What is Modern Music?

[Beef Oven!]

I suppose, unlike nouns, adjectives are by nature, relative. We know a pipe if we see one even when someone tells us it isn’t a pipe, whereas something being modern depends entirely on by what or whose standard/ definition we are judging, unless the word is used to mean something like ‘the latest’ or ‘most up-to-date’.

IMV, to be modern, music must be contemporary (but being contemporary doesn't make it modern, ipso facto).

Btw

This is a pipe...... don't let them tell you it's not.

[doversoul1]

IMV, to be modern, music must be contemporary (but being contemporary doesn't make it modern, ipso facto).

Btw

This is a pipe...... don't let them tell you it's not.

I suppose ‘modern music’ is not the same thing as a work of music ‘being modern’. Monteverdi’s music is often talked about being/sounding very modern.

I’ll leave the pipe business to our Expert.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Look Pal, this thread is more fun when it's littered with cat jokes....but serialously, in interviews on Record Review today Roger Wright stressed several times that Boulez was a composer first and conductor second...obviously very sensitive to the fact that many music lovers would rather listen to him conduct, say, The Rite or La Mer than to hear his music, Posterity will no doubt be the judge. In AMcG's recorded interview with PB himself (10 years ago), Boulez referred to Stravinsky as an intuitive composer not an intellectual. He said intuition was fine for the big Russian ballet scores but no good for Strvainsky's neoclassical works which he hated. I find that an extraordinarily arrogant stance. I suppose it is a very French thing to value the 'intellectual', but I'm not sure what intellectualism (as opposed to intelligence, which can take many forms) has to do with inspiration and intuition which, in my book, is what makes a composer. BTW what a fantastic performance of Les Noces ended the programme with the RIAS chamber choir sounding so right for the piece.

Have you posted this on the right Thread, ardy?

And wasn't Boulez praising Stravinsky's "intuition", saying that it produced the works of the Russian and Swiss years, whereas Stravinsky's attempts to fit in with a post-war French intellectual tradition led to his abandoning this intution, resulting in weaker works (in Boulez' opinion) - in other words, Boulez was not "valu[ing] the intellectual"?

EDIT: The relevant comments are from 2hr 45min 30secs here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06tw0p6

[ardcarp]

Have you posted this on the right Thread, ardy?

And wasn't Boulez praising Stravinsky's "intuition", saying that it produced the works of the Russian and Swiss years, whereas Stravinsky's attempts to fit in with a post-war French intellectual tradition led to his abandoning this intution, resulting in weaker works (in Boulez' opinion) - in other words, Boulez was not "valu[ing] the intellectual"?


EDIT: The relevant comments are from 2hr 45min 30secs here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06tw0p6

That's not how I read it.....

[MrGongGong]

This is a pipe...... don't let them tell you it's not.

Hummm that looks suspiciously like a photograph to me (it is a "real" one though).

[Beef Oven!]

Hummm that looks suspiciously like a photograph to me (it is a "real" one though).

[ahinton]

Yes, Searle. My spell check is more aggressive than it used to be. Maybe they update them when you update your OS, from time to time. It certainly kicks in much more often than it used to.

I had assumed correctly, then: I didn't think that you were referring to an otherwise unidentified American composer sleeping in that western city!

Yes, serialism has been around for a very long time, and that fact does undermine my view that it can be considered modern. But I do! And 2VS is modern music, IMV. I detect a fundamental break from the late romantic period (to the 1890s).

That last part is where, to a large extent, we differ (which is not to say that either of us is "right" or "wrong"); to my mind (and, more importantly, to my ears), much of the music of 2VS owes an incalculable debt to Brahms, Wagner and Mahler (and to perhaps a somewhat lesser extent Bruckner) and, in purely expressive terms, the music that each of those three composers produced between, say, around 1908 and 1924 when dodecaphony began to establish itself seems to me to broaden enhance, rather than overturn or even undermine, the expressions of those earlier composers.

I don't see Stockhausen, Lachenmann, Barrett, Boulez et al as a fundamental change from turn of that century modern music, in the sense of a radical break. (of course I might be wrong!).

