Where have the Great Composers gone?

[SeptimalTritone]

Most of the examples I posted were 12 tone. People were asking what similarities there were between Brahms and Schoenberg, even Schoenberg's 12-tone music, and I gave them. Andante and Florestan, you should have checked them out, given that you asked the question.

Although nobody, unless they had the prior knowledge already, would be able to distinguish, say Schoenberg's piano works op 25 and 33 as 12-tone while his piano works op 11 and 23 as free-atonal, or the variations for orchestra as 12-tone while the five pieces for orchestra as free-atonal, I'm sure that Andante really meant that he didn't like these works in general. Which is fine- it is not necessary to find Schoenberg or post-op 10 to one's liking, and I don't think that there's any sort of listener deficiency or lack of desire to go outside one's comfort zone as sanantonio suggested. Dislike of any kind of music, early or modern, conservative or avant-garde, is perfectly fine. I don't think that listeners have failed composers or avant-garde composers. They just don't like them.

I remember a discussion I had with someone on TC where I explained what was going on in Cage's Water Walk, and other pieces of music or electronic music that heavily relied on everyday sounds. He thought that the sounds had no relation, except if one watched the performance, and even then, the piece wasn't good because the sounds had limited interest. I said that the sounds used were in commentary and dialogue with each other, that steam reflects pouring water, that radio sounds reflected the running sink, that piano sounds reflected the toy bird sounds, and that the affect was similar to a counterpoint of sound, and that such a compositional idea was natural in a post-Webern era. He said that while he understood what I meant, he still didn't like Cage's Water Walk or the musique concrete paradigm in general.

He wasn't the type of person who didn't want to go out of his comfort zone or a narrow-minded person, in fact, he listens to a lot of music. But still, he didn't get much enjoyment out of the music above, even with understanding of what I said. So I don't think that if one were just open-minded, or listening carefully, or lacked implicit bias, that one would then like Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Cage, and others. And even though people often say "I don't like Schoenberg because he used the 12-tone method", what they really mean is "I don't like later Schoenberg after op 10". After all, I've played on youtube to non-music friends Schoenberg and Webern, and they really dislike it, and yet know nothing about atonality or serialism or tone rows, and therefore cannot be biased about it. Yes, I know that the idiom is much less familiar to them, especially because film or pop music is far from the regular chromaticism and melodic-rhythmic angularity of such works, and they therefore could possibly use greater familiarity, but still, it is perfectly legitimate to dislike the entirety of free-atonal expressionism, 12-tone serialism, post-serialism... and avant-garde electronic music, whether it be concrete, minimal, noise, or incorporated in a chamber instrumental ensemble. It is not the result of ignorance or narrow-mindedness, and even if they are, in fact, less pre-familiar with the idiom, they still can dislike it all, and yet be good listeners.

[Cato]

I don't know about anyone else, but I prefer to expand my comfort zone rather than keep it small...........

Good for you!  You are therefore (most probably) a member of The Remnant, who were mentioned above. 0:)

[Mahlerian]

Sure, people aren't used to listening to music as dense as Schoenberg's.  Contemporary popular music has such a severe deficit of harmonic richness and counterpoint that anything which cannot possibly be reduced to melody+accompaniment will sound chaotic or at the least overly busy.  The potential to enjoy Schoenberg is still there for everyone though.  There's no categorical difference between Op. 10 and Op. 11, or Op. 26 and Op. 4, so if someone enjoys some Schoenberg works, they're already open to his style.

Also, you must see that people reaching for the 12-tone method as an explanation of why they dislike certain works are not approaching them correctly.  It would be a fairer world to Schoenberg's music if suddenly no one knew anything about how it was put together and just listened.  It's music like any other music, but the idea of the 12-tone method or serialism or some other bugbear prevents them from even accepting that much.

