Classical Music & Opera Forums

Found on another classical music forum:

The classical music written by composers today is nothing but noise. These composers are ivory tower composers who do not recognize that their primary duty is to serve the audience by providing works that the audience will find pleasing. Instead, they write music for a small, closeted group of likeminded academics who are also out of touch with the rest of the world.

I'm no special friend of so-called "New Music", but the above seems a bit over the top to me.

How does it seem to you?

ACD

their [composers] primary duty is to serve the audience by providing works that the audience will find pleasing

Whilst that assertion is (primarily) true for tin-pan-alley songwriters and composers of advertising jingles; it doesn’t apply to composers working in more serious genres.

What many who like to cite “the good old days” fail to realise or mention is that most of the music ever composed (from any era) is largely of inferior quality. We only listen to a tiny fraction of the music composed from (any) previous eras –the stuff that has survived the test of time is mostly the finest of those eras. Today’s music will prove to be no different.

My dissent from the sentence quoted by ACD is purely theoretical: in life, therefore in music, there can be nothing such “the last wave”.

Otherwise, I tend to share bricon’s (and ACD’s, right?) concept that popular and classical music are two different kinds of human expression (with natural “grey areas” between them); and that classical music is by definition more “cerebral” (serious) than popular music, and therefore requires a higher degree of preparation from the listener, and consequently it is for (more or less numerous) élites.

Then, that an élite includes millions of people in the world, or just few guys in closed clubs, is to me just a matter of civilization, both on the “supplier”, the “customer” and the “service provider" side. And judging with this scale, I have to bitterly conclude that musical civilization hit its peak in the ninteenth century, and has since declined.

Statements like that quoted in the opening post have been made by critics throughout the entire history of classical music; Mozart (“too many notes), Berlioz, Stravinsky are just three examples of composers who have been subjected to such criticism – over three separate centuries. Would the person who penned that opening quote consider Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Symphonie fantastique or The Right of Spring to be music that is only appreciated by “a small, closeted group of likeminded academics who are also out of touch with the rest of the world”?

Steve Hicken wrote:What I find most interesting about this quote [the one that opened this thread], and the innumerable ones like it that one can find anywhere, is that it purports to know the intention of composers the writer doesn't name: to "write music for a small, closeted group of likeminded academics who are also out of touch with the rest of the world". Who does the writer apply this to? What does "academic music" mean in this context, if anything?

Well, first off, I don't think the writer was commenting on the intention of the composers at all. He's commenting on the music itself, and saying what it sounds like to him; viz., like it was written by composers who "write music for a small, closeted group of likeminded academics who are also out of touch with the rest of the world," which is to say the music is so cerebral and empty emotionally that to any "normal" music-lover it sounds like nothing so much as noise, and that music like that could be appreciated only by likeminded specialists who know and understand the nuts and bolts of its making, which is to say, other "academics."

What I found over the top about that quote was the barefaced (and to my mind, insupportable) declaration that composers are somehow or in some way obligated to "recognize that their primary duty is to serve the audience by providing works that the audience will find pleasing," which, again, to my mind, is a perfectly imbecile, even immoral, notion.

(P.S. Good to see you here, Steve.)

ACD

I think that we can now safely discount ANY opinions proffered in British newspapers about music or “the arts”.

pop [music] is the highest of the arts

Article

Culture vs civilization: is this perhaps a key to look at the problem?

First we should agree on the definitions: culture as the global set of (intellectual) assets of a community, civilization as the way culture (i.e.: each individual cultural asset) is spread within a community.

Then: could we say that Richard Strauss managed to stay at the helm of our musical civilization, bringing perhaps a modest contribution to our musical culture (especially in the twentieth century)?; and on the contrary, that John Cage has perhaps brought his honest contribution to our musical culture... and almost nothing to our civilization?

The Proms commence in London tonight and continue for the next two months. Each concert will be broadcast by the BBC and will be available on-line, on-demand for 7 days after each concert.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/2008/

Found on a classical music blog:

I prefer to think of those black dots [on the pages of a score] more as the composer’s architectural blueprint, and the performer the craftsman — one is no more important than the other — the final result being a collaboration. Maybe I’m a Communist.

To which I responded:

No, not a communist. Infinitely worse. Judging by your above, you're clearly a postmodernist.

What might your response have been?

ACD

Thanks for this, Bricon (I missed it on my last logon).

