I look forward to hearing some of your recordings. I am currently engrossed with Woelfl at the moment, but perhaps Pleyel is not a world apart.Thal
Hi pianogeek,Have you been able to find any samples of recordings for Shohat's piano solo music? I've looked a bit, but cannot locate any. It seems too that his output in that department is quite small to date.
Composers for the concert hall long ago discarded the need to have an answer in terms of a sympathetic listeners; they've done this both in theory and in practice. Is it any wonder that such a deeply entrenched hostility towards the phantom "modern music" exists?
I feel that ahinton does his own music, and music of many of his colleagues, a great disservice, when confronted with the grievances of rachfan, merely refuses to not recognize the source of those grievances.
I think for the most part, composers living today, who are living in the esoteric atmosphere of their own music and music rarely heard by others, would be well advised to not pretend as though people's incomprehension of "modern music" has no basis in reality. Ignoring those trends will only create more hostility. Or put another way, not accepting that these oft-heard complaints have a basis in reality is a great weakness, which will not aid in the general acceptance of new music.
Not so long ago I saw a story about a kid that was being called a genius because he just wrote music all day long. The music is ok but nothing new or special, and yet it's getting played. To me it seems more like he's suffering from a musical kind of tourrettes or epilepsy, frankly. This was the program "60 Minutes" and he was compared to Mozart. But he's NOT a Mozart. It's bullshit. But....he was nice looking.On another program, and forgive me for not remembering what it was at this point, an "important composer" was featured. And why was he considered "important," you may ask? He was young, black, and most importantly, good looking, and had written hip hop music for string quartet. That's it, folks. Nevermind that the Kronos Quartet played Purple Haze YEARS ago. Nothing new here.The music world is far too political and hung up on looks. A Rachmaninoff might well be out there but he can't get the time of day from anyone becuase he's not good looking, not young, not hip, anything along those lines. There is a reason that many conductors insist on holding auditions for orchestra positions from behind a screen, so the playing is judged only by the music and nothing about the individual's appearance, as it should be. Composition faculties need to work on this as well. My own career as both a pianist and composer was trashed because of how I look, while lesser but prettier people always got the opportunities. Madness reigns! lol
Not really. Lots of "new" composers get the spotlight, especially where I am. Here at my uni we dedicate a lot of time to living composers, both those that are well-established and those that are up-and-coming, and that is how it should be. Most of these people are quality composers that I can see standing the test of time. Those of you that have to rely on a website solely to form a reputation just need to persist a bit more and get your name out in other ways. If you are truly a good composer, you might get noticed. And if that doesn't work, well, I'm sorry to say, maybe composing just isn't your thing. It's incredibly hard to be a (working) composer today that can bring something new to the table (originality), engage an audience, and actually compose well. Most composers that I have seen featured in new music concerts embody all 3 of these criteria.
Most composers I have seen lack craftsmanship. They have all brought something 'new' to the table, they have all managed to engage an audience, but they rarely have the tools required to produce a coherent composition. There is so much bs in the world of new music that it's hard to distinguish between someone who is genuinely composing something good and someone who is just playing on the lack of discriminating ears.
When I ask professors (and I have done so, face to face) why nobody writes Romantic style music anymore, the answer I receive is: "Because the great masters of the past discovered everything."
You're either looking in the wrong places, focusing heavily on the negative, or espousing an overly dismissive and stodgy set of standards. While there are certainly some charlatans milling about in the composition world (some more public than others), I find that our current period is loaded with good composers who do have the tools required to produce coherent compositions. The past 100 years has seen a lot of these composers moving further from the public eye, but they are pretty easy to find if you bother looking for them. Looking through a heap of the CRI releases I've accumulated over the years, there are a ton of excellent contemporary composers penning works that transcend all period-boundaries. I would also make the argument that with the late 20th century's explosion of different genres, a lot of the world's musical genius spread out into other formats (jazz, rock, film scoring, sound design, electronica), especially considering classical music's aggregated retreat into itself.
If you had to recommend one composer whose output thus far warrants serious attention and does not consist of self-indulgent BS, who would it be?
Perhaps Leif Segerstam...?
Snap out of it. Music so intellectualized that it is anti-melodic is not memorable. It will die with the absurd fashionable people who promote it.
you'll realize that he can't be human (aside from the vast output).
He is an actor.He was in that series called "The life and times of Grizzly Adams".Thal
You're right. I'm probably not looking in the right places. If you had to recommend one composer whose output thus far warrants serious attention and does not consist of self-indulgent BS, who would it be? I'm not being sarcastic; I am genuinely interested.
Actually, Segerstam now has 192 symphonies. And yes, the guy is pretty solid for having written SO MUCH stuff. But, if you look a bit more into the guy, you'll realize that he can't be human (aside from the vast output).
