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These threads are always a Typing Speed Contest, to make it more interesting, let's do it using iPhone/iTouch ONLY.

You obviously are the best composer in the world. This is so out there, this is like at least 20 years ahead of your time. Let the people ridicule you, you know your time will come. What do they know, scraggy... what do I even know! The reason I am tended to say I don't like this piece of crap is ONLY due to the fact that I don't understand this masterpiece, and this feeling I get which I can only describe as being a severe headache (might even be a stroke) is your genius' weight on my inferior brain. You, sir alien sir, deserve your own section, your own forum here on Young Composers - NO! Young Composers isn't even worthy of being in your almighty presence. If I were to file you to anything it would be the internet itself. Man... I love you, although I don't know why - although I don't understand why, but I feel I must be on my knees of grace, thanking you, my alien sir lord sir, with your blessed heart for uploading this piece, and your other pieces too. Utter emotions, utter emotions... You just made my life worth living again.

Yes, this is a good analysis of the work. I tend to dream about sleeping with anorexic lesbians. Astute ear!

'we as composers should.' your opinion enlarged to a set of composers. not logically valid. 'regardless of what composer does, he is a listener' again, logical nonsense.(hint - listening is doing) 'the last listener is the one to whom artistic freedom extends'. you haven't given the case of who is this 'one', it can't be empirical construct. no go. then, you say, it's conceptually open. well, it is, because it's conceptual and not empiric construct. but - gain you go - knowing the audience is conceptually open. here is an empirical swing ('audience') with conceptual indexing ('opennes of concept that could define an audience). no go. it may be melodramatic, but it does not mean that your logic works differently than that of herr adolf. could we have a case here? i don't know. i suggest an analogy, which may or may not be transdisciplinary, so to say. 'the now'? are you saying you have a good grip of 'the now'? 'the now' is time to take the power in our hands and fry the infidels, for we know what is 'the now' wanting us to do! it does not matter whether music is performed a lot. mozart is performed more now than in his lifetime. did he know 'the now' or 'the now now'? if 'the now' is so important why wouldn't we start composing what is cool for most of the audience to have more hits on youtube? hey, who cares about that lone possible listener scrolling past millions of musics of 'the now' to find some music!? screw him. and her as well. we, as a new breed of socioposers, should do what 'the now' is!

Wow. Well, no one can certainly accuse you of not being creative :blink: Or entirely sane :lol: I actually enjoyed this piece -- the piano concerto you uploaded in the Orchestral Section was, I thought, rather tedious and obligatory -- minimalistic in an un-engaging way -- but this is clearly more playful and not so serious/pretentious. (I hope.) I like how trippy it is -- the discordant brass and wind remind me of something out of the psychedelic 60's. At first, I thought to myself, "There is simply no way that this relates to the outlandish scenario he portrays, he's clearly just trolling the forum again." But then I thought ... that experiencing this piece was rather like experiencing a bad dream. So maybe, just maybe you're trying to convey the feeling in a dream when you can't even use your legs (the piece had a "dragging" feeling to it, after all), trying to get away from all these "monsters", but finding that you can't. (Or maybe she's crawling to the fridge, but can't get there cuz she's starved? ROFL!!!) The anorexic sore, empty stomach being portrayed by the rather hollow sounding wind part. (Or maybe you think flutes are homosexual :<) Etc., etc. Keep in mind this is a massive stretch of interpretation on my part of positively monolithic proportions, (be honest with yourself, how many other people are going to be as willing to work with you as me?) and there is absolutely no chance by Beethoven's wig that anyone would actually think that this piece was some sort of commentary on the world of fashion and the media if you hadn't said as much. I mean, come on. I can't believe I'm doing this, but I'm actually "liking" your piece -- the music's somewhat tasty to me, if a bit drab and underdeveloped in the rhythmic drudgery it portrays. Not bad! (Just please reconsider your attitude that you're the greatest composer in the universe at this point in time, as you delicately pointed out in your Concerto upload. Maybe you feel that all publicity is good publicity, but it's a rather cheap way to get attention, don'tcha think?) Thanks for sharing, but for the love of God, please don't upload your entire portfolio of opuses (opusi?), okee? You'll obliterate the tattered remains of this forum :nod:

As usual, Gardener's post in is the thread ender. No reason to say anything beyond what he's said.

