtrack by Goldsmith. It's not the same as listening to the movements or the pieces in the Shining, or say the Ligeti in 2001.


I entirely agree, the soundtrack to The Shining is fantastic even just as music. However, the point is not whether the music is of a high quality and can be listened to without the movie, but whether people (in general) would ever think that this sort of music would be ideal for a romantic dinner, or for a joyful reunion.

Generally speaking, different cultures have different music and different people have different music; psychologically speaking though, whether certain music expresses generally positive or negative emotions is shockingly universal and cross-cultural. The reality is, most modernist pieces (especially those that really eschew tonality in the general sense) do not express positive emotions in any traditional sense. This doesn't mean they're bad (I own and listen to some atonal music), but it is something that many people seem to have a hard time admitting.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

Phil loves classical said:


> Gross generalization. It's _*true*_ that *most *people in the world enjoy modern music, as horror film music? You don't like it, that's fine, but to presume how others like it?


With the emphasis on the word 'gross'. "Modern" music (define your terms) gets used for all kinds of things, including just as part of a programme of concert music. To suggest that it is all used for horror is absurd.

(And not every piece in _The Shining _is modern.)


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## arpeggio (Oct 4, 2012)

Opisthokont said:


> Ahh! Sometimes I'm quite bad at tone (pun intended) - I forgot all of this context really. I never meant to imply that contemporary (non-neoclassical) classical music is dead, just that it's underground, underfunded and hard to find in live performance! The reason I care about the perception of this music is because I like it. Often times unpopularity can seem like an insult, but I don't think it is - although I have to think that since I'm quite unpopular lmao. Part of my point about the postminimalists is that the conservative nature of concert halls, in my estimation, actually has very little to do with "tonality" or "atonality" and much more to do with cultural perception.


Even though I am only an amateur musician I frequently perform music by living composers and have been involved in several premiers.

My wife and I have attended many music festivals devoted to or featuring contemporary music. I have mentioned these festivals in other threads.

I have just finished the Christmas concerts of the groups that I perform with. I have performed several classical Christmas works by living composers.

So, I do not know how to respond to statements that there is a dearth of new music.


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

BachIsBest said:


> I entirely agree, the soundtrack to The Shining is fantastic even just as music. However, the point is not whether the music is of a high quality and can be listened to without the movie, but whether people (in general) would ever think that this sort of music would be ideal for a romantic dinner, or for a joyful reunion.
> 
> Generally speaking, different cultures have different music and different people have different music; psychologically speaking though, whether certain music expresses generally positive or negative emotions is shockingly universal and cross-cultural. *The reality is, most modernist pieces (especially those that really eschew tonality in the general sense) do not express positive emotions in any traditional sense.* This doesn't mean they're bad (I own and listen to some atonal music), but it is something that many people seem to have a hard time admitting.


I've been meaning to want to collect a list of "happy atonal works" for quite a while now. I think the emotional landscape here depends a lot on the composer. I find that a lot of schoenberg has a slightly mournful quality to it, and someone like boulez has music that feels like watching a thunderstorm from a glass house. On the other hand every mauricio kagel piece to me feels like it would fit in perfectly in an absurdist comedy, and milton babbitt work is two steps away from being jazz. For an example of a more joyous serialism, I like this quite a bit!


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## Aries (Nov 29, 2012)

Opisthokont said:


> On the horror topic, I honestly have no idea. I think post-tonal music can express joy, sorrow, love, excitement, whimsy, etc...


Maybe modernist composers should attach explanations or manuals to their compositions, to make them understandable for more people. Especially if the music is supposed to express something positive.



Phil loves classical said:


> Penderecki's Threnody was intended to develop a new musical language and dedicated to the victims of Hiroshima.


Hiroshima was horrific, and the music kinda works for this purpose. It is good that Penderecki made clear what the music is about. But if someone would see the expression of joy in this music it would raise many questions.


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

arpeggio said:


> Even though I am only an amateur musician I frequently perform music by living composers and have been involved in several premiers.
> 
> My wife and I have attended many music festivals devoted to or featuring contemporary music. I have mentioned these festivals in other threads.
> 
> ...


Yeah from what you're saying I think part of this may be my mistake of only paying attention to the concert halls around me and not to the concert bands. I wouldn't be surprised here that bands have a lot more leeway to perform new works. I think I'll start looking into concert band performances near me and hopefully find some interesting stuff.

Now that I think about it, that's probably why I haven't had the same issues finding contemporary jazz - it's all band music for the most part!


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## Aries (Nov 29, 2012)

Maybe modernism in music is too theoretical and/or does not really fit into the time, isn't really "modern". It wouldn't be the first time intellectuals created something that doesn't really work.

Russian composer Alexey Rybnikov says the following:

_"As the chairman of the Union of Composers, I know what the composer's thought is breathing with now. This is largely postmodernism - specific techniques for extracting sounds from instruments. Postmodernism has grown to enormous proportions and, in my opinion, no longer looks fresh."_

_"You know, I am rather frivolous about my work. In the sense that I do what I'm interested in. I tried myself in dodecaphony - there were also some other compositions in this direction, Concerto for Quartet and Orchestra. Well, yes, I can, but ... It became boring. I wanted to learn something else. And then, I missed the main components of music - harmony, melody, form.

Dodecaphony is fascism in music. The sounds are numbered, lined up, and then they can only walk in ranks. You don't need much inspiration to compose this kind of music. Anyone can compose a dodecaphony. And not everyone can compose a melody! That's great rarity. Not even a melody, but a grain - a memorable musical image. Khachaturian said that you need to be able to create an image that, like a nail, is driven into the brain and in itself has the vitality in order to live separately from the author and the performer."_

https://www.colta.ru/articles/music...oPdoiyLIEJu3NbI6_L2lS2LJDydis441ZwJ_zyvxu4e3w


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## composingmusic (Dec 16, 2021)

Opisthokont said:


> Yeah from what you're saying I think part of this may be my mistake of only paying attention to the concert halls around me and not to the concert bands. I wouldn't be surprised here that bands have a lot more leeway to perform new works. I think I'll start looking into concert band performances near me and hopefully find some interesting stuff.
> 
> Now that I think about it, that's probably why I haven't had the same issues finding contemporary jazz - it's all band music for the most part!


If you're looking at this problem from the perspective of what's programmed on concert hall stages, that may well explain a big part of the programme. A lot of orchestras in the US (also elsewhere, but even more in many places in the states) are quite hesitant about programming contemporary music, and a big part of that has to do with wanting to appease patrons - many of these patrons prefer older, common practice period music. Or, at least, I've heard this from marketing departments and other people. I haven't really spoken to these patrons all that much, tbh. So, at least, there is the impression that these patrons prefer common practice music, and that's partially why it's so hard to get new things programmed.

A lot of it also has to do with how it's framed. If there is a new piece, it often doesn't get the same level of attention and marketing as the older repertoire. There's numerous examples of this: I saw an advert for a concert with a piece commissioned by a prominent, living American composer, and the marketing posters for this concert advertised the Beethoven on the programme, with barely a mention of the new piece.

In many European countries, the issue of funding is different, because a lot of orchestras receive government funding. Some orchestras are quite conservative and program mostly older music, but others do program quite a bit of contemporary music actually. I've also encountered a much more open attitude to contemporary music, and it's often something people are more aware of, and genuinely enjoy. This goes for laypeople too - for instance, in Finland, I think a lot of laypeople would be aware of who Saariaho, Lindberg, and Salonen are, at least! And if you go to a contemporary music festival, you'll get laypeople who just came to listen to the music - it's a much wider audience than a concert where everyone knows each other by name.

To be fair, at least in the UK, you still have these issues with marketing. And I'm not saying these are the only reasons for this issue - it's quite a complex and nuanced topic. There are some orchestras and countries that are more conservative, and others that have a more accepting attitude towards contemporary music, so I'm not saying that this attitude is universal in Europe.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

BachIsBest said:


> I entirely agree, the soundtrack to The Shining is fantastic even just as music. However, the point is not whether the music is of a high quality and can be listened to without the movie, but whether people (in general) would ever think that this sort of music would be ideal for a romantic dinner, or for a joyful reunion.
> 
> Generally speaking, different cultures have different music and different people have different music; psychologically speaking though, whether certain music expresses generally positive or negative emotions is shockingly universal and cross-cultural. The reality is, most modernist pieces (especially those that really eschew tonality in the general sense) do not express positive emotions in any traditional sense. This doesn't mean they're bad (I own and listen to some atonal music), but it is something that many people seem to have a hard time admitting.


I agree that modern or serial music has limited use in film. But I look at Classical Music standing on its own terms, without reference to movies. Hammeredklavier was saying the way most people enjoy Modern music is in a horror film context, which is very presumptive. Those who enjoy Modern music I would say likely like have gotten over what it expresses in terms of emotion, as in joy or horror. It's also inaccurate to say most Modern music sound like Penderecki's Threnody, which admittedly does fit being used in a horror movie.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

BachIsBest said:


> I entirely agree, the soundtrack to The Shining is fantastic even just as music. However, the point is not whether the music is of a high quality and can be listened to without the movie, but whether people (in general) would ever think that this sort of music would be ideal for a romantic dinner, or for a joyful reunion.


The soundtrack to _The Shining _suitable for a "romantic dinner, or for a joyful reunion"?

:lol:


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

allaroundmusicenthusiast said:


> I'm not ignoring anything! This isn't a discussion about influence, you're very wrong about that. And if you don't know who Zimmer or Desplat are (indeed academy award winners who write music for the biggest films, esp Zimmer), then how can you argue with me about the standing of composers in society today and in my generation?


Because I'm interested in classical music, or art music, not film scores generally, few of which are of lasting artistic merit, imo. You might as well tell me who compose most TV commercial jingles. Nor am I wrong about cultural influence. That is an important indication of the significance of new music, which is the subject of this thread.


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## allaroundmusicenthusiast (Jun 3, 2020)

fluteman said:


> Because I'm interested in classical music, or art music, not film scores generally, few of which are of lasting artistic merit, imo. You might as well tell me who compose most TV commercial jingles. Nor am I wrong about cultural influence. That is an important indication of the significance of new music, which is the subject of this thread.


No, no, you're back peddling now. I wasn't the one who brought up the Oscars (which are completely irrelevant for me, both for music and film, I was just following your argument). Again, this is not a thread about artistic merit, this is a thread about how little merit is perceived in modern music compared to the merit perceived in and awarded to other modern and contemporary arts


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

allaroundmusicenthusiast said:


> No, no, you're back peddling now. I wasn't the one who brought up the Oscars (which are completely irrelevant for me, both for music and film, I was just following your argument). Again, this is not a thread about artistic merit, this is a thread about *how little merit is perceived in modern music compared to the merit perceived in and awarded to other modern and contemporary arts*


Perceived by whom?

I don't agree that there is such a wide merit gap as you describe. Those in the know value modern music, as do those whose expertise is literature, or the visual arts, value experimental works in those fields.

However, I think that among the general population all experimental art is either ignored or ridiculed. Statements like "takes no talent" or "like something my toddler drew" or "sounds like gibberish" - can apply across genres.


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## allaroundmusicenthusiast (Jun 3, 2020)

SanAntone said:


> Perceived by whom?
> 
> I don't agree that there is such a wide merit gap as you describe. Those in the know value modern music, as do those whose expertise is literature, or the visual arts, value experimental works in those fields.
> 
> However, I think that among the general population all experimental art is either ignored or ridiculed. Statements like "takes no talent" or "like something my toddler drew" or "sounds like gibberish" - can apply across genres.


I'm not interested about those in the know, and if I were, I also have the impression, based both on digital and analogical (ha!) discussions, that there are a lot more people in the know about modern literature and visual arts, than about music. I'm much more interested on the weight the names of authors, painters and filmmakers carry in the general population compared to music's big names. And I see a lot of disparity there, both in recognition and respect.

I very much agree with your last paragraph, you're right. But let's leave those people out of the general population and put them in the camp of delusionals and ignorants, the other extreme of a gauss curve that has to its left a tail of "delusionals", the general population in the middle, and those in the know to the right.


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## BachIsBest (Feb 17, 2018)

Phil loves classical said:


> I agree that modern or serial music has limited use in film. But I look at Classical Music standing on its own terms, without reference to movies. Hammeredklavier was saying the way most people enjoy Modern music is in a horror film context, which is very presumptive. Those who enjoy Modern music I would say likely like have gotten over what it expresses in terms of emotion, as in joy or horror. It's also inaccurate to say most Modern music sound like Penderecki's Threnody, which admittedly does fit being used in a horror movie.


Perhaps I misinterpreted @Hammeredklavier. Of course not all modern music sounds like Penderecki's Threnody.

Unrelatedly, If it is indeed true that "those who enjoy Modern music I would say likely like have gotten over what it expresses in terms of emotion", then I would be a bit concerned. With the vast majority of my favourite music, I enjoy it in a large part because of what it expresses in terms of emotion.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

allaroundmusicenthusiast said:


> I'm not interested about those in the know, and if I were, I also have the impression, based both on digital and analogical (ha!) discussions, that there are a lot more people in the know about modern literature and visual arts, than about music. I'm much more interested on the weight the names of authors, painters and filmmakers carry in the general population compared to music's big names. And I see a lot of disparity there, both in recognition and respect.
> 
> I very much agree with your last paragraph, you're right. But let's leave those people out of the general population and put them in the camp of delusionals and ignorants, the other extreme of a gauss curve that has to its left a tail of "delusionals", the general population in the middle, and those in the know to the right.


I can't challenge your impression, it is obviously based on your personal experience. However, I tend to think differently, and my experience has informed my completely different conclusion.

I am also unsure what your point is in pursuing this question.


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## allaroundmusicenthusiast (Jun 3, 2020)

SanAntone said:


> I can't challenge your impression, it is obviously based on your personal experience. However, I tend to think differently, and my experience has informed my completely different conclusion.
> 
> I am also unsure what your point is in pursuing this question.


Yes, I realize we have a different outlook on things, based on our own experiences which cannot be falsified or reconciled. 
My general point is: why? Why do I find that modern literature, modern film, and modern painting are much more respected than modern music. And that's where our experiences diverge. But I think that it mostly starts with music lovers putting down modern music, and then it extends to the general population (supossedly difficult to enjoy, difficult to access it, etc etc, whereas literature and film are much more accessible and digestible, other visual arts of course not, they're locked up in galleries and museums). This is a very sad matter for me, even if you say that I'm mistaken.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

^ You speak about these things as if they are homogenous arts. "Modern" literature is not a thing, in any meaningful sense, nor is "modern music".


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## allaroundmusicenthusiast (Jun 3, 2020)

Forster said:


> ^ You speak about these things as if they are homogenous arts. "Modern" literature is not a thing, in any meaningful sense, nor is "modern music".


Absolutely not, it's just an umbrella term to make it easier.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

This Feldman piano and string quartet instills in me a feeling of "having an endless series of questions". I'm reminded of an eerie, silent scene of a horror film where a zombie or a ghost might be hiding somewhere, waiting to ambush the protagonist:


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

allaroundmusicenthusiast said:


> Yes, I realize we have a different outlook on things, based on our own experiences which cannot be falsified or reconciled.
> My general point is: why? Why do I find that modern literature, modern film, and modern painting are much more respected than modern music. And that's where our experiences diverge. But I think that it mostly starts with music lovers putting down modern music, and then it extends to the general population (supossedly difficult to enjoy, difficult to access it, etc etc, whereas literature and film are much more accessible and digestible, other visual arts of course not, they're locked up in galleries and museums). This is a very sad matter for me, even if you say that I'm mistaken.


It could be that by visiting TC and reading posts where highly negative opinions about modern music are expressed you are getting a skewed sense of how modern music is generally perceived.

Do you also spend an equal amount of time on literature or visual arts forums?

I don't visit those forums so I don't know if a similar phenomenon occurs. But, I also think that the number of TC members who express negative opinions about modern music are relatively small in number, although at times, loud.


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

allaroundmusicenthusiast said:


> No, no, you're back peddling now. I wasn't the one who brought up the Oscars (which are completely irrelevant for me, both for music and film, I was just following your argument). Again, this is not a thread about artistic merit, this is a thread about how little merit is perceived in modern music compared to the merit perceived in and awarded to other modern and contemporary arts


What can I say? No. The Oscars are a good metric for public recognition, but not artistic merit. For example, as I mentioned, Leonard Bernstein's score for On The Waterfront was nominated for an Academy award in 1954, but lost to Dimitri Tiomkin's workmanlike but pedestrian score for The High and the Mighty, a pedestrian movie, later rightly and hilariously spoofed by the Zucker brothers in their classic 1980 comedy, Airplane! Today Bernstein is recognized as an important composer, and the suite he made from his On The Waterfront score is routinely performed in concert. Tiomkin was a hugely successful Hollywood soundtrack composer in his day, and winner of many Academy awards, but is little remembered today.

The fact that Bernstein could achieve the limited recognition he did in the movie genre is impressive. Similarly, imo, are the achievements in that genre of Corigliano and Glass, neither of whom are movie genre specialists, and both of whom, imo, have written vastly more imaginative, more interesting, and better music than anything by John Williams, for example, who has achieved much more success in that genre. IMO, the music of Williams, like that of Tiomkin, will largely be forgotten once the movies of his era are forgotten, while that of Corigliano and Glass will continue to be performed.


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## allaroundmusicenthusiast (Jun 3, 2020)

You're still not getting it, I'm not arguing anymore with you, given that you're completely missing my point.