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

Sure, people aren't used to listening to music as dense as Schoenberg's.  Contemporary popular music has such a severe deficit of harmonic richness and counterpoint that anything which cannot possibly be reduced to melody+accompaniment will sound chaotic or at the least overly busy.  The potential to enjoy Schoenberg is still there for everyone though.  There's no categorical difference between Op. 10 and Op. 11, or Op. 26 and Op. 4, so if someone enjoys some Schoenberg works, they're already open to his style.

Also, you must see that people reaching for the 12-tone method as an explanation of why they dislike certain works are not approaching them correctly.  It would be a fairer world to Schoenberg's music if suddenly no one knew anything about how it was put together and just listened.  It's music like any other music, but the idea of the 12-tone method or serialism or some other bugbear prevents them from even accepting that much.

Completely agree with you here. I have never understood the need for people to bother with learning theory to listen to music. Familiarity with the aesthetic is all it usually takes, and that it why many people enjoy pop music. They are familiar with it. Personally I can't really distinguish one song from another or be able to put names of artists to songs they sing, apart from a few songs that I do like to listen to every now and then. Typically when I hear a Beyonce song (or whoever is most popular at the moment) I can't remember how it went after the song ends...

[SeptimalTritone]

Sure, people aren't used to listening to music as dense as Schoenberg's.  Contemporary popular music has such a severe deficit of harmonic richness and counterpoint that anything which cannot possibly be reduced to melody+accompaniment will sound chaotic or at the least overly busy.  The potential to enjoy Schoenberg is still there for everyone though.  There's no categorical difference between Op. 10 and Op. 11, or Op. 26 and Op. 4, so if someone enjoys some Schoenberg works, they're already open to his style.

Also, you must see that people reaching for the 12-tone method as an explanation of why they dislike certain works are not approaching them correctly.  It would be a fairer world to Schoenberg's music if suddenly no one knew anything about how it was put together and just listened.  It's music like any other music, but the idea of the 12-tone method or serialism or some other bugbear prevents them from even accepting that much.

Regarding your second paragraph, people who are completely ignorant of the 12-tone method give similar responses of dislike! I would imagine that those who initially did not know would go look up that it's 12-tone, and then say, oh 12-tone music isn't good. I don't think bias or wrong information plays that strong of a factor. Remember that I said that I explained very clearly to someone how Cage's Water Walk worked, and he even understood and thanked me for clarifying the goal of the piece, but still didn't like it at all. In other words, he got the proper intellectual clarity, and still didn't like it! Remember that I said that I've played 12-tone Schoenberg and Webern to people blind, to people who know nothing of serialism.

I've actually also played the beginning of Feldman's 2nd quartet blind, and it's just dissonance to them, even though that opening is just a gentle and simple simultaneity of C#, D#, and E slowly tossed between the instruments! One person said "Not the dissonance again!" Another person even asked me "Is this also Webern?" Clearly, they are just lost and are trying to latch onto some concept, any concept that is, and I don't think they are letting the idea of splattering tone rows onto the page interfere. I know that that's what historically happened and that people in Schoenberg's time disapproved of his music when learning about his methods, and I can see the possibility of that still today, but for a lot of people certain highly avant-garde music is all just way past their emotional sensibilities, even to our a-la-carte friend who got what I was saying about Cage's Water Walk, but still didn't like it.

I think that there is a greater contrapuntal density, melodic angularity, faster harmonic rhythm, rhythmic angularity, rate of textural shift, and more difficult burden to structurally remember and recall in the 12 tone works over the late romantic and free atonal works. They are perhaps not qualitatively more difficult, but quantitatively more difficult.

It took me a very long time to get Boulez, but I just as easily could have stopped persuing his music. Given that there's no way to demonstrate that Boulez is in fact good rather than merely technically skilled, it is equally valid to not like him. After all, you don't like Ferneyhough very much, even though lots of people in university music spheres, and avant-garde ensembles like the Arditti quartet and Intercontemporain ensemble are very into him, seeing him as a top composer. Is, therefore, your not liking him something that you ought to change, and that "you have the potential, but just gotta try harder and get more acclimated?" When is musical dislike legit, and when is it bias and lack of familiarity?

