Who Killed Classical Music?

[Quarky]

What concerns me is who is setting agendas like these. I know what I think.

Sydney Grew?

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

please excuse my lazy ignorance but this thread has provoked my quietude and prompted some questions and observations

what was the size of the audience for classical music during the period 1850 to 2014 and how has it changed? serious music was always an upper and middle class concert going activity i would have guessed before say before the early 20C when promenade and wartime concerts might have widened the audience [but who went to the pleasure gardens and in what numbers in Handel's times]

economically the middle classes [more in the American sense but also in a European context] have not seen their incomes so restricted for so long than in the last twenty or thirty years; so that today we see rising attendances for concerts but less net return because of discounting ...

people seem to be squabbling about musical theory and technique [with at least some reference to the experiences of listening] but in numerical terms i doubt that the audience for serious music has ever been larger ... and i am led to wonder what might be meant by 'dead' or 'killed'

music has never been more widely available or more listened to across the globe; the expansion of the audience in China and Asia is remarkable

i would hazard that serious music has never appealed strongly top more than 15% of the general population at any time in history [including 'classical' 'jazz' 'indian classical' and similar musics that the record stores put at the back of the store]

serious music is a cult and has schisms that can be pernicious [see above] such squabbling is to be expected in times of economic hardship and cuts in public funding [short-sighted and dumb as these cuts may be] and i wonder what experience of funding or its withdrawal might have irked Mr Prokofiev?

has the televising of Proms Concerts and Proms in the Park done much to widen the audience?

commercial and/or popular music [difficult these typologies eh] are struggling with new economic conditions; technologies and demography interactions and so on ...

btw there is no shortage of serious classical music of many sub genres on youtube, nor jazz ..... but check the hit rates

did James Joyce kill literature for all but a learned elite?
did Einstein kill theoretical physics for all but a learned elite?
did Baudel kill history for all but a learned elite?
and why has no one mentioned Harrison Birtwhistle yet? or Ives? two composers of the unlistenable for the 'popular audience'....
and now we have proved Fermat's Last Theorem can more than 500 people in the history of humanity understand the proof?

dominant positions should be overthrown and replaced, there can be no adaptation/improvement/innovation/evolution without such 'killing' and rebirths [not all of this last survives thankfully]

we might ask have we 'killed' the concept of public service? mutuality? common ownership? no but their denigration has been extreme and they do require redefinition/elaboration and promulgation to restore them to a saner position in our political discourses

schismatic attacks denigrate work that deserves respect and should be esteemed for what it achieves .. music and the arts should be free open and improving [with all the debate that might entail] just as we would wish for our republic eh ....

i am no Panglossian, rather i argue for accepting that what you actively dislike is surely going to a part of what you love; the desire for hegemony is ill fated in any long run, and actually unnatural if you look at the world around you ... the argument for hegemony is always for more money or power for the proponent Mr G Prokofiev [who or what put salt on your tail?]

[Richard Barrett]

in numerical terms i doubt that the audience for serious music has ever been larger

A survey by the Association of British Orchestras (ABO) has found attendances at concerts and performances between 2012 and 2013 were up 16 per cent on those three years earlier. More than 4.5 million people a year now see orchestras play live in the UK.

And yet their funding is still being cut further.

[teamsaint]

You're seeing this from an (understandably) middle-class standpoint, teamsaint. Educational ideals used to be about aspiration to 'higher things', or to put it bluntly giving the ignorant the opportunity of enlightenment. Do 'most' parents want to pass on the best of what they know? And is 'the best of what they know' going to be of less and less value as we spiral downwards as a nation of culture?

Well, yes I do see things from a "middle class perspective", of course, but I did have all parents in mind when I said it. I was really just emphasising that we , as individuals , do what we can. Even if the aspiration in our education system has been replaced by functionality, it doesn't mean that the people have irrevocably lost aspiration in the areas we are discussing. All those parents who pay for music lessons, just as a single example. There must be many parents who recognise that there is something worthwhile in classical music(and other things) even if they personally are in fact unable to really appreciate them at this stage.
I completely agree though that there is a very real danger of "The best of what we know " becoming increasingly debased.
But it is only a danger, not a certainty. My point has implicit that despite cultures changing, we do all have the power to do something, at whatever level. That doesn't mean letting those with power off the hook.

[Sydney Grew]

Well - I have two final questions for member Hinton:

. . . Why twelve notes? I have asked this question many times but no one has ever ventured an answer. Why not eleven, say, or seven plus one, or six? There cannot possibly be any musical reason for the twelve every time round can there? Why not simply select the note you want when you want it (i.e. free pan-tonalism)? (And that the note you want is the next one in some fixed "row" should not be the reason why you want it should it?)