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## allaroundmusicenthusiast (Jun 3, 2020)

SanAntone said:


> It could be that by visiting TC and reading posts where highly negative opinions about modern music are expressed you are getting a skewed sense of how modern music is generally perceived.
> 
> Do you also spend an equal amount of time on literature or visual arts forums?
> 
> I don't visit those forums so I don't know if a similar phenomenon occurs. But, I also think that the number of TC members who express negative opinions about modern music are relatively small in number, although at times, loud.


You could be right about that


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## Aries (Nov 29, 2012)

SanAntone said:


> It could be that by visiting TC and reading posts where highly negative opinions about modern music are expressed you are getting a skewed sense of how modern music is generally perceived.


People who are less interested in classical music overall have a much more negative opinions about modern classical music in particular. You will find positive opinions about modern classical music rather among people who are very interested classical music like here. But this may gives a skewed sense.



fluteman said:


> IMO, the music of Williams, like that of Tiomkin, will largely be forgotten once the movies of his era are forgotten, while that of Corigliano and Glass will continue to be performed.


Did this happen before to film composers? I don't think there is empirical evidence yet, because the film genre isn't old enough yet. But maybe many films will be forgotten in the future. But John Williams in particular wrote music for big films. It is kinda hard to imagine that it all will be forgotten. In 200 years maybe. I don't watch films much at all, but the John Williams melodies are some kind of a general good.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Aries said:


> People who are less interested in classical music overall have a much more negative opinions about modern classical music in particular. You will find positive opinions about modern classical music rather among people who are very interested classical music like here. But this may gives a skewed sense.


I don't know where you are getting your information but in my experience avid fans of Rock, or other non-Classical genres, are more open to experimental or avant-garde Classical music than are traditional Classical music listeners.


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## Aries (Nov 29, 2012)

SanAntone said:


> I don't know where you are getting your information but in my experience avid fans of Rock, or other non-Classical genres, are more open to experimental or avant-garde Classical music than are traditional Classical music listeners.


Its possible that other subgroups of people than Classical music listeners are more open to avant-garde Classical music. But the subgroup of Classical music listeners is still much more open to it than the general population.

I think that the general pupulation is more open to modern paintings for example. My experience is 90% know Picasso, maybe 15% know Schönberg. In my local McDonald's there are modern paintings hanging on the walls, but they play pop music. Hard to imagine that they play Stockhausen anywhere.


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## VoiceFromTheEther (Aug 6, 2021)

Aries said:


> My experience is 90% know Picasso, maybe 15% know Schönberg.


I'd rather expect 5% to have heard of Picasso and 0,1% of Schönberg.

*Edit:* I mean the general population in the West, not the people I know.

Among the people I know I'd expect 75% to have heard the name Picasso and 2% (the classical musicians) to have heard of Schönberg.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

What would be the musical equivalent of this:


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## Aries (Nov 29, 2012)

VoiceFromTheEther said:


> I'd rather expect 5% to have heard of Picasso and 0,1% of Schönberg.
> 
> *Edit:* I mean the general population in the West, not the people I know.


Here in Germany we are taught about Picasso already in the school multiple times beginning in the elementary school. But modern music isn't really taught. I once made a short student lecture about new music and the other pupils were rather surprised that classical music was still composed during the 20th century. We also have a lot of asylum seekers here but I think 85%-90% for Picasso is accurat. For Schönberg 15% is maybe to high, but it is not less than 5% imo. There are just to many intellectuals who just know such stuff. Percentages like 0.1% are unrealistic most of the time, because the society is too diverse. Some people here and there and you already have some percentages.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Aries said:


> Its possible that other subgroups of people than Classical music listeners are more open to avant-garde Classical music. But the subgroup of Classical music listeners is still much more open to it than the general population.
> 
> I think that the general pupulation is more open to modern paintings for example. My experience is 90% know Picasso, maybe 15% know Schönberg. In my local McDonald's there are modern paintings hanging on the walls, but they play pop music. Hard to imagine that they play Stockhausen anywhere.


I haven't been to McDonald's in decades, but as I remember they had photographs of their food on the walls.


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## Bulldog (Nov 21, 2013)

SanAntone said:


> I haven't been to McDonald's in decades, but as I remember they had photographs of their food on the walls.


I was once in a McDonald's that had real food on the wall courtesy of some teenagers clowning around.

As an aside, I hate clowns. Trust one, and you'll be sorry.


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

allaroundmusicenthusiast said:


> You're still not getting it, I'm not arguing anymore with you, given that you're completely missing my point.


Exactly what I was going to say. Ciao.


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## VoiceFromTheEther (Aug 6, 2021)

Aries said:


> Here in Germany we are taught about Picasso already in the school multiple times beginning in the elementary school. But modern music isn't really taught. I once made a short student lecture about new music and the other pupils were rather surprised that classical music was still composed during the 20th century. We also have a lot of asylum seekers here but I think 85%-90% for Picasso is accurat. For Schönberg 15% is maybe to high, but it is not less than 5% imo. There are just to many intellectuals who just know such stuff. Percentages like 0.1% are unrealistic most of the time, because the society is too diverse. Some people here and there and you already have some percentages.


How many students pay attention? What is the retention rate for such things years after graduation?

Go to an average bus stop somewhere, or to an open air market, or to a queue of people waiting at the doctor's or at a public office, and ask around about Picasso and Schönberg. You will get the percentages I am talking about...

Intelligentsia / Bildungsbürgertum is a puny minority.


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

SanAntone said:


> Do you also spend an equal amount of time on literature or visual arts forums?


I actually spend quite a lot of time on literature forums (overall a lot more time spent on there than there actually), and I don't see the same phenomena there. Anecdotally, people who go out of their way to trash modernist literature also trash literature (as in books of the 'canon') in general. Whereas, again anecdotally, I've had a lot better conversations about modern and contemporary classical music with people who are really into 'non-canonical' music such as metal or edm than I have had with people really into the common-practice 'canon' music.


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## Aries (Nov 29, 2012)

VoiceFromTheEther said:


> How many students pay attention? What is the retention rate for such things years after graduation?
> 
> Go to an average bus stop somewhere, or to an open air market, or to a queue of people waiting at the doctor's or at a public office, and ask around about Picasso and Schönberg. You will get the percentages I am talking about...
> 
> Intelligentsia / Bildungsbürgertum is a puny minority.


Maybe, I don't know.

I experience the term "little Picasso" as equivalent to "little Mozart" for child prodigies. Such terms doesn't seem limited to the Intelligentsia even tough they like these terms the most. But maybe I should talk more to people at bus stations.


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## composingmusic (Dec 16, 2021)

VoiceFromTheEther said:


> How many students pay attention? What is the retention rate for such things years after graduation?
> 
> Go to an average bus stop somewhere, or to an open air market, or to a queue of people waiting at the doctor's or at a public office, and ask around about Picasso and Schönberg. You will get the percentages I am talking about...
> 
> Intelligentsia / Bildungsbürgertum is a puny minority.


On the note of Schoenberg, there's an interesting phenomenon that I often see: people who have the notion of contemporary music being difficult will sometimes cite it as somehow being related to Schoenberg and dodecaphonic composition, even though much of contemporary music today sounds nothing like Schoenberg, and I wouldn't consider Schoenberg to be contemporary (after all, he died around 70 years ago).


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

I am, and always have been, intensely interested in modern visual art, literature and theater as well as modern music. I have known many people, including close family members and friends, who are well-known and successful in each of these fields. To the OP's question, "Why did classical music hit such a stumbling block with modernism in a way that other art forms figured out?" The obvious answer is, "It didn't." As for the reactionary backlash against certain modern music, especially in the mid-20th century, there was exactly the same kind of reactionary backlash in these other areas. (When Hitler gave his famous 1937 speech attacking modern art, he just as easily could have been referring to modern music, literature or theater, but what he actually was talking about was modern visual art.)

And there are enfants terrible and provocateurs in every field. For every John Cage there is a Robert Rauschenberg, a Eugene Ionesco, an Allen Ginsberg. 

Music and theater have the additional issue of being performance arts. Without an immediate audience, and one willing to pay enough to cover the production expenses, it is hard for new music or theater to get off the ground at all. Those early performances often are in small spaces in 'reclaimed' urban spaces (often quite literally abandoned and repurposed factories and warehouses), but if they achieve some success they can be promoted to bigger venues. But visual art and literature aren't all that different. Ulysses first appeared in serial form in a very minor periodical. 

In all of these artistic fields, the innovative and adventurous must fight for acceptance against the traditional and long-accepted. In all of them, even the most worthy of the innovative and adventurous usually has a long battle to gain that acceptance, and only the best of the best win that battle. But in all them, ultimately paradigms do change and traditions evolve.


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

I do agree with you fluteman that this corresponds to a conservative turn that happened in culture in general. But I guess the question is, why when we read various music critics, especially those for major newspapers, are they still against darmstadt? It just doesnt seem to be the case in literature - not that book criticism major newspapers is great. But very few people seem to be still upset by literature of the 50s. Ralph Ellison, Achebe, Nabokov are pretty much accepted now? There are several classes in this era of literature at the university I'm at but in music composition here the focus is common-practice methods and contemporary methods, the modernist style of composition gets flown by.


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

composingmusic said:


> On the note of Schoenberg, there's an interesting phenomenon that I often see: people who have the notion of contemporary music being difficult will sometimes cite it as somehow being related to Schoenberg and dodecaphonic composition, even though much of contemporary music today sounds nothing like Schoenberg, and I wouldn't consider Schoenberg to be contemporary (after all, he died around 70 years ago).


I do like the comparison here, SVS was around the 1910s, the earliest romantic composers were in the 1800s, which is about 110 years. 1910 to 2020 is also 110 years. There is a perspective here that people miss. It's honestly insane that schoenberg sounds so radical even today. In terms of time, the seven octave piano was newer to schoenberg than twelve tone music is to us today.


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

Opisthokont said:


> I do like the comparison here, SVS was around the 1910s, the earliest romantic composers were in the 1800s, which is about 110 years. 1910 to 2020 is also 110 years. There is a perspective here that people miss. It's honestly insane that schoenberg sounds so radical even today.


Schoenberg, maybe, but not Stravinsky, who was a bit younger. And I remember going with my child to the theater to see Pixar's Ice Age and hearing Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel as part of the sound track. It seemed right for an icy, mirror-like world, and none of the kids in the theater gave it a second thought.


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

Opisthokont said:


> I do agree with you fluteman that this corresponds to a conservative turn that happened in culture in general. But I guess the question is, why when we read various music critics, especially those for major newspapers, are they still against darmstadt?


I don't read anything against Darmstadt, but then, I'm in America, not Germany. Here, we have Bang on a Can, which is well established and routinely gets positive reviews.

/https://bangonacan.org/


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

fluteman said:


> Schoenberg, maybe, but not Stravinsky, who was a bit younger. And I remember going with my child to the theater to see Pixar's Ice Age and hearing Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel as part of the sound track. It seemed right for an icy, mirror-like world, and none of the kids in the theater gave it a second thought.


Yeah it's fascinating - reminds me of what I was talking about in this thread earlier with the idea of a "long 20th century". Schoenberg sounds radical, late-romantic stravinsky sounds... contemporary? It's bizarre that music from so long ago feels so "with the times". Of course if you're immersed in the culture of contemporary classical music, then late-romantic stravinsky certainly does sound old, but for everyone else?


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

Bang on a can is certainly popular - but I wouldn't really consider them in the same sort of high-modernist style. I always associated them with (post)minimalism and more tonal styles of contemporary music rather than the high-modernist style that still remains contentious. This is why in my original post for this thread I had that aside about the minimalist resurgence into popularity: but I think, perhaps contentiously, that a lot of that more tonal contemporary music is fundamentally more musically conservative than the atonal styles. (That's not a bad thing necessarily, "musically conservative" is not the same as "politically conservative" certainly)

Darmstadt was probably the wrong example, as much as I really meant the american post-darmstadters. To say that there isn't - or at least wasn't - animosity towards the american serialists though... that just seems like a difficult argument to make. Perhaps if you don't agree that this as widespread among music reviewers, you must at least see how commonplace such a sentiment is online?


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

Opisthokont said:


> Bang on a can is certainly popular - but I wouldn't really consider them in the same sort of high-modernist style. I always associated them with (post)minimalism and more tonal styles of contemporary music rather than the high-modernist style that still remains contentious. This is why in my original post for this thread I had that aside about the minimalist resurgence into popularity: but I think, perhaps contentiously, that a lot of that more tonal contemporary music is fundamentally more musically conservative than the atonal styles. (That's not a bad thing necessarily, "musically conservative" is not the same as "politically conservative" certainly)
> 
> Darmstadt was probably the wrong example, as much as I really meant the american post-darmstadters. To say that there isn't - or at least wasn't - animosity towards the american serialists though... that just seems like a difficult argument to make. Perhaps if you don't agree that this as widespread among music reviewers, you must at least see how commonplace such a sentiment is online?


Frankly, I don't pay much attention to such sentiments when I see them online. Online communities can easily become little clubs or hothouses where people with odd views seek and sometimes find support and validation that they don't typically get out in the real world.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

fluteman said:


> Frankly, I don't pay much attention to such sentiments when I see them online. Online communities can easily become little clubs or hothouses where people with odd views seek and sometimes find support and validation that they don't typically get out in the real world.


I have to admit not understanding the psychology.

I originally joined a Classical music forum, this would have been around 2009, to find a community of people who were enthusiastic about Classical music and recordings. I assumed this would cover music from the 14th to 21st century. And I did find a number of other posters who were interested in new music, as I was.

But what surprised me were those members who went out of their way to attack not only the composers and music but the audiences of it. Nothing of what they would post ever caused me anything other than confused humor - but it would put a damper on the conversation.


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## VoiceFromTheEther (Aug 6, 2021)

Opisthokont said:


> It's honestly insane that schoenberg sounds so radical even today.


However Schoneberg sounds to you, please do tell: what was supposed to change over time? Anatomically modern human brains have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and his music, according to the recipe, sounds the same today as it did when first premiered.


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

VoiceFromTheEther said:


> However Schoneberg sounds to you, please do tell: what was supposed to change over time? Anatomically modern human brains have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and his music, according to the recipe, sounds the same today as it did when first premiered.


Culture means a lot - there's lots of music from around the world that sounds alien to me because I'm not used to it. Common practice music for the most part, seems rather familiar - even if there has been a lot of change and relaxing of the rules of voice-leading and whatnot, a lot of the language of tonal harmony is still everywhere in our popular music. But even going back to western medieval music - a lot of the harmonies are just different than the tonal harmonies we're used to. I've listened to a lot of schoenberg so it doesn't sound so alien to me anymore: but I don't think we're particularly immersed in pantonal or atonal harmony in the same way we're immersed in tonal harmony. This isn't to dismiss any idea of the universal in music - it is about the human condition after all, but music is a living and breathing historical-cultural form.


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## Aries (Nov 29, 2012)

Opisthokont said:


> I do agree with you fluteman that this corresponds to a conservative turn that happened in culture in general. But I guess the question is, why when we read various music critics, especially those for major newspapers, are they still against darmstadt? It just doesnt seem to be the case in literature


Why is one question, another question is whether it is surprising. If a concept like "modernism" is applied to different things like music and literature, isn't it expectable that it works better in one area than in another? The areas are different. A systematic application of "modernism" to everything probably doesn't satisfy everything.



Opisthokont said:


> (That's not a bad thing necessarily, "musically conservative" is not the same as "politically conservative" certainly)


Political discussion is unfortunately forbidden here, but I record the observation that "politically conservative" is something necessarily bad for you.

I suspect that those who like the idea of a systematic application of modernism to all kind of art forms also like the idea of a systematic political application of modernism.


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## chipia (Apr 22, 2021)

The answer to this question is certainly complex,
but I think one aspect is that most people nowadays grow up with pop music, which is in many regards highly simplified, e.g. based on the same 4 chord loops and Verse-Chorus forms.

I think that most contemporary classical ( and even much of common practice music) deviates too radically from the music people are exposed to in everyday life to make sense of it.

Literature doesn't have this problem because in the end literature still uses the english language people are familiar with, and the threshold for accepted complexity is much higher than with music, because most people already require reasonably advanced language skills to master everyday life. The same isn't true of music.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

allaroundmusicenthusiast said:


> Absolutely not, it's just an umbrella term to make it easier.


I see. Not.

Not even narrowing down to 'modernism' will do. It's also a broad term, encompassing a broad range of artefacts.


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

From my point of view the reason for modernism never becoming the mainstream of musical life has got something to do with the expressive powers of melodies, harmonies and rhythm.

It is natural for us humans to enjoy melodies because for tens of thousands of years we have been singers. 

It is natural for us humans to enjoy harmonies that are based on the first a few harmonics/overtones, because they "resonate better". Perfect octaves, major seconds, thirds, fourths, 5ths and 6ths and minor sevenths are more harmonic and naturally resonant than minor 2nds, augmented 4ths and major 7ths. The human mind enjoys harmony even on a biological basis. 

Based on those scientifically more harmonic harmonies and more harmonic scales, the human culture has been able to develop an immensely rich and expressive world of tonality.

What about the rhythm then? Ever our heart beat creates an (hopefully) somewhat even pulse. It is natural for us to see and hear rhythmical patters everywhere because they are everywhere. Even our walking goes one-two, one-two. The swing sways from one side to another, rhythmically.

Then all of a sudden we have ultra modernism that in away aims at deconstructing the natural melodies, natural harmonies and natural pulses, saying that "old music" is conservative. Deconstruction of the ties to musical history also prevents the ultra modernist composers to communicate and express through the musical language that has been based on (natural) melodies, harmonies and rhythms, and which people naturally understand.

