Where have the Great Composers gone?

[Ghost Sonata]

I've found this discussion to be as important as it is interesting and informative - not the least of which is the encouragement to listen to new work.  I don't, much, and I should.  Esp. grateful for M. Croche's historical sketch of Great Composers' shifting receptions as I've been haunted throughout this thread by the notion that our (at least, my) historical comparisons or conceptions, are founded on slippery ground.  I'm convinced that the very Tradition of Great Composers, an overwhelming, even overbearing one, yet a socio-cultural foundation stone, is playing an historical trick on us by making us feel the lack of such a presence in our own time when we needn't.  Or perhaps you weren't taken in.  Anyway, it's a joke aided and abetted by too exclusive a reverence for the past and a relatively small (but growing, I think), contingent of new music listeners, at least judging from my own hometown orchestra's programming.  I hope we might do better at recognizing greatness than our historical predecessors.  My impression is that our track record is improving!     

[Florestan]

only the test of time can filter out those works which audiences consistently find meaningful and enriching and could qualify for the sobriquet "great".  By test of time, I mean at least a century since the work's debut.

This.

My interest is solely in finding new music and composers whose music appeals to my aestheitc sense.  Period.  I make no claim to being a better judge of music that will be considered great, nor does that goal interest me. My goal is finding music I find interesting, beautiful and which I like to listen to.

And this.

[Karl Henning]

Since I consider the attempt to identify "great" works written in the last 50 years futile and subjective, I choose to ignore that criterion.

I've caught myself in the attempt so to identify.  (I'm not saying I am entirely "beyond" that exercise.  Damn it, the Wuorinen Fourth Concerto is a great piece, it is the resistance which is futile.)

Nor will I suggest that what I have found is necessarily true of others:  that I have come to wonder if the need to have those musical works which I find repeatedly engaging be Great Music, the need to have the composers of those works be Great Composers, may just be a whisper of insecurity on my own part.

Not the Wuorinen, though;  that is simply testimony to marvelous artistry.

[Ghost Sonata]

Since I consider the attempt to identify "great" works written in the last 50 years futile and subjective, I choose to ignore that criterion.  For me, only the test of time can filter out those works which audiences consistently find meaningful and enriching and could qualify for the sobriquet "great".  By test of time, I mean at least a century since the work's debut.

My interest is solely in finding new music and composers whose music appeals to my aestheitc sense.  Period.  I make no claim to being a better judge of music that will be considered great, nor does that goal interest me.  My goal is finding music I find interesting, beautiful and which I like to listen to.

However, for those, like yourself, for whom determining greatness is important - I wish you nothing but good luck and happy hunting in your endeavor.

I agree that the passage of time can or ought to provide better, broader perspective and, one hopes, greater understanding.  Why the hop from half a century to a century - are you suggesting that the process can legitimately begin only after fifty years?

[San Antone]

I agree that the passage of time can or ought to provide better, broader perspective and, one hopes, greater understanding.  Why the hop from half a century to a century - are you suggesting that the process can legitimately begin only after fifty years?

Not really.  I was just making a statement about my idea of "new" music would be music written in the last 50 years.  And then balancing that idea against a second estimate of a span of time for audience reaction to coalesce into some kind of consensus of "greatness" would take a minimum of 100 years.

Just my own estiamtes, YMMV.

[James]

Since I consider the attempt to identify "great" works written in the last 50 years futile and subjective, I choose to ignore that criterion.  For me, only the test of time can filter out those works which audiences consistently find meaningful and enriching and could qualify for the sobriquet "great".  By test of time, I mean at least a century since the work's debut.

Quality & excellence (aka great work) is a criterion I'm always looking for in life. For composition, within the last 50 years it isn't that futile or subjective at all.

My interest is solely in finding new music and composers whose music appeals to my aesthetic sense.  Period.  I make no claim to being a better judge of music that will be considered great, nor does that goal interest me.  My goal is finding music I find interesting, beautiful and which I like to listen to.