[Mahlerian]

Regarding your second paragraph, people who are completely ignorant of the 12-tone method give similar responses of dislike! I would imagine that those who initially did not know would go look up that it's 12-tone, and then say, oh 12-tone music isn't good. I don't think bias or wrong information plays that strong of a factor. Remember that I said that I explained very clearly to someone how Cage's Water Walk worked, and he even understood and thanked me for clarifying the goal of the piece, but still didn't like it at all. In other words, he got the proper intellectual clarity, and still didn't like it! Remember that I said that I've played 12-tone Schoenberg and Webern to people blind, to people who know nothing of serialism.

You're arguing a different point.  I did not say that their bias was the root of their dislike, but rather that they project their dislike onto their idea of the method and that creates their bias.

I think that there is a greater contrapuntal density, melodic angularity, faster harmonic rhythm, rhythmic angularity, rate of textural shift, and more difficult burden to structurally remember and recall in the 12 tone works over the late romantic and free atonal works. They are perhaps not qualitatively more difficult, but quantitatively more difficult.

I did not personally find this to be the case at all.  I found Pelleas und Melisande was one of the last Schoenberg works to open up to me, while the Op. 50 choral works or Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene were among the pieces that drew me to him in the first place, simply because of what he was doing musically.  It sounded good.

I think it would be difficult to argue that Op. 25, for instance (not predominantly 12-tone, but still) has a higher rate of harmonic change or is particularly difficult to grasp compared to the E major Chamber Symphony, which is difficult in every single way a piece of music can be.

It took me a very long time to get Boulez, but I just as easily could have stopped persuing his music. Given that there's no way to demonstrate that Boulez is in fact good rather than merely technically skilled, it is equally valid to not like him. After all, you don't like Ferneyhough very much, even though lots of people in university music spheres, and avant-garde ensembles like the Arditti quartet and Intercontemporain ensemble are very into him, seeing him as a top composer. Is, therefore, your not liking him something that you ought to change, and that "you have the potential, but just gotta try harder and get more acclimated?" When is musical dislike legit, and when is it bias and lack of familiarity?

I don't go around saying that Ferneyhough's techniques are objectively inferior or any such nonsense.

[SeptimalTritone]

Regarding the claim of techniques being objectively inferior or the negativity toward technique creating bias, one simply has to excuse their lack of intellectual maturity. It sucks, but it is useless to battle them, for I've never, ever, seen anyone set that 12-tone music isn't a good method change their mind.

Still, for a lot of people, Schoenberg, or if not that Stockhausen and Xenakis, just doesn't sound good, and they didn't know beforehand of any of their methods. Sure familiarity helps, but if they don't like it they won't want to become familiar, and if they aren't familiar they won't like it, and if they don't like it they won't want to become familiar, and so on.

It really took me a lot of powering through displeasure to like Schoenberg and a lot of others. Even with my knowledge that Schoenberg in particular was an evolution of late romanticism and that some of Stockhausen and Boulez were a post-serialism, it was just painful to listen to for many months, and I did it simply because I wanted to be modern and not a plebeian. I would power through what was to me cold, complex, and unintelligible musical code at the expense of pleasure in order to be modern, and the whole way I was listening carefully and really trying to get it but not liking it. I eventually did like the music, even to the point of greater pleasure than with common practice, but most people aren't going to want to do that.

Regarding the rate of harmonic rhythm, I see what you mean. The chamber symphony goes through a wide harmonic space, while the piano suite sort of sticks to its three tetrachords or 12-tone ostinati with a greater rhythmic regularity. You're right. I still think it takes a very long time to recognize the harmonic-melodic regularity of the latter piece or even get pleasure from it. And at the risk of giving ammo to anti-Schoenbergists, studying op 25 and discussing it here has taught me and continued to teach me a lot about 12-tone linearity, sequence, and harmonic rhythm of entire 12-tone groups, and made it clear to me the regularity of its tonal motion or what that even meant. Actually, op 25 is almost comparatively square and swashbuckling, and I think I never would have thought that before. But if people eventually enjoy Schoenberg (who still only gets two pages of hits compared to the six pages of hits of either Debussy, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bartok, and Shostakovitch on that website you've shown), there's still a long ways to go for someone like Boulez to be widely enjoyed, and even a longer ways to go with someone like Lachenmann.