192 Symphonies? Ok, but...are they any good?
If they really wanted to be innovative, they would perhaps not follow the modernistic intellectualism that has been so predominant in the music world. As someone stated, "What's so innovative about stacking up bigger and bigger tone clusters?". Nothing.Try something innovative, progressive and different - Try tradition and looking towards history instead of intellect.
Umm, it is possible to incorporate both...or at least not give a sh*t about where to draw the lines. There's not much of a point behind bitching about things like tone clusters or the kinds of compositional tools utilized by guys like Xenakis, spectral composers, etc... (Xenakis is easily the most tired bone of contention around here).I'm pretty sure that most of the composers who have created innovative works throughout musical history were never sitting around preoccupied with situate themselves in any specific aesthetic territory. Most of them were too busy working. A good example I can cite is Danish composer Niels Viggo Bentzon, whose work is sort of like 1-part Bach, 1-part Chopin, several parts Schoenberg, several more parts Hindemith, and loads more parts completely himself. He was a clearly a figure who blended lots of the old and lots of the new. What's even more telling is how amazingly unusual his writings are about his own works. Describing the Tempered Piano XII (one of his sets of preludes and fugues), these are his exact notes:"When the wind rose on the coastThe fisherman stopped shortNow is the time to catchThe biggest eelYes, why not?"The descriptions of the other 12 sets are not much more informative. But that's fine, the music is left to speak for itself. I much prefer the chances I have to listen to a new piece without hearing about its technical, historical, political and harmonic inclination ahead of time.I don't quite see the benefits of looking either at history OR at modern intellectualism for compositional ideas. How is musical history NOT simply former shades of musical intellectualism. A lot of users here wave the term "intuition" around here like a big ball and chain, making it seem like the modern age has lost touch with that mystical intellectual ideal and replaced it with soul-sucking, overly-thought-out musical mathematics. I don't quite see that and I would argue that a point of view like that is far more stubborn and transparantly limiting.
Untrue. Whereas in previous eras, the music served humanity and served to express emotions (music based in history and concretism), today, the modern compositional music largely serves the purpose of music reaching a sort of "ideal" state. It doesn't have to reflect human emotions, it isn't bound to anything - Putting it short, music that strives to be above humans and exist only as abstract rather than music as an art, describing human emotions, philosophy, life and existence.Thus there is a huge difference between the progression that Beethoven and later romantic composers offered, a progression grown from history with the goal to act on the same level as humans, as opposed to composers like Xenakis, whose music grows from upwards instead from downwards, whose music is as swerving on a cloud of abstraction.
Look man, I just explained to you how they don't "serve humanity" (Even though that term is somewhat wrong, or at least has a bad sound to it.) To be honest, you are working below me right now. Your idea is that as long as music is written it's all fine and dandy. I just explained how the goal of writing music in modernism has become not something relating to humans but rather to make music an abstract. And that is why I dislike modern music.Your last sentences so fully disregard what I wrote that I question your capability to read and understand literature at much higher than highschool level.But your post is such a fine example of what I was writing about: This relativism that says "Well, back then, there were composers writing music different from what their predecessors wrote, and so there is today, so because their music was liked, we must like the music of today". It's just different - There's a whole different ideology in the modernist music. But I think I have made it clear even to you by now.
Your last sentences so fully disregard what I wrote that I question your capability to read and understand literature at much higher than highschool level.
I'm saying that your argument that the music of the classical and romantic periods is more in touch with humanity/history/etc than modern music is simply nonsense.
Yet you disregard all arguments I make for the point. I never said my posts were "literature", even though obviously they are - Everything written is technically literature.Anyway, I honestly have no intention of reading your post, and could care less since I feel my point of view is not going to be changed by you calling it nonsense. Feel free to feel otherwise, although this discussion is, for me, over.
Alright so I read through your post now, and you still miss the point: Music in previous eras came from below, Bachs music too, very much indeed, whereas modernist music (that means music written for the purpose of fulfilling the modernist ideology rather than music written during a specific period of years) seek to be music in abstract terms, Xenakis explicitly states that his music strives objectivity etc.This hasn't got much to do with how the music emotes - I'm very well aware that Bach's music is emotionally appealing on a different level than romantic music. This has to do with what the composers want to achieve and express.
If anything is overly abstract, I would say the above and below descriptors take the cake. I don't know what you're talking about when you say the music Bach wrote came from "below." Below where? The language you're using sounds way too mystical and arbitrarily philosophical to be convincing.
Your distaste in modern aesthetical goals doesn't seem like it's an axe worth grinding. Every period had its own ideology and identity in the cosmos, and I still don't see anything about the modern viewpoint that has even the slightest diminishing of human interests. Musicians in our time period can choose to relinquish human concerns to whatever degree they want in the same way that average individuals can choose to relinquish religious beliefs or moral concerns. If a musician wants to take a heavily abstacted approach to composing, how is that any less human than an individual's decision to stay home from church to itemize the phone bill and plan out the coming work week.
