A few more random thoughts which might feed into the discussion:

You need to be fairly familiar with a field to know what's actually innovative and what isn't.

On a personal note: the music which interests me most (as listener, but I suppose also as composer and performer) is that which expands my perception of music in some way, and that's more likely to come about through work which moves through uncharted territory (ie. is in some way innovative). I think that experience of "expansion" is also one which can continue through more extended and deeper experience with a given work, indeed it partly (maybe even principally) consists of a new way in which that deepening takes place.

I use the phrase "uncharted territory" so as to imply that innovation per se isn't a question of rearranging familiar elements in a new order (although, in a trivial sense, virtually all music does that) but of those elements being unfamiliar, or perhaps defamiliarised.

I'm not saying I ask all music to be innovative, or that anything that is must necessarily be of interest (a misunderstanding which comes up quite frequently), just that it's one feature which is likely in the first instance to attract my attention, because of the aforementioned desire for music which is somehow "mind-expanding".

Well I'm not, but let me have a go at coming up with some ideas (like Martle suggested in, was it message #31?) and you can shoot me down as just repeating something someone else has done......

But before I do a few questions.  If an audient (member of the audiance) isn't familiar with a field, he may think of something as innovative when it isn't - but does that matter?  Does a thing have to be genuinely innovative for it to be inspiring / envigorating to the listener, or merely perceived as so by that listener?  (I think the latter).  Or is the purpose of the innovation to enable the composer to say something in a way no other composer has done before?  If what he wanted to say could be expressed to the audience by some existing means, is the innovation necessary?  Or does the new way of expression change the way the audience reacts?  (I guess maybe, maybe not - depending on the impact of the expression)

Anyroadup, here's some ideas......

So, KHS did that thing with 4 brass bands at corners of a playing field.  What about that sort of thing aplied to the concert hall?  Or just the 4 different sections of the SO in a field?  Audience members could choose their listening point for their own personal balance preference  ("I like a bit more strings myself, so I'm going west")

What about the concept of surround sound?  The thing about the SO is that there are plenty of players -so why not have them all around the audience.  Imagine the Albert Hall with players lining the edge of the Arena and The Gods.

I get annoyed with duff performances of the VW Talis Fantasia, where the second orchestra is not enough in the background, and Double Orchestra works where both orchestras are on the left and right of the stage, but on a stage that is predominantly in front of the audience.  Why can't orchestra 1 be to the left of the audience and orchestra 2 be to the right?

And if you go so far as similar Orchestras around and above teh audience, teh coposer can use them as a mixing desk  turning up teh volume and getting that sort of Dolby Demo experience you have at the cinema.....

Or players distributed amongst the audience?

And then there are different techniques for sound production - was it Ades who did that thing where a Tam Tam was struck then lowered into a bath of water?  What  about doing that to vibraphone tubes?  Or a celesta?  And I really want to know what it sounds like when you use a violin bow a cymbol and lower it into / raise it out of water......

Have people made enough use of tapping stringed instrument backs (with fingers, I guess - unless we couldn't care about union rules.....).  Playing wrong side of the bridge?  Plucking wrong side of the bridge?  Plucking right and wrong sides of the stopped fingers?

Are there any weird effects that could be made by more than one player on an instrument?  After all, in a SO there are usually at least two players for each type of instrument, but tend to be one player per actual instrument.  Can a Double Bass do different things with two left hands, for example?  (e.g. some false harmonics???)  (You may have to write like a piano part.)

That'll do for starters....

Do they spark of other ideas?  Maybe the ideas we come up with will give us a better feeling for the scope of innovation left.....

Tommo

Well, I reckon if you spoke to plenty of concert planners, they would tell you that whilst some of the works you list go down well with average concert-goers, the likely reaction to the Busoni, Schoenberg, and even some Bartók can be very mixed (and diminish potential ticket sales), let alone if later works of Schoenberg, say, were programmed. It's hard to deny that such music has not won widespread appreciation and understanding with classical concert-goers (more's the pity, to me).

That very question only really makes sense if one conceives of music as 'saying something', in the sense of 'content'. In such a semantically ambiguous medium as music, I find it harder to clearly delineate a style/content dichotomy in such a manner. In some sense or other the means of 'saying' is itself part of what is being 'said'.


Agreed to all that, but would you say (J.S.) Bach, or Mozart, were particularly innovative, or might they be better characterised as adopting an essentially integrative approach to composition?

That ventures involving large numbers of individuals by no means necessarily have the democratic implications that seem implicit in your earlier conceptions.


Killing people per se is by no means necessarily the primary reason for a military manoeuvre.


The context was about whether someone can be innovative by saying something that could be said by existing means, which you deny. I'm not sure if this is the case or whether the question is really meaningful. In another medium, the efforts of the French nouvelle vague (especially Godard) to tell a quite conventional type of story in a highly unusual manner is to my mind very innovative.

Er, no I don't, but let's try not to get bogged down here.

My gut tells me that what you want to 'say' and how you want to say it are very linked.  I just ask the naïve question to see if that assumption can be broken, and generate something innovative.

On the wozzeck front, was there a social revolution that allowed Berg to express what he did, and/or a social change that created the concepts he did?  Thinking about social change today may give ideas for concepts to express in music....

So, some observations I would make are that we are tending to act much more from a point of individual gain rather than for tha good of society, and yet we are also trying to wipe out individuality in areas (e.g. Bash R3 because it is different).  Or is there something to be expressed about extremism without reexpressing religious differences?

Tommo

It's certainly a piece which couldn't have been written before it was, partly because it relates to Berg's own experiences in the first World War. Georg Büchner, who wrote the play on which it was based (the first play in German literature whose main characters come from the working class, according to Wikipedia), was himself an early revolutionary.

These two phenomena are by no means mutually contradictory. The overwhelming pressure in our society is to conform to its supposed norms by acting selfishly, one of those wonderful "innovations" brought to us by Margaret Thatcher, although the principle is much older: divide and rule. Part of which strategy involves marginalising many points of view (including, to my mind, the most realistic and least obfuscated ones) by branding them as "extremism".