Ask Dave: Can We Judge Serial/Avant-Garde Music?
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- čas přidán 9. 05. 2022
- A viewer asks: "Where would you draw the line beyond which traditional parameters of interpretation cease to apply? Varèse? Boulez's Sonatas, Marteau sans Maître and Pli selon Pli? Stockhausen's Gruppen or Klavierstücke?" An excellent and difficult question. In this video, I propose one possible answer.
- Hudba
A friend of mine went to a conducting masterclass taught by Pierre Boulez. He got to conduct Avant "l'Artisanat furieux", which is the first movement of Le marteau. Boulez told him just to make phrases like any other music, give a clear beat, and listen. Whatever one may think of the piece, that's pretty much the answer: the same criteria apply.
In college in the 70s, I took a class called Twentieth Century Music. On some exam or assignment I said I enjoyed Ives' Concord Sonata, but I didn't feel I understood the music. The prof answered that enjoying the music IS understanding it in an essential way. I also think of Stravinsky, answering what he liked about Boulez's music. He said that Gertrude Stein was asked what it was she liked about Picasso's paintings, and she answered, "I like to look at them." Stravinsky said, "That's my answer. I like to listen to Boulez."
Wasn't it Stravinsky who said about Boulez (I'm paraphrasing) "I've no idea what his music is saying but I like the noise it makes"? That's pretty much the rule I apply to 'difficult' music.
That would be my answer as well. I grew up with classical music, my parents listened a lot to it, so when I actively started to seek out music on my own (as a teenager with 13 or so), I already had some basic knowledge of Brahms, Wagner, Mozart, Beethoven, etc.
But I then stumbled upon composers like Ligeti, Glass, and Boulez, and found their music vastly fascinating. It was unlike anything I had heard before. Perhaps teens jump on those things, who knows. I love Boulez' "Sur Incises" or "Dérivee 2". I can't even comment on the mechanics behind the scores (they may be quite mathematical and complex), I have never taken a look at the actual printed scores, but I love to listen to them. They are the musical equivalent of a fascinating crystalline structure. I find some of Boulez's music for some (maybe odd) reason quite calming (I know it may drive other people nuts, that's the way it is.)
And film composers such as Leonard Rosenman and Jerry Goldsmith wrote serial film scores (or scores had serial elements at their core) that were strikingly dramatic, very immediate in their impact, easy to "get" and understand. Scores like THE COBWEB, PLANET OF THE APES or FANTASTIC VOYAGE.
Gertrude Stein is great. however, i am a lunatic
I came up with a simple rule as a presenter, both on radio and in concert: If a composer or performer is not willing to court an audience, I am under no responsibility to provide one.
Absolutely!
In the early '80s I attended a new music festival at Bowling Green (Ohio) University. Among the numerous composers who were invited to attend concerts of their music was Milton Babbitt. He was the headliner actually. During a panel discussion of contemporary music, the infamous "Who Cares if You Listen" article was mentioned and Babbitt revealed that the provocative title was not his. He called his essay "The Composer As Specialist," but an editor at High Fidelity magazine--where Babbitt's article first appeared--made the unilateral decision to change the title to the provocative one it's known by to this very day.
I still remember what one of my classmates said about twelve-tone music in my music theory class at college. He said, "I'm glad someone else did it and I didn't have to do it."
What's the role of familiarity (hence recordings)? As as kid I could buy Carter and Darmstadt lps extremely cheaply (no-one bought them till deleted). So I did, thereby 'learning' such pieces before much of Brahms, Beethoven and the gang, indeed well before I could read a score. When you're young, you soak it up from recordings and it seems natural - good or bad. Carter Concerto for Orchestra, Stockhausen Mixtur, Schoenberg Variations made perfect sense. Even then, some works were obvious turkeys you'd never play twice, but mostly not and those records were carefully made. It was only a part of listening - but it didn't feel separate to the rest of the world of music we were absorbing. Now it kind-of does and I'm not sure why. Might be (in part) changing styles of performance and recording. Thanks for the talk on this DH.
When I played chamber music as a university student, the LaSalle Quartet was in residence at the school. They taught that you play Schoenberg like Brahms, Bartok like Beethoven, and Webern like Mozart. The "modernness" is built into the music, and you just play it as music.
Of course, this approach requires prejudgement on how Brahms, Beethoven and Mozart should be played. I think Brahms sounds much better when played like Beethoven.
