21st Century aesthetics

[ChamberNut]

Please forgive us JdP, for we know not what we do!  0:)

[greg]

But there is, it's called "genius".

Lol.

[karlhenning]

Lol.

[Maciek]

3) Who was that Russian guy... Zhandov???...

Zhdanov (Жданов)

[Guido]

Not sure that's true, Guido. (Or maybe it's just that we mean different things by "fans of modernism." Certainly the composers and performers and listeners I hang out with do not find any of the people you mentioned particularly compelling or important. (Though one of them just as certainly started out being important, and well liked.)

Ok take away Tavener, Corigliano and I think my list contains composers that are both great as composers and have very wide appeal (and are well respected by critics and academics in the literature).

[DavidW]

Not sure that's true, Guido. (Or maybe it's just that we mean different things by "fans of modernism." Certainly the composers and performers and listeners I hang out with do not find any of the people you mentioned particularly compelling or important. (Though one of them just as certainly started out being important, and well liked.)

This is easily the worst appeal to authority fallacy I've ran into in a long time.  Some random people that we do not know, which remain unnamed, but we should believe have an opinion that matters, say that well known composers are not of high quality and have not produced music of any significance, and no justification is given for that assertion.  Alrighty then...

Between this post and JdP's genius rants this thread has quickly demonstrated to me that I should not waste anymore time reading this drivel.

[schweitzeralan]

No, he quit when he wasn't interested in writing music anymore.  I guess.  But I'm pretty sure it had nothing to do with some idea about what other composers were up to.

Interesting.  I always believed that Sibelius no longer composed because he felt he wasn't "au courant." I just wish he hadn't destroyed the score to his 8th Symphony. There were several Sibelian oriented compositions during the first half of the last century. Music in the future, to be sure, will be quite different from prevailing tonalities created over the last 8 centuries of Western culture.

[some guy]

DavidW, it cannot be the worst appeal to authority that you've ever seen, because it's not an appeal to authority at all. I'm not asserting that anything is true because these anonymous people say that it's true, I'm simply pointing out that there are people who are "fans of modernism" who do not hold the people in Guido's list in high esteem. I'm not making any argument about the people on his list or of their importance. Just pointing out an exception to his generalization.

But I'd like to get back to this point, if I may.

they don't seem to offer much new outside the old models.

I'd like to get back to this point, if I may. As a couple of you know, I spend up to five months a year going to contemporary music festivals around the world (and the other seven trying to churn out reports on those festivals). I have noticed what looks to me like a trend--younger composers being more and more aggressive about writing music that's like the music of fifty, sixty, a hundred years old or more. And as I talk to composers, many of whom have teaching jobs to pay the bills, I hear many stories of young composers eschewing adventure and danger for simply reproducing the styles and sounds of the past. This came up first, oddly enough, talking about electroacoustic composers, people who one would think would most naturally be more adventurous. Yet many are putting out what's been called "nostalgia music," that is putting out music that says what's been said before (and said better) rather than trying to find something to say that hasn't already been said.

Mimicking the past can be useful as an exercise, as a way of developing a style of one's own--perhaps even essential for that--but beyond that it can only be pastiche. That is, it can present some of the general sound of an era, some of the characteristic tricks of a time (or of individual composers), but not the spirit that informs that earlier music. Composers from the past, at least the good ones, were writing new music. The decisions they made, the sounds they created, the forms they used (or invented), were all informed by the spirit of exploration. At the very least, a composer in say the nineteenth century would be consolidating the discoveries (as it were) of his more adventurous colleagues. Hence the musics of Peter Cornelius, Saint-Saens, and Boito, musics that are their own to be sure, but which do not go beyond what Berlioz had made, fresh and new. That's maybe partly what we so admire about Beethoven, that he could start out consolidating what Haydn and Mozart had done, but who also went far beyond anything they had imagined, as Berlioz would do with him in his turn.

