21st century classical music

[San Antone]

Nice challenge at the end, after apologizing for the obvious gaps in the selection!

Very tempting, I assure you, as some huge names are simply non-existent. Starting with Francis Dhomont. He taught for many years in Montreal, so one entire strand of Canadian electroacoustic music can be attributed to him.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45PQX_2j1Y0&list=TLuUMWpWT0KrpyEhBdqbD0h7Wku_qTaUDk

And the women! All the women who are not on that list. Starting with Pauline Oliveros. Indeed, electroacoustic music is practically--for the past thirty or forty years--the special province of women. Or maybe I just prefer women, so know the female electroacoustic composers better.... Or maybe the women are simply writing better stuff. Hmmmm.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dY6_i26s-U4

This is a recent film by Patrick Bokanowski. Music by Michele Bokanowski.

(sanantonio, you do know that I posted two links awhile back. Post #643. I want to make sure I get credit for those. )

I agree the selection is weighted very heavily with the "big names" (I think they could have reduced the amount of Stockhausen, and added some other composers).  But what a playlist like this offers is an easy way for people who are not experienced with this music to find a lot of very representative music in one place.  Dhomont is an important omission, as are the others you mention. 

I've found posts of yours in other threads with lists of composers which I've appreciated.  Post #643 is another helpful post.  Please, don't hold back.  You are probably the person on GMG who knows the most about new music and I, for one, would very much appreciate your contributions.

[San Antone]

Mauro Lanza

https://www.youtube.com/v/NCZGOlU5oa0

#9

His soundcloud page with more audio clips.

[Sean]

Yes dear, we know.

You are the only person in the world. The only one of any consequence, anyway.

Why do you even bother?

Okay, actually I'm vaguely interested in electronic music, which indeed is still being written. I do think posterity will understand it as another cul-de-sac and another nail in the coffin, but maybe there's a little left to say with it, I don't know...

[some guy]

Posterity is a fancy word for "the grandchildren of grandchildren."

These are not people that I will ever have a chance to meet, as I will have died long before they are born. Long before even their parents are born.

That the suppositious opinions of those people can have any sort of effect on how I listen and what I listen to and what I value today, in my current condition of being alive, takes my breath away.

I cannot know, no one can know, what these as yet unborn people will think about anything we know about. And even if we could, would it really make any difference?

[North Star]

Electronic music is just as much a dead end as that thing with all those hammers that was so popular in the late 18th century.

[Sean]

Posterity is a fancy word for "the grandchildren of grandchildren."

These are not people that I will ever have a chance to meet, as I will have died long before they are born. Long before even their parents are born.

That the suppositious opinions of those people can have any sort of effect on how I listen and what I listen to and what I value today, in my current condition of being alive, takes my breath away.

I cannot know, no one can know, what these as yet unborn people will think about anything we know about. And even if we could, would it really make any difference?

Hello some guy, well I can see you're a man of some sensitivity and judgement, and in touch with real and objective aesthetic experience.

But my point here is that the characters on this thread are making a mistake, although I'm happy to agree to disagree. It's a mistake I made as a headstrong youth when first getting into 20th century music- despite my enthusiasm, older more experienced people at the local music society pointed out that though it is indeed interesting it just doesn't compare in depth and potential of interpretive richness with the great works of the repertory.

And once we take a few steps back from the thicket we're in and take a look a the wood properly we see that of course modernism in music has only really worked when allied to established tonal principles that the human ear and mind understands, such as in Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Messiaen and others.

The rest is rather trivial if curious expressive areas people have found rummaging in the post-Schoenbergian decadence and silliness.

[San Antone]

Ansgar Beste

https://www.youtube.com/v/jn2a7OPrCYc

"Pèlerinage Fantastique" (2010) for prepared string quartet.  2011-03-12, Kairos Quartet in Klosterneuburg / Vienna (Aut), final concert of ZEITklang competition 2011.

[Sean]

Sean .. its everywhere though, you'd have to live in a cave not to notice, and in fact it could be easily argued that music that just ONLY uses traditional instruments & practices is cul-de-sac. Electronic music & media is far more widespread and prevalent today in comparison, and its formed its own evolution, history and tradition. By far the most fruitful of all the avant gardes experiments was the development of electronic music.

No, this is the big intellectual trap. It's when we attend to music on music's own terms that we find a tremendous range of expression, not when false harmonic systems are concocted in its place under confused ideas of finding new idioms.

The literary parallel in modernism is with the likes of Joyce and the deeply confused idea of altering the terms of language itself, instead of just saying something new with it, resulting in meaninglessness. And remember all this garbage is pushed by academics way up in towers separated from reality who don't engage with artworks on any personal level.

Or take the dramatic switch to tonality centred on the 1590s- it had been assumed that harmonic variety issued from using a variety of modes, but no, once composers noticed there was something much more communicative about only two then they developed the set of 24 keys all using those same progressions to exploit this amazing new aesthetic realm. And nobody with any sense bothered with the other modes for 300 years and certainly not with the similar possible sets of keys within them.

Here's Shiva dancing freely but circumscribed by a circle of fire, the mind never straying beyond its core reference to truth out into intellectual groundlessness- he stands on the demon of ignorance and foolishness.

