If There Isn't At Least One, Why Not?

[marvinbrown]

Longears: I agree with you on that post-Beethoven interregnum, but it seems neverheless that none of them shook the world to the same degree as Beethoven or, later, Wagner.

  Yes, I believe whole-heartedly that nobody shook the music world quite like Beethoven and later his rightful heir WAGNER.  In the words of Gustav Mahler-"There was only Beethoven and Wagner".  Wagner, a great admirer of Beethoven, intended to pick up where Beethoven left off.  He saw in Beethoven's 9th Symphony the "genesis" of his music dramas, and much like Beethoven he revolutionized music in ways never before imaginable.  In the opera world he surpasses every composer I can think of.

  marvin 

[longears]

What is perhaps more interesting is the wealth of Scandinavians (should we include Miss Bjork?) as candidates for Leading Composer of the 21st Century!

What might be the cause of this? 

a) Sibelius
b) Nielsen

c) As a consequence of a, the very strong composition and conducting programs of the Sibelius Academy.

[longears]

  Yes, I believe whole-heartedly that nobody shook the music world quite like Beethoven and later his rightful heir WAGNER.  In the words of Gustav Mahler-"There was only Beethoven and Wagner".  Wagner, a great admirer of Beethoven, intended to pick up where Beethoven left off.  He saw in Beethoven's 9th Symphony the "genesis" of his music dramas, and much like Beethoven he revolutionized music in ways never before imaginable.  In the opera world he surpasses every composer I can think of.

Don't you mean "Beethoven and his rightful heir Elgar?"

If Wagner intended to pick up where Beethoven left off, then he missed the mark by a country mile.  Beethoven left off with pure music of timeless beauty in the late symphonies, piano sonatas, and string quartets.  Wagner wrote "music dramas" (not operas) in which the music is subservient to the drama (or lethargy, depending on your point of view).

You, of course, are entitled to your opinion, and may take comfort in the fact that many more share your opinion of Wagner than share 71dB's opinion of Elgar.

As for opera, even if we stretch the category to include Wagner's set pieces, he's not even a patch on Mozart, nor, for that matter, on Verdi, Puccini, Rossini, or Strauss.  Of course, not suffering from narcissistic grandiosity, they had the good sense to work with librettists who knew a thing or two about drama, thus produced entertaining works that sparkle with wit and humanity, rather than turgid, stillborn, pretentious monuments to one sad little man's vanity (but he was a genius at self-promotion, I'll sure grant him that!).

[marvinbrown]

Don't you mean "Beethoven and his rightful heir Elgar?"

If Wagner intended to pick up where Beethoven left off, then he missed the mark by a country mile.  Beethoven left off with pure music of timeless beauty in the late symphonies, piano sonatas, and string quartets.  Wagner wrote "music dramas" (not operas) in which the music is subservient to the drama (or lethargy, depending on your point of view).

  If we forget about Wagner for a moment and look at this academically are we to believe that no one was able to match Beethoven's accomplishment in music after his death?  what are we saying here, Beethoven has no heir, has GREAT music ended with Beethoven?  Its a very sad thought and one that I am sure Mahler and Bruckner would not have agreed with.  If not Wagner who then?  and who now in this present age?  Music has changed dramatically after Beethoven's death and the revolutionaries that changed it are Wagner, Mahler, Schoenberg, and countless others, even R. Strauss  contributed as well.  I do recognize GREATNESS in music even after Beethoven. 

By the way I never argued that Wagner was the GREATEST composer to have ever lived but he sure is a front runner for the Greatest opera composer to have ever lived.

  marvin

[some guy]

Greta, I would say that I don't like ugly music, either, were it not that my point is that "ugly" is largely a matter of where you're standing. That is, something you might find ugly, I might find beautiful. And vice versa.

I certainly was not saying that I don't like well-crafted and colorfully orchestrated music, either, but simply that those words (especially when coupled with the words "easily likable," set off a red flag for me.

I too could say I like accessible music, music that's easily likable. But what I'd be referring to would be Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Tudor, Yoshihide, Rowe--folks like that. Music that I find it easy to like. Music that I find accessible. But if you were to say you liked accessible music, meaning Ades or Barber, and I said I liked accessible music, meaning Merzow or Marclay, well you see how we would be talking about very different things even though we were using the same words.

I'm suspicious, at the very least, of discourse that relies on words that can have practically any kind of content, and worse, that uses those words as if they in fact referred to one kind of thing and one only. I like beautiful music as much as you do, you see, but what I find beautiful and what you find beautiful could perhaps be quite different things.

