# Need "pure"/absolute music



## Joris (Jan 13, 2013)

Lately I've been obsessed with the idea of purity and objective formal construction. Something without dramatic gestures or anything you would relate to anything outside the music

Examples I found myself are 
Karel Goeyvaerts - Composition No. 5 With Pure Tones
And this piece by him 
Brahms - Fugue 

Also Arvo Pärt and Morton Feldman have an outspoken aesthetic in this direction as far as I know.

But what tonal piece does convey this aesthetic the best in your opinion? With atonal music this is the point half of the time. In other words: what piece is as much fun to listen to as to analyse?

Thanks a lot


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## HaydnBearstheClock (Jul 6, 2013)

Joris said:


> Lately I've been obsessed with the idea of purity and objective formal construction. Something without dramatic gestures or anything you would relate to anything outside the music
> 
> Examples I found myself are
> Karel Goeyvaerts - Composition No. 5 With Pure Tones
> ...


You can't go wrong with Haydn's quartets if you're looking for formal experimentation and a very 'logical' listening style. Try his Op. 76 quartets - for example, No. 1, No. 2 or No. 5, but the entire set is excellent.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Joris said:


> Lately I've been obsessed with the idea of purity and objective formal construction. Something without dramatic gestures or anything you would relate to anything outside the music
> 
> Examples I found myself are
> Karel Goeyvaerts - Composition No. 5 With Pure Tones
> ...


Don't forget John Cage, esp. the aleatoric works. One of the "driest" musical martinis out there is Milton Babbitt's* Piano Concerto *(New World). It seems to exist in a sort of stasis. Boulez' *Structures I & II i*s often cited as a "failure" because of its entirely self-generated material; even Boulez agreed with this. That* HatArt *CD with that, and Cage (both for 2 pianos) exemplifies this objective approach.

Tonally, I'll throw a curve ball and cite *Illiac Suite *by Isaacson. It's totally computer-composed. Illiac was the name of the mainframe computer used in the composition.

Historically, I feel the Classical era is most objective, with Mozart and Haydn.

Try Carl Orff's solo piano pieces, little gems of proto-minimalism. The series is intended for teaching. His wife also contributed some works to this.

In fact, minimalism is a virtual embodiment of objectivity, being concerned with "surface" features which are the self-evident content. What you see is what you get.


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## Stargazer (Nov 9, 2011)

I believe that Brahms was a very big proponent of absolute music, I'd look into some of his stuff!


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## Joris (Jan 13, 2013)

Yes but some Brahms has a lot of Romantic gestures and can overpower the listener. I'm interested in something which is just a play of form. But this is indeed what absolute music is about.

Thanks for all the responses


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## DrKilroy (Sep 29, 2012)

You may also try some of Stravinsky's neoclassical works.

Best regards, Dr


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## GioCar (Oct 30, 2013)

Bach's The Art of Fugue.

More absolute than this... even the instrumentation is not specified.


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## Guest (Dec 18, 2013)

"Absolute" has not yet been used in any way near to how it has been used in the past.

In that more ordinary, more accepted usage, practically all of Brahms is "absolute" music. If not literally all. Maybe the Academic Festival overture. Maybe the requiem.

Maybe.

But otherwise. 

What's happened hear, I fear, is that the OP has simply redefined "absolute" and is now looking for examples of that new definition. Well, OK. But there's bound to be some kerfluffle. And there's bound to be some strange examples. Like dry. Dry? 

Well, Joris? Is that what you are after? Dry?

Hmmm. Water is often referred to as pure. (Though nowadays....) And it's just about as wet as you can get.

As for "without ... anything you would relate to anything outside the music," well, good luck with that! As you may have noticed from a couple of other threads here over the years, any human being is perfectly (purely?) capable at any time of relating any thing to any music. Including every single piece of music mentioned on this thread so far. And if "without... anything you would relate to anything outside the music" means "dry" or "passionless," then you and I will just have to disagree, I guess.


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

some guy said:


> In that more ordinary, more accepted usage, practically all of Brahms is "absolute" music. If not literally all. Maybe the Academic Festival overture. Maybe the requiem.


Considering that two-thirds of Brahms's output is vocal music, I'm not sure what definition of "absolute music" we would find in order to arrive at the estimation that almost all of Brahms's music is "absolute," but you're right that it would be a definition quite at odds with common usages of the term today.

Then again, the term was never used consistently in the past either. E.T.A. Hoffman is often cited as an important precursor for singling out Beethoven's instrumental works as the true source of Beethoven's genius, but anyone familiar with the flowery, descriptive, and explicitly visual imagery of that Hoffman essay (written in 1813) knows that, contrary to common usage today, "absolute music" was not equivalent to music valued for its own sake without reference to "extramusical" elements. Hanslick is also sometimes cited as a source, but his treatise _The Beautiful in Music_ from 1854 uses the term only once, and pretty dismissively at that. In his journalism and music reviews, Hanslick also uses the word "formalist" as an insult, so whatever musical values Hanslick may have promoted, formalism was apparently not one of them.

Wagner is the one who actually coined the phrase "absolute music" in 1846-again, as a pejorative term-to describe what he saw as the now defunct genre of the purely instrumental symphony, which Beethoven had made obsolete in his Ninth. Wagner later changed his mind and started using "absolute music" more positively, but if his own output is any indication, the term did not belie any special allegiance to instrumental music.

Busoni wrote a famous defense of the term in 1907, but like the above writers he did not equate "absolute" with pure form or anything like that. In fact, Busoni went out of his way to complain that pure form as popularly construed (i.e. consisting of nothing but adherence to abstract musical forms like sonata) was the opposite of absolute music since, according to him, "absolute music" is that which is "free" and not confined by rules or conventions. This is why he said the closest any composer ever gets to absolute music is in development sections or transitional passages, where they are most at liberty to ignore the rules of form.