[San Antone]

Lucia Ronchetti

https://www.youtube.com/v/1HGurfyE38I

Le Palais du silence (extrait)

Too bad this is just an excerpt; I'd love to hear the entire work.

[some guy]

despite my enthusiasm, older more experienced people at the local music society pointed out that though it is indeed interesting it just doesn't compare in depth and potential of interpretive richness with the great works of the repertory.

Well, there's the problem right there. When you were young and impressionable, you allowed the prejudices of some older people to impress you way too much.

You should have kept listening to music.

You should have taken your own advice, which is to attend to music on its own terms. This is precisely what you have NOT done. Quite the contrary. You have accepted a view of what "music" should do, have internalized that view, and then have listened to music with this idea in mind. But not all music does those things. There is other music, with other terms. And you have demonstrated over and over again that music that does not follow a particular set of terms--not its terms but something else's terms--is somehow inferior or less valuable.

My best advice to you is to take your own advice, and attend to every single piece you hear ON ITS OWN TERMS. Not your terms, not some other piece's terms, not on the terms of "the great works of the repertory." ITS terms.

It's good advice, Sean. Take it.

[Sean]

some guy

My best advice to you is to take your own advice, and attend to every single piece you hear ON ITS OWN TERMS. Not your terms, not some other piece's terms, not on the terms of "the great works of the repertory." ITS terms.

Okay, I guess you're right there. Nothing like empirical observation free of preconceptions and baggage. We agree on something...

James, very well, I'm probably not as up to date as you with the electroacoustics. I do recommend however Brian Eno's Thursday afternoon, Apollo and Music for airports...

[Sean]

By the way I wonder if Jonty Harrison is still composing, I met him a couple of times years ago at Birmingham University- he's an artist and was coming up with some really interesting use of natural sounds.

[San Antone]

My best advice to you is to take your own advice, and attend to every single piece you hear ON ITS OWN TERMS. Not your terms, not some other piece's terms, not on the terms of "the great works of the repertory." ITS terms.

Yep.   

[San Antone]

Brian Ferneyhough

https://www.youtube.com/v/s5cMRabf14Q

Renvoi/ Shards (2008) for quarter-tone guitar and quarter-tone vibraphone, played by asamisimasa (ensemble).

Renvoi / Shards: fragments of delay, revision, regeneration.  "Emerging from a babble of miniscule, disconnected figural constructs, the discourse obsessively seeks to unravel its own Gordian knot in order to arrive back at a primal state it never started from."

[San Antone]

Brian Ferneyhough

https://www.youtube.com/v/xANR6U5CLG8

Liber Scintillarum (2012) for flute, oboe, clarinet, violin, viola, cello.

[some guy]

I certainly hope Jonty is still composing.

I haven't kept up with him as I should. I've kept up with a couple of his students.

I'll be right back, though.

[...]

I didn't find any recent Jonty on youtube, but I did find an electroacoustic channel that has many of the people that did not make that other list. Put those two lists together, you've got a pretty decent overview of the past 70 years or so.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3db0bMg9GI0&list=PLD099C32FB32E9E1E

[jochanaan]

... not when false harmonic systems are concocted in its place under confused ideas of finding new idioms....Or take the dramatic switch to tonality centred on the 1590s- it had been assumed that harmonic variety issued from using a variety of modes, but no, once composers noticed there was something much more communicative about only two then they developed the set of 24 keys all using those same progressions to exploit this amazing new aesthetic realm. And nobody with any sense bothered with the other modes for 300 years and certainly not with the similar possible sets of keys within them...

Do you not see the internal contradiction here, Sean?  Tonality as it's practiced now is just as artificial as 12-tone serialism.  The only "natural" system possible is one based on the harmonic series; anything else is a variant or a construct.  And any instrument except the human body (voice, hands and feet for rhythm) is as artificial as a synthesizer.  But it is obvious that, with these "artificial" means, musicians have created music that moves souls.  So why not use any and all means to make music?

[Sean]

jochanaan, tonality is defined by a reference to acoustic consonance and dissonance, meaning a huge range of harmony and music is possible. Once you move away from the basic understanding however that music needs to respect the experience of frequently coinciding wave peaks as agreeable and euphonious and replace everything with an intellectual scheme then you really are in an Emperor's New Clothes procession making its way down the road. This is the situation today where the arts, if not our civilization, have done everything else and are exhausted.

You can't use any and all means to make music because music has a natural reference- and indeed it's that objectivity which provides for its truth content...

[petrarch]

jochanaan, tonality is defined by a reference to acoustic consonance and dissonance

(...)

You can't use any and all means to make music because music has a natural reference- and indeed it's that objectivity which provides for its truth content...

Except that "reference" isn't fixed nor unchanging. Consonance and dissonance are fluid concepts that have changed over time.

[jochanaan]

Except that "reference" isn't fixed nor unchanging. Consonance and dissonance are fluid concepts that have changed over time.

Indeed.  It is said that tonality began to break down almost as soon as it was fully developed; some even point to J.S. Bach as one of the agents of its breakdown.  After all, the dissonances in such music as the famous Toccata and Fugue in d are considerable...