Who Killed Classical Music?

[Oldcrofter]

Thank you, ahinton - I should have put a question mark after 'Howard', I suppose. I must admit I haven't studied every message in this thread and Reginald Goodall didn't come immediately to mind.

[Richard Barrett]

I wonder, Richard Barrett #207, if you could give the context or subject matter of "(Howard) Goodall's well-known racist views," and explain why you " wouldn't wish to take any advice from him as to the meaning of "lineage" "

My apologies, I mistakenly assumed that Reginald Goodall was being referred to. I'm only dimly aware of who Howard Goodall is.

[ahinton]

My apologies, I mistakenly assumed that Reginald Goodall was being referred to. I'm only dimly aware of who Howard Goodall is.

Your wisdom in the latter might well do you credit(!)...

I had to admit that the first name that came to mind when I read that was also Reginald Goodall, despite my inability to perceive a contextual relevance for its presence.

[Quarky]

Hmm. I'd say you guessed wrong, Oddy -

And that's the real point, I think, about Serialism - that it has enabled many of the finest Musical imaginations to produce much of their best work (their most subtle, most emotionally sensible), whatever their attitude to Schoenberg's personal aesthetic. AND it continues to do so.


(Incidentally, Oddy, by "increased complexity of composition" - when following from "in the 18th and 19th Century" - do you mean to imply/state that Mozart's compositions are less complex than Richard Strauss'?)

Oh dear, not one of my better posts

I guess I should have sat on my hands,and left it the experts!

[MrGongGong]

My apologies, I mistakenly assumed that Reginald Goodall was being referred to. I'm only dimly aware of who Howard Goodall is.

You should ask Dominic Murcott (I think Peter W has a recording of his "rant")

[teamsaint]

Can I just interrupt to say how nice it is to back here in the real world , after being stuck away in an office devoid of any really meaningful or worthwhile sounds all day.

Great stuff.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

social networks are used to explain everything these days

here iis one for abstraction in painting [art] has anything like this been done in the musical field?

http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/videos/250

[Serial_Apologist]

social networks are used to explain everything these days

here iis one for abstraction in painting [art] has anything like this been done in the musical field?

http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/videos/250

In the 1980s and '90s there were lots of "family trees", tracing the aetiology (?)* of British Progressive Rock and Jazz-rock Fusion groups: who was with whom, when, etc. I'm not aware of this in the classical music field.

[Sydney Grew]

Well! We have heard in this thread a little about what happened one hundred years ago. We have also heard a little about what is happening in our own time. I thought therefore it might be of interest to hear a little about the situation at the half-way mark.

In the (very reputable and authoritative) Musical Times of January 1960 appeared this (presumably written by the editor, although the author is not named):

The music of the so-called second Viennese School, which came into being about fifty years ago (and which finds little favour in present-day Vienna), was the outcome of a particular musical and racial situation; and though the public of most countries has had ample opportunity of hearing and appreciating that music, it has, by and large, been rejected; weighed in the balance and found wanting. It flouts the natural laws of acoustics, and to many of us it now has a faded, old-fashioned air. The twelve-note system may be described curtly as neuroticism placed in a strait-jacket, lest worse befall it. Its reductio ad absurdum has come with the mathematical music that has been the vogue recently in certain continental centres. Lacking the sap of a vital creation, this will soon shrivel and die. As for musique concrète and electronic music, however useful either may be in providing "noises off" or on, in stage and radio plays, it is safe to say that neither manifestation has a future as the basis of a satisfying art-form.

Complaints have been made that these various developments have made little headway here because the ears of young people have had few chances of becoming attuned to them; that schools and colleges, preoccupied with the established repertory, have ignored the so-called avant-garde school. But it is surely the chief function of an educational establishment to base its teaching on the accepted masterpieces of the past. A student worth his salt will, like his professor, hear what he wants to hear, either by radio or on a gramophone record, if a "live" performance is lacking. He should remember the Pauline injunction: Prove (that is, test) all things; hold fast that which is good. In point of fact, the music of the past fifty years is, to our certain knowledge, heard and studied in many musical institutions. The Principal of one of our foremost colleges recently gave a talk, with illustrations, on electronic music.