[amw]

The Op. 25 suite is the work on which I changed my mind about Schoenberg—when we had to analyse it in Literature & Materials of Music class I found it absolutely boring, not just because of dissonance—lots of that in Beethoven and Bartók, my favourite composers of the time—but because instead of the relentless rhythmic drive of those two, or any memorable thematic ideas, we just had a highly formalised structure where nothing made intuitive sense aurally even if it seemed to make sense in analysis. Much of the rest of Schoenberg's mature work seemed similar, just typically without such an evident structure. When I came back to the suite was after having listened to and become familiar with a good deal of the neoclassical repertoire as well as most of the works of J.S. Bach. At this point it seemed much more transparent that the suite was a neo-baroque homage and I could understand everything else, including its lack of drama or surface excitement, within this context. I could also listen somewhat better for the models Schoenberg was using in his other works and therefore understand them within that context, even if I didn't necessarily find the surface of the music particularly appealing. Rather than active listening to Schoenberg himself, I think appreciation just took finding other "avant-garde" composers whose works I liked instantly, and exploring their output extensively, and then coming away from that with a wider palate.

[Mirror Image]

To further a point in amw's excellent post, I think it should be noted, and is obvious, that not everyone listens the same way. Quite frankly, I don't really care what compositional methods Schoenberg or his disciples used as this isn't really what Schoenberg wanted in the first place for the listener. He saw himself as part of the Romantic tradition. Yes, on the surface this music can seem uncompromising, but the expression is what really tells the story here. Schoenberg once said "My music isn't modern it's merely badly played." This could be interpreted from several angles, but what I take away from the quote is that musicians are always over-analyzing, over-thinking, and turning this what I would deem "heart-on-sleeve' music into some kind of academic exercise. The reason, IMHO, that many people think Schoenberg's music is not easy on the ear is because their perception of his music is it's this dissonant, ugly wall of sound when the fact is you can't approach every composer with the same kind of mental checklist. I mean I get that there are people that just genuinely dislike his music, but, for me, the more I kept an open-mind, the more his music started clicking for me. I think if anyone is willing to approach his music without any kind of preconceived notions, then I think there's a possibility they will find something to enjoy. If anything, this music takes us into an eerie, darker emotional world that you just can't get into any other way. Look beyond Verklarte Nacht, folks! There's a whole new musical world out there!

[Mahlerian]

Regarding the claim of techniques being objectively inferior or the negativity toward technique creating bias, one simply has to excuse their lack of intellectual maturity. It sucks, but it is useless to battle them, for I've never, ever, seen anyone set that 12-tone music isn't a good method change their mind.

You've failed to notice the experiences of several people on TC, including Mirror Image and Weston (who is not a member here).  Even you, who continue to be skeptical of the method although you enjoy the music created using it.

It really took me a lot of powering through displeasure to like Schoenberg and a lot of others. Even with my knowledge that Schoenberg in particular was an evolution of late romanticism and that some of Stockhausen and Boulez were a post-serialism, it was just painful to listen to for many months, and I did it simply because I wanted to be modern and not a plebeian. I would power through what was to me cold, complex, and unintelligible musical code at the expense of pleasure in order to be modern, and the whole way I was listening carefully and really trying to get it but not liking it. I eventually did like the music, even to the point of greater pleasure than with common practice, but most people aren't going to want to do that.

See, that was not how it was for me at all.  I was fascinated by the music, and even though I couldn't follow much of it at first, the parts that drew me in kept me there.  I think you would be as wrong to generalize from your experience as I would be to generalize from my own.