Ultra modernism stating that certain aesthetics and techniques belong to the future and others belong to the past is in my opinion ridiculous. No technique in itself makes music modern or conservative. In a way serialism is old stuff. We´ve heard it. We´ve lived a couple of years since Darmstadt as well. I might even think serialists are more conservative than postmodernists who make less aesthetic statements.

In my opinion composers should study different techniques and listen to a lot of all kinds of music -- and while and after doing that, compose whatever they like, despite some "rules" of some institutions or social groups, or the supposed placement on the timeline of the musical canon/development. 

In this world there is room for music that has deconstructed melodies, harmonies and rhythms, too. It is just not realistic to think that kind of music would ever come mainstream. It just will not.

Being mainstream is not the only possible goal, though, oh no. Expressing stuff through music could be one of the goals. And to be able to express something, the music should somehow be attached to what we are as human beings or how we perceive things. Then the listener can also find that attachment to humanity/human perception/cognition/natural phenomenon in the music.

(I also compose modern art music. But I take into account all the aspects I have stated above. My art music doesn´t necessarily have bell canto singable melodies, but certain melodic aspects/tendencies that a natural human mind can follow. Although I do not use major-minor tonal harmony and I do not like triads in my art music (my style is more polyphonic), my harmony is based on the conscious use of the intervals, taking into account the dissonance-consonance -dicotomy. I also refuse to deny myself of melodic and harmonic tendencies which give structure to music. I just create my own tendencies and offer them to the listener. I also refuse to think that a pulse or an even pattern would somehow be a categoric failure for a modern composer.)


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

Waehnen said:


> Then all of a sudden we have ultra modernism that in away aims at deconstructing the natural melodies, natural harmonies and natural pulses, saying that "old music" is conservative.


There. I have extracted the straw man from the middle of your post. If certain music or other art doesn't speak to you, or to others, then it is unsuccessful. No need to assign it a label with an implicit value judgment such as "ultra modernism", much less a political agenda such as "anti-conservative".

Judging from your post, you yourself are a contemporary composer, and judging from your stated ideas on harmony, many would apply the labels "ultra modernist" and "anti-conservative" to you and your music. Yet you obviously try to distinguish your own music from the "ultra modern". This demonstrates the danger of painting with such a broad brush, to mix artistic metaphors.


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

fluteman said:


> There. I have extracted the straw man from the middle of your post. If certain music or other art doesn't speak to you, or to others, then it is unsuccessful. No need to assign it a label with an implicit value judgment such as "ultra modernism", much less a political agenda such as "anti-conservative".
> 
> Judging from your post, you yourself are a contemporary composer, and judging from your stated ideas on harmony, many would apply the labels "ultra modernist" and "anti-conservative" to you and your music. Yet you obviously try to distinguish your own music from the "ultra modern". This demonstrates the danger of painting with such a broad brush, to mix artistic metaphors.


It is tiring to read that kind of posts. I haven´t labeled a single piece of music or a composer here as ultra modern. So on what basis do you make your claim on me throwing around labels? At times I sure am an ultra modernist myself, at times I am post modernist, at times I even compose pop music. I don´t care about the labels, the terms I use are describtive, not definite.

One must have terms in which to communicate the things I have communicated. If you have better terms for me to use, please inform me, but do not try to say I have labels for my fellow composers.

Fluteman, if you wish to have a discussion with me, I ask you to be a bit more constructive in your next post. Otherwise I will just skip it. I do not have the energy for unnecessary internet fights.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

fluteman said:


> There. I have extracted the straw man from the middle of your post. If certain music or other art doesn't speak to you, or to others, then it is unsuccessful. No need to assign it a label with an implicit value judgment such as "ultra modernism", much less a political agenda such as "anti-conservative".
> 
> Judging from your post, you yourself are a contemporary composer, and judging from your stated ideas on harmony, many would apply the labels "ultra modernist" and "anti-conservative" to you and your music. Yet you obviously try to distinguish your own music from the "ultra modern". This demonstrates the danger of painting with such a broad brush, to mix artistic metaphors.


The biggest straw man argument is that atonal music is "unnatural."

This assumes that the diatonic scale is natural, or governed by the laws of physics. The diatonic scales, modern modes, and the chromatic scale are produced using the same mathematical frequency divisions. These are loosely based on the overtone series, but the natural overtone series produces frequencies different from those we use in our scales and modes - and the overtone series also produces dissonances as well as consonant intervals.

It is an absurdity to claim that Schoenberg created a system of composition which is unnatural which is why it will never "catch on."

Well, the reality is that it has caught on with many, many listeners.


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

SanAntone said:


> It is an absurdity to claim that Schoenberg created a system of composition which is unnatural which is why it will never "catch on."


Are you stating I claim atonal music unnatural?

It seems to me that Fluteman and SanAntone themselves have constructed some straw men.

I have tried to explain why certain music will never break through to mainstream. I have tried to explain why certain musical elements are easier, more natural and pleasurable for the majority of people to enjoy. I also clearly stated that pleasing the majority is not the only goal in art music.

Anyway, I might have to delete my post if this is the quality of the conversation.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Waehnen said:


> Are you stating I claim atonal music unnatural?
> 
> It seems to me that Fluteman and SanAntone themselves have constructed some straw men.
> 
> ...


Are you the only person posting in this thread? Get a grip; it's not all about you.  I don't even know if that comment was made in this thread, but it has been made recently in one of these threads about "modern music."


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

SanAntone said:


> Are you the only person posting in this thread? Get a grip; it's not all about you.  I don't even know if that comment was made in this thread, but it has been made recently in one of these threads about "modern music."


You liked the Fluteman comment which was a comment on me. Then you commented a Fluteman comment on my post. So clearly you commented on me with a straw man strategy. So yeah, it was kinda natural to assume this particular straw man was about me.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Waehnen said:


> You liked the Fluteman comment which was a comment on me. Then you commented a Fluteman comment on my post. So clearly you commented on me with a straw man strategy. So yeah, it was kinda natural to assume this particular straw man was about me.


No; I quoted Fluteman's post because he brought up *straw man arguments* regarding modern music. I didn't even read his post entirely, and did not consider you at all in my comment. I don't even connect you with this thread. Did you start it?

It doesn't matter to me who starts threads, my comments have nothing to do with them specifically unless I am quoting one of their posts. Since I didn't quote your post, I was not addressing you nor referring to you. Oh, and this forum does not allow members to delete their posts.


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

Waehnen said:


> It is tiring to read that kind of posts. I haven´t labeled a single piece of music or a composer here as ultra modern. So on what basis do you make your claim on me throwing around labels? At times I sure am an ultra modernist myself, at times I am post modernist, at times I even compose pop music. I don´t care about the labels, the terms I use are describtive, not definite.
> 
> One must have terms in which to communicate the things I have communicated. If you have better terms for me to use, please inform me, but do not try to say I have labels for my fellow composers.


I'm sorry, but without specifying any particular piece of music or composer, you have indeed used the term "ultra modernism" and even defined it (as music that "aims at deconstructing the natural melodies, natural harmonies and natural pulses"). Your goal seems to have been to distinguish this unspecified music, and these unnamed composers, from you and your own music. But your failure to specify any music or name any composer, much less give a concrete example of what you are talking about, dooms your enterprise.

If you wanted to pursue your line of reasoning, you might explain your approach to harmony, for example how you don't use major-minor tonal harmony and don't like triads, yet do use the consonance and dissonance dichotomy. Does this mean you prefer modal harmony? Or do you avoid diatonic scales? What is consonant to you if not fifths and thirds, i.e., triads? Must all music follow your three natural laws of melody, harmony and rhythm, or is obeying one or two of the three enough?

And whatever your answer, can't something similar be said about a great deal of modern music of different kinds? Frankly, I am tired of your kind of vague yet broadly judgmental post.


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

SanAntone said:


> No; I quoted Fluteman's post because he brought up *straw man arguments* regarding modern music. I didn't even read his post entirely, and did not consider you at all in my comment. I don't even connect you with this thread. Did you start it?
> 
> It doesn't matter to me who starts threads, my comments have nothing to do with them specifically unless I am quoting one of their posts. Since I didn't quote your post, I was not addressing you nor referring to you. Oh, and this forum does not allow members to delete their posts.


Good. I believe you. Thanks!


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

fluteman said:


> I'm sorry, but without specifying any particular piece of music or composer, you have indeed used the term "ultra modernism" and even defined it (as music that "aims at deconstructing the natural melodies, natural harmonies and natural pulses"). Your goal seems to have been to distinguish this unspecified music, and these unnamed composers, from you and your own music. But your failure to specify any music or name any composer, much less give a concrete example of what you are talking about, dooms your enterprise.
> 
> If you wanted to pursue your line of reasoning, you might explain your approach to harmony, for example how you don't use major-minor tonal harmony and don't like triads, yet do use the consonance and dissonance dichotomy. Does this mean you prefer modal harmony? Or do you avoid diatonic scales? What is consonant to you if not fifths and thirds, i.e., triads? Must all music follow your three natural laws of melody, harmony and rhythm, or is obeying one or two of the three enough?
> 
> And whatever your answer, can't something similar be said about a great deal of modern music of different kinds? Frankly, I am tired of your kind of vague yet broadly judgmental post.


There was absolutely nothing judgmental about my post. I merely gave an answer to the question in the original post.

Obviously you would have preferred another kind of answer but do not have better arguments against me, hence your straw man strategy. Forcefully seing me a part in some kind of war. Totally unnecessary.

For me the ultra-modernist deconstruction I described is one useful tool, one method amongst others. A very important tool in that it allows one not to take musical elements as given. Deconstruction gives freedom.

Please read my post again with some more tought. Thanks!


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

Waehnen said:


> There was absolutely nothing judgmental about my post. I merely gave an answer to the question in the original post.
> 
> Obviously you would have preferred another kind of answer but do not have better arguments against me, hence your straw man strategy. Forcefully seing a part in some kind of war. Totally unnecessary.
> 
> Please read my post again with some more tought. Thanks!


The trouble is, both the original post in this thread, and your response, set up straw man premises. The original post adopts the false premise that contemporary music is less accepted or popular than other forms of contemporary art. Your response sets up the premise that there is a bad genre of music that rejects natural laws and that you refer to as "ultra modernism".

The original poster at least explained his post to the extent I could link it to something concrete, i.e., the reaction against certain modern art movements that was especially apparent in the mid-20th century, though that applied to many forms of art, not just music. He, like you, appears to be reaching for some sort of approach that would accept moderately modern music, but not the extreme or ultra modern. Whatever all of that means.

I asked you some specific questions about your musical taste and approach, which might have provided some much needed clarity, and which you have ignored. So, ciao.


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

fluteman said:


> The trouble is, both the original post in this thread, and your response, set up straw man premises. The original post adopts the false premise that contemporary music is less accepted or popular than other forms of contemporary art. Your response sets up the premise that there is a bad genre of music that rejects natural laws and that you refer to as "ultra modernism".


I interpreted the original question like this: "Why isn´t modern and atonal music from Schoenberg onwards mainstream?" I answered that question.

I do believe that there has been an ultra modernist movement which has sometimes gone beyond pure aesthetics and also become an institutionalized form of ideology. When that ideology works the way I described in my post (claiming that only deconstruction is modern and everything else belongs to the past), it is not an approach to music I share. Then again I do not know any ultramodernists who would solely aim at deconstruction and nothing else.

It needs to be admitted, that yes, I did refer to an ultra modernist movement as a phenomenon that has existed in the world. Still I do not put any composer in a box. Not even the Darmstadt composers. Who am I to put anyone in a box?

I am merely stating that the level of deconstruction will always have correlative consequences in the reception. Always. So you need to be aware of what you do and not just blame the audience. You need to acknowledge the facts and take responsibility for your own musical actions.



> I asked you some specific questions about your musical taste and approach, which might have provided some much needed clarity, and which you have ignored. So, ciao.


From your questions on my musical techniques I got the impression that you just wanted to "box" me and give a label to me and through that, give me a spot in some kind of war you think everyone is part of.

Sorry, I am not interested in discussing my musical techniques on this forum in depth. This conversation can be conducted without discussing my musical techniques. They were a side note on my original post.


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## allaroundmusicenthusiast (Jun 3, 2020)

Waehnen said:


> I am merely stating that the level of deconstruction will always have correlative consequences in the reception. Always. So you need to be aware of what you do and not just blame the audience. You need to acknowledge the facts and take responsibility for your own musical actions.


Is there no room in your theory for the role of the institutions of classical music (labels, concert halls, programmers, other stakeholders) and also the public? Is it all the composer's fault?


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

allaroundmusicenthusiast said:


> Is there no room in your theory for the role of the institutions of classical music (labels, concert halls, programmers, other stakeholders) and also the public? Is it all the composer's fault?


Sure there is room in my theory for the things you mention. We live in a world of complex interaction.


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## allaroundmusicenthusiast (Jun 3, 2020)

In this world of complex interaction, for me, what composers effectively write is a very bad predictor of its own acceptance among the public. I assign much more responsibility to the agents I mentioned.


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

allaroundmusicenthusiast said:


> In this world of complex interaction, for me, what composers effectively write is a very bad predictor of its acceptance among the public. I assign much more responsibility to the agents I mentioned.


In this complex world of interaction, I would say the game is fifty-fifty depending what is considered a sufficient level of acceptance among the public.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

> "Why isn´t modern and atonal music from Schoenberg onwards mainstream?" I answered that question.


Maybe to your satisfaction, but your posts only present what I see as false premises. Your question assumes a false premise, i.e. Classical music other than atonal music is mainstream. However, Classical music as a whole claims about 1% of the global music market. Hardly mainstream.

Pop, Rock, Rap, Country are mainstream genres of music.

Atonal music from Schoenberg onwards is not mainstream for the same reason Classical music in general is not mainstream: Classical music requires more from a listener than mainstream forms of music, which offer easy accessibility and instant gratification. Atonal music may require more from a listener than the most accessible Classical music, but none of it is mainstream.


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

SanAntone said:


> Maybe to your satisfaction, but your posts only present what I see as false premises. Your question assumes a false premise, i.e. Classical music other than atonal music is mainstream. However, Classical music as a whole claims about 1% of the global music market. Hardly mainstream.
> 
> Pop, Rock, Rap, Country are mainstream genres of music.
> 
> Atonal music from Schoenberg onwards is not mainstream for the same reason Classical music in general is not mainstream: Classical music requires more from a listener than mainstream forms of music, which offer easy accessibility and instant gratification. Atonal music may require more from a listener than the most accessible Classical music, but none of it is mainstream.


I am talking about mainstream in the context of western art music which includes classical, romantic, modern, postmodern and contemporary art music. Sure there is more marginal and more mainstream under this huge umbrella as well.

So no false premises which would somehow undermine and neutralize everything I have written.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Waehnen said:


> I am talking about mainstream in the context of western art music which includes classical, romantic, modern, postmodern and contemporary art music. Sure there is more marginal and more mainstream under this huge umbrella as well
> 
> So no false premises which would somehow undermine and neutralize everything I have written.


Your primary false premise is that atonal music is somehow different from the rest of Classical music - and you left out several periods of Classical music which may not fit your false premise as easily as the ones you listed.

I would suspect that Medieval music, Renaissance music, Baroque music all have similar or maybe even smaller audiences than 20th century modernist music. Btw, the Classical music I listen to mostly is from the pre-tonal periods (9th-16th centuries) and the post-tonal periods (20th-21st centuries). The Classical music periods I listen to the least are 18th and 19th centuries - which I am assuming you think of mainstream.

While I have no urge to undermine and neutralize "everything" you are writing, I do think you are overstating your argument and basing most of your conclusions on false premises..

What is your purpose for creating this thread and pushing this "atonal music is not mainstream" agenda?


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

SanAntone said:


> Your primary false premise is that atonal music is somehow different from the rest of Classical music - and you left out several periods of Classical music which may not fit your false premise as easily as the ones you listed.
> 
> I would suspect that Medieval music, Renaissance music, Baroque music all have similar or maybe even smaller audiences than 20th century modernist music. Btw, the Classical music I listen to mostly is from the pre-tonal periods (9th-16th centuries) and the post-tonal periods (20th-21st centuries). The Classical music periods I listen to the least are 18th and 19th centuries - which I am assuming you think of mainstream.
> 
> ...


I view atonal music a vital and natural part of western art music. I even consider the deconstruction I have mentioned a vital and important part of art music. I referred to medieval and other music not specifically listed by me by the term classical.

Just because you repeat your idea of my false premises doesn't make it true. There is no logic in the statement. I do not believe I have constructed my thinking on somehow false facts. If I have, please elaborate more. Please explain.

You ask me why I have created this thread with an agenda. I have not. I am just one of the many who has replied to this thread. You are mistaking me for someone else. There is a true false premise.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

_ADD: I'm editing this following Waehnen's declaration not to continue. I'm leaving in the bit that prompted the declaration, but making it less prominent. I think it distracts from the more important observation in response to the OP._

I've been trying to follow this discussion, but other business has kept me from contribtuing, so forgive me if this has already been said (in this thread: I know I've said this elsewhere in similar threads).

[I quoted Waehnen who said, "I haven´t labeled a single piece of music or a composer here as ultra modern." And I replied, "And there's your problem."]

The terms that are being bandied about need to be applied to specific pieces of music so we know what, exactly, we are talking about - and also what we are not talking about. This is not the first time broad generalisations have been made about 'modern' music (which is too often a confusing shorthand for 'modernism') and then apparently applied to 'contemporary' music (that is, music by composers of, say, the last 20 years). It's as if the well documented but poorly mythologised "destruction of CPT" by the "ultra modernists" (eg the serialists and the "worst" of the post-modernists) has tarnished the work of every composer active since 1950-ish.



