Dbass

Alright, now...I'm a classical musician, and I DO like music from the 20th century (I love Dmitri Shostakovich and Arvo Part, and I could forgive some others) but I have a big problem with the trends classical music is stuck in. First, 12 tone stuff - Schoenberg...WTF?
Next, John Cage and Music Concrete...Argg
Then, pretty much everyone else who just sort of throws shit together in a haphazard attempt to make things sound as bad as possible-atonality, etc.
Can anybody acquainted with this (is there anybody) explain why all these jerks think they know what music is?!

vanblah

Usually these are attempts to find new melodies or harmonies inside atonal pitches. You know ... the "beat" inside of two notes that are out of tune. Sometimes, it has to do with undoing things that were done before. Other times, it's someone throwing something together in a haphazard attempt.

What do you mean that you are a "classical" musician? Do you mean that you are classically trained on a certain instrument? Or that you are a musician in the classical sense of the word?

roachboy

there are alot of reasons for "classical music" as you describe it being as it is.

first off, however: you understand, i assume, that classical music is not one thing any more. hasnt been for years. if you check out the spectral composers, for example, you find interesting combinations of traditional (notation) and contemporary (timbre, overtones, microtonal tunings/intervals) concerns. from folk like scelsi through radelsecu and scarriano.

as for musique concrete: i can understand why a classically trained player would find tape music threatening, i guess. but at least try to think about what it reacted to, and what it is about. tape music is one of the most important things that splintered european classical music ideology---it shifted the focus of many folk away from sounds as produced by traditional instruments to all sounds. cage can be seen as trying to figure a way to maintain the traditional position of composer and assimilate the implications of tape music at once. there have been several waves of debate about cage--the most interesting to my mind unfolded around folk like la monte young and pauline oliveros in the early 1960s (san fransisco)...but there have been others...around questions like whether one had to follow cage into chance operations or whether he opened space up for a variety of other types of practice, some of which worked to undo the old, dysfunctional split between composition and improvisation, composer and performer, etc.

as for your remarks about schoenberg etc.: you need to open your ears. for myself, i do not think that all serial/post-serial music is equally interesting, but there is some amazing stuff written through these constraints--what i take much of it to be about is transforming the sense of space you can work with, eliminating the need for repetition, exploring the implications of silences between notes. stockhausen's klavierstucke are about the most recent pieces i can think of that i find fascinating and that work out of serial constraints.



seriously..............open your ears.



on the other hand, not everybody has to like everything, so there we are. i guess there is always some level of demand for folk who find 19th century european classical music to be interesting. there are some beautiful things floating about in the sea of dreck that is the 19th century tradition. i like listening to other people's performances of some of them. but i find nothing compelling about the tradition because it is tradition, nor about the assumptions that underpin performing it.

european classical music is at this point just another set of possibilities for thinking about/organizing sound.

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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

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Dbass

Well,first, I'm a classically trained double bassist - so perhaps that could explain my lack of interest in melodic innovation. I'm a simple man with simple desires.
Roachboy, you make a frustratingly good point...to be more specific, I'm referring primarily to a piece Cage wrote for organ, "as slow as possible," a piece which (provided sufficient funding) will play for some 600 years in a Bavarian church. These things really anger me, because I feel that Cage's message is that, since he's shed the boundaries of traditional music, he knows what music is, which elevates him above, say, Bach.
Next, I do appreciate the value of dissonance, when it's put to me in a manner with...value. What I mean is that dissonance when used to create tension/resolution moments: my example would be most music by Arvo Part, and to a much lesser degree, Bach and Vivaldi...maybe not the best defense, but it's all I've got.
I don't mean to be combative, I just feel like a dinosaur. Sigh.
Thanks guys

aberkok

Man, I can't tell you how many times I've thought about this or ranted. I feel like a lot of composers these days are a product of the Universities or grant beneficiaries, and as a result are somewhat detached from what's going on musically for most people. I find myself unable to relate emotionally to what's going on in these pieces.

