More from the "prof"

[MrGongGong]

http://www.futuresymphony.org/the-music-of-the-future/

erm

[Richard Barrett]

erm

Thanks MrGG, I was in need of a chuckle. Plus this is a useful text for pointing out the glaring emptiness of so much Scruton has to say. "Boulez’s Pli selon pli, in which the exotic instrumentation and serial organisation do not conceal the fact that no moment in this work has any intrinsic connection to the moment that comes next." (My emphasis.) Is there any moment in any musical work that has an intrinsic (that is to say not culturally mediated) connection to the one that comes next? And this individual calls himself a philosopher.

[Richard Barrett]

I just had a more extensive look through that website, which is all in all pretty horrific, although I guess it's not much more than a vanity project by a few oldish men who think Sir Prof is a lone voice of sanity in a musical culture dominated by the liberal gay metropolitan serialist elite.

[ahinton]

I just had a more extensive look through that website, which is all in all pretty horrific, although I guess it's not much more than a vanity project by a few oldish men who think Sir Prof is a lone voice of sanity in a musical culture dominated by the liberal gay metropolitan serialist elite.

You probably have neither the time nor the inclination to take this piece apart and discuss it all in detail but I'm sure that I'm by no means alone in wishing that you would at least consider doing so.

I have my reservations about both Boulez himself and certain of the positions that he adopted or appeared to adopt at certain times, not least his evident contempt for a number of those who might otherwise have been regarded as his colleagues and/or peers, but the statement "Boulez's Pli selon pli, in which the exotic instrumentation and serial organisation do not conceal the fact that no moment in this work has any intrinsic connection to the moment that comes next" - not least because it is about one of the composer's finest and most ambitious achievements - strikes me as though it should have been written "Boulez's Pli selon pli, in which the exotic instrumentation and serial organisation that are intrinsic to what it seeks to achieve do not conceal the fact that no moment in this work has anything other than an inherent connection to the moment that comes next, in the sense that, whether or not one could regard the whole as embracing a sense of "narrative", there is never any impression that the composer is uncertain or doesn't care where the music is, where it's just been and where it's going next". As it happens, I'm by no means one of those who would shoot down every clause in Scruton's writings purely because of their authorship and as if by habit and I do think that there are times when he's on to something well worthy of serious consideration but, in this statement about Boulez, just as in his disgraceful (in every sense) observations elsewhere on the anything but gentle art of foxhunting, he has let himself and his readership down.

As to whether "Sir Prof" is regarded by anyone (who?) as "a lone voice of sanity in a musical culture dominated by the liberal gay metropolitan serialist élite", I could not personally be one of those "few oldish men" supposedly guilty of such a view even if only because I do not recognise this "liberal gay metropolitan serialist élite" as a meaningful, let alone influential, still less dominant, phenomenon; whilst there may today be no obvious shortage of "liberals", "gays" and "metropolitans", "élitists" one one kind and another and even "serialists", the notion of somehow bracketing all of those categories together as though to some extent any one might presume any one or more of the others makes no sense to me - one might as well ask which of those particular descriptors might be thought to fit you, Matthewses, Hespos, Birtwistle, Ferneyhough, Connesson, Dusapin, Adams, Dillon, yours truly or anyone else for all the use that such contemplation might be.

I had to admit to more than a frisson of amusement at the prospect of Sir Roger being invited to participate at Donaueschingen and accepting that invitation, not to mention whatever motivation/s might have lain behind the idea of said invitation, but one may reasonably suppose that, unless it was done in the spirit of some kind of spoof, those who invited him there felt that it was a valid thing to do and that they therefore had reason to do it.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I think that a part of this lecture was broadcast on a recent Hear & Now. I remember thinking as I listened to him that it was like trying to follow the line of thought of somebody demonstrating that elephants couldn't possibly exist because emus cannot fly - the non-sequiturs based on incomplete knowledge and complete misapprehensions ("arguing" against theories of Music that exist only in his fantasies) made for a singularly surreal experience.


The best I can say for him is that he's reminded me that it's been far too long since I last listened to Pli Selon Pli, and it's time to put that right.

[Richard Barrett]

non-sequiturs based on incomplete knowledge and complete misapprehensions

I absolutely don't have time for doing such things but I did submit a comment, which is currently "awaiting moderation" - let's see what happens next! - I might as well post it here too:

I would take issue with very many of the statements made in this essay but for now here are a few. “I question the prominence in our musical culture of the experimental avant-garde.” What prominence would that be? “…to deprive musical elements of their intrinsic ways of relating to each other.” What is an “intrinsic” (by which presumably is meant “not culturally determined”) way in which musical elements can relate to one another? A little knowledge of musical cultures outside the Western sphere should be enough to convince anyone that there is nothing “intrinsic” about the way musical elements in the context of that cultural sphere relate to one another. “… the ideal in our tradition has been of an uninterrupted sense of necessity – each melodic and harmonic step following as though by logic from its predecessor…” – who is this “we”? “As Stockhausen himself says, this work has no real beginning and no end: like all his works it starts without beginning and finishes without ending.” Like SOME of his works, certainly; but this categorical statement betrays a very limited knowledge of Stockhausen’s work, the most recent example cited having been composed almost half a century ago – just as no music prior to the 18th century is cited at all, presumably because it doesn’t behave according to the supposedly eternal rules of what is and isn’t acceptable in music, as in: “What was most striking to me about Stockhausen’s description of what he was doing was the word ‘melody,’ used of this sequence that is not a melody at all”, succeeded by some really not very convincing justifications for this strange assertion – “it has no beginning, no end, no up-beat, no tension or release” – not unlike the centuries-old gagaku music of Japan, really, or for that matter the organum of the Notre Dame school. Finally: “In a concert devoted to music of this kind the audience can know that the piece is ended only because the performers are putting down their instruments.” Sometimes this might be the case (and why should this be a problem?), as for example in performances of free improvisation, another entire method of creating music which is ignored here (although not in Donaueschingen) but in the vast majority of cases it isn’t, certainly not in the case of the Boulez work cited, which begins and ends with exactly the same emphatic chord, or in Stockhausen’s supposedly surgical “Mantra”, whose ending the composer describes as “like someone who’s humming a melody of music which he’s heard ages ago. It reminds him of his childhood; his whole life has passed and at the very end he still remembers the very simple tune without all its complications.” While this essay takes aim at pseudo-philosophical justifications of so-called modernism, it does so using pseudo-philosophical justifications of an anti-modernist stance which rely on an unquestioned worship of values attributed to around three centuries of history of (a highly circumscribed canon of) one among the many strands that constitute the richness of human musical culture. It is a highly limited and limiting way to look at things, in distinction to the imaginative freedoms expressed in the work of all the famous names mentioned.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Thanks for that, Richard.

[ahinton]

I absolutely don't have time for doing such things

OK, fair enough; I hope that you didn't mind my asking...

but I did submit a comment, which is currently "awaiting moderation" - let's see what happens next! - I might as well post it here too:
I would take issue with very many of the statements made in this essay but for now here are a few. "I question the prominence in our musical culture of the experimental avant-garde." What prominence would that be?

I for one have no idea, as indeed I suggested earlier.

"…to deprive musical elements of their intrinsic ways of relating to each other." What is an "intrinsic" (by which presumably is meant "not culturally determined") way in which musical elements can relate to one another? A little knowledge of musical cultures outside the Western sphere should be enough to convince anyone that there is nothing "intrinsic" about the way musical elements in the context of that cultural sphere relate to one another.

Again, I have no idea and agree with your conclusions.

"… the ideal in our tradition has been of an uninterrupted sense of necessity – each melodic and harmonic step following as though by logic from its predecessor…" – who is this "we"?

Ask Sydney Grew; he's the one who has the most recourse to an unidentified and unidentifiable second person plural.

"As Stockhausen himself says, this work has no real beginning and no end: like all his works it starts without beginning and finishes without ending." Like SOME of his works, certainly; but this categorical statement betrays a very limited knowledge of Stockhausen’s work, the most recent example cited having been composed almost half a century ago – just as no music prior to the 18th century is cited at all, presumably because it doesn’t behave according to the supposedly eternal rules of what is and isn't acceptable in music, as in: "What was most striking to me about Stockhausen’s description of what he was doing was the word 'melody,' used of this sequence that is not a melody at all", succeeded by some really not very convincing justifications for this strange assertion – "it has no beginning, no end, no up-beat, no tension or release" – not unlike the centuries-old gagaku music of Japan, really, or for that matter the organum of the Notre Dame school.

Can't argue with any of that!

Finally: "In a concert devoted to music of this kind the audience can know that the piece is ended only because the performers are putting down their instruments." Sometimes this might be the case (and why should this be a problem?), as for example in performances of free improvisation, another entire method of creating music which is ignored here (although not in Donaueschingen) but in the vast majority of cases it isn't, certainly not in the case of the Boulez work cited, which begins and ends with exactly the same emphatic chord, or in Stockhausen’s supposedly surgical "Mantra", whose ending the composer describes as "like someone who's humming a melody of music which he's heard ages ago. It reminds him of his childhood; his whole life has passed and at the very end he still remembers the very simple tune without all its complications." While this essay takes aim at pseudo-philosophical justifications of so-called modernism, it does so using pseudo-philosophical justifications of an anti-modernist stance which rely on an unquestioned worship of values attributed to around three centuries of history of (a highly circumscribed canon of) one among the many strands that constitute the richness of human musical culture. It is a highly limited and limiting way to look at things, in distinction to the imaginative freedoms expressed in the work of all the famous names mentioned.

Oh for a civilised but trenchant debate between the two of you! But I'm sure that you'd have neither the time nor the inclination for that!