Absorbing great work is my aesthetic, I love the benefits. It's constantly inspiring and a reminder that people can do great things, that perhaps we aren't that bad afterall. Great work is usually interesting, beautiful, moving etc.

[San Antone]

Quality & excellence (aka great work) is a criterion I'm always looking for in life. For composition, within the last 50 years it isn't that futile or subjective at all.

It is my view that these qualties are subjective and what to you is a work exhibiting "quality and exellence =  great", may not stike another person the same way.   I do not consider any individual's opinion definitive, no matter their training, experience, or background.  Which is why, for me, determining "greatness" can only be done by collective consensus over a long span of time.

Absorbing great work is my aesthetic, I love the benefits. It's constantly inspiring and a reminder that people can do great things, that perhaps we aren't that bad afterall. Great work is usually interesting, beautiful, moving etc.

I find your use of the work "great" superfluous and will often derail a discussion with people arguing over the justification for calling a work "great" instead of simply discussing the relative merits of the music.

[Monsieur Croche]

"What kind of beast would like this piece on first hearing?"

https://www.youtube.com/v/uTAJOBn73GA


Enjoy, and best regards.

[Karl Henning]

I find your use of the work "great" superfluous and will often derail a discussion with people arguing over the justification for calling a work "great" instead of simply discussing the relative merits of the music.

Exactly.  One could (and perhaps ought to) simply say:

Absorbing music is my aesthetic, I love the benefits. It's constantly inspiring and a reminder that people can do great things, that perhaps we aren't that bad after all. Music is usually interesting, beautiful, moving &c.

[Karl Henning]

https://www.youtube.com/v/uTAJOBn73GA

Enjoy, and best regards.

That is great fun!  (I can hear the echo of my voice-major classmates at Wooster complaining, There's no melody! but in no way do i hold that against it.)

[Florestan]

It is my view that these qualties are subjective and what to you is a work exhibiting "quality and exellence =  great", may not stike another person the same way.

Word.

I do not consider any individual's opinion definitive, no matter their training, experience, or background.  Which is why, for me, determining "greatness" can only be done by collective consensus over a long span of time.

+ 1.

And, of course, music does not have to be "great" in the sense you defined "greatness" in order to be enjoyed. Witness the excellent Chandos series "Contemporaries of Mozart".

As I said in another thread, life´s too short to concentrate only on greatness. 

[Karl Henning]

As I said in another thread, life´s too short to concentrate only on greatness. 

Maybe some have short attention spans  0:)

[San Antone]

And, of course, music does not have to be "great" in the sense you defined "greatness" in order to be enjoyed. Witness the excellent Chandos series "Contemporaries of Mozart".

As I said in another thread, life´s too short to concentrate only on greatness. 

I agree 110%.

[Monsieur Croche]

I agree that the passage of time can or ought to provide better, broader perspective and, one hopes, greater understanding.  Why the hop from half a century to a century - are you suggesting that the process can legitimately begin only after fifty years?

Why wait until you are dead to, uh, then get an interstellar eMail telling you 'what the cognoscenti and audiences a hundred years hence' have finally decided and declared was the better and best from that life you were in before you left it?  Makes 0 sense to me :-)

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

Tell that to Samuel Wesley!
Honestly though, J.S. Bach's 80-year disappearance from memory is very exaggerated to the point of it now being one of the more infamous musical myths.

You are correct about this - JSB never went out of style among musicians, even during the Classical Period. (Beethoven as a boy was playing the Well-Tempered Clavier from memory, and was even written up in a local paper for doing so.)

But I think the overall thrust of M. Croche's post is accurate.

[SeptimalTritone]

Okay, thanks for replying. If I understand you correctly you draw a distinction between the intrinsic value of a work, which is a matter of aesthetics and technical/theoretical analysis and as such cannot be assessed but by specialists, and its enjoyment value, which does not require any special knowledge from the general audience.

So far, so good. We are in perfect agreement.

With this in mind and with your permission, let´s return to the two statements of yours that triggered my original reaction.

