Nirvana69

that awkward moment when someone implies there are 'rules' in sonata-allegro form.

Yeah, here's hoping that in the four and a half years since you first made this thread, you've managed to figure out basic transposition instruments. Good luck!

Uh, why has no one here said the blatantly obvious in this thread? This question is basically unanswerable without knowing what exactly you're writing. Four chords is more than enough in your average pop song or quasi-minimalist piece but probably nowhere near enough in a Romantic symphony. More than that, it also depends how often there are harmonic changes. It should be fairly obvious to say that piece with a harmonic rhythm so slow that four chords take four minutes is probably going to need less total chords than a piece with a harmonic rhythm so fast that four chords happen in 5 seconds. Hell, I tend to write whole sections of pieces where it's not even appropriate to really talk about 'chords' so much as it is macroharmony and if you want to reduce that to chords, then I write pieces with only three-four chords. Without a stylistic context, this whole thread just become irrelevant.

There's a difference between having an opinion and making demonstrably false claims to support an opinion especially when one uses vaguely defined terms in the guise of a reason. He can think however he wants about Berg. But there's quite a difference between saying 'I prefer Schoenberg and Webern's music to Berg's' to 'Berg wasn't as innovative/was more traditional' since these things can be argued on a more empirical level. And it's my opinion that his claims are demonstrably false; something that I've backed up with way more evidence then he has yet to provide me with. Any reason I gave can be argued on an empirical level and I feel this gives more support to my position. yes, he ultimately can have whatever opinion he wants for whatever reason he wants. But if all he has is vaguely-defined rhetoric then there's no reason anyone else should take his opinion seriously besides him. Not all opinions/beliefs are 'equal.' And music being an 'abstract art form' does not make it exempt from rational discussion.

You'd have to define 'the very roots' of the 'approach to composition in Western music' then because it was my point that Schoenberg didn't do that either. Schoenberg still employed traditional forms. Schoenberg still made us of standard motivic development practices. Schoenberg still approached orchestration largely traditionally (the third piece of the Five Piece for Orchestra being a notable exception.) And really, Schoenberg's twelve-tone system as he described it is just a different manifestation of the Fugue Principle which has been around for hundreds of years. There's hardly anything 'entirely new' about Schoenberg's system at all honestly. About the most radical departure was the full rejection of voice-leading tendencies and the consistent saturation of the full chromatic in the macroharmony. You haven't provided any empirical data to support any of your claims. All you do is hide behind vague, arbitrary criteria that you can just shift at a moment's notice. You accused Berg of not being an innovator and 'not doing anything new with Schoenberg's system' or something to that effect. I provided more than enough provable information (as in things that can be argued over on an empirical level) to prove that statement wrong. Berg was just as 'innovative' as Schoenberg or Webern. And unless you can better define your terms and make claims on an empirical level, then there's no reason I, or anyone else, should take them seriously.

I can't tell if you're talking about me or Composer Phil.

Because all invention isn't essentially the result of combining two things that 'already exist.' Because Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique in the first place isn't really more than combining the Fugue Mentality (a compositional principle which has pervaded Western art music's thought for hundreds of years) with Late Romanticism's increased emphasis on chromaticism and tonality that no longer functions as such. Because all Berg ever did was 'combine' serialism with a late-romantic style. It's not as if he both composed the single most late-Wagnerian opera of all time (Wozzeck) as well the complete antithesis which is arguably one of the earliest harbingers of post-modernism (Lulu.) It's not as if Berg was actually the first to tackle the idea of large-scale instrumental form whereas Schoenberg and Webern were cat-footing around with directionless miniatures and explicitly programmatic texts in their 'free atonal' periods. It's not as if Berg demonstrates several post-modern tendencies such as the 'atonal' quartal chord which appears in the piano sonata; a three note triad that eventually builds up to a six note, functionless chord using traditional voice leading techniques (subverting a system by exploiting the flaws and corrupting it from the inside out; a technique that predated neoclassical Stravinsky by about 20 years.) It's not as if Berg was developed rigid numerical structures based on abstract numerology which predates most attempts by any other composer (Messiaen and Bartok being two of the most notorious) which actually became a gigantic fetish in Euroean high Modernism. It's not as if Berg frequently exploited loopholes in 'classical' molds which ultimately end up corrupting the very integrity of the form from the inside out. It's not as if Berg didn't have his own idiosyncratic twelve-tone technique which involved the use of free rotations, welding multiple row permutations together, an almost strict avoidance of any retrograde forms, and the technique of using several interrelated tone rows rather than a single row (techniques which Schoenberg and Webern almost never made use of) nor did he ever have any other innovations such as 'character rhythms' (a rhythmic leitmotif technique which is notable for privileging rhythmic contour rather than pitch as the motive was often treated previously in Western art music which, while rudimentary, predates part of Messiaen's rhythmic techique) Anyway, you obviously know what you're talking about in dismissing Berg as inferior because he 'only combined two things' rather than actually 'invented' anything. You most certainly aren't full of scraggy.

