At 8:40 PM +0100 3/23/08, shirling & neueweise wrote:
but in case you don't want to take my word for it, check out arditti's site (as only one example), check out just how much this music is being performed around the world and compare it to even 10 yrs ago. there is a whole generation of musicians who have grown up with the possibility of performing his music, and learning it from people who had to "figure it out'" themselves.
I can back Jef up on this, even though the music in question is not something that will ever appeal to me, personally. We have applied music faculty who are probably of that "in between" generation who had to figure it out themselves. And we have performance major students, at least the best of them, who have no automatic prejudices against all the various kinds of "new music" and have reasonably open minds towards them, and working with their teachers they manage VERY creditable performances of very difficult music. It's definitely a generational thing, and definitely not uniform within a generation since both those same performance majors AND their contemporaries are deep into rock, pop and rap as well.
On the other hand, music performance majors represent, what, at least one standard deviation (or more) above the mean in the general population in terms both of their desire for technical mastery and their understanding of the degree of musicianship that this music requires. There's a difference between accepting new musics because they are interesting and intellectually challenging, and embracing them because they make sense to you and satisfy your musical needs. So the number of performances may indeed be going up, but what that actually proves may not be what the composers would like it to mean in terms of general public acceptance of their work.
it really comes down to this, for me. instead of saying "X is unplayable", any argument against such things should begin with "i can't play that."
I can agree with that, certainly, but it isn't really the right starting point. That starting point has to be the simple question, "what is there about this music that will make it worth the time and effort to learn to play it?" (Or sing it, which is an order of magnitude more difficult than playing instruments where you just have to push the buttons at the right times!) Some people seem to believe that making music impossibly difficult equates to creating great music. I don't think it's that simple at all.
I've seen this happen over and over again in music history, since that happens to be my field of special interest. Musicians want to be able to do something new and different, so they figure out how to do it, but then have to figure out a new way to notate it. And style periods start, develop, and decline, increasing in complexity and making sense to fewer and fewer people until, unless you're a member of one of those elite in-groups, there's a reaction against it and a return to simplicity, which in every transitional period I've studied has meant a return to melody as the basic building block of music. It was the reaction against the rhythmic complexities of the Ars Subtilior in the late Ars Nova period (different, but every bit as challenging rhythmically as anything being attempted today) that gave birth to the new flowing melodies and rhythmically simplified accompaniments of the early renaissance.
My theory (and I really miss being able to discuss it with Andrew) is that the return to simplicity and melody in the early 20th century was in reaction to the increasing complexity of late romantic harmony, and that 20th century American popular music was and is the result of that stylistic change, while all the 20th century experimental stylistic movements are simply an unnatural late outgrowth of post-romantic excess which survive precisely because academia has nourished and protected them from the influence of public opinion. Andrew does not agree with me, and I suspect that others on this list do not either, but that's how I see it. And if I had completed my Ph.D that's the kind of study that would have fascinated me for a dissertation.
John -- John R. Howell Virginia Tech Department of Music College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