I worked as an usher for almost 3 years at Roy Thomson Hall, home of the Toronto Symphony. Every concert would have a similar structure. A lighter or shorter piece possibly string orchestra only, followed by a new piece by the latest competition winner or commision from the composer in residence (and a symphony in the second half of the program). The new piece was, with few exceptions, received very badly. I often didn't enjoy it.

I have a music degree and one of the things you hear most from professors when it comes to this topic is "meet the music halfway." I'm a jazz guy and we generally feel this about our music too. It's not as catchy as most pop music, but the idea is that after hundreds of repeat listenings, our music will still hold something worthwile. Well, I feel that most contemporary classical music is asking the listener to meet them more than halfway (90%). That doesn't allow for the listening experience to be visceral or emotional enough for my liking.

There's nothing wrong with a good tune and these guys don't seem to know that. I feel it's just the orchestras and tenured university professors just trying to preserve a really outdated forum for trying out new ideas. This stuff should stay in the classroom. When it's time to write for real people, you don't have to be Kenny G or Michael Bolton, but you got to give them something to hang on to.

That is all.

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ubertuber

dbass (nice handle - I get it now),

It depends - do you want the long answer or the short one? The short answer is that some of these guys truly were hearing more than you or I ever could, and invented new musical systems to express their thoughts. Shoenberg is one, in my opinion and roachboy's favorite Berg is another. Naturally, more followed. They may have learned Schoenberg's rules, but that doesn't mean that they were making music. The problem lies in the fact that composers were so far ahead of audiences that most people couldn't tell the difference between the real deal and the frauds - so there certainly is a lot of drivel out there. BUT, there is lots of good stuff too - it just takes a long time and a "culturization of the ears" (which can only be earned the hard way - by listening) before you can make honest assesments as to which is which..

The long answer (disclaimer - even this is a horribly abbreviated version that only betrays my own bias) is that sometime in the 1950's a couple of guys (Pierre Boulez and Karl Stockhausen) took the academic musical community by storm. These guys decided that the future of music lay in serialism (the randomization to all possible factors in music), which, I should mention, they did not invent. And they were smart - I mean so smart that no one could debate them. They went around telling everyone that tonality was so old hat that if you were still writing in keys then you weren't making music. And the thing is, they were really persuasive. People bought into this. I think it is partially because Boulez and Stockhausen had a point (to a degree) and partially because they were so smart and so convinced that people were afraid of arguing with them because they didn't want to be recognized as unable to see the Emporer's new clothes. At any rate, composers developed a real contempt for audience - for a time (thankfully over) audience appreciation was regarded as de facto proof of a lack of artistic integrity. This was coupled with a period in which the business structure of the music industry was changing. For the first time composers who were not performers were able to find financial support in large numbers. This was due to several reasons - university jobs, government grants, private commissions, among others. The ability of composers to support themselves independent of audience appreciation coupled with the attitude that "art for art's sake" should forsake an audience that can understand and appreciate the work in question led to composers assuming that audiences had a responsibility to come to them, not the other way around.

So now, you are looking at a time when lots of music is being written - some of it really really academic, and some really really avant guard. Both sides are producing lots of good stuff, and both sides are producing a tremendous amount of garbage. And no one is in a position to say which is which without being accused of being too simple minded to comprehend the art of composition. In the end, whether this was a correct situation or not, audiences sort of lost faith in composers. They didn't come to concerts with a willingness to suspend disbelief and try out new music - and I believe that at least in part this was justified because their trust had been abused by some of the most egregious offenders.

Fast forward to today - at last the iron grip of Boulez and Stockhausen has been broken (actually like 20 years ago), yet the distrust between audiences and composers remains. Composers don't trust audiences to appreciate art over entertainment, and audiences don't trust composers to make music that is of a high quality (however you want to take that). I think this is the biggest threat facing classical music - our audiences have always had grey hair - this is nothing new. It is just a matter of finding ways of cultivating the baby boomers as their hair turns grey. The real challenge is to find a way to reunite musicians, composers and audiences. If there is no credible influx of new material into the classical world, then what are we other than museum art? And if we are museum art, then why should we continue to perform? It is this question of relevance and currency that threatens to kill classical music once and for all.