Even fairly "traditional" composers, like Mendelssohn, were writing music of their time, not recycling music of the past. It's not 1870 any more. Or 1920. Or even 1970. Part of the reality of a piece from 1920, say, is the date--meaning the ideas, the assumptions, the atmosphere of that time. A composer in 2009 writing music that "could have been written" in the 1920s can only pretend to feel what it must have been like then to be a composer, to live in a world where Stravinsky and Bartok are writing new music, where Prokofiev is alarming and bewildering audiences. Where, if you were really au courant, you knew of things like the Futurists, both Italian and Russian, and of fabulous artistic movements like Dada and of fabulous creatures like the Ur Sonata.

Pieces written then that were adventurous then of course don't really seem adventurous any more. But I think that they all of them have a quality that no pastiche from 2009 could ever even hope to capture. Too much has happened since then. Too many people have done too many things. And audiences, at least the ones who've been following the much that has happened since then, will not think a piece that sounds like Ravel is fresh and new and bewildering, as a new piece by Ravel would have been in Ravel's time, but simply a piece that sounds like Ravel. And pieces by Ravel will always seem rather better somehow!

[jowcol]

I'm probably the only person who has a vague idea of what it actually is in this entire forum. This doesn't necessarily go to my credit of course, as all good men should have a modicum of understanding of the nature of genius, even if they don't directly understand the produces of genius, but it does speak negatively for everybody else.

Tao te Ching:  # 20

Give up learning, and put an end to your troubles.
Is there a difference between yes and no?
Is there a difference between good and evil?
Must I fear what others fear? What nonsense!
Other people are contented, enjoying the sacrificial feast of the ox.
In spring some go to the park, and climb the terrace,
But I alone am drifting, not knowing where I am.
Like a newborn babe before it learns to smile,
I am alone, without a place to go.
Others have more than they need, but I alone have nothing.
I am a fool. Oh, yes! I am confused.
Others are clear and bright,
But I alone am dim and weak.
Others are sharp and clever,
But I alone am dull and stupid.
Oh, I drift like the waves of the sea,
Without direction, like the restless wind.
Everyone else is busy,
But I alone am aimless and depressed.
I am different.
I am nourished by the great mother.

[Franco]

It's not 1870 any more. Or 1920. Or even 1970. Part of the reality of a piece from 1920, say, is the date--meaning the ideas, the assumptions, the atmosphere of that time.

By definition, a composer alive today and writing music today is writing music of "the time". 

It is not up to you, or anyone, to decide what style is appropriate for a composer writing today.  It is only up to you to decide for yourself if the music written by any composer today is meaningful to you. 

Obviously, it is meaningful to the composer no matter what you may think about his chosen method of expression.

[some guy]

By definition, a composer alive today and writing music today is writing music of "the time".

Ah, if it were only this easy.... There's this thing called anachronism, invented by those clever Greek people (who came up with a word for everything, seemingly) to cover what I'm referring to, the phenomenon (also Greek, see what I mean?) of someone who imagines living in another time would have been better, and so who tries to imitate the conditions of that time in his or her own life. Of course, composers today who are writing music as if it were still 1870 also own refrigerators and use cell phones and perhaps even have an mp3 player or two. And one could argue, and perhaps you would, that that phenomenon is a characteristic of this time, because people are indeed doing it now.

But there's something vaguely uncomfortable about that simple notion, don't you think? That whatever is in a time is also of a time. So if a certain group started wearing Elizabethan attire and speaking the language of Shakespeare in 2009 (other than at Renaissance fairs), then that would be of the current time. What's wrong with that, I think, is that we can identify it as different from what's characteristic of 2009. We know that there was a time when people dressed and talked that way, and that that time is past. We no longer, generally speaking, believe in things like the music of the spheres or in any pre-Newtonian conceptions of the universe. We no longer share assumptions about reality like gravity being an attraction, like that between two people. That a rock falling to earth is attracted to the larger stone, as it were, that's why it rushes towards it. That's part of the reality of 1600, too, but no one's interested in imitating that. Only the superficials, the externals are imitatable.

It is not up to you, or anyone, to decide what style is appropriate for a composer writing today.  It is only up to you to decide for yourself if the music written by any composer today is meaningful to you.

Well I cannot decide for Jennifer Higdon, say, what will inspire Jennifer Higdon. But I can listen to her music, and since I listen to a lot of other composers, I can hear that she's writing as if large chunks of the past century never happened. And I can hear that her tonality is traditional in a way that Ravel's, for instance, was not. That is because other things have happened, and I know that they have happened, and I can hear that she is writing as if they haven't.

