Composers you don't get

[not edward]

Interestingly I heard this exact same combo do this exact same piece in Carnegie Hall earlier in 2000. It was part of a 4-concert Boulez-led mini-fest, with Bartok's Wooden Prince on the second half.

Yep, they played the same four concerts in Edinburgh (went to them all) and London (went to to the Berg/Neuwirth/Mahler one). The London Mahler 6 was probably the best live performance I've ever heard of a Mahler symphony... and what was really rather endearing, given Boulez's "iceman" reputation, was how obviously he was swept along by the occasion, particularly in the finale.

[EigenUser]

I only have "Quatuor pour la fin du temps" and I haven't given it enough listens. I know Xenakis was a student, was Ligeti also? I acquired it before I was really fully interested in modern music, so I suppose it's something else I might enjoy spending time with now.
However, I'm not sure I'd like his solo piano stuff.
Before I got into modern music I was so focused on keyboard music. But now, when it comes to pushing boundaries, I find myself less interested in "avant garde" solo piano stuff, with some exceptions like Cage's prepared piano music and Feldman's pieces. I love Xenakis but took his solo piano pieces off my playlists. I know Ligeti's etudes are much praised.   

Xenakis was a student for a very brief period. Both Boulez and Stockhausen were students of Messiaen, but not Ligeti. Messiaen's Vingt Regards pour l'Enfant Jesus is a great cycle of piano pieces. While I think he started to wear out the whole birdsong thing by the late 1970s,  Oiseaux Exotiques ("Exotic Birds") is a fun, jovial concerto for piano, winds, and percussion. Et Exspecto Resurrection Mortuorum is a masterpiece (yes, I will use that word! ) and also one of the more powerful works I know. I can't wait to get home tomorrow morning because I was notified that my copy of the score arrived, finally. Much of his music is glorious and it is best to listen with an attitude of acceptance for the bombast. The Trois Petites Liturgies and especially the Turangalila-Symphonie are good examples of this. Both include the ondes-Martinot, an early (1930-ish) electronic instrument based off of the same principles as the theramin. His early works like L'Asenscion and Les Offrandes Oubliees are also very well-done and bridge the gap between late Debussy and mature Messiaen.

One of my favourite concert experiences was at the Edinburgh Festival in 2000, when Christian Tetzlaff played the Ligeti violin concerto with the LSO under Boulez. Absolutely fantastic performance, but one of the things that really stuck out was this little old lady coming up to me at the interval, saying "I didn't know modern music could be like that!" and asking me if there were any recordings of the piece.

I think the violin concerto's a great introduction to Ligeti; it's got pretty much everything (including good tunes).

Great story! The first movement is the one that got me hooked with it's shimmering glass-like quality.

Yeah, the tune that opens the 2nd mvt. is one that he apparently liked a lot and kept going back to. It first appears, as far as I know, in Musica ricercata back in the 1950s.

The first time it was used was in an early Sonatina for piano four-hands. It is a beautiful, flowing theme with modal inflections (even more added in the VC).

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

The first time it was used was in an early Sonatina for piano four-hands. It is a beautiful, flowing theme with modal inflections (even more added in the VC).

Interesting to know, thanks. I sometimes wonder if that melody is rooted in his exploration of Hungarian & Romanian folk music which he undertook in the 1940s.

[EigenUser]

Interesting to know, thanks. I sometimes wonder if that melody is rooted in his exploration of Hungarian & Romanian folk music which he undertook in the 1940s.

Here's the Sonatina:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1pfyw8dbbA
You will likely recognize the first movement as well.

The Violin Concerto offers a wider cross-section of his work in comparison, it is very characteristic & representative of not on only his work from the Horn Trio onward, but of his work as a whole. And it's outer movements delve deeply into rhythmic complexity and layering, and the effect is much wilder than anything in the Piano Concerto.

Yeah, all of the rhythmic stuff happens in the first and fifth movements. The VC is more impassioned whereas the PC is very mechanical sounding. I like this because it fits the personalities of the instruments very well.

