What is Modern Music?

[vinteuil]

On Breakfast, Clemmy read out an email complaining that something earlier in the programme ... sounded like a cat walking across a keyboard. A cat walking across a keyboard would seem to me a perfectly legitimate way to generate music.

... well, it worked for Scarlatti -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlPo-NHiI_k

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_fugue

[Serial_Apologist]

As I've mentioned before; nothing but confusion can arise from attempting to equate "musical modernism" (whatever that may be at any time) with "modern music" in terms of answering the question posed by the thread topic. In the first paragraph of an essay on Elliott Carter (written towards the end of the composer's life), Daniel Barenboim wrote that, notwithstanding the widespread love for and admiration for certain works of Mendelssohn, the course of 19th century Western musical history would have been no different without him and one might interpret this as Barenboim's assertion that Mendelssohn was not a "modernist" in his day whereas, for example, Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt, Wagner (and perhaps to a slightly lesser extent Alkan) were; what constituted "modern music" in the mid-19th century would, however, have been a different matter

As the musical modernism being illustrated by a desire to rid music of "emotion", this is surely a nonsense; which composers from, say, the death of Liszt to that of Fauré sought to do that? I, too, have an emotional response to Stravinsky's Symphony in C even though it's probably not printable in polite society. "Emotional" indeed means many things and it's a constant source of irritation to me that the word "emotion" and its derivatives are so frequently debased by over-use and inappropriate use. Just as talent can be regarded as the worst enemy of genius, sentimentality can be seen as the worst enemy of emotion, in each case because the former gets widely mistaken for the latter.

The notion that music is either "emotional" or "cerebral" is likewise a nonsense (like that which seeks to persuade that men are practical and women emotional) because all musical creation is cerebral to the extent that various brain processes, including problem solving, are an inherent constituent of musical composition, but factionalising and snobbery so often risk getting in the way of understanding of such issues.

Someone once said to me of something of mine that she found it to be powerfully emotional - and then, goddamit, apologised for saying so because she thought that this isn't what a composer might want to hear! (I suppose because, to some people, composers are such brainboxes that they have little room for emotional expression); I replied that if she and others thought otherwise then I'd probably got it all wrong and the best thing to do would be to introduce the score to the shredder sharpish. So yes - "cerebral concepts" - at least in the sense that they can get dragged into such considerations - is indeed no more than the linguistic fudge as which you describe it.

The kind of sentimentality of which Rachmaninoff is sometimes accused by his detractors (and which is in the accusers' heads rather than Rachaminoff's) all too often rests on the "big tune" content of some of his works; if we recognise that Rachmaninoff's music is replete with genuine emotion rather than cheap Hollywood-type sentimentality (which would be reasonable solely on the grounds that most of it was in any case written before Hollywood became Hollywood), would anyone seriously find his later works - i.e. those few pieces that he wrote after leaving his native Russia for good - any less emotional than his earlier ones simply because the "big tunes" of the second symphony and second piano concerto are no olonger present as once they were? (I'm referring here principally to his fourth piano concerto, third symphony and Symphonic Dances).

Are Varèse's Amériques, Arcana and Ecuatorial short on emotion? Did Scriabin, Roslavets and Schönberg eschew emotion in favour of some kind of "cerebral" expression arising from their respective semi-serial and serial organisation of tones? Of course not! Does the fact that I cannot get anywhere near Boulez's piano sonatas as I can some of his other works mark them out as lacking in emotional content? I don't see what this would be the case just because they don't register with me.

I think that we can therefore dispense with any notion that "modern music", whatever it may be, may be identified or is identifiable by a reduction of emotional expression as a creative priority; like any other music, "modern music" is, after all, composed by humans!

This is a really wonderful post, thank you ahinton!

The charge of "cerebralism" is sometimes made against the integral serialists of the late 1940s and early 1950s such as Goyvaerts, Boulez and Stockhausen at the time, on the grounds of various assertions having been made, more on their behalf than by them themselves, of the wish to distance themselves from their own subjectivity, which they considered one of the problems of previous music, by resort to mathematical pre-formularisation. Perhaps it was this that attracted John Cage to Darmstadt, given his own interest in seeking to remove ego and intentionality from his own compositional processes, and why he spent so much wordpower in rebutting the ways in which he felt the serialists were going about it. "Stop pushing the notes around so much, Karlheinz", or words to that effect. The works speak for themselves, however, along with the reactions, whether positive or negative, to e.g. "Gruppen" or "Gesang der Jungelinge". But the origins of the accusation go back further, and largely to Schoenberg's invention of the 12-tone method - an invention that was in many respects more of a discovery, given that in the process of weeding out procedures he felt surplus to requirements while at the same time advancing harmony further and further away from diatonic-orientated functioning, he had started coming up with note sequences and chordal combinations which turned out to have fewer and fewer internal repetitions or doublings. And so it was but a step, or series of steps, that led, quite naturally as it were in relation to the vocabulary that by 1923 had become quite natural to him to express his music in, to automatically thinking in terms of tone rows. These by good fortune in turn suggested means of coordinating the 12 notes of the chromatic scale in ways analogous to the previous diatonic system. The more one gets into following Schoenberg's music chronologically (and that of Berg and Webern) the more one hears a stylistic and aesthetic continuum, in which emotional expression is as varied as it had been in Mahler's symphonies - indeed, more so, since the new means of expression offered so many new areas of feeling and articulation, one would have thought. No one ever seems prepared to accuse JS Bach of being cerebral; yet in many respects Schoenberg, Berg and Webern were just taking what JSB achieved technically in the "Goldberg Variations" and fitting it into a language and breadth of feelings in all their complexity resonating with that of their and our times.

[french frank]

I would think that a problem with defining something like " Modern Music" is that in order to have any practical application, you need to be able to fit specific music inside that definition.

I'd say that the problem of applying the word 'modern' to music is that it is simply a lay description - an adjective which can be applied to almost anything at any time.

This from an inherited book called Modern Cooking:

[ardcarp]

Shabby chic....that's cool.

[ahinton]

This is a really wonderful post, thank you ahinton!

Thank you very much - though no more so than your response to it!

The charge of "cerebralism" is sometimes made against the integral serialists of the late 1940s and early 1950s such as Goyvaerts, Boulez and Stockhausen at the time, on the grounds of various assertions having been made, more on their behalf than by them themselves, of the wish to distance themselves from their own subjectivity, which they considered one of the problems of previous music, by resort to mathematical pre-formularisation. Perhaps it was this that attracted John Cage to Darmstadt, given his own interest in seeking to remove ego and intentionality from his own compositional processes, and why he spent so much wordpower in rebutting the ways in which he felt the serialists were going about it. "Stop pushing the notes around so much, Karlheinz", or words to that effect. The works speak for themselves, however, along with the reactions, whether positive or negative, to e.g. "Gruppen" or "Gesang der Jungelinge". But the origins of the accusation go back further, and largely to Schoenberg's invention of the 12-tone method - an invention that was in many respects more of a discovery, given that in the process of weeding out procedures he felt surplus to requirements while at the same time advancing harmony further and further away from diatonic-orientated functioning, he had started coming up with note sequences and chordal combinations which turned out to have fewer and fewer internal repetitions or doublings. And so it was but a step, or series of steps, that led, quite naturally as it were in relation to the vocabulary that by 1923 had become quite natural to him to express his music in, to automatically thinking in terms of tone rows. These by good fortune in turn suggested means of coordinating the 12 notes of the chromatic scale in ways analogous to the previous diatonic system. The more one gets into following Schoenberg's music chronologically (and that of Berg and Webern) the more one hears a stylistic and aesthetic continuum, in which emotional expression is as varied as it had been in Mahler's symphonies - indeed, more so, since the new means of expression offered so many new areas of feeling and articulation, one would have thought. No one ever seems prepared to accuse JS Bach of being cerebral; yet in many respects Schoenberg, Berg and Webern were just taking what JSB achieved technically in the "Goldberg Variations" and fitting it into a language and breadth of feelings in all their complexity resonating with that of their and our times.

This is all very true; perhaps the only aspect of it of which you omit mention is that Schönberg was not the only composer moving towards some kind of serial pitch organisation in the years leading up to 1924, Hauer, Scriabin and Roslavets perhaps being the most "significant others" (if you'll pardon the expression!). What I have always felt about serial composition is that, at its best, the serialism matters little to the listener and the results can enhance the expressive capability of music composed within the equal temperament 12 semitones to the octave system, as indeed you suggest. Dodecaphony, be it in the hands of Schönberg, Skalkottas, Perle or whoever else, is not a guarantee of the eschewing of tonal references of some kind, including diatonicism, as indeed so much dodecaphonic music well demontrates; it also does not necessarily of itself confine the composer in terms of repetition, the use of octave doublings and the like. When you write that "the more one gets into following Schoenberg's music chronologically (and that of Berg and Webern) the more one hears a stylistic and aesthetic continuum, in which emotional expression is as varied as it had been in Mahler's symphonies", you've quite unsurprisingly hit a nail firmly on its head, especially given that all three composers revered Mahler who, had he lived, say, for a further 35 years, might not have wanted to go down serialist paths, but so what? - he was Mahler and the choice would have been his alone to make.

Your J S Bach referencce which, again, is very much to the point, points to the idea that the Second Viennese School composers were no more "modernists" than he was and, for that matter, nor was Boulez other than for a few years; all of them espoused "traditions" (as long as the meaning of that word is correctly understood as something other than the constricting, stultifying, in-aspic phenomenon as Busoni railed against when confronted by its misuse). Perhaps only Xenakis (or perhaps more correctly "especially Xenakis") really carved out something that was only remotely connected with past means and methods of music-making - yet even he had recourse to mathematical "traditions" which had their roots in the past!

[MrGongGong]

Your J S Bach referencce which, again, is very much to the point, points to the idea that the Second Viennese School composers were no more "modernists" than he was and, for that matter, nor was Boulez other than for a few years; all of them espoused "traditions" (as long as the meaning of that word is correctly understood as something other than the constricting, stultifying, in-aspic phenomenon as Busoni railed against when confronted by its misuse). Perhaps only Xenakis (or perhaps more correctly "especially Xenakis") really carved out something that was only remotely connected with past means and methods of music-making - yet even he had recourse to mathematical "traditions" which had their roots in the past!

Xenakis (unlike Logothetis ) never gave up on the idea of the "concert hall" (nor did Cage or Stockhausen). While many visual and performance artists moved out of galleries (often to have composers move in!) to perform on the beach, in car parks or other public spaces the vast majority of "Modernist" composers stayed indoors (with an occasional trip out to collect mushrooms or sing Stimmung in a cave).

(Maybe bit OT)

[teamsaint]

Xenakis (unlike Logothetis ) never gave up on the idea of the "concert hall" (nor did Cage or Stockhausen). While many visual and performance artists moved out of galleries (often to have composers move in!) to perform on the beach, in car parks or other public spaces the vast majority of "Modernist" composers stayed indoors (with an occasional trip out to collect mushrooms or sing Stimmung in a cave).

(Maybe bit OT)

interesting.
although oddly, I doubt if galleries with modern/contemporary art have ever been more popular.
probably not something one can say of contemporary /modern concert hall music.( Although I think it is more popular than promoters think it is).

[MrGongGong]

although oddly, I doubt if galleries with modern/contemporary art have ever been more popular.
probably not something one can say of contemporary /modern concert hall music.( Although I think it is more popular than promoters think it is).

Indeed
I guess the idea of other spaces as a site for visual art isn't considered as unusual as it is when folks play orchestral music in a car park or underwater in a swimming pool (or even on Aldeburgh beach).

[Stanfordian]

Is John Rutter's music modern?
Is Harrison Birtwistle music modern?
Is Webern's music modern?
Is Stockhausen's music modern?

I think we need new word for music that sounds modern, sounds progessive, sounds different to the traditonal classical music sound of say Beethoven.

[Beef Oven!]

Is John Rutter's music modern?
Is Harrison Birtwistle music modern?
Is Webern's music modern?
Is Stockhausen's music modern?

No
Yes
Yes
Yes

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I think we need new word for music that sounds modern, sounds progressive, sounds different to the traditonal[ed-sic] classical music sound of say Beethoven.

"Wagner"?

[ahinton]

No
Yes
Yes
Yes

!!!

OK, I don't want to start a game here, but
Is Whitacre's music modern?
Is Beef Oven! I mean Beethoven's late music modern?
Is Reicha's music modern?
Is Berlioz's music modern?
Is Liszt's late music modern?
Is Vermeulen's music modern?
Is Sorabji's music modern?

Is any kind of pattern developing here?

[ahinton]

"Wagner"?

Or even Wagner (without the " ")?

[ahinton]

I think we need new word for music that sounds modern, sounds progessive, sounds different to the traditonal classical music sound of say Beethoven.

But who's to say what is or is not "progressive"? Whilst Schönberg devoted the largest chapter of Style and idea to Brahms the progressive, I imagine that not everyone would view Brahms thus buit, evidently for Schönberg, Brhams' music (or at least some of it) sounded modern, progressive and akin (or at least closely related) "to the traditonal classical music sound of say Beethoven" (whom Wagner, Mahler and Schönberg himself revered).

This doesn't get any easier, does it?(!)...

Oh, I forgot...

Is Busoni's music Modern?

[Stanfordian]

But who's to say what is or is not "progressive"? Whilst Schönberg devoted the largest chapter of Style and idea to Brahms the progressive, I imagine that not everyone would view Brahms thus buit, evidently for Schönberg, Brhams' music (or at least some of it) sounded modern, progressive and akin (or at least closely related) "to the traditonal classical music sound of say Beethoven" (whom Wagner, Mahler and Schönberg himself revered).

This doesn't get any easier, does it?(!)...

Oh, I forgot...

Is Busoni's music Modern?

No, it doesn't get any easier!