The first:

My question is: why is this so? We have two bodies of works, Schoenberg´s late SQs and Debussy´s Preludes, whose intrinsic value has long since been established by the specialists as being very high in both cases --- yet they ellicit markedly different, and strongly emotional, reactions from casual listeners. What makes the difference in the end?

For the first question, Schoenberg's much lesser diatonicism and triadicism, much lesser degree of repetition or imperfect repetition (with yet the burden of needing to perceive regularity and recall in often sonata form or sonata form-ish movements), much greater linear contrapuntal density, much greater quantity of melodic wide leaps, and much greater rhythmic irregularity. All of these elements, especially acting together at the same time, make it much less comprehensible, and therefore enjoyable, to casual listeners. The comprehending and liking amongst the general classical audience could change, and of course I would welcome that in the same way I would welcome more people in the world listening to Mozart and Beethoven, but it doesn't change, as you pointed out, the intrinsic aesthetic value, which is only evaluatable by technical analysis, whether it be in the case of Beethoven, Debussy, Schoenberg, or living composers.

When I was a (complete) beginner of 20th century music, I found Dallapiccola's piano music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb6PxV6f4C4 to be much more enjoyable than Schoenberg's piano suite, or other earlier/later piano works. Both the Dallapiccola and Schoenberg piano suite in particular are 12-tone, but the Dallapiccola was a much better experience. Not to diss on Dallapiccola now, because his sparser and largely tertian chord spacing textures are really good, but they were more enjoyable and comprehensible for me initially. Not to say that Schoenberg ought to be liked of course (aesthetic judgements are neither normative nor descriptive judgements of pleasure, for I don't hold any negative statement the popularity of pop music nor put judgement on people liking pop music, but aesthetic judgments).

The second:


Assuming for the sake of discussion that this is true, would you please explain me in what way(s) the aesthetic dimension of this (Sachiko M, Yoshihide, and Nakamura)

is broader and wider than the aesthetic dimesnion of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfOJCKN148M

TIA.

Your first question was good, and it illustrated understanding of my point. I don't agree with the premises of the second question, and it contains a misunderstanding and misreading of my earlier post, in its whole. I never said that a given modern piece is broader and wider than a given earlier piece. Schumann's music is not broader and wider than Mozart's music, but different as spaghetti and kabobs are. The same goes for Bartok, Sachiko M, Ockeghem, and Wagner when compared with each other. As I explained in detail in my earlier post, they are incommensurate objects. Together, they expand the aesthetic library of music.

So, the aesthetic achievement of the Sachiko M is different. As far as what that is, the point-like sparseness of the sounds, the palette of sounds: pitch, noise, glitch, microsound, and timbre, the independence of those sounds from melodic line, the extreme freedom of their time scale, the quasi-statsitical nature of their distribution that provides unpredictability over the course of half a minute, but a kind of predictability over a few minutes, and yet an unpredictability over the course of tens of minutes... these kinds of things are incommensurate with the goals of the Bartok! It is a good thing that the Sachiko M uses these elemenets, and it is a good thing that the Bartok doesn't use thee elements.

[SeptimalTritone]

This is wonderful post, especially in the clarity with which you explain your position. At the same time, coming from a background of aesthetic philosophy in the visual arts, I feel that you are using both the terms "aesthetic" and "evaluation" very differently from how I would, and I'm wondering if your usage is common in musicological circles. To me, what you are referring to as "aesthetic evaluation" is what I would call description or analysis (rather than evaluation) of formal or structural (but precisely not "aesthetic") qualities. Now, I can imagine such description or analysis (of instabilities, resolutions, etc.) being used as the basis for a system of evaluation (whereby greater complexity of such patterns of instability and resolution, for example, would constitute a "better" work). But since evaluation to me implies making a judgment, you haven't actually described the criteria on which such a judgment would be made.

