Communication: a vital essence of music

[some guy]

In another thread, composer Shulamit Ran was mentioned as having won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990.

Clicking on her name in that post sends you here--http://shulamitran.wordpress.com/-- where you can read this, among other things:

"Shulamit Ran has never forgotten that a vital essence of composition is communication."

[Edit: I wrote a bunch of stuff about this to get things started. Then deleted it. Maybe for later....]

[Karl Henning]

Well, I don't know.

What does (can) the music communicate, apart from itself?

[North Star]

What does (can) the music communicate, apart from itself?

But maybe that is enough.

[Karl Henning]

Oh, I hope so!

[Ken B]

Well, I don't know.

What does (can) the music communicate, apart from itself?

1. The listener's unworthiness.
2. A lesson in the ill effects of subsidies.

OH SORRY.  I thought I was on the Boulez thread. Please disregard.

[jochanaan]

To any of us that have been in a concert, whether as performer or listener, it is obvious that some communication is going on. Where we disagree is in what is being communicated and how. My own sense is that the communication is below, or above, or beside that which language communicates.

[Lisztianwagner]

Well, I don't know.

What does (can) the music communicate, apart from itself?

It sounds like a stravinskian answer.

[Madiel]

1. The listener's unworthiness.
2. A lesson in the ill effects of subsidies.

OH SORRY.  I thought I was on the Boulez thread. Please disregard.

Well, on point 1 I think you're right. I've seen, from more than one source, evidence that there was a certain period of time when avant-garde composers openly revelled in being incomprehensible, and treated with disdain any composer who sullied themselves by actually trying to communicate with their audience. They thought it was a job well done if an audience member indicated that they didn't understand the work and that it was all just 'noise'.

The truth lies somewhere in between spoon-feeding people the musical equivalent of "See Jane. See Jane run." and giving them something in a new 'alphabet' the composer expressly invented for the purpose of laughing at the audience for not understanding said alphabet.

[amw]

Well, on point 1 I think you're right. I've seen, from more than one source, evidence that there was a certain period of time when avant-garde composers openly revelled in being incomprehensible, and treated with disdain any composer who sullied themselves by actually trying to communicate with their audience.

It would be nice if you could present these sources for our edification.

[Ken B]

It would be nice if you could present these sources for our edification.

You too young to remember or just kidding?

The tools are at hand: google, "Boulez quotations",
"Epater les bourgeois"

[Madiel]

I don't have a library of television documentaries to hand just now. But, along with Ken's Google suggestions, you can also try 'Darmstadt school' or similar.

[some guy]

I hate to see things go off the rails so soon. But, oh well.

I've seen, from more than one source, evidence that there was a certain period of time when avant-garde composers openly revelled in being incomprehensible, and treated with disdain any composer who sullied themselves by actually trying to communicate with their audience. They thought it was a job well done if an audience member indicated that they didn't understand the work and that it was all just 'noise'.

Too bad. I would venture to guess that your "sources" are all disaffected listeners who repeat the same made up kinds of stories. I know of no period when avant garde composers openly revelled in being incomprehensible. Think about it for just a second. Who would do this? Perhaps some rebellious teenager thumbing his nose at the man? Can you image a mature, professional composer doing this? I suppose it's just possible, but really, a certain period when everyone was doing this?

The truth lies somewhere in between spoon-feeding people the musical equivalent of "See Jane. See Jane run." and giving them something in a new 'alphabet' the composer expressly invented for the purpose of laughing at the audience for not understanding said alphabet.

The truth lies somewhere completely different, I'd say. For one, while the musical equivalent of "See Jane. See Jane run" may indeed exist, that other stinker is nothing more than just that, a stinker. Again, imagine this out in some detail. Composers, en masse, inventing new alphabets for the express purpose of laughing at the audience? Wow. Some serious hostility being expressed there, and not by the composers.[/quote]

This isn't adequately known, despite plenty of documentary evidence, but the anti-modern sentiment started up around the turn of the century. The nineteenth century. Over a hundred years before either Schoenberg or Stravinsky did any of their earliest modernist works. Over a hundred years. Think of it. If anything were a response to anything else, a much likelier possibility was that composers decided that nothing they did would ever woo hostile audiences back and so they might as well just do whatever they wanted.