ACD

If that were true, composers would not publish their works in the detail that they do. A melody (or vocal) line over a figured bass would be enough to suffice for an “architectural drawing” of a piece. That composers choose to release their work in (fully scored) detail – even cadenzas are routinely fully composed – this must tell us something about (most) composers’ intentions.

Well, my answer would be: “it depends”.

Certainly the sentence is idiot if the composer’s epoch is - say - from Mannheim’s school onwards... up to John Cage!

But we must not forget that for a long time the normal scenario (mainly, but not only in vocal pieces) was not far from the one described in the sentence: the composer set out the blueprint, and the interpreter was required to bring his/her “value-added” to the piece. “Abbellimenti” (embellishments) like the “fioritura” were the improvisation tools in the hands of the performer. And the performers’ free cadenzas - still allowed, if not welcomed, by Mozart and Beethoven - aren’t they just another remnant of that practice?

Viceversa, extending the concept to the dynamics of a piece: could anyone tell how exactly to perform Mahler’s sixt symphony’s scherzo (at number 56) meticolously labeled “Altväterisch”?

daland wrote:[W]e must not forget that for a long time the normal scenario (mainly, but not only in vocal pieces) was not far from the one described in the sentence: the composer set out the blueprint, and the interpreter was required to bring his/her “value-added” to the piece. “Abbellimenti” (embellishments) like the “fioritura” were the improvisation tools in the hands of the performer.

Yes, that's true -- for a pre-Baroque and Baroque-period performer, not a 21st-century one who is neither competent nor qualified to add such embellishments of his own. And where Bach is concerned, he generally frowned on such performer-invented embellishments and made his feelings known by writing out those embellishments for the performer to follow; a practice for which he was the recipient of much complaint.

ACD

Is it appropriate for a performer to improvise in works that are not contemporaneous with the composer of the works?

Can a performer who (say) has been exposed to; Beethoven, Wagner, Schönberg, Ligeti and modern popular, perform improvisations in (say) a Scarlatti sonata without that post-baroque “baggage” being apparent in the improvisations?

Interesting point, bricon.

As Vincent C. K. Cheung recalls in this essay, Daniel Gottlob Türk, a prominent German theorist in the 18th century, had this to say about performers’ cadenzas:

“I would say nothing new, but only repeat often heard complaints, if I spoke against the very great abuse of the embellished cadenzas. For it is not seldom that a concerto seems to be played solely for the sake of the cadenzas. The performer struggles not only to achieve pointless length, but also introduces all sorts of ideas that have not the slightest relation with the preceding composition, so that the good impression which the piece has perhaps made upon the listener for the most part has been “cadenza-ed away.”

“Ideas that have not the slightest relation with the preceding composition”: that’s to me the main point here. Besides that, I would’n object for an inspired interpreter of today to invent his own embellishments (for the ritornello) of a Scarlatti’s sonata.

daland wrote:Besides that, I would’n object for an inspired interpreter of today to invent his own embellishments (for the ritornello) of a Scarlatti’s sonata.

Oh? Why is that? What makes a 21st-century performer qualified and competent, as I previously put it, to invent such embellishments for a work composed by an 18th-century composer -- an 18th-century master? Or to say the same thing but say it as Bricon put it, how could a 21st-century performer possibly free himself of all the "post-baroque 'baggage'" he unavoidably carries about with him? He might be able to ape 18th-century embellishments that sound superficially like they fit the piece, but he lacks the 18th-century sensibilities that informed an 18th-century performer not only as to the embellishments themselves, but their placements as well.

ACD

ACD,
I'm not that drastic about 21st century interpreters' capabilities...

As Daniel Gottlob Türk wrote more than 2 centuries ago, contemporary (to the piece) interpreters do not garantee fine results either.

On the contrary, the total compliance of the interpretation to the original environment sometimes open the doors to questionable initiatives, like many of the performances given with original instruments do.

daland wrote:As Daniel Gottlob Türk wrote more than 2 centuries ago, contemporary (to the piece) interpreters do not garantee fine results either.

That's neither here nor there, Daland. Every performer automatically possesses the sensibilities of his place and time, but that doesn't guarantee he has the gift to employ those sensibilities in a first-rate manner in the invention of either embellishments or cadenzas.

daland wrote:On the contrary, the total compliance of the interpretation to the original environment sometimes open the doors to questionable initiatives, like many of the performances given with original instruments do.

You're here making my point for me. What makes you believe 21st-century HIPsters are any more free of their 21st-century baggage than non-HIPster musicians? They're not, and their posturing as if they were is nothing other than a fraud.

ACD