Again, this isn't about "right" and "wrong", but personally I find that Stockhausen's music began as you describe it but moved farther away from identity with such origins, Lachenmann represents a somewhat different approach even though I have heard him described as the modern-day Richard Strauss(!) to the extent that his concern with individual sounds and combinations thereof sometimes appear to assume some kind of priority over the techniques of "developing variation" of material that so preoccupied 2VS and their ancestors, Barrett seems to me more often than not to be yet farther distant again from that fin-de-(previous)-siècle and Boulez (to over-simplify grossly in both senses of the term!) began with a sensuousness some of whose origins were in Debussy and Szymanowski, then ran this in parallel with the rigours of total serialism and then gradually the surface-texture-informed sensuousness gradually took over from this. All of that is, of course, so ridiculous an over-simplification as to imply a kind of reduction ad absurdum that I neverthelesas do not intend, but...

I see DM as backward looking in terms of tonal harmony and form (traditional Beethoven symphonic lay-out). Whereas while Searle uses the symphony format, his music is dodecaphonic. Regarding your last comment concerning Searle, I don't think about music as being forward looking - for me there's just the past and the present.

This slightly bothers me; you say that you do not think about some music as forward-looking but appear to have little problem with finding other music backward-looking and I do not quite understand how these play out compatibly in reality; that said, I don't personally see David Matthews' music as wilfully looking forward or backwards but existing in his own present while at the same time being conscious of particular heritages and the fact of his recourse to tonal hamony and form fails to persuade me otherwise.

[Serial_Apologist]

This slightly bothers me; you say that you do not think about some music as forward-looking but appear to have little problem with finding other music backward-looking and I do not quite understand how these play out compatibly in reality; that said, I don't personally see David Matthews' music as wilfully looking forward or backwards but existing in his own present while at the same time being conscious of particular heritages and the fact of his recourse to tonal hamony and form fails to persuade me otherwise.

My response to Beefy would be along lines that the main break between the "first generation" serialists directly or indirectly under Schoenberg's guidance, and those of the Darmstadt generation, was that the latter sought - to start with at any rate - to carry through what they felt were the full implications in the serial principle that the former had, ironically, largely failed to carry through after adopting the method, preferring to adapt it to pre-existing formal models from the tonal past like theme and variation. It seems the slip back into "melodic acceptability" came roughly simulteously with Stockhausen's transition from "points-based" to "moment" form, and there still is a school of mainly French modernists seeking to perpetuate the points principle as carrying the day for serial compositions. But this - if I understand it correctly! - presumably restricts serial organisation to surface musical parameters such as pitch, dynamics, timbres and durations, whereas, once we get onto moment form, serialism is, according to Christopher Fox in a radio talk I have on cassette, dealing with proportions, which can be to do with ratios between different co-ordinated elements, including samples and quotes, as in "Telemusik" and "Hymnen".

As to the matter of forward or backward-looking idioms, atonality, predominant whether in thematic or athematic compositions, continues to exert the pull that many refer to when they describe a piece as "modern", since it represents a non-reversible change in terms of perceptibility, the air from another planet that Schoenberg used from the poem in the finale of the second string quartet. There sems no question, in my mind at least, that something qualitative takes place in listener capacity at that point, as opposed to the quantitative addition of suspensions and appogiaturas hostile to enharmonic resolution in eg Reger's Prelude and Fugue on BACH of 1900 where you can sense the music's direction and thwarting. You can't do that with, eg. Erwartung, and the as-it-were qualitativeness of the transformed experience brouight about by atonality, which still renders it "modern", "contemporary" or whatever description analogous to Kandinsky's abstract paintings of the same period one uses, compared with the directional harmony related to a 19th centuiry sensibility to be found in David Matthews' Eighth Symphony.