I never made the silly assumption that composers were going out of their way to be modern or shocking for its own sake.  Even a brief glimpse over the words of those composers would disprove that notion; the only reason it continues to be held onto by some stubborn individuals is because of their willful ignorance.

Regarding the rate of harmonic rhythm, I see what you mean. The chamber symphony goes through a wide harmonic space, while the piano suite sort of sticks to its three tetrachords or 12-tone ostinati with a greater rhythmic regularity. You're right. I still think it takes a very long time to recognize the harmonic-melodic regularity of the latter piece or even get pleasure from it.

For YOU.  Your experience is not normative.  The music is pleasurable on its own, and can be enjoyed on a first hearing for one who is sufficiently familiar with the idiom.

And at the risk of giving ammo to anti-Schoenbergists, studying op 25 and discussing it here has taught me and continued to teach me a lot about 12-tone linearity, sequence, and harmonic rhythm of entire 12-tone groups, and made it clear to me the regularity of its tonal motion or what that even meant. Actually, op 25 is almost comparatively square and swashbuckling, and I think I never would have thought that before. But if people eventually enjoy Schoenberg (who still only gets two pages of hits compared to the six pages of hits of either Debussy, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bartok, and Shostakovitch on that website you've shown), there's still a long ways to go for someone like Boulez to be widely enjoyed, and even a longer ways to go with someone like Lachenmann.

Why should saying that studying the music gave you better understanding of how it was put together give ammo to people who are against Schoenberg?  It's the same for any music.  You have some odd hangups about serialism.  Stop treating it as if it's some other category of things and just hear it and perceive it as music.

As for popular understanding and acceptance, give it time.  Schoenberg is more popular than plenty of other composers from his era, and once anti-modernists move on to the next "horror," they'll forget completely about how horrible Schoenberg was supposed to be and treat him as if he was always really accepted by audiences, just as they have with all of the composers you just mentioned.  I think you underestimate the extent to which ideas control perception; if Schoenberg is treated as a respected classic and his music is played and listened to like a respected classic, he will be a respected classic.  If he's treated as a distant, difficult avant-gardist, then he will be perceived and received that way.

[SeptimalTritone]

You've failed to notice the experiences of several people on TC, including Mirror Image and Weston (who is not a member here).  Even you, who continue to be skeptical of the method although you enjoy the music created using it.

Ouch! When books or articles have given only limited guidelines for linear tone row structures, one would wonder how it actually works. I can't just take word for it that it works without having any idea. I really, really apologize and eternally regret even asking how it works. How can I ask questions and express skepticism of my own knowledge and understanding if it is to be treated as an opposition to it? This is frightening and terrifying for someone who wants to learn. I'm not kidding.

I actually recently put up the quadruple canon of the sixth movement of Webern's cantata 2 up. My theory about that is that this particular canon works by the linear and diagonal (but still linear) webbing of 014 and 015 linear patterns. The linear tone row just within itself, as well as the webbings between the voices, has a large number of 014s and 015s. Bumping up or down even one voice causes problems for that, regardless of octaves. Of course, there is also a larger symmetrical structure of inversion-crab canon together at the same time governing the larger scale, but there's also a microstructure. See how I learned something by working out my own doubts? If I had just accepted that it worked I wouldn't have been able to figure this out.

When one learns things, one has to be critical of how they organize things in their mind. I don't have an "odd skepticism". If you present anyone with a knowledge of common practice counterpoint the Webern canon, they would want to know what sort of forces make it work. I am listening to it as music, and always have! Yet I want to know what makes it work. I have always been initially skeptical of everything, even the idea that in common practice music the first inversion triad should be treated as a consonant passing and the second inversion triad as a dissonance to the dominant took a while to figure out in my mind. I don't have "odd hangups" and am not some contrarian: I have had doubts and questions for everything I learn and think about, and am not a skeptic! I want to better learn serialism, not be a skeptic of it!