Thank you. I will try to explain my opinion on the subtle differences you pointed out. Yes, a lot of what I talked about is mechanical "play by play" evaluation. Music theorists don't actually think, though, that "greater complexity of such patterns of instability and resolution, for example, would constitute a "better" work". For one, instability and resolution means very, very different things depending the composer, and indeed, even in a given piece, different kinds of patterns exist. A lot of pieces aren't so strongly tied kinds of instability and resolution, see my post on Japanese noise music above, for example. Second, complexity (or even stratification, or structuring) of said content isn't a good thing per se as Monsieur Croche pointed out, but a kind of aesthetic that may be chosen, and the analyzer is to point it out when it occurs. Maybe it's better to say that a piece is good, by mechanistic consideration, if it realizes that mechanism's full potential, or close to full potential.

And finally, even with pieces with very similar goals or styles, especially pieces of the same composer, it's philosophically difficult to made claims of better using purely mechanistic considerations. It's somewhat imprecise. Beethoven's late quartets are mechanistically unrankable amongst themselves, but are probably mechanistically rankable above the middle and early quartets.

Now, the term "aesthetic" is even trickier, as different historic thinkers have proposed very different definitions. I tend to think of Kant as a starting point; he claimed aesthetic judgment to reside in a kind of middle ground between the subjective and the objective (and aesthetic judgment, for him, could involve neither sensual gratification, which was too subjective and particular, nor adequacy to some concept or purpose, which would be too objective and universal). What you are labeling "aesthetic" seems to fall into the second (objective) category, to me. Whether it's really possible or even desirable to avoid those two aspects of judgments, such avoidance is arguably the basis for considering "the aesthetic" to be independent mode of experience, reducible neither to subjective opinion nor objective fact.

None of this is meant to challenge the content of your post, as what you describe may well be the best way to analyze music, and could provide a perfectly valid way of making judgments. I just wouldn't call such judgments "aesthetic." I also am not so sure I see any need to grant more or less value to classical or "art music" in relation to rap or pop, but I certainly agree that it is worthwhile to draw distinctions at the structural levels you describe.

OK. This is important. The evaluations and aesthetic statements I'm talking about do have subjectivity. They are not purely objective and universal, because that's not possible. What I mean is this: the events and mechanisms are traceable objectively by sheet music analysis. The salience of those events on psycho-acoustic response is not so bulletproof objective. But the concept of salience is greatly important for music theory, for good music theory is informed by salience!

For example, the mirror fugues in Bach's Art of Fugue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-g5mT8p00o are first played normally, then inverted. While the inversion of the entire given fugue entails a lot of structurally intricate and shapely qualities, the actual salience of such a procedure is an imperfect recollection of the themes and motifs that the inverted fugue recalls from the initial fugue, brought to light in a new context, and recalling similar devices in the earlier contrapunctus movements in Bach's entire Art of Fugue. It is important for music theory to make that claim of salience, even though salience is somewhat subjective.

For another example, take the post-serial procedures of Boulez's La Marteau sans Maitre. The post-serial procedures used are very intricate: take a tone row, divide it up in different but related ways, and take those pieces and pitch-multiply them into sets. Then take that matrix of sets, and go through it in a certain order. This is very intricate, but the actual salient affect doesn't pick up tit-for-tat on this structure. Rather, the affect is of a dialogue of harmony and line of instruments, with a quasi-statistical feel of half similarity, and half stochasticism. And indeed, Boulez decided to modify about 10% of the notes from the mathematical procedure. He understood the quasi-statistical regularity and emergence.

Generally, take the messy concept of motivic recall. Certain motivic recall is obvious and consciously perceived by the listener, and certain motivic recall is not obvious and consciously perceived, but structurally important. Which is conscious and which is subconscious is subjective and listener dependent, but good music theory tries to recognize some kind of difference in salience. Also, music theory writing, while as much as possible tries to treat, for example, harmony and rhythm as a unity, tends to "divide and conquer" when explaining its mechanisms in words, and then it's hard to tell which mechanical attributes out of the many that are occurring at once are the most salient and important to the listener's psycho-acoustic response.

Psycho-acoustic salience, while subjective, is inseparable from the description of mechanistic clockwork. Psycho-acoustic salience is also non-rigorously treated... we do not use brain scans to inform music theory. And yet psycho-acoustic salience's subjectivity isn't nearly as subjective as musical taste. Why? Because generally listeners who do like a given piece of music have similar experiences, and the subjectivity is in whether two listeners will, in fact, both like it.

