I wrote:
> >
>
> > Do you include the arts in your category of the humanities? If so, I
> > disagree with your idea that the humanities are too little constrained.
>
Dan responded:
>Yes I do, but I do think the case is different from PoMo. By being able to
>pick a new set of rules for every musical composition, and by sampling the
>constraint space differently each time, a composer risks, and dare I say
>usually, composes something that is of interest to him, and his small
>group,
>and that's about it. I'm sure you've noticed that very few classical
>pieces
>written after, say, the 1920s are played.
Pieces written after 1920 aren't played by who? I just checked the Chicago
Symphony's website, and upcoming pieces include Benjamin Britten's War
Requiem written in 1962, The Wound-Dresser by John Adams, Romanian Folk
Dances by Bartok, Tiento y Batalla by Halffter, and To the Edge of Dream by
Takemitsu. The New York Philharmonic, recently known for how much is
ignores music written after 1910, is world-premiering The Enchanted Wanderer
by Rodion Shchedrin later this year. The Boston Symphony Orchestra is
performing music by Britten, Kirchner, Chadwick, Henze, Weir, John Cage, and
a world premier of a multimedia piece for cello and orchestra by Tan Dun,
among others. This past season, the Kansas City Symphony performed pieces
by Janacek, Barber, Copland, Prokofiev, Kernis, Martinu, Adams, Vasks,
Shostakovich, and Revueltas, along with the Mozarts and the Shumanns, etc.
Pieces written after 1920, pieces by composers who weren't even *born* in
1920, get played all the time by orchestras both big and small, and I listed
just American orchestras. European orchestras have a reputation for being
much more favorably disposed to modern music than American orchestras.
>When they are, they are works
>from those who were considered tainted by popular culture at the time: like
>Copland and Bernstein.
>
Copland and Berstein both wrote pieces that are still popular (more or less)
today, but if you listen closely you'll find they use lots of techniques
commonly associated with "modern" music, Copland especially. Listen to
Appalachian Spring or Rodeo by Copland or the Candide overture by Bernstein.
Parts of those are lovely and "normal," and parts have lots of dissonance
and difficult rhythms. I personally don't find Copland or Bernstein
"tainted" at all; they both merely reflected elements of their culture at
the time, including the influence of jazz and folk music.
> >
> > My undergraduate degree is in music composition. With "modern"
> >music, pretty much anything goes, but I and most of my fellow composition
> >students found that if we used self-imposed constraints, it allowed us to
>be more
> >creative. Without constraining ourselves, there were just too many
> >choices, too many possible ways to go with a piece of music that we were
>left
> >without a sense of direction. The constraints we gave ourselves helped
>us
>focus
> >our musical ideas. Choosing which constraints we would use in a given
>piece
> >of music became one of the most important pre-compositional decisions we
> >would make. A lot of composers don't think about it in those terms,
> >necessarily, but most seem to go through that process.
>
>I heard that before, and I can understand what you are saying. (One thing
>that helps me is that my wife was one semester short of being a performance
>major when she got a bone tumor and my younger daughter is going to be a
>music education/voice major). However, I think that there is still
>difficulty with modern academic music. The basic problem, IMHO, is that it
>is mostly written as an intellectual exercise. There is little
>communication of feelings. There is little connection with the culture.
I'll get to an answer for this below.
>
>My favorite example of how modern music is disconnected from the culture is
>the piece "triangle". Notes are played according to a mathematical formula
>that is associated with the relationships between points on the triangle
>where the musicians are placed. Why not simply come up with a new type of
>math and be done with it? Why even bother with music?
>
I'm not a big fan of pieces like Triangle. They have their place, I
suppose, but that's not the kind of music I get excited about. I get
excited about music that is passionate, pensive, exciting, sentimental, or
otherwise moving. Pieces like Triangle, or "4:33" by Cage, were never
mainstream even among "serious classical" composers.
> > The biggest difference between the current period of "classical" music
>and
> > the previous musical periods (the baroque, the classical, the romantic,
> > etc.) is that each previous musical period had a set of constraints that
> > applied for just about every piece of music written by just about every
> > composer in that particular time period, but with "modern" music those
> > constraints vary from composer to composer and often from piece to
>piece.
> > That seems to be closer to what you are getting at with your comment
> >above, if you meant to include the arts as part of the humanities.
>
>It is. Let me ask you. How much do your friends listen to popular music,
>old classical music, or the new academic music (which you call the current
>period of "classical" music). The only modern work we listen to are choral
>works, which seem to be more tied into modern culture. I think it has to
>do
>with the demand for church music.
>
I listen to old classical music, new academic music, pop music (not a big
fan of boy-bands, though), old jazz, "smooth" jazz (the really synthetic
stuff, but I have to be in the right mood), folk music from various parts of
the world (especially Scottish and Irish, but also Russian, Chinese, South
American ("Nah Bahia tem, tem, tem, tem" - sorry about potential
mis-spelling, Alberto, that's from memory), industrial, blues, bluegrass,
funk, reggae, country, punk, metal, Ani DiFranco (who is in a category all
her own), big band, modern theoretical reconstructions of ancient Greek
music, electronica... I think you get the idea. For me, music is music.