And, to get things back on track, I do think the idea of "communication" helps fuel the anti-modernist agenda. Music is supposed to be comprehensible, that is, it's supposed to be something that someone with very conservative tastes can listen to without getting angry. I recently heard a person go off about Britten's sea interludes as an example of headache-inducing modernist noise that should never be performed in the concert hall and another person go off on how inexpressibly hideous the latest effort from Lowell Liebermann was. So don't think for a second that your favorite mild-mannered neo-tonalist is going to escape the wrath of the truly anti.

If the point of art is to make something, to create a thing that would not otherwise exist, then while this thing is new, it is going to seem incomprehensible to some people. That it seems that way only to some, and that incomprehensible pieces from the past have managed to get into the repertory quite nicely (Tchaikovsky's violin concerto, anyone?), means that perhaps incomprehensible is both temporary and individual specific. Anything that one human can make, anything, is potentially comprehensible to another human being. If you're not that human being, oh well. Your bad experience is certainly valid for you. For anyone else, well, maybe not, eh?

[Ken B]

I hate to see things go off the rails so soon. But, oh well.Too bad. I would venture to guess that your "sources" are all disaffected listeners who repeat the same made up kinds of stories. I know of no period when avant garde composers openly revelled in being incomprehensible. Think about it for just a second. Who would do this? Perhaps some rebellious teenager thumbing his nose at the man? Can you image a mature, professional composer doing this? I suppose it's just possible, but really, a certain period when everyone was doing this?
The truth lies somewhere completely different, I'd say. For one, while the musical equivalent of "See Jane. See Jane run" may indeed exist, that other stinker is nothing more than just that, a stinker. Again, imagine this out in some detail. Composers, en masse, inventing new alphabets for the express purpose of laughing at the audience? Wow. Some serious hostility being expressed there, and not by the composers.

This isn't adequately known, despite plenty of documentary evidence, but the anti-modern sentiment started up around the turn of the century. The nineteenth century. Over a hundred years before either Schoenberg or Stravinsky did any of their earliest modernist works. Over a hundred years. Think of it. If anything were a response to anything else, a much likelier possibility was that composers decided that nothing they did would ever woo hostile audiences back and so they might as well just do whatever they wanted.

And, to get things back on track, I do think the idea of "communication" helps fuel the anti-modernist agenda. Music is supposed to be comprehensible, that is, it's supposed to be something that someone with very conservative tastes can listen to without getting angry. I recently heard a person go off about Britten's sea interludes as an example of headache-inducing modernist noise that should never be performed in the concert hall and another person go off on how inexpressibly hideous the latest effort from Lowell Liebermann was. So don't think for a second that your favorite mild-mannered neo-tonalist is going to escape the wrath of the truly anti.

If the point of art is to make something, to create a thing that would not otherwise exist, then while this thing is new, it is going to seem incomprehensible to some people. That it seems that way only to some, and that incomprehensible pieces from the past have managed to get into the repertory quite nicely (Tchaikovsky's violin concerto, anyone?), means that perhaps incomprehensible is both temporary and individual specific. Anything that one human can make, anything, is potentially comprehensible to another human being. If you're not that human being, oh well. Your bad experience is certainly valid for you. For anyone else, well, maybe not, eh?

That's a long response. Time better spent googling I fear. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Cares_if_You_Listen

[EigenUser]

Just dropping by with some quotes from today's birthday boy. Don't shoot the messenger! 

Any musician who has not experienced - I do not say understood, but truly experienced - the necessity of dodecaphonic music is USELESS. For his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of his epoch.

Ouch!

