I think the key component here is that we can't predict the future. Especially in a time like the one we live in right now, it's hard to tell which trends will hold ground and which will give way. Perhaps in the 20th century there was more of an 'agenda' to push tonality and sound and thus, it was easier to deem what was 'radical' and what was 'conservative', but I think we are nearing the end of that. I'm not one to take on a post-modernist view of art and say that we really have nothing more to offer, I just believe that the next 'radical' change is not something that many of us will easily be able to anticipate at first, so we're just going to have to wait for the results and not mislabel people along the way.

I think it's a given that the most radical composers are often the ones that are the most easily misunderstood. It's easy to pass over innovation when it is too far out of context. A perfect example of this is Bach. He was really considered by many an insignificant, old fart in his day, though not by all of course. A lot of his most innovative work was passed over because it seemed puzzling, and believe it or not... extremely conservative.

I always like bringing up the F minor Fugue from the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier as an example. It's a strange work for sure. There are two things one usually notices when approaching the work. During the baroque era, the most obvious thing one would have noticed would have probably been the unique structure of the work. It's a four voice fugue with a three voice intro. The whole early structure of the fugue turns out to be deceptive when an episode interrupts the entrance of the fourth voice. In Bach's day, this was considered old-fashioned. He was recycling the ricercar, a form that had been used during the Renaissance and the Early Baroque, far before he was born. And I'm sure all of this added to the view others had of him as being a conservative, with understandable reason too.

However, listen with our modern ears, and the first, most striking thing about the fugue is very different for us - we may note the outdated structure with curiosity, but what really gets to us is the tonal ambiguity. Really, if Bach hadn't resolved back to f minor at the end of the fugue subject he would've basically left us with one of the first examples of serialism... hundreds of years before the concept actually developed. What did the serialists think... what do we today think when we are exposed to this enigma of tonal ambiguity from far back in the Baroque era? Probably a good deal... the work simply exudes modernism and extreme innovation. But would many of Bach's contemporaries have thought the same way? Sadly, probably not. It was simply far beyond what they were thinking at the time, even to their most radical concepts of 'innovation'.

All in all, it's true that the past and the future can often be intertwined. One couldn't really say that neo-classicism in it's time was conservative, though it did look significantly to the past for ideas and inspiration, did it not? And what about minimalism? Sometimes it seems that the greatest innovations are those that are actually the most backwards. And that's certainly some food for thought.

 

Air - your "take" on the Feldman quote makes a lot of sense to me, you obviously thought about it in a deep way. What you say about J.S. Bach makes a lot of sense to me. Actually, that very excerpt you posted is my favourite part of the Well Tempered Clavier. I've always thought of it as different than the others, since I got an old tape with Wanda Landowska playing it on one of her not entirely "authentic" harpsichords. I'm no musician, but the first time I heard this part, it kind of sounded more similar to me to someone like Mahler than J.S. Bach. I was pretty amazed at that. & your explanation there corresponds with my initial "gut" feelings. Another one is his final (3rd) movt. from the Brandenburg Concerto #3. It isn't far away from "Minimalism" & I've read Aussie writer Andrew Ford's corresponding opinion on this (he mentioned it in passing, I have made a thread about this, which I'll need to tend to soon, as there have been good replies) & it was also made into a modern ballet I remember watching about 20 years ago.

...All in all, it's true that the past and the future can often be intertwined. One couldn't really say that neo-classicism in it's time was conservative, though it did look significantly to the past for ideas and inspiration, did it not?

Well it's funny how we (or at least I) tend to think of Stravinsky in relation to the "Neo-Classical" movement between the two world wars. But there were many others who worked with it's ideas strongly in mind. Mentioning J.S. Bach, one of the first composers to explicitly "resurrect" many of his techniques in a quite literal way was Bartok. He was probably as big a "Neo-Classicist" as Stravinsky at the time, yet everyone talks of Bartok's "dissonance," "astringency" & all this stuff. But things like the old contrapuntal forms are never far beneath the surface of his works. Eg. the Music for Strings, Percussion & Celesta has a lot of this kind of thing going on, incl. a canon (or two?). Bartok was just as much a traditionalist as a radical, imo. It's just that people tend to "judge a book by it's cover." Same for Schoenberg in the 1920's, he incorporated a lot of the old forms - minuets, gavottes, these ancient dance things - into his works then (eg. the Serenade & Suite, both chamber works, & I think the former even has a guitar & mandolin!). Apparently, some of the high-end serialist theoreticians after 1945 were a bit bemused & critical that Schoenberg chose to do this kind of thing, straight after "discovering" or "developing" whatever the serial technique. They thought it was a kind of joke - eg. why would you "invent" this revolutionary "new" technique & then write these pretty little dance things, which are quite tuneful & even a bit fun in some ways. Of course, he didn't "rigidly" apply the serial technique in these works, & that may also have brang the ire of those later guys up against these works.

