Intensity vs. Energy

[opus10no2]

To me, this is the difference between anger and fury, focussed furious intent and energetic anger.

I mean, as a listener of more aggressive popular music, hardcore electronica, and things like black metal, I am fully aware of what those genres can express.
The thing is, I also listen to 'art' music, or whatever you choose to call it, music traditionally intended for performance without loud percussion and thick/distorted timbres.
One may wonder, as a general member of the public, that if furious intensity is my goal, which it most certainly is, why do I choose to listen to and play this music which, on the surface to a casual listener, lacks the energy and immediate sonic assault of the aforementioned popular genres.

Of course, I plan to dip my feet in those genres and create music with percussion and more sonically forceful timbres. But the difference, as I see it, is that art music allows greater harmonic and rhythmic intensity by virtue of not adhering to a metronomic pulse and limited harmonic progressions. The capacity for intensity increased via subtlety and complexity.

An interesting idea would be do have more dynamic performance , dynamic and rhythmically flexible, harmonically complex, and timbrally dynamic to the furthest reaches of sonic possibility.
I realise some areas of music have attempted some of this, but it's an interesting possibility.

The reason i thought this relevant to pianistic discussion, is to get greater understanding of the virtues and limitations of our art, and to contemplate further possibilities, not least of which is the advancement of synthesised and sampled audio technology, which should encourange more pianists to take up experimenting with keyboards. The 'corny' sounds of the 80s are no longer all it can produce 

[rc]

An interesting idea would be do have more dynamic performance , dynamic and rhythmically flexible, harmonically complex, and timbrally dynamic to the furthest reaches of sonic possibility.
I realise some areas of music have attempted some of this, but it's an interesting possibility.

I probably wouldn't like the result of this idea...  I imaging this kind of thing would be difficult to listen to.  Maybe a fun challenge for the performer, but I prefer my music to have an audience

[opus10no2]

Well, progressive rock does it, but not wwith all the factors I mentioned, it has an even dynamic and is metronomic.

[rc]

Yeah, I never got much into prog rock.

With nearly all rock they like to compress the dynamic into a limited range, that's one thing I immediately liked about classical music is the dynamics.  Though the dynamic variation makes a certain demand on the listener, it's not made for background music.  Tempo fluctuations I'm touchy about.  It's easy to go too far and lose coherence.

It's not any one of these factors that I have a problem with, but the idea of all of them together taken to an extreme.  Seems closer to a puzzle than art.

[opus10no2]

Well, think of projects that have combined rock instrumentation with an orchestra, the consistent punch of a rock band, and the intense dynamic possibilities of the orchestra.

Ones I know include Metallica, which I thought was uneven but amazing at times, and Therion are a swedish band who compose rock songs to be sung with the addition of a kind of bel canto vocals/choral and some orchestration.
This is great, but there are restrictions - namely the fact they are actually still written as rock songs, and not composed in a particular dynamic way. Also, there is still virtually no rhythmic freedom because they rely on a metronomic rock beat.

It'd interesting to experiment with the possibilities of a flexible beat.

Actually, the beat and 'groove' is now considered to be the primary force of popular music, often overtaking the 'tune' in importance.

[pianowolfi]

What is the difference betwen energy and intensity? I mean, I have heard pianists who made me cringe and collapse with a beautifully played combination of simple pp notes without any complex harmonic changes. That is intensity for me. That is also energy for me. And also a kind of fury. I don't get the difference actually. Energy, intensity, fury can be anywhere in good music.

[opus10no2]

Well, intensity can be found in many ways, but in general, more dynamic etc. music has a greater capacity to be intense.

The most intense pianists are those who have the perfect combination of control and abandon, and especially the execution of climatic passages.

Observe Rachmaninov's playing in the cadenza of the first movement of his first Piano Concerto, incredible dynamic and rhythmic intensity, you can feel his blood boiling, even through all the hiss of the old recording.

[ted]

     "But the difference, as I see it, is that art music allows greater harmonic and rhythmic intensity by virtue of not adhering to a metronomic pulse and limited harmonic progressions. The capacity for intensity increased via subtlety and complexity."

Yes ! That is exactly the conclusion I have come to - rather late in life, it has to be admitted. A pulse or beat is a simple subset of rhythm - indeed, probably the simplest possible subset. Unfortunately, because this subset is readily mappable onto visual musical notation, the illusion has persisted for hundreds of years that rhythm actually DOES involve a regular beat, that rhythm MUST be periodic and so on. In fact, I find that those rhythms most intensely musical, while exuding distinct character, are usually aperiodic or quasi-periodic functions of time.

Without going into enormous detail, my personal solution has been to evolve my own dynamic forms using improvisation - forms and "theories" (perish the word, but there's no other term) which operate within, and only within, improvisation. Reduced to its essentials, I use "cells", a cell being any general idea at all. The sound data of each cell becomes the instruction, the theoretical "rule" for the next cell. A feature, any feature, of each cell is taken as the genotype for the successive phenotype.

Rhythm, for me, is close to life itself in music, and can only live and breathe in dynamic forms, not in the  static, architectural patterns of traditional forms. The Indians and the Chinese have always known this, and that is why their music is never static, but always organic and growing out of itself.

In short, all this gobbledegook I am saying is that, if you want real rhythmic fury, (any organic quality really, but you mentioned fury) then I cannot see any method except the spontaneous - i.e. improvisation.

I haven't posted any rhythmic cellular transitions in the Audition room  because they're very long. I posted one split into four (it's over thirty minutes) on boxnet here:

http://public.box.net/verj83657

It is from last year and neither particularly good nor particularly furious - I'm getting better at it now. It is just that, after reading your post I wondered if improvised cellular transition via rhythm might be one way you could achieve your synthesis toward the end of fury.

[counterpoint]

What is the difference betwen energy and intensity? I mean, I have heard pianists who made me cringe and collapse with a beautifully played combination of simple pp notes without any complex harmonic changes.

That's what I'm realizing too: the most intense moments are in the slow movements. The beginning of the slow movement of Ravels concerto, the beginning of the slow movement of Beethovens concerto #4, the Notturno for Piano Trio by Schubert, many of the slow and silent movements of Messiaen's Regards etc.