David Matthews SYMPHONY NO. 8 First Performance 17/04/15

[Richard Barrett]

If a listener can only understand a work in the context of other works by the same composer, then contemporary music can't be understood. Listening to music is therefore an historical activity that can only be entered into in hindsight. That might work for many in this forum, but it doesn't work for me. I think Jayne's wrong on this.

There is a level of understanding of an artist's work which can only be gained by a broad and sustained engagement with it. But if DM's 8th symphony can't be appreciated by any other means that surely makes it weak even on its own terms. There needs to be something about a first listening which is sufficiently attractive to create the desire for a second. But as far as I'm concerned this discussion is not primarily about musical taste. It's about what this piece of music (not "the symphony" or some other generalisation, and not David Matthews and his intentions, whatever they are) means in its cultural context.

[ahinton]

There is a level of understanding of an artist's work which can only be gained by a broad and sustained engagement with it. But if DM's 8th symphony can't be appreciated by any other means that surely makes it weak even on its own terms.

Would you say so because you regard the work itself as weak in its own right or because a work that can only be appreciated in the context of more of the same composer's output is itself a sign of its weakness?

There needs to be something about a first listening which is sufficiently attractive to create the desire for a second.

Sure but, as I suggested earlier, if that first listening is also of insufficient attraction to persuade some listeners to check out any other work by the same composer, isn't something wrong somewhere? We all have our first experiences of all composers' works to which we've listened, but imagine the difference in response if one person's first experience of Shostakovich is the 12th symphony and another's the 4th!

But as far as I'm concerned this discussion is not primarily about musical taste. It's about what this piece of music (not "the symphony" or some other generalisation, and not David Matthews and his intentions, whatever they are) means in its cultural context.

Fair enough, except that who can say what it "means in its cultural context" without first identifying in some detail what that cultural context is? - and, even then, would it not remain difficult to say with certainty what it "means" in words...

[french frank]

There needs to be something about a first listening which is sufficiently attractive to create the desire for a second.

Surely, this thread has shown that there was? Several members wanted to listen again. It would be asking a lot to expect everyone who listened once to want to listen again. Isn't the key factor the listener, given that the music is the same for everyone?

[Richard Barrett]

Surely, this thread has shown that there was? Several members wanted to listen again.

I meant (of course!!!) for an individual listener.

[french frank]

I meant (of course!!!) for an individual listener.

Of course you did!!! But on the basis of that specific criterion, the symphony was a success, wasn't it?

[ahinton]

Of course you did!!! But on the basis of that specific criterion, the symphony was a success, wasn't it?

It would also appear to be so on the grounds of the reviews published at http://www.fabermusic.com/news/effor...y-no-820042015...

[Richard Barrett]

Of course you did!!! But on the basis of that specific criterion, the symphony was a success, wasn't it?

I suppose so, but that's not a particularly interesting matter, is it? All kinds of rubbish can be "successful" as we see around us every day. The discussion here has rather been about the meaning of this "aesthetic of denial".

[french frank]

I suppose so, but that's not a particularly interesting matter, is it? All kinds of rubbish can be "successful" as we see around us every day. The discussion here has rather been about the meaning of this "aesthetic of denial".

As I see it, everyone should be allowed to create music in the way they wish, paint as they wish, write as they wish. There is no freedom in art if that isn't so. To feel constrained to do it in a way that pleases the masses - or the minorities - simply in order to satisfy THEIR expectations seems to me (a non creator) to make the whole enterprise hardly worthwhile to the creator.

[ahinton]

I suppose so, but that's not a particularly interesting matter, is it? All kinds of rubbish can be "successful" as we see around us every day. The discussion here has rather been about the meaning of this "aesthetic of denial".

Indeed, yet there has so far been precious little specific idenfication of this and how it supposedly manifests itself in ways that all would recognise in David Matthews' 8th symphony which, frankly, does not especially surprise me, not so much because I don't find evidence of any such thing in the work itself or the composer's intentions towards it but because I'd be hard put to it to figure out how it could be identified beyond question in any of his music (not that you say that you've listened to any of his other 120+ works).

