Magnus Lindberg's lair

[CRCulver]

He's another socially well-placed musical nobody...

Lindberg first came to the attention of the media when he and his chums were outsiders without any social connections to speak of. The sheer visceral power of his music is what catapulted him to where he is now. Go back in the Finnish press and read reviews of some of those early 1980s concerts and how shocked the critics were that must this powerful and mature was coming from a student. Stenius' biography Chaconne: En bok om Magnus Lindberg och den nya musiken (Helsinki: Söderströms, 2006) has a good amount of detail about how Lindberg got to where he is, and it wasn't because he just knew the right people all along.

[Sean]

I take a different view to those critics.

[CRCulver]

I take a different view to those critics.

Disagreeing with critics comes down to arbitrary personal taste, that's fine. However, your assertion that Lindberg found success just because of his social connections is demonstrably false. Be a man and retract your claim.

[Sean]

Disagreeing with critics comes down to arbitrary personal taste, that's fine. However, your assertion that Lindberg found success just because of his social connections is demonstrably false. Be a man and retract your claim.

Indeed I don't know about his social connections. However find it impossible to understand how basically uncommunicative music can be said to be justified on the basis of communicating with an audience, and thus there must be other reasons...

[Guido]

Sean, you keep universalising your own experience and mistakingly thinking that your experience is the experience of the music and that of everyone else. Personally, I adore the cello concerto - I think it's one of the most inventive and compelling works in the genre since the Lutoslawski and Dutilleux concertos. It moves me. I think it's beautiful. I am an audience. I find it communicative. I cannot be wrong about this because it is a subjective judgement.

It may not speak to you, but it does speak to other people, and it's such a dull and tired pseudo-intellectual trick to fit ones personal likes and dislikes into some grand theory of music, especially one that is a more general theory about the decay of culture etc. etc. People were saying the same thing when Mozart was alive, when Mendelssohn was alive, when Wagner wrote his operas, when Brahms' music reached unsympathetic ears, early Stravinsky, Bartok, Berg etc. etc. etc...

In any case, when your judgement about contemporary music always seems to be negative, that the composer doesn't understand art, is working with whatever scraps of tonality he/she can salvage etc. etc. - it seems disingenuous! I can't believe that you really believe all this stuff or you wouldn't devour so much new music. If you thought it was that bad, there's no reason that you'd put yourself though the pain of listening. Or do you enjoy it despite its degeneracy?

[Sean]

Hi Guido, hope you're alright there, the point about art is that it isn't subjective, just experienced by subjects individually- if it was subjective there'd be no aesthetic category, the interesting thing. I don't know the Cello concerto, so maybe you're right about it.

I'm surprised if you don't even get the feeling that aesthetic experiences are universalizable though- you're happy to relegate deeply meaningful art to your personal response and respect the next fool who experiences nothing? Don't worry though- I don't like this debate and it's very well worn ground.

Regarding my critiques of new music, I'm usually just putting things into perspective- contemporary works are often limited and unwittingly conceited but still worth something, even if it's in little more than making sense of the degeneracy: the thing is that the immense artistic achievements of the tonal repertory must be kept absolutely in focus- and anyone coming to new music making judgements about it but who's innocent of really great music must remain benighted.

[Guido]

I am good. Hope you're well. How's the PhD?

Hi Guido, hope you're alright there, the point about art is that it isn't subjective, just experienced by subjects individually- if it was subjective there'd be no aesthetic category, the interesting thing. I don't know the Cello concerto, so maybe you're right about it.

I do think that some art is better than other art of course - I don't think someone when someone feels that Carson Cooman's Psalm 66 is better than The Mass in B minor, that that really reflects a truth about the music - so I don't think quality is a subjective thing, but it is based on subjective experience. For this reason I cannot be wrong when I say that the cello concerto moves me, is expressive and satisfying and I find it beautiful and I keep returning to it -  even if you think its trash and inexpressive.

So I think that the aesthetic experience is universal in some senses - lots of people like Bach because it's great music and has the power to produce a very great subjective response in a huge amount of people. (i.e. it's emphatically not the other way round, which some sceptics on this forum claim - that Bach is just considered one of the greats because he is loved by so many people - it's not a democratic thing!). However, I don't think my own aesthetic experience is universalizable to everyone else - I have my own tastes and its all refracted through my ears and brain... so when I listen to the B minor mass it seems that I am taking the universal experience it offers and refracting it through my own experience and understanding, as all the other listeners are. What I don't do is take my subjective experience as the subjective experience of the work and then claim that other people are wrong when they like things that I don't.

Hope this makes sense. I agree this is a tired subject, but I just think you are making a slight mistake with some of your pronouncements, even if I agree that art does have some objective grounding. Obviously also, I'm an optimist about life and art so I can't take your doom laden pronouncements very seriously!

[Sean]

Hi, as I say I don't know the concerto and I'd expect any two receptive people to agree on aesthetic judgements- as does Kant for instance. We can't point to our experience of art as we can to a colour say, because the cognitive faculties are involved in the formation of aesthetic experience- but this subjectivity or intersubjectivity is a form, the highest form, of objectivity.