For me the new harmonic means and formal procedures therefrom emanating signalled a new stage in human consciousness and behaviour forestalled by the continuation of the capitalist mode of production; they were waiting for what has still to take place. Whether or not it will will probably determine whether humanity has a future on this planet, which probably means any future. One can't overlook the fact that those reverting to past idioms by rejecting the new on principle, such as Richard Strauss otr Kabalevsky, to take two convenient examples from Stalinism and fascism, the two great ideological betrayers of the 20th century, rather than incorporating the past into the present as an historical continuum, are figures from or supported by the forces of conservatism that decry music and other non-drug inducing enrichers of consciousness unless religion-mediated, and I think this may well be the underlying driver of most of the antagonisms that exist between modernism's supporters and its sworn enemies.

Here endeth the sermon.

[ahinton]

My response to Beefy would be along lines that the main break between the "first generation" serialists directly or indirectly under Schoenberg's guidance, and those of the Darmstadt generation, was that the latter sought - to start with at any rate - to carry through what they felt were the full implications in the serial principle that the former had, ironically, largely failed to carry through after adopting the method, preferring to adapt it to pre-existing formal models from the tonal past like theme and variation. It seems the slip back into "melodic acceptability" came roughly simulteously with Stockhausen's transition from "points-based" to "moment" form, and there still is a school of mainly French modernists seeking to perpetuate the points principle as carrying the day for serial compositions. But this - if I understand it correctly! - presumably restricts serial organisation to surface musical parameters such as pitch, dynamics, timbres and durations, whereas, once we get onto moment form, serialism is, according to Christopher Fox in a radio talk I have on cassette, dealing with proportions, which can be to do with ratios between different co-ordinated elements, including samples and quotes, as in "Telemusik" and "Hymnen".

As to the matter of forward or backward-looking idioms, atonality, predominant whether in thematic or athematic compositions, continues to exert the pull that many refer to when they describe a piece as "modern", since it represents a non-reversible change in terms of perceptibility, the air from another planet that Schoenberg used from the poem in the finale of the second string quartet. There sems no question, in my mind at least, that something qualitative takes place in listener capacity at that point, as opposed to the quantitative addition of suspensions and appogiaturas hostile to enharmonic resolution in eg Reger's Prelude and Fugue on BACH of 1900 where you can sense the music's direction and thwarting. You can't do that with, eg. Erwartung, and the as-it-were qualitativeness of the transformed experience brouight about by atonality, which still renders it "modern", "contemporary" or whatever description analogous to Kandinsky's abstract paintings of the same period one uses, compared with the directional harmony related to a 19th centuiry sensibility to be found in David Matthews' Eighth Symphony.

For me the new harmonic means and formal procedures therefrom emanating signalled a new stage in human consciousness and behaviour forestalled by the continuation of the capitalist mode of production; they were waiting for what has still to take place. Whether or not it will will probably determine whether humanity has a future on this planet, which probably means any future. One can't overlook the fact that those reverting to past idioms by rejecting the new on principle, such as Richard Strauss otr Kabalevsky, to take two convenient examples from Stalinism and fascism, the two great ideological betrayers of the 20th century, rather than incorporating the past into the present as an historical continuum, are figures from or supported by the forces of conservatism that decry music and other non-drug inducing enrichers of consciousness unless religion-mediated, and I think this may well be the underlying driver of most of the antagonisms that exist between modernism's supporters and its sworn enemies.

Here endeth the sermon.

But not here endeth discussion thereof! - this is where fora such as this one represent a distinct advantage over sermons in Church!

