What's Your Favorite Modern Piano Sonata?

[Simula]

I listened to Vine No.1. The work is interesting, but in my mind, is at times confused. This sounds like a student piece to me, all technicality zero heart and soul, wannabe innovation. I properly redeemed this noise with music: Sibelius piano sonata in F major.    

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

I listened to Vine No.1. The work is interesting, but in my mind, is at times confused. This sounds like a student piece to me, all technicality zero heart and soul, wannabe innovation. I properly redeemed this noise with music: Sibelius piano sonata in F major.    

I listened to Sibelius piano sonata in F major. The work is interesting, but in my mind, is at times confused. This sounds like a student piece to me, all technicality zero heart and soul, wannabe innovation. I properly redeemed this noise with music: Vine no. 1  

Honestly I feel that the Sibelius has more in common with typical student compositions of his time. Vine's sonata was composed for Sydney Dance Company, and I can really hear how it would work with choreography....plus as a piece of music I find it very inventive in its use of quartal harmony and its complex melodic writing. It could hardly be a student work.

[kishnevi]

Boulez's 2nd is incredible, can listen to that alone for days!   

Currently listening to Charles Rosen's recording of Boulez 1 and 3 (the one made au seance de compositeur).  Certainty nothing to be musically despised there.

[Simula]

Honestly I feel that the Sibelius has more in common with typical student compositions of his time. Vine's sonata was composed for Sydney Dance Company, and I can really hear how it would work with choreography....plus as a piece of music I find it very inventive in its use of quartal harmony and its complex melodic writing. It could hardly be a student work.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

[Mandryka]

I tried to find Norgard's 2nd but could not find it on youtube, however I did come across Bartok's corniest piece of work, his Sonatine. God spare me! A bunch of juvenile riffs, nothing more.

I'll send it to you.

[Karl Henning]

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

It would be a funny world, if we all heard music the same.

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

It would be a funny world, if we all heard music the same.

You should compile a book of your Henningisms!

[North Star]

You should compile a book of your Henningisms!

*pounds the table*

[Karl Henning]

(* bows *)

[Cato]

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

...ear... ?   

You should compile a book of your Henningisms!

And the titles of his works!  0:)  To quote Bill and Ted: "Most excellent, Dude!" 

[Monsieur Croche]

I am having a problem with the word "modern." 

Ah, but if only all those damned composers would have timed their birth, life and working years and their deaths to neatly coincide with the named historic eras and those dates!

Then there would be no such question or confusion about whether Beethoven was a classical composer or a romantic one, lol (It is classical all the way where Luigi is concerned.)

How inconvenient that the Groves girls and boys, after a decade or more of discussion, moved the starting date of the Modern Era from 1900 to 1890, that occasioned by the existence of Debussy, the first 'modern' composer.' Inconvenient too that Mahler, Saint-Saens, Satie and so many others' lifetimes spanned the late 19th and 20th centuries...

Of course if people weren't such mentally lazy slobs, they'd do a little more independent thinking and assess / suss out some rather obvious differences in both approach, technical aspects of harmonic usage, etc. and then these puzzles resulting from being both lazy and literal about the name of an era and what that actually denotes would not exist.

So, yeah, 'Modern' cut and dried and without any nuanced applied thought = 1890 to 1975; 'Contemporary' era = 1975 to present.

Without further elaboration, technically, anything written within those time slots falls under the label -- and if one doesn't think further that composers earlier work and later work often show very different aspects, and that each composer is writing in their own manner as they wanted and could within those dates... lol, and again even "between" the modern and contemporary eras, with some composers damnably happening to have had / having active careers spanning pre and post 1975....

Well, what a world: what a strain on the brain


Best regards.

[Karl Henning]

You're asking to see my birth certificate (the long form), right? 

[Monsieur Croche]

You're asking to see my birth certificate (the long form), right? 

How else can it possibly be determined that your work is contemporary music, eh?

[Simula]

I'm surprised no one mentioned the Berg Sonata, full tilt romantic.

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

I'm surprised no one mentioned the Berg Sonata, full tilt romantic.

Probably because it's 'full tilt romantic' and thats not what first comes to mind when we think 'modern'

[Simula]

Probably because it's 'full tilt romantic' and thats not what first comes to mind when we think 'modern'

The Berg Sonata will always be modern to me, it is a far cry from Beethoven or Mozart.

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

The Berg Sonata will always be modern to me, it is a far cry from Beethoven or Mozart.

Ok then

I often find that music written more than 30 years ago sounds very much 'outside of my time.' Sort of like looking at old artefacts in a museum. Everything from the 2nd viennese school is like this for me.

[Karl Henning]

I am having a problem with the word "modern." 


https://www.youtube.com/v/9AiRrz3Udks

The Berg Sonata will always be modern to me, it is a far cry from Beethoven or Mozart.

....

Sent from my SCH-I545 using Tapatalk

[kishnevi]

Ok then

I often find that music written more than 30 years ago sounds very much 'outside of my time.' Sort of like looking at old artefacts in a museum. Everything from the 2nd viennese school is like this for me.

All is relative.  The year I was your current age was the year Part wrote Spiegel im Spiegel, Stockhausen embarked upon Licht, and Ligeti premiered the original version of Le Grand Macabre, Barber wrote his Third Essay, and Arnold premiered his Eighth Symphony.  And Donna Summer was steaming up the charts. Among a bunch of other things.  For you they are outside your time, but for me they are contemporary.

(To be fair, of all those I mentioned, I only knew about Barber and Summer when I was 19.)

[Monsieur Croche]

Ok then

I often find that music written more than 30 years ago sounds very much 'outside of my time.' Sort of like looking at old artefacts in a museum. Everything from the 2nd viennese school is like this for me.

Everything 'dates,' i.e. Guillaume de Machaut or Bach or Mozart or Beethoven or Berg or Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Sibelius, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Berio, Messiaen, etc.... well, you catch the drift. The rest of the issue sits in whether the likes of, say, Handel, Haydn or any of the past composers (or even works of the very recent past) 'still speak to us.'

That thirty years ago of yours is very near that seismic shift from 'older school' Modern Era to the Contemporary era, 1975, lol. Interesting timing on the part of your parents and their opus one, two, etc. children :-)