Most of my composer friend didn't have quite as broad musical tastes as me,
but most at least listen to pop and three or four of the others I mentioned.
Oh, and I love choral music.
>I don't think modern academic music is inherently bad or wrong, but I do
>think that the disconnect between them and any set of listeners is a
>measure
>of something gone wrong. IMHO, the arts should be an expression of the
>culture of the times. I cannot imagine any of the academic musicians from,
>say, 1950 on, being remembered in 100 years unless they crossed over.
>(Well, I'll probably be proven wrong by one exception we can't pick out
>today). However, I'm sure that Beatles' songs will still be part of the
>culture of 2100.
>
Let me re-quote one sentence from what you said above: "IMHO, the arts
should be an expression of the culture of the times." How do you define
"culture?" Much of the modern music that is dissonant is a reflection of
the fact that we live in a difficult world, where we have terrorism and
world wars and AIDS and ethnic cleansing. But I bet most people on this
list hear modern classical music all the time. The music for X-Files
contains modern techniques of dissonance and unusual rhythms regularly, as
did the music for Star Trek: The Next Generation, Babylon 5, and Deep Space
9, as does the soundrack to The Fellowship of the Ring (which I'm listening
to right now), just about any soundtrack by Danny Elfman, most soundtracks
by John Williams (who also wrote the theme music for old TV shows like "Time
Tunnel," "Land of the Giants," -- co-written with Alexander Courage -- and
"Lost in Space," IIRC)... I could go on and on. I'm pretty sure John
Williams will be remembered in 2100, as will Howard Shore, Danny Elfman, and
a few others. The music they all write is modern classical music. That
doesn't sound like modern classical music is disconnected from the culture,
it sounds like it's a part of it.
Almost all film and television composers cross over or use a mixture of
techniques. The ones that are known more for film work simply do more film
work than other kinds of stuff. Let me give you a specific example.
One of my favorite "serious" composers is John Corigliano. He has written
numerous "concert" pieces, but two of his four most famous works are his
soundtrack for The Red Violin (which won an Oscar) and his soundtrack for
Altered States (which was nominated for one) (the other two are his opera,
The Ghosts of Versailles, and his Symphony #1 which was "an impassioned
response to the AIDS crisis" -- for more info see:
http://www.schirmer.com/composers/corigliano_bio.html ).
Lots of composers write in multiple genres today. It's par for the course.
I've written Williams-like or Shore-like music for a local community theater
group. (It's not as good as, say, Shore, but I'm working on it :-) I've
written really passionate "Romantic" pieces (Romantic as in, in the style of
late Beethoven or Tchaikovsky or Berlioz or Chopin). I've written
semi-minimalist jazz-influenced brass quintets. Heck, I've written jazz.
I've written extremely tonal choral music (sort of in the vein of John
Rutter). I've written more complicated and less tonal choral music. I've
written "concert" pieces for orchestra. I've written a couple of pop songs,
one "Christian Contemporary" tune (a la Sandi Patti), a few folk songs of
the type you might hear in a coffee shop on a Friday night. And some
"classical" electronic music. I'm working (off and on) on some big-band
stuff. And my experience is fairly typical.
I'm not going to tell you that there aren't composers who write nothing but
"serious" music; there are, but usually tend to be college professors first,
and composers second. Not all of them, but most.
"Modern" music techniques also have a habit of working their way into pop
music. "Hella Good" by No Doubt uses dissonance that would have been
considered "wrong notes" in pop music 15 or 20 years ago, but just sounds
cool today. Hardcore Metal bands have used "creative dissonance" since at
least the early days of Metallica, and the guys in Metallica were influenced
by some European bands who were influenced by Progressive Rock bands who
were influenced by classical music. Industrial groups like Nine Inch Nails
use sampled sound techniques that were originated in the 1950s by people
like Iannis Xenakis and John Cage (although Cage and Xenakis used cut and
pasted pieces of reel-to-reel tape whereas NIN uses the digital equivalent
of that). Techno and Trance are an outgrowth of classical minimalism.
Techno, Trance, Industrial, and related genres (I usually clump them
together under the name "Electronica") all rely on music synthesis
techniques developed by classical electronic composers. That doesn't sound
like "modern" classical music is disconnected from our culture, it sounds
like it's a testing ground for new ideas later used by more popular music.
Of course none of these connections are obvious unless you have studied the
evolution of music in the 19th and 20th centuries, which just happens to be
one of my hobbies :-)
Can I draw direct causal connections for these influences? For many of
them, yes. For others it's a little more complicated. But in general,
that's my argument for why the perceived disconnect between "modern"
classical music and the rest of society exists in perception only.
Reggie Bautista
"More details available upon request" Maru :-)
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