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ubertuber

Dbass,

In Cage's defense - look at the piece not as music, but as art. Does the artistic idea lay in the performance of the piece, or in the conceptualization of it? No one is going to go to an entire concert of a piece that is 600 years long, but it sort of does challenge your ideas of what can be art and what can't. Similarly, Cage's piece 4'33" may be a total bore, but on first performance, the idea must have been shocking. Think about it - an unsuspecting audience left with nothing but their own thoughts and observations for four and a half minutes... The value of confronting people with their own inability (or ability, of course) to be quiet and consider their own inner thoughts was extraordinary. Of course, it would only work once - and future audience that had heard of the piece would never buy into it like the first ones did. That doesn't make me distrust Cage - it makes me wish that I had been at the premiere of his piece, or at the premiere of the Rite of Spring...

__________________
Cogito ergo spud -- I think, therefore I yam

onodrim

Well said ubertuber, I couldn't agree with you more.

One point I could add as well - composition of new pieces isn't just "randomly thrown together," although I can understand why you might see it in this way. Since you (Dbass) mentioned John Cage in your initial post, I'll use him as an example. (and I like him anyway. ) In some of his indeterminatly composed pieces, he used the I Ching sticks to tell him how to write the piece. It tied in directly with his personal philosophy on music which was that it should be meditative in nature and calm the soul/sober the mind. So, while it might sound like a bunch of "junk" to you, it's really his personal philosophy combined with new experimental composition techniques at work together in a process which is actual quite involved and complicated.

I hope that makes at least a little sense, I should never be a music history teacher.

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onodrim

Me too! How amazing would that have been. Our professor gave us a little 4'33'' experience today actually. While we were all still settling in for class he went and sat at the piano, it was probably a good minute before we all realized he was still sitting there being very quiet, and then we all just gradally caught on to what he was doing. It was interesting how the whole class gradually got quieter, some people were totally at ease and others were agitated and didn't know what to do, even though they were aware of the piece already. I can only imagine what the reactions would have been like the very first time it was done.

/end thread hijack

__________________
"The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides"
-Carl Sagan

Willravel

Music evolves. Sometimes it evolves in a crappy direction. Case in point: LFO.
We live in a society that wants so badly to fit in that they choose their favorites based on what they think other people will be impressed with. They listen to the songs over and over, and eventually, they learn to love them. I agree that most modern classical composers have lost what classical mosic had for so long: brilliance. No modern composer can be compared to Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Liszt, Debussey, or Chopin. You simply can't do it. There may be people out tehre with that skill, but they aren't writing music. You can compare modern classical composers to otehr modern composers all you want. No one will ever be Bach again.

I understand your comparison from Cage to Stravinski, but it rubs me wrong. Stravinski knew that there were eventual boundries to music. As conceptually pleasing as Cage is, I feel that he falls out of the great composer list because of things like 4'33". Art for the sake of art is masterbation. It only pleases itself, and that leaves the art viewer, the one who is supposed to appreciate the art, alone with nothing but a reflection of the true spirit of the art.

I've given up on modern classical music. I gave it a chance, and it didn't meet with my expectations. I am perfectly content listening to pieces and songs written 80 years or more before my birth.

