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

[Serial_Apologist]

.......from S-A earlier today:

And it makes me wonder: is this what the modernist composers ostracised, persecuted and half-starved under one form or another of Stalinism from the 1930s to the 1960s for writing music "incomprehensible" to the masses, and those who died in Nazi concentration camps for being Jewish and composing "degenerate" music, would have wanted from today's much-vaunted "freedom"?

I would have hoped that however any musician lived and died he or she would wish for other musicians the freedom to do their own thing without any emotional baggage landed on them for not kowtowing to some perceived preferential ( or even reverential to their own memory) style. My uncle's wife, Magda, escaped Vienna in the 30s to Canada and thence to California. She was listening to her beloved Mozart on her dying day. Her ashes are in a Wiltshire graveyard. Do you think she would sympathise with your strictures?

The thing is that what brings us together here is so much larger than what divides us that your contribution above seems to erect a barrier. Maybe its just me , sorry.

MY strictures???!!!

I think they all already had enough emotional baggage put on them before I came along to add my tuppence' worth.

[Ian]

The questions that have been under discussion here is why? and what does this mean? .

It’s obvious what it means! It means that your world view of what counts as contemporary is massively incomplete. It means that, even if it is true that DM’s 8th could have been written 50 years ago, that is no reason to categorize the work as anything other than properly contemporary - because that, in fact, is what it is!

It means that you have to take the plunge and reimagine what ‘contemporary’ (and ‘being contemporary’) actually (in reality!) mean.

Contemporary culture is whatever people are doing - it’s not an abstract construct fixed by historical precedent - convenient to be use as a weapon against anyone falling foul of your personal expectations.

[Serial_Apologist]

I think the point that has been made about a "60 year gap" is that throughout 20th century musical developments there was always a middle ground between the most advanced and tradition. In the 1930s a figure such as Zemlinsky represented middle ground between Schoenberg and where perhaps Mahler might have taken his music had he lived to a ripe old age. By the late 1950s Schoenberg's limitation of serial organisation to pitch order was considered old hat by the generation that made Webern their starting point. "Middle way" composers in the relatively conservative environment of 1950s Britain such as Fricker might start off in Neo-Classical Stravinsky or Hindemith territory before going on to absorb middle-period Bartok and then take on serial techniques. Apart from a few very elderly composers who had started writing music before WWI, there were not many still writing in an idiom of 60 years before.

[Serial_Apologist]

It’s obvious what it means! It means that your world view of what counts as contemporary is massively incomplete.

Then I wonder if you've actually heard any of Richard's music - or the music he has participated in as an improvising participant.

If anything, it's what he doesn't leave OUT that disturbs me!!!

[Richard Barrett]

It’s obvious what it means! It means that your world view of what counts as contemporary is massively incomplete.

You are not paying much attention if that is what you think. I was very careful to write "what sounded like non-contemporary music", and the analysis I've been trying to communicate (without much success in your case, it seems) has nothing to do with "my personal expectations", which along with my "world view" you know nothing (and seemingly wish to know nothing) about.

[Ian]

The Soft Machine was certainly composing and performing music which related to contemporary popular music while being innovative in ways that could never have been envisaged 50 or 60 years previously.
...
The issue we are discussing here is no longer, I believe, one of commissioned product for the concert hall needing to conform to mainstream or avant-garde desiderata, but of saleable product constituting a large part of what you describe the contemporary composer as needing, apparently uncritically, or at any rate willy-nilly, to take account of.

Takes me back! although still at school I was very much into Soft Machine and similar. I was in a school band whose claim to fame was that one of group was the brother of a member of Henry Cow, no less!

I really don’t know what your point is though. What is it, for example, do you think it is I’m describing that contemporary composer’s need to take account of?

[Ian]

Then I wonder if you've actually heard any of Richard's music - or the music he has participated in as an improvising participant.

If anything, it's what he doesn't leave OUT that disturbs me!!!

So what? The point is that Richard ( and one or two others) are in denial regarding DM's reality as a contemporary composer (and I am taking into account what his music sounds like) Therefore his view about what constitutes being contemporary is obviously, objectively, incomplete.

In other words, the solution to the DM 'problem' is not for DM to change his ways and get with it - but for the definition of 'contemporary' to be broadened to include what people are actually doing - even if that is something that sounds similar to music of an earlier time. Hence my question regarding the time-scale of an 'era' in my inaugural contribution.

