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24K views 223 replies 32 participants last post by  GreenMamba  
#1 ·
A bit of background. At the time this article was written, Copland had already written both his early, more difficult works, inspired by Stravinsky, and also his New Deal-era populist works (also inspired by Stravinsky, just more diatonic). A few years later the critic Henry Pleasants was to write The Agony of Modern Music, a book which declared that classical music was dead, that the only serious music left was Jazz (and he ended up disliking the turns that took too before long), and that Wagner was the last serious composer to write for his time and his audience.

https://www.nytimes.com/books/99/03/14/specials/copland-modernist.html

The list of accessibility levels of the various composers (all still living at the time, I believe?) is interesting. I wonder how closely it aligns with the profiles of those who feel reticence towards 20th century music. (Note that when he says "late" Stravinsky, this does not mean the serial works, which had not yet been written in 1949.)

From my perspective, this music is very much a part of my aesthetic, and I find it difficult, as did Copland, to understand how others find it incomprehensible, unmelodic, chaotic, and so forth. It is just as difficult for me to imagine that by listening to the music as it is for me to recover my initial impressions of Debussy or Mahler as noisy and unlikable.

I think there are signs that what is considered difficult has continued to gradually shift over time, and even the music in his top category of difficulty has moved down the ladder to make way for newer music that presents more problems.

What are your reactions to the article and the list in particular?
 
#2 · (Edited)
Nice find :tiphat: I will have to read the article later, but I would rate the composers somewhat like this (without trying to break them up too much into early and late, etc.—and remember that I haven't heard as many pieces by the majority of the composers listed as Copland had):

Very easy: Shostakovich, Khachaturian, Satie, Vaughan Williams, Honegger, Britten, Varèse, Ives

Quite approachable: Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, BartĂłk, Hindemith, Berg, Webern

Fairly difficult:

Very tough:

I simply left out the ones I know too little of to say.
 
#3 · (Edited)
An extremely well written and thoughtful article that states its case succinctly. I would take his list, and from today's perspective, divide it into only two categories: quite approachable -- comprising the first three lists -- and fairly difficult -- the final list with the possible exception of Ives, who occupies a category of his own (which I would call "Quirky"). :)
 
#5 ·
Pretty much everything Copland wrote I gradually learned over my first year and a half at TC. Modern music was a mystery, and I had to learn how to listen differently. In some sense it was an epiphony when I started to realize that I could truly like this bizarre music. He asks, "Why is it that the musical public is seemingly so reluctant to consider a musical composition as, possibly, a challenging experience?" There's nothing wrong with wanting music to immediately please. On the other hand, I think many listeners would be surprized at what they could learn to like.

Copland's list of composers by degree of difficulty seemed roughly right to me. However, when I first started, I found Shostakovich, early Stravinsky, and Prokofiev mostly unpleasant. I probably would not have placed Ives in the very tough group, but I agree that Varese could be the most difficult
 
#6 ·
I recognize at least part of this article as being taken directly from Copland's own book "What to Listen for in Music". Or maybe he took part of this article for the book.

Either way, ever since I read that book I've felt that Copland was a great writer and an amazing communicator to the layman about Classical Music. Him and Bernstein excelled in this area, imo. I hope to be a similar kind of figure someday.
 
#8 ·
I understand the article now as I too no longer find any of these composers an impossible challenge -- only a rewarding one. But it hasn't been that long since I found many of these works inscrutable and therefor just annoying. It was like overhearing an animated conversation in an unknown foreign language in public. My conscious mind tries not to focus on it, but I can't help half unconsciously trying to pick out words or phrases that make sense. It then becomes more of a distraction than an (often equally meaningless) conversation in my own language would be.

I'm glad now most modern and contemporary music no longer has that effect on me

As to Copland's list, I would add his own music to the Quite Approachable category though I've scarcely heard more than the popular pieces.

Also, Britten as fairly difficult? I don't get that. Scriabin is difficult maybe, not Britten.

[Tip for reading the article: If you have Firefox click on the Reader View book icon at the top in the address bar. That gets rid of the atrocious font that is so hard on the eyes.]
 