And I can deprecate that.

Obviously, it is meaningful to the composer no matter what you may think about his chosen method of expression.

Of course. And perhaps it is meaningful for some people to live in log cabins and hunt buffalo. And they are free to do so if they can. But creative people are supposed to be making something new, hein? Creating, not recreating. Creating, not mimicking (however important mimicking is for learning). What we call romantic music was new when it was being done in the nineteenth century. It was fresh and startling and revelatory--and it pissed off audiences just as Schoenberg still seems capable of doing (talk of being out of time!!). But it has become, as all things must, familiar and comfortable. It may feed a part of our souls that now needs that food (now, because in 1730, say, our souls evidently did not need it), but it is no longer fresh and startling and revelatory. We may like the sounds of 1870 so much that we crave the music written now that mimics that time. But it's not the music of that time. It's a reproduction, a pastiche. It shouldn't satisfy us, it shouldn't satisfy its creators. But, of course, as you pointed out, it's not for me to decide what should or should not satisfy anyone else but me.

But I can tell the difference (I hope) between a piece written when the assumptions and ideas and atmosphere of 1920 were current and a piece that mimics some characteristic tricks and turns of that time. And if I cannot, then I can at least look at the dates and say with some confidence that the piece that sounds like 1920 with the date 1920 on it is genuine and the piece with the sounds of 1920 but a date of 2009 is not.

[Franco]

Ah, if it were only this easy....

No, it really is that easy.  It is you who are putting forward unecessary abstractions and assumptions about what you can never know: what motivates another human being.

There's this thing called anachronism, invented by those clever Greek people (who came up with a word for everything, seemingly) to cover what I'm referring to, the phenomenon (also Greek, see what I mean?) of someone who imagines living in another time would have been better, and so who tries to imitate the conditions of that time in his or her own life.

I doubt this is really what is at work. 

Of course, composers today who are writing music as if it were still 1870 also own refrigerators and use cell phones and perhaps even have an mp3 player or two. And one could argue, and perhaps you would, that that phenomenon is a characteristic of this time, because people are indeed doing it now.

But there's something vaguely uncomfortable about that simple notion, don't you think?

Not at all.  HOw another composer works does not make be feel uncomfortable.  I may not enjoy what s/he writes, but would never judge their method.  Not only would it be pointless and rude for me to do so, but it is their method.

That whatever is in a time is also of a time. So if a certain group started wearing Elizabethan attire and speaking the language of Shakespeare in 2009 (other than at Renaissance fairs), then that would be of the current time. What's wrong with that [?]

Nothing.

I think, is that we can identify it as different from what's characteristic of 2009.

So what?

We know that there was a time when people dressed and talked that way, and that that time is past.

Apparently not, if an entire community chose to dress and talk like that today.  There are communites who live as if large chunks of the last century did not happen: the Amish.  They are doing fine.

We no longer, generally speaking, believe in things like the music of the spheres or in any pre-Newtonian conceptions of the universe. We no longer share assumptions about reality like gravity being an attraction, like that between two people. That a rock falling to earth is attracted to the larger stone, as it were, that's why it rushes towards it. That's part of the reality of 1600, too, but no one's interested in imitating that.

It would not matter one bit if someone would believe in those things.  And if those beliefs motivated their artistic work - who are you to deny its relevance?

Only the superficials, the externals are imitatable.

Says you.

Well I cannot decide for Jennifer Higdon, say, what will inspire Jennifer Higdon. But I can listen to her music, and since I listen to a lot of other composers, I can hear that she's writing as if large chunks of the past century never happened. And I can hear that her tonality is traditional in a way that Ravel's, for instance, was not. That is because other things have happened, and I know that they have happened, and I can hear that she is writing as if they haven't.

Okay, so you don't like her music; don't listen to her.  I doubt it will change anything about her methods and the enjoyment her audience finds in her music.  But you are not the arbiter of what is acceptable; you have no power to stop Jennifer Higdon from writing the kind of music that is important to her, nor to stop other people from enjoying it.  It seems to me that your indulgence in this regard is even more meaningless than Jennifer Higdon writing music, in your words, "as if large chunks of the past century never happened".