Dbass

Wow...ubertuber, I really feel what you're saying. It's tough for me, because as a composition student in college, I'm basically getting encouraged to write with less melody, less consonance, and it's like...what if I'm not inspired to write really harsh pieces...the thing is, I'm not being coached to work within some boundaries of new music, I'm just supposed to make my music make LESS SENSE! Again, I'd like to stress that the part of art for art's sake that annoys me is that someone feels that they, above all people, have discovered the true meaning of art, and so they can take the liberties they want with the form, when I really believe that we're all still trying to just figure out (!) what Bach had going on in his mind...I mean, it's great that people are pushing limits and overstepping boundaries, but I mean, really...as a performer and composer, and to borrow from previous posts, the battle used to be between composer and performer, didn't it? Bach's Chaconne for violin was a question: How far can a violinist go? How high can he aspire? And now, it seems to me (I'm drawing on a piece called "In C" which is basically a half hour of people playing anything they want in C major) that the question is: How many audience members can I fool into thinking this is art and for exactly how long?
Sorry to keep beating a dead horse!

roachboy

dbass:
well, first thing is that a feel for you as a composition student for some reason: i think i say that insofar as you are running into one of the least pleasant situations in that context--you are moving in one direction---perhaps your teachers fight you--and both of you somehow believe that the edge of the classical world, such as it is, are the edges of the World---fall off there and....poof.....

i think you should feel free to let yourself change, move through phases, experiment and stop experimenting, adopt constraints and not adopt constraints. hopefully, you will have a long engagement with music and will, at some point, be able to look back across it, see how you moved, understand some of it, no longer understand some of it....what i think is most important within this is that you give yourself liscence to move, to change, even if that means you spend periods where you might feel a certain opacity within yourself about what exactly you are doing.

i would say something about "finding your voice" or an equivalent hallmark sentiment, but what i have figured out is that the problem with it (the sentiment) is that it assumes voice is one thing, when it might more accurately be the case that a voice is one thing at a given time, but that across time the matter is more complicated.

at any rate, there is a way in which frustration is good, it pushes you to sort things for yourself.

you really should check out the spectral folk--sounds like they are working in exactly the space you are thinking of--for example, the three scarriano pieces on garth knox's solo viola cd (he has a spectral cd as well, but i havent heard it)

as for the more general questions being discussed above:

dissonance: i dont really hear dissonance as such any more--more open versus closed intervals, with conventional harmony figuring as closed. dissonance for me is more a question of timbral contrasts. i am not saying that this place is in any way normative, but i understand how i arrived at it, i think: first in that what i am most interested in initially spun itself out of folk like cecil taylor, john carter, the art ensemble of chicago, ornette coleman: open intervals (or thier minor second inverses) open space for very different types of improvisation than closed intervals (lots of folk--lots of them--have worked this one out--see the shifts away from bop in the unfolding of jazz, particularly after 1958/1960)....from schoenberg and webern comes an emphasis on linear development rather than on harmonic and a different relation to space from that typical of 18-19th centuriy music....from doing group improvisation for years comes the rejection of any meaningful distinction between composition and improvisation in practice---they are different approaches to the arrangment of sonic material, thats it. but what really matters for me at least about group improvisation is that it opened up a way of thinking about manipulating sound and what i guess you could think about as meditation practices.

you'll probably move out, toward the types of sonic organization articulated by those who preceded you; inward in a sense--into your instrument, what it can do--and inward in another sense, moving as a variant of a subject across/within the previous two engagements. what will probably shift repeatedly within this is what you find compelling or beautiful. for example (and again, this is not in the least normative, it is only my experience) i am obsessed at the moment with overtones/harmonics and with what stockhausen called negative space--but when i was a student studying music (until i decided to move into something else because i wanted, for better or worse, to protect my sense of my own mobility), i had no idea these possibilities existed much less that they would be as engaging as they are to me.

dunno how relevant all this is. i hope that the encouragement comes across---------------keep going----------be stubborn-------if you want to find sounds that take your breath away (and who doesnt, really, regardless of the format you work in)----keep looking for them. they are, in all probability, right in front of you in one way--20 years from now, they might well still be right in front of you, but in a different way. you cant see there from here anyway--there is no here---there is no there.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

ubertuber

Willravel, I feel your pain, but I think this is one of those times when you can say there is no gain without pain. You say that no one is writing music like Bach anymore - I say that's nothing new.