#12 ·
As to Copland's list, I would add his own music to the Quite Approachable category though I've scarcely heard more than the popular pieces.
Here are some of Copland's non-populist works:

Written before the article's publication
Piano Variations
Piano Concerto (Might not strike you as "difficult" now, but this piece led critics to call Copland the "American Schoenberg," believe it or not)

Written after the article's publication
Piano Fantasy
Inscape

These two use Copland's personal adaptation of the 12-tone method.
 
#9 ·
I still remember when I found several of the works on Copland's "Fairly difficult" and "Very tough" lists as being ... well, difficult and/or tough.

But I was a teenager.

I've heard a lot of music since then, much of it contemporary experimental and avant-garde music. I rethink what I consider difficult and tough music, nowadays.

I wonder what Copland would have made of Schnittke's First Symphony, or Peter Maxwell Davies' Eight Songs for a Mad King , or Penderecki's Threnody, Xenakis's Synaphai, or Stockhausen's Momente ... or the piece I'm currently listening to via headphones: the eleven movement chamber work Emma (for viola, cello, piano) written in the late 1980s by Christian Wolff.

And note -- I haven't even mentioned anything written in the 21st century!

I suspect that Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven were once considered difficult. I suspect that (from a dedicated performer's point of view) they still are.

Some of Copland's listings under "Very easy" (Shostakovich, early Schoenberg and Stravinsky) and "Quite approachable" (Prokofieff, especially) can prove rather thorny and dense at times. I've never found Roy Harris, Villa-Lobos, Ernest Bloch, or William Walton to sound challenging in any significant manner, but each presents his own challenges, I'm sure.

One of the things I most treasure about hearing experimental, new, avant-garde, challenging, difficult, tough contemporary music, is that it awakens a spirit of surprise and wonder and awe that I suspect all audiences in all times have felt to some degree for works of their own age. Since I can no longer experience this same kind of wonder and awe from "tonal" music of past masters (though I can experience wonder and awe for different reasons from sublime tonal music of past masters), I seek it out in new music, which remains my primary listening area.

The same may explain my foray into punk rock and experimental/noise pop music and free jazz or what the late Gunther Schuller terms "third stream", to which I turn much more often than do I to the "top 40 hit lists" of the rock and jazz arenas. Recent acquisitions to my music library (say, 90 of the last 100 CDs and LPS I've purchased) are almost all in the area of "very new" music and include such things as the box sets of the remastered Black Saint/Soul Note jazz catalog, several Merzbow discs, quite a few discs from col legno and NEOS labels which specialize in contemporary serious music, and three of the maga box sets of music conducted by Pierre Boulez.

I will not dispense with my vast Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven collections; nor turn away from my beloved Brahms and Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Vaughn Williams .... But I welcome the new -- earful adventures in sound, everywhere. It's one of the few real areas of life where I can be a full fledged adventurer, out on the edge, facing the brink! Ah! Exhiliarating!
 
#10 ·
"The literary world does not expect Gide or Mann or T.S. Eliot to emote with the accents of Victor Hugo or Walter Scott. Why, then, should Bartok or Milhaud be expected to sing with the voice of Schumann or Tchaikovsky?"

To suppose that people should like a certain style of music, and to bemoan the fact that they don't, seems a pretty useless exercise all around.
 
#14 ·
A good read because although it was written sixty years ago, it could be dated today and I would find it entirely agreeable. It shows how little has changed in terms of the general listening public's perception and understanding of modern music. "Ultra-modern" music written in 1925 almost one hundred years ago from today are still challenging to the majority of classical music listeners today. This is in stark contrast to say when the Bach revival was well and truly in its heyday during Romanticism when Mendelssohn to Brahms revived music composed a century before them by say Bach and Handel. I think this all says a lot.
 
#15 ·
Copland says that a composer expresses musical thoughts "in the musical language of his own time," yet, when I listen to contemporary composers, they frequently sound so much like Xenakis, Nono, Stockhausen, Ligeti, Boulez and others that they sound like the 1960s and 1970s. While I like much contemporary music, the fact that it seems to be repeating the sound of 30-70 years ago makes me want to compare it with the great music of the recent past which it so strongly resembles, and I often find myself thinking that Nono, Boulez, Stockhausen etc. did 'it' better. This isn't a rejection of the younger composers, per se, but I often ask myself if I need to hear/buy more of the same/similar.
 
