gianluca

Well, I don't really hate it (at least not in the same way I hate pop music), but I just dislike it immensely. Although I must say I'm sort of intrigued by the uncompromising nature of early hardcore minimalism (e.g., Four Organs by Steve Reich or Music in Twelve Parts by Philip Glass and of course Lamonte Young's early stuff, which was actually influenced by Webernian serialism). Too bad that over the years, minimalism has developed in the direction of utterly uninteresting and conventional earcandy, despite its early potential of becoming an aesthetic that's actually interesting... Philip Glass keeps producing the same excruciatingly simplistic, boring and mindnumbing garbage he's been churning out since Satyagraha, thereby turning his whole life into a piece of minimalism - not only does his music have minimal substance, as a composer he shows minimal progress and artistic development as well, repeating himself over and over again and not just in his music. Reich's music suffers the same fate as Glass', albeit to a lesser degree. Like Glass, Reich reached his creative peak in the 1970s when he wrote Music for 18 musicians and sadly enough, he's never written anything as good and inspired since then. Some of his later pieces are pretty decent, though (Different Trains for instance), but not quite on the same level as 18. So on the whole, Reich hasn't showed much artistic development since the 1980s either. And then there's John Adams, a clever craftsman, but nothing more than that. He knows how to steal from other composers and combine it all into one effective showpiece and that alone impresses some people, but not me. I think Adams' music is highly derivative, unoriginal, bombastic and not groundbreaking at all.

Actually, I think Ruth Crawford Seeger is a completely different case. Czerny's output is of varying quality not just because he devoted himself primarily to teaching, but also (mainly?) because he was a 'vielschreiber', because he simply wrote far too much. And because of this varying quality, his works other than the etudes have fallen into neglect. Crawford Seeger, on the other hand, wrote very little, but what we have of her work is of great quality (I love her string quartet BTW). Moreover, her works can hardly be said to have fallen into neglect. True, she may not be a very popular composer either (which may in part be due to the uncompromisingly dissonant nature of her music), but at least there still seems to be considerable interest in her music, especially among lovers of 20th century music.

Having played a great deal of Czerny when I was a kid, I must admit his etudes are painfully dry. But let's not forget that these etudes were intended for instructive, pedagogical purposes only, and they serve those purposes extremely well. However, early on in his career Czerny showed considerable promise as a composer. I once accidently stumbled on a score of one of Czerny's early concert works, his First Piano Sonata op. 7, which to my surprise was a musically rich and rewarding work full of interest. It's a grand sonata written in an idiom that's highly influenced by Beethoven (who was Czerny's teacher) but that also seems to anticipate the romanticism of Schubert and Mendelssohn and even Liszt (who was Czerny's pupil). For some reason, Czerny failed to live up to his early promise as a composer, probably because he wrote too much and too many etudes.

I'd say some of Mozart's music (e.g., the wonderful finale of the Jupiter Symphony!) portrays happiness at its finest and most profound. And then there are lots of composers who have portrayed happiness in a much more superficial manner, for instance, people like Offenbach or Johann Strauss.

Well, of course that comment was a bit of an ironic hyperbole, although one with a serious truth in it. What I meant to say is that the music of many British composers - Holst, Vaughan Williams, Delius, Britten, Butterworth, Finzi, Howells, Walton, Malcolm Arnold, etc. - is melodically strongly rooted in the tradition of English folk tunes like Greensleeves. And this gives their music that characteristically English sound, which I personally find uninteresting, unadventurous and conservative... Even today, contemporary British composers like Michael Nyman or even Thomas Ad

Ok I can see your anger, Nikolas, but I have to agree with Nightscape that you're overreacting a bit. No offense, but I'm sure you're not (yet) that important or sought-after as a composer that there's a potential possibility of companies like these making any significant profit from your music. Of course I know it's the fact that they even tried to that makes you angry, but still, what's the worst that can happen? Maybe one or two people downloading a score of yours from that site without you getting the royalties you deserve. But then, there's something to potentially gain from it as well: more name recognition and extra promotion for your work as a composer...

True, the piece has a very beautiful surface. Too bad there isn't much content beneath that surface.

The problem with most British composers is that they keep recomposing Greensleeves over and over again...

I can't stand this kind of music, which to me sounds like a piece of utterly uninteresting kitschy choral schlock infused with cheap pop-like banalities. Rutter is in the same league as that other British composer of gawdy kitsch garbage, Andrew Lloyd Webber...

It's only beautiful because the A minor triad (the harmonic basis of the piece) is, of itself, something beautiful. Other than that, the piece has hardly any musical substance. The only creative thing about it is its mensuration canon technique, which however was used before to much more profound effect by the likes of Bach and Josquin...

Mahler plays Mahler.... it seems more exciting than it really is. Keep in mind that these are only piano roll reproductions of Mahler's playing and the piano roll is a medium with a deservedly bad reputation. I have always been highly suspicious of piano roll recordings like these, for piano rolls have been shown to be unable to capture all nuances, shadings and subtleties of the original playing. The Welte-Mignon player piano system for which Mahler's rolls were made was only able to approximate the dynamic nuances and tempo shadings, which is why some of the greatest pianists sound devoid of color and imagination on piano rolls. Moreover, the rolls were usually heavily edited after the pianist had recorded the roll: dynamics were added separately to some special coding channel, often done by someone other than the pianist who had recorded the roll. So at best, these piano rolls only give a fair impression of what Mahler's piano playing sounded like (and that alone makes it a very valuable, historic document), but it's not the same as listening to Mahler's actual piano playing.

Tonality has relevance in contemporary art music, if and only if a composer is able to find a tonal language that is truly new, original and unlike the tonality of the past - that is, a tonal language that sounds like it could only have been developed today and that would not be able to exist if modernism (the most important development in art music in the 20th century) hadn't taken place. However, in my opinion no contemporary composer has succeeded in finding such a truly new tonal language. Virtually all composers writing tonal music today are composing in a rather regressive, unoriginal, clich

No, that's a wrong inference. Basically, I hate any music that seriously lacks substance, originality, invention and depth. (And by the way, I have outgrown the phase of being concerned about being popular.)

Go study his Preludes and Etudes and you'll see that Chopin's stylistic breadth is actually much more varied than that of most of his contemporaries.

New music that's associated with the so-called "New Spirituality" movement, i.e., the music by the likes of P