Opisthokont said:


> [...] Why is contemporary classical music then in such a dismal state? [...]


I am not a regular listener to contemporary classical music, but I do pay attention to as many of the premieres at the BBC Proms as I can. It's quite clear to me that whilst none of those that I have heard are composing anything resembling traditional CPT, they are not all composing something that is inaccessible or (to use a shortcut term) "like pianos falling downstairs" or any of the other terms used to disparage the modern.

For examples, see this list of premieres at the 2021 Proms.

https://www.classical-music.com/features/articles/bbc-proms-premieres-all-the-new-works-commissioned-for-the-2021-bbc-proms-season/Even in 2020, the year of the plague, the BBC commissioned 6 world premieres.

Now, not all of them are world premieres (but there are 11 of those) and I'm not saying that they are all sweet, happy tunes. But they offer a variety of approaches to classical and are typical of what has been happening in the world of classical over the past xx years.

It seems some people are stuck in just as much of a timewarp as those of us who are still mining the best symphonies of the 19th and 20th centuries.


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## composingmusic (Dec 16, 2021)

Waehnen said:


> I view atonal music a vital and natural part of western art music. I even consider the deconstruction I have mentioned a vital and important part of art music.


I agree with this, and something that's really important to consider when looking at this issue is historical context. Within the context of music history, we have the evolution and gradual deconstruction of tonality through the romantic era, where it becomes increasingly elusive - look at Wagner or late Liszt. In the scope of the world at large, you have increasing instability, which eventually leads to the world wars. These wars had a profound impact on modernist music, as did the mounting instability which led up to the wars.

There's a really interesting phenomenon that one also sees in the 20th century, with lots of different possible stylistic directions for a composer to consider. A lot of these start as reactions resulting from different stylistic directions, and they end up interacting in really interesting ways.


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

Forster said:


> I've been trying to follow this discussion, but other business has kept me from contribtuing, so forgive me if this has already been said (in this thread: I know I've said this elsewhere in similar threads).
> 
> And there's your problem.
> 
> ...


It would appear that even you think I am some one else I am not. You state I have a problem. No I do not. This whole conversation is totally absurd and based on the assumption that anyone who says anything is part of some kind of culture war and must be on one side or another.

I can no longer discuss among these ridiculous assumptions. People obviously think I am some other writer. Quite absurd!

It was a mistake for me to write in this thread. What an absurd experience. Reminds me of the fact that the internet is not always a good place to be.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

Waehnen said:


> It would appear that even you think I am some one else I am not. You state I have a problem. No I do not.


Well, perhaps I should have said, "There's _the _problem", for it is not yours alone, but is shared with others too.

Can you explain which composers and which compositions you are referring to when you talk of ultra-modernists? Then we might get somewhere.


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

Forster said:


> Well, perhaps I should have said, "There's _the _problem", for it is not yours alone, but is shared with others too.
> 
> Can you explain which composers and which compositions you are referring to when you talk of ultra-modernists? Then we might get somewhere.


I cannot continue this absurd conversation. Sorry.


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

Forster said:


> The terms that are being bandied about need to be applied to specific pieces of music so we know what, exactly, we are talking about - and also what we are not talking about. This is not the first time broad generalisations have been made about 'modern' music (which is too often a confusing shorthand for 'modernism') and then apparently applied to 'contemporary' music (that is, music by composers of, say, the last 20 years). It's as if the well documented but poorly mythologised "destruction of CPT" by the "ultra modernists" (eg the serialists and the "worst" of the post-modernists) has tarnished the work of every composer active since 1950-ish.


I distinguished pretty clearly in my first post that this not what I meant nor what I was saying. I love both modernist and comtemporary music - it's the vast majority of what I listen to. I spend a decent amount of my free time reading about and composing in the idioms of darmstadt. it's upsetting that I'm somehow being characterized as an anti-modernist when it couldn't be further from the truth. The reason I started this thread is that I want that music to be more popular, not because I bemoan it for "destroying CPT". If anything my personal criticism is the opposite - I think contemporary music is not atonal enough and too musically conesrvative, but that's my own personal taste. I've said this several times throughout this thread now too!

Sorry if I come off as upset it feels quite frustrating to be mischaracterized like this. And a lot of people have done it too - I think many are just reading the title and coming to conclusions about me without reading anything else I've written here.


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

Opisthokont said:


> I distinguished pretty clearly in my first post that this not what I meant nor what I was saying. I love both modernist and comtemporary music - it's the vast majority of what I listen to. I spend a decent amount of my free time reading about and composing in the idioms of darmstadt. it's upsetting that I'm somehow being characterized as an anti-modernist when it couldn't be further from the truth. The reason I started this thread is that I want that music to be more popular, not because I bemoan it for "destroying CPT". I've said this several times throughout this thread now too!
> 
> Sorry if I come off as upset it feels quite frustrating to be mischaracterized like this. And a lot of people have done it too - I think many are just reading the title and coming to conclusions about me without reading anything else I've written here.


Opisthokont, they think I am you and that you are me. They have mixed in their heads your arguments and mine. No wonder it get confusing because you and I are not the same.

Anyway, now they base their every argument on the assumption that there is a culture war, and this creature Opisthokont-Waehnen is on the other side, hating Darmstad ultra modernist movement and claiming everything atonal is horrible Darmstadt modernism.

Nothing you nor I say will change that assumption. We are now the Frankenstein Monster. Opisthokont-Waehnen.

So it is better to stop writing in this thread.


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

Waehnen said:


> Opisthokont, they think I am you and that you are me. And they base their every argument on the assumption that there is a culture war, and you and I are on the other side, hating Darmstad ultra modernist movement and claiming everything atonal is horrible Darmstadt modernism.
> 
> Nothing you nor I say will change that assumption.
> 
> So it is better to stop writing in this thread.


It's frustrating because I want more Darmstadt-esque music, not less of it? My favorite composers are the darmstadt composers, it's nearly all of what I listen to nowdays. It's so bizarre because my entire point was that Darmstadt did not get a fair shake and was unfairly criticized and I was wondering why! And that's immediately clear in any of the posts I've made, I feel?


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

Opisthokont said:


> It's frustrating because I want more Darmstadt-esque music, not less of it? My favorite composers are the darmstadt composers, it's nearly all of what I listen to nowdays. It's so bizarre because my entire point was that Darmstadt did not get a fair shake and was unfairly criticized and I was wondering why! And that's immediately clear in any of the posts I've made, I feel?


They have created this monster Opisthokont-Waehnen. I am sorry. This is absurd.

Let's try to see the funny in this.


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

Opisthokont said:


> It's frustrating because I want more Darmstadt-esque music, not less of it? My favorite composers are the darmstadt composers, it's nearly all of what I listen to nowdays. It's so bizarre because my entire point was that Darmstadt did not get a fair shake and was unfairly criticized and I was wondering why! And that's immediately clear in any of the posts I've made, I feel?


Anyway, I answered to your OP question. Would you like to read my answer and comment on my ideas on the level of deconstruction having a correlation in the reception?

Maybe Opisthokont-Waehnen could sort this mess up by his monster-self?


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## Aries (Nov 29, 2012)

SanAntone said:


> The biggest straw man argument is that atonal music is "unnatural."
> 
> This assumes that the diatonic scale is natural, or governed by the laws of physics. The diatonic scales, modern modes, and the chromatic scale are produced using the same mathematical frequency divisions. These are loosely based on the overtone series, but the natural overtone series produces frequencies different from those we use in our scales and modes - and the overtone series also produces dissonances as well as consonant intervals.


The overtone series is the most consonant series of different intervals that is possible. 2:1, 3:2, 4:3, 5:4, 6:5 etc.

The diatonic scale and especially the major scale is a very good attempt to include the intervals of the overtone series: 1:1, 10:9, 5:4, 4:3, 3:2, 5:3, 15:8, 2:1

It is a great human invention that fits well to the natural way of human singing and musical expectation.



fluteman said:


> The trouble is, both the original post in this thread, and your response, set up straw man premises. The original post adopts the false premise that contemporary music is less accepted or popular than other forms of contemporary art.


But it is probably right.

Compare some google results:

- Pablo Picasso: About 26.100.000 results
- James Joyce: About 13.700.000 results
- Igor Stravinsky: About 2.800.000 results
- Arnold Schoenberg: About 1.040.000 results

https://www.google.com/?hl=en


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

Opisthokont said:


> I distinguished pretty clearly in my first post that this not what I meant nor what I was saying. I love both modernist and comtemporary music - it's the vast majority of what I listen to. I spend a decent amount of my free time reading about and composing in the idioms of darmstadt. it's upsetting that I'm somehow being characterized as an anti-modernist when it couldn't be further from the truth. The reason I started this thread is that I want that music to be more popular, not because I bemoan it for "destroying CPT". If anything my personal criticism is the opposite - I think contemporary music is not atonal enough and too musically conesrvative, but that's my own personal taste. I've said this several times throughout this thread now too!
> 
> Sorry if I come off as upset it feels quite frustrating to be mischaracterized like this. And a lot of people have done it too - I think many are just reading the title and coming to conclusions about me without reading anything else I've written here.


Unless one is very clear which bit of a post is directed at which other poster, we can all become confused. I'm sorry for any upset caused by such confusion.

The first part of my post was aimed at two, possibly three posters, who keep referring to 'modern' when they really mean 'modernist'. And directly at Waehnen who referred to 'ultra' modernists.

The second part of my post was aimed at the OP's 'dearth of new music' title and "concert halls started programming less and less new music until we reached the state we're in now." All I wanted to show was that new music is being programmed (in the UK at least) and it's not all 'ultra'.

I was also writing - as most of us do - to the Forum. We're having a multi-way conversation in public, where any member can jump in where they wish (sometimes with both feet). One of the general tendencies here is to generalise (he says, generalising) and so my post addressed that habit.

To those who dislike 'ultra', please specify the composers and the compositions you object to, and if you think that all modern (that is, present-day) music is tainted by ultra, please show your working!


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

Forster said:


> To those who dislike 'ultra', please specify the composers and the compositions you object to, and if you think that all modern (that is, present-day) music is tainted by ultra, please show your working!


I do not object to any kinds of music. The world is big enough for it all.

I have criticized "Ultra modernist movement" as an institutionalized ideology which states that only systematic deconstruction of the past is modern, and everything else belongs in the past. That ideology/attitude is naive and I do no share it. Some composers and scholars have applied that approach to various degree.

My point is that the level of deconstruction has correlation in the reception. I consider that a fact.

Does anyone disagree with what I am ACTUALLY saying?


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## composingmusic (Dec 16, 2021)

Waehnen said:


> Opisthokont, they think I am you and that you are me. They have mixed in their heads your arguments and mine. No wonder it get confusing because you and I are not the same.
> 
> Anyway, now they base their every argument on the assumption that there is a culture war, and this creature Opisthokont-Waehnen is on the other side, hating Darmstad ultra modernist movement and claiming everything atonal is horrible Darmstadt modernism.
> 
> ...


I guess I can unite with this Frankenstein monster? Haha :lol:


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## composingmusic (Dec 16, 2021)

Forster said:


> To those who dislike 'ultra', please specify the composers and the compositions you object to, and if you think that all modern (that is, present-day) music is tainted by ultra, please show your working!


A good point you brought up is that there's so many different kinds of music that fall under the umbrella term of contemporary classical. Furthermore, I've also run into different definitions of "contemporary" from different people. Modernism is one clear direction, but we also have spectralism (which overlaps with this), different kinds of polystylism, minimalism, different types of postmodernism, and so much more. There's also a distinction between 20th century and contemporary - one working definition of "contemporary" I've run into is anything in the last 50 years. I've also run into people calling anything from the start of modernism onwards to be "modern". These terms can be a bit confusing, even for someone who works with them on a regular basis!

Re. new music programming, I think that depends on the country, venue, and type of ensemble. There is a fair amount of new music being programmed in the UK, and the same can be said for Finland. I think there may be less in some areas of the US, and I'm not as familiar with scenes elsewhere.


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## arpeggio (Oct 4, 2012)

Opisthokont said:


> I distinguished pretty clearly in my first post that this not what I meant nor what I was saying. I love both modernist and comtemporary music - it's the vast majority of what I listen to. I spend a decent amount of my free time reading about and composing in the idioms of darmstadt. it's upsetting that I'm somehow being characterized as an anti-modernist when it couldn't be further from the truth. The reason I started this thread is that I want that music to be more popular, not because I bemoan it for "destroying CPT". If anything my personal criticism is the opposite - I think contemporary music is not atonal enough and too musically conesrvative, but that's my own personal taste. I've said this several times throughout this thread now too!
> 
> Sorry if I come off as upset it feels quite frustrating to be mischaracterized like this. And a lot of people have done it too - I think many are just reading the title and coming to conclusions about me without reading anything else I've written here.


Sorry about the confusion.

Not only with TC but even in other internet classical music forums there have been individuals who have used these forums as a platform to trash music they dislike. I have even seen threads that trashed Beethoven's _Ninth._


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Waehnen said:


> I do not object to any kinds of music. The world is big enough for it all.
> 
> I have criticized "Ultra modernist movement" as an institutionalized ideology which states that only systematic deconstruction of the past is modern, and everything else belongs in the past. That ideology/attitude is naive and I do no share it. Some composers and scholars have applied that approach to various degree.
> 
> ...


Yes. I disagree with these statements:

The existence of an "*Ultra modernist movement*" - which implies coordinated action, a conspiracy, IOW - "as an *institutionalized ideology* which *states that only systematic deconstruction of the past *is modern, and everything else belongs in the past." "My point is that the level of deconstruction has correlation in the reception. I consider that a fact."

These are your (seriously flawed) ideas and assumptions, and they not facts.

There is no unified institutional ideology or movement dedicated to the destruction of previous styles of music. There are individual composers following their personal aesthetic styles and writing the kind of music which emerges from their innermost selves. They are not part of a "movement" or "institution" or, to use my word, a conspiracy to destroy the past.

To the extent like-minded composers are seen to make up a "school" or "style" this labeling is done after the fact, by outsiders, for pedagogical purposes or for writing a historical survey of a period.


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

SanAntone said:


> Yes. I disagree with these statements:
> 
> The existence of an "*Ultra modernist movement*" - which implies coordinated action, a conspiracy, IOW - "as an *institutionalized ideology* which *states that only systematic deconstruction of the past *is modern, and everything else belongs in the past." "My point is that the level of deconstruction has correlation in the reception. I consider that a fact."
> 
> ...


You seem to be disagreeing with a Straw Man Krankenstein Monster again, not me. Because you cannot argue against me reasonably, you try putting words in my mouth. I do no appreciate it at all.

I haven't said a word about s conspiracy and I most certainly do not believe in such a thing.

Neither do I believe that this conspiracy of yours (not mine) would seek to destroy the music of the past.

Both statements above are ridiculous so it is easy for you to disagree with them. It is easy for me as well.

The statements speak more of you than of me.

If you wanted to know more specifically what I mean, all you had to do is ask.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Waehnen said:


> You seem to be disagreeing with a Straw Man Krankenstein Monster again, not me. Because you cannot argue against me reasonably, you try putting words in my mouth. I do no appreciate it at all.
> 
> I haven't said a word about s conspiracy and I most certainly do not believe in such a thing.
> 
> ...


You seem to forget what you wrote and what I responded to:



Waehnen said:


> I do not object to any kinds of music. The world is big enough for it all.
> 
> I have criticized "Ultra modernist movement" as an institutionalized ideology which states that only systematic deconstruction of the past is modern, and everything else belongs in the past. That ideology/attitude is naive and I do no share it. Some composers and scholars have applied that approach to various degree.
> 
> ...


Yes. I disagree with these statements:

The existence of an "Ultra modernist movement" - "as an institutionalized ideology which states that only systematic deconstruction of the past is modern, and everything else belongs in the past." "My point is that the level of deconstruction has correlation in the reception. I consider that a fact."

These are your (seriously flawed) ideas and assumptions, and they not facts.

And since you did not respond to my post, I will repeat it:

There is no unified institutional ideology or movement dedicated to the destruction of previous styles of music. There are individual composers following their personal aesthetic styles and writing the kind of music which emerges from their innermost selves. They are not part of a "movement" or "institutional ideology" to destroy the past.

To the extent like-minded composers are seen to make up a "school" or "style" this labeling is done after the fact, by outsiders, for pedagogical purposes or for writing a historical survey of a period.


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

> There is no unified institutional ideology or movement dedicated to the destruction of previous styles of music. There are individual composers following their personal aesthetic styles and writing the kind of music which emerges from their innermost selves. They are not part of a "movement" or "institutional ideology" to destroy the past.


I agree that there is no such a thing. I have never claimed there was.

Are you an expert on the European institutions on music? I happen to know for a fact that there are institutionalized schools which prefer certain compositional methods and aesthetics, and which have educated and educate young students accordingly. It is a fact that these kinds of schools are not purely outside artistic ideologies.

These things have been studied here in Europe. There are heaps of writings by and interviews on teachers and composers on the matter and the fight between these schools.

It is ignorant to claim there are no schools of aesthetics and compositional methods, or artistic ideologies. It is simply not true. Sure there are. It's a fact.

Yet, these schools sure are not conspiracies nor they seek to "destroy the music of the past", whatever it is you meant by that phrase. That was your claim from the very beginning, not mine.

I was mainly talking about the ultra modernist way of thinking as an abstraction and orientation which people apply to different lengths and extent in their creative work.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Waehnen said:


> I agree that there is no such a thing. I have never claimed there was.
> 
> Are you an expert on the European institutions on music? I happen to know for a fact that there are institutionalized schools which prefer certain compositional methods and aesthetics, and which have educated and educate young students accordingly. It is a fact that these kinds of schools are not purely outside artistic ideologies.
> 
> ...