And I can deprecate that.

Yes you do; not that it matters to anyone other than you.

Of course. And perhaps it is meaningful for some people to live in log cabins and hunt buffalo. And they are free to do so if they can. But creative people are supposed to be making something new, hein?

Everyone is a creative person.

Creating, not recreating. Creating, not mimicking (however important mimicking is for learning).

I doubt this is all that happens in those works you don't approve of.  You are missing what is going on, is all.

What we call romantic music was new when it was being done in the nineteenth century. It was fresh and startling and revelatory--and it pissed off audiences just as Schoenberg still seems capable of doing (talk of being out of time!!). But it has become, as all things must, familiar and comfortable. It may feed a part of our souls that now needs that food (now, because in 1730, say, our souls evidently did not need it), but it is no longer fresh and startling and revelatory.

Right, and no one is actually writing music exactly like the music of the 19th century.

We may like the sounds of 1870 so much that we crave the music written now that mimics that time. But it's not the music of that time. It's a reproduction, a pastiche. It shouldn't satisfy us, it shouldn't satisfy its creators.

Strawman.

But, of course, as you pointed out, it's not for me to decide what should or should not satisfy anyone else but me.

Yep.

But I can tell the difference (I hope) between a piece written when the assumptions and ideas and atmosphere of 1920 were current and a piece that mimics some characteristic tricks and turns of that time. And if I cannot, then I can at least look at the dates and say with some confidence that the piece that sounds like 1920 with the date 1920 on it is genuine and the piece with the sounds of 1920 but a date of 2009 is not.

If this makes you happy, go ahead and think those things.  But, someone with your bent could say the piece of 1920 was mimicking a piece from 1870 and the work from 1870 was genuine and the 1920 one not; and so on and so on and so on ...

[snyprrr]

Everyone is a creative person.

And everyone is "special", ok, now reallly. I think it is this exact sentiment that has produced the current exophicallitic paradigm of inoncolonologic metasperasticastics.

Otherwise, the rapist is just another "artist." (cue Polanski debate)

No, not everyone is a creative person, unless the parasitic blood-sucking moocher is just being creative when he leeches off of others. Hey, it's a "relative", right?



I'm just not the kind of person who tells their child they're still a winner for trying. Sorry, yes, I'm just a mean old man, boo hoo, but no, child, that is NOT a good fuge... go write another, until you write one that pleases the Master.



Every time this thread gets brought back to life (in a different thread), the same camps get set up, and I'm just curious about the "who are you to judge?" camp. Who am I to judge? I'll tell you. I am the one who has lent you my ears, my wallet, my time, my oh so precious, self-actualized existence of me-me, gimme-gimme, to listen to your up-chuck pablum,...so, MAKE IT GOOD. Oh, if there was just some incentive, such as the gill-o-teen, to make sure that these composers were taking serious thought as to whether or not their offerings should see the light of day.

Yes, I, I say "you" suck, whom ever thou art, because  there is nothing inside of you, and the only reason you're a composer is because of daddy's connections to Harvard, and because of ADVANTAGE, not because of talent.

Sorry, did someone not get the memo that we don't NEED any more composers? As long as I can't get a copy of Florent Schmitt's 1949 SQ, there will be no need in you writing anything. Thank you... maybe you could go get a job stocking shelves, or something useful.

Dear Modern Composer-type,

        Why are you not useless? Do you think we need another "Missa Gaia"? Another sodomitic opera? Are you, tee hee, "pushing the envelope"? Do you not realize that it's all about the benjamins? How did you get into school? Were you poor, or was it daddy? Do REAL people want to be "composers of music" in this day and age? I thought you all wanted to be rock stars. Has that dream faded, and now you want to compose "serious" music???

         May I tell you that whatever you write will most likely suck? Do it for yourself, but please, don't do it for me, and don't do it on the tax-dollar, either. I don't want to start seeing Obama-composers sringing up a;ll over the place writing Green symphonies.

AAAAAaarrrgggghghhhhhh!!!!!!.............

Boy, this topic just makes the blood force out of my pores. Like I said, until I can get Schmitt's SQ, y'all are dead to me.