...And what about minimalism? Sometimes it seems that the greatest innovations are those that are actually the most backwards. And that's certainly some food for thought.

Yes, there is often a synthesis of the "old" in "new" ways. I can hear the ghost of guys like J.S. Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, Stravinsky, etc. etc. in many quite recent works (eg. post 1945). I won't go further, I want to hear what others say. These thoughts have been brimming in my head for a while now.

BTW - If anyone out there could point to a source with the context of that Feldman quote - eg. date, what he said before & after that sentence, these types of things, it would be useful. I remember reading this quote in another source, and it said that Feldman whistled a tune from a Sibelius symphony before he said this (hence it being mentioned in a book on Sibelius, which I provided the link to in my initial post)...

 

there was a period in which it seems it was mandatory to wrote atonal/twelve tone/serial/post-cagean music. And when everybody must write in a certain way, a composer who chooses a different path (that could be original or innovative in subtle ways), at his own risk to be considered a conservative just to preserve his uniqueness is already a radical.
Luonnotar for example is tonal music, but it's an incredibly original, unique and deep piece of music. I can't say the same of a lot of music that on paper shoud be a lot more experimental and innovative.

 

The "progressive/conservative" split is a false dichotomy if there ever was one. Nothing "radical" will retain its novelty in a couple generations or so, compositional value notwithstanding.

 

Well... depends on the composer. Some of the people we think of as 'conservatives' were really those who breathed new life into an older form, spurring its development. Palestrina with the mass, Haydn with the symphony and string quartet, Mozart with opera and the piano concerto, Scriabin and Prokofiev with the piano sonata. I think of these composers as innovators.

Then you have people who really didn't help to 'develop' the older forms, like Bach, Brahms, and Saint-Saens. But of course, these people would get sick of writing in the same rules all the time..

 

It's not at all surprising when contemporary opinion is completely wrong about a composer's music. This is particularly true whenever a composer's music becomes symbolic of a general attitude in the ethos of a society.

As an example, look at the controversy that existed in the late 1800's among the followers of Wagner vs. Brahms. Wagner, who was twenty years older than Brahms, had already declared that he wrote "the music of the future". This condemned Brahms to being labelled "conservative", or "old fashioned" almost from the moment he began to make his name known in the early 1850's. When Eduard Hanslick became his champion in Vienna in the 1870's, support of Brahms became both a political and an esthetic position, and being a Brahmsian meant that you liked your music the way it was written in the good old days.

But when you listen to Brahms' music, there's absolutely nothing "conservative" about it considering its time and place. Yes, he stayed within the orchestral forces and movement lengths of Beethoven's time, and kept general allegiance to sonata form. But starting around the G minor piano quartet, he began a process of continual thematic development that was truly revolutionary - no more first or second theme in a sonata - just one polymorphous theme that can be stretched, dissected, inverted, and manipulated in all sorts of amazing ways.

He also wrote with a harmonic richness that went beyond Schumann and Chopin and into the strange, ethereal music of the late piano pieces. As an example, just exactly what key are we in at the beginning of the D minor piano concerto, or at the beginning of the first symphony?

He had a tendency to have polyrhythmic sections in his music - not explicitly written out like Stravinsky's, but with lots of sections where the piano's left hand is de facto playing 2/2 or 4/4 while the right hand is actually playing in 3/4 or 6/4 time. Or the second string quintet - what an elastic rhythm there is in that first theme!

And nobody at the time seemed to notice it... the image of Brahms as conservative, the guy who wrote the Hungarian Dances and Ein Deutsches Requiem and the Liebeslieder Waltzes, obscured the fact that he was really a revolutionary.

 

...When Eduard Hanslick became his champion in Vienna in the 1870's, support of Brahms became both a political and an esthetic position, and being a Brahmsian meant that you liked your music the way it was written in the good old days...

I think people like Hanslick have a tendency to mix ideology and music, which is a "lose lose" situation. They make statements that they see as definitive or factual, not admitting any ideology or bias. Hanslick's opponent, Hugo Wolf (who we now know more as a composer of lieder, but his "day job" was as a music critic) also made some extreme statements, throwing his hat in with the opposing "progressivist" camp. He said something like that the cymbal clash in Bruckner's Symphony #7 was worth more than all of Brahms' symphonies & serenades put together. This kind of thinking didn't help his own career (it alienated Brahms, who in the early days was a big supporter of Wolf's music) but more importantly it lead to a split between the two extremes, squeezing out the "middle ground."