[Mahlerian]

Ouch! When books or articles have given only limited guidelines for linear tone row structures, one would wonder how it actually works. I can't just take word for it that it works without having any idea. I really, really apologize and eternally regret even asking how it works. How can I ask questions and express skepticism of my own knowledge and understanding if it is to be treated as an opposition to it? This is frightening and terrifying for someone who wants to learn. I'm not kidding.

That's not what you seem to be expressing.  You seem to be questioning the basis of the pieces in question and challenging anyone to disagree.  I can't tell you how serialism works any more than I can tell you how common practice tonality works.  I could explain what is done, sure, but that's not what you're asking.  Nobody knows exactly why or how common practice tonality works.  Why should you expect them to be able to understand something more recent and more poorly understood?

I actually recently put up the quadruple canon of the sixth movement of Webern's cantata 2 up. My theory about that is that this particular canon works by the linear and diagonal (but still linear) webbing of 013 and 014 linear patterns. The linear tone row just within itself, as well as the webbings between the voices, has a large number of 013s and 014s. Bumping up or down even one voice causes problems for that, regardless of octaves. Of course, there is also a larger symmetrical structure of inversion-crab canon together at the same time governing the larger scale, but there's also a microstructure. See how I learned something by working out my own doubts? If I had just accepted that it worked I wouldn't have been able to figure this out.

When one learns things, one has to be critical of how they organize things in their mind. I don't have an "odd skepticism". If you present anyone with a knowledge of common practice counterpoint the Webern canon, they would want to know what sort of forces make it work. I am listening to it as music, and always have! Yet I want to know what makes it work. I have always been initially skeptical of everything, even the idea that in common practice music the first inversion triad should be treated as a consonant passing and the second inversion triad as a dissonance to the dominant took a while to figure out in my mind. I don't have "odd hangups" and am not some contrarian: I have had doubts and questions for everything I learn and think about, and am not a skeptic! I want to better learn serialism, not be a skeptic of it!

But you have always been a skeptic.  You don't even trust your own perception of the music to know that it works, and you almost assume that it doesn't and everyone else is being fooled.  You're asking bizarrely specific questions which only have answers on a case-by-case basis as if they're axiomatic principles of serialism.  There are as many ways to write serial music as there are serial composers.  You're never going to discover the one true serial method that will solve all of your problems, and you're just going to keep being suspicious of everything as long as you search for that one true method that nobody can provide.

[arpeggio]

I have understood the basic structure of 12-tone music since I was in high school.  In spite of the this knowledge I did not get Schoenberg until I was in my fifties.

I like the aleatoric music of Lutoslawski but I do not get Xanakis.

Why? I do not have the foggiest idea.

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

Analysing a piece of music is not going to give us any concrete answer of how notes 'work' but it may be enjoyable and give an insight into t he creative mind of a composer or help with interpreting a piece of music. Scepticism for how triads, intervals, pitches etc work in various styles of music is probably more suited to coming up with questions in like with music psychology rather than music theory.....Music theory is descriptive and can be rather subjective as well, it isn't really supposed to be treated like a science.....

[Karl Henning]

For YOU.  Your experience is not normative.  The music is pleasurable on its own, and can be enjoyed on a first hearing for one who is sufficiently familiar with the idiom.

Footnote:  It is always possible that someone finds the music attractive, just because they do, orthogonal to prior familiarity with the idiom.  Probably most of us have some experience with finding something whose idiom was an entire novelty to us, immediately engaging and attractive.

[Cato]

I don't have "odd hangups" and am not some contrarian: I have had doubts and questions for everything I learn and think about, and am not a skeptic! I want to better learn serialism, not be a skeptic of it!

Then I would advise that you listen to it!    And listen to it without thinking about it analytically: you are frustrating yourself, it would seem, by wanting to find a "key" of some sort to understand it.

Perhaps check out the symphonies of Fartein Valen and certain works by Nikos Skalkottas (e.g. the Largo Sinfonico) or the serial works of Ernst Krenek: try listening to them in neutral so to speak, and allow your unconscious to "understand" them.