ATTENTION: Huge post coming. Close your eyes if you can't take it! I find it interesting that serialism still seems such a hot topic for those "new to it", even though contemporary serialist music is n rare thing. Much of that may have to do with the common misconception Nikolas just cleared up, that "atonal" (or at least not traditionally tonal) music is serial by nature. No doubt though, serialism is an important thing to be aware of even today, for the influence it had on the ("academic") music of the 20th century - and also because many serialist composers were also rather clever minds who wrote things about music that hadn't really been voiced until then and which, IMHO, are still important for a composer to be aware of. First of all, the term serialism: We need to establish what exactly we mean by it, since there are mainly two confliction definitions thereof. In english usage (I'm not sure whether it's generally english or just American) it often refers to all dodecaphonic composition, i.e. music composed with Schönberg's twelve-tone technique or derivations thereof. I'm also not sure if in the english usage of the term it also encompasses other original approaches to 12-tone composition, such as Hauer's method. I believe in french it's used similarly than in english, although I'm not entirely sure. In the german usage of the term (and some other languages which I'm not sure about), "Serialismus" is used strictly to describe methods of composition where "all" parameters of a composition are organised in tone rows, while Schönberg's technique is simply called 12-tone composition or dodecaphony. (By putting "all" in quotation marks I mean that in truth there is no such thing as a fixed "parameter list" in music - you can call whatever you want a "musical parameter", so there's no such thing as "all musical parameters" in an objective sense. But certain things like pitch, rhythm, dynamics etc. are at least very broadly seen as "musical parameters", so that's what I'm talking about here.) This method was mostly developed by certain pupils of Messiaen (who himself had with one work laid out the foundation of this kind of composition), notably Boulez, Stockhausen, to some degree Nono and others. This was in the early 1950s and lasted only rather shortly, in this strict form. (I.e. those same composers already had distanced themselves from this quite a lot by the end of the 1950s, while keeping certain elements of it.) Why am I placing such an importance of the distinction between those usages? Because I've often seen english-speaking people using the term in the english way (i.e. thinking of Schönberg's method), but associating the "control-fetishism", the number-games and the "academic dominance" of the german definition with it, which would be quite a mistake. "Serialism" in the sense of 12-tone composition is a method, which describes certain techniques of controlling certain specific aspects of your piece in a limited way. It is not a fixed aesthetic however and neither describes how the music is going to sound, nor does it postulate a specific musical mindset as a whole. "Serialism" as in the 1950s serialism on the other hand is not a fixed method at all. There is no manifesto that describes a certain technique (well, there's Messiaen's introduction to his "Mode de valeurs et d'intensités", but that's more a "proto-manifesto" that was taking as a common starting point for other composers). In fact, every serialist composer of this form of serialism pretty much invented a new technique with every new piece he or she wrote. It is however much more a general musical mindset: The desire to control all aspects of a composition systematically, and the desire of treating all aspects of the composition by the same principles (i.e. using the same processes for the rhythms as for the pitches etc.), seeing Schönberg's method as faulty in its sole focus on one musical parameter. It is this fundamental idea of a structurally unified music that this form of serialism establishes. In any discussion about serialism, it should be made quite clear about what exactly we're talking about here. Now, as to the questions themselves. The question of purpose is of course, because of the reasons Plutokat mentioned, very hard to answer. But of course there are reasons why Schönberg invented his technique and there are reasons Messiaen's pupils went for their own "doctrine". The latter, I already answered to some degree: The desire to bring all musical parameters together under one single governing idea. Historically speaking, this might be seen as a logical continuation of the Beethoven-Brahms line of motivic treatment, where the composers tried to derive all musical material in a piece from the same motivic core in order to create more unity. 1950s serialism simply takes this to a more abstract level, not using a concrete motivic core as the center of the piece, but a structural idea, from which everything is derived. The idea itself may never be actually audible, but everything -is- related by its childhood to this idea, which should, in theory, lead to an audible sense of unity and structure. (Of course Boulez would kill me if I called this a direct continuation of the Beethoven-Brahms line, hehe.) Another aspect is the distrust in the "composer's intuition". It was a time shortly after WWII and people wanted to make a new start, socially, politically and culturally. Indirectly, it may also have had to do with how the Nazis instrumentalised tonal-traditional music of their time, while banning those who diverged from it. In any case, those 50s composers realized that there was no way of breaking with the past as long as the composers allowed themselves to simply "write intuitively" - as all our intuition is based on what we know, what we've heard, and thus musical tradition. So they thought to get away with that by stepping back to a more abstract level as a composer, a level where the composer would only devise general rules and let them then enfold themselves unhindered according to a certain algorithm. This allows a composer somewhat more to "leave his prejudices behind" and delve into directions where he might never have ended up if he had composed every