[ahinton]

As I see it, everyone should be allowed to create music in the way they wish, paint as they wish, write as they wish. There is no freedom in art if that isn't so. To feel constrained to do it in a way that pleases the masses - or the minorities - simply in order to satisfy THEIR expectations seems to me (a non creator) to make the whole enterprise hardly worthwhile to the creator.

It certainly seems to me to risk making it an unnecessarily onerous one of dubious value; "entartete musik" and "formalism" were once considered to be out of order in certain places because they were perceived not to conform to certain expectations of the contemporary composer, perhaps in part because they might have been thought by the powers that were to represent some kind of "æsthetic denial" of the realities of modern life...

[Richard Barrett]

As I see it, everyone should be allowed to create music in the way they wish, paint as they wish, write as they wish. There is no freedom in art if that isn't so.

Of course artistic freedom is axiomatic, or should be. I don't know how this word "allowed" has crept in now, I certainly didn't imply anything in that direction. But that isn't the question either, at least as far as my and FG's contributions have been concerned. The question (once more!) is what use that freedom is put to and why, and what the result says about other issues both in composition and in a wider cultural context. I would have thought that was obvious by now.

[Serial_Apologist]

I suppose so, but that's not a particularly interesting matter, is it? All kinds of rubbish can be "successful" as we see around us every day. The discussion here has rather been about the meaning of this "aesthetic of denial".

To me that would mean being able or unable or unwilling to express in art or music the complexities of today's surrounding world - be they economic, political (being another word for religious to me), ecological or cultural. There seems to be an inexhorable law gravitating in the direction of complexity, operating ever since composers in the wake of Bach's compexity tried to start off by simplifying their means and ended up making them more complex: think CPE Bach's transition away from contrapuntal complexity towards relatively simply outlayed tonally-gravitated contrasting narratives leading eventually to Beethoven's Ninth and the late quartets; Debusy's early inner battles regarding whether to go for popularity or more elaborate sophistication; Neo-Classicism in the 1930s and '40s giving way to 12-tonery, and 12-tonery to integral serialism and stochasm; post-serialism to a minimalism that has yet to find a sequel adequate to its times; Miles Davis's and John Coltrane's bid to simplify harmonic procedure by reverting to scales, and amid the urban context those scale choices and cross-combinations becoming evermore divorced from their precursorship in a part-recalled African past in Coltrane's great late recordings, along with those touched by association. That the modern composer can give expression to all this with access to the technical means of linguistic expansion and sound generation makes the world of musical complexification more readily available to the composer or real-time performer using computers etc than it was for Schoenberg when in some kind of mental whirl creating those still extraordinary sounds in Erwartung in a month on score paper as far back as 1909, or Stockhausen glueing scrupulously measured lengths of pre-recorded tape together in 1954 - and this is to be seen in the work of some groups operating between the worlds of contemporary classical, jazz, and improvised music, using these techniques, as well as in the composer's studio.

This is what "reflecting our times" in music means to me, at any rate; and I guess it is what will set much of the pace for the future, while the forces driving the imponderables and complexities of our age remain in place. maybe some future age of simplicity in which all are included for our inborn value, rather than ability to command and dominate one way or another, will find echoes in simpler means of expression and delivery.

[Serial_Apologist]

It certainly seems to me to risk making it an unnecessarily onerous one of dubious value; "entartete musik" and "formalism" were once considered to be out of order in certain places because they were perceived not to conform to certain expectations of the contemporary composer, perhaps in part because they might have been thought by the powers that were to represent some kind of "æsthetic denial" of the realities of modern life...

In the case of the Nazis the aesthetic denial consisted in believing in the superiority of some tradition of Ayrian culture, musical and artistic they had concocted to propitiate the Fuehrer's racist agenda; in that of "formalism" the idea of a simplified music celebrating of the supposed triumphs of the Stalinist state and immediately appealing to the masses - none of which one would think Richard to be remotely advocating!

