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ahinton
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« Reply #60 on: 13:27:36, 26-04-2007 » |
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Alistair,
As I'm sure you're aware, I'm playing Devil's Advocate here, relaying things that have been said to me or that I've read on boards in an attempt to pin down thoughts behind the thread. I'm not stating my own position as such, but I do feel that those who (for whatever) reason continue to avoid a large swath of C20th 'Classical' music must in some way help to provide answers to further our understanding of the present position and possible roads ahead.
Bws,
Ron
OK, but I see little or no evidence that such people do help with this; all they do for the most part in the vast majority of cases is stay away from the subject or make biased but uninformative comments based upon a mix of received opinion and undeveloped personal taste or both. I happen to think that large swathes of the minimalist-oriented music of the past three or more decades risk alienating audiences that attend concerts to be challenged to concentrate, think and respond - and that's rather the other end of the spctrum, surely? In short, I just don't think that there is a catch-all ideal answer here. The best that one can reasonably hope for is that (a) listeners are encouraged to listen to a wide variety of musics from all eras (especially in their early days of listening) and to give them the concentration due to them in order to develop tastes and rely on their own judgements rather than those fed to them by others and (b) composers are encouraged (if any of them need such encouragement) to write music that is not specifically intended only for the ears of a certain kind of professional musician. And that's it! We're all different, we all react differently to every conceivable kind of aural stimulus - including us composers! One final thought on this from my own listening experiences, picking up on the unfamiliarity argument that features in this discussion. My earliest exposure to music included very little "tonal" music before, having decided as a result that I wanted to be a composer, I went to study with someone (not Searle, at this stage) who had been a pupil of Webern shortly before WWII and who plunged me into a world of Webern and some of the composers active in the Darmstadt / Donaueschingen / Köln axis to the point at which, after a couple of years or so, this kind of music constituted the vast majority of my listening experience. I worked chronologically backwards from there, so I heard no Mahler or Debussy until at least two years following my musical "initiation" (so to speak). When, soon after that, I heard a Mozart piano concerto for the first time, my reaction - perhaps inevitably - was very much akin to the "funny modern music" kind of thing one hears from some people from time to time afgter listening to a contemporary score and which is more often than not prompted entirely by previous unfamiliarity with the kind of musical langauge involved. Incidentally, that experience certainly influenced my general view of what constitutes tonality and "atonality" in ways that some people might find abit hard to accept (although that's rather beside the point here, really... Best, Alistair |
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richard barrett
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« Reply #61 on: 13:30:41, 26-04-2007 » |
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bearing in mind a couple of recordings (particularly my least favourite) of DSCH 4 where the engineers have sought to give the celesta an unnaturally exaggerated presence, I can see how this might begin to create an a unique and interesting timbre. Where do you think I got the idea from? ... but seriously, both there and in the Mahler Lied von der Erde the instrument appears at the end, in a valedictory role, although of course to utterly divergent expressive effect in these two pieces - shell-shocked in one, etheral in the other, to put it (too) simply - which set me thinking about putting it at the other end of the piece, perhaps even with a sostenuto-pedal-like function applied to some of its notes using a bowed vibraphone, tuned gongs doubling others maybe, so that first the percussion section and subsequently perhaps the rest of the orchestra "emerges" from the celesta sound. I'm running away with myself here talking about something that isn't even started yet... but it just goes to show that there's maybe something to be said for intrusive engineering.  |
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richard barrett
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« Reply #62 on: 13:33:01, 26-04-2007 » |
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give some succour to our struggling rumps
A delightful turn of phrase if I may say so. |
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richard barrett
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« Reply #63 on: 13:41:20, 26-04-2007 » |
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allowing the listener to experience all the clunky, rather weird toy-piano overtones Exactly! Once I've written this piece I promise never to listen to the Jansons DSCH 4 again. (It's for the same orchestra too, and I suppose even the same celesta.) But that will take another couple of years. Actually another "thought experiment" which was going through my mind is to imagine what music written in 2008 might sound like if the Fourth had been premiered in 1936 and achieved the worldwide exposure and influence which it could well have done, rather than in 1962 when the progressive-minded among composers were carrying out their explorations elsewhere in the field of musical possibility. |
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Ian Pace
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« Reply #64 on: 15:32:05, 26-04-2007 » |
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Making the orchestra sound like a piano... you mean relatively limited in terms of timbre, more limited in terms of density, completely inflexible in terms of intonation, and presided over by a single all-powerful figure rather than being the result of a large-scale collaborative effort? I suppose there might be something in that...  Sometimes less can be more....... A large number of individuals entirely subsuming any individuality they might have in favour of blindly submitting either to the wishes of a mystical figure on the podium, or to impersonal ideas of 'professionalism' - well, I'm sure you can see where that's going. Hmmmmm - how often does an orchestral performance constitute a 'large-scale collaborative effort', or how often a 'how much are we getting paid for this' endeavour from players who do not want to put anything more into things than simply what they are told to do? If the orchestra supposedly could constitute a microcosm of what a better society might be like (Cage thought the same at some point, though I reckon his experiences with the NY Phil must have shaken this confidence), I'd like to see some much stronger evidence for it..... |
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'These acts of keeping politics out of music, however, do not prevent musicology from being a political act . . .they assure that every apolitical act assumes a greater political immediacy' - Philip Bohlman, 'Musicology as a Political Act'
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Ian Pace
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« Reply #65 on: 15:34:06, 26-04-2007 » |
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The Wagnerian use of the orchestra, with swathes of exotic colour enacted en masse by the players in the service of an essentially manipulative vision from 'on high', to me seems hopelessly outdated at least in its original form, yet a lot of orchestral music does not seem to have significantly moved on from this
...
