The Belief That Romantic Music Should Have Died 'A Natural Death'

[karlhenning]

What narrow-minded, philistinian pap.

Aye;  I've been listening to John Cage for two days now.  "Josquin" should try speaking only of what he actually knows.  Just for something different.

[Frumaster]

Catch up to whom, the liberal cultural relativists who are poisoning history with their idealogically biased revisionism? Give me a brake.

Thank you.  I'll just have to be uncouth by continuing to reject the cultural equivalence nonsense thats being shoveled down our throats.  Revisionist history is one of the popular mediums through which it propogates now, unfortunately.

I think you made a particularly good point here:

If some tragic disaster was to destroy every remaining trace of the music of the past, rubbish like John Cage wouldn't last five minutes and people would devote themselves to create great music anew.

I'm not out to offend John Cage fans and the like, but modern concert music's advancement can only be fully appreciated in light its deviaion from centuries of earlier music.  But I still haven't been able to appreciate a lot of the modern era even as I continue discovering the past.  Our natural instinct in the absence of pre-20th century concert music would be, in my opinion, to at least return to simpler harmonic structures and more conjunct melodies. 

[Homo Aestheticus]

But afterwards among the quite young crowd there was animated discussion of how cool it was. It was much the same in Chicago at the few MusicNow concerts I got to attend. I'm active on a filesharing community dedicated to modern composers, and among the 15-30 crowd there.

There's a lot of people who  only  dig those composers and have no interest in older repertoire.

So what if the young people reacted that way ? And why is that a good sign ?

We have a 400-year period of Western music behind us that contains every single  acknowledged  masterpiece ever written.... and for it to be dismissed as boring and uninteresting or not worthy of discussion by them is very dispiriting to say the least.

[Bulldog]

We have a 400-year period of Western music behind us that contains every single  acknowledged  masterpiece ever written.... and for it to be dismissed as boring and uninteresting or not worthy of discussion by them is very dispiriting to say the least.

Why get so worked up over the opinion of one person, especially a person who's income potential is hurt by the love of music of past centuries.  The man has a personal agenda, so forget him.

[ChamberNut]

What? I'm not involved in the music business at all.

Don's referring to the individual who wrote the article, not you.

[Homo Aestheticus]

Why get so worked up over the opinion of one person, especially a person who's income potential is hurt by the love of music of past centuries.  The man has a personal agenda, so forget him.

No, I'm fine...  It's just that I occasionally come across some nutty people who vigorously cheerlead for any music whatsoever so long as it was composed not earlier than about 60 years ago.

[sul G]

I think we're in danger of misrepresenting Gann here - he's a man of deep learning, great historical awareness, admirable imagination and frequently astonishing compositional skill. This is one article, making one specific argument about how we prioritise our listening; it does not follow from it that Gann despises the music of the past, which is the misrepresentation we're skirting with.

[Homo Aestheticus]

I think we're in danger of misrepresenting Gann here - he's a man of deep learning, great historical awareness, admirable imagination and frequently astonishing compositional skill. This is one article, making one specific argument about how we prioritise our listening; it does not follow from it that Gann despises the music of the past, which is the misrepresentation we're skirting with.

Yes Luke, I'm sure he possesses all of those qualities....   I just find his style of writing entertaining.

[sul G]

Yes, it's certainly that! His music is equally entertaining, FWIW

[jochanaan]

...But if there is so much interest, why are the works not performed more often? The concert halls and the orchestras want to make money, so if this were true, they would program that music more.

There's one very practical reason: Rehearsal time.  Any professional orchestra, and quite a few of the semi-professional ones, can play Beethoven or Tchaikovsky or most nineteenth-century music at a moment's notice; but more modern music is both less familiar and much more difficult!

...I would argue that film music (like john Williams and such) is a better extension of classical music than modern classical music.

Film scoring is the 20th- and 21st-century equivalent of opera or incidental music, and thus should be very much of interest to major composers.  In fact, quite a few major composers going all the way back to Erich Wolfgang Korngold have done film scores.

I would also say the problem is one of perception. Classical in general (including modern classical) has a PR problem.

It's not just PR; it's that our culture actively discourages taking an hour or so just to sit and listen--an essential requirement for much Romantic and modern music.

As to Boulez, I don't see how that is possible. His music is not particularly melodic.

Is it only melody we remember?  I'm just as likely to find myself tapping a cool rhythm or hearing a nice harmony in my head--or in the case of Varèse's music, an unusual and compelling sonority that's as haunting as any Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff melody...