This is all of great interest and there's much to be said in favour of your first paragraph. However, in response to the opening of your second paragraph, I would seek to counselt that "atonality" - a term that Schönberg for one disparaged - must be (but all to often isn't) seen as a matter of degree rather than something finite and specific; it is also a matter of the nature and extent of listeners' aural experience, to the extent that some would perceive certain passages as more "atonal" than would others, since keen ears familiar with earlier more overtly tonal music might well pick up tonal references either subconsciously or inevitably or both. Schönberg's seminal Second String Quartet, notwithstanding the other-planetary atmosphere that pervades its latter part, begins in F# minor and ends, admittedly via a most circuitous tonal route, in F# major. Erwartung is one of Schönberg's most complex scores but never once in all the times that I've listened to it (which must be at least 50 by now, although I've not been counting!) has it struck me as "atonal"; it inhabits an unique world of what I'd be rather more inclined to call "hypertonality" - on in which tonal references and relationships become ever more complex rather than undermined or eschewed and this is one reason why its entire course is so powerfully expressive; the most lucid performance of it that I ever encountered was live at Barbican (unfortunately!) with Jessye Norman and LSO conducted by Boulez and never have I heard so much detail so clearly or so well balanced - indeed, Boulez contrived to make all that coruscating complexity seem as clear and flowing as an unpolluted stream yet without ever diminishing the work's power. The "directional harmony" that you note in David Matthews' Eighth Symphony is also present in Erwartung; it's just different harmony and its directions and frequency of changes are so very much greater (which statement is not intended as any kind of value judgement of either work!).

I'm sorry but I simply cannot come to terms with the capitalist references on your final paragraph in the context of music, not least because musical expression has changed and developed over the years ever since there was such a thing as music whereas the kind of capitalism towhich I take you to refer have hardly done the same in parallel with such musical developments. You write of "Richard Strauss or Kabalevsky, to take two convenient examples from Stalinism and fascism" (and I assume you to mean those latter two terms in reverse!), but I think that the former wrote as he did because it's what he wanted to do (after all, he did, with prescient arrogance, once declare that he would begin as an iconoclast and end as an old master before proceeding to do more or less just that) - and, after all, the shrinking back from the heights and depths of his own expressionism in Salome and Elektra in later works occurred well before the rise of Fascism in Germany in the 1930s - whereas Kabalevsky, a far more minor figure, probably wrote as he did either because that was all of which he felt capable or because he felt obliged to do as bidden or even both - and he had little of Shostakovich's talent for getting around the strictures imposed by what Sorabji would have called his so-called "Sovietical betters".

As to the notion of "incorporating the past into the present as an historical continuum", where would you perceive Busoni in all of this - a composer who sought, among other things, to bring draw past and future together in the present? I do not in any case believe that either Strauss or Kabalevsky (and I've never put them in the same sentence before!) were obviously "supported by the forces of (any form of) conservatism".

One of the problems about "the antagonisms that exist between modernism's supporters and its sworn enemies" is that a monochromatic view of such opposing sides is just too simplistic; years ago, I recall Anthony Payne declaring, for example, that it's perfectly possible to love Delius and Webern and I'm quite sure that there are those whose chosen listening experiences would demonstrate that their espousal of Shostakovich, Xenakis and Rachmaninoff (who all co-existed in a Prom programme some years ago) proves that these allegedly unbridgeable gulfs are in fact nothing of the kind, so this notion of "supporters", "sworn enemies" and "antagonisms" between them is thus far from clear-cut and, to some extent, dependent also upon the practical application of received opinion. It thus brings us back to the Do (or maybe even Doh!) of the topic to the extent that the question "what is "modernism?"" seems to be at least as unanswerable as that of "what is modern music?"!

[Serial_Apologist]

But not here endeth discussion thereof! - this is where fora such as this one represent a distinct advantage over sermons in Church!

This is all of great interest and there's much to be said in favour of your first paragraph. However, in response to the opening of your second paragraph, I would seek to counselt that "atonality" - a term that Schönberg for one disparaged - must be (but all to often isn't) seen as a matter of degree rather than something finite and specific; it is also a matter of the nature and extent of listeners' aural experience, to the extent that some would perceive certain passages as more "atonal" than would others, since keenears familiar with earlier more overtly tonal music might well pick up tonal references either subconsciously or inevitably or both. Schönberg's seminal Second String Quartet, notwithstanding the other-planetary atmosphere that pervades its latter part, begins in F# minor and ends, admittedly via a most circuitous tonal route, in F# major. Erwartung is one of Schönberg's most complex scores but never once in all the times that I've listened to it (which must be at least 50 by now, although I've not been counting!) has it struck me as "atonal"; it inhabits an unique world of what I'd be rather more inclined to call "hypertonality" - on in which tonal references and relationships become ever more complex rather than undermined or eschewed and this is one reason why its entire course is so powerfully expressive; the most lucid performance of it that I ever encountered was live at Barbican (unfortunately!) with Jessye Norman and LSO conducted by Boulez and never have I heard so much detail so clearly or so well balanced - indeed, Boulez contrived to make all that coruscating complexity seem as clear and flowing as an unpolluted stream yet without ever diminishing the work's power. The "directional harmony" that you note in David Matthews' Eighth Symphony is also present in Erwartung; it's just different harmony and its directions and frequency of changes are so very much greater (which statement is not intended as any kind of value judgement of either work!).

