# Composers who leap out of their time...



## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

I've always been interested in the way certain mindsets go with certain time periods, and how the zeitgeist becomes fashion. Chicken & egg really - great writers/composers set a trend but one can usually find forerunners to their innovation.
Recently my violin teacher introduced me to 'The elements - 1. Chaos' by Jean-Fery Rebel, a French baroque composer. It's amazing - the jagged & insistent opening chord, so unexpected for its date. Apparently it wasn't well received, either. 
Has anyone else been startled by a 'modern' or out-of-its-time work by a historical composer?


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## presto (Jun 17, 2011)

A lot of CPE Bach must of seemed very avant-garde in it's day.
A good example are his 4 Sinfonias Wq 183, they still sound very striking even today.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Biber's Battalia a 10

Some very dissonant music in places for the 17th century. An analysis of the work from the youtube video:
_

"- Analysis -

Battalia is often translated as "a body of troops" or simply as "battle." This piece is dedicated to Bacchus, god of wine, vegetation and theatre. This immediately suggests notions of absurdity to both player and listener. *Biber uses many non-traditional musical techniques including striking the bow on the instrument, woven paper through strings, and Ives-like polytonality.*

2nd Movement - "The Profligate Society of Common Humor" (The troops have gathered in one location, each in their own campsite) The form consists of 8 different songs each starting at a different timbre.
*The harmony is polytonality* as the* 8 melodies are in 7 different keys*. ☞ D, c, d, Ｆ, A, G, e
The rhythmic intensity is created by using *polyrhythm*.
*One section is in 12/8 time and the others in 4/4 time*.
I interpret this movement as each mercenary group having it's own nationalistic
song and every group is singing at the same time in the same campsite."_


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## Turangalîla (Jan 29, 2012)

I'm pretty sure that Mussorgsky leapt out of his time-he was a man in the Romantic era stuck with a post-romantic mind. When he first published _Pictures at an Exhibition_, the publishers "re-harmonized" the score to take out the dissonances...they were too daring.


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## Novelette (Dec 12, 2012)

Rameau's first version of Hippolyte et Aricie was revolutionary in 1733 when it was first performed.

Particularly, the second Trio des Parques, "trio of the Fates", which culminates in a descending chromaticism that was so discordant to contemporary ears, and so difficult for the orchestra to perform, that it was dropped from the opera after the first few performances.






Also, a video of the recent staging in Paris. Scene begins at 1:24:25


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## waldvogel (Jul 10, 2011)

This one comes from around 1600 - Gesualdo's Moro Lasso. The introduction seems like it could have been written sometime in the late 1800's, rather than in 1600.


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

^That is quite eerie and beautiful. Was he executed?


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Weston said:


> ^That is quite eerie and beautiful. Was he executed?


Believe I read once that Gesualdo, being a nobleman, was beyond the reach of the civil authorities. But he did have to worry about his wife's relatives, which was a source of anxiety. He may have murdered other people as well (see Wiki).


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

Bach's Cantata BWV 80 Ein feste burg, with orchestration by Wilhelm Friedemann is so full of _stuff_ going on it teeters on the precipice of complete chaos. The polyphony is so deep I am almost reminded of Charles Ives' colliding marching bands. Even when the polyphony is tamed somewhat in the 5th segment, there are blasts of trumpets trilling on notes so out of place they startle. It makes perfect sense in context after hearing it a time or two, but I'll never forget my stunned reaction on first hearing.

Since everyone is so into authentic performances now, preferring Bach's original version for oboes, I'm having trouble finding a decent rendition on YouTube, but the startling 5th section begins at about 9:30 in this video:






The "out of place" trilled notes are in the original version for oboe also. They just don't smack you in face quite so hard. I absolutely love W.F's wonkier version though.


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## Bone (Jan 19, 2013)

So glad to see all the Gesualdo love here! As I have posted previously, his music works very well for brass ensemble and I make sure we program one of his pieces whenever possible.
Ars Subtilior composers in general strike me as amazingly advanced for their time. Surprised they all weren't burned at the stake.


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## John Browne (May 18, 2013)

I'll mention the ars sublitior also. Most people when they think *music* and *medieval age* think chant or maybe some trabadour stuff. What they don't think if music with mind boggling rhythymic complexity or if not that than harmonies that don't sound "medieval".


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

Very nice, both of them. The first one, when it starts, sounds 'jazzy'. Thank you!


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

tdc said:


> Biber's Battalia a 10
> 
> The rhythmic intensity is created by using *polyrhythm*.
> *One section is in 12/8 time and the others in 4/4 time*.[/I]


12/8 : 4/4 is tuplets, a 3 : 4 ratio, not truly a polyrhythm, since both are in four....


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

To me, the largest standout is Eric Satie, publishing (private, limited edition for friends) his _Trois Gymnopedies_ in 1888 a short time after Wagner's death, when romanticism and German theoritic harmonic usage and musical rhetoric were endemic / predominant throughout Europe.

Though there was simple music going on in music halls, within the context of classical music history, the _Trois Gymnopedies,_ so radically different from all that was going on at the time, seem to come from somewhere far outside all that was known and being done.