#16 ·
First, Copland uses the word "variegated." I absolutely love this word and use it in my everyday speech, but people always think it sounds stupid, or don't readily know it, but can kind of guess what it means, or think it is inappropriately applied. Anyways, reading it here highlights that the word may be out of date. Makes me feel simpatico with Copland nonetheless.

Second, I enjoyed the article, but I find his position a little confusing, or really, quite unwelcoming. Let me explain.

He spends a great deal explaining why people make music:

The objective is not necessarily to make beautiful sounds like Chopin or Mozart. Much as one should like to do just that, it isn't possible, because one doesn't write the music of one's choice but a necessity.

If forced to explain the creative musician's basic objective in elementary terms, I would say that a composer writes music to express and communicate and put down in permanent form certain thoughts, emotions and states of being. These thoughts and emotions are gradually formed by the contact of the composer's personality with the world in which he lives. He expresses these thoughts . . . in the musical language of his own time. The resultant work of art should speak to the men and women of the artist's own time with a directness and immediacy of communicative power that no previous art expression can give....


When approaching a present-day musical work of serious pretensions, one must first realize what the objective of the composer is and then expect to hear a different treatment of the elements of music -- harmony, melody, timbre, texture -- than what was customary in the past.
How should one realize the objective of a composer? Maybe he means an objective that comes out in the sound -- that is, just listen to the music, and do not expect it to sound like some other previous composer or era.

But this could also mean that the listener must consider context -- i.e., we need to know the circumstances in which the composer is writing, who he is writing it for, what is going on his life, who came before him, who are his peers. It is like program music; know the person you are listening to, the intentions of the music.

I despise this type of musical analysis. Sure, in some cases, artists make clear what their objectives are, but in the vast majority of others, the interpretation is left to the listener, or a critic, or some apocryphal anecdote built from rumor to memory to story to biographer footnote to Wikipedia. When I hear, let's say, Svoboda or Glass, I am not considering what is going on in today's world. I am considering what I am hearing. The same thing? Maybe, but I do not wish to delve into speculation.

The second time reading through, I think he is making the former point (i.e., objectives need not be to emulate the past) and not this latter point, which is good.

Also, the Mozart thing confuses me. Is he saying:

(1) That the objective of Chopin and Mozart was to make "beautiful sounds," and that contemporary composers have different objectives; or

(2) That Chopin and Mozart's objectives just happened to create "beautiful sounds," as many people think, and contemporary composers have their own objectives, but because they do not sound the same, does not mean they are not valid forms of music?

I think it is the latter, because (1) is a totally unfair characterization/assumption, and in my opinion, would really devastate his entire argument.

Regardless (of all that above), I agree that Copland is a great writer of music, and I wish he had someone like him alive today.
 
G
#19 ·
How should one realize the objective of a composer? Maybe he means an objective that comes out in the sound -- that is, just listen to the music, and do not expect it to sound like some other previous composer or era.

But this could also mean that the listener must consider context -- i.e., we need to know the circumstances in which the composer is writing, who he is writing it for, what is going on his life, who came before him, who are his peers. It is like program music; know the person you are listening to, the intentions of the music.
No, I don't think he's saying that. I think when he refers to 'objective', he's actually describing what it is that drives him to make music

to express and communicate and put down in permanent form certain thoughts, emotions and states of being. These thoughts and emotions are gradually formed by the contact of the composer's personality with the world in which he lives.
I don't think he is referring at this point to the notion of specific objectives for each composition.

Also, the Mozart thing confuses me. Is he saying [etc]:
He's saying that it is his objective to live in his own time and write music for his own time. He doesn't (can't) write music as Mozart and Chopin did. It has nothing to do with whether Mozart or Chopin wrote great or beautiful music. He's just rejecting the expectation that he should write music like they did, because he's living in the 20th C, not the 18th or 19th.
 