Richard Barrett has already answered that one as thoroughly and correctly as it needs to be answered.

Well what you say is not actually the case as I see it Mr. H! Here is the passage in question, but I have difficulty in interpreting it:

As you presumably well know, the musical reason for twelve is that there are twelve pitch-classes in the chromatic scale. One reason for their (theoretically) strict permutation in serial music is in order to create a harmonic consistency against which deviations may be perceived.

That there are twelve steps in the tempered chromatic scale is indeed a well-known fact. But that does not answer my puzzlement about why these notes should be arranged in order, and why that ordering should be used over and over again by a composer when composing. To take a simplified instance, imagine a man who begins his composition with a four-note chord - four different notes, say. Nothing should compel him to write next another four-note chord made up of four notes that are all different from the first four. But perhaps he rather reluctantly manages it; even then he has used up only eight of the stipulated twelve. To put the four remaining notes into a third chord would sound really horrible - I think every one can agree that it is a silly idea. What he, being a level-headed composer, would perhaps like to do is to refer back to the first chord and repeat some of its constituent notes. So what is he to do with the third lot of four notes that he cannot bring himself to incorporate into a third chord? Well, what many composers who find themselves in this sort of hole do is hide them away in a few wood-wind chirrups - in other words, render the offensive harmonies practically inaudible, at least as regards pitch. Therefore the reason why a composer should be forced or obliged to use the number twelve is as impenetrable to me as ever.

And the next sentence baffles me as well - specifically the phrase "harmonic consistency." In fact every composer has his own style which makes his authorship immediately recognizable - Bach, Brahms, Sibelius, Delius, Scryabine, Tubin, and dozens more - just listen to their things for a second or so and you know who wrote it. They each have their own favourite chords and progressions - that is what I understand by harmonic consistency. Even my own compositions have a half-diminished seventh or some inversion thereof in every bar - harmonic consistency - and the reason - a purely musical reason - is that I enjoy the vibrations (in the nature of things some chords are more pleasant and exciting than others).

But I don't see how a harmonic consistency can arise out of the dodecaphonic business, because as I have shown in the first paragraph a composer can write any (inconsistent) chords or progression he likes and hide the surplus and unwanted notes away in a few twiddles chirrups or flourishes. Remove the twiddles and the essence of the music remains the same, or is even improved thereby. A proper passacaglia gives a kind of consistency, but serialism permits a much freer and more varied arrangement of the notes.

[MrGongGong]

Aaaah sweet Sid

Aint "note based music" quaint

To put the four remaining notes into a third chord would sound really horrible

THIS is one of the places where you go completely wrong IMV
Whether notes sound 'horrible' or not (personally I love Xenakis and think Elgar's Salut D'amore sounds 'horrible' but leave that alone for now!) is more dependent on their voicing and timbre than their note name. In Western music we use the same note name for completely different sounds ! the note D can be many many things. To assume that because D&Eb sound 'discordant' in one context that they will in every other one is rather ignorant of even simple harmony. These notes C E G B make a well known chord. To treat variables as absolutes is a mistake.

[Richard Barrett]

I don't see how a harmonic consistency can arise out of the dodecaphonic business, because as I have shown

All you have shown is the restrictedness of your thinking, as MrGG implies.

By "harmonic consistency" I do not mean the same chords turning up again and again as you seem to imagine ("even", as you put it, in your "own compositions" which I recall you are extremely reticent about actually letting anyone hear), but actually something more like the opposite of this. The harmonic consistency of, for example, the first movement of Webern's Symphony op.21, ensures that no characteristic tonalities emerge to distract the listener from the textural-motivic-canonic fabric that presumably is the music's perceptual priority. If you can't or won't understand this, perhaps you have little business pontificating about what is and isn't the case in serial composition.

[ahinton]

Well what you say is not actually the case as I see it Mr. H! Here is the passage in question, but I have difficulty in interpreting it

That's as maybe, but there is evidently nothing that I can do about your difficulty here as it is not of my making or of Richard Barrett's.

That there are twelve steps in the tempered chromatic scale is indeed a well-known fact. But that does not answer my puzzlement about why these notes should be arranged in order, and why that ordering should be used over and over again by a composer when composing. To take a simplified instance, imagine a man who begins his composition with a four-note chord - four different notes, say. Nothing should compel him to write next another four-note chord made up of four notes that are all different from the first four. But perhaps he rather reluctantly manages it; even then he has used up only eight of the stipulated twelve. To put the four remaining notes into a third chord would sound really horrible - I think every one can agree that it is a silly idea. What he, being a level-headed composer, would perhaps like to do is to refer back to the first chord and repeat some of its constituent notes. So what is he to do with the third lot of four notes that he cannot bring himself to incorporate into a third chord? Well, what many composers who find themselves in this sort of hole do is hide them away in a few wood-wind chirrups - in other words, render the offensive harmonies practically inaudible, at least as regards pitch. Therefore the reason why a composer should be forced or obliged to use the number twelve is as impenetrable to me as ever.