These are your exact words:

I have criticized *"Ultra modernist movement" as an institutionalized ideology which states that only systematic deconstruction of the past is modern, and everything else belongs in the past.* That ideology/attitude is naive and I do no share it. Some composers and scholars have applied that approach to various degree.

You have identified an "Ultra modernist movement" - which means you believe such a movement exists. A MOVEMENT, not a composer here and there, an actual "movement" with an institutionalized ideology. And for you to say I am putting those words into your mouth is absurd. The words came directly out of your mouth.

I am not an expert on European educational institutions. But I have been involved in music for over 50 years and come into contact with a wide variety of musicians, composers, professors, from around the world and have never gotten the impression of an "ultra modernist movement" with an "institutionalized ideology" as you describe.

Artists, composers, musicians, are more complex than that. They transcend their education, which generally they receive as youngsters and outgrow and evolve from.


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

I'd like to apologize for my behavior there yesterday - I understand, the title here I choose was bad and unnecessarily provocative. I originally was going to call it "The economics of new music" but that felt not descriptive enough. Sorry to forster, arpeggio, etc... for lashing out there.


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

Waehnen said:


> Anyway, I answered to your OP question. Would you like to read my answer and comment on my ideas on the level of deconstruction having a correlation in the reception?
> 
> Maybe Opisthokont-Waehnen could sort this mess up by his monster-self?


I think for me the take away from this thread is that there are many interesecting things to keep in mind that are all wrapped together.

-Contemporary music is much more popular in the form of concert bands than concert halls. Contemporary composers are adaptable people and have figured out ways of surviving without large support from concert halls.

-Contemporary music v "Contemporary" music vs Modern music. The popularity of boulez or babbitt should probably be kept separate than the popular of phillip glass or even kaija saariaho, and those two should be kept separate from the frequency of performances of actually upcoming composers who have not established themselves, tying that into one thread just confuses things. Even more than this when we say contemporary music do we mean mason bates? Hans zimmer? Is einaudi contemporary music? What I really care about is the popularity of "complex" music. And towards "complexity" in musical form. (And I care about it because I love that style of music!)

-Unpopularity isn't bad. I should have made clear, I do not think the modernist project failed. I think it is much more of a failure to have one's music played at train stations to stop the homeless or played to help children study for useless exams than it is to have one's music only played in horror films.

-As for "ultra modernism", I dont really like the term here because ultra modernism does actually refer to a specific school of cowell and ruggles. (It's actually interesting because cowell justified his use of secundal harmony via the harmonic series). But as for high modernism, I do think the boulezian attitude did have an impact on its popularity. Outside of darmstadt it seems like there wasn't that much pressure to write in the modernist idioms but boulez especially seems to have left a massive specter in everyone's eyes (to his credit!). There is a lot of boulez music I like but its hard to argue that his attitude was popular.

-People will assume that if you talk about modern or contemporary music that you hate it. I only really spend time talking about music I like tbh. I dont have the patience to listen to music I dont like enough to talk about it. But that may not be clear unless its made hyper-apparent? I never said serialism destroyed classical music, I never said serialism or atonality made music unpopular even - part of my point about the postminimalists is that I didnt think this picture was completely correct. But because it was there people assumed that's what I was saying. And that is understandable given how this thread went forward!

-I do think that modernist music is probably more popular now that it has been in the past. The ubiquity of good recordings easily available on the internet I think will give this style of music a well deserved second life. It may be too optimistic of me, but I think now that we can easily listen to any piece of music by babbitt or webern over and over again and those recordings can be found by a quick google search - I wouldnt be surprised if people start seeing what was missed earlier.

-Modernist music in particular is contentious because its historical circumstances are explicity political. Its no coincidence that the second viennesse school found its height at the interwar period and that free jazz was most popular around 1968. Its hard to talk about these things on a forum like this because there is no separating the music from its political circumstances. I mean there is a reason why this sort of usic struck adorno so hard - both in support and in criticism: even the term "emancipation of dissonance" is a political one. This makes it especially hard to discuss on a forum like this.


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

SanAntone said:


> These are your exact words:
> 
> I have criticized *"Ultra modernist movement" as an institutionalized ideology which states that only systematic deconstruction of the past is modern, and everything else belongs in the past.* That ideology/attitude is naive and I do no share it. Some composers and scholars have applied that approach to various degree.
> 
> ...


I have said what I have said. I have not said anything about a conspiracy or an aim of destroying the past. I have written exactly enough on the deconstruction of traditional melody, harmony and rhythm. That is not me claiming that a conspiracy is formed to destroy all the music that has ever been in the past.

Sure youngster often outgrow their schools. No doubt about that. That still doesn't mean there was no school or that nothing could be said or studied about the ways of the schools, or how the former students of a certain teacher speak about their famous teacher. Even they talk and write about the school and how the aesthetics of the school has influenced them.

I happen to know what I talk about here. I have myself studied under the influence of these schools and reflected in conversations on the schools with many Finnish composers. I have talked with 3 great Finnish composers in which aesthetic school I should study in. If you do not believe in institutionalized aesthetics in art music, talk to any Finnish composer.

One of my fellow composer students said before I started: "You do well here if you do exactly as they tell you." I never forgot his anxiety.

Then again it is a well-known fact that Americans are more open minded about music than Europeans, even at institutions. Many Finnish composers have felt wonderful liberation on the new continent. Just listen to Esa-Pekka Salonen BEFORE the U.S and then listen to LA Variations.


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## composingmusic (Dec 16, 2021)

Another addendum about serialism – from the perspective of a composer, serialism creates some interesting problems that make form quite hard to grapple with. This is especially true if you approach it from a pointillistic, Webernian perspective. However, serialism does level the playing field of pitch to a degree, and makes it difficult to create long-term harmonic structures (not impossible: Berg does this quite well, although he's also not as strict with his usage of row-forms as some of the others, and he purposefully chose rows that incorporate triads). Reportedly, Boulez said towards the end of his life that his dogmatic approach to serialism, and the things he'd said about people who didn't agree with serialism being useless, earlier on in his life – he said this had been a mistake on his part. I find that quite interesting.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Waehnen said:


> I have said what I have said. I have not said anything about a conspiracy or an aim of destroying the past. I have written exactly enough on the deconstruction of traditional melody, harmony and rhythm. That is not me claiming that a conspiracy is formed to destroy all the music that has ever been in the past.
> 
> Sure youngster often outgrow their schools. No doubt about that. That still doesn't mean there was no school or that nothing could be said or studied about the ways of the schools, or how the former students of a certain teacher speak about their famous teacher. Even they talk and write about the school and how the aesthetics of the school has influenced them.
> 
> ...


How many of these composers are examples of the "ultra modernist" ideology you have described?

Uuno Klami	
Helvi Leiviskä	
Taneli Kuusisto	
Nils-Eric Fougstedt	
Erik Bergman	
Tauno Marttinen	
Sven Einar Englund	
Tauno Pylkkänen	
Joonas Kokkonen	
Einojuhani Rautavaara	
Usko Meriläinen	
Ilkka Kuusisto	
Aulis Sallinen	
Teppo Hauta-Aho
Erkki Salmenhaara
Charlie Morrow
Leif Segerstam
Mikko Heiniö
Jukka Tiensuu
Kalevi Aho	
Kaija Saariaho
Juhani Komulainen
Olli Kortekangas	
Jouni Kaipainen	
Kimmo Hakola	
Magnus Lindberg
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Timo Alakotila
Pertti Jalava
Jaakko Mäntyjärvi
Arto Järvelä
Maria Kalaniemi
Osmo Tapio Räihälä
Mika Pohjola
Eicca Toppinen
Tomi Räisänen
Sampo Haapamäki
Sonja Vectomov
Sauli Zinovjev


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

I always found the american approach to serialism more fascinating. They still were total serialists but much less dogmatic about the entire affair. There is a lot of joy in wuorinen and babbitt's music - you can tell they really enjoyed what they were doing. Someone like sondheim can be a student of babbitt because they explicitly were not forced into writing in the same style of music. Its a sign of a good teacher to cultivate the talents of a student into what's best for the student - what the student enjoys doing. Unfortunately not all teachers are good.


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## composingmusic (Dec 16, 2021)

Apart from Babbitt, I think Messiaen is a particularly good example of someone with varied students. He taught Stockhausen, Boulez, Xenakis, Grisey, Murail, Blackwood, and so many others – all of whom are distinct individuals. And indeed, not all teachers are good.


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

composingmusic said:


> Apart from Babbitt, I think Messiaen is a particularly good example of someone with varied students. He taught Stockhausen, Boulez, Xenakis, Grisey, Murail, Blackwood, and so many others - all of whom are distinct individuals. And indeed, not all teachers are good.


Oh wow I knew about stockhausen, boulez and xenakis but I did not know grisey, murail and blackwood(!) were also messiaen students. That's crazy!


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

Please keep the discussion civil, in line with the Forum Rules, Guidelines & Terms of Service:



> Be polite to your fellow members. If you disagree with them, please state your opinion in a »civil« and respectful manner. This applies to all communication taking place on Talk Classical, whether by means of posts, private messages, visitor messages, blogs or social groups.
> 
> Do not post comments about other members person or »posting style« on the forum (unless said comments are unmistakably positive). Argue opinions all you like but do not get personal and never resort to »ad homs«. Mentioning that someone is on your ignore list is not allowed either.


Some posts (including posts quoting them) have been adjusted or deleted.


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## composingmusic (Dec 16, 2021)

Opisthokont said:


> Oh wow I knew about stockhausen, boulez and xenakis but I did not know grisey, murail and blackwood(!) were also messiaen students. That's crazy!


Indeed, he taught quite a lot of people! A few others of note include Luc Ferrari, Alexander Goehr, George Benjamin, Qigang Chen, György Kurtág, Pierre Henry, Ton de Leeuw, Gilbert Amy, Betsy Jolas... there's a number of others too. It's quite fascinating really.


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

Art Rock said:


> Please keep the discussion civil, in line with the Forum Rules, Guidelines & Terms of Service:
> 
> Some posts (including posts quoting them) have been adjusted or deleted.


Sorry you had to edit my posts. I admit I wasn´t aware of the last sentence of the rules quoted. Good to know! It makes sense. Will not happen again.


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## composingmusic (Dec 16, 2021)

On the subject of teachers – Boulanger is another interesting one. She taught a huge variety of composers.


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

Opisthokont said:


> even the term "emancipation of dissonance" is a political one. This makes it especially hard to discuss on a forum like this.


Right. What you need to keep in mind is that certain posters here (mis)use words like "modernist" or "atonal", or even "ultra modernist" as in this thread (where, whatever that term is meant to mean, it certainly doesn't mean Cowell and Ruggles), to fulfill their need for a shorthand derogatory label for music that for a variety reasons is unfaithful to 18th and 19th century European aristocratic and ecclesiastic music traditions. And yes, there is often a political agenda behind it, as many of these posters, at least implicitly but sometimes explicitly, advocate a return by western secular democracies to aristocratic and ecclesiastic values of this earlier era.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

fluteman said:


> Right. What you need to keep in mind is that certain posters here (mis)use words like "modernist" or "atonal", or even "ultra modernist" as in this thread (where, whatever that term is meant to mean, it certainly doesn't mean Cowell and Ruggles), to fulfill their need for a shorthand derogatory label for music that for a variety reasons is unfaithful to 18th and 19th century European aristocratic and ecclesiastic music traditions. And yes, there is often a political agenda behind it, as many of these posters, at least implicitly but sometimes explicitly, advocate a return by western secular democracies to aristocratic and ecclesiastic values of this earlier era.


I think it is more useful and leads to a more productive discussion if labels are not used but instead specific composers or works serve as examples of a kind of style or music a member wishes to discuss.


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## composingmusic (Dec 16, 2021)

SanAntone said:


> I think it is more useful and leads to a more productive discussion if labels are not used but instead specific composers or works serve as examples of a kind of style or music a member wishes to discuss.


On this subject, once can trace a variety of influences from school to school, and trying to find something "pure" would be incredibly difficult. Look at how Ligeti's work evolved over time, or Boulez, for instance. Stravinsky, of course, is a prime example of how a composer can evolve over time.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

composingmusic said:


> On this subject, once can trace a variety of influences from school to school, and trying to find something "pure" would be incredibly difficult. Look at how Ligeti's work evolved over time, or Boulez, for instance. Stravinsky, of course, is a prime example of how a composer can evolve over time.


So are you saying you prefer using labels?


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## composingmusic (Dec 16, 2021)

SanAntone said:


> So are you saying you prefer using labels?


No, that's not what I'm saying? I was trying to point at these people as examples as to why labels are difficult. However, I do also acknowledge that labels can be useful when trying to classify things in a broader sense.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

composingmusic said:


> No, that's not what I'm saying? I was trying to point at these people as examples as to why labels are difficult. However, I do also acknowledge that labels can be useful when trying to classify things in a broader sense.


I believe that _good_ composers have a personal voice which they might express in a variety of styles, but even if the style changes, their voice remains consistent. (Voice could mean personality, or whatever quality it is that makes that composer's music unique.)

Take the example of *Stravinsky.* I have no trouble hearing Stravinsky's unique voice or personality come through whether the work is from his early Romantic period, or his Neo-Classical works, and I can hear it in his late serial works. And his use of the Romantic style is different from how Sibelius or Shostakovich expressed that same style, or his embrace of Neo-Classicism is different from Hindemith, e.g.

Or to take the example of the SVS - Schoenberg, Berg and Webern all wrote very differently using the same general 12-tone style.

So, for me, labels are totally useless since, IMO, _good_ composers (and I stress that adjective since I find there is no point in discussing mediocre composers) are uniquely themselves no matter what style they compose in.


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## composingmusic (Dec 16, 2021)

SanAntone said:


> I believe that _good_ composers have a personal voice which they might express in a variety of styles, but even if the style changes, their voice remains consistent. (Voice could mean personality, or whatever quality it is that makes that composer's music unique.)
> 
> Take the example of *Stravinsky.* I have no trouble hearing Stravinsky's unique voice or personality come through whether the work is from his early Romantic period, or his Neo-Classical works, and I can hear it in his late serial works. And his use of the Romantic style is different from how Sibelius or Shostakovich expressed that same style, or his embrace of Neo-Classicism is different from Hindemith, e.g.
> 
> ...


I agree that labels are inadequate, but they can be useful to designate certain stylistic traits, even if a composer can be linked to several labels. For instance, SVS refers to a specific group of composers, spectralism to a different group, etc. There is a danger of over-generalizing and using labels even when it's not appropriate, in a reductive way. However, I would not go so far as to say that labels are completely useless, as they do make it easier to address certain subjects - if used in a careful, nuanced way.


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

SanAntone said:


> I think it is more useful and leads to a more productive discussion if labels are not used but instead specific composers or works serve as examples of a kind of style or music a member wishes to discuss.


Exactly. Also, a term like "ultra-modernist" or "atonal" should either be used correctly, or all should agree on some alternative meaning. I never realized Cowell and Ruggles were referred to as "ultra-modernists". Virgil Thomson used the amusing term "far outs" for the likes of Cage, Stockhausen, Boulez, Leuning and Ussachevsky and those who more or less followed their paths, and I thought that's who this thread might be about. Apparently not.


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## composingmusic (Dec 16, 2021)

fluteman said:


> Exactly. Also, a term like "ultra-modernist" or "atonal" should either be used correctly, or all should agree on some alternative meaning. I never realized Cowell and Ruggles were referred to as "ultra-modernists". Virgil Thomson used the amusing term "far outs" for the likes of Cage, Stockhausen, Boulez, Leuning and Ussachevsky and those who more or less followed their paths, and I thought that's who this thread might be about. Apparently not.


Atonal is one that I have problems with, especially since so many people use it with a negative connotation in mind. I've seen people use it for anything from music that has dissonance and doesn't fit into common-practice tonality (but still has some kind of tonal structure), and I've seen others define it as music that tries to avoid pitch hierarchy (in the sense of trying to assign equal weight to pitches through some sort of serial or stochastic technique).


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

composingmusic said:


> I agree that labels are inadequate, but they can be useful to designate certain stylistic traits, even if a composer can be linked to several labels. For instance, SVS refers to a specific group of composers, spectralism to a different group, etc. There is a danger of over-generalizing and using labels even when it's not appropriate, in a reductive way. However, I would not go so far as to say that labels are completely useless, as they do make it easier to address certain subjects - if used in a careful, nuanced way.


We just basically disagree.

IMO, a label used as a designator of stylistic characteristics is reductive and inaccurate. However, if someone uses a label to merely position a composer within a period or group of linked composers, then it is not problematic.


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## composingmusic (Dec 16, 2021)

SanAntone said:


> We just basically disagree.
> 
> IMO, a label used as a designator of stylistic characteristics is reductive and inaccurate. However, if someone uses a label to merely position a composer within a period or group of linked composers, then it is not problematic.


I did say that it's reductive if it's over-generalized, and I agree that it's more useful for designating composers amongst other groups of composers. Labels can still be useful for classifying things, I think. Something can have problematic aspects, but still be useful for certain things.


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

Labels are interesting in this sense. It's true that composers who write in many different styles often keep the same voice. I do think there are certainly stylistic and ideological comparisons to draw though, which is when those labels become useful. And it's true one can use labels in multiple different ways, sometimes to designate a school - which tends to be much less problematic - rather than designating style. I think there are times where broad labels are useful and times when more specific labels are useful.