@@ThreadBomb The point wasn't that there was a distinct approach to Brahms, Beethoven, or Mozart either. The point was there was a universality of musicianship that transcends style. You like Brahms played like Beethoven. What I think you mean is you like Brahms played with the textures made more transparent and rhythmic rigour. That was how the LaSalle Quartet tended to approach all music. Whether all music was well served by that approach is certainly open to discussion.
I remember falling in love with Webern's op. 21 Symphony and Stravinsky's late music before I had any idea of what serial music was, and I have gotten people hooked on the power of classical music with Moses und Aron as their first exposure, so to me, I think it is just a technique for handling a certain level of tension, just as different modes and scales are. Untrained listeners accept it as legitimate in movie scores.
But movie scores only use serial techniques to express horror.
@@ThreadBomb Reminds me of something Ennio Morricone said in an interview once, who besides the film scores he composed to pay the bills also composed some heavily modernist concert music that barely anybody's ever heard. In the '60s he was associated with other avant garde composers of the day and made one of his revered teachers angry at him for using these newer techniques in one of his movie scores for some scene of psychological horror. The man considered it a horrible thing how Morricone was essentially propagating the idea that modern classical is a horror to the ears and greatly upset Morricone who'd been proud of the idea of him helping to bring this kind of music to the ears of people who didn't listen or had no interest in modern compositional techniques. I suppose the same still applies today.
@@JBuddis That reminds me of a recent experience I had. I listened to all the LaSalle recordings of Schoenberg's four string quartets, which got increasingly avant garde as they went along. The fourth quartet is totally serialist. I ended up liking the fourth quartet the best.
Then I realised that the first theme of the first movement of that quartet sounds remarkably like the soundtrack to The Hateful Eight (in the scene where Kurt Russell vomits blood all over). Whether that soundtrack had true serialism or not, I think there is more avant garde classical music in a modern movie soundtrack than most people realise - up to and including twelve-tone serialism.
Just heard that the other day off a cassette tape I had made borrowing the CD set from the library!
Interesting I found I liked the 3rd Quartet quite energetic cello lines, lots of counterpoint, like listening to a 3D cube in 2D😊
4th Quartet also good strong piece.
@@ThreadBomb 2001:A Space Odyssey used Ligeti's atonal (I'm not sure if it's serial) music to evoke astonishment. I saw an Italian movie "The Gospel according to Matthew" in the mid-1960's that used Anton Webern's serial music during the scenes of miracles by Jesus. The entire score of the original Planet of the Apes was entirely12-tone and serial and served for every emotion in the movie.
I'm in complete agreement with Kyle Gann on this subject, who wrote about how he felt that the Darmstadt crew (Boulez, Stockhausen, etc) got most of the attention by being the loudest and most deliberately confrontational, and that lesser known contemporaries like Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono, and Henri Pousseur were ignored despite their music being far more compelling.
Maderna in particular deserves a second look. He's never going to be a huge concert draw, but I find his orchestral music to be quite beautiful, even sensual, which is not a word you usually associate with post-Webern serialists!
Agreed. Maderna's chamber music and for small emsembles can be quite charming. Giardino Religioso and Juilliard Serenade come to mind.
I saw his opera Hyperion in Paris and two or three concerts at Radio France in the early nineties with Aura Giardino religioso etc
I have never seen his music programmed since
My favorite modern composer...
Liking a lot of Xenakis despite not "understanding" a lick of it, or whatever mathematical techniques he used to make it kind of made me realize something that maybe Xenakis realized too- you can get away with just about anything in music as long as there's a sense of forward progression. Most of his best work may have little in the way of any classical tonality, but it still provides a sense of tension-and-release that I don't get with a lot of serialists, and that creates an interest in seeing what comes next.
Xenakis' Epicycles is an exception to that.
One of the most enduring composers of this generation of composers. I'd place 'Keqrops' among the top 10 in his output.
I love his electronic pieces because I experience them as so visceral. Yet I don't understand thing one about how he put them together.
I really appreciate this channel. It’s like having a very entertaining, well-spoken friend write us a CD booklet every day, and occasionally present essay-worthy material on music’s bigger questions. Thank you!
You're very welcome.
Are traditional parameters constant or do they change over time? There's the famous story (maybe apocryphal) of the first horn player at the premier of Schubert's 9th, shortly into the first movement yelling across to a colleague, "Have you found a tune in this yet?" I'm old enough to remember more than a few folks slamming their seats and storming out of a performance of Rite of Spring. Bed-of-nails compositions for one generation can become bread-and-butter to the next. My broad rule is to give any piece six complete listens, and if nothing is coming through after that, pack it in. Maybe come back later. At a rough guess, 80% of the pieces I found indecipherable at first, eventually register and many become favourites.