[karlhenning]

If Wagner intended to pick up where Beethoven left off, then he missed the mark by a country mile.

Great question!  I don't think it is so much that Wagner wanted to pick up where Beethoven left off, but that Wagner wanted to legitimize his own work as an "inevitable" Artwork of the Future, by the notion that after Beethoven, music had to go The Wagner Way.

You may think this splitting hairs (and maybe it is);  another way of looking at it, perhaps, is that Wagner picked up on those few bits of Beethoven which he selectively filtered as Important; which is a different matter to seeing all the musical value in the Beethoven oeuvre.

[bwv 1080]

but he sure is a front runner for the Greatest opera composer to have ever lived.

But he is not quite as fast as Mozart in that regard

[marvinbrown]

But he is not quite as fast as Mozart in that regard

  LOL    a very clever remark indeed.


  marvin

[marvinbrown]

Great question!  I don't think it is so much that Wagner wanted to pick up where Beethoven left off, but that Wagner wanted to legitimize his own work as an "inevitable" Artwork of the Future, by the notion that after Beethoven, music had to go The Wagner Way.

  Thank you Karl for explaining it in words that escaped me.

  marvin

[Catison]

Greta, I would say that I don't like ugly music, either, were it not that my point is that "ugly" is largely a matter of where you're standing. That is, something you might find ugly, I might find beautiful. And vice versa.

I certainly was not saying that I don't like well-crafted and colorfully orchestrated music, either, but simply that those words (especially when coupled with the words "easily likable," set off a red flag for me.

I too could say I like accessible music, music that's easily likable. But what I'd be referring to would be Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Tudor, Yoshihide, Rowe--folks like that. Music that I find it easy to like. Music that I find accessible. But if you were to say you liked accessible music, meaning Ades or Barber, and I said I liked accessible music, meaning Merzow or Marclay, well you see how we would be talking about very different things even though we were using the same words.

I'm suspicious, at the very least, of discourse that relies on words that can have practically any kind of content, and worse, that uses those words as if they in fact referred to one kind of thing and one only. I like beautiful music as much as you do, you see, but what I find beautiful and what you find beautiful could perhaps be quite different things.

But I think you are overlooking one of the most valuable resouces in this discussion: the composers themselves.  When it was a taboo 50 years ago, it is now more common then not to hear composers talking about how they write for their audiences.  This really is happening and is a dramatic shift from the rhetoric of the middle 20th Century.  Those composers were writing for their legacy, for a future audience.  They couldn't care what anyone throught about their music.  Now composers are writing for the current audience and hoping for a legacy built upon their current reputation.

As an example, take the violin concertos of Schoenberg and Adams.  The "layers" argument works nicely here.  Schoenberg's outer layer is dominated by its twelve-tone origins.  It is harmonically complex, and its melodies can seem elusive.  Adams' concerto is infused with clanking rhythmic patterns, which about anyone can tap their feet to.  The middle movement has a ground based on Pachebel's Canon, the epidome of accessible music, and the finale is a sparkling color wheel, spinning at breakneck speed.

But looking underneath, the picture is very different.  Adams builds the first movement of his concerto up through a constantly evolving melody.  It is impossible to find a tune, although it feels like one is just under the surface.  The Pachebel ground in the second movement is only superfically there.  The notes are interchanged with beat patterns of three, four, and five shifting around.  On the first hearing it is impossible to judge just how the bass moves next.  (Here is a bassist talking about how irregular a seemingly regular Adams bass part can be.)  And the third, supercharged movement is perpetuo, but with so much synchopation, it is like the violin part pauses at random to catch its breath.  The Schoenberg, for all its expressionistic harmony, is just a Brahms concerto in disguise.  The form could not be more straightfoward.  Schoenberg relied upon the depth of his harmonic language to carry his voice (making him and Stravinsky such antagonists).  His forms were traditional.

So both composers are accessible in their own way: Schoenberg in his forms, Adams in his physical energy.  But which of these is an audience going to respond to more easily?  How many people are going to recognize Brahms in Schoenberg?  How many people are going to tap their feet to Adams?  These are leading questions, but the point is clear.  Adams builds into his music a more immediate impact for his audience.  That isn't coping out, not with the level of detail behind that first impact.

Both the Adams and Schoenberg concertos are some of my favorite pieces of music.  I liked Adams immediately, and I still enjoy revisiting his music.  The energy is palpable and sometimes just plain breathtakingly gorgeous.  Schoenberg required a long journey for me, but one well worth it.  There is little other music that is so beautiful.  I'd call one of these composers accessible, and the other not so much, but the end result is the same.  Composers today are recognizing that.  The words 'challenging', 'rewarding', and 'accessible' don't have to be coupled, like composers half a century ago thought.  It is an old-fashioned thought now, and people like Adams prove it.