Especially for a deep analyses of style I find that referring to a specific school or specific composers is better than referring to broad periods of music - but for historiographical purposes it seems difficult to talk about any sort of historical movement without referring to broad labels. I mean "classical" itself is one of these vague labels that we all seem to find at least somewhat useful, being on this forum. But other labels like "romantic" and "baroque" also find themselves pretty useful imo. Modern and contemporary is just a continuation of that sense. Labels at some level are operational of course, if we pick at their limits they'll always fall apart, but we all need somewhere to start.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Opisthokont said:


> Labels are interesting in this sense. It's true that composers who write in many different styles often keep the same voice. I do think there are certainly stylistic and ideological comparisons to draw though, which is when those labels become useful. And it's true one can use labels in multiple different ways, sometimes to designate a school - which tends to be much less problematic - rather than designating style. I think there are times where broad labels are useful and times when more specific labels are useful.
> 
> Especially for a deep analyses of style I find that referring to a specific school or specific composers is better than referring to broad periods of music - but for historiographical purposes it seems difficult to talk about any sort of historical movement without referring to broad labels. I mean "classical" itself is one of these vague labels that we all seem to find at least somewhat useful, being on this forum. But other labels like "romantic" and "baroque" also find themselves pretty useful imo. Modern and contemporary is just a continuation of that sense. Labels at some level are operational of course, if we pick at their limits they'll always fall apart, but we all need somewhere to start.


IMO, the 20th century (and continuing into the 21st) is typified by a diversity of styles more so than any other century. Using labels for this period is especially inappropriate, IMO.

The only period that has something approaching a common style is the Classical period, roughly 1750 - 1820 (give or take a decade on either side). But even within a period such as the Classical each composer is a unique voice and I find it somewhat dehumanizing to treat composers as examples of a style. Haydn is very different from Mozart who is very different from Beethoven, etc.

Then things start to become more diverse in the 19th century, with shorter periods of stylistic unity and more transitional composers. Until when we arrive at the 20th century you can almost say that each composer was a style unto himself.

Even the Baroque period had composers as different from each other as Bach and Vivaldi, and going back further, the Renaissance period is so long, with composers as different from each other as Dufay and Palestrina, the idea of a shared style breaks down. The Medieval period is even longer with an even wider variety of styles.

So, I don't see much usefulness in labels.

For me the best conversations about music are less about broad stylistic or historical period considerations and more about what is unique about different composers within a similar period.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

So, did anyone check the link I posted to the Proms website to find out which current composers were writing premieres for the BBC Proms?

I offered it as an easy example of how current music is alive and being commissioned. There must be others, alongside the BBC in the UK and in other countries, surely?


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

SanAntone said:


> For me the best conversations about music are less about broad stylistic or historical period considerations and more about what is unique about different composers within a similar period.


Interesting! I don't necessarily disagree but I want to hear more! Would you consider "Classical music" (not as in the classical-period but as in the things discussed on this forum) to be a useful label at all?


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## composingmusic (Dec 16, 2021)

Forster said:


> So, did anyone check the link I posted to the Proms website to find out which current composers were writing premieres for the BBC Proms?
> 
> I offered it as an easy example of how current music is alive and being commissioned. There must be others, alongside the BBC in the UK and in other countries, surely?


I went back to look for this link - thanks for pointing it out! I was able to make a few of those premieres, although there were quite a few I wasn't able to see (mostly because I wasn't in the UK at the time). A lot of them are now up on Youtube as recordings, which is nice.

The commissioning process does vary a lot from country to country. In the US, a lot of it is private funding. In many places in Europe, there is government funding available, and funds from various foundations. Finland is particularly good for government funding - I've received several commissions that started with a player or ensemble asking if I'd be interested in working with them, and then they applied for funding (and received funding). But yes, active commissioning is most definitely a thing.


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

Forster said:


> So, did anyone check the link I posted to the Proms website to find out which current composers were writing premieres for the BBC Proms?
> 
> I offered it as an easy example of how current music is alive and being commissioned. There must be others, alongside the BBC in the UK and in other countries, surely?


In the US the pulitzers are a decent way checking new "established" composers, I'm not sure where to find up-and-comers though. But that said the pulitzers seem to be less an example of a place where lots of people listen to music and more of a sort of institutional way to keep music alive outside of its listenership.


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## composingmusic (Dec 16, 2021)

Opisthokont said:


> In the US the pulitzers are a decent way checking new "established" composers, I'm not sure where to find up-and-comers though. But that said the pulitzers seem to be less an example of a place where lots of people listen to music and more of a sort of institutional way to keep music alive outside of its listenership.


A few places you could look for up-and-comers, along with people who are more established: 
Gaudeamus Prize
International Rostrum of Composers
Ivors Composer Awards
Royal Philharmonic Prizes
Takemitsu Prize
Donaueschingen Musiktage
LSO and LPO Composer Schemes
BMI Student Composer Awards and ASCAP Morton Gould Awards
Tanglewood Music Center Fellowships
Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival Young Composer String Quartet Program
Nordic Music Days
Ung Nordisk Musik
Musica Nova Helsinki
Composers associated with the Peter Eötvös Foundation (either as mentees or through masterclasses)
Lucerne Festival course
Darmstadt courses
Dartington courses
There's a number of other festivals and programmes that are worth looking out for too.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Opisthokont said:


> Why is contemporary classical music then in such a dismal state? Why did classical music hit such a stumbling block with modernism in a way that other art forms figured out?


I think that the short answer is that the modern era, which brought about the concert halls and opera houses, is well and truly over. You talk to this in the last part of your post:



> The function of music in the romantic era was coincidental with the rise of nationalism and humanism, it served both purposes of the state and was easily commodified with aristocrats in various courts.


Its interesting how the revolutionary age - industrial, political, social - which began in the mid 18th century and basically wound down in the mid 20th century brought about the music which forms the core part of the performance canon. So many changes happened, one being that composers came to operate independently of churches and courts.

Now we're well into the digital revolution. Access to music is easier than ever before, everyone is part of this vast marketplace. That brings its challenges, one of them being that what's played at the concert hall or opera house no longer represents culture as a whole. The scene is split into many genres and subgenres. Composers today probably don't represent what they did in the modern era - part intellectual, showman, cultural icon - but to survive they do have to fill some sort of niche.

You're right that gradually the fare presented in concert halls and opera houses came to comprise almost entirely of the classics of the canon (c. 1750-1950). When Mendelssohn started giving concerts at Liepzig, it would have been an even split between old and new music. Gradually the canon reached the point of being a closed shop. It can be argued that the canon and grand narratives view which are central to modernism put a premium on masterpieces, but the price that was paid for that was a sort of stagnation of what is played live.

Having said that, I think its fair to say that what is played live is only a fraction of the music out there being produced. Digital technology ensures its dissemination. The situation presents challenges but also opportunities. In many places now, the independent music scene is going quite well. This isn't on the scale of the flagship venues or large arts organisations, it is small and can be local. Philip Glass talked about this in an interview in 2015:

_"When we were kids, people became sculptors and painters and musicians because they believed in their heart that that was the only meaningful way they could spend their lives. It never occurred to us we could make a living at it. That sort of idealism began to erode. In the new generation of young people, though, I find that idealism has returned. People are playing in theaters in small places-it's like the bad old days, which were the good old days!"_

One practical example of this is how chamber music groups, including string quartets, tend to play more new music than orchestras or opera companies. Obviously, economies of scale help.

Orchestras will still be around. The increasing acceptance of film, television and video game music in multimedia events has ensured they bring in younger audiences and balance the budget. Similar thing is happening with opera companies, many of which do productions of musicals. Nobody, however, would argue that the new music presented by these sorts of big flagship groups has the same sort of cultural weight it did around seventy years ago. The canon isn't being added to, so this part of the classical music scene is no longer a showcase for new music. That role has been taken over by smaller and specialised ensembles.

In a sense, its no big deal. Culture changes over time. The role of composers will be different today than it was a hundred or more years ago. Same goes with the other professions - do engineers, doctors or teachers for example work in the same way they used to? This is, of course, a rhetorical question.

* Source: https://time.com/3773068/philip-glass-no-one-can-tell-you-what-people-will-be-listening-to/


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

Now that we have established a concensus on that there is no ”Dearth of New Music”, should we concentrate on the life of new music?

We seem to agree that due to different levels of deconstruction on melodies, harmonies and rhythm, modern contemporary music will not and does not need to become ”mainstream classical” in the sense that Bach & Beethoven & Brahms are mainstream and parts of an established canon, played all around the world.

Is the time of established canons really over for contemporary composers? Has music irreversibly turned into a multiversum with many local realities not necessarily in intense contact with each other? So there will be these small festivals and individual clubs and concerts scattered around the world playing whatever the locals have composed or whatever has leaked over enough from other parallel realities?

Will there be new Mahlers, Stravinskys and Shostakoviches? Not with some of the levels of deconstruction, I think, but is that really a problem? Do we long for grander than life composer figures?

One of the big misconceptions by the way: that modern contemporary music is somehow more complex than the established mainstream classical. For example, the 6th Symphony by Tchaikovsky is very complex and complicated, more so than most modern contemporary music. A dodecaphonic piano piece is by no means de facto more complicated than a Chopin Nocturne.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Waehnen said:


> Is the time of established canons really over for contemporary composers? Has music irreversibly turned into a multiversum with many local realities not necessarily in intense contact with each other? So there will be these small festivals and individual clubs and concerts scattered around the world playing whatever the locals have composed or whatever has leaked over enough from other parallel realities?


Maybe we can split classical into two categories

1. The canonic definition, basically tied to modernism (in other words, a sort of neverending revivalist gig).

2. Music which somehow fits into the classical tradition, but can very widely diverge from it (this includes avant-garde, experimental, hybrid or crossover categories, music originally composed for other media like film, and even much of pre-c.1750 music which was relatively neglected until the 20th century and which is still being rediscovered, and so on).

BTW nothing wrong with a revivalist gig, at least if it can adapt to changing circumstances and survive. The Count Basie Big Band is still going, even though the man has been dead for about forty years.



> Will there be new Mahlers, Stravinskys and Shistakoviches? Not with this level of deconstruction, I am afraid.


Well, unless the specific conditions of the modern era somehow return, no.

But who knows? Never say never, or in the words of the ever wise Zhou Enlai, _its too early to tell_.


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## Aries (Nov 29, 2012)

Waehnen said:


> Is the time of established canons really over for contemporary composers? Has music irreversibly turned into a multiversum with many local realities not necessarily in intense contact with each other?


I think it always was a multiversum. When we look at the canon of today, we deduce that the pieces included are there since they were composed. But that isn't true.

First of all I think there was a great national split in music in earlier centuries. Germany, France, Italy etc. were probably all different worlds, even Vienna and Prussia (Baroque survived longer in Prussia for example), and don't forget smaller countries.

Then in the romantic era romantic music really dominated. Baroque was forgotten and even the Classic was really in the shadow of the romantic music. In the 20th century many baroque and classical music was revived. And the different national canons were maybe somewhat merged together.

Now in the era of internet and postmodernism everything seems to split again like it was before television in the era of the newspaper. But that things are splited is historically normal. But the split now will be more stylistic than national.


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

I think for now the cat is out of the bag with modernity - there is no going back to the time before the world wars, before the atomic bomb, before the age revolutions and the rise of the bourgeoisie - the shadow of the french revolution still looms over us. well perhaps there _are_ ways of going back - the common ruin of all - but that's an extreme scenario. I do think that to understand material culture necessarily requires understanding political economy.

The question is not about going back, but going forward? Of course there is always an element of return present - and I can't of course really comment on whatever our future forms of economic and material-cultural organization will be. Perhaps we will see, in the interstices of things, a new sort of canonicity develop, hopefully something wider and more affirming than our current idea of what canonicity means. If we do believe adorno's argument to its end, perhaps it is the case that the music of SVS and darmstadt by the nature of how it functions, can never have a canonical place in a society of mass culture. But I doubt whatever things are forming, now and into the future will simply be canonicity as we think it today.

Already we see canonicity changing from "these are the great geniuses one most follow" to "these people were incredibly smart and their tools are still quite useful to us today". Optimistically we may perhaps see a flowering of a million musical forms: a million approaches to tonality, a million approaches to rhythm, a million approaches to timbre: that would be a fully emancipated music. At this point I'm just writing fiction so I should probably stop myself.


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

Opisthokont said:


> I think for now the cat is out of the bag with modernity - there is no going back to the time before the world wars, before the atomic bomb, before the age revolutions and the rise of the bourgeoisie - the shadow of the french revolution still looms over us. well perhaps there _are_ ways of going back - the common ruin of all - but that's an extreme scenario. I do think that to understand material culture necessarily requires understanding political economy.
> 
> The question is not about going back, but going forward? Of course there is always an element of return present - and I can't of course really comment on whatever our future forms of economic and material-cultural organization will be. Perhaps we will see, in the interstices of things, a new sort of canonicity develop, hopefully something wider and more affirming than our current idea of what canonicity means. If we do believe adorno's argument to its end, perhaps it is the case that the music of SVS and darmstadt by the nature of how it functions, can never have a canonical place in a society of mass culture. But I doubt whatever things are forming, now and into the future will simply be canonicity as we think it today.
> 
> Already we see canonicity changing from "these are the great geniuses one most follow" to "these people were incredibly smart and their tools are still quite useful to us today". Optimistically we may perhaps see a flowering of a million musical forms: a million approaches to tonality, a million approaches to rhythm, a million approaches to timbre: that would be a fully emancipated music. At this point I'm just writing fiction so I should probably stop myself.


How would you react if some composer declared that he wanted to start composing like Mahler and Wagner, stating that it was and is a sufficient level of modernism? And if the composer was succesful and got his great mahlerian symphonies on the repertoire list of major symphony orchestras? If everyone from the audience to the conductors, critics and musicians loved this new "old-style neoromantic" music?

Would a situation like that present any kinds of problems? Could anyone really argue that "this is not modern enough"?


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## fbjim (Mar 8, 2021)

It's somewhat strange that this great fracturing, even in the popular music sphere, has happened compared to other art, particularly film where all I hear is complaints about the "monoculture", which amounts to a fancy way to complain that Disney/Marvel owns everything now, and everything released seems to be part of established franchises or reruns of old franchises. Of course this is good for the accountants, but those who like more artistic freedom outside the independent film sphere are not particularly happy with the situation. 

Perhaps it's just inherent to the more strictly hierarchical way that film production very much depends on large studios, who demand large ROIs, while the record labels borderline don't care because they're getting all their money passively via streaming deals now. I'd certainly prefer too much music than too little, though there's the small problem that artists aren't really making a living anymore.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Opisthokont said:


> I think for now the cat is out of the bag with modernity - there is no going back to the time before the world wars, before the atomic bomb, before the age revolutions and the rise of the bourgeoisie - the shadow of the french revolution still looms over us. well perhaps there _are_ ways of going back - the common ruin of all - but that's an extreme scenario. I do think that to understand material culture necessarily requires understanding political economy.
> 
> The question is not about going back, but going forward? Of course there is always an element of return present - and I can't of course really comment on whatever our future forms of economic and material-cultural organization will be.


I do not place any emphasis on political trends, nor do I worry about the future. Composers will compose and new music will continue to appear. This I am confident of. I have zero interest in labeling music from the past or future. The sounds don't care either, what you call them.

Music is a part of life, and as such has its own meaning. Music is meant to be heard, nothing more.


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

Waehnen said:


> How would you react if some composer declared that he wanted to start composing like Mahler and Wagner, stating that it was and is a sufficient level of modernism? And if the composer was succesful and got his great mahlerian symphonies on the repertoire list of major symphony orchestras? If everyone from the audience to the conductors, critics and musicians loved this new "old-style neoromantic" music?
> 
> Would a situation like that present any kinds of problems? Could anyone really argue that "this is not modern enough"?


I think it's always a question of the competition of resources - I think it would make a big difference: is that composer promoting the work of others, even those outside the neoromantic music? The issue I don't think is what music people make, as much as it is what music people are allowed to or can make. I think it's fine to have neoromantic music along with the stuff focused on more contemporary idioms as long as they both get space.


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

SanAntone said:


> Music is a part of life, and as such has its own meaning. Music is meant to be heard, nothing more.


Meaning is one of the most political things out there, isn't it? Does one look at the colosseum and not see anything about the culture that made it; does the ceiling of sistine chapel not tell you something about the people who looked at it? We look back at paintings and etchings on ancient clay pots and we can tell what was important to the people who had them and the people that made them - why should music be any different?

Both the fields of archaeology and anthropology use this idea extremely commonly. Art can tell us a lot about people!


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

Opisthokont said:


> I think it's always a question of the competition of resources - I think it would make a big difference: is that composer promoting the work of others, even those outside the neoromantic music? The issue I don't think is what music people make, as much as it is what music people are allowed to or can make. I think it's fine to have neoromantic music along with the stuff focused on more contemporary idioms as long as they both get space.


I share your opinion on the matter. All music should be tolerated and different aesthetics should not fight against each other. Music and art should not be a field for a resource war. The task of keeping art a resource war free zone is not always easy but we should aim at it.

There is no value in being a modernist or a traditionalist or a neoromanticist or a postmodernist or a polystylist because you have no other option. The freedom of artists must always be respected.


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## Dan Ante (May 4, 2016)

Didn't WAMY say "Music should never offend the Ear"


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

Dan Ante said:


> Didn't WAMY say "Music should never offend the Ear"


I think Mozart expressed his own view on the matter. And yes, his music never offended the ear -- not even the Dissonance Quartet did.