It is no part of a critic's business to tell a composer the kind of music he should write. But it is one's plain duty to warn him if one believes he is on the wrong track. The theories of this second Viennese School and its offshoots lead to an artistic cul de sac; and the sooner talented composers break out of it and find the true path, the better it will be, not only for them, but for music as a whole. The untalented, on the other hand, might just as well stay grubbing along in the tangled undergrowth. Serial technique, and all that goes with it, has been called a revolution in music; and it certainly cannot be ignored. It has, moreover, an insidious fascination for a young composer who, in the present muddled state of affairs, scarcely knows which way to turn. But the time, we suggest, has come for a counter-revolution, a call to order. With the coming of this New Year, then, let us "ring out a slowly dying cause. . . . Ring out the old, ring in the new."

[MrGongGong]

I would remark here only that I do not agree that "electronic music has no future as the basis of a satisfying Art-form." On the contrary, provided its users keep to a world of pitched sounds and harmonies, it IS the future.

Pitch = good
unpitched = bad
Wendy Carlos = good
Denis Smalley = bad (apart from the bit where the pipes come in?)

So I guess the wind machine will have to go back to Bell then

Maybe you could furnish us with a list of approved composers and their works so we can avoid degenerate music?

Or do you really mean (with a nod to the great Trevor Wishart) that as ALL recordings and broadcasts ARE electronic music then they are the future?

[Quarky]

Well!

I would remark here only that I do not agree that "electronic music has no future as the basis of a satisfying Art-form." On the contrary, provided its users keep to a world of pitched sounds and harmonies, it IS the future.

Can't resist comment. It seems to me that with electronic music, the composer is free to choose whatever pitch or frequency, merely by typing in the frequency value or turning a dial. So it may be a little difficult to persuade him to stick to harmonies, which I assume were a natural product of "acoustic" instruments. It does not seem to me to necessarily follow that the human ear reacts favourably only to harmonic sounds, and I'm not aware of any scientific proof of this. If the human head had nothing between the ears, it would presumably be a helmholtz resonator, resonating to certain harmonics. But all that greystuff in the head gets in the way of a simple analysis.

An example recently on Hear and Now of Stockhausen training a choir boy to sing a "non-harmonic" note for Gesang der Junglinge.

Guess it's the end product which is the important thing.

Warning: This post was written by a person with little or no musical training, and may be a load of b***s!

[Sydney Grew]

Never having heard of Wendy Carlos I sought information and found: "Wendy Carlos, born Walter Carlos, November 14, 1939." Well! a contemporary, but a very odd one: "I was about five or six...I remember being convinced I was a little girl, much preferring long hair and girls' clothes." I will spare members further details of the "sex-reassignment surgery." But after reading that I am no longer tempted to listen to any of his/her productions. I would prefer simply to imagine them; strange is it not?

[Sydney Grew]

The twelve-note system may be described curtly as neuroticism placed in a strait-jacket, lest worse befall it.

What a thought-provoking description (especially for any one who has seen Schönberg's demented paintings of the period) - and oddly enough it is a description I have not seen before. The final phrase is particularly good; it has a kind of profundity.

I would really like to know who the editor was who wrote that summing-up of the situation at the start of the sixties (quoted four posts back). Can any member close to the Musical Times tell us?

[Belgrove]

I would really like to know who the editor was who wrote that summing-up of the situation at the start of the sixties (quoted four posts back). Can any member close to the Musical Times tell us?

It may have been Andrew Porter

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Porter_%28music_critic%29

Strangely, the material in the Musical Times I have consulted (available on JSTOR) does not reveal such details.

[jean]

The twelve-note system may be described curtly as neuroticism placed in a strait-jacket, less worse befall it.

I'm surprised that got past your pedant's eye, Syd.