Allow me to repeat the very basic advice I received from Alexander Tcherepnin, when I was in your very state of befuddlement!  "You must listen to more music."  He did not advise me to analyze more music, but simply to listen without worrying about structure or technique.

Do you know the story where someone deduced the tone row for Moses und Aron and came to Schoenberg to tell him about it?  The composer, however, was dubious about the whole effort, and really saw no point to it.

For your consideration:  Fartein Valen Symphony #2

https://www.youtube.com/v/NDcMuyPWl1s

[Cato]

For the Skalkottas, I found this:

[asin]B0000268PO[/asin]

NAXOS allows one to hear it online...for a fee, I would assume! 0:)

http://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=bis-cd-904

[Gaspard de la nuit]

Coming from a popular music background until I was 25yo, it was actually Schoenberg that interested me most when I first started listening to classical music. It had nothing to do with what methods he was using to compose, I just thought it sounded dark and unique. Back then, I always thought classical music sounded so safe and predictable. I had no idea how aggressive it could be. As someone coming from a punk background, this impressed me greatly. I've always felt that new music shouldn't conform to predetermined standards. We should always be looking for new sounds. How it is made is only secondary to how it is perceived.

[violadude]

There is nothing natural about music -- of any kind.  "Natural" and "natural-sounding" are simply inadmissible as part of any discussion or argument about music because, sorry, it is as false a premise as it is a wildly invalid one.

There is nothing natural about music and the very materials from which it is made, its scales (of varying amounts of tones per octave, modes, tunings); there is nothing natural about the forms it takes, whether simple folk-song like formats, dance forms, or more elaborate forms.

There is nothing natural about any particular scale, its tuning, the harmonic system upon which music is based; nothing natural about, say, the concept of a leading tone, resolutions, etc.

Music -- folk, traditional, classical, pop, from any culture (i.e. "Ethnic music,") -- all of it as we have it and know it, is wholly based upon a cumulative body of conceits.

The only reason people routinely could think to say one sort of music sounds 'natural' and another sort does not is their relative degrees of familiarity with one (the one they think sounds natural) and lack of familiarity with another (the one they claim is not natural.)

There is not much which is made by man that is not more utterly synthetic, contrived, and artificial, as, say, a piece of music by J.S. Bach -- or truly, any piece of music by any other composer.

I just wanted to take this fallacious premise of natural / unnatural out of the running in the discussion on any kind of repertoire from any era. It often comes up, is based on the very false assumption that there is anything natural-sounding about "the repertoire with which I am familiar," while there just is not.


Best regards.

Been reading through this thread, this post stuck out to me.

I agree with the general spirit of your post M. Croche, but I have always come at it from the direct opposite approach. The separation of humans and animals, civilization and the wild, natural and man made, is a completely false illusion that we have invented, most likely, simply because we have become aware of our own consciousness and therefore consciously view ourselves in a separate light. But it's false. Humans are evolved animals and in that sense are no different than anything else on the planet. When a lion roars, do we call it unnatural? When a monkey uses a stick as a primitive tool is it unnatural? No, it is merely a natural part of their particular set of behaviors. So too, I believe, that making music is a natural part of a human's behavior. Therefore, rather than no music is natural, I think the opposite is true, all music is natural.

So, too, all human behavior and products of such, I believe, are natural. But maybe that's for another discussion.

Maybe a petty distinction, as it all amounts to the same thing, but I like to "hear myself talk" sometimes. 

[violadude]

--Kingsley Amis

The fact is this: the true heirs of the Western classical music tradition are not Schoenberg and his acolytes but rather the likes of Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, Radiohead etc. These sort are the equivalent of the great or good "composers" of the previous eras.

It seems to me, to say that Bob Dylan, The Beatles etc...are the true heirs of the Western Classical Tradition is to ignore the unique qualities of either. Classical Music is very different from pop/rock. The latter is not heir to the former simply because both use tradic harmonic structures and somewhat regular rhythmic structures.