Even if Xenakis stated a goal of objectivity for music, there's no way of painting that up as anything more than a subjective musing of his own. Even the socialist realists in Russia were making their own individual decisions when they chose to relinquish their individuality for set aesthetic goals.
All I'm saying is that the world is far different then it was during the classical and romantic periods, and that, as far as I see things, composers for the most part are in step with those differences.
The implied divisiveness and proto-sectarianism of the notion that an engagement with certain past composers' music is by definition incompatible with an involvement in certain contemporary music is as unhelpful as it is unrealistic and it fails to address issues such as the how it is possible for a pianist such as Jonathan Powell to include the music of Xenakis, Medtner, Finnissy, Skryabin, Ferneyhough, Alkan, Busoni and the late works of Chopin in his repertoire; what price incompatibility there?
This thread has now turned into a never-resolving and increasingly tiresome duet. Whilst its intended pejorative overtones are patently obvious, I simply cannot understand what is supposedly meant here by "modernist ideology", in vacuo and without descriptive explanation. As a composer myself, I find this head-in-the-sand attitude that appears to seek to suggest that the way most composers think and express thoughts nowadays is somehow out of touch with humanity and its needs is as gratuitously offensive as it is untenable. The implied divisiveness and proto-sectarianism of the notion that an engagement with certain past composers' music is by definition incompatible with an involvement in certain contemporary music is as unhelpful as it is unrealistic and it fails to address issues such as the how it is possible for a pianist such as Jonathan Powell to include the music of Xenakis, Medtner, Finnissy, Skryabin, Ferneyhough, Alkan, Busoni and the late works of Chopin in his repertoire; what price incompatibility there?I accept that question posed by the thread title is no more edifying than the intransigence displayed by those who prefer lazily and indiscriminately to pour scorn on what they like to call "modernism" to givign serious consideration to the much wider picture of present-day musical composition.The answer to the question is that there are Rakhmaninovs in the telephone directories of several countries and, whilst that is not exactly a serious response, it seems to me to be as serious as the question itself.Best,Alistair
I thought it obvious what modernist ideology would be: The ideology practiced by Xenakis for example, and not as much that of Rzewski. I like a lot of Rzewski, by the way. That is music written in a tonally modern way, but it's musical goals are more to my liking.I don't see how it should be impossible to both play Chopin and Finnissy. I just wouldn't come to a Finnissy concert.
Maybe this will facilitate discussion:Is there an example of atonal music that conveys 'joy', as in Presto giocoso in the Italian Concerto, BWV 971?
I thought it obvious what modernist ideology would be: The ideology practiced by Xenakis for example, and not as much that of Rzewski. I like a lot of Rzewski, by the way. That is music written in a tonally modern way, but it's musical goals are more to my liking.
I don't see how it should be impossible to both play Chopin and Finnissy. I just wouldn't come to a Finnissy concert.
So...like I stated, your merely expressing your tastes...What sucks the most about this is that the first three responses (retro, petter, ahinton) to this now-horrible thread (certainly my fault in part) pretty much owned the original question in a fair and balanced manner. Next topic please. Enough of my time has gone down the toilet on this.
"Xenakis, for example"? What kind of example is that and why? Xenakis went against the trands of what were loosely thought of as postwar modernism (as emerged from what one might call the Darmstadt côterie) by going entirely his own way; so did Carter. Is it therefore reasonable to claim an identical ideology for all of them. And don't forget that, in the midst of all this, we had Tippett's A Midsummer Marriage, Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, Lutoslawski's Concerto for Orchestra and heaven knows what else; are you similarly suggesting that all of these subscribed to a single opposing ideology? If so, what a black-and-white world you'd inhabit! Emotionally restricted, too, I'd say...
You're missing the point but, having written what you did here, I must as you if, on principle, you'd therefore walk in and out of a piano recital containing works by Finnissy, Chopin, Xenakis, Alkan, Ferneyhough and Rakhmaninov (let's not forget the poor and - by this thread - much-maligned - Sergey Vasilyevich) even if it were given by Jonathan Powell?
Retrouvailles, I'm not sure if you're referring to me. I think I've been sensibly arguing for my viewpoint all the way. Don't let the door hit you.
can't take a hint.
Also, it seems that most people here don't like learning new things. This forum is beginning to sicken me more and more. I won't name names (or will I?) but it is always the same people that grind my gears. Now, I am open to differing opinions, if they are justified in a logical and sensible manner. But when people go bashing things for stupid reasons is when I get pissed off, like a lot of the responses to this thread. Go ahead, tell me I'm stupid for saying this. I'm pretty much done here, just like indutrial. Perhaps this discussion is better suited to a more sensible forum. Perhaps GFF? I don't know.
Topic: Why aren't there any Rachmaninoffs anymore? 