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Ian Pace
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« Reply #75 on: 12:43:48, 04-05-2007 » |
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OK, how about looking at which British composers are best-known or most often played in Germany, and see how they compare with the central 'canon' in Britain (might be interesting to do this for other countries as well)? From earlier comments, it would seem the following fit one or other of those categories:
Harrison Birtwistle
Brian Ferneyhough
Jonathan Harvey
George Benjamin
Mark-Anthony Turnage
James Dillon
Richard Barrett
Rebecca Saunders
I had thought that Adès was quite well-known in Germany nowadays, not least because of Rattle - is he not really known outside of Berlin? How about Macmillan or Tavener or Bryars or Nyman?
(Jennifer Walshe is Irish, that's why I'm not including her)
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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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quartertone
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« Reply #76 on: 13:29:46, 04-05-2007 » |
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From earlier comments, it would seem the following fit one or other of those categories:
Harrison Birtwistle
Brian Ferneyhough
Jonathan Harvey
George Benjamin
Mark-Anthony Turnage
James Dillon
Richard Barrett
Rebecca Saunders Yes, I'd agree with that. EDIT: I forgot, James Clarke is heard occasionally too. I had thought that Adès was quite well-known in Germany nowadays, not least because of Rattle - is he not really known outside of Berlin? I don't even know how well-known he is inside Berlin. Either way, his music hasn't really caught on. How about Macmillan or Tavener or Bryars or Nyman? All more or less unheard here. |
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« Last Edit: 14:03:36, 04-05-2007 by quartertone »
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Ian Pace
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« Reply #77 on: 13:38:50, 04-05-2007 » |
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OK, if we can agree on that list, then I suppose it makes me think of a list of those who are played often in Britain, but not in Germany, which might include:
Peter Maxwell Davies
Alexander Goehr
Gavin Bryars
John Tavener
Michael Finnissy
Colin Matthews
Oliver Knussen
Simon Bainbridge
Howard Skempton
Diana Burrell
Judith Weir
John Woolrich
Michael Nyman
James Macmillan
Steve Martland
(with Anderson and Adès as borderline cases)
I'm wondering whether there might be any sorts of unifying factors amongst either group? What aspects of the music of the earlier group might appeal more to German listeners that is distinct from this group? It's interesting to me that most of the earlier group are also played pretty frequently in Britain as well these days (Barrett and Saunders slightly less so than the others, but their work is certainly not unknown here).
Might be interesting also to do it the other way round - look at which German composers are known in Britain, and which not?
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« Last Edit: 13:40:33, 04-05-2007 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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time_is_now
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« Reply #78 on: 13:58:23, 04-05-2007 » |
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Sorry, had to do some work! ... Just to answer the last couple of questions I was asked before we move on to the lists of English/Germans (which I think is v interesting). Given which, and given this supposed unforgivingness of 'German New Music listeners' (what, they're a separate club from other German music listeners?) Aren't those groups of listeners often quite separate in many countries (though I'd reckon that on the whole new music listeners are more interested in older music as well (including much older, pre-baroque music) than vice versa)? Yes, I do agree that new music listeners are often to some extent a separate group. It was a minor point, but it was more the capital letters ('German New Music listeners') that I was raising an eyebrow at. Maybe just q-t's German side coming through! Anyway, he's accepted it was a vague and slightly reified category. |
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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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quartertone
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« Reply #79 on: 14:05:25, 04-05-2007 » |
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It was a minor point, but it was more the capital letters ('German New Music listeners') I always capitalise "New Music", and "German" is pretty obvious... |
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time_is_now
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« Reply #80 on: 14:12:38, 04-05-2007 » |
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I don't know which pieces of his you have heard, but I can guess, and I'm pretty sure they must all be composed before around 2002. Yes, that's true. Is there any way you could summarise the change that's happened since then? Yes. I'd say the connections with European music of the 1970s and 80s, which were always present but somewhat submerged by the superficial coating of sub-Knussenesque orchestration, have risen slightly more to the surface, while at the same time a personal voice has become more apparent: where previously there were personal mannerisms, now there's something a bit more like a style, which helps to communicate (whereas the mannerisms were more apt to distract from) the quite distinctive blend of harmonic/timbral exploration and (for want of a better word) 'spiritual' but non-religious content. You now say you don't, which leaves me unsure whether you were siding with the 'German New Music listeners' or not when you wrote:most German New Music listeners are a bit less forgiving towards more traditional fare such as that offered by A and A; in Witten 2002, where the Ardittis played Adès's Piano Quintet (which I found pathetic, incidentally), the piece was almost universally derided. Though my tastes are closer to "German New Music listeners" than "English New Music listeners" (I know those are vague and reified categories, but I hope they'll suffice for the sake of this particular argument), I'm also critical of some of the negativist fetishes found here. In short, I'm critical of both sides, something I'm grateful to my mixed heritage for facilitating. As for the quintet, I also derided it - not for being traditional, just for being very poor, either by traditionalist of avant-garde standards. It probably wasn't helped by Arditti's poor intonation (maybe playing all that microtonal music has had some effects there), but the piece really struck me as superficial and "clever" in a very un-clever way. And ham-handed, actually, something I wasn't expecting. Yes, well, I agree that Adès can be unexpectedly ham-handed (unexpected given his reputation and the amounts of money being thrown his way, which one would have thought might go to someone with a polished technique at least, even if such high-profile commissions do often go to music which is aesthetically safe if not reactionary). I do think the Ardittis may well have been at least part of the problem, though - I've heard them play Janacek painfully out of tune, and I think you're right that they (or IA in particular) are now so used to having to deal with complex rhythms and pitches that they have serious ensemble problems in anything which does use tonal configurations. |
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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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Ian Pace
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« Reply #81 on: 14:23:19, 04-05-2007 » |
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and (for want of a better word) 'spiritual' but non-religious content. Can you expand on what you mean by that, and how exactly it is manifested in the music? |
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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 #82 on: 14:37:02, 04-05-2007 » |
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Not wishing to put a spanner in the works of this happy little conversation: if I recall accurately, the thread began with Jennyhorn looking through the shelves of a CD shop in Munich and wondering what the proportions of CDs of contemporary British music found there had to do with "German attitudes" towards "British music". I know I said this before, but I'm now more convinced than I was before: I don't know whether there's much mileage to be had out of believing either in such a thing as "German attitudes" or such a thing as "British music".