Prediction: Lachenmann will start writing waltzes within ten years.

[Franco]

snyprrr

There's not much in your post I can agree with; we have very different worldviews, I see people as all sharing many things including creativity, whereas you apparently don't.   

For me, being creative is not being a genius or even talented in the arts.  It is what every parent draws on when raising children.  It is the ability to solve problems, it is used in just about everything humans do, such as telling someone what they mean to you. 

The idea that creativity is only at work in the arts is wrong, IMO.

And there are worse things than telling your child he is a winner just for trying; it's called not trying. 

[The Six]

[jochanaan]

Adams? Part? Tavener? Macmillan? Reich? Corigliano? Whitacre? All these are popular with both audiences and "fans of modernism"...

...and mostly anything but "straightforward" in their use of tonality.

Prediction is always hazardous--you can't expect the next "genius" to appear on schedule--but I foresee an increasing blend of "World Music" and classical disciplines à la Hovhaness, Tan Dun, Golijov and Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble.  Far from believing such a trend will destroy classical music, I see it as perhaps the only way to keep it alive.  Farmers and ranchers know that the "purebred" strains of crops and livestock are least likely to thrive, while hybrids are consistently hardier and more vital.

[DavidW]

Well said Jo, interesting post.

[jochanaan]

I'm probably the only person who has a vague idea of what it actually is in this entire forum...

How can you discern that?  Have you spent as much time as, say, Karl Henning, Mark Simon, I or the other professional musicians here in studying, reproducing and emulating music of admitted genius?  Can you produce a cogent analysis of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony that actually defines and describes what's happening in it?  Can you analyze a modern piece of music and tell us to our satisfaction that, despite our love and admiration for it, it's actually no good?

[Gurn Blanston]

How can you discern that?  Have you spent as much time as, say, Karl Henning, Mark Simon, I or the other professional musicians here in studying, reproducing and emulating music of admitted genius?  Can you produce a cogent analysis of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony that actually defines and describes what's happening in it?  Can you analyze a modern piece of music and tell us to our satisfaction that, despite our love and admiration for it, it's actually no good?

I can't actually see you because of the online thing, Jo; is there a wall in front of you that you're talking to? 



----------------
Listening to:
Ensemble 415 - WAM Sonata in C for Fortepiano 4 Hands K 521 3rd mvmt

[schweitzeralan]

No, it really is that easy.  It is you who are putting forward unecessary abstractions and assumptions about what you can never know: what motivates another human being.

I doubt this is really what is at work.  


Not at all.  How another composer works does not make be feel uncomfortable.  I may not enjoy what s/he writes, but would never judge their method.  Not only would it be pointless and rude for me to do so, but it is their method.


Nothing.


So what?
 

Apparently not, if an entire community chose to dress and talk like that today.  There are communites who live as if large chunks of the last century did not happen: the Amish.  They are doing fine.


It would not matter one bit if someone would believe in those things.  And if those beliefs motivated their artistic work - who are you to deny its relevance?

Says you.


Okay, so you don't like her music; don't listen to her.  I doubt it will change anything about her methods and the enjoyment her audience finds in her music.  But you are not the arbiter of what is acceptable; you have no power to stop Jennifer Higdon from writing the kind of music that is important to her, nor to stop other people from enjoying it.  It seems to me that your indulgence in this regard is even more meaningless than Jennifer Higdon writing music, in your words, "as if large chunks of the past century never happened".

Yes you do; not that it matters to anyone other than you.


Everyone is a creative person.


I doubt this is all that happens in those works you don't approve of.  You are missing what is going on, is all.


Right, and no one is actually writing music exactly like the music of the 19th century.


Strawman.

Yep.

If this makes you happy, go ahead and think those things.  But, someone with your bent could say the piece of 1920 was mimicking a piece from 1870 and the work from 1870 was genuine and the 1920 ne not; and nd so on and so on ...

Interesting "dialogs" addressing the very ideas I had when initiating this thread.   I only wish my tastes and ecumenical  and embracing today were as broad as they were years ago. But, of course, that's my problem.  Music will survive but simply won't be the same.  That I fully understand.