Another one like this was Theodore Adorno, who worshipped Schoenberg & trashed Sibelius as something like the worst composer in the history of music. Of course, neither Schoenberg or Sibelius had anything to do with Adorno, I think they didn't care much what the man said. These kinds of warped ideological & extreme views do no service to "progressive" music, they actually narrow down people's options, when the role of a critic/music theorist should be to open up options, imo.

But starting around the G minor piano quartet, he began a process of continual thematic development that was truly revolutionary - no more first or second theme in a sonata - just one polymorphous theme that can be stretched, dissected, inverted, and manipulated in all sorts of amazing ways.

I always thought that what Brahms did with his concertos (eg. his unique way of treating themes, & their length - esp. of the first movts.) is not much different, in some ways, as to what Bruckner was doing in the symphonic realm (or maybe even Wagner in the operatic area?).

... the image of Brahms as conservative, the guy who wrote the Hungarian Dances and Ein Deutsches Requiem and the Liebeslieder Waltzes, obscured the fact that he was really a revolutionary.

Yes, often the "sexed up" image/stereotype of someone we have hides a more balanced view, which (as the Feldman quote suggests) could very well turn out to be basically the opposite of what we had previously thought.

 

The famous quote by Schoenberg "I was a conservative who was forced to become a radical" speaks to this topic strongly. I've been reading a book about c20th music, and the author says that Schoenberg borrowed Brahms' sense of structure & married it with Wagner's adventures towards the outer reaches of tonality. A number of people on this forum have said that Schoenberg's music doesn't really sound "new" to them, in comparison with things that came after his death in 1951. Not that he's "old hat," but I'd say that just like any composer, he was "of his time." I haven't got exhaustive familiarity with the man's works, but many of the works that I have come across & know well do have a sense of combining old & new. It makes me think that people who "knock" guys like Schoenberg, kind of blaming him for making "the split" with tonality, perhaps don't have a solid understanding of what went on before Schoenberg? It's a bit like the old saying "if you don't understand the past, you can't deal with the present, and you'll find it difficult to anticipate the future." Just some thoughts...

 

Or he might have been making a point about his theory on "natural music" without really knocking Mozart or Beethoven. It's not that damning of a quote, really.

He was a quintessential modernist, to him a sound was just a sound and that's it. I think that's the big barrier most people can't scale.

 

Well, let's see. I have $15 to spend on entertainment this week. Shall I buy a CD of Beethoven or Mozart, or shall I buy a CD of traffic noise? Hmmm... I wonder. Some decisions are so hard.

 

You make it sound so obvious, but I think Mr. Cage would actually have to consider it.

Different strokes. Sometimes, radically different strokes.

 

I'm sure he would. I'm sure other people would, too. That's fine.

I wouldn't. But, I apologize for going for the obvious sarcasm. It kind of misrepresents my stand as an "Innocent Bystander".

As I've said before, I listen to it all without prejudgment. So far, most of the modern serious music I've gotten any real satisfaction from listening to has tended to be a little less than the most "experimental". I'm not sure if that says more about me or more about it, but it's reality.

 

Focusing on Cage specifically, I like to defend him, but I couldn't disagree with him more on a fundamental level. Field recordings, radio transmissions and that kinda thing were pretty big at a record store I used to frequent, and I never understood why anyone would buy something like that. It's "neat" but it's novelty.

I do feel "sounds" aren't enough and a guiding concept needs to emerge from textures to create something substantial, but I find value in how Cage's ideas spurred on new ways of approaching music. I just wish he focused more on writing rather than being a modern prankster so his "real" body of music would be taken more seriously.

Anyway, obviously there's more to modernism and the avant-garde than just Cage's ideas, but the discussion got sidetracked.

 

You're right. Radical views on music and art can simply be dangerous.

Life without danger must be awfully boring.

 

Can you guy's please not turn yet another thread into a "which 20th C. composer is most ugly" thread.

P.S. The sound of traffic reminds me of the city, and I love being in the city, thus I love the sound of traffic, therefore no, traffic doesn't always sound like ****.

 

Actually, what HC is saying is pretty spot on, in a way. Yes, electronic music is noise! This is what John Cage called "illegal harmonies," & Schoenberg "the liberation of the dissonance." A lot of post-1945 music is beyond the normal scale (eg. microtonal) & (as Argus says) is environmental or electronically distorted, so cannot be notated, or at least not in traditional ways (eg. use of graphs rather than staves). I'm sure that if someone from 100 years ago heard something like even "mild" electronic music (eg. Vangelis' score for Chariots of Fire), they'd be totally baffled. Same as before, if Beethoven would have heard Wagner's music, I'm sure he would have "heard" it differently to people in Wagner's time (or now, when Wagner's innovations are seen as kind of commonplace). Maybe Wagner's music would have sounded to Beethoven to be nothing much more than cacophony?