"It is not enough to deface the Mona Lisa because that does not kill the Mona Lisa. All art of the past must be destroyed."

Seems like an over-reaction to me...

Stupid, stupid, stupid! [on the music of Verdi]

Geez! Not surprising, considering he suggested that opera houses should be burned down...

"The more I grow, the more I detach myself from other composers... in my opinion we must get rid of [history] once and for all."

He should join GMG! Seriously, though, he is a fun person to quote.

Of course, this is only one composer and it obviously wouldn't be anywhere-near fair to say he represents the 20th-century avant-garde. It appears that he's also mellowed out significantly over the past 20 years. More recently:

"Certainly I was a bully. I'm not ashamed of it at all. The hostility of the establishment to what you were able to do in the Forties and Fifties was very strong. Sometimes you have to fight against your society."

[Cato]

It sounds like a stravinskian answer.

Close: I believe Igor's comment in his Poetics was that the music of a fugue had no meaning outside of itself. 

[amw]

You too young to remember or just kidding?

Neither.

Pierre Boulez said some polemical things sixty years ago. I do not see how that is remotely equivalent to an "entire generation of composers" expressly trying to "alienate" audiences and "suppress" all non-avant-garde music as is so often claimed by those who make the case.

One could find plenty of quotes from composers, critics, etc saying negative things about modernism as well. (Britten, Medtner, Beecham, Bernard Shaw, William Sargeant, Henry Pleasants... Daniel Asia?) In fact I suspect those would go back a good deal further than Boulez. Yet no one ever seems to talk about those quotes. It's always just Boulez and one article by Milton Babbitt that doesn't in fact say what you think it does. And those two are considered to be an unstoppable tide of evil serialism crushing everything in its path, even though "avant-garde" music was never something practiced by a majority, or even the mainstream, of composers—at its height it was still limited to the attendees of the Darmstadt Ferienkürse (no one was forced to attend those courses, incidentally), some university departments and the occasional outing at festivals like Warsaw Autumn.

So really... where is the evidence that anyone but Boulez and a couple of his friends wanted to burn down the opera houses? Or that any composer actively tried to alienate their listeners? Where is the avant-garde conspiracy to undermine all neo-tonal, accessible composers? Because I would totally sign up for that conspiracy, it sounds awesome >.>

[some guy]

That's a long response. Time better spent googling I fear. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Cares_if_You_Listen

You have GOT to be kidding.

Do you not know anything about this piece, including having read it so you know what it really says? Surely by now everyone must know that the title is not Babbitt's, that Babbitt himself spent the rest of his life trying to counteract the effects of that title.

Fail.

[Brian]

"Shulamit Ran has never forgotten that a vital essence of composition is communication."

I think the really obvious semantic problem here is that communication is the essence of more or less everything. So long as another person exists in some relationship to you or your work, there is communication. On the train to work this morning, what I wore communicated something to the other commuters; the fact that I forgot my belt communicated; so did the book I was reading; so did my body language, probably. And imagine if I had talked to them!

So I understand Karl's point - that music, as an abstract thing, may not necessarily communicate in the same way of speech. But what if - everything communicates!

[EigenUser]

Well, I don't know.

What does (can) the music communicate, apart from itself?

Skip to 6:55 in the video. I love Stockhausen's response to this question.

"I hope so!" *stands up and leaves interview*

https://youtube.googleapis.com/v/L0-mdPKWGbQ

[Ken B]

You have GOT to be kidding.

Do you not know anything about this piece, including having read it so you know what it really says? Surely by now everyone must know that the title is not Babbitt's, that Babbitt himself spent the rest of his life trying to counteract the effects of that title.

Fail.

The title may or may have been Babbit's but it's a fair summary of the content. Although better would be "they" rather than "you" since Babbitt's intended readership are those who share his disdain.
I'm not going to debate this further. Others can read the wiki article, follow the link, look at Nate's quotes, do the googling.