G
#18 ·
There's plenty to chew on in the article...and TC members have masticated some of it to death already! Get past the comparative list near the beginning, and there are gems to be mined such as

  • "music that has proved its worth" (the 'test of time' argument, which he cautions against)
  • "When a contemporary piece seems dry and cerebral to you, when it seems to be giving off little feeling or sentiment, there is a good chance that you are not willing to live in your own epoch, musically speaking"
  • "If you find yourself rejecting music because it is too dissonant, it probably indicates that your ear is insufficiently accustomed to contemporary musical vocabulary and needs more training -- that is, listening." (try listening properly!)
  • "the human ear is limited in absorbent capacity" (what kind of ears have you got?)

Finally, was Copland being optimistic or pessimistic when he said,

""contemporary music is likely to remain peculiar, unless audiences demand that the music producers let them hear more of it. From where I sit that sounds like the millennium."



 
#21 ·
I still find the below work absolutely shocking, dizzying, head-splitting, nauseating, dissonant and yet at the same time terrific, soulful, and viscerally emotional beyond my capacities:


And I think that anyone who doesn't find it this to be so... is simply not listening carefully.

In a sense, the below works are less jarring than the above because once you get into their sound, one realizes that they're more smooth, streamlined, elegant, and actually... beautiful. And when I say beautiful, I'm not being obtuse: I mean it.


Seriously, Stockhausen's Gruppen and Messiaen's Sept Haikai are more streamlined, smooth, and flowing than Beethoven's Hammerklavier (and including his Grosse Fugue, Serioso Quartet, 8th and 9th symphony finales). Not that I'm dissing Beethoven (I love Beethoven, especially the works I've quoted, and he's always been one of my top 5) but I think that people exaggerate the ugliness of modern music and are not listening carefully enough. Once you get used to the harmonic world, you can only realize that it's more streamlined and smooth and down to earth. Although of course sometimes it gets to be jarring like the Grosse Fugue and Hammerklavier. Maybe this classic recent work is a great example:


I think one just needs time and willingness to acclimate to the vocabulary and sensitivity of post-1930 modern music.
 
#22 ·
A very good read; change the dates and add some withering contempt and it could pass for a TC post! :p

The passage that stood out for me:
Most music lovers do not appreciate to what an extent they are under the spell of the romantic approach to music. Our audiences have come to identify nineteenth-century musical romanticism as analogous to the art itself. Because it was, and still remains, so powerful an expression they tend to forget that great music was written for hundreds of years before the romantics flourished.

It so happens that a considerable proportion of present-day music has closer ties with that earlier music than it has with the romantics. The way of the uninhibited and personalized warmth and surge of the best of the romanticists is not our way. That may be regrettable from your angle, but it remains a fact nevertheless -- unavoidable fact very probably, for the romantic movement had reached its apogee by the end of last century, in any case, and nothing fresh was to be extracted from it.
Of course, the fact that audiences (of 1949 and 2015) regard 19th-century romanticism as "analogous to the art itself" is regrettable from the composer's point of view, but it remains a fact nevertheless!
 
#23 ·
The thing that really jumps out at me is "late Stravinsky" under "fairly difficult." As Mahlerian points out, this was before Stravinsky's serial period. Some of his recent pieces then were the Symphony in Three Movements, Violin Concerto, and Mass.

These are supposed to be "fairly difficult"? Really?

I kind of get how Hindemith could be called "fairly difficult," though I never found him so. But neoclassical Stravinsky?
 
#24 ·
Anecdotally, I did come out of a Boston Symphony concert where Stravinsky's Concerto for Piano and Winds was played, and overheard a young woman opining about how difficult it was.

Movement 1

Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements is also one of the few works mentioned by name in Pleasants' Agony, wherein someone (Milhaud??) is quoted to the effect that the rhythmic intricacies are meaningless because the players are too busy counting notes.
 
G
#26 ·
Tactics like changing the terms of the discussion used to really rile me, but I've found something good about them, something that allows me to continue to recognize their unfairness AND to keep blood pressure levels low--and that is to see them for what they are, admissions of failure--failure to have any reasonable counter-argument to the issue at hand, so a substitute argument has to be constructed, which is a thing that can be countered, easily, principally because it's made up expressly to be successfully (or "successfully") countered.
 
#30 ·
I disagree with Copland on many levels here, and I'm someone who doesn't really like to listen to Mozart and Chopin and has no special adulation for the WCM Austro-German pre-20th century masters.