I dunno. Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Schoenberg, a great majority of composers once the 20th century started and tonality dissolved as a primary (and convenient) means of structural articulation and cohesion(though that arguably happened in the late 19th century but w/e.) Perhaps you've heard of some of them? They wrote some cool stuff.

A good rule of thumb is generally the *less* ideas you have in a composition, the longer you can sustain interest and creativity.

Eh, no. I can think of a few works before the Quartet that employ quasi-birdsong like melodic lines. Really no more 'explicit' or prominent than in the quartet. His 'explicit' use, exploration, and research of birdsong didn't really come until much after the quartet though. And that manifested itself in Le merle noir , Oiseaux exotiques, and 7 books of birdsong 'transcriptions'

Don't listen to all the haters, Mercurious209 . I love your idea and I'm with you 100%. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help! :)

Also, I might be misremembering but, to the best of my knowledge, there's very little birdsong in the quartet as well. Especially in contrast to some of Messiaen's later works.

Yeah, the Quartet for the End of Time is pretty cool. It's a great 'introduction' to Messiaen's mature output as it's basically a manifesto of all the main compositional ideas and techniques that Messiaen would explore throughout the rest of his career. Though, I personally prefer a lot of Messiaen's later works. Also, I think it's kind of a misnomer to refer to anything in Messiaen as 'dissonantly beautiful.' If anything, my biggest problem with Messiaen lies in the fact that there is basically no (or very little) dissonance in his language.

I had a longer message typed but it ended up going out on a tangent regarding general philosophy of music and how I think there will be a fundamental tension between us because of it. In the interest of not wanting to derail this thread, I'll try to keep things as concise and on-topic as possible. I'll concede that there are some pieces in which 'polytonality' is justified. Many of the stereotypical 'polytonal' pieces that I know of, however, do not justify this label at all and, to the best of my knowledge, I've never encountered a piece where the label was justified. Of course, this could be my own ignorance and I can still respect the theoretical possibility of what you're saying. That being said, I still feel there's a flaw in the term. That is, it privileges only horizontal relations without any regards global vertical structuring (between the various axises.) This gets to be a problem for various reasons. I had a whole list of them typed out but I feel the most pervasive is one of perception. If you're going to write a piece with independent, tonally governed axises, you're likely going to have to resort to some mean of vertical structuring which will govern the relations between them. Otherwise, the term allows for so much ambiguity that, even while writing under completely sound horizontal logic, the result could be a incomprehensible, incoherent mess. It is very likely the composer (even if not entirely consciously) will still resort to some global structuring between the various layers. And while this isn't a big enough flaw in itself to discount the use the term 'polytonality,' I think it should largely be qualified with references to how the global harmony between layers is structured. But again, there is also the question: If the harmonic materials reach such a complexity that any impression of a tonal center in the individual layers becomes lost, then what exactly is the point of writing with functional tonality whatsoever? Functional tonality is written under the assumption that a tonic is the 'goal' (ideally) and when you reach such density of information that the tonic no longer becomes perceptible, then really, you may as well not be writing functionally anyway since, obviously, whatever is controlling the harmony isn't traditional function. It's the same problem Schoenberg ran into with writing his late tonal pieces. Writing in layers of even perfectly defined, simple functional harmony is going to guarantee no consistency of sound in terms of larger structure and if the result remains consistent or logical at all, it's likely going to adhere to different means of structuring with the 'polytonality' being merely a means to the end (but far from the only.) Unless, of course, you believe in the absolute integrity of purely horizontal listening.