[Luke]

Coming to this thread very late (or perhaps it was running when I was last active here, years ago....) so forgive me for jumping in the middle of things:

I'm really sorry again about writing the wrong name. I think it'll be a long time until I approach Scriabin again. But I'll be onto Ligeti again soon. I do like Clocks and Clouds, Lux, Lontano...The concertos haven't made any impact on me at all yet.

Above, you said something about being closer to spectral music than to Ligeti's style, but Ligeti, with his super-sophisticated use of harmonics/natural harmonics, is not a million miles away from the spectralists, and that delightful shower of notes that is the opening of the Violin concerto shows that best of all. So maybe give that a go again...and now I read the posts below, I can see that others have recommended the same piece. I also agree with the statement that the Piano and Violin concerti are just as representative of Ligeti as the Requiem, and in fact perhaps more so. Like Messiaen, Ligeti accrued techniques throughout his life but never fully abandoned any, so the later works are more and more fully representative of the man's music. And as much as I love the earlier stuff (and it was the stuff I knew first) the later music, with its playful, ultra-virtuosic humour and its magically managed complexities is just unsurpassable, amongst the most imaginative music ever composed.

As far as Messiaen goes, whoever it was steering clear of the piano music - don't!! Messiaen, like Ligeti, is a compendium of techniques, each very much his own, each somehow belonging together so that, unlike any other composer, he can leap from complexity to simplicity, the purest triads to the densest thickets of atonality, without any jarring. (That's slightly contentious, I'm sure it jars for some, but once one is in the Messiaen soundworld, the whole thing is of a piece, it seems to me). The many enormous multi-movement works are all spectacular encyclopedias of these techniques, and amongst these the Vingt Regards and the Catalogue (i.e. the piano sets) stand very, very high indeed. Try the VR first, though. And watch this, the barn-storming fugue that is its 6th movement, Par lui tout a ete fait, all the way to the end (yes, it's harsh, rebarbative stuff - also immensely, crazily difficult to play - but hang on in there for the pure visceral thrill of it).

Satie is one of my musical gods. For a very small number of his pieces (Socrate above all - this is his one indisputable masterpiece, and it's possibly the least well-known of the great turning-point masterpieces of music, if that isn't a tautology - the Nocturnes, the Gnossiennes, some of the other earlier piano music, and for some of those songs which Karl correctly characterised as salon and which yet go far, far, far beyond that, to my mind).  For his attitude. For what he meant for composer who came after. I don't even think he is a particularly good composer, and neither did he. His importance goes beyond that, for me anyway.

[EigenUser]

Coming to this thread very late (or perhaps it was running when I was last active here, years ago....) so forgive me for jumping in the middle of things:

Above, you said something about being closer to spectral music than to Ligeti's style, but Ligeti, with his super-sophisticated use of harmonics/natural harmonics, is not a million miles away from the spectralists, and that delightful shower of notes that is the opening of the Violin concerto shows that best of all. So maybe give that a go again...and now I read the posts below, I can see that others have recommended the same piece. I also agree with the statement that the Piano and Violin concerti are just as representative of Ligeti as the Requiem, and in fact perhaps more so. Like Messiaen, Ligeti accrued techniques throughout his life but never fully abandoned any, so the later works are more and more fully representative of the man's music. And as much as I love the earlier stuff (and it was the stuff I knew first) the later music, with its playful, ultra-virtuosic humour and its magically managed complexities is just unsurpassable, amongst the most imaginative music ever composed.

As far as Messiaen goes, whoever it was steering clear of the piano music - don't!! Messiaen, like Ligeti, is a compendium of techniques, each very much his own, each somehow belonging together so that, unlike any other composer, he can leap from complexity to simplicity, the purest triads to the densest thickets of atonality, without any jarring. (That's slightly contentious, I'm sure it jars for some, but once one is in the Messiaen soundworld, the whole thing is of a piece, it seems to me). The many enormous multi-movement works are all spectacular encyclopedias of these techniques, and amongst these the Vingt Regards and the Catalogue (i.e. the piano sets) stand very, very high indeed. Try the VR first, though. And watch this, the barn-storming fugue that is its 6th movement, Par lui tout a ete fait, all the way to the end (yes, it's harsh, rebarbative stuff - also immensely, crazily difficult to play - but hang on in there for the pure visceral thrill of it).

