How Finicky Do You Get With Your Markings?

I write as few indications as I possibly can while still clearly conveying what it is that I want.

I used to write markings all over the place, but now I'm very minimalist about it.

To a certain degree postminimalism + new electronica + noise + sound art + free improvisation + EAI + some "new complexity" composers should all be classified together as a new genre, distinct from "classical" and "popular" musics although deriving from both. If there is a 21st century mainstream it's embodied in a focus on performance (or rather, a return to a focus on performance, after 200-300 years of the focus being on an abstract process called "composition") and specifically those aspects of performance that can't be easily translated into recorded sound. The time period in which recordings were central is a blip in history; a gap of fifty years between the invention of magnetic tape and the invention of the internet. Now that recordings are digital and digital media are free, pop music, which used the recording as the embodiment of the work, is forced to evolve. This is a good thing. The concept of the work, whether a score or a recording, is problematic, and is part of cultural narratives we are beginning to abandon as a society.

 

Regardless. I agree that much of the work of the past 40-50 years will come to be regarded as, if not bad, at least reactionary (which is often the same thing). Many musicians shied away from the tough questions that had been posed in the fifties and 'sixties in the aftermath of the worst disaster in human history. Pierre Boulez obsessively reworked his early, epoch-making pieces, each reimagining less striking than the last. The Germans turned out infinite imitations of Lachenmann and Stockhausen that addressed the surface rather than the ideas behind their music. The Americans churned out bland serialist music for a few years before returning to their prewar tendencies of churning out bland neoromantic music. (Of course, they were well out of the war.) Minimalism was a poor attempt to achieve some of the intensity and power of pop music, which itself was repeatedly sanitized and neutered for the enjoyment of middle-class white audiences. Here we are in the twenty-first century now. The classical audience is older, richer and more fascist. They demand composers write a certain kind of music, and composers (who largely are the children of that same audience) are happy to oblige. As for pop music, it is developing a "canon" of essential recordings, to which younger artists are denied entry. When the recording companies die it will too, as tonal music died with the social order that supported it.

 

"Style" is a red herring. Some 20th/21st century composers who had a real impact, on classical, pop and whatever will take their place—and on the wider society—include Strauss, Stravinsky, Webern, Varèse, Cage, Stockhausen, Ligeti, Reich, Cardew, Radulescu, Feldman, Penderecki, the GRM, L'itineraire, — and moving outside the strict idea of "composition", Young, Riley, Zorn, Fluxus, Bang on a Can, and more i can't think of right now.* You probably don't like any of those people because you think music ought to be like it was in the nineteenth century, and that's fine. Not everyone thinks the world is a better place with women wearing trousers, nonwhites being allowed to rule themselves and gays being alive. To claim none of those people/groups was remotely influential however is rather blind.

 

* also Rachmaninov and Puccini and Korngold, but it's kind of cheating to include them >.>

Jay I like everything about this post.

well, I try to imagine what a performer would naturally do..

I'm more finicky than I used to be; however, I'm still that obsessive about it.    

To a certain degree postminimalism + new electronica + noise + sound art + free improvisation + EAI + some "new complexity" composers should all be classified together as a new genre, distinct from "classical" and "popular" musics although deriving from both. If there is a 21st century mainstream it's embodied in a focus on performance (or rather, a return to a focus on performance, after 200-300 years of the focus being on an abstract process called "composition") and specifically those aspects of performance that can't be easily translated into recorded sound.

Right, I was trying to get at that when talking about sound installations and programs: while a lot of new music isn't 'Art Music', there is an underlying interconnection.

Regardless. I agree that much of the work of the past 40-50 years will come to be regarded as, if not bad, at least reactionary (which is often the same thing).

Well, I don't see why reactionary ideas are a fundamentally bad thing. This kind of thinking would seem inevitable since composers started to become more aware of what was going around them.

Here we are in the twenty-first century now. The classical audience is older, richer and more fascist.

I don't see how it might be any different than 30-50 years ago.

"Style" is a red herring. Some 20th/21st century composers who had a real impact, on classical, pop and whatever will take their place—and on the wider society—include Strauss, Stravinsky, Webern, Varèse, Cage, Stockhausen, Ligeti, Reich, Cardew, Radulescu, Feldman, Penderecki, the GRM, L'itineraire, — and moving outside the strict idea of "composition", Young, Riley, Zorn, Fluxus, Bang on a Can, and more i can't think of right now.* You probably don't like any of those people because you think music ought to be like it was in the nineteenth century, and that's fine. Not everyone thinks the world is a better place with women wearing trousers, nonwhites being allowed to rule themselves and gays being alive. To claim none of those people/groups was remotely influential however is rather blind.