For me there is no doubt, though, that would Mozart live today, his approach would be somewhat different. As a modern artist, it would be a rather grand statement to limit the expressive possibilities of oneself in always making sure that nobody´s ear is offended.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Opisthokont said:


> Meaning is one of the most political things out there, isn't it? Does one look at the colosseum and not see anything about the culture that made it; does the ceiling of sistine chapel not tell you something about the people who looked at it? We look back at paintings and etchings on ancient clay pots and we can tell what was important to the people who had them and the people that made them - why should music be any different?
> 
> Both the fields of archaeology and anthropology use this idea extremely commonly. Art can tell us a lot about people!


Some people look at paintings or listen to music and think about what is important to the people of that time that produced the work, i.e. sociologically, or politically. But there are others, such as myself, who look at a painting, or listen to music, and don't think of anything as prosaic as what you describe. We see or listen and respond intuitively and not intellectually.

The meaning, such as it is, is found in the work itself, not from any associations with ideas.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

Dan Ante said:


> Didn't WAMY say "Music should never offend the Ear"


If true, it rather implies that he never innovated. Innovation inevitably offends someone's ear.


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

Forster said:


> If true, it rather implies that he never innovated. Innovation inevitably offends someone's ear.


I think Mozart innovated a lot, but without offending anyone´s ear. He left the offending to the next generation: Beethoven.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

Waehnen said:


> I think Mozart innovated a lot, but without offending anyone´s ear. He left the offending to the next generation: Beethoven.


https://www.theguardian.com/music/2004/jun/04/classicalmusicandopera

Plenty of offended ears indicated in this article


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

Forster said:


> https://www.theguardian.com/music/2004/jun/04/classicalmusicandopera
> 
> Plenty of offended ears indicated in this article


Yes, I must admit it. I stand corrected!


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Forster said:


> If true, it rather implies that he never innovated. Innovation inevitably offends someone's ear.


Any music can please or offend the ear, which is why it is generally assumed that the appreciation of beauty is a subjective response.

Which is why the entire discussion about atonal/tonal music is irrelevant. It is adding another layer to the music to label it atonal or tonal, a layer that is unnecessary to listening to and appreciating the music for what it is - organized sound that either pleases your ear or not.


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## arpeggio (Oct 4, 2012)

It appears that some of the newbies think that other members overreact to discussions over modern music.

The situation is that the atmosphere has dramatically improved here at TC over the past few years.

We lost many fine members as a result of the disputes. Two good friends that we lost were Mahlerian and Henri Couric. Henri was a bassoonist with a French Orchestra. I had many interesting discussions with him because he was a master of the French Bassoon and studied with Sergio Azzolini, one of the great period bassoonists.

Amazon used to sponsor discussion groups including one on classical music. That was a real warzone. The anti-modern music types actually succeeded in shutting down all discussions on modern music for about 18 months. We used to have members here who had the same objective.

The nastiest situation that has occurred against me happened in the Amazon site. I am an amateur musician and I perform with several community orchestras and bands. I used to use my real name but as a result of this incident I am weary of using my real name here. As a result of my position over several forms of modern music some of the members of the Amazon Forum threatened to complain about me directly with the various groups I played with.

So, I apologize if at times I overreact.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

I never bought the formalist line, that music is just music. Indeed, in some ways I see it as a get out of jail free card when discussing topics like this.

I've said this many times before, but civilisation isn't just a series of isolated objects in a museum, its about the relationships between them.

Music, like the other arts, is not just about the end product, but also about the lives, times and inspirations of the individuals who created them. It includes many related aspects, like their reception and legacy over time. Culture is not just about what facts we know, but the history of meanings and interpretations across subsequent generations.

Music, like the arts or other areas like sport or fashion, is inherently political. E.g.:






Formalist views aren't more objective than contextual views. Since I joined, people arguing the formalist line on TC have tended to take the high moral ground, arguing their point of view is unsullied by other considerations. Prima facie that's a very weak argument, and logically impossible. Can we - and do we need to - separate music from its context like a surgeon who cuts a piece out with a scalpel? I think not, and during my early years on this forum it was more a matter of the speaker trying to force some undisclosed agenda. I'd rather they just said what they think.

Incidentally, I think that the ban on politics on TC need not impact on our discussions of politics as related to music, most of which is of historical interest. What needed to be banned where the endless discussion of current politics, particularly American politics and their former president. It was getting beyond tedious.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Sid James said:


> Music, like the other arts, is not just about the end product, but also about the lives, times and inspirations of the individuals who created them. It includes many related aspects, like their reception and legacy over time. Culture is not just about what facts we know, but the history of meanings and interpretations across subsequent generations.


Well, I completely disagree with you.

What you call "the end product" IS all there is to a piece of music. It stands alone and either succeeds on its own merit, in which case it will continue to be performed generation after generation, or does not succeed, in which case it will disappear from the repertory.

I have no interest in the historical or biographical context for the work, nor any interest in theoretical analyses of the music. That material is tangential and unimportant, IMO, and irrelevant for experiencing the music.

I am _only_ interested in the music. Just the sounds.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Dan Ante said:


> Didn't WAMY say "Music should never offend the Ear"


This quote is likely misattributed ("quoted in a journal entry (12 December 1856) The Journal of Eugene Delacroix as translated by Walter Pach (1937), p. 521. The quote is not found in any authentic letter by Mozart."). Pre-Romantic era composers didn't really have their own individual philosophical ideas what music is supposed to be. They simply followed and elaborated on different methods or traditions of composition within the context of their common practice and profession.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

SanAntone said:


> Well, I completely disagree with you.
> 
> What you call "the end product" IS all there is to a piece of music. It stands alone and either succeeds on its own merit, in which case it will continue to be performed generation after generation, or does not succeed, in which case it will disappear from the repertory.
> 
> ...


My view is that it can't be "just the sounds" as you say, because as soon as we get beyond the printed score - e.g. into matters of interpretation, recordings, historical provenance (e.g. matters of the canon) - we're going way beyond formalism.

The Musee d'Orsay is a good example of the contextual (basically postmodern) take on curatorship, as related to visual arts. It opened in 1986, and its situation in a disused railway building, incorporation of historically relevant decor, technology and photos as part of the exhibits gives viewers a more rounded experience.

Its a contrast to the decontextualised white cube sort of museum more typical of modernism (e.g the Guggenheim in New York). This can be compared to the move away in musicology from formalism to more contextual approaches, which also gained momentum in the 1980's (cf Joseph Kerman's article "How we got into analysis and how to get out," 1980).


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## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

Over the centuries, vast numbers of symphonies, concertos for a wide variety of instruments , miscellaneous orchestral works , operas, oratorios, cantatas , sonatas for piano and other instruments etc have been written .
Since circa 1600 , approximately 40,000 operas have been written . All of this probably comes to l millions of different works ! And the vast majority of these works have been deservedly forgotten . 
It's no different with the music of our time . I agree, there isn lack of new music today .
Many,many new operas have been written in the 21st century , and some have been widely and even successfully performed . No, opera as an art form is far from dead . Orchestras all over Europe, the US and elsewhere have played who knows how many new works in recent years . 
And most of these operas ,orchestral works et al will never achieve a lasting place in the "canon" of classical music . But you never know when any of them might be revived in the future, assuming the world still exists , remains stable and classical music is still performed . 
The repertoire of classical music is in no way "ossified " as many critics claim . It's in constant flux .


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Sid James said:


> My view is that it can't be "just the sounds" as you say, because as soon as we get beyond the printed score - e.g. into matters of interpretation, recordings, historical provenance (e.g. matters of the canon) - we're going way beyond formalism.


The fact of the matter is *music is simply sounds*.

If you wish to overlay that with all kinds of extraneous material, that is, of course, your choice. But not only do I not need that, nor want that, it is a distraction from the direct experience of the sound of the music.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

You must be kidding. Its not my choice, its history. Its about the direction in which musicology has been moving for the past 40 or 50 years. I gave the Joseph Kerman article as an example. You might like to check it out. Its a seminal text in that shift away from formalism.

And does your ruling out anything but sounds mean that topics like this, which focus on issues like the lack of new music entering the performance repertoire for the past 70 years, are also irrelevant? If they are irrelevant, what's your stake in this debate? Why don't you just go and listen to your sounds? Why discuss anything to do with music, except the notes? That might make things easier. You can avoid ALL distractions.

Sorry to be so blunt, but I'm not in a mood for beating about the bush today.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Sid James said:


> You must be kidding. Its not my choice, its history. Its about the direction in which musicology has been moving for the past 40 or 50 years. I gave the Joseph Kerman article as an example. You might like to check it out. Its a seminal text in that shift away from formalism.
> 
> And does your ruling out anything but sounds mean that topics like this, which focus on issues like the lack of new music entering the performance repertoire for the past 70 years, are also irrelevant? If they are irrelevant, what's your stake in this debate? Why don't you just go and listen to your sounds? Why discuss anything to do with music, except the notes? That might make things easier. You can avoid ALL distractions.
> 
> Sorry to be so blunt, but I'm not in a mood for beating about the bush today.


In a word, are "topics like this, which focus on issues like the lack of new music entering the performance repertoire for the past 70 years, are also irrelevant?" *YES*!

"Why discuss anything to do with music" - because it can sometimes be interesting and sometimes bring out a new idea. Nothing you have posted has, but nevertheless .... Here's the brass tacks, the blunt part: *this forum and all texts, and discussions ABOUT music, are not* *Music*.

While I may find a discussion about music interesting and entertaining, it is a discussion - and entirely separate from the experience of the music itself.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

Sid James said:


> Music, like the other arts, is not just about the end product, but also about the lives, times and inspirations of the individuals who created them.


What "Music is..." is open to personal interpretation. It's possible to listen to music and only hear the music - not the lives, times and inspirations etc...



SanAntone said:


> Well, I completely disagree with you.
> 
> What you call "the end product" IS all there is to a piece of music. It stands alone and either succeeds on its own merit, in which case it will continue to be performed generation after generation, or does not succeed, in which case it will disappear from the repertory.
> 
> ...


On the other hand, some of us _are _interested in background. I certainly am - it adds to my enjoyment of the music itself (not just 'added interest').

Just diffrent strokes, eh?


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Forster said:


> On the other hand, some of us _are _interested in background. I certainly am - it adds to my enjoyment of the music itself (not just 'added interest').
> 
> Just diffrent strokes, eh?


Yep. As I posted just before your post, discussions can be interesting, but when it comes to experiencing the music, discussions and the issues they raise don't figure in.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

SanAntone said:


> In a word, are "topics like this, which focus on issues like the lack of new music entering the performance repertoire for the past 70 years, are also irrelevant?" *YES*!
> 
> "Why discuss anything to do with music" - because it can sometimes be interesting and sometimes bring out a new idea. Nothing you have posted has, but nevertheless .... Here's the brass tacks, the blunt part: *this forum and all texts, and discussions ABOUT music, are not* *Music*.
> 
> While I may find a discussion about music interesting and entertaining, it is a discussion - and entirely separate from the experience of the music itself.


This is a bit too much for Christmas Day of all days, but at least we've managed to draw a line in the sand. Thanks for the veiled insult. I didn't say I was posting a new idea or even anything interesting, I just shared what I thought about the topic.

You've made more posts on this thread than I have. Obviously, your posts are really interesting and present new ideas too. All for a topic you don't care about. What a joke.



Forster said:


> What "Music is..." is open to personal interpretation. It's possible to listen to music and only hear the music - not the lives, times and inspirations etc...


Of course it is. I wasn't presenting a dichotomy and I hope you're not making one out of what I said, either.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Sid James said:


> This is a bit too much for Christmas Day of all days, but at least we've managed to draw a line in the sand. Thanks for the veiled insult. I didn't say I was posting a new idea or even anything interesting, I just shared what I thought about the topic.
> 
> You've made more posts on this thread than I have. Obviously, your posts are really interesting and present new ideas too. All for a topic you don't care about. What a joke.


Yes, a wonderful joke. :lol: Who's counting posts? I sure don't.

Whether I employ the ideas expressed in this thread when I'm listening (I don't) has nothing to do with discussing those issues in this thread.

This forum can be entertaining and a diversion, as can listening to music. I have no trouble keeping the two things separate.


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## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

I miss read the thread title - I thought it was "The Death Of New Music"


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

Sid James said:


> You must be kidding. Its not my choice, its history. Its about the direction in which musicology has been moving for the past 40 or 50 years. I gave the Joseph Kerman article as an example. You might like to check it out. Its a seminal text in that shift away from formalism.


New musicology is pretty old by now, I'm not sure what the new trends are in the field. It's odd that those views are so controversial here though. The dialectical interplay between (subjective) musical form and (objective) social content is fundamental to understanding music. Imagine studying linguistics or writing without cultural, historical and economic background? I'm not sure how one studies or talks about music without that either. It's pretty much established at this point that musical language is deeply connected to both social and material contexts, the music that people make and listen to says something about what they find important. It's true, sound is fundamental - _humans make music but we do not make it as we please_. The geography and geometry of sound is so tied up in social being that I'm not sure how you can separate it out.

I do think one can make a mistake by ignoring form altogether: the most interesting ideas to me are the ones that directly connect musical form to objective social meaning. The language of common practice functional harmony, for example, is deeply tied up in the cultural context of classical music, evolution of the "music concept" and various other material and social forms (such as the concert hall). The various post-tonal languages follow other contexts. But so does really all music. Even when composers exposit the musical form as the fundamental part of their work, they do so with full knowledge and understanding of the social ramifications of musical form - the 19th century philosophical turn of the social as objective and the form as subjective was already immediate for people like henze and boulez from their politics, others like schoenberg and stockhausen from their spirituality - I would even argue that bach has something similar in mind with divinity (although rather than occurring as a modern element for bach it obviously occurred as a pre-enlightenment notion instead).


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

This thread has also reminded me of the bad sides of the internet: anyone can jump in at any point with any assumptions and with any ideas related or unrelated to what has or has not been said before. Some people also have aims of being provocative. Some people just write whatever come to their mind.

They key would be to recognize early on who are at least willing to aim at the somewhat same level of the conversation. That is the only way of making the conversation tolerable. If some one really puts thougths in the writing and the other one just trashes everything for the sake of feeling like trashing everything, you are not going to get anywhere other than a deep place of frustration.


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

My idea in internet conversation has always been just responding to whatever I find most useful in the moment. It's inevitable that people will sometimes throw dirt: this is not necessarily bad either - sometimes people do have strong emotions - of course other times they're just doing it for dirt's sake. So fundamentally I just respond to whatever will drive interesting ideas. This thread has helped me get my thoughts in order since it's forced me to think through my responses, and that's always good!


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

PlaySalieri said:


> I miss read the thread title - I thought it was "The Death Of New Music"


I wonder how many people misread that? It's a pretty big difference - death implies that nothing is being written or the music is gone - dearth simply implies the music is hard to find, more scarce, less available.


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## composingmusic (Dec 16, 2021)

On the subject of social and historical context: I do think it’s important to consider how music is affected by social context, technology, and other things. For instance, both WWI and WWII had a profound effect on contemporary music: WWII in particular affected the music of Boulez, Stockhausen, and that whole generation. Electronic composition became possible in the 20th century too, as did many possibilities with recorded technology. Film also became an important medium, both through photography and movies. All of this opened up new possibilities for music, and it’s important to consider when looking at the evolution of 20th century music and 21st century music.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

PlaySalieri said:


> I miss read the thread title - I thought it was "The Death Of New Music"


I thought it was "The Earth of New Music" or


hammeredklavier said:


> Upon reading the thread title ("dearth"), I immediately thought of
> 
> 
> 
> ...


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## RogerWaters (Feb 13, 2017)

It amuses me that, even in a thread about ‘new music’ where nearly all the participants are enthusiasts and there is some venting about not feeling welcome on TC, things can get pretty unpleasant.

As for the OP, in my experience the observation that modernists literature and visual art are championed more than modern classical is correct (I’ve worked around humanities departments in universities for some years). I have no idea why, and it’s an interesting question.

Perhaps it’s because, with a novel or a painting, the experience isn’t ‘happening to you’ as much: you are in control, whereas in a concert there is no averting one’s eyes (or ears).


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Opisthokont said:


> New musicology is pretty old by now, I'm not sure what the new trends are in the field. It's odd that those views are so controversial here though.


Its pretty much established out there in the real world, but here any mention of it tends to be met with either hostility or indifference.


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## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

I don’t know what the so-called new music is anymore or how one would recognize it if or when it appeared. So I don’t know whether there is a dearth of new music or not. IMO, from sometime early in the 20th century to the present, the general message to or from composers is: nothing will be composed that resembles CPT era music. Other than that, no restraints or rules are necessary. Personally, I find that troubling (‘that’ being no restraints or rules, not that it doesn’t resemble CPT music).


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## Opisthokont (Dec 16, 2021)

DaveM said:


> I don't know what the so-called new music is anymore or how one would recognize it if or when it appeared. So I don't know whether there is a dearth of new music or not. IMO, from sometime early in the 20th century to the present, the general message to or from composers is: nothing will be composed that resembles CPT era music. Other than that, no restraints or rules are necessary. Personally, I find that troubling ('that' being no restraints or rules, not that it doesn't resemble CPT music).


Interesting! I conceive of it much differently: The message of the 20th century is not that "no rules are necessary" but rather a search for a new set of rules but with no real agreement. The first sets of rules were mirror harmony, quintal harmony, serialism, futurism, dissonant counterpoint. Later on we saw a new set of rules: total serialism, minimalism, spectralism, rhythmic harmony (a la nancarrow). And even further on: new complexity, generative music, totalism, post-minimalism, microtonality, post-spectralism. This is only counting the 'classical' manners of composition: it would be silly to deny the influence of blues and jazz on classical music, both of which bring their own aesthetic ideas about the rules of music.