So what can we do to "access" various types of post-1945 music? Basically adjust our ears, our listening, our expectations, accept it as different. So yes, by definition it probably is "noise," but I'm just over that. Just as with other music, it's a case of "take it or leave it" (or be in the middle about it, that's how I got into this & many other types of music new to me, just "sit on it" for a while)...

 

Wait 'til half the members here discover the musical genre literally called "noise".

 

To be honest, I think the only "noise" I here is people talking against something that's happened in music - decades ago. I'm sure J.S. Bach wouldn't have been amused at Wendy Carlos' "take" on his pieces with her Moog synthesiser (her very successful album "Switched on Bach"), his reaction would be understandable (he was around hundreds of years before electricity was invented). Now that technological advancements have happened (even since the 1960's, since Wendy Carlos' time) there are more possibilities that have been opened up in music, both "classical" & "non-classical." No-one is asking anyone to like anything. But the reality is that electronic music is one of the many possibilities that composers have today, and don't forget, the way even Schoenberg wrote for acoustic instruments was vastly different (in terms of tuning, technique, the qualities/make of the instruments, etc.) to what composers of earlier times did. I'm just bemused how some people don't see "the big picture" here? Things have changed rapidly in music since even 1945, not to speak of from J.S. Bach's time. Is change in music such an odd thing? I, for one, don't think so...

 

Getting back to the topic of conservatives and/versus radicals, I just got a recording made by young pianist Francesco Tristano of his own, J.S. Bach's and John Cage's works. I've reviewed it on current listening thread HERE. It seems that musicians today don't really care for the so-called boundaries between various periods or composers. They just want to present the public with something interesting to listen to, give us their own "take" on these greats. Other musicians who have done this with some success are Hilary Hahn (she tends to couple newer & older violin concertos - eg. the Sibelius/Schoenberg disc, & the more recent Tchaikovsky/Higdon disc) as well as Janine Jensen (of course, many performers of the past began to do this decades ago - two I can think of were pianists Alfred Brendel & Maurizio Pollini). I think that the old "divisions" are breaking down fast, people are beginning to realise that the old dichotomies - really, they're false dichotomies - are basically a thing of the past...

 

Speaking to myself here, but oh well, if someone reads this, it's worth it for me.

Referring to the issues above, about many in the younger generation of musicians embracing the past as well as the future, the "conservatives" as well as the "radicals," I've found an interview (referred to by stlukes here before, but he only quoted part of it) with pianist Murray Perahia. I like how he doesn't err on the wrong side of judging or rubbishing "atonal" music, he just says he doesn't play it because he doesn't understand it & wasn't educated/trained in much depth about it. Mr Perahia is in his early sixties. Full interview HERE.

Schoenberg occurs several times in our conversation. He marks a dividing line for Perahia, who performs nothing later than Pierrot Lunaire, which was premiered in 1912. "I play pretty much everything until Schoenberg, but I don't play atonal music because I don't understand it. Atonal music tries to get its organicism from intellectual concepts. This is serious music. It tries to be comprehensive, in fact. Every note is taken care of, all relationships are judged, and there's a unity in some way, but it's hard for a tonal person to understand it. It measures music completely differently, and you have to have another education for it, which I never properly got."

 

I'm pretty sure his musical education beats mine, and I can enjoy atonal music. Sometimes it might just amount to different ears I guess.

 

You're right, I think anyone who is interested can listen to, appreciate, enjoy any type of music they want (incl. "atonal," contemporary, whatever). But I think Mr Perahia was talking mainly about what he is able to play, hence the reference to him playing nothing later than Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. Whether he likes to just listen to this music, as opposed to performing it, I'm not sure about (don't remember what the article said about that, I'll have to go back & read it when I get the time)...

 

Relating to dogma, I just got a cd of the music of Chinese composer (now living in France) Qigang Chen (b. 1951). He studied with Messiaen, he was his last student in the 1980's. A quote by Mr Chen speaks to the issues of dogmas in classical music, which I thought I'd post here (I will listen to the disc later tonight) -

In the west, the official system of contemporary music engenders numerous parasites. Some experts or critics live primarily as hangers-on of modern music and serve the interests of various cliques. Art has to be personal and free; it cannot subscribe to a norm. For me, the first principle is to remain faithful to oneself and to rise above the pedantic advice of would-be experts in modernity. The recognition of the public, so strongly decried in certain quarters, is for me the measure of a new bond forged between society and the artist, the sign of a real renewal in musical creation...No-one has a monopoly of the truth. What counts is freedom of expression...

I think this is interesting, if very strongly put. The last lines talk to the position of many Chinese intellectuals today, but Mr Chen has not been living in the country since about 1984 when he started his studies with Messiaen...