One of the great epithets often applied to pianists is 'they made the instrument sound like a whole orchestra'. How about the other way round sometimes?
I admit you've lost me here. You'll get over it. Doesn't a piano (or for that matter any other single instrument) by its nature serve an "essentially manipulative vision from 'on high'"
No. |
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'These acts of keeping politics out of music, however, do not prevent musicology from being a political act . . .they assure that every apolitical act assumes a greater political immediacy' - Philip Bohlman, 'Musicology as a Political Act'
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Ian Pace
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« Reply #66 on: 15:43:51, 26-04-2007 » |
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I would remind the Member that DON GIOVANNI opens with an attempted/actual rape, Does depend whose side of the story you believe - it is deliberately left slightly ambiguous (personally I do read it as an attempted rape, though). and the murder of the victim's father. No - the Commandatore challenges the Don to fight, and the Don, after at first declining, defeats and kills him. That is not the same as murder, it could equally be argued to be self-defence. This is merely the opening gambit in a spree of violence and abuse (a further attempted rape occurs in the ballroom scene) which permeates the entire course of action. There are other ways of reading that moment concerning the Don and Zerlina (bearing in mind her earlier aria), but I won't go into that on here.... Again we return to Brahms as the great Model. Did He ever write anything of that kind? The plodding patrician of Hamburg was utterly unable to write for the stage There have been more than a few composers who were unable to write practically anything of consequence away from the stage - is that to be held against them? |
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« Last Edit: 15:49:00, 26-04-2007 by Ian Pace »
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'These acts of keeping politics out of music, however, do not prevent musicology from being a political act . . .they assure that every apolitical act assumes a greater political immediacy' - Philip Bohlman, 'Musicology as a Political Act'
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richard barrett
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« Reply #67 on: 15:51:43, 26-04-2007 » |
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how often does an orchestral performance constitute a 'large-scale collaborative effort' Always. It may additionally be those other things you mention. Of course, the orchestra as it presently exists is an institution inherited from a time and social milieu in which collaboration or equality weren't considered to be important issues, but that can be said about very many aspects of and institutions in musical life. If players really do have a 'how much are we getting paid for this' attitude, it isn't the players themselves who are to blame but the conditions under which they have to work, which often turns idealistic and committed young musicians into sour and cynical individuals whose care for music has been drummed out of them in only a few years. I think that to regard music as manipulative is at least as much a listening attitude as a performative or compositional one. |
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time_is_now
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« Reply #68 on: 15:56:05, 26-04-2007 » |
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I think that to regard music as manipulative is at least as much a listening attitude as a performative or compositional one.
I may be being pointlessly provocative here, but to what extent would you (or anyone else) be interested in saying the same with 'innovative' for 'manipulative'? ... |
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The city is a process which always veers away from the form envisaged and desired, ... whose revenge upon its architects and planners undoes every dream of mastery. It is [also] one of the sites where Dasein is assigned the impossible task of putting right what can never be put right. - Rob Lapsley
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richard barrett
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« Reply #69 on: 16:04:02, 26-04-2007 » |
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I think that to regard music as manipulative is at least as much a listening attitude as a performative or compositional one.
I may be being pointlessly provocative here, but to what extent would you (or anyone else) be interested in saying the same with 'innovative' for 'manipulative'? ... Well, a piece of music can be innovative whether anyone listens to it or not. |
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time_is_now
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« Reply #70 on: 16:12:33, 26-04-2007 » |
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Oh, so what you were actually suggesting before was that even more music is manipulative than Ian suggests, just that some of it is never heard?
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The city is a process which always veers away from the form envisaged and desired, ... whose revenge upon its architects and planners undoes every dream of mastery. It is [also] one of the sites where Dasein is assigned the impossible task of putting right what can never be put right. - Rob Lapsley
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aaron cassidy
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« Reply #71 on: 16:36:09, 26-04-2007 » |
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and (b) composers are encouraged (if any of them need such encouragement) to write music that is not specifically intended only for the ears of a certain kind of professional musician.
I can say w/ some considerable certainty that no composer sets out with the specific intention to write music that actively excludes a particular segment of the listening public, or at least I can't really think of an example in which someone has done that. I realize I'm turning your words around a bit, but the implication that one writes for a 'certain kind of professional musician' also seems to imply that one is also writing music in a way that is actively not for listeners outside of that category. I would no more expect a concert music composer to tailor their work for the masses than I'd expect, say, someone in the mainstream pop music world to be writing music that's tailored to me. |
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George Garnett
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« Reply #72 on: 16:51:26, 26-04-2007 » |
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'Manipulate': to operate with the hands Should not be attempted from on high  |
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« Last Edit: 17:05:14, 26-04-2007 by George Garnett »
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time_is_now
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« Reply #73 on: 16:56:22, 26-04-2007 » |
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Well, 'manufacture' once meant 'make with the hands'. But now usually the opposite!
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The city is a process which always veers away from the form envisaged and desired, ... whose revenge upon its architects and planners undoes every dream of mastery. It is [also] one of the sites where Dasein is assigned the impossible task of putting right what can never be put right. - Rob Lapsley
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richard barrett
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« Reply #74 on: 19:10:16, 26-04-2007 » |
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Oh, so what you were actually suggesting before was that even more music is manipulative than Ian suggests, just that some of it is never heard?
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