There's obviously been a lot of interplay between these various manners of composition and composers have mixed and match, moved between them. But it doesn't seem like there are "no rules" per se, but rather that the set of rules has dramatically expanded. It's also worth noting that a great deal of composers have and continue to make neoclassical music - but the fact that it's the ones who don't that catch our attention is also important.

It's interesting in this sense, because this push and pull seems implicit in all sorts of music. A good example is jazz, which itself has had many different manners of composition, from 'tonal' to 'modal' to 'free', but even free jazz has rules to it. It's something I want to be more knowledgable about, but it's my understanding that even in the world of atonal jazz, free atonality gave way to composers and improvisers trying to find their own sets of rules - much like the way it did in classical.

And of course since we were talking of new musicology, it's worth noting here that musical rules themselves say something about the culture that values them. It's a little vague when we talk about 20th century classical music, because we don't really think of a massive "total serialist" culture in the same way we think of a culture that surrounds rock or the blues, but even so it's still hard to deny that connection - musical rules change because values about music change, and values about music change because values change.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

Sid James said:


> Of course it is. I wasn't presenting a dichotomy and I hope you're not making one out of what I said, either.


Not "a dichotomy", no. It just seemed to me that both you and San Antone were presenting your ideas in those particular posts with a degree of certainty that ruled out others' approaches.

What is "the new musicology"?


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Forster said:


> Not "a dichotomy", no. It just seemed to me that both you and San Antone were presenting your ideas in those particular posts with a degree of certainty that ruled out others' approaches.


This topic is a wide ranging one. The OP invited us to a discussion about music and issues like changes in society, culture, the arts and so on.

My point was that restricting things to a formalist approach - e.g. music is just notes or the resulting sounds - doesn't suffice and doesn't do full justice to this topic. We're specifically talking about changes in music over time, not just about an individual listener listening to or analyzing a piece of music without historical or other context.



> What is "the new musicology"?


In a nutshell, musicology as a discipline emerged in the 19th century and was initially heavily involved in formal analysis of scores. Later on, specialised areas emerged, for example musicologists would focus on particular eras or styles of music. Basically, it was a product of modernism, and it developed in parallel with its prioritisation of innovation, downgrading of other music (particularly in popular genres) and the emergence of a canon.

The new musicology emerged out of postmodernism, in particular it came to embrace approaches outside of music (e.g. history, sociology, anthropology). It also questioned the objectivity of modernism.

In place of the grand narrative view, there was a move towards discussions of meta-narratives (in other words, looking at developments in music from many perspectives). In place of objective or more formalist oriented views it advocated approaches like intersubjectivity (e.g. taking in issues of different segments of audience, reception, development of criticism over time, aesthetics).

I think that the development of multiple canons is also relevant, it contrasts with the more homogenised view of the canon developed during the modern era (c.f. William Weber).

Although I usually refer to my own reference materials with regards to these sorts of topics, the wikipedia article seems like an okay start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_musicology


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Sid James said:


> This topic is a wide ranging one. The OP invited us to a discussion about music and issues like changes in society, culture, the arts and so on.


These discussions tend tp take on lives of their own beyond what the OP asked for.



> My point was that restricting things to a formalist approach - e.g. music is just notes or the resulting sounds - doesn't suffice and doesn't do full justice to this topic. We're specifically talking about changes in music over time, not just about an individual listener listening to or analyzing a piece of music without historical or other context.


I never talked about something you call a "formalist approach". The fact is that music is sound just as a painting is paint on a canvas (although visual art can present subject matter more directly and clearly than can instrumental music. Music with text is another matter altogether).

I prefer dispensing with any extra-musical information when listening to a work of music, or viewing a painting, and just try to absorb what is there. Not what a musicologist has written about or even quotes from the composer about what he intended. Some of that may be important for a performer, but as a listener I simply don't care. I am only interested in the end product and how it strikes my ears and mind.

But I am not describing what I think as the best way to listen. Each person approaches art with their own needs, preferences, and priorities. Mine just happen to not include the kind of context you seem to value.


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## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

I think that classical music has always had a much greater lag time than other genres of music as well as the other arts. Classical music branched off into innumerable directions following World War 1 and especially World War II. The serial movement seemed right for the atomic age and computerization; even if the grandfather of serial music, Arnold Schoenberg, considered himself in many ways a traditionalist who used the term "expressionist" to identify his style as the next logical step in the German tradition that united Brahms' craftsmanship with Wagner's passion. The music critic, Harold Schoenberg, said that it was really Webern and not Schoenberg who inspired the serial boom of the 1950s, 60s and 70s. I remember that in the 1980s, minimalism was considered by many to be a flash in the pan, and back in the 1980s I remember reading an article in _Ovation_ magazine (or was it _Opus_?) where in an interview with Gunther Schuller, who was at the time considered to be a well-respected contemporary composer, Schuller was really dismissive of Philip Glass; calling him "rock-fringed" and then said "It was all done before by George Anthiel...and much better." But now I'd venture to say that while Philip Glass and John Adams have become practically standard repertoire, Schuller's own "Third Stream" compositions survive almost as a footnote. All-in-all I don't think the situation changes very much. Before the good people of NAXOS released their wonderful _American Classics_ line; "Golden Age" conductors such as Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Ormandy, George Szell, Leopold Stokowski, Fritz Reiner, and Seiji Ozawa; would record only a handful of of works by (then) contemporary American composers such as Walter Piston, Roy Harris, William Schuman, Roger Sessions, Virgil Thomson, Randall Thompson, George Frederick McKay, and Alan Hovhaness; just to show that they were aware of it. Now we know that Piston, Harris, Schuman, Sessions, and Hovhaness were very fine symphony composers, each with a cycle of eight or more symphonies that shows growth and innovation, and Hovhaness composed 60+! Virgil Thomson composed two very fine operas, and Randall Thompson, some excellent choral works.

At the same time, Eugene Ormandy, Herbert Von Karajan, and James Levine each did a sort of obligatory Schoenberg/Berg/Webern album that they knew would lose money, but maybe they did it for the sake of the historical significance; and even they didn't go much further into the world of serial compositions. Pierre Boulez, though, fought the good fight more than anyone whose musical stature was as well-respected; and Boulez always championed the likes of Schoenberg, Varese, Berio, and many others. There were other composers who were tonal and traditional such as Shostakovich, Britten, Copland, and Barber, who were popular in their own time and whose works were programmed and much recorded in their own lifetimes but they were exceptional compared to most others who were lucky to get something programmed or recorded here or there; and Britten recorded most of his own works himself.

The only full-blown serial work that I think has made it to the heart of the repertoire is the Berg _Violin Concerto_ which has been recorded by Stern, Szeryng, Mutter, Perlman, and many others.

I hear a good deal of new classical music on the radio and on YouTube by many interesting and innovative composers. Vivian Fung from Canada is one I've come to find interesting. She is young, eclectic, and somewhat far-out at times; which I think is understandable. I'm sure that just as Picasso could have painted in the style of Rembrandt, and Stravinsky could have composed in the style of Tchaikovsky; that a hard-working and talented enough and young composer could compose in the style of Mozart or Beethoven; but then it wouldn't be original.

So we have the lag time. From what I understand, Bach wasn't fully appreciated until Mendelssohn came along. Ives wasn't known, or let alone hailed as (arguably) America's greatest composer, until _after_ he had long since stopped composing. And while Mahler had champions in Bruno Walter and Dimitri Mitroupolos, he didn't reach cult status until Bernstein recorded the first complete Mahler cycle.

For all we know there could be some part time composer working in a gas station or a coffee shop who will someday became a great old man (or lady?) of music.


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## BachIsBest (Feb 17, 2018)

As an experiment, I googled "greatest composers of all time" and clicked on the first list not behind a paywall. A relatively uncontroversial list of 20 great composers appeared.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 – 1750)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 – 1791)
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827)
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840 – 1893)
Richard Wagner (1813 – 1883)
Johannes Brahms (1833 – 1897)
Franz Schubert (1797 – 1828)
Robert Schumann (1810 – 1856)
Giuseppe Verdi (1813 – 1901)
Igor Stravinsky (1882 – 1971)
Frédéric Chopin (1810 – 1849)
Felix Mendelssohn (1809 – 1847)
Claude Debussy (1862 – 1918)
Franz Liszt (1811 – 1886)
Sergei Rachmaninov (1873 – 1943)
Antonín Dvořák (1841 – 1904)
Gustav Mahler (1860 – 1911)

Now, we can go through this list and decide which composers were actually unsuccessful in their time. Obviously Bach (although Bach made a reasonable living and was well-respected, but considered old-fashioned; today he might have been labelled pastiche) and Schubert and probably also Mahler (although Mahler's 8th was widely hailed as a great work upon its release and Mahler's popularity wasn't bad later in his life; unlike many composers today, his works were always at least occasionally played by top orchestras even before the Mahler revival). The rest of those composers definitely enjoyed a large degree of success during their lives.

So we have three out of twenty "misunderstood in their time" composers, one of whom was misunderstood because he was writing music too old fashioned for his time. Yet the myth of the misunderstood composer toiling away in obscurity until his death, his music too advanced for the people of his time, lives on and on. I don't know why. 

As a final factual note for this thread, Karajan made money off his second Viennese school recordings.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

BachIsBest said:


> Obviously Bach (although Bach made a reasonable living and was well-respected, but considered old-fashioned; today he might have been labelled pastiche)


Is this even true though? Isn't it a preconceived notion formulated and spread by 20th-century "experts" hampered by limitations of revival and knowledge of classical music in their time? Take a look at https://www.talkclassical.com/47729-if-mozart-lived-longer-14.html#post2173203 and https://www.talkclassical.com/72289-bad-superficial-crtitiques-value-4.html#post2128364 and https://www.talkclassical.com/67827-do-other-baroque-composers-12.html#post2155907


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## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

BachIsBest said:


> As an experiment, I googled "greatest composers of all time" and clicked on the first list not behind a paywall. A relatively uncontroversial list of 20 great composers appeared.
> 
> Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 - 1750)
> Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791)
> ...


I didn't say that anyone was "misunderstood"; I said there was a "lag time"; or to be clear, a lag time regarding contemporary composers of the 20th/21st centuries with a few notable exceptions (Shostakovich, Copland, Barber, Britten). Since I read that Berlioz didn't "get" Wagner; and that Richard Strauss didn't "get" Debussy it's also an idea of mine (and I could be wrong) that "new" music takes some time for other musicians, let along the public, to digest. I think it's safe to say that while the symphonies of Walter Piston, William Schuman, Roy Harris, and Alan Hovhaness were rarely recorded during their lifetimes, conductors such as Gerard Schwarz did much after those composers were no longer among us to record complete cycles under the NAXOS label.

As for how much money anyone has made recording music by the second School of Vienna; I'd like to see sources. I have anecdotal evidence. In 53 years, I've never met anyone off-line, including fellow fans of classical music, who owns anything or has downloaded anything, or let along knows or cares to know anything by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. If these records are going gold and platinum I'd like to know who is out there buying them; and why well-respected and famous musicians apart from Pierre Boulez have never ventured to go much further than just a handful of works by Schoenberg/Berg/Webern. Wouldn't record companies who are out to make money then market Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, like your latest boy-band? I also read an interview with Claudio Arrau where he stated that while he enjoys playing works by Boulez and Berio at home, he wouldn't play them at the concert hall or on records because "My audience wouldn't like it."

I always thought that while lots of classical music lovers dislike Karajan for different reasons (musical and otherwise) that he at least deserved some credit for using his position for the good of championing the much maligned Second School of Vienna, even if it was only a little bit.

By your own account with Bach being born in 1685 and Stravinsky dying in 1971 we have 286 years being shared by 20 great composers making it so that only a handful were popular in their day which is about the size of it. Even if we say there are 100 great composers who were popular in their day; that means that your average kid shooting hoops has a better chance of making into the NBA or the average kid posing in front of the mirror has a much better chance of being in the movies; than the average kid who is dreaming about becoming a great composer has of realizing the dream.

You've got to be talented. You've got to work hard. And then you have to be lucky. And, yes, there is a lag time.


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## BachIsBest (Feb 17, 2018)

Source for Karajan making money off his recordings of the second Viennese school: https://books.google.ca/books?id=uXq4qfNwaNgC&pg=PA12&lpg=PA12&dq=karajan+second+viennese+school+money&source=bl&ots=U2FuPt6ODY&sig=ACfU3U0368CXvxKDNHc2AlgEvZm0UhDE5A&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwit-Pf84IT1AhW1LTQIHbcDAgcQ6AF6BAgTEAM#v=onepage&q=karajan%20second%20viennese%20school%20money&f=false

Obviously, though, there is, in general, very little to no money to be made in recording music that could be described as atonal.

I don't think misunderstood is really a necessary term, if you wish to use the term "lag time" that is fine. I do think you misunderstood the point of me using twenty composers. I used twenty composers from someone else's list so I would avoid any temptation of cherry-picking composers that prove my point. There have, of course, been more than twenty great composers over the 186 year period, and if I was making a list of the top twenty greatest composers it would likely look a bit different.

To be frank, the fact that some people didn't understand the music of some of their contemporaries shows nothing. I don't "get" the music of Debussy today, and Wagner is probably more unpopular now than at any other point since he became famous. Sure Berlioz admitted to being baffled by what Wagner was doing harmonically, but he still liked and respected his music.

As for people like Walter Piston, William Schuman, Roy Harris, and Alan Hovhaness, they are so obscure amongst anyone not specifically passionate about the music of the 20th century it seems nearly irrelevant to bring them up. If there is lag time in their appreciation, then it hasn't passed yet.

If you look at any list of great composers, what you will find is the vast majority of them were very well respected in their own lifetime. The romantic image of the misunderstood artist toiling away in obscurity only to be discovered by later generations, is, with some exceptions, a myth.

Finally, so we are not talking past each other, if by "lag time" you merely mean that composers are generally more well-respected at the end of their carer than at the beginning, then this is, as far as I can tell, true.


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## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

BachIsBest said:


> Source for Karajan making money off his recordings of the second Viennese school: https://books.google.ca/books?id=uXq4qfNwaNgC&pg=PA12&lpg=PA12&dq=karajan+second+viennese+school+money&source=bl&ots=U2FuPt6ODY&sig=ACfU3U0368CXvxKDNHc2AlgEvZm0UhDE5A&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwit-Pf84IT1AhW1LTQIHbcDAgcQ6AF6BAgTEAM#v=onepage&q=karajan%20second%20viennese%20school%20money&f=false
> 
> Obviously, though, there is, in general, very little to no money to be made in recording music that could be described as atonal.
> 
> ...


Your source on Karajan seems reputable, and I'm surprised that Karajan could make it sell. So the correction stands. Your source is also very interesting with good information on the world's great conductors. While we obviously don't agree on everything at least we've found some common ground. You've made profound counterpoints. My best to you.


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

Opisthokont said:


> ........... Compare this with what happened in other art forms: Modernist literature is still extremely popular today. Now, I doubt that many people read joyce, but a lot of people certainly like to say that they've read joyce. Even people like nabokov who considered themselves academics are quite widely read. Playwrights like alfred jarry and beckett are still quite popular and their style of writing has had a profound effect on even mainstream popular television and movies. Playhouses quite often play new works and they also play lots of modernist works. With visual art, we have lots of museums dedicated to both modern and contemporary art. They may not be widely popular but they've certainly found both a niche market of extremely wealthy people and enough clout to still have new works displayed in museums for the public to see. In contrast, (new) classical music has not found any market to speak of. It's unclear whether there will be any funding in 20 years.
> 
> Why is contemporary classical music then in such a dismal state? Why did classical music hit such a stumbling block with modernism in a way that other art forms figured out?
> 
> ...


Indeed the problem is _partly_ with classical music itself. Watching TV you will often hear talking heads and comperes saying with pride that they don't like classical music but never saying the same of other art genres. So that helps to make modern music seem unpopular. But if you look closer you will find lots of modern literature and art (arguably the greatest modern works from these genres) that most people are also totally closed to. Few really spend much time with literary classics either. The middle brow wins the day every time. You often hear people say that they hate Shakespeare. And artists like Rothko and Pollock are a joke in many quarters. Art that takes work and effort to get into is out and that includes anything that is new and needs to be looked at in new ways. So is classical music (and new classical music) really so different? It comes in a language that is not widely learned these days.

At the other end of this issue is the question of whether new classical music is really so unpopular these days. It may not get programmed that much but then most of the music from the older tradition is also ignored. It is all a shrinking repertoire of favourites. Opera does a little better and even avant garde operas can sometimes be seen as hits (at least in Europe). Meanwhile more modern music gets recorded than was ever the case since recording was developed and sells quite well.

So, things aren't so grim but could be better if classical music were not considered an elitist art form. The only thing that surprises and disappoints me is that many (perhaps larger than 25% of the total) serious classical music fans still abhor anything that sounds too new ... but even that proportion is shrinking and acceptance of the avant garde among serious classical listeners is growing, I think.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

But does any of this matter? 

I maintain that there is and always has been an audience for new music. It is smaller than the audience for the standard repertory works, but my attitude is "so what?"

There are at least a dozen YouTube channels offering music written since 1970, some focusing on music written in the last 20 years. Two I can think of post new works twice a week, each. That's four works of new music written in the last few years - every week. These channels have thousands of subscribers, and these videos receive many views.

There are hundreds of composers born since 1980 who write new music, and some are more well known and performed than others, but they are working and composing.

This is all that matters, IMO.


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