A very intesting talk, and take on the question. Yes, as listeners we are the ones who ultimately bring to bear the usual criteria of performance, which is not to say that great composers and musicians don't help to expand those criteria. During the mid-80s I went a premiere (in London) of Ligeti's Piano Concerto, which was performed twice - presuming some degree of popular demand. Not exactly a serial piece but Ligeti had been through the Darmstadt-Donaueschingen thing, had been influenced by serialism, and came out the other side unscathed. During the interval the man sitting next to me said: 'Excuse me for asking, but what is it that makes you want to hear this music, and a second time round?' My answer was simple: 'Because, it's pleasant, engaging, delightful, original, funny, spooky, all the things and more you might expect from any kind of music that's worth listening to'. It was Ligeti who in an essay (on Boulez, I think) said that the paradox of serial music is that the more rigidly constructed it is the more random-sounding and musically disorganised the end result. Excuse the long comment.
Wow! What an interesting and fun topic! I find that, no matter what kind of music is being performed, I listen the same way, whether Mozart or Cage, Carter, or Boulez. I can't listen any other way. The music may deliberately run counter to any recognizable tradition of music, or at least try to, but, as you say, if it's performed, it's still going to be about sound and patterns of sound and how we respond to them.
I've shown in class an episode of the old (ancient?) American TV program, "I've Got a Secret," which had as its guest, John Cage, who performed his piece "Water Walk." Some of the "instruments" he used were a goose call, a water pitcher, a flower vase, 5 radios (which weren't working, so he tapped them instead, and knocked them off the table to "turn them off"), an iron pipe, etc. You get the idea. He used a stop watch to guide the timing of the sounds. It was hysterical and great fun, and it plays with and against our traditions of music. Interestingly, some of my "avantgarde" conceptually oriented art students, who usually claim to be hip to the latest contemporary art phenomena, were shocked, and didn't think this was music. Others, like me, thought it was great fun and enjoyable for what it was.
I think there's a parallel to the extremely abstract, "eliminate the human element in music" phenomenon in the visual arts: it's Minimalism from the 60s and 70s, artists like Donald Judd or Carl Andre. Judd would use industrial materials and simple shapes like cubes and have the works manufactured by machining companies. So his work was purely out of his head (mind?) and not made by hand. Carl Andre would place square pieces of different metals in a square on the floor, with titles like "144 Pieces of Aluminum". I was with a grad school friend when we first encountered one of Andre's pieces - my friend accidentally walked on the piece. From Minimalism we moved to pure Conceptualism and Joseph Kosuth whose piece "One and Three Chairs" comprised a chair, a photo of the chair, and an enlarged dictionary definition of a chair.
Oh, and then there is sound art, whose artists say their work is not music, but they use sound as the medium for their work. I suppose this could be considered the bridge between abstract music and conceptual visual art, all leading, at least in some cases, to an imagined ideal of pure "mind." Whew! Fun times!
I’m a big fan of The Classical Nerd’s channel. His balance of biography, reception history, and music theory is quite enjoyable. I’m glad that his Milton Babbitt video led to this question and this talk. Thanks Dave! -Charles
Great channel & has helped me a lot as a fairly newbie to CM
Re: the worst concert performances "..there's some terrific dirt there ..." Haha. I look forward to more of the "dirt" . This channel always cheers me up !
Thanks Dave thats so interesting. And I think these days we’re better placed to see some of those 50s experiments in particular for what they were (some of the early Boulez stuff, that Messiaen piece on “modes of values and intensities”, some of Stockhausen, Cage etc) in a very shocking historical context. As for serial/ avant garde music more generally, the stuff that lasts and gets re-recorded seems to have digested these experiments and subordinated them to more expressive ends, so you’re absolutely right. From Berg’s Lulu (hard to get your head around initially but very expressive and engaging) to Stockhausen’s “Gesang der Junglinge” (even if that’s almost impossible to access and hear) to, yes, Pli selon pli, or Carter or Ligeti, people engage because of the expressive characteristics, not the maths (and there’s maths all over the shop in all of that!)
I’m not at all against a lot of “neotonal” composition, but it strikes me that this expressive subordination of the maths and chance has been the dominant thing keeping people listening to this late 20th century stuff.