[Mystery]

You really think that Holloway is the world's greatest living composer? Better than Kurtag, Dutilleux, Carter?

Perhaps you have a vested interest in saying that - maybe he reads these forums!

Haha fear not, I know the music of not one of them. Anything beyond 1750 is simply not music ;-) However he is my lecturer so perhaps I should be nice, for extra marks/brownie points...

[Josquin des Prez]

Penderecki is difficult, as it could well be him, basing the balance on musical quality as well as everybody knowing his name. The problem with calling him a leading composer of today is that he would be named that for music he composed over 30 years ago.

Except his late chamber music walks all over his early stuff. What, it isn't great unless it's 12 tone?

Schnittke (emotional content) and Ligeti (craft) are my first choice when it comes to contemporary composers. Unless of course were are talking about living ones.

[Catison]

...Music History textbook, titled "The New Accessibility".

Is this Grout?  I absolutely hate the chapters on 20th Century music, and I'm glad he keeps them short.

[some guy]

Catison, it's true that in the post you quote I don't talk about what composers think about audience. But that's because I'm trying to make a point about the discussion in that post, not about the music.

In a previous post, I do talk about composers, about how they want to be understood and heard, all of them. And while all composers do write to a greater or lesser extent for an audience, the makeup of that audience differs from composer to composer. (Tim Hodgkinson doesn't write for the same audience as Rautavaara does.)

For most of the people I know, audience is not primary. Sound is. Once they've done whatever they're going to do with whatever sounds they've chosen, they of course want people to listen to the results and to like them. Only natural. I suppose anyone could be thinking about what other people like, but I suspect for most composers that that's secondary to thinking about their materials and what to do with them. Only makes sense. Your materials are something you know, the clarinet or the violin or the sawtooth wave or the sample of train brakes or whatever. The audience (that great amorphous, indefinable, contradictory beast) is less known--because less knowable.

And just by the way, that taboo you mention is largely illusory, given a spurious sense of reality by being repeated over and over again in history books and music reviews. I know what Babbitt titled his famous (infamous) essay, but I also know (having actually read it) that it's a positive essay with positive advice for composers. It's not a "turn your back on the audience and write for the future" kind of thing at all. No, I'm pretty sure that all composers always have been interested that people respond well to what they do. And I'm pretty sure that all composers always have concentrated on musical concerns when composing.

[EmpNapoleon]

As for opera, even if we stretch the category to include Wagner's set pieces, he's not even a patch on Mozart, nor, for that matter, on Verdi, Puccini, Rossini, or Strauss.  Of course, not suffering from narcissistic grandiosity, they had the good sense to work with librettists who knew a thing or two about drama, thus produced entertaining works that sparkle with wit and humanity, rather than turgid, stillborn, pretentious monuments to one sad little man's vanity (but he was a genius at self-promotion, I'll sure grant him that!).

I hope this Wagner bashing feels good.  Does it calm your vanity and increase your self-promotion?   I love Wagner, but you wrote the above.  You must hear what I can't, you musical genius you.  I know it's not rational to have to begin every post on his forum with "in my opinion," but...

If there isn't at least one, why not?  That's a great question.  Why isn't there a music champion today?

[longears]

  If we forget about Wagner for a moment and look at this academically are we to believe that no one was able to match Beethoven's accomplishment in music after his death?  what are we saying here, Beethoven has no heir, has GREAT music ended with Beethoven?  ...  If not Wagner who then?  and who now in this present age? ... By the way I never argued that Wagner was the GREATEST composer to have ever lived but he sure is a front runner for the Greatest opera  composer to have ever lived.

Great music certainly didn't end with Beethoven, even though I think no one has bettered or even matched his music for solo piano and for string quartet, and only Sibelius surpassed his symphonic work.  Great composers certainly didn't end with Beethoven, either.  For my money, Brahms, Dvorak, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Debussy, Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, and Shostakovich at the very least were great in the same broad sense, and Schubert, Verdi, Puccini, Strauss, Chopin, Berlioz, and, yes, even Wagner were all great in a narrower sense.

Some regard Brahms as LvB's heir.  I don't think anyone after LvB has matched his achievement, and perhaps only Mozart before.  And (as I said earlier) even if you regard Wagner as an opera composer, he wasn't a patch on Mozart.  I also already offered my candidate for the present age: John Adams. 