Rather, I imagine, as the reason why you can't get it is impenetrable to most of the rest of us, apart from the fact of your obvious selectivity in the way in which you write about it here.

I have never agreed with - or even been able to bring myself to take seriously - the remark attributed to Boulez more than half a century ago about the uselessness of composers who wilfully declined at least to consider (I don't say "use" - and nor did he) serial methods and procedures, but 12 note serialism is nevertheless one road to compositional salvation from time to time for some composers just as are others to other composers.

You seem to begin with the be bothered about undue re-use of all or part of a tone-rown in a composition or movement therefrom. Why, if it's all handled skilfully and convincingly? Consider such powerful and masterly works as the D minor String Quartet and E major Chamber Symphony of Schönberg, in which the sheer concentration of material within a framework of constantly developing variation thereof is in every sense a macth for the kind of thing that you write about - albeit not, of course, within a 12 note serial ambit - and has its roots in Haydn, Beethoven, Wagner and - yes - Brahms!

A composer is not in any case "forced" to employ all 12 notes of the chromatic scale in note rows at all times, as you suggest. Furthermore, a composer can, if he or she so wishes, use 12 note themes but threat them non-serially, as indeed I have done on a number of occasions.

You seem furthermore to consider that 12 note serial practice and harmonic richness are somehow mutually incompatible; somehow I imagine that many composers, pehaps most notably Berg, would disagree with you. 12 note serial practice does not necessarily of itself even rule out tonal references, be they melodic or harmonic or both.

The rest of what you write - perhaps most especially your tiresomely repetitive references to a "passacaglia" - I have to admit to finding hopelessly incomprehensible, not least your citation of Scriabin, your bizarre spelling of whose name does nothing to conceal the fact of that composer's own moves towards something approaching serialist methodology.

[ardcarp]

12 note serial practice does not necessarily of itself even rule out tonal references, be they melodic or harmonic or both.

It doesn't (and you quote Berg, where in Wozzec and the Violin concerto tonal references seem tantalisingly close). But I'm sure Schoenberg's intention was to remove tonal anchor points from the listener; and I've never yet managed to hang on to a tonal reference in say Webern's SQ.

[Richard Barrett]

I've never yet managed to hang on to a tonal reference in say Webern's SQ.

Webern's music can readily be analysed in terms of (almost) each successive pitch being chosen to avoid "tonal references", that is to say ignoring the twelve-toneness of it altogether, although he was also careful to set up his twelve-tone rows so that they would produce exactly that result. Berg on the other hand did quite the opposite, with the results you mention. So the composition of the series itself, and an awareness of its possible symmetries and implications, is just as important (though in a different way) from the composition of thematic material and an awareness of its implications in tonal music.

And, while I'm about it, anyone who thinks that serial composition is in itself restrictive, as opposed to liberating, has not really understood how it works. I'm not talking in terms of using the techniques "loosely", but of choosing a point of departure which not only enables a distinctive envisioned music to come into being but also enables the composer to discover a music he/she hadn't already thought of, and for these two facets of the composition to be indistinguishable from one another.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

It doesn't (and you quote Berg, where in Wozzec and the Violin concerto tonal references seem tantalisingly close).

Wozzeck doesn't use "12-note serial practice" - did you mean Lulu, ardy?

But I'm sure Schoenberg's intention was to remove tonal anchor points from the listener

I'm not so "sure" of this - how does it apply in works like the Piano Concerto or the Ode to Napoleon; dodecaphonic serial works where "tonal" Triadic harmony is frequently foregrounded? From AS's own vocabulary (he insisted on "Pantonality" and despised the word "Atonality" - all tonal possibilities, not none), I think it's not so much a "removal of tonal anchor points" as a replacement with other phrase and cadencial points which are a synthesis of procedures found in the works of Wagner and Brahms.

and I've never yet managed to hang on to a tonal reference in say Webern's SQ.

No; such reference points move too quickly - but do you find one in, say, the first fifteen bars of Tristan? There, F major, D minor, A minor, G major/minor all hover around as potential areas of resolution, and when F major does appear in bar seventeen, it's immediately rejected in favour of G major, and then C major and then G minor. Take away the consonant triads, displace the octaves in the chromatic lines - and you've got pre-serial "Atonality". Having established a way of "composing with the notes of a motif", the "Method of Composing with Twelve Notes related only to one another" was an extention that allowed the large-scale harmonic connections that exist in Brahms to be applied to the techniques of the "Free Atonal" works.