So maybe there are wider questions to be addressed here, like "is it useful or interesting to talk about such a thing as 'British music'?" - I've always suspected that the answer to this in 2007 is not really, and that it's becoming indeed less useful with every passing year. I for one would like to get past categorising composers on the basis of their country of origin. If you look at the two lists Ian has cited and exclude the composers who actually live in Germany, I don't think one group looks necessarily more "British" than the other, which is to say that the choice of British composers whose work is played in Germany (assuming these lists are accurate: a glance at publishers' websites reveals the number of "noteworthy" performances in Germany of work by Macmillan and Bryars in the coming six months is 0 and 13 respectively) may well come down to other factors (which no doubt include a dose of randomness) than their allegiance to some kind of common British aesthetic thinking, or, as some might say, common British lack of aesthetic thinking.
So why all the blustering, I wonder.
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Ian Pace
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« Reply #83 on: 14:48:23, 04-05-2007 » |
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So maybe there are wider questions to be addressed here, like "is it useful or interesting to talk about such a thing as 'British music'?" - I've always suspected that the answer to this in 2007 is not really, and that it's becoming indeed less useful with every passing year. I for one would like to get past categorising composers on the basis of their country of origin. If you look at the two lists Ian has cited and exclude the composers who actually live in Germany, I don't think one group looks necessarily more "British" than the other, which is to say that the choice of British composers whose work is played in Germany (assuming these lists are accurate: a glance at publishers' websites reveals the number of "noteworthy" performances in Germany of work by Macmillan and Bryars in the coming six months is 0 and 13 respectively) may well come down to other factors (which no doubt include a dose of randomness) than their allegiance to some kind of common British aesthetic thinking, or, as some might say, common British lack of aesthetic thinking. Well, maybe it is by considering such lists (albeit modified if they do not seem entirely accurate) that it might be possible to ascertain whether there are any linking factors that play a part in shaping perceptions in Germany (or elsewhere). Maybe there aren't, but I'm not convinced that is a foregone conclusion. I'd be interested to know whether anyone posting here who is not native to Britain (not necessarily to Germany either) perceives some commonality between different British music, or not? I'm not sure whether, as Britons, we are necessarily the best people to answer this question. Festivals, critics, writers, and so on, frequently categorise music in terms of its country of origin - that may not be the best way, but if these categorisations did not resonate in people's minds with what they hear, do you not think they would never have gained any wider currency? Of course there may be several significantly different sub-categories within a nation (possibly relating to region, class, etc.) that are sufficiently different that they should be considered separately, but that does not fundamentally alter the point. When a group of people have been raised within a common environment, culture, set of values that are widespread, etc., surely that's likely to have an effect upon the development of their sensibilities and consciousness? Categories like French music, Dutch music, Italian music, German music, Hungarian music, Russian music, American music, are not meaningless to me; being a Briton, being 'within' that culture makes it harder for me (or for many others, I would argue) to appreciate how it might be perceived from outside. And for that reason I wouldn't be surprised if others do sense some common factors between composers, or compositional sensibilities, amongst otherwise diverse composers from Britain. One might similarly observe that certain varieties of American music have gained much more of a following in various parts of Europe than others - these would include Cage, Feldman and other members of the New York School, Carter (more in some places than others), and Reich, Riley, Glass, Adams, etc. Whereas Babbitt, Wuorinen, Westergaard or Del Tredici, Jacob Druckman, Joan Tower, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (and many others) are very little known and played on this side of the Atlantic, despite being highly regarded and frequently played in the US. Is this entirely arbitrary? I would be surprised if that was the case. |
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« Last Edit: 14:52:16, 04-05-2007 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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xyzzzz__
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« Reply #84 on: 10:13:08, 05-05-2007 » |
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"I know I said this before, but I'm now more convinced than I was before: I don't know whether there's much mileage to be had out of believing either in such a thing as "German attitudes" or such a thing as "British music"."