[Ghost Sonata]

Why wait until you are dead to, uh, then get an interstellar eMail telling you 'what the cognoscenti and audiences a hundred years hence' have finally decided and declared was the better and best from that life you were in before you left it?  Makes 0 sense to me :-)

I can sympathize with but not completely subscribe to sanantonio's approach with its emphasis on Music for Enjoyment, that is, after all, music's raison d'etre (leaving aside economic needs of composers). And I believe he's right - time provides perspective. For greater details on his MO, best consult with sanantonio.  He cannot, of course, entirely eliminate himself from the process. If he buys recordings of contemporary composers he will naturally gravitate toward composers  he most enjoys and will be voting with his dollars.  Whether that vote constitutes one for greatness, amusement, or astonishment gets lost in the process, but gets counted. The effect is admittedly a small one in the market place but philosophically relevant to the discussion. The downside of his approach, to me, is that many of us would like to have some input into the equation, smaller or greater, and there is also something to be said for fully appreciating a composer in his or her lifetime (though sanantonio's approach may be a personal one and not prescriptive - dunno.)

[San Antone]

I can sympathize with but not completely subscribe to sanantonio's approach with its emphasis on Music for Enjoyment, that is, after all, music's raison d'etre (leaving aside economic needs of composers). And I believe he's right - time provides perspective. For greater details on his MO, best consult with sanantonio.  He cannot, of course, entirely eliminate himself from the process. If he buys recordings of contemporary composers he will naturally gravitate toward composers  he most enjoys and will be voting with his dollars.  Whether that vote constitutes one for greatness, amusement, or astonishment gets lost in the process, but gets counted. The effect is admittedly a small one in the market place but philosophically relevant to the discussion. The downside of his approach, to me, is that many of us would like to have some input into the equation, smaller or greater, and there is also something to be said for fully appreciating a composer in his or her lifetime (though sanantonio's approach may be a personal one and not prescriptive - dunno.)

I don't subscribe to the idea that music should be rated as good, better, best ... great.  It just does not matter to me whether someone (or everyone) considers a work great or horrible.  I listen to a lot of music because I am curious about what is being written, or has been written - in a variety of styles.  Most of it I enjoy at some level; some I love to listen to.  I never ever think if it is great or not great.  Just how my brain works.

I am most definitely not offering a proscriptive to anyone else.   But this thread seemed to be going down the well worn path of deciding which composers have risen to greatness.   All I was doing was making the observation that if that determination is going to be made, then I think it takes the passage of a good amount of time so that we can receive a consensus opinion.

But if I enjoy a work and someone (or a whole lot of people; or if Pierre Boulez) tells me it is great - it does not change how I enjoy it; nor would it change my opinion of the work if someone (or a whole lot of people; or if Pierre Boulez) told me the opposite.

[Florestan]

For the first question, Schoenberg's much lesser diatonicism and triadicism, much lesser degree of repetition or imperfect repetition (with yet the burden of needing to perceive regularity and recall in often sonata form or sonata form-ish movements), much greater linear contrapuntal density, much greater quantity of melodic wide leaps, and much greater rhythmic irregularity.

All the above pertain to the aesthetic/technical/theoretical plane --- and as such it does not answer my question: given two works on the same aesthetic/technical/theorical plane, one enraptures casual listeners, the other makes them wince in pain --- the difference is obviously make by an extra-aesthetic/technical/theorical ingredient. Which one?

So, the aesthetic achievement of the Sachiko M is different. As far as what that is, the point-like sparseness of the sounds, the palette of sounds: pitch, noise, glitch, microsound, and timbre, the independence of those sounds from melodic line, the extreme freedom of their time scale, the quasi-statsitical nature of their distribution that provides unpredictability over the course of half a minute, but a kind of predictability over a few minutes, and yet an unpredictability over the course of tens of minutes... these kinds of things are incommensurate with the goals of the Bartok! It is a good thing that the Sachiko M uses these elemenets, and it is a good thing that the Bartok doesn't use thee elements.

