Unpopular Opinions

[Florestan]

What, all people?

What if some people like it because of the music's excellence?

They've been brainwashed by Stalin and Zhdanov.

For the record, "sounds like film music" is (rather like Socialist Realism) a squishy phrase at best.  Some use it as a positive.  Some as a negative.  One wonders just what it means.

I've read in another thread that Rimsky-Korsakov too sounds like film music.

[Karl Henning]

I've read in another thread that Rimsky-Korsakov too sounds like film music.

I have trouble, too, perceiving how a recogniseable language of emotional "tropes" or "topics" applies solely (and dismissively) to "film music."

[Florestan]

I have trouble, too, perceiving how a recogniseable language of emotional "tropes" or "topics" applies solely (and dismissively) to "film music."

Indeed. Or why it is a bad thing (or at least not a commendable one).

[Ken B]

Little of Shostakovich's best music is for orchestra. I think this undercuts the sounds like movie music claim. How much film music really sounds like preludes and fugues?

[Dancing Divertimentian]

Shostakovich's greatest work - the viola sonata - is neither "beautiful" in the conventional (populist) sense nor cut from some subversive, idyllic mold to please anyone.

[Karl Henning]

Shostakovich's greatest work - the viola sonata - is neither "beautiful" in the conventional (populist) sense nor cut from some subversive, idyllic mold to please anyone.

Verily.

[Parsifal]

Shostakovich's greatest work - the viola sonata - is neither "beautiful" in the conventional (populist) sense nor cut from some subversive, idyllic mold to please anyone.

I agree that the viola sonata is one of the finest of Shostakovich's works. His greatest music is in the chamber works. Of the symphonies, the 9th, 10th and 15th speak to me strongly. For the others I find it hard to get past the Soviet bombast.

[PerfectWagnerite]

I agree that the viola sonata is one of the finest of Shostakovich's works. His greatest music is in the chamber works. Of the symphonies, the 9th, 10th and 15th speak to me strongly. For the others I find it hard to get past the Soviet bombast.

I would also add the 1st VC to any short list of great DSCH works, a unique work that really has no resemblance to anything else.
Of the symphonies I would add the 4th symphony on my personally short list - a work that almost got DSCH imprisoned or killed, with an ending that is neither tragic nor triumphant.

[Dancing Divertimentian]

I agree that the viola sonata is one of the finest of Shostakovich's works. His greatest music is in the chamber works. Of the symphonies, the 9th, 10th and 15th speak to me strongly. For the others I find it hard to get past the Soviet bombast.

Yes, those are three of my favorite symphonies as well. And I agree about his chamber music.

[Karl Henning]

This was a really interesting post, thank you.

Shostakovich owes much of his prestige to Testimony and to being considered a kind of hero who battled the evil Soviet empire from the shadows, which does not match very well the kind of personal power he actually got to wield at some times of his life.

I agree that "sexing up" the biography/historical circumstances has been a heavy marketing technique.  I'll agree that this has affected how some evaluate his work. Where I disagree is, the greatness of his work does not depend on the marketing campaign.

I think it unfair that he has pushed out of the picture many other Soviet composers who wrote music I find much more enjoyable but who were less "historically significant".

That is an opinion, expressed a bit fallaciously as something of Shostakovich's doing. From my perspective, the quality of the work is "at fault," and (begging your pardon) your quarrel seems to me to echo another chap, who complains that Mozart's music crowds out Dittersdorf's.

The reason why his stuff, in spite of not abandoning tonality, has found favor with many fans of the 20th century avant-garde is that it rarely falls into the temptation of being "beautiful", which to some people is the cardinal sin.

This is the first suggestion I've ever heard, that the 20th-c. avant-garde has idolized Shostakovich!

And my session of Dmitri-bashing would not be complete without stating that, in my ill-formed opinion, the Leningrad symphony, far from being the fluff decried by many serious-minded music lovers, is actually the best thing he ever did.

I'm really glad you think this highly of the Leningrad.

[Abuelo Igor]

That is an opinion,

Of course! And unpopular, to boot. 

expressed a bit fallaciously as something of Shostakovich's doing. From my perspective, the quality of the work is "at fault," and (begging your pardon) your quarrel seems to me to echo another chap, who complains that Mozart's music crowds out Dittersdorf's.

Of course he did nothing personally to "push out" the other guys. He seems to have staying power, for some reason.

This is the first suggestion I've ever heard, that the 20th-c. avant-garde has idolized Shostakovich!

Right again, but I think he belongs squarely in the "no poetry after Auschwitz" camp, even if old Teddy Wiesengrund would have never approved.

I'm really glad you think this highly of the Leningrad.

I'm sure that in some alternate version of this universe it is the only work of his that gets played, in the manner of Holst's The Planets.

Of course I like a great deal of Shostakovich's music, but it's impossible for me to see him as one of the greats, and there are aspects of his work that I am not mad about.

[Karl Henning]

I repeat myself a bit, but ... interesting again, thanks.

[Abuelo Igor]

I think that enhances his aura among some, but I don't think it's the main reason.  He's hardly the only composer of the 20th century who resisted a dictator, and many others have fallen more or less by the wayside in spite of compelling personal stories (KA Hartmann, for example).

Who is great, by the way. Thank you for reminding me of him.