As far as I can tell, the kind of absolute music the OP is asking for most closely approximates Stravinsky of the 1930s (all that stuff about "Music is powerless to express anything at all," etc.), even though to my knowledge he did not actually use the term "absolute music." That is, more or less, what the term has come to mean today: the Stravinskian vendetta against overly expressive music but disguised as a term that came from the Romantic period. And since the term has a distinctly modernist connotation now (though not always acknowledged as such), I agree with *DrKilroy* that Stravinsky is the OP's best bet, along with other modernist composers who inherited Stravinsky's formalism.


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## Guest (Dec 18, 2013)

Eschbeg is absolutely )) correct about Brahms. I was careless.

But I do differ about how he has characterized Stravinsky. This Stravinsky quote has got to be one of the more misunderstood quotes ever. 

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

Note that his sole purpose is to exclude "expression" as a property of music. Much like some others of us have been doing from time to time on other threads. It says nothing about whether or not music has any power to move us emotionally. 

He tries, kind of like a frustrated poster on TC, to explain his original comment in a later one: "The over-publicized bit about expression (or non-expression) was simply a way of saying that music is supra-personal and super-real and as such beyond verbal meanings and verbal descriptions. It was aimed against the notion that a piece of music is in reality a transcendental idea "expressed in terms of" music, with the reductio ad absurdum implication that exact sets of correlatives must exist between a composer's feelings and his notation. It was offhand and annoyingly incomplete, but even the stupider critics could have seen that it did not deny musical expressivity, but only the validity of a type of verbal statement about musical expressivity. I stand by the remark, incidentally, though today I would put it the other way around: music expresses itself." 

For every twenty billion people who have heard the first quote, I doubt there are even two who have heard the second. 

Well, now, at long last, there can be more than two. Woo hoo!!


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

I'm not seeing much to disagree with there (nor do I see much that contradicts my own brief take on Stravinsky). Stravinsky was not unlike Hanslick in this regard: both conceded the expressive aspects of music while simultaneously wanting to downgrade the primacy that expression has traditionally had in the evaluation of music. As long as we're juxtaposing Stravinsky quotes, we might as well throw in the one that started the whole mess: his essay on the Octet, in which he writes, "My Octet is a musical object. This object has a form and that form is influenced by the musical matter with which it is composed... My Octet is not an 'emotive' work but a musical composition based on objective elements which are sufficient in themselves." That's from 1924, eleven years before the bit about the "powerless to express anything." This latter quote, by contrast, comes twenty-six years before the one *someguy* cites. I suppose we can all judge for ourselves whether the middle quote ought to be more closely aligned with the one that preceded it or the one that followed it.

Either way, Stravinsky suffered roughly the same fate as Hanslick: the rejection of expressivity is the message readers have chosen to get out of their writings, even if it was not exactly the message intended, and the received message has gone on to be hugely and possibly disproportionately influential. Rightly or wrongly, later composers did indeed adapt a brand of dry and sober formalism under Stravinsky's aegis, and it is still the case that this kind of music is the one that most closely resembles what the OP seems to be asking for.


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## Joris (Jan 13, 2013)

Good posts!

Yes Stravinsky even wrote in 1913: 'In le Sacre du Printemps I wanted to express [*!*] the formidable vigor of nature which renews itself; the total, overwhelming, all-encompassing power of innovation'

Hence his music of that period was even called expressionist


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## GioCar (Oct 30, 2013)

help.................


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## Aramis (Mar 1, 2009)

GioCar said:


> help.................


sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss
CALL THE AMBULANCE SOMEBODY, I THINK HE JUST MANAGED TO POST THIS BEFORE COLLAPSING HIS LIFE IS IN TC USERS HANDS


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Joris said:


> Good posts!
> 
> Yes Stravinsky even wrote in 1913: 'In le Sacre du Printemps I wanted to express [*!*] the formidable vigor of nature which renews itself; the total, overwhelming, all-encompassing power of innovation'
> 
> Hence his music of that period was even called expressionist


Actually, expressionism in music usually refers to the German movement associated with Schoenberg and his school (pre-12-tone, but post-major/minor tonality).


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## Guest (Dec 18, 2013)

Eschbeg said:


> "...elements which are sufficient in themselves."


Yeah, that's the good stuff.

That's my hobbyhorse we're talkin' 'bout there. Music is sufficient in itself. It doesn't need to do anything except sound. It doesn't need to paint pictures or tell stories or massage our emotions. It's fine just like it is, free, and no sort of servant to anyone or anything.

Yeah.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Joris said:


> Lately I've been obsessed with the idea of purity and objective formal construction. Something without dramatic gestures or anything you would relate to anything outside the music
> 
> Examples I found myself are
> Karel Goeyvaerts - Composition No. 5 With Pure Tones
> ...


Let's question this premise. Tonal music theory is a collection of common practice procedures, as can be seen by examining any textbook on harmonic procedures: uses of the V chord, common progressions, leading tones, resolutions. Anything that has been tried has been codified and objectified.

So, instead of finding _"an idea of purity and objective formal construction... something without dramatic gestures or anything you would relate to anything outside the music," _which seems to be what tonal theory has already done, shouldn't our path of inquiry be a more aesthetic one? It seems to me that the "art" of music is all about "gestures" which lie outside the boundaries of the expected and the mundane, whether they be seen as dramatic or not. Art must do things which have not yet been codified or formulized; it must give us a new way of looking at music.


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## dgee (Sep 26, 2013)

As a little wildcard, how about the late works of Liszt? There's surely some absolute music according to your definition there


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