When all this aesthetical/technical/theoretical analysis is said and done, my sincere, honest and frank opinion remains the same: Bartok means music, whereas 

I sincerely apologize to you or anyone else who feel offended by it, but I cannot help it, I had to say it loudly and publicly.

Thank you. I will try to explain my opinion on the subtle differences you pointed out. Yes, a lot of what I talked about is mechanical "play by play" evaluation. Music theorists don't actually think, though, that "greater complexity of such patterns of instability and resolution, for example, would constitute a "better" work". For one, instability and resolution means very, very different things depending the composer, and indeed, even in a given piece, different kinds of patterns exist. A lot of pieces aren't so strongly tied kinds of instability and resolution, see my post on Japanese noise music above, for example. Second, complexity (or even stratification, or structuring) of said content isn't a good thing per se as Monsieur Croche pointed out, but a kind of aesthetic that may be chosen, and the analyzer is to point it out when it occurs. Maybe it's better to say that a piece is good, by mechanistic consideration, if it realizes that mechanism's full potential, or close to full potential.

And finally, even with pieces with very similar goals or styles, especially pieces of the same composer, it's philosophically difficult to made claims of better using purely mechanistic considerations. It's somewhat imprecise. Beethoven's late quartets are mechanistically unrankable amongst themselves, but are probably mechanistically rankable above the middle and early quartets.

OK. This is important. The evaluations and aesthetic statements I'm talking about do have subjectivity. They are not purely objective and universal, because that's not possible. What I mean is this: the events and mechanisms are traceable objectively by sheet music analysis. The salience of those events on psycho-acoustic response is not so bulletproof objective. But the concept of salience is greatly important for music theory, for good music theory is informed by salience!

For example, the mirror fugues in Bach's Art of Fugue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-g5mT8p00o are first played normally, then inverted. While the inversion of the entire given fugue entails a lot of structurally intricate and shapely qualities, the actual salience of such a procedure is an imperfect recollection of the themes and motifs that the inverted fugue recalls from the initial fugue, brought to light in a new context, and recalling similar devices in the earlier contrapunctus movements in Bach's entire Art of Fugue. It is important for music theory to make that claim of salience, even though salience is somewhat subjective.

For another example, take the post-serial procedures of Boulez's La Marteau sans Maitre. The post-serial procedures used are very intricate: take a tone row, divide it up in different but related ways, and take those pieces and pitch-multiply them into sets. Then take that matrix of sets, and go through it in a certain order. This is very intricate, but the actual salient affect doesn't pick up tit-for-tat on this structure. Rather, the affect is of a dialogue of harmony and line of instruments, with a quasi-statistical feel of half similarity, and half stochasticism. And indeed, Boulez decided to modify about 10% of the notes from the mathematical procedure. He understood the quasi-statistical regularity and emergence.

Generally, take the messy concept of motivic recall. Certain motivic recall is obvious and consciously perceived by the listener, and certain motivic recall is not obvious and consciously perceived, but structurally important. Which is conscious and which is subconscious is subjective and listener dependent, but good music theory tries to recognize some kind of difference in salience. Also, music theory writing, while as much as possible tries to treat, for example, harmony and rhythm as a unity, tends to "divide and conquer" when explaining its mechanisms in words, and then it's hard to tell which mechanical attributes out of the many that are occurring at once are the most salient and important to the listener's psycho-acoustic response.

Psycho-acoustic salience, while subjective, is inseparable from the description of mechanistic clockwork. Psycho-acoustic salience is also non-rigorously treated... we do not use brain scans to inform music theory. And yet psycho-acoustic salience's subjectivity isn't nearly as subjective as musical taste. Why? Because generally listeners who do like a given piece of music have similar experiences, and the subjectivity is in whether two listeners will, in fact, both like it.

Undoubtedly, psycho-acoustic salience and mechanistic clockwork were top priorities for Bach and Haydn.

Now if you´ll excuse me, the good clean fun of BWV 1054 is screaming for my attention.

Over and out.