note "as he saw fit at the moment", allowing them to experience things they would never have experienced otherwise. (Of course it's clear that even this approach was far from being absolutely set apart from musical tradition: Most of this music still uses traditional instruments and instrumental groups, still uses the same forms of notation, and of course the structural rules themselves are still dependent on the composer's "intuition" and thus coloured by tradition.) Schönberg's form of serialism on the other hand came out of necessity after having written freely atonal music for some time. He had realized that without any fixed tonality it was very hard to compose longer pieces without getting lost in musical details, since there was no unifying architecture to cling to. That's why he had in the meantime composed either short pieces, or pieces with texts (songs), where the text helped him to create larger forms. That's why he wanted to systematise his form of composition and ended up with his 12-tone-technique. Now, what exact properties did he want this technique to have? It is true that to some degree the rules of this technique served the purpose of avoiding certain tonal implications. It's not that he didn't like tonality (anyone who has ever listened to -any- Schönberg piece will see that this is clearly not the case), but much more that he was aware of the immense power that tonal implications have for a listener used to classical music, which automatically make the music heard in a very specific context, while making it almost impossible to hear the music outside of this context, making it impossible to hear the sounds merely as sounds, all with their own "colour", equal to each other in importance. That's why his rules lead to an approximately even distribution of pitches etc. - simply to avoid an implied functional context and let the individual sounds of the notes and note-constellations truly come out. In the end, these rules are similar than many classical rules, such as the avoidance of parallel fifths: Those were especially avoided because of their very specific power that makes them stand out in a way that rivals the aspects of music that were supposed to be the actual focus, i.e. in this case polyphony (next to the property of parallel fifths/octaves reducing the audibility of the individual voices, of course). Maybe most musical rules ever devised and broadly used had the purpose of reducing the influence of certain powerful effects that might otherwise "steal the show" so to speak, and distract from the actual musical intentions. As to your second question: The question whether I or others enjoy "listening to serial music" is similar to asking whether people enjoy "looking at photographs": It's simply much too broad to be answered generally. In short: It depends on the person and it depends on the specific piece in question. I do, in any case, enjoy listening to a lot of serial pieces, encompassing both classical 12-tone pieces as well as pieces composed in the 50s vein of serialism. Do I personally write serial music? No, and I've never done so and I quite possibly never will. But I have been heavily influenced by it and learned a lot from it. I do, for instance, sympatise with the idea of the 1950s serialism of basing an entire composition on one core idea (although for me those ideas can be much more "philosophical" and less technical than they used to be in the 50s serialism), and I also sympatise with creating structures that allow me to "leave myself behind" to some degree, i.e. working out processes that lead me to venture into things that are foreign to me, that let me experience things I wouldn't come up with by simply writing note after note without any plan, just following my intuition. I do also sympatise with a generally very planned approach, where I think a lot of what I want with a composition before writing the first note. But I clearly diverge from this form of serialism in a lot of other ways: I have no intention of leaving any traditions behind - actually, consciously playing with such traditions can be a major part of my compositions. I also have no intention of treating every musical parameter according to the same technical processes and frankly, I believe it to be a mistake to believe this is even possible. Dynamics simply are a fundamentally different thing than pitches, and treating them the same does neither of them justice. I also disagree with clearly splitting up the music into a clear set of parameters in the first place. Harmony can turn into timbre, rhythm into pitch, and so on - there are no clear borders there. (Of course I'm not saying the serialist composers weren't aware of that. Stockhausen even wrote a major text about the relationships of pitch and duration. But the core of 1950s serialism still relies on such clear separations.) Last but not least: I do not tend to follow through one single technical algorithm for a whole piece without concessions. I may have some rather firm "rules" and planned structures, but I consciously leave myself the possibility of certain spontaneous decisions, of intuition, etc. (This too was of course done by many of said serialist composers in the late 50s and later, but is a clear contrast to the "original 50s serialism".) "Are the melodies supposed to be so rigid"? It depends on the composer whether there is even supposed to be a melody of some sort. It also depends on the composer whether the music is intended to be "beautiful"/sensual or has an entirely different aim. Schönberg definitely intended his music to be "enjoyed" in a similar way as people tend to listen to Schubert or Debussy. And I have no problem listening to it in the very same manner. For other composers (especially of the later brand of serialism), this is vastly different again - Boulez's "Structures" is certainly supposed to be "rigid" in a way - there aren't supposed to be "nice melodies" in there at all. Pleasure is not the main goal here, although "enjoyment" in a different sense may still very well be. Those different froms of "pleasure", "enjoyment" etc. are very hard to pin down though, since so many things can be meant by them. I'd rather not venture into that as well.

