What is Modern Music?

[doversoul1]

Do we actually talk about ‘modern music’ in classical music/Radio3 context? From a quick Googling, I get an impression that modern music refers to something like ‘the music created in our lifetime’. For example (I gave up before finding classical music here):

http://www.theguardian.com/music/series/a-history-of-modern-music

We talk about someone’s music is modern but do we have a programme of modern music?

[Beef Oven!]

[Second Viennese School]...........which was then (roughly) 50 yeras old.
Now it's OLD HAT, OLD FASHIONED, NOT MODERN, NOT NEW. Still interesting though.

We are 'exchanging ideas on how far back from the present we can go in our definition of contemporary'.

[ardcarp]

Taking that at face value, how about:

New = ink still wet on the page (if indeed ink is involved)
Cotemporary = written in the past 10 years
Late Modern = written in the past 50 years (i.e. since 1965)
Early Modern = wtitten between 1905 and 1965

[Beef Oven!]

Taking that at face value, how about:

Ok, here goes.....

New = ink still wet on the page (if indeed ink is involved)

What Lloyd-Webber has in the pipeline?

Cotemporary = written in the past 10 years

Karl Jenkins - Requiem

Late Modern = written in the past 50 years (i.e. since 1965)

Howard Blake - The Snowman

Early Modern = wtitten between 1905 and 1965

Elgar - Pomp & Circumstance Marches 4&5


I think something's missing from your criteria

[ahinton]

= composed.

Sure, but that embraces both the written and the unwritten.

[Beef Oven!]

Sure, but that embraces both the written and the unwritten.

Sure, so long as we acknowledge that writing music isn't the only way of composing.

[doversoul1]

Taking that at face value, how about:

New = ink still wet on the page (if indeed ink is involved)
Cotemporary = written in the past 10 years
Late Modern = written in the past 50 years (i.e. since 1965)
Early Modern = wtitten between 1905 and 1965

In the past 10/50 years from when? Will some music from each category be ‘downgraded’ in term of modern-ness this time next year? Also, as the term ‘early modern’ already exists in a wider historical sense, can it not be rather confusing?

[ahinton]

My own very subjective opinion (I allow myself such luxuries from time to time) is that modern music is........

Any music, composed from 1890 to present, that radically breaks from the past and either deliberately or accidentally forms a symbiosis with the concurrent forms of new and different forms of expression in the arts.

OK, that's yours, for you, but any particular reason why 1890?

Beefheart

Yes, I already knew that you have one!

[ahinton]

Ok, here goes.....



What Lloyd-Webber has in the pipeline?



Karl Jenkins - Requiem



Howard Blake - The Snowman




Elgar - Pomp & Circumstance Marches 4&5


I think something's missing from your criteria

!!!

[ahinton]

Sure, so long as we acknowledge that writing music isn't the only way of composing.

Quite (which is what I was seeking to do in what I wrote).

[Beef Oven!]

OK, that's yours, for you, but any particular reason why 1890?

Completely subjective and anecdotal; much of the Strauss, Mahler Schoenberg, Zemlinsky etc that I listened to,seemed to start to turn around that time. Can't really put it into words.

[Beef Oven!]

Quite (which is what I was seeking to do in what I wrote).

No, you said and/or. I'm saying they are identical. No and, and no or about it.

[ahinton]

No, you said and/or. I'm saying they are identical. No and, and no or about it.

No, they cannot be identical in terms of how they're produced; one depends on written notation of some kind and the other may not, but they're each still means of/towards composition.

[ahinton]

Completely subjective and anecdotal; much of the Strauss, Mahler Schoenberg, Zemlinsky etc that I listened to,seemed to start to turn around that time. Can't really put it into words.

OK.

[ardcarp]

I'm enjoying this....