Well, that dimension doesn't interest me at all. When I 'perceive structure', I know that I'm engaged in a very complicated experience that goes well beyond the mere concatenation of parametric values, but I am not under the illusion that this experience is somehow KS 'working his magic on me' but rather my own maelstrom of experiences being confronted with a new and engaging stimulus. When I try to make sense of it as an ardent student or as an interpreter, I feel the need to know as much as possible about the composer's intentions, which
When I am a less engaged listener than all that, of course, I am fine with just wrestling with the piece purely on my own terms.

While I agree that
...I would still (as an ardent student etc) take my impressions on one hand, try to construct the intentions of the composer on the other, and then at least find a compromise between them.

Then I think you're seeing them in a one-sided fashion. As I claimed in my very first excursion into the topic of Klv X, Stocki is a master of abstract thinking, and by that I meant to assert that he was so gifted at conceiving abstract structures and being able to imagine their possibilities as sonic experience. Pure abstraction isn't interesting.



Ally Sheedy? Well, I won't divulge my preferences, though I guess they don't matter anyway, since career-wise both of them along with Judd Nelson (pictured above) seem to have disappeared to Sirius.

We wish to express our gratitude to Member Pace for this valuable analysis of the Ninth Piano Piece, which follows his earlier valuable analysis of the Tenth. We shall listen to the Ninth to-night in bed and have his description in mind.

Incidentally (talking about beds) it is quite true what some one said earlier about the ending of the Tenth. We listened to that too in bed and had been becoming more and more exasperated by the long-held reverberations, until finally with a start we realised that the silence last "heard" was going to be the very last, that the clusters and everything had stopped entirely, and that the piece must have ended. We are not sure whether we were even awake during the music immediately preceding the last silence; certainly we do not remember hearing it particularly. In general, when getting to know a new work, we find the parts which stick in one's mind first are a) the beginning and b) the ending. The bits in between fall into place later. So all those pauses may (in part of course) be an ingenious way of working up to a disguised ending. (Mind you plenty of modern works have disguised beginnings and we do not care for that concept at all.) But it is interesting is it not that in the diatonic world too far more emphasis is given to the musical fact that a work is ending than to the musical fact that a work is beginning. Beethoven already at the end of his Eighth Symphony satirized that custom very amusingly.

One person's abstract structure can be another person's sensuality, though, I think. One of the things that Stockhausen presumably is "saying" with a structure like that of Piece 10 is "this is how I experience music", or at least that this is one of the ways in which he interacts with it. I'm not sure that a concept like "abstract" has a precise meaning in music anyway, when subjected to closer scrutiny, any more than our minds are actually capable of dividing a musical experience up into "aural" and "structural" components. Stockhausen (and many other composers) may often appear to do that when discussing music, but it should at the same time be understood that this is an arbitrary division made in order to talk coherently about the experience at all, rather than a description of its essential nature.


I think Ian is saying that Tory Eurosceptics would enjoy reading Michael Nyman's Experimental Music - Cage and Beyond, though I'm inclined to doubt that they'd find La Monte Young that much more palatable than Kagel.

Nothing more complex than saying that Tory Eurosceptics also like blanket patronising generalisations about 'Europeans' as well. Certainly doubt whether many would recognise a 'European art composer' (not that there is some singular category of such diverse people, they are just the 'other' for Eurosceptics and Nyman alike), but in many cases I'm not sure Nyman would either.

Well, 'abstract' is often used either to mean music with no obvious representative or mimetic qualities (so that a Bach fugue would be 'abstract', whereas the Pastoral Symphony would not, at least in places). How much these representative/mimetic qualities would be apparent without a title/programme note is sometimes dubious (in Finnissy's Snowdrift he uses strings of high rapid grace-notes quite similar to those in the final section of Klavierstück IX; some might hear those in the Finnissy as representing a snowfall, but mightn't one equally do so in the Stockhausen if it had a similar title?). If one believes that musica rappresentiva is a meaningful category, then presumably 'abstract music' is also so, as its counterpart. But some use 'abstract' in a stronger (and usually pejorative) sense to refer to (usually contemporary) music perceived not to have any 'expressive' or evocative qualities. If one believes music can be expressive or evocative without entailing any necessary representation, and also that all music produces some type of effect in this respect, then this sort of definition of 'abstract' is not so meaningful (even certain highly pointillistic works can be found to be evocative in their totality; Stockhausen talks about the 'music of the stars' in the context of Messiaen's Mode de valeurs et intensités and his own Kreuzspiel, so at least he finds some evocation there! I find I have a reaction to Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis, though trying to render it in words is always imperfect). There is a third definition, to do with different type of 'representation', specifically on a 'meta-musical' level. By this definition, works with no obvious allusions or resemblances to past music are seen as 'abstract'; those containing such things as tonal chords or progressions, or recognisable types of gestures, less so. At least the first and third definitions of 'abstract' are meaningful, I believe; possibly the second may also be.

As far as 'abstract structure' is concerned, I still don't see how this is a meaningful concept at all independently of any sonic manifestation. One can talk about music where the relationships between sounds being more important than the individual sounds themselves thus being more 'structurally oriented', but sonic relationships are themselves properties of experiences in sound.

Actually, I'm simply asking what 'spirituality' means. Not saying it can't be heard, want to know what this is that is being heard.


Sounds alone can communicate something of a personality, I believe. And in the case of Sorabji (and others), I can hear something of the 'authoritarian personality' type in the sense defined by Adorno and others. The reasons for that have been done to death in earlier threads. Same way that Orff's 'In taberna' from Carmina evokes something akin to a group of drunken and testosterone-stuffed louts looking to beat seven shades of s**t out of someone just for kicks.

Do you not think that music can be expressive and evocative, in ways that are not necessarily a purely arbitrary construction from outside? And if it can, does not what it expresses/evokes have a wider meaning?

Why don't you start by saying what you think it means?

I think such a thing would have to be largely in the ear of the beholder.

To you, maybe! To me it suggests that they are intimately connected.

The pattern here seems to be: Ian asks a question based on an idiosyncratic reading of someone else's post, the someone else attempts to answer it, without necessarily any clear idea of why it's being asked, and then Ian jumps in and disagrees. As with the spirituality question, you seem far more concerned with knocking down other people's opinions than stating your own. A lot of people who otherwise enjoy contributing to and reading these boards might understandably ask themselves why any discussion involving you has to be so adversarial. I ask myself that too.

I prefer feeling that I'm among friends, yes. I'm just not that concerned about using this messageboard as a soapbox.