Replying to myself as I noticed that it’s now easy to listen to Gesang der Junglinge on CZcams- I thought the Stockhausen estate had made it rather difficult. Nobody has to like it but it’s a striking thing nonetheless
Hi Dave! I have a two-part question for you that I've been wondering about for a long time. 1. What is your process for listening to the recordings you review? Do you listen with score, without? Do you take notes as you listen? Just wondering if you could talk about your process a little when it comes to listening and then reviewing. 2. How do you prefer to listen to music? Headphones? Earbuds? In the car? On the subway? Do you multitask while listening (i.e. dishes, etc.)? Do you have a preferred setup? Any speaker, headphone, amp, recommendations? Would you consider yourself an audiophile? I know that's a pile of questions. Feel free to answer whatever you'd like and ignore the rest! Thanks! Shannon Mack, Los Angeles, CA.
I dealt a lot with contemporary music and, among other things, rehearsed piano works by Karlheinz Stockhausen. As far as I know, there is of course a new interpretation culture of clarity, measurability, rhythmic precision, the ban on abphrasing etc. in this music. However, the serialists also saw their music in the existing tradition. Knowledge of classical, romantic music is necessary to gain access to this music.
Dear David Hurwitz, I own a CD with four improvisations by the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein. ( SMK 61845) Those improvisations sound like they were composed. Do you know how they came about? Thank you for your erudition and the great talks! Greetings from the Netherlands!
Cage was amused to find that total control -- such as Babbitt advocated -- and total chance procedures like composing by I Ching hexagrams led to the same sort of music. I don't know how Babbitt felt about that.
At 5:20 there is a great performance of Anton Webern's variations for piano op27 which hasn't been caught in any CZcams copyright strike.
To enjoy listening to Schoenberg requires a certain familiarity with prolonged dissonance. Just as with strong coffee or unfiltered beer, it takes some getting used to. If you're already there, it's not "dissonant," it's "music."
Except for the Wind Quintet.
I subscribe to Anna Russel's theory that with modern music you never know if the composer has reached new heights or if he is just trying to put one over on you.
Thank you Dave! This is a wonderful idea! What is your preferred way for viewers to submit questions?
This way works fine.
I was wondering how you can judge a minimalist piece like Terry Riley’s “In C”, where the performers have so many choices on instrumentation, timing, repeats, etc. I have heard a couple of performances on the radio which sounded like different pieces. Then I decided, if I like it, then that’s ok.
That's how you judge it.
It's like jazz improvisation.
I'd be interested in hearing about the viewer population of your channel (if CZcams provides that information). Just in general, the classical music-listening audience tends to be older, but younger people tend to be more active online.
Dear Mr. Hurwitz,
I am not a musician and I thoroughly enjoy your channel.
So refreshing to hear your take on serialism. I spent some time listening to the discordant sounds thinking I must appreciate this music.
Being older, I only listen to what is enjoyable!
Looking forward to more videos,
John
Thanks for listening (to me, if not the serialists)!
Perhaps some post-modern music has been written for Far Future Man or Aliens. Grin.
I've a question for Ask Dave series:-
Darren Sammut (me) asks which British composers were most influenced by the turn-of-the-century French Impressionism, given that those Brits were so limited in what was available to them, only the main and obvious repertoire, and thus the flexing of imagination to embrace and induce and thereby subsume from neighbourly France...
12:43 "If it doesn't strike you reasonably quickly or at least give some sense of the composer inviting us into their world: why waste your time?"
That's not a question of avant-garde / electronic music vs. "conventional". Schoenberg used the popular tune "O du lieber Augustin" in his 2nd string quartet. And Xenakis' _La légende d'Eer_ builds up at the beginning like Schoenberg's _Verklärte Nacht_ or Liszt's piano sonata. So isn't that quite inviting?
What I said.
I listened as I thought the talk would be as announced beneath the screen.
Alas, it's actually not about judging the music, but about judging performance.
Perhaps you could do one some time about the former.
I did once hear, on the Beeb, composer Michael Berkeley say that, of course, back in the 60s, there was a lot of music composed that was rubbish.
I wrote and asked him how a layman/person could distinguish between new music that was worthwhile and new music that was rubbish. I received no reply.
What I asked him is the question I'm hoping someone could answer for me.
Greetings from East Anglia in England.
I guess you are not going to make any video upon the DG avant garde series reissue coming in August
Why not?