In other words, Schönberg was creating audibly coherent harmonic movement in a fully chromatic Musical "language", rather than removing "tonal anchor points" - which just makes it sound as if his intention was to spoil the listeners' fun!

[Richard Barrett]

Schönberg was creating audibly coherent harmonic movement in a fully chromatic Musical "language", rather than removing "tonal anchor points" - which just makes it sound as if his intention was to spoil the listeners' fun!

Not all of us think tonal anchor points are necessarily fun!

One of the points of my previous post (with regard to Webern) was that the "positive" and "negative" views of what 12-tone composition is doing are actually two sides of the same thing, although I certainly agree that for listeners (or composers!) to think more in terms of things that music is avoiding than in terms of what it's actually focused on might well hinder appreciation of the music.

[Serial_Apologist]

It doesn't (and you quote Berg, where in Wozzec and the Violin concerto tonal references seem tantalisingly close). But I'm sure Schoenberg's intention was to remove tonal anchor points from the listener; and I've never yet managed to hang on to a tonal reference in say Webern's SQ.

Of course in Wozzeck Berg had not yet reached the point at which either he, Webern or Schoenberg had fully forumlated the 12-tone method; a better example of what I take it you mean would have been the later Lulu, in which row constructions allow for harmonic progressions with strong Mahler 9 reminiscences.

There are tonal references in Schoenberg's serial works: I'm thinking especially of the Bachian chorale tune stated in the clarinet in the third movement of the Suite Op 29, around which a sequence of witty variations ensue, including, I'm sure, intentional quasi-tonal, or at any rate bitonal implications arising at certain points - this theme reappears at the work's conclusion; and of course in "Ode to Napoleon", in which the series is deliberately devised to allow for a major chord resolution at its conclusion. I am led to wonder if in this, perhaps Schoenberg's most overtly political work up to that point, the composer was taking a hint from his one-time pupil Hanns Eisler's comparable use of "tonally-orientated tone rows" in for example "Die Romische Cantata".

Edit: I see that Ferney has coincidentally said much the same, but more articulately!

Edit 2: I wonder if I'm alone in "hearing" minor progressions throughout Webern's ostensibly last-ever work, the Orchestral Variations Op 40.

[ahinton]

It doesn't (and you quote Berg, where in Wozzec and the Violin concerto tonal references seem tantalisingly close). But I'm sure Schoenberg's intention was to remove tonal anchor points from the listener; and I've never yet managed to hang on to a tonal reference in say Webern's SQ.

Point taken, but I'm not convinced that this is necessarily the entire story. For starters, in http://www.briancmoseley.com/wp-cont...paces-Text.pdf p.36 fn56, we read "We will see later, in an analysis of Webern’s Quartet, op. 22, how row areas can project different inversional centers that can be used compositionally in a manner approximating tonal center". Then there's a number of tonal references and implications that manifest themselves in Cantatas I & I, not least the passage in parallel perfect fourths some three quarters of a minute before the close of No. I which comprises two four-part chords D-G-B-E / C#-F#-B#-E# (about which I was once told in an aural training class many years ago that I was listening to it wrongly!). Perhaps my ears are bent out of shape but I do hear tonal implications in mature Webern from time to time, albeit more often harmonic than melodic. Not that this is of any particular importance, of course, other than to contribute in a small way to the endorsement of my disagreement with SG over such matters.

[ahinton]

Of course in Wozzeck Berg had not yet reached the point at which either he, Webern or Schoenberg had fully forumlated the 12-tone method; a better example of what I take it you mean would have been the later Lulu, in which row constructions allow for harmonic progressions with strong Mahler 9 reminiscences.

There are tonal references in Schoenberg's serial works: I'm thinking especially of the Bachian chorale tune stated in the clarinet in the third movement of the Suite Op 29, around which a sequence of witty variations ensue, including, I'm sure, intentional quasi-tonal, or at any rate bitonal implications arising at certain points - this theme reappears at the work's conclusion; and of course in "Ode to Napoleon", in which the series is deliberately devised to allow for a major chord resolution at its conclusion. I am led to wonder if in this, perhaps Schoenberg's most overtly political work up to that point, the composer was taking a hint from his one-time pupil Hanns Eisler's comparable use of "tonally-orientated tone rows" in for example "Die Romische Cantata".

Edit: I see that Ferney has coincidentally said much the same, but more articulately!

Edit 2: I wonder if I'm alone in "hearing" minor progressions throughout Webern's ostensibly last-ever work, the Orchestral Variations Op 40.

You may well do so as indeed I also do de temps en temps in other mature Webern works, but the Variations for Orchestra was the composer's penultimate, not his last, completed work and it was his Op.30, not Op. 40, his final completed work being Cantata II, Op. 31.