misteryous_a

First off, thank you all for your answers. I'm not sure how to define Musical Discourse, in Portuguese "discurso musical" (which I translated literaly) would be immediately understandable. Maybe, to define it as the flow of musical ideas/textures would be apropriate, but I am not sure. Albert Pensive, let me give you an example (however acnowledging that this is a very subjective matter). Take "Le Marteau sans Maitre" by Boulez. Boulez uses mostly a serial language in that work. However, a diferent treatment of that language can lead to extremely diferent results. For a long time I didn't listen to the full work, because I didn't like the way it started, as the first movement is pretty chaotic (or at least it souds pretty chaotic on the first listenings, so one could say it is not really accessible). However, the second movement, is completely diferent musically, and I though it was very beautiful from the first time I listened to it. I think that the main reason for that is the rythmn. In both movements the language is serial, but the rythmns used in the second movement are a lot simpler and you can sense a pulse. So, to make it short, the language is similar, the treatment of the language is diferent, and thus, the flow of the discourse is very diferent in the two movements, and one is a lot more accessible than the other, i'd say :-)

Hello, I am studying composition at a university and one of my optative subjects is "Musical Sociology". For that subject I am writing a short paper about the accessibility of contemporary music. More specifically, I am studying the hypothesis that two elements, form and musical discourse, are more important than the musical language used in a given work in determining it's accessibility. For anyone interested in helping I have, at the moment, two questions. The first is: among contemporary works written using non tonal idioms, which would you consider to be more accessible, and why? I also ask the opposite question regarding works written in a more traditional tonal idiom. Which of those « works would you consider to be less accessible, and why? Thanks for the help, and sorry for any mistakes.