Thank you!! Can’t wait)
- Many composers today don't know what the human throat is. At Bloomington, Indiana, I was invited to listen to music written in quarter tones for four harps and voices. I had to go out to be sick. (E. Schwarzkopf, Newsweek interview, 15 October 1990)
There's a microtonal harmonization of the theme to The Flintstones (on CZcams) that is so beautiful that when you follow it with the "tempered scale" original, it is the one that sounds wrong. Microtones in general are big in pop and gaming music now.
Yes listen to Jacob Collier makes microtones very accessible andhe explains with his own music how he even build chords on these tones!
It's not so bad after all the well tempered (equal temparament?) tuning has only been around since Bach😀
I was hoping for an aleatoric review, where you flip a coin or draw a card from a tarot deck to make your decision.
Yes! Use the Exquisite Corpse method to write music reviews! Of course, that means David will have to allow others to participate, but be can choose whom and how many. I think we've got something here.
@@dennischiapello3879 It is the way forward! All other ways of generating reviews are redundant!
Want to ask a question: is there such a thing as “late style”?
It depends.
@@DavesClassicalGuide Been reading about this topic as written in Edward Said’s book. Love to see your take, if it doesn’t trouble you.
@@ianchow107 To be honest, it doesn't strike me as a meaningful question as it applies to music.
As I believe you imply or state, a "composer" who merely pushes a button to activate a mechanical device is a performer/interpreter and has injected a human element into the otherwise "detached" or "mechanized" expression. In other words, the composer/performer sets parameters. And those parameters are, by definition, human. Maybe I misunderstood this point. But my bottom line when it comes to "bleep, blop, bloop" music is that it rarely hurts to try something once. What percentage of the music written during Haydn's lifetime is still played?
I have a big dificulty with serial music: how can I could know if one piece is good or not, if they sound always the same ? Some explanations of the composers help aboput there intentions, but it is literature, not music - you can not understand without a book or analysing the score with math criterias...
Hi
I get where you’re coming from but they don’t all sound the same! So if you listen to Weberns Symphony, then Bergs violin concerto (which is serial), then Stravinskys Requiem Canticles and then le marteu sans maitre, you’re really listening to very different sounding works
But it’s up to you!
@@murraylow4523 Exactly. They don't sound the same at all (that bad ones do), but more importantly, if you like it, then it's good (for you) and that is what matters most.
Yes! You don’t have to like any of these works in particular (I happen to like them) but the idea that these post-tonal compositional techniques just result in a grey blur is for the birds. Once you absorb the language then you’re free to do all sorts of things which is really what we have seen. There were similar trying experiments in the early minimalism but once absorbed, some great things followed
I think the problem of "good" or "bad" is an intelectual one, but music, being an intelectual activity, is also something you experiment for pleasure. And I think we tend to forget this. So, first of all, think if you like the music or not. If so, it's good music for you, there"s no question. I listen to lots of tough music just because I enjoy it, but without wondering about its quality.
At least, this is my opinion.
@David Hurwitz , @Murray Low and @Jose Carmona Thanks for your comments!! But one of the my difficulties I have to like this kind of music (and I try to know, to understand, listening) is that the final sound result seems secondary, the form is predominant and mandatory. If I can't distinguish just from what I hear if the work is good or not, I need a theoretical treatise to understand what the author is trying to express, then I get really confused...
Ok Dave, question for you....is there such a thing as bad music, or just bad performances? Can one or two notes be executed in a meaningful and emotional way or just sound plain boring?
Yes.
I disagree with your answer, in one respect. With integral serial music, all basic parameters of music as a communicative device have been rearranged in an unfamiliar (to the audience) pattern, so the question is not whether an artistic message is communicated well, but rather whether the rearrangement leaves a possibility of communicating at all. Audiences are invited to find A message rather than find THE message, so therefore interpretation as a task of the performer is replaced by accurate reproduction of the score. At some point, I suppose different serial rows might have expressive content, but it seems to me like we are busy at this point still taking in the new musical textures to see if they signify anything.
Fair enough.
To be frank, lacking the ability to follow the mathematical and theoretical structures at play in certain pieces, I consult my gut. It grabs me (like Varese) or it does not (like so many academic serialists). Why, I don't know.
the Maîtres sans Marteu
i have a question....you,mr hurwitz a musical critic,or other one critic....when you make a critic,do you take from reference about a recording ' interpretation of a composer for a new version of a same music ( ex,stravinsky milhaud,honneger,ravel.......and other one).....so i know ,the recording officially start in the beginnig of 20th century....but if you have a recording of ...mahler,liszt,bruckner,etc etc....dou you make a reference about a interpretation of is own music? amusing and interresting question.....and on otherside....the conductor,pianist ,etc.....every people make a reference about a recording of the same thing....?