I really hope people realize that people with analogous opinions to Copland's DO NOT speak for all modern-day composers or all 20th century composers, they certainly don't speak for all serious, dedicated musicians, and it's fairly presumptuous of them to say that people whose enthusiasm for their music hasn't been roused are intellectually lazy and addicted to romantic music. In my case, I just don't like it that much (the same way I don't really like Chopin).
 
#34 ·
I don't think Copland is calling those who lack enthusiasm "intellectually lazy." He says that this discomfort is present even in "well-intentioned" listeners and seems to imply that the main reason for the misconceptions regarding modern music are due in large part to lack of exposure.

Also, it is a mischaracterization to say that he is saying that listeners are "addicted" to Romantic music; he is saying that their expectations of what constitutes emotion and feeling as regards music stem in large part from the way emotion was handled in the 19th century.

One has to remember that at the time of writing, the Baroque revival (to say nothing of the early music movement) had yet to get underway and centuries of music were largely ignored in favor of the works of the 19th century.
 
#31 ·
[sigh] You wrote: "He [Copland evidently] is saying that composers write the way they will, and people expect them to write otherwise, in spite of the fact that it's an unreasonable demand."

I responded: "I don't think people "expect" composers to write in any way whatever. They like the music or they don't, that's all."

Now you write, "So you admit that the view you attributed to Copland and criticized was not his?"

I am totally lost. I attributed nothing to Copland. I responded only to your remark, as should be obvious.
 
#33 ·
My first point was, "To suppose that people should like a certain style of music, and to bemoan the fact that they don't, seems a pretty useless exercise all around."

That was in response to Copland's "The literary world does not expect Gide or Mann or T.S. Eliot to emote with the accents of Victor Hugo or Walter Scott. Why, then, should Bartok or Milhaud be expected to sing with the voice of Schumann or Tchaikovsky?"

Seems fair enough to me. Again, most people don't "expect" composers to do anything in particular. They just like the music or they don't, that's all. Some, including around here, might wish it were otherwise. But it isn't.
 
#35 ·
No, it's not fair, because Copland is not saying "should" at all. Nor is he speaking of "liking" as such. In context, he is referring to the persistent (so persistent that it survives to this day in somewhat altered form) misconception that composers of today write unemotionally and intellectually as opposed to composers of earlier times.

His argument is that people feel this way in spite of the fact that composers today (and in 1949) are just as emotionally inspired as those of earlier times because they are confusing the style in which something is expressed with the thing that is expressed.

Also, again, people do have expectations. To claim otherwise flies in the face of all that we know about human psychology and the processing of unfamiliar stimuli.
 
#36 ·
Well, I'd like to take this a step further. If people are conditioned, through their expectations, to prefer older rather than newer music, what do you propose to do about that? To bemoan the problem without suggesting any solution verges on simply whining.


So I ask: Is a learned preference for older music at the expense of newer really a "problem"? Who's it a problem for? How should the problem be solved? Also, why?
 
#38 ·
Well, I'd like to take this a step further. If people are conditioned, through their expectations, to prefer older rather than newer music, what do you propose to do about that? To bemoan the problem without suggesting any solution verges on simply whining.

So I ask: Is a learned preference for older music at the expense of newer really a "problem"? Who's it a problem for? How should the problem be solved? Also, why?
He does propose a solution. Increased openness to new experiences and taking seemingly incomprehensible music as a challenge rather than an insult, along with an understanding that the new music doesn't have to be the same as the old in order to provide pleasure.
 
#45 ·
I'm not going to pursue this farther. But I certainly wish you and Mr Copland all the best luck in your re-education plans. Hope you're not tripped up by the likelihood that audiences really don't care "why composers compose the music they do." But that's possibly an unimportant detail.
 
#47 ·
To those who think education is not a good way to clear up misunderstandings and misconceptions about 20th century music, what about Classical Music as a whole? Plenty of people misunderstand the entire spectrum of classical music, would you not say education is a good way to fix that? Why is that not a good way when it comes to 20th century music then?

Was Bernstein just being a pretentious, snobby "re-education camp" advocate when he put on his "Concerts for Young People"?