I would have to disagree (re: style). I emphasize that word because without the distinction, it's easy fall into the line of thought that certain ideas didn't have any sort of lsating influence because the music which was most immediate and representative of it fell out. I'm not sure about the last bit: "You probably don't like those people...". In the context of the last couple of posts, I'm assuming that's directed at Michael...

Also, Cadenza, how can you say that installation and program music aren't art music? YOU are the one who is confused.

Well firstly, we should get on the same page about what Art Music is and isn't. When I said 'programs' I was talking about those that are computer-related. People make them on their computers with various software (Supercollider, MaxMSP, Pure Data, etc). Program music is an entirely different thing than what I am talking about.

Also, my views of music's worth is not in mainstream integration.

I was simply observing how you were 'justifying' the alleged insignificance of the ideas and trends we discussed a couple posts back. Your line of reasoning was based on your subjective reactions to the music and how you imagined the the greater audience would react to it.

You assume that, because I believe that music should be pleasant to listen to, that I believe that all non-tonal music is bad. That simply is not true. I simply do not agree with how anyone who writes in these modern movements is given a free pass to write music that sounds BAD. Not that those movements cannot have good music, but the composers use the movements as excuses to not have to work harder to write things that sound pleasing to the ear in the name of "experimentation.

Well actually, I never said that. I'm not quite sure of what you're trying to say but I can assure you of a couple things: you don't need a free pass to write music, nor do you need an excuse.

I won't respond anymore, however, as this is not the point of this thread.

You have a right to make a case for yourself. I think we've all demonstrated that a civil exchange can occur here so for the sake of (hopefully) stimulating discussion, why not?

...as tonal music died with the social order that supported it.

 

We have a saying in Spanish-speaking countries: "Those you claim as dead actually enjoy a great health" ("Los muertos que vos matáis gozan de buena salud")... When someone or something is really dead, there's no need to insist so much on it being dead.

We have a saying in Spanish-speaking countries: "Those you claim as dead actually enjoy a great health" ("Los muertos que vos matáis gozan de buena salud")... When someone or something is really dead, there's no need to insist so much on it being dead.

 

latin is a dead language even though some people still speak latin.

 

i quote charles rosen on sonata form:

When sonata form did not yet exist, it had a history—the history of eighteenth-century musical style. Once it had been called into existence by early nineteenth-century theory, history was no longer possible for it; it was defined, fixed, and unalterable. Except for a few small and unimportant details, sonata form will be for all eternity what Czerny said it was.

 

There is, of course, the history of what individual composers did with the form, but there is little continuity to this kind of history—it stops with each practitioner, and starts all over again from the beginning with the next. Even its most influential exponents, like Brahms, could not change the form as Haydn or C.P.E. Bach had: after Brahms, sonata form remained what it had been before him. There is, however, the history of its prestige.

 

A good deal of both instruction and entertainment may be found in the way individual composers from 1830 to the present day came to terms with this powerful form in a whole variety of styles, none of which were especially suitable for dealing with it. This history is irremediably discontinuous because sonata form is largely irrelevant to the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century styles; it does not generate these styles, and is not altered by them.

 

with appropriate substitutions of names and dates, the same applies to e.g. fugue, opera seria, madrigals, symphonic poems, common-practice tonality, serialism etcetc

So if everything is officially "dead", everything can be alive as well.

oh

 

here was me thinking you were responding to my posts because you actually understood anything i wrote

 

don't i feel silly now

... you were responding to my posts because you actually understood anything i wrote

 

don't i feel silly now

 

Feel as silly as you want. The point is, when you have to argue about something or someone being "dead", it isn't.

 

BTW, if most people still speak English, would you dare claim it is a dead language because everyone should be speaking Esperanto by now? Just because America is no longer a British colony, which was the social order that supported it...? Do you think it's no longer developing itself because it is already defined as a distinct language? This is snobbish nonsense - condescending tone aside.

 

Also: why wouldn't we take this (so far) civil discussion into its own thread, rather than derailing this one?

latin is a dead language even though some people still speak latin.

 

i quote charles rosen on sonata form:

 

 

with appropriate substitutions of names and dates, the same applies to [...] serialism

 

Serialsm is exceptional in that it was codified before a single composition employing it was produced. Interesting how this seems to be related to its historical denouncement as formalism/ degenerate music

I have on good authority that Sonataform is well alive and kicking.

Old forms (like sonata form) shouldn't be neither treated as the only "valid" ones, nor completely discarded as relics.

We have alternatives, yet at the same time, sonata form offers development, contrast, etc, which are important aspects of many musical styles.

 

Let's not be so reactionary (on ether side).