The inspiration is very personal to me, but I hint at it in my last post. The opus number is via a quantum random number generator.

of course this is your take on reality, not mine. i mean, it's obvious (that what you believ is what you believe) isn't it? our artistic freedom extends far beyong any listener, for one who composes does not qualify as a listener, at least not in a sense as other listeners. if one composes for himself, it does not mean he composes for himself as a listener (he might, of course to a degree), but something else. like possible listener, do you include in your listeners the future listeners, the possible(of the infinite)? you can't say nothing about the last listener since there exists none! here, thus, your logic breaks down and not without terrible consequences. which are - if you single out any type or group of listener(s) as your target, you do no better than adolf did by singling out aryans as master race. inclusion by things like worthy/capable/analysed (sure, you KNOW your target, right) creates what one could call a violence of social(nice, isn't it?). the excluded, those for whom you don't compose, dominates the largest field of possibile listeners, but they undergo genocide already in your head. i think this whole logic of exclusion/inclusion is wrong. and terribly so. i so wish the artists deal less with sociology for they come to produce catacombs for living. why one can't accept that he/she composes for anyone who might come into relation with one's work, no matter how and where? you mentioned charles ives in another post. well, he wasn't wrong to include 'peasantry' in his possible audience. the failure to reach them on large scale means not that he somehow' miscomposed' what peasantry likes, it's rather that peasantry as a possible audience does not exist, or if it does, it does not exist in a form of being open to works (of ives). thus his desire to reach them is not necessarily supposed to mean that he wants to please them, to be a butterfly for peasantries tired dicks, but rather to say something to them that, maybe, is not seen by them. he, thus, wants universalism through local proccedings. local functioning as possible space for infinite, which alone can be universal. with logic of finitude (i.e. definite boundaries for listeners) you only reach totalitarism in arts, segragation based on circling in and out. sectism. particularism. fundamental terrorism. and i'm not saying that this is what you intend as a person, but that is what logic you subscribe to implies.

No, from a completely practical standpoint of psychology, it's not possible to be engaged in one's surroundings and live in a vacuum - something is being absorbed through the interaction with one's environment. Beethoven may have perceived himself to be emotionally isolated from the world, but by and large, he didn't abandon the principles and conventions of the time to express himself artistically. He couldn't for fear of being institutionalized, for that matter. But that's the point I'm making, sorry if you feel I've misconstrued what you said. I happen to think you're taking Beethoven's journal entries without any larger context in mind. What I saw was a response implying "it's not much different today as it was then," (I'm paraphrasing). Quite frankly, the details in the previous post that you later expounded on in your reply to me do considerably more to restore my confidence. I'm sitting there reading this material like you're using it to prove a point, but no point should be proven by omission of relevant details. For example, returning back to Beethoven, his early education spent studying music is a pretty critical piece of information that should apply to how Beethoven was not composing music in a vacuum and that he was drawing on that knowledge to express himself. We should also consider how the attendance of the peasantry at some of Mozart's concerts is categorically different to the condition that modern music experiences such a profound resistance today. These are pretty significant points to make that establish the differences in music then and music now (culturally speaking), because the middle class isn't showing up in droves to performances of Stockhausen or, more ironically, Charles Ives (whose interest in composing music of the peasantry is quite well documented by now). So, clearly, while there is a case to be made for the similarities, these in and of themselves do nothing to shed any light on the environment when we omit relevant information from our positions. At least you know that information. Next time, I hope you'll do more with it.