There are always going to be "expectations" of art and artists - what's important it seems to me is where such expectations come from. If the tenor of the times is to pronounce relatively simplified means of expression as being what gets certain composers or concert organisers accepted over those communicating a more complex picture, that says something about how the kind of product the arts establishment, in its dependency on or collusion with increasingly commercialised funding, wants the public to be in receipt of. It shouldn't take too much difficulty adding two and two together to figure out why that should be the case today: "difficult" art helps facilitate a questioning of received wisdoms, and this, apart from the deeper issues of authenticity under discussion, is problematic for those who hold sway over politics and society today.

[Richard Barrett]

There seems to be an inexhorable law gravitating in the direction of complexity, operating ever since composers in the wake of Bach's compexity tried to start off by simplifying their means and ended up making them more complex

That's an interesting idea, I'd never really seen it like that before. But complexity (in music, say) isn't just a reflection of social phenomena and historical processes; I think there's something deeper than that going on, in the sense that the certainty, the divine order if you like, which ultimately lies behind the necessity for closure (or the implication that there's a closure-shaped hole which isn't being filled), has been progressively dismantled, for example by Marx, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, Heisenberg, Schoenberg, Kandinsky, Joyce etc. etc. - of course their discoveries required a certain stage in social evolution to be conceivable in the first place - and the result is on the one hand something profoundly exciting for artists (and their audiences) of a progressive frame of mind, and seemingly something rather scary for their more nostalgic colleagues.

[ahinton]

To me that would mean being able or unable or unwilling to express in art or music the complexities of today's surrounding world - be they economic, political (being another word for religious to me), ecological or cultural. There seems to be an inexhorable law gravitating in the direction of complexity, operating ever since composers in the wake of Bach's compexity tried to start off by simplifying their means and ended up making them more complex: think CPE Bach's transition away from contrapuntal complexity towards relatively simply outlayed tonally-gravitated contrasting narratives leading eventually to Beethoven's Ninth and the late quartets; Debusy's early inner battles regarding whether to go for popularity or more elaborate sophistication; Neo-Classicism in the 1930s and '40s giving way to 12-tonery, and 12-tonery to integral serialism and stochasm; post-serialism to a minimalism that has yet to find a sequel adequate to its times; Miles Davis's and John Coltrane's bid to simplify harmonic procedure by reverting to scales, and amid the urban context those scale choices and cross-combinations becoming evermore divorced from their precursorship in a part-recalled African past in Coltrane's great late recordings, along with those touched by association. That the modern composer can give expression to all this with access to the technical means of linguistic expansion and sound generation makes the world of musical complexification more readily available to the composer or real-time performer using computers etc than it was for Schoenberg when in some kind of mental whirl creating those still extraordinary sounds in Erwartung in a month on score paper as far back as 1909, or Stockhausen glueing scrupulously measured lengths of pre-recorded tape together in 1954 - and this is to be seen in the work of some groups operating between the worlds of contemporary classical, jazz, and improvised music, using these techniques, as well as in the composer's studio.

This is what "reflecting our times" in music means to me, at any rate; and I guess it is what will set much of the pace for the future, while the forces driving the imponderables and complexities of our age remain in place.

Well, that's undoubtedly the most comprehensive view of the notion of what reflecting, or responding to, one's time might represent for the composer that's been expressed in this thread so far, although given that, as you say, "the modern composer can give expression to all this [i.e. the ever increasing range of available musics, techniques et al] with access to the technical means of linguistic expansion and sound generation [that] makes the world of musical complexification more readily available to the composer", it might be taken to suggest that reflecting or responding to one's time means reflecting or responding to ever more and more means of musical expression in part because of its availability for exploration and absorption rather than reflecting or responding to extra-musical events, societal developments, discoveries and all the rest of what makes up contemporary life in the various contrasting environments in which it is lived by "composers and other lunatics" (as Sorabji once put it, albeit with sharp tongue firmly in both cheeks).