Yes I would agree that subliminal vestiges of directional harmonic movement are to be found in Erwartung, but we have a problem if we disagree on a definition of atonality; the thing that for me makes their presence qualitatively different from where, for example, the chord of superimposed fourths right at the start of the First Chamber Symphony resolives through part-movement into a major triad, is that a first-time listener in 1906, while he or she might be outraged by the intial chord, anticipates its resolution; and this anticipation is gratified, albeit grudgingly for the listener who can't accept the sound of simultaneously piled-up fourths and probably reaches for his theory book to tell him it's non-compliant with eternal theory, whereas where we have similar chord complexes in Erwartung the thwarting of their expected resolution, in combination with the combined complexity of all surrounding events that the consciousness of the newcomer has no antecedents with which to guide his or her listening, is in an altered state. That altered state, representing extreme psychological tension, anxiety and disorientation, is the Expressionistic equivalent of, yes, something that had been anticipated elsewhere - in the similar but emotion-depleted harmonies of Satie's "Sonneries de la Rose-Croix" as long previously as 1892, and more familiarly in the whole-tone-dominated harmonic context of a Debussy piece such as "Cloches a travers les feuilles" of 1905. But, whether we're talking about the mollifying effects of harmonic irresolution as representing a mind lost to present and future in a prolonged instant of beauty, or frozen in petrification in the face of some unknown horror, we have the emancipation of states of consciousness to degrees unforseen in Western music. One could include the rhythmic stasis, in the first instance brought about by de-emphasis and non-accentuation, in the second by accumulation to a point of indiscernability, and add the break-up effect of forward momentum that caused such disturbance to first-night recipients of "The Rite".

I'm sorry but I simply cannot come to terms with the capitalist references on your final paragraph in the context of music, not least because musical expression has changed and developed over the years ever since there was such a thing as music whereas the kind of capitalism towhich I take you to refer have hardly done the same in parallel with such musical developments.

On the contrary, I think most observers of right or left would concur that the acceleration of advances in techniques, language, and areas of feeling expressed within Western music are inextricably linked with the advances in science and mind discoveries made possible by capitalism's expansion of the means and speed of production. An important side-issue here is the individualisation of the creative artist that parallelled the rise of copyright and the commodification of music.

You write of "Richard Strauss or Kabalevsky, to take two convenient examples from Stalinism and fascism" (and I assume you to mean those latter two terms in reverse!), but I think that the former wrote as he did because it's what he wanted to do (after all, he did, with prescient arrogance, once declare that he would begin as an iconoclast and end as an old master before proceeding to do more or less just that) - and, after all, the shrinking back from the heights and depths of his own expressionism in Salome and Elektra in later works occurred well before the rise of Fascism in Germany in the 1930s - whereas Kabalevsky, a far more minor figure, probably wrote as he did either because that was all of which he felt capable or because he felt obliged to do as bidden or even both - and he had little of Shostakovich's talent for getting around the strictures imposed by what Sorabji would have called his so-called "Sovietical betters".

Strauss had the foresight to prepare his bed for what he either thought or hoped would be a stop put to all this progressiveness, with its disturbing questioning of the passed down wisdoms that speak of privilege and hierarchy preordained in the unchanging course of events, so he was ahead of the pack and by making his peace changed back to old means and didn't have to compromise. I chose Kabalevsky because he symbolised a generation of composers post WW2 who, coming later in our story, obediently fell in line with the privileged elite of the USSR.

