Electronic Music

[Quarky]

I approach music with an open mind and I can't accept the responsibility for music that is unappealing - it's not my fault!

Coincidentally, Schoenberg hasn't been off my turntable this week and I've rekindled my love for his 5 Pieces for Orchestra Op.16

....My two penny worth......

I'm not sure that Schoenberg is the easiest point of departure for an appreciation of electronic music. Certainly in my case, I latched on to Stockhausen's work many, many years before I could make head or tail of Schoenberg's piano pieces.

But then I didn't have a background in Classical Music, just Jazz, R&B, etc. I picked up a lot of Classical Music while at university. One may have an open mind, but it's difficult to escape one's previous listening experiences.

IMHO, Schoenberg had to climb the mountain of 19th Century music, Brahms etc, before making his "breakthrough" to a different mode of composition. I guess that's how many people approach his music. But if climbing that mountain is avoided, life can be simpler!

Music Concrete, Stochastic music. What does that owe to Schoenberg?

[mahlerfan]

....My two penny worth......

I'm not sure that Schoenberg is the easiest point of departure for an appreciation of electronic music. Certainly in my case, I latched on to Stockhausen's work many, many years before I could make head or tail of Schoenberg's piano pieces.

But then I didn't have a background in Classical Music, just Jazz, R&B, etc. I picked up a lot of Classical Music while at university. One may have an open mind, but it's difficult to escape one's previous listening experiences.

IMHO, Schoenberg had to climb the mountain of 19th Century music, Brahms etc, before making his "breakthrough" to a different mode of composition. I guess that's how many people approach his music. But if climbing that mountain is avoided, life can be simpler!

Music Concrete, Stochastic music. What does that owe to Schoenberg?

I only mentioned AS because Aufherstehen was asking about him and other 2VS composers and I happened to have listened to quite a lot AS lately - no connection to EM

[RichardB]

How it captured me was on an intellectual level.

But what does that actually mean? Helmut Lachenmann had some sage words to say about this, along the lines of: if intellectual and emotional responses to music can be separated, both are underdeveloped.

[RichardB]

Certainly in my case, I latched on to Stockhausen's work many, many years before I could make head or tail of Schoenberg's piano pieces.

Me too. Actually I still can't say I have any great love for Schoenberg's music, whereas my attraction to that of Stockhausen, Xenakis and others was immediate.

So in answer to Mario (and I think I've said this before), it doesn't really matter where you start, but working your way into late 20th/early 21st century music in chronological order is only one way, it wasn't mine, and it might not be the best for you either. There are as many ways in as there are listeners, and I don't think I could tell you what yours might be. On the other hand you might find it for yourself, with the help of something like Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise which really requires no prior knowledge and covers 20th century composition in an attractive and entertaining way, after which there's Tim Rutherford-Johnson's Music After the Fall which picks up the thread in 1989 (the "Fall" is of the Berlin Wall, not the post-punk band fronted by the late Mark E Smith) and brings it up to date.

But those of us who are actually producing music that extends the tradition into new and unheard areas would in no way claim that any special knowledge is necessary in order to appreciate it. Music that requires a history lesson for its appreciation (and there is some of that around) creates, even before it's heard, a split in its audience between those who are "in the know" and those who aren't. What has always attracted me is music that suggests that I find a new way of listening, and thus expand my consciousness of what music can be and what it can do. To cite a recent anecdote, I recently had the opportunity to present two new compositions (both involving electronic music) at three concerts, the first of which was played to an audience of asylum seekers from Syria and various African countries (this was in France by the way) who were being looked after by the arts centre where the concerts all took place. You can't imagine an audience less steeped in the "Western classical tradition" than these people. And yet the whole concert, which was almost two hours long, clearly engaged their attention from start to finish, and was also thought-provoking as indicated by the questions that they came up with afterwards.

[Quarky]

An interesting article for any one still interested in Xenakis! (should work with Google Translate) ::https://www.radiofrance.fr/francemus...stasis-7745990

[Mario]

Richard B, very useful. Thank you for your trouble.

Give me about three decades, and I might (emphasise might) be able to have an intelligent discussion with you.

Best wishes,

Mario

[HighlandDougie]

Ok Richard, I’m game!

You may recall that I’ve said elsewhere that I do not find your music “repellent”, but simply conclude that I don’t understand it, and it must be me.

You must believe me when I say that I’ve tried, I really have tried to move away “from the 19th century”, but have failed miserably.

I guess I could ask you a million questions, but quite simply, apart from just opening my ears, and approaching the whole subject with an open mind, how do I get into this music?

Schoenberg, Webern, Berg? Where do I start, and a daft question perhaps, how do I listen?

Thanks in anticipation,

Mario

At the risk of being pooh-poohed by others far more expert than I, can I suggest that you access (physical CDs or streaming) Volume 8 of SWR Music's Michael Gielen Edition which covers Schoenberg, Berg and Webern? And the operas (mostly) excepted, should give a pretty fair conspectus of the 2VS. If it's 20th C music to expand your musical horizons, how about Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono and Luciano Berio? And, as a listener-friendly introduction to his music, 'Psappha' by Iannis Xenakis?

[RichardB]

Give me about three decades, and I might (emphasise might) be able to have an intelligent discussion with you.