I'm sorry, but I'm not sure I understand your question (I do speak French if that would be easier for you). We always use "reference recordings" as a basis of comparison between versions, old or new, if that is what you are asking.
@@DavesClassicalGuide oh my god...my poor english...sorry.....i just want to know....i take from example the rite of spring of stravinsky,conducting by the composer....( with columbia symphony)....can it happen sometime for a critic,he based a critic about new interpretation of rite on the interpretation of a composer....?...a composer recording is a reference....?,,,,ouf....!
@@robertdandre94101 A composer's recording of their own work is always a reference version for purposes of comparison, but that doesn't mean it's a good version.
@@DavesClassicalGuide merci....!
whats the most ungainly piece of music that you eventually realised was beautiful?
For me, I'd probably nominate Penderecki's St Luke Passion. I was completely shocked when I first heard it, but I now find it incredibly moving.
So many pieces probably
But as there’s a serial theme here I’d say Luigi Nono’s Il Canto Suspeso. Serial choral singing is a “big ask” but then I heard it in a concert with some renaissance madrigals and then I “got” it’s particular beauty
Harold in Italy.
@@pelodelperro LOL!
@@pelodelperro What about the 'Symphonie funèbre et triomphale'?
12 tone music is the exact musical incarnation of all the other ideologies that have led to such great suffering and death in the 20th Century.
Ideological ‚‘thinking‘ is a dreadful glitch of the mind that education should be fundamentally oriented towards counteracting.
I find it incredible that so many apparently intelligent people cannot resist what is obviously a dreadful glitch of the mind - in a way ideology is an attempt at a short-cut to avoid thinking - Genuine ratiocination IS almost always virtually physically painful like lifting heavy weights
12 tone music will in the future hopefully be of interest only as an illustration of the direct repulsive results of such ideological ‘thinking‘ - IF we find a way of correcting the deadly glitch.
Academic Musical education will only make sense again when this supposed replacement of what was claimed to be a somehow ‚random‘ historically arrived-at diatonic system with a new system supposed to be equivalent is seen as the complete nonsense it is.
Schoenberg famously claimed - based on his fundamentally stupid error - that once his system was internalised, people would be humming his music on the streets.
The whole thing is as out-of-date, proved-wrong and in-the-end-toxic as Marxism yet lives on in academia as though nothing had happened.
I strongly disagree with the analogy and the results you claim. There is only good music and bad, and the 12-tone method has produced both. What matters is the genius of the composer. Nothing else.
@@DavesClassicalGuide Can you give me an example of good 12 tone music please.
I know that almost all genres of music can produce great works; I just had never thought of serial music as a genre
Have a look at the video. There's a ton of wonderful stuff, from Moses und Aron to Rautavaara's Third Symphony and Frank Martin's Petite Symphonie Concertante. Try the latter two in particular. Not all twelve-tone music is "strict" or absolute. It's a tool. It depends on how you use it.
the problem does not exist. almost all of the post-1945 avant-garde has nothing to do with music
But that is a glib answer. Maybe you and I don't like it or understand it. Maybe we're too attuned to a beautiful Tschaikovsky tune, and not to type of music described here. I happened to listen to a bit of Stockhausen a while back and actually found it compelling. But I wouldn't go out and buy it or go to a concert and listen to it...
It has everything to do with music and how we listen to it. The results are not always compelling, but we can't expect composers to keep living in the 19th Century forever.
@@pelodelperro You talk as if there only two options: this post-ww2 "music" or 19th century romanticism
sound and music are two different things
@@goodmanmusica2 I agree
Serialism destroyed classical music. Once that Second Viennese cult got a hold of universities and imposed their 12 tone rubbish, people no longer wanted to hear new classical music.
'people no longer wanted to hear new classical music.' this simply isn't true. Viewing figures for a wide range of new(ish) classical music suggest otherwise.
Not *always* of mass appeal, but Beethoven's Diabelli Variations/ Grosse Fuga isn't exactly all that friendly either. I was completely mystified by Berg's Chamber Concerto when i first encountered it but listened to it umpteen times until i grew to appreciate it.
@@MorganHayes_Composer.Pianist Serialism largely failed as a genre. Modern 21st centry composers have largely abandoned the 12-tone technique and stick to tonal music, popular music is still tonal, and children aren't going around whistling tone rows as Schoenberg imagined. If a piece of music can't reach non-musicians, then it's simply an academic exercise, not a great work of art.