[marvinbrown]

Great music certainly didn't end with Beethoven, even though I think no one has bettered or even matched his music for solo piano and for string quartet, and only Sibelius surpassed his symphonic work.  Great composers certainly didn't end with Beethoven, either.  For my money, Brahms, Dvorak, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Debussy, Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, and Shostakovich at the very least were great in the same broad sense, and Schubert, Verdi, Puccini, Strauss, Chopin, Berlioz, and, yes, even Wagner were all great in a narrower sense.

Some regard Brahms as LvB's heir.  I don't think anyone after LvB has matched his achievement, and perhaps only Mozart before.  And (as I said earlier) even if you regard Wagner as an opera composer, he wasn't a patch on Mozart.  I also already offered my candidate for the present age: John Adams. 

  Fair enough I will respect your opinion  .

  marvin

[longears]

I hope this Wagner bashing feels good.

Wagner bashing?    I think the comments about his personality are incontrovertible, and the linkage between his character flaws and the flaws in his art seems obvious.   

[marvinbrown]

Wagner bashing?    I think the comments about his personality are incontrovertible, and the linkage between his character flaws and the flaws in his art seems obvious.   

  That comment is uncalled for.


  marvin

[Catison]

Catison, it's true that in the post you quote I don't talk about what composers think about audience. But that's because I'm trying to make a point about the discussion in that post, not about the music.

In a previous post, I do talk about composers, about how they want to be understood and heard, all of them. And while all composers do write to a greater or lesser extent for an audience, the makeup of that audience differs from composer to composer. (Tim Hodgkinson doesn't write for the same audience as Rautavaara does.)

For most of the people I know, audience is not primary. Sound is. Once they've done whatever they're going to do with whatever sounds they've chosen, they of course want people to listen to the results and to like them. Only natural. I suppose anyone could be thinking about what other people like, but I suspect for most composers that that's secondary to thinking about their materials and what to do with them. Only makes sense. Your materials are something you know, the clarinet or the violin or the sawtooth wave or the sample of train brakes or whatever. The audience (that great amorphous, indefinable, contradictory beast) is less known--because less knowable.

The point of my post is that this music-first-audience-second idea is starting to dither away.  Or, to put it more into the modernist perspective, the audience's reaction is influencing the sound world of composers.  The audience may be amorphous, but it is the composer's conception of who that audience might be that directs their sound.  Of course, it has always been this way, but the difference is that in the mid-20th Century, that audience was some unknown distance away, an audience who had evolved enough to get it, but as the evolutionary idea of music is dying, that conceptual audience has retreated from the future into the present.

And just by the way, that taboo you mention is largely illusory, given a spurious sense of reality by being repeated over and over again in history books and music reviews. I know what Babbitt titled his famous (infamous) essay, but I also know (having actually read it) that it's a positive essay with positive advice for composers. It's not a "turn your back on the audience and write for the future" kind of thing at all. No, I'm pretty sure that all composers always have been interested that people respond well to what they do. And I'm pretty sure that all composers always have concentrated on musical concerns when composing.

I have read the Babbitt essay as well.  The essay has been mischaracterized more than Babbitt's music has actually been heard, I would think.  But I wouldn't call it an advice article.  He was defending highly complex music, music so complicated and academic (ewww, bad word) that the audience at the time of its conception would be small.  He was arguing for equal opportunity research for the arts.  Why should physics be allowed to progress unchecked by the opinion of the masses and music not?

This assumes there would be an audience in the future, however.  That is Babbitt's unsaid hypothesis.  Just as the most academic, abstract research into quantum mechanics eventually filters down into the textbooks of high school, the modernist composers assumed that their music would eventually enter the repertoire of the NY Phil.  Webern thought people would be whistling his music, walking down the road to buy milk (sorry, bad joke).  These composers were writing for that unseen audience, just over the horizon.  By this hypothesis, the modern composers were able to create amazing music.  There are a lot of modernist masterpieces written in the 20th Century.  If they were worried about how people around them would judge their music, then they might have composed differently, one never knows. 

But that hypothesis is now horribly old-fashioned.  Composers are, in general, more concerned with how their music is received by the audience of the present, whatever that is, than they have been in the past.  And it is creating a different type of music, not better or worse, just different.

So naturally, to get back to the subject of this thread, the leading composers of our time are going to be more concerned with current audiences.  And hence, in the words of Greta, their music is going to be accessible, but challenging, or complex, but beautiful.  In the post-modern world, those "buts" are important.