Beethoven couldn't manage to produce the harmonic complexity and craftmanship of Bach's music.
Mozart couldn't match Beethoven's gift for motivic development, and Brahms couldn't churn out catchy little tunes packaged in perfectly balanced compositions like Mozart. On the other hand, it goes backwards too. Beethoven couldn't write a great opera if he tried (and he did - listen to Fidelio - it's good but not great like Magic Flute), but it was a walk in the park for Mozart. Bach couldn't have written the music that Beethoven did, and none of those cats could have done what Wagner and Mahler did to tonality.

As far as modern composers go - I already said that I think your lack of trust if at least somewhat justified. But, I'll play devil's advocate. Composers have always been at least somewhat ahead of their audiences. In the 20th century, they have been pushing pretty hard on the limits of what people can tolerate. At least some of this has been in good faith. Granted, some guys were throwing shit on the wall and waiting to see what stuck, but others were honestly exploring new ground. I'll be the first to criticize Cage, but I don't think he was a dishonest artist or lazy musician. I think his work pushed the boundary between what is music and what isn't. There is value there too. It just so happens that I think he pushed so hard he broke through to the point where the concept of his pieces contained more craft than the performances. This isn't inherently wrong, but perhaps his work is more appropriate as performance art than performing art. Maybe some of his stuff is more at home at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) than Carnegie Hall. Maybe not...

Anyway, I'll end by saying that there is some good stuff out there. I'm particularly digging the music of John Adams, who is still alive. I hope you'll check it out - $16 for a CD that you could either sell at a used record shop if you hate it, or could turn you on to a whole new composer isn't much of a risk. In particular, listen to Grand Pianola music, or the chairman dances. I'll admit up front that it might sound a little repetitive at first (though nothing like Glass), but this is because Adams is a leading proponent of minimalism. This doesn't mean few notes, it means few compositional elements. So he uses just a few blocks to make towering structures. If you do listen to it, let me know what you think.

By the way, I agree with you statement about art for art's sake. I wrote an essay bashing it for a class last semester (a difficult proposition at a music conservatory).

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Cogito ergo spud -- I think, therefore I yam

ubertuber

dbass,

Listen to roachboy - he is right on. And do what your teachers ask of you even if it isn't what you want. You are making tools right now, and you want the sharpest knives and flattest levels you can get, right? Remember that when you are done with school and your compositions only answer to yourself (and audience and commissioners, of course). Your teachers aren't giving you the ends, they are giving you the means - they're not giving you blueprints, only tools. When you are making your own music you want to have Batman's utility belt full of great tools that you can pull out whenever you need them.

__________________
Cogito ergo spud -- I think, therefore I yam

Dbass

Awesome point, and well spoken! Where do you go to school? I have a friend at Eastman, but I don't remember if that's in NY, if your location is true. I suppose I can bend, but it'll be hard...you get it, i think. Also, I'll check out this Adams chap,I think I heard something of his on this late night classical arts showcase deal. Rock.

roachboy

other folk i have been listening to who are doing lovely things in a somewhat less dissonant form:

elaine radigue (adnos)
james tenney (postal pieces, forms 1-4)
pauline oliveros (deep listening band releases)
giancento scelsi (complete works for strings)

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Lak

"Which is more musical; the sound of a truck driving past a factory, or the sound of a truck driving past a music school?"
Yep, Cage certainly had some messy ideas, but art is art (unless of course the artist says so). I quite like the idea of 4:33, that the piece is actually the miscellaneous sounds you can hear while the piano isnt being played, but I sure as hell wouldn't pay to see it performed. My music teacher had it on CD. Yyygcch. Nor would I pay to see Cage and his randoms blow bubbles into various containers of water for an hour or so. Whatever inflates your liferaft, mate.
But speaking of dissonance, I WOULD pay to see a performance of Threnody for 52 strings, now THAT is a cool piece.

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