But I actually don't find his music especially beautiful either.  Not in the way that I find Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, Boulez, Stravinsky, Messiaen, Takemitsu, and others of his time (even Milton Babbitt sometimes!) beautiful, and that's part of the reason I prefer Prokofiev generally.

I'm glad that you agree with me that his music can be ugly, but I think that's the way he wanted it. The idea of somebody making an effort to put beauty out of the equation just rubs me the wrong way. Or maybe beauty just evaded him. Most of his "lighter" output sounds like parody, and not a very affectionate one at that.

The idea that people who like Second Viennese or Darmstadt modernism think beauty is anathema is really only something critics express; the composers said they found their own music beautiful, and people who enjoy the music often talk about its beauty.  I sometimes dislike the music that people who dislike those composers think of as "beautiful," but that's hardly an aversion to beauty in general; if I liked the music, I probably would hear beauties in it.

I think that Webern can be quite beautiful in his own special alien way (I didn't want to cheat by resorting to Berg, who is often quite lush), and I suppose the same can be said of Le marteau. Things have changed in the last decades, but, for many years, anyone who didn't spit on "received" ideas of beauty was seen as a bourgeois reactionary. Can beauty be found at the end of differing paths? Sure. Can you appreciate works without beauty for other reasons? Ditto.

[(poco) Sforzando]

I was going to listen to Bernstein's Mass, but I realised I could just look at this picture instead:

Good choice. Mass is bad 70s kitsch, the point in his career where Lenny went from a mediocre imitator of Stravinsky to writing purely bad music.

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

Good choice. Mass is bad 70s kitsch, the point in his career where Lenny went from a mediocre imitator of Stravinsky to writing purely bad music.

Had to double check where I read this before.  Have you become a mediocre imitator of our friend bwv 1080?

[Mahlerian]

Who is great, by the way. Thank you for reminding me of him.

My pleasure.

I'm glad that you agree with me that his music can be ugly, but I think that's the way he wanted it. The idea of somebody making an effort to put beauty out of the equation just rubs me the wrong way. Or maybe beauty just evaded him. Most of his "lighter" output sounds like parody, and not a very affectionate one at that.

I don't think the absence of beauty equates to ugliness.  Ugliness, in my mind, is something more than a lack of beauty.  I don't find counterpoint exercises beautiful (and I've written hundreds of them!), but they're not ugly either.

I think that Webern can be quite beautiful in his own special alien way (I didn't want to cheat by resorting to Berg, who is often quite lush), and I suppose the same can be said of Le marteau. Things have changed in the last decades, but, for many years, anyone who didn't spit on "received" ideas of beauty was seen as a bourgeois reactionary. Can beauty be found at the end of differing paths? Sure. Can you appreciate works without beauty for other reasons? Ditto.

Of course I can appreciate works that I don't find especially beautiful.  I like a number of Shostakovich pieces greatly, including the Fourth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Symphonies and some of the piano works and the string quartets, and though I don't react to them as beautiful, they are certainly compelling music.  Beethoven's music is often not very beautiful, either, but its power and genius of construction can be overwhelming.

But I submit that these are only my personal reactions.  Beauty is perceived in different ways by different people, and the problem for many is that foreign musical languages always sound odd or wrong.  When I say I find Schoenberg's Serenade or the slow movement of the Wind Quintet or Moses und Aron beautiful, for example, I don't mean that I really hear it as ugly the way others do but find beauty in the ugliness, I just mean that it sounds wonderful to me in its expressivity and lyricism.

I don't have interest in denigrating received ideas of beauty.  Debussy and Chopin and Mozart are all just as beloved to me as the names I mentioned above, and I hear their music as beautiful in the same way others do.  I don't care much for some composers of the mid-20th century not because I dislike older ideas about beauty, but specifically because their music does not accord with those ideas in my mind.

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

The whole idea of `beauty' in art irks me a lot, but I'll explain later

I only enjoy art that is beautiful. I don't understand the point of creating something that isn't. Beauty, to me, is largely in the experience of creating or observing art. To see how art, music, theatre, literature etc. can really affect us, how it can change us, based on what it expresses to different people is beauty to me. Anything that actively tries to not affect people in this way is pretty much impossible to create by a living, feeling human being anyway. I look forward to hearing your viewpoint.

[nodogen]

By "transgression" in regard to music, do you simply mean rule breaking?

Is there a link with catharsis in some way? Or does that come in the mini essay?!

[Jo498]

I think both transgression and katharsis are aspects of art that are mostly independent of "beauty". The idea of katharsis in drama is at least as old as the oldest theoretical reflection on dramatic art in the western culture (Aristotle's Poetics). (Of course in that time the katharsis was not for the author but for the audience who would vicariously experience the tragical things happening with e.g. Oedipus and thus be "purged" from strong emotions.)

Transgression probably came into fashion strongly with the romantics (like Byron's defiant heroes, or more obviously and less artsy, De Sade). But if one takes only the depiction of fairly horrible things it is also almost as old as art. Take the anatomically precise descriptions of spears entering livers in Homer. Or certainly something like Dante's Inferno.
Nevertheless all these (probably not De Sade who was certainly better at transgressing than at writing) have been considered epitomes of beautiful art for centuries, sometimes (as in Homer or Sophocles) for millenia.

[Karl Henning]

Where does catharsis and transgression come into music for you?

As inessential.  That is, not an inherent necessity in art.  Which is not to say it does not belong, of course.