seellingsen

Wait, is this supposed to be a parody of the serialism thread?

Sadly, because Ligeti had such a unique musical style, there are very few other composers who write in styles similar to his. That said, I think you might enjoy Conlon Nancarrow's studies for player piano, which are said to been highly influential on Ligeti's piano writing, particularly in the etudes.

I'm not too familiar Blatter's book, but I wouldn't call it the book on orchestration, at least not in terms of popularity with musicians and theorists. There are certainly other well-respected books on the subject out there - Piston's Orchestration, Berlioz' Treatise on Orchestration (later updated and amended by Richard Strauss) and Rimsky-Korsakov's Principles of Orchestration spring to mind, at least of the texts I'm familiar with. I'd probably recommend the Rimsky-Korsakov, which focuses on instrument combinations, balancing orchestral choirs and so on, while the other two deal more with the properties of individual instruments (also, the RK is available free of charge as an online course, including audio samples, on these very forums). That said, check all of them out if you get the chance. I've also heard good things about Samuel Adler's The Study of Orchestration, but I can't really comment because I haven't read it myself.

If this is a reply to my post (feel free to disregard the following if it isn't), I can't see how this helps at all. I didn't mean to suggest in my previous post that there are absolutely no neurological differences between men and women, since that would be patently absurd, but that none of those differences affect either gender's musical aptidude. As far as I can see, the Wikipedia article doesn't contain any information that would contradict this.

This is very true, especially for 20th and 21st century music. I don't think you can really evaluate the quality of a composer's music based on how well-known that composer is.

Mind giving us some proof of that "simple fact"?

Yes. Most of them are professional musicians or music theorists, but that was the case even when Cowell was alive.

Absolutely not, unless you take "atonality" to mean serialism, which is most decidedly dead as a style. Many, perhaps most, living composers of serious concert music work within a style that is more or less wholly atonal. Including those who only partially incorporate atonality into their works, that's almost certainly a majority. Granted, many of these are old-guard modernists like Milton Babbitt or Pierre Boulez, but many are also not. As for the future, I think tonality and atonality will continue to coexist as they do today, at least as far as art music is concerned. Atonality is a technique rather than a style, and is no more a period in itself than is tonality or modality. Therefore, it will not go out of style simply because it has been in use for a century, although specific atonal styles undoubtedly will (think about the decline of twelve-tone music in the last thirty years, for instance). And goodridge_winners, atonal music doesn't necessarily need to be avant-garde. Many composers (Ralph Shapey and Shulamit Ran spring to mind) have combined essentially non-tonal languages with very conservative forms and styles. And isn't it a little arrogant to claim that something "isn't music" simply because it doesn't appeal to you? There are many composers and individual pieces I can't stand, but I've never believed them to be non-music simply because of my dislike for them.