What I don't do is take my subjective experience as the subjective experience of the work and then claim that other people are wrong when they like things that I don't.

This is incorrect- you can take it as the experience.

I have to travel to Edinburgh tomorrow, where I don't really want to be to do some more study, so until then...

[Guido]

This is incorrect- you can take it as the experience.

I don't agree. We each filter our emotional and aesthetic response through our own understanding which is a function and result of our psychology, upbringing, tastes, age, previous experiences, intelligence, musicality, technical knowlege etc. etc. Although we are similar in these things (most of us on this forum are western for instance, or strongly influenced by Western thought) we are not identical (chemically in our brains will be different) and therefore there is no reason that we should experience things in exactly the same way, nor can our experience be normative (or even prespcriptive as you're suggesting your own experience is).

What about when you change your mind about music - sometimes music grows on you and sometimes it gets less significant with each hearing... Also, it might change with age - you hear certain truths in the music that speak to your current person in a way that you couldn't experience before various life experiences... What I'm saying is that the subjective experience is not fixed and will partially depend on what the listener is receptive to at that moment.

[bhodges]

Lindberg first came to the attention of the media when he and his chums were outsiders without any social connections to speak of. The sheer visceral power of his music is what catapulted him to where he is now. Go back in the Finnish press and read reviews of some of those early 1980s concerts and how shocked the critics were that must this powerful and mature was coming from a student. Stenius' biography Chaconne: En bok om Magnus Lindberg och den nya musiken (Helsinki: Söderströms, 2006) has a good amount of detail about how Lindberg got to where he is, and it wasn't because he just knew the right people all along.

Good post, thank you.  Lindberg (currently composer-in-residence at the NY Phil) may not appeal to all tastes--even I don't like everything he's done--but he's hardly writing "basically uncommunicative music." 

I don't agree. We each filter our emotional and aesthetic response through our own understanding which is a function and result of our psychology, upbringing, tastes, age, previous experiences, intelligence, musicality, technical knowlege etc. etc. Although we are similar in these things (most of us on this forum are western for instance, or strongly influenced by Western thought) we are not identical (chemically in our brains will be different) and therefore there is no reason that we should experience things in exactly the same way, nor can our experience be normative (or even prespcriptive as you're suggesting your own experience is).

What about when you change your mind about music - sometimes music grows on you and sometimes it gets less significant with each hearing... Also, it might change with age - you hear certain truths in the music that speak to your current person in a way that you couldn't experience before various life experiences... What I'm saying is that the subjective experience is not fixed and will partially depend on what the listener is receptive to at that moment.

Well put.

--Bruce

[Sean]

You're totally wrong Guido and if you read you posts, like others in your position, you'll find they're very contradictory: what you're basically trying to do is relativize truth, which is something fixed and absolute, and given access to by art.

[CD]

...what you're basically trying to do is relativize truth, which is something fixed and absolute, and given access to by art.

[bhodges]

You're totally wrong Guido and if you read you posts, like others in your position, you'll find they're very contradictory: what you're basically trying to do is relativize truth, which is something fixed and absolute, and given access to by art.

Erm...no.  I don't see anyone here trying to "relativize truth" (if that were even possible).  Truth is, well, truth.  But if you see yourself as the sole standard-bearer, or the only one able to see what others cannot (in your eyes), I can only offer, "Good luck with that."

--Bruce

[CRCulver]

You're totally wrong Guido and if you read you posts, like others in your position, you'll find they're very contradictory: what you're basically trying to do is relativize truth, which is something fixed and absolute, and given access to by art.

Could the mods please move this to a separate discussion in the general forum? There's no reason people looking for discussion specifically about Magnus Lindberg should have to wade through so many posts on general aesthetics.

[Guido]

You're totally wrong Guido and if you read you posts, like others in your position, you'll find they're very contradictory: what you're basically trying to do is relativize truth, which is something fixed and absolute, and given access to by art.

I'm not sayng that - read my posts again.

[Sean]

You're all welcome to your insecure views.

[Sean]

I'm not sayng that - read my posts again.

Guido, as with others before you I don't understand how you can accommodate relativism or subjectivism and objectivity, apart from endless shuffing around... Yours, S

[CRCulver]

Ondine has announced that it will issue a recording in February or March of Lindberg's GRAFITTI for orchestra and choir, settings of inscriptions found at Pompeii that depict many different strands of Roman everyday society. I attended the world premiere of this piece in Helsinki last spring and was very impressed by it. It maintains the strengths of Lindberg's idiom while at the same time throwing in a lot of scenes which will surprise longtime fans.

In any event, a a classical piece where the choir signs "You give good head" (Myrtis bene fellas) is always a novelty. I wonder how much criticism this will invoke from the conservatives, like when David Hurwitz was really pissed off that Thomas Ades included a musical description of fellatio in his opera Powder Her Face.

[greg]

And I thought Lindberg was cool... what happened? 

[snyprrr]

In any event, a a classical piece where the choir signs "You give good head" (Myrtis bene fellas) is always a novelty. I wonder how much criticism this will invoke from the conservatives, like when David Hurwitz was really pissed off that Thomas Ades included a musical description of fellatio in his opera Powder Her Face.

Good fellas?