I suppose governments tend to support composers that were born in their own country, but apart from that I'd agree that I can't see what's so British about a lot of British music like Chris Dench, most Ferneyhough, and with Finnissy he does seem to pass a comment on an idea of Britain, not that I knew anythig about that at first (the first piece I ever heard by him was "Red Earth").
Its v interesting how the Ardittis have put out CDs on the basis of composers that grew up in the same country rather than composers sharing similar sensibilities (although I suppose these aren't the two ways to group string quartets, I don't know). I don't get much of an idea of Italy from what I've heard of their "From Italy" dbl set. But again that could be the string quartet as a format than anything else.
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time_is_now
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« Reply #85 on: 12:20:40, 05-05-2007 » |
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Interesting. I think Ferneyhough could be perceived as very much engaged with an idea of Englishness actually, starting as early as Sonatas for String Quartet, which bypasses the history of the quartet genre in favour of something relating to the viol consort tradition; then in the metaphysics of Transit; and on to the text for a piece like On Stellar Magnitudes, which seems to combine English and American experimental poetry traditions; or maybe even the text of Opus Contra Naturam. Interested to know what Ian thinks about this.
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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 #86 on: 12:45:32, 05-05-2007 » |
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I wouldn't be sure that these examples add up into being "very much engaged with an idea of Englishness", t_i_n. While BF talks about the Sonatas in terms of Purcell's fantasias, I've always heard them as relating at least as strongly to the Lyric Suite and Schoenberg's quartets. Transit seems to me at least as connected to German metaphysical traditions as English ones. I'm not trying to hold up the thread here, but what I wonder is why this issue is thought so worthy of discussion: this may be just me, but I've never given the issue of "Britishness" much thought except to reject it as an interesting issue. Brian F might well find something clever to say about it if one asked him, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's any more important to him.
Surely it's a concept which goes back to the late 19th century sense of musical "nationalism", whose main legacy in British music (and elsewhere, like Central and Eastern Europe and the Nordic area) was the "rediscovery" of folk music and its incorporation of material derived from it into "serious" composition, as an alternative (or complement) to the prevailing ascendancy of Austro-German/Italian/French way of doing things? "Englishness" seems often to be a code for "looking to the past".
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time_is_now
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« Reply #87 on: 12:49:13, 05-05-2007 » |
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You're probably right. I lost faith in most of my examples as I was trying to write the post, which might mean I don't have a point or might mean there is a point but I'm not the best person to be trying to make it just at the moment.
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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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Ian Pace
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« Reply #88 on: 12:54:08, 05-05-2007 » |
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and on to the text for a piece like On Stellar Magnitudes, which seems to combine English and American experimental poetry traditions; or maybe even the text of Opus Contra Naturam. Interested to know what Ian thinks about this.
Well, the text of Opus Contra Naturam very literally combines English and American experimental poetry traditions, as that stuff for the first section is by Ferneyhough, the text for the second section by Bernstein! The more intuitive sounding-approach to what goes on on a large scale (which is almost certainly the product of various intricate techniques on certain levels, but the result to me sounds more intuitive) in both this piece and others (Ferneyhough's techniques used essentially in an ad hoc manner rather than for the production of grandiose super-formulae in the manner of Stockhausen) is at the very least something that to me makes his work sound quite different to a lot of German music. Also, whilst Ferneyhough employs a gestural language that owes more than a bit to expressionistic music, the sensibility seems significantly different - in that sense the mediated Schoenbergian elements of the music are transplanted into a different context. I did have a plan once (should still do it) for a concert of 'British serialism' (sounds like an oxymoron, I know) - in the broadest sense, British composers who have adopted and/or developed techniques from serial music, not least to see if any commonality might be discerned (compared to their various European and other counterparts). What I would ask: if someone with a reasonable degree of familiarity with post-1945 music did a blind listen to pieces they didn't know by the following. Boulez, Barraqué, Manoury, Murail, Dusapin Stockhausen, Henze, Lachenmann, Huber, Rihm Nono, Berio, Clementi, Donatoni, Sciarrino Do you not think it would be reasonably clear which ones were French, which German, which Italian? Similarly, if I hear Cage and Feldman next to Walter Zimmermann, it is apparent to me that the former two come from a different sensibility and approach to the latter (more didactic, more through-composed, more focused upon the development of material). |
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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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time_is_now
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« Reply #89 on: 12:58:55, 05-05-2007 » |
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if someone with a reasonable degree of familiarity with post-1945 music did a blind listen to pieces they didn't know by the following.
Boulez, Barraqué, Manoury, Murail, Dusapin
Stockhausen, Henze, Lachenmann, Huber, Rihm
Nono, Berio, Clementi, Donatoni, Sciarrino
Do you not think it would be reasonably clear which ones were French, which German, which Italian? Well, I think the trouble with that is that someone with 'a reasonable degree of familiarity with post-1945 music' would probably be able to guess the composers, and would be making judgments as to national provenance on the basis of an idea of the countries in question which already includes the knowledge of specific composers and styles those countries have produced in the period in question. |
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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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