[Ian]

You are not paying much attention if that is what you think. I was very careful to write "what sounded like non-contemporary music", and the analysis I've been trying to communicate (without much success in your case, it seems) has nothing to do with "my personal expectations", which along with my "world view" you know nothing (and seemingly wish to know nothing) about.

Do you really think in that all the words you have written in this thread alone you have revealed nothing regarding your views and expectations?

[clive heath]

Maybe I misunderstood the sentiments of the S-A quote in #417 above. I thought the suggestion was that today's composers have a duty of care to honour the genres of the particular type of musicians he mentioned and that by implication DM in DM8 does not do this. This is a what I call a stricture, an obligation. Rightly or wrongly it also seems to be suggested that their sacrifice was in vain i.e. " what they would have wanted " is not what there is. But I am at a loss as to who the "They" and "Them" are in the last sentence as I hoped my first sentence would read that I understood your dissatisfaction to be with today's composers, i.e. my "other musicians", well, some of them.

[P. G. Tipps]

Do you really think in that all the words you have written in this thread alone you have revealed nothing regarding your views and expectations?

[Serial_Apologist]

Takes me back! although still at school I was very much into Soft Machine and similar. I was in a school band whose claim to fame was that one of group was the brother of a member of Henry Cow, no less!

I really don’t know what your point is though. What is it, for example, do you think it is I’m describing that contemporary composer’s need to take account of?

Commercial genres.

[ahinton]

Commercial genres.

But does David Matthews take account of those - or do you think that he seeks to do so or even cares about doing so? Is suchever public success as he may achieve with his work predicated upon such consideratons, in your view?

[Serial_Apologist]

Maybe I misunderstood the sentiments of the S-A quote in #417 above. I thought the suggestion was that today's composers have a duty of care to honour the genres of the particular type of musicians he mentioned and that by implication DM in DM8 does not do this. This is a what I call a stricture, an obligation. Rightly or wrongly it also seems to be suggested that their sacrifice was in vain i.e. " what they would have wanted " is not what there is. But I am at a loss as to who the "They" and "Them" are in the last sentence as I hoped my first sentence would read that I understood your dissatisfaction to be with today's composers, i.e. my "other musicians", well, some of them.

Clive, I am the confused one now because your quote was from my #319

[ahinton]

Clive, I am the confused one now because your quote was from my #319

Fair enough, perhaps, but can you and/or anyone else here imagine just how confused David Matthews himself might be should he happen to read all this stuff and care enough about what he's read to be sufficiently bothered to be confused?(!)...

[Serial_Apologist]

Alister, I was trying to deal with Ian's attributions towards Richard's views on David's symphony, in which he confusingly claimed:

One of the complaints against DM is that he is representative of a contemporary orthodoxy that is in denial regarding all true and proper contemporary modes of expression. For example, on more than one occasion I have seen fgh challenge members to come with examples of significant composers who wrote in a style that could be mistaken for a composer working 50 - 100 years previously.

On the surface this seems reasonable, however, what renders the challenge irrelevant is the fact that in our present reality people born in the same year on the same street can be brought up with, and/or develop an interest in, completely different musical realities. This was nowhere near the case (for example) in Haydn’s time. So although it’s true that Haydn’s music does not sound as if it was written 100 years before it actually was, that is equally true of all of his contemporaries irrespective of their talent. What’s more, the vast bulk of the music listening public weren’t even listening to old music and Haydn’s music was obviously clearly and understandably related to contemporary popular music.

If it were the case nowadays that the listening public were listening too and clamoring for nothing but the latest cutting-edge whatever it would indeed seem odd for any composer to deny that reality. But the reality is that’s not the reality!

What Ian seems to be suggesting here is that, apart from the popular, the contemporary composer of today - unlike his Haydn contemporaries - ineluctably has a wider range of musical inspirations and traditions to work into his or her own music which should be reflected to avoid being the the kind of state of denial he sees the avant-garde composer to be in.

I've heard this argument being deployed quite a number of times in recent years by composers and commentators, namely that the composer of today does not just have the Euroclassical tradition as his or her sole reservoir of reference, but will have been exposed to jazz, pop music, ethnic musics of all sorts that will be refracted through new music. So of course was Debussy, one might say; but far from resulting in some kind of magpie mishmash, all these elements were distilled into a recognisable personal style capable of expansion in his own hands and those of later composers.