But that's really not the right way to think, if you don't mind me saying. You can have an intelligent discussion with anyone at any time! For myself I think it's important (as well as enlightening) to think of conversations like this as sharing enthusiasm rather than dispensing knowledge or insight. It's always been a source of fascination for me that, as mentioned above, when I first encountered the music of Stockhausen, Xenakis and the rest I was about 13 years old, and not being brought up in a musical or intellectual or otherwise privileged situation, and it had a strong and immediate and obviously long-lasting effect without any difficulties or obstacles to be overcome, and there's really nothing at all extraordinary about me, so I wonder why so many others do experience such difficulties and obstacles, to the point of saying, as mahlerfan did, that they find it hard to understand how there could be an audience for "this kind of thing".

Returning to Orient-Occident for a moment, actually it's fairly untypical of Xenakis's electronic music in a number of ways, which I won't go into detail about now but which are mostly connected with the fact that it was originally intended to accompany a film about ancient sculpture and the reciprocal influences it shows between "east" and "west", for example between Greece and India. The film is over 20 minutes in duration and the eventual composition is not much more than half that long, having been edited down from the film version. So many of the choices of materials can be explained in terms of their original function, although the percussion music that takes place near the beginning doesn't sound so very different from some of the (non-electronic) music he wrote for percussion many years later, such as the solo piece Rebonds.

[mahlerfan]

But what does that actually mean? Helmut Lachenmann had some sage words to say about this, along the lines of: if intellectual and emotional responses to music can be separated, both are underdeveloped.

I'm not sure that Lachenmann's words make sense, at least in my experience (assuming that his claim is not based in neurological evidence). Two songs from the past that I adore 'Everlasting Love' by Love Affair and 'Only One Woman' by The Marbles, illicit no intellectual response in me whatsoever! But I simply love hearing them and I'm overjoyed. Birtwistle's 'Earth Dances' on the other hand, stimulated me intellectually when I heard it. I was baffled. I realised that there must be something important going on, otherwise he wouldn't have written it. I was intellectually curious. I find it interesting to work out what's going, but I think it's purely a cerebral thing. Why would this mean that one or both of my responses are underdeveloped?

[RichardB]

I think it's purely a cerebral thing.

I just don't understand what that means, where music is concerned.

[Joseph K]

I just don't understand what that means, where music is concerned.

Me neither.

[Serial_Apologist]

....My two penny worth......

I'm not sure that Schoenberg is the easiest point of departure for an appreciation of electronic music. Certainly in my case, I latched on to Stockhausen's work many, many years before I could make head or tail of Schoenberg's piano pieces.

But then I didn't have a background in Classical Music, just Jazz, R&B, etc. I picked up a lot of Classical Music while at university. One may have an open mind, but it's difficult to escape one's previous listening experiences.

IMHO, Schoenberg had to climb the mountain of 19th Century music, Brahms etc, before making his "breakthrough" to a different mode of composition. I guess that's how many people approach his music. But if climbing that mountain is avoided, life can be simpler!

Music Concrete, Stochastic music. What does that owe to Schoenberg?

My own musical education (if such it can be called!) is similar, apart from both the jazz and classical music sides (which I see as inter-related) being as an autididact. But without (hopefully) cutting across what others have said, I don't happen to think that one has to go through any mountain climbing in order to appreciate Schoenberg, or music which followed in his wake, so to speak, because he, among others, did it for us, and the results are there in the music, just as they were in Bach's or Beethoven's. If one can latch onto him, further investigation into how he and others before and after arrived at the point they did can add an additional level of enrichment to the music, because every time we review the history we find something additional that we missed on previous run-throughs.

[Serial_Apologist]

Coincidentally, Schoenberg hasn't been off my turntable this week and I've rekindled my love for his 5 Pieces for Orchestra Op.16

The Op 16 pieces - along with the rest of Schoenberg's oeuvre from between (say) his Op 6 and Op 21 - provide an excellent touchstone for how far one has oneself been able to "break the bonds of a past aesthetic", by virtue of how so many of the threads that had kept music "together" from the point of view of critics etc attached to procedural "norms" had been broken, or circumvented. For a long time I regarded the biggest leap in understanding to be the jump, between 1907 and 1909, into a music in which tension and release had become so relativised that one no longer needed to depend on diatonic resolution - at which point I could "feel" the continuity that existed between particularly the structure in Schoenberg's melodic expression, and that of his early, pre-atonal music, and composers such as Strauss, Wolf and Mahler. In line with the theory that the simpler is accessible to understanding by way of the more complex (is that Gestalt theory? - anyway the idea, sort of, that "un-inventing" new discoveries is a fruitless path to recovering some previous imagined "purity"), it then becomes all the more rewarding to listen back to those prophetic works to find clues as to how their creators might have gone on, had they been open to the possibilities they themselves had opened up, or, er, not died.

[Mandryka]

Why should creative musicians be thinking of the "market"?

What group do creative musicians think of when they do their thing? I don't believe they're all solipsists, making music for themselves, or purified and ascetic, making music for music's sake. They have peers; they presumably want to get their ideas performed etc. This sounds like writing for a market, if not the market.

[Mandryka]

just wondering how it can get much of an audience, outside of the academic world.

Maybe it's like poetry. I mean, the market for poetry is pretty niche, mostly academics and other poets. The group of producers is the group of consumers.