Satie is one of my musical gods. For a very small number of his pieces (Socrate above all - this is his one indisputable masterpiece, and it's possibly the least well-known of the great turning-point masterpieces of music, if that isn't a tautology - the Nocturnes, the Gnossiennes, some of the other earlier piano music, and for some of those songs which Karl correctly characterised as salon and which yet go far, far, far beyond that, to my mind).  For his attitude. For what he meant for composer who came after. I don't even think he is a particularly good composer, and neither did he. His importance goes beyond that, for me anyway.

A good friend of mine won a piano competition playing the 10th of the Vingt Regards -- you know -- Regard de l'Espirit de Joie. That is a crazy piece! And he wasn't even a music major -- he's in dental school now! I also love the first one -- so easy that even I can (kind of) play it.

The juxtapositions in Messiaen are exactly what I love about his music so much. Take, for instance, the third of the Trois Petites Liturgies. Each "cycle" (or phrase, I guess) starts with an extremely dissonant and mechanically rhythmic section with ostinatos in the percussion/strings chanting in the chorus. Next, there is a melody that the strings play in unison with the chorus that sounds like it is chasing itself, or running in circles. It abruptly stops, and finally we get a kind of "love-theme" with the strings/ondes/chorus playing diatonic chords. Then the whole cycle repeats for another three times, with some variations (especially the 3rd and 4th repeat). It really almost sounds unappealing when describing it, but he just makes it work somehow.

[North Star]

EigenUser, I'm listening to Trois Petites Liturgies now, and it's a beauty. Like both Luke and you said above, Messiaen is wonderful at moving from consonance to dissonance and back, without making it jarring (in a bad way).

[Brian]

Messiaen is wonderful at moving from consonance to dissonance and back, without making it jarring (in a bad way).

This immediately made me think of
http://www.youtube.com/v/Nv2GgV34qIg

[Karl Henning]

Well, my working title for my Op.123 was "Peace Piece," though I admit I held no great hope that it was at all original.

[Scion7]

Bill Evans rises from the grave . . . "kill, Kill, KILL !!!"

[Luke]

Hi James! Thank you, good to be back. Looking forward to getting involved properly again. 

[Brian]

So, Luke, who are the composers you don't get?

[Karl Henning]

Yeah, keep it on topic, buddy!

[Luke]

I find it an odd phrase, because I don't feel like there are any composers in particular that I don't get, no one to whose music I respond 'what on earth was all that about?' but there are a few who, though I get them, I don't find particularly worth getting. No one particularly exciting, mind you.

And I always remember dismissing Ives as a teenager, for reasons which still make some kind of sense to me, and then discovering that the Concord Sonata, in particular, is nevertheless in fact one of the finest musical creations I know. Humility is the order of the day, then. If I don't like a composer particularly, I've learnt to shut up about it. 








That said - Weber. Wolf's Glen aside, what's the point 

[Karl Henning]

What, you weren't invited to the dance? 

[Luke]

Probably for the best, that...

[mc ukrneal]

I find it an odd phrase, because I don't feel like there are any composers in particular that I don't get, no one to whose music I respond 'what on earth was all that about?' but there are a few who, though I get them, I don't find particularly worth getting. No one particularly exciting, mind you.

And I always remember dismissing Ives as a teenager, for reasons which still make some kind of sense to me, and then discovering that the Concord Sonata, in particular, is nevertheless in fact one of the finest musical creations I know. Humility is the order of the day, then. If I don't like a composer particularly, I've learnt to shut up about it. 

This (the bolded stuff) is what I have been trying to formulate for this thread. Isn't it amazing when the piece you hated one day turns out the next day to be insightful and meaningful?

I actually thought you might name this modern composer, posts on GMG, last name starts with O...  

[Luke]

Well, oddly, and joking aside, I do find him a hard one to fathom, yes.

[Jay F]

If I don't like a composer particularly, I've learnt to shut up about it.

Same here. It's like pumpkin pie. "You don't like it because you haven't tried my pumpkin pie."

No, I just don't like pumpkin pie.

[Karl Henning]

Well, but it is still the fact that you've not tried my pumpkin pie