The later Morton Feldman works, though he came from and through his own time, starting with _Madame Press Died Last Week At Ninety_, forge a path unique in music history, and sound like there was no real precedent for them: they also still sound to me like nothing else by anyone else, apart from the body of music in general.


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## Tristan (Jan 5, 2013)

I agree with a lot of these, but the one that stands out to me is Bertali's "Ciaccona a violino solo", wherein there are passages with glissandos and accidentals that sound modern:

Bertali - Ciaccona

The part from 2:31-3:14 is the best example. I've heard other performances where the violinist takes a bit of liberty with the piece, but this version seems more accurate.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

KenOC said:


> Believe I read once that Gesualdo, being a nobleman, was beyond the reach of the civil authorities. But he did have to worry about his wife's relatives, which was a source of anxiety. He may have murdered other people as well (see Wiki).


The murder was 'within law' at the time and place. His punishment was being banished, as much a common-sense law, the behavior re: revenge and all those nobles walking around with daggers being part of that consideration - a practical maneuver to prevent series of more bloodshed and murders.


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## Celloman (Sep 30, 2006)

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Richard Wagner...nobody even tried to write music like that until the twentieth century. He must have sounded pretty far out there for his time.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Jean-Féry Rebel and Heinrich BIber are composers very much of their time. Those cited very forward passages, most surprising for us who do not expect such usage in late renaissance, early baroque, are but brief passages, meant to be illustrative, demonstrating Chaos (Rebel, les elements) or discord, disagreement, etc. (Biber, la Battaglia a 10). Nowhere in these composers works (that I know of) are any extended movements working predominantly as a new vein to mine, instead they are brief "color effects." Between the two, empirically, I think Rebel had a better ear for it 

Gesualdo, another case in point As phenomenal as those pivotal devices and shift of keys are, they are an extreme of what was going on all around him at the time. One listen to some of Monteverdi's madrigals from the later books would tell most people's ears that. This in no way lessens the quality of Gesualdo's later highly chromatic music, but puts it in a context where it did not arrive, from Mars, like a Venus fully grown on the half-shell and from outside its own time. (A friend of mine, when a freshman voice major at Eastman, told me she walked by the choral rehearsal room and heard music she thought must be modern jazz, only later finding out they had been rehearsing a piece by Gesualdo 

Compare the polytonality of Biber, those few bars in all of La Battaglia, with the melodic and breezy polytonality of Milhaud, where the polytonality is not 'effect' but the cloth of which the piece is woven, not to illustrate strife, discord, etc, but out of a purely lyric impulse.
Chamber Symphony No. 1




or his "thicker" polytonal romp as heard in his _Cinq études pour piano et orchestre_





The earlier examples are surprising, but they are only very brief episodes used _only as effect_... they were not some phenomenally forward thinking musical idea _anyone at the time thought up to be developed._


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## starry (Jun 2, 2009)

Isn't it a very romantic period idea of someone estranged from their own time and somehow looking to the future, and it's just looking at things in hindsight as well.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Celloman said:


> I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Richard Wagner...nobody even tried to write music like that until the twentieth century. He must have sounded pretty far out there for his time.


Wagner too, has visible roots, though with the more than radical music in the introduction to Tristan und Isolde, harmony, and traditional chord function, would never be thought of the same again. Truly 'Evolutionary." By its being accepted, it changed the direction of western classical music as we know it.


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## GGluek (Dec 11, 2011)

The Monteverdi Vespers are pretty much the fulcrum on which the Renaissance teetered over into the Baroque.


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## Dimitri (Jun 27, 2013)

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe's _Fauste_ in 1806 I believe included the first secular use of the Dies Irae (obviously it had religious undertones, but it wasn't written for a church). It's also thought to be one of the inspirations for Berlioz's use of the Dies Irae in Symphonie Fantastique.


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

Rued Langgaard:"Insektarium" for piano (1917), in a VERY nerdy performance:








(I recommend checking out this one ...)

Rued Langgaard:"Music of the Spheres" (1916): 



(should you pick up the Frandsen recording, it is better, IMO)

Liszt:"Bagatelle Sans Tonalite": 



Liszt:"Nuages Gris" 




Daniel Ruyneman:"Hieroglyphs" (1918, "_van drie dwarsfluiten, celesta, harp, piano, twee mandolines, twee gitaren en "electrophoon", een door hemzelf ontworpen muziekinstrument_"):


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## techniquest (Aug 3, 2012)

Unless I've missed it, I'm surprised no one has yet mentioned Charles Ives. His 'Central Park in the Dark' & 'The Unanswered Question' (1906) along with his later symphonies are extraordinarily out of their time musically.


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## starry (Jun 2, 2009)

Isn't art in general always about experiment in a sense anyway, and not just about following a strict style? Some may be followed later and some may not, though I'm not sure that's always an indication of how well done or even how famous any earlier unusual ideas may be. Indeed later composers, in some cases, may not even been aware of them or consider them relevant to their own work in a totally different style. It's possible for people to come up with a similar idea in a different place and time, you could say the same over many accusations of plagiarism too.


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