I said nothing to the contrary, did I? Regardless of what the composer desires to do, the composer is a listener. Just because the composer controls the sound doesn't mean the composer is not a listener in the process. Whether the composer hears the work before or after putting it to paper or notation, the composer relies on some kind of musical judgment to make decisions about it, from what to include to what to exclude. All of this ultimately results in a final product, one of which the composer intended others to hear (presumably) and by doing so listens to him or herself. No, I do not. The last listener is the one to which artistic freedom extends. Ergo, it is a finite construct with infinite possibilities that depend solely on how long the work is listened to, performed, etc. Yes, I assume that ultimately a work will cease to be performed as aesthetics and expectations change over time. But in the moment, music offers insight into other social factors on which to understand cultures of the past. It can be demonstrably shown that, as we understand it now, fewer and fewer works will receive infinite performances as more and more music is created. The human being cannot hear every work ever written as it stands now, even spending 24 hours a day 7 days a week listening with no breaks and no sleep. Far from targeting an audience, it's a matter of identifying what most audiences connect with, absent the specifics of any one musical language. This is largely conceptual and open, not, as you put it, the production of "catacombs" for the living. And this whole comparison of my approach to Adolf is too melodramatic and plainly ignorant for me to waste any time with, so I'm moving on. No, I disagree entirely, and it's not the first time I've heard these thoughts regarding "totalitarianism" in arts. I don't care to expound on this further. It's a tiring argument to have with anyone who turns a blind eye to "the now".

AGAIN - did I imply that my views are not "opinionated"? Of course not. I have an opinion, just as you have an opinion. If the composer is not LISTENING to what they are doing, what is the composer doing to qualify their work? 1) Composition is performed for an audience. People like it so piece is programmed again. 2) Composition is performed again. People like it, so piece is programmed again. 3) Sometime down the road, people's interests and aesthetics change. Piece is not programmed. 4) Expression ends at the final listening of the work by anyone. Artistic freedom expressed in the work is no longer expressed, ergo, it ends with the final listener. Okay, well, Adolf used Eugenics to justify his racial prejudices. This was hardly a "logical" application to bettering the world - Eugenics never had a valid basis in science or in logic. It was propaganda, nothing more and nothing less. Transdisciplinary? No. Try "outright wrong." No, what I'm saying is that until you demonstrate the relevance of your views to the world as it exists today, with real examples that offer something demonstrable reflecting your position, I have no desire to explain myself to you. Mozart doesn't have millions of hits on Youtube. Still, why is that person, the one lone person scrolling through all the millions of musics of 'the now' more important than me? Why should I be indoctrinated into composing music for that person instead of the millions of others who seem to have a better grasp of what they want? After all, the implication is that all of the music out there is inferior to the music this one person is looking for, at least as I see it. But no, the illusion here is that this person scrolling past millions of musics of 'the now' to find some music even knows what 'some music' is or what to look for... and maybe he or she doesn't. Maybe that person is so cynical and withdrawn from the world or the aesthetics that it is up to them, NOT US, to cope with that. We can't save everyone, not in THIS society. Now, maybe the day will come when that is no longer the case, that we can survive doing what we do and reach every last human being searching for something, something they have no idea of and might not even know it if they were to come across it... but that isn't MY concern, and the only totality of music I see is this kind of indoctrination, this endless search for something "new" and innovative for, what, the sake of this one person? Please, let's keep piling on the melodrama... because maybe if you continue to do so someone will come along and agree with you, or how about instead... PLEASE, SPARE ME THE RHETORIC! Said by you, not by me.