As to the notion of "incorporating the past into the present as an historical continuum", where would you perceive Busoni in all of this - a composer who sought, among other things, to bring draw past and future together in the present? I do not in any case believe that either Strauss or Kabalevsky (and I've never put them in the same sentence before!) were obviously "supported by the forces of (any form of) conservatism".

I see Busoni as one thread of Modernism underrepresented in most accounts.

One of the problems about "the antagonisms that exist between modernism's supporters and its sworn enemies" is that a monochromatic view of such opposing sides is just too simplistic; years ago, I recall Anthony Payne declaring, for example, that it's perfectly possible to love Delius and Webern and I'm quite sure that there are those whose chosen listening experiences would demonstrate that their espousal of Shostakovich, Xenakis and Rachmaninoff (who all co-existed in a Prom programme some years ago) proves that these allegedly unbridgeable gulfs are in fact nothing of the kind, so this notion of "supporters", "sworn enemies" and "antagonisms" between them is thus far from clear-cut and, to some extent, dependent also upon the practical application of received opinion. It thus brings us back to the Do (or maybe even Doh!) of the topic to the extent that the question "what is "modernism?"" seems to be at least as unanswerable as that of "what is modern music?"!

These matters tend to resolve by virtue of failures in social and political advance being reflected by failures of nerve which understandably lead composers of once-radical aspirations for their art compromising. This in turn hands a legacy of weakened radicalism to future generations, which we see today as downgrading any progressivity into just a passing fashion of no importance, rather than signifying crucial conjunctures in which opportunities were unable to be followed up.

[Beef Oven!]

I have a few points to raise following on from the very interesting discussion between ahinton and S_A, but I am temporarily decomposed, if you'll allow the BBMism.

[oddoneout]

BTW what a fantastic performance of Les Noces ended the programme with the RIAS chamber choir sounding so right for the piece.

Les Noces is one of those 'heard of but not heard' pieces for me and this was a good introduction to the work. I have a question though about the final section, the Russian bridal celebration - and please don't shoot me down - why does it sound like Carmina Burana? Or perhaps in view of the composition dates the question should be the other way round. Either way, different cultural source material, supposedly, yet similar tunes, vocal effects(eg ragazzi) instrumentation.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Les Noces is one of those 'heard of but not heard' pieces for me and this was a good introduction to the work. I have a question though about the final section, the Russian bridal celebration - and please don't shoot me down - why does it sound like Carmina Burana? Or perhaps in view of the composition dates the question should be the other way round. Either way, different cultural source material, supposedly, yet similar tunes, vocal effects(eg ragazzi) instrumentation.

Les Noces was one of the most popular of the Diaghilev ballets in the '20s (even HG Wells was a fan) and cheaper to mount than Le Sacre, so more frequently staged. Everybody heard it - including Carl Orff who made a career from copying the superficial features of the work.

The instrumentation of Les Noces (four pianos and four percussionists) is very different from the large orchestra of Carmina Burana - it's in Catulli Carmina that Orff nicked Stravinsky's instrumentation as well.

[Pabmusic]

Les Noces was one of the most popular of the Diaghilev ballets in the '20s (even HG Wells was a fan) and cheaper to mount than Le Sacre, so more frequently staged. Everybody heard it - including Carl Orff who made a career from copying the superficial features of the work.

The instrumentation of Les Noces (four pianos and four percussionists) is very different from the large orchestra of Carmina Burana - it's in Catulli Carmina that Orff nicked Stravinsky's instrumentation as well.

There's an authorised version of Carmina Burana with 2 pianos and 6 percussion (I've played timps in it) but I think it's not the original.

[ardcarp]

why does it sound like Carmina Burana?

including Carl Orff who made a career from copying the superficial features of the work.

Parts of it inhabit a very similar sound-world where there is an ositnato pounding away, where there is a short repeated theme on top, and where the 'harmony' doesn't shift very much.

Is (are) Les Noces ever staged as a ballet these days? If it is I'd love to see it.