"Saturated" pieces

[perprocrastinate]

Pieces where the composer fits waaaaay too much material into them for us to handle.  

This one is just ridiculous.

[j_menz]

Pieces where the composer fits waaaaay too much material into them for us to handle.  

This one is just ridiculous.

You're too easily frightened.

[rachmaninoff_forever]

Go on YouTube and search Petrouchka. 

After a certain point in time, enough is enough...  Stravinsky went waaaay overboard with that work. 

[invictious]

Go on YouTube and search Petrouchka. 

After a certain point in time, enough is enough...  Stravinsky went waaaay overboard with that work. 

Despite how unpianistic it may be in some places, it still remains one of my favourite works. I cannot forget the first time I heard Danse Russe and I thought 'oh my god I love this!'

[nanabush]

Ya Petrouchka is an insane technical nightmare... but it's still incredible!  Damn you Stravinsky!

[ted]

For me it depends on whether the sound of the music is actually perceived as "saturated". Music can be very prolix in terms of numbers of notes while the brain hears clear and simple musical chunks. If a piece of music were just a random heap of thousands of notes, then such "saturation" I would find uninteresting, or at least of temporary interest only, like the background noise of a city. The degree of musical interest, although practically impossible to define in general, I feel has more to do with the ways the brain can find of chunking the incoming information into meaningful groups, and this varies from one person to another, and even from time to time for one individual. I tend to conjecture that there exists a critical area of musical fertility around a middle ground of complexity, with saturated and sparse extremes both leading to